David wanted to ask if she still had all her teeth, but he restrained himself.
Wagging one finger as if to say, You listen to me and you listen good, Mathers declared, “That fucking house is haunted.”
| 39 |
A fat beetle as big as a bumblebee, with an iridescent green shell and translucent sour-yellow wings, flew past Richard Mathers and settled on the grip of the revolver that lay on the makeshift table.
Leaning forward in his lawn chair, Mathers met David’s eyes, intensely recounting his experience at Nine Rock Point Lane. “So I go upstairs. There’re like three bedrooms being used. One has a closet full of a man’s clothes. The second has like only a lot of, you know, girl stuff. The third is for a bitch, too, and damn if she isn’t there, sitting in this armchair. The chair faces away from the door, so I don’t see her till I’m deep in the room. Right then I almost split, but I realize she don’t see me, don’t hear me, she’s staring into space like she’s fucking hypnotized or something. She’s so still, I think maybe she’s dead, but then I see she’s breathing. And once in a while, her eyes blink. When I talk to her, she don’t answer. It’s like I’m invisible to her, dude.”
David thought of a strange moment on the first night that he and Maddison had dinner together in the harborside restaurant. She had fallen silent; her smile became fixed; her gaze slipped out of focus; and for half a minute, maybe longer, she didn’t seem to be there with him.
“This girl in the armchair—what did she look like?”
“What did she look like? Shit, man, she was this spooky bitch staring into space, zombified. Like a freakin’ cyborg. I got the hell out of there.”
“Blonde hair or black hair? Blue eyes or brown? Young or old?”
Mathers shifted his gaze from David to the iridescent beetle on the revolver. “I don’t know. I don’t remember. Young, I guess, but not a kid. Young and creepy as shit, so I just quick got the hell out of there, into the upstairs hallway, headed toward the stairs, which is when all this freaky shit happened, everything got weird.”
“What got weird?”
“The hallway, dude. It was the same hallway and it wasn’t. I mean, it was like tweaked. Like it was the same hallway, but bent.”
Mathers seemed as earnest as he was incoherent.
“Bent? What’s that mean?”
“Bent means bent. All the angles was wrong, walls and ceiling, like it was—I don’t know—all sort of rubbery.”
“How long did this last?”
“Maybe a minute. I’m like dizzy from it. Unbalanced.”
“Anything like that ever happen to you before?”
Mathers frowned. In his boyish face, his frown was close to a pout. “Why would it happen to me before?”
“Some medical conditions have similar symptoms. Like ocular migraines.”
“I didn’t have no headache.”
“Ocular migraines aren’t painful. They’re characterized by strange visual stimuli.”
“Characterized, huh?” The insinuation that he might be less than a perfect physical specimen greatly offended Mathers. “I eat high protein, low carbs. Pump iron every other day. Resting heart rate like sixty. BP is a hundred ten over seventy. I can hammer nails with my dick. I got no medical conditions, asshole.”
“Good for you.”
Mathers slitted his eyes as thin as razor cuts. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I’m glad you’re in good health. I’m happy for you.”
“Bullshit, dude. Nobody’s happy for nobody but themselves.”
The inquisitive iridescent beetle crawled past the loading gate of the revolver, onto the hammer, and started forward over the top strap toward the barrel.
“Back to the bent hallway,” David said. “All the angles wrong. What happened then?”
“Heavy footsteps. It’s a wood floor. Someone’s coming toward me. Gotta be some big sonofabitch, those footsteps so heavy, booming off the walls, like he’s wearing lead boots. But nobody’s there.”
“Footsteps in another room,” David suggested. “Or maybe not footsteps at all.”
“You was there, huh? You want to tell it? You can tell it better than me?”
“Sorry. Go on.”
Mathers took another jab to pay back the imagined insult. “They teach you in college how you know everything, but you don’t know nothing. You don’t know jack shit.”