Helltown - Jeremy Bates Page 0,23

three times, hard, angry.

Silence.

Steve cupped his hands against the small window in the door’s upper carved panel and peered inside. Then he reached for the door handle.

“Whoa,” Noah said. “What are you doing?”

“Seeing if it’s unlocked.”

The handle twisted in his grip. The door swung inward.

“This is trespassing,” Noah said.

“It’s an emergency,” Steve said.

Steve stepped into the atrium and flicked on an overhead light. After a moment’s hesitation, Noah joined him. A vase of dead flowers sat on a small deal table. A mirror hung on the opposite wall. Noah caught his reflection—and barely recognized the wide, frightened eyes staring back at him.

Directly ahead of them a staircase led to the second floor, and beside that a long hallway, which ended at a closed door. To their left was a small dining room. The table appeared not to be used for eating, as it was covered with newspapers and magazines. Six Chippendale chairs were tucked beneath it, the decorative backings broken in several of them. To their right was the living room. Stuffy antique furniture and moody oil paintings in ornately carved gilded frames shared the space with discarded socks, dirty dishes, ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts, and boxes stocked with an assortment of junk. A wood-paneled television sat on a small table next to the fireplace. A brown wire snaked from it across the floor to an upholstered Lay-Z-Boy recliner, on which sat a controller box the size of a large book.

Noah thought of his grandparents’ big old place in upstate New York—if they died and his lazy Uncle Phil moved in.

Steve said, “Don’t see a phone anywhere.”

“Me neither,” Noah said.

“Hello?” Steve called.

No one replied.

“Hello?” Noah said. “We’ve had an accident! We need to use your phone to call the police.”

Silence.

“Fuck it,” Steve said. He started down the hallway.

Noah followed close behind him.

Although the hardwood floor was covered with a turkey-colored rug-runner, their footfalls nevertheless caused the boards beneath to groan and squawk. It was stealthy, ominous—the sound a thief made.

The door at the end of the hall gave to the kitchen. It was the most unkempt room yet with gunk-hardened dishes piled in the sink, opened cans of tuna fish and baked beans and other preserved food left on the counters, and dried spills on the linoleum floor tiles. On a small drop-leaf table sat close to twenty empty brown bottles of Bud Light.

Noah wrinkled his nose against the stench of stale beer and cigarettes, and beneath that something sweet and greasy. “This place is a dump,” he said. “Maybe whoever lives here doesn’t have a phone after all?”

“Living way out here, isolated?” Steve shook his head. “They have to have one.” He crossed the kitchen to a narrow butler’s stairwell that led upstairs.

“Forget it,” Noah said quietly. “If there’s some drunk up there—”

“If there is, he’s passed out.”

“We don’t know that.”

“Then why hasn’t he answered us?”

“You think there’s going to be a phone in the bedroom?”

“Maybe there’s a study, or a library.”

“Let’s just go. We could have been at the hospital by now.”

Steve placed a foot on the first tread. “You coming or not?”

“I think I’ll keep looking down here. Yell if someone stabs you.”

“Thanks.”

Steve disappeared up the steps. Noah returned to the living room. He searched beneath the scattered newspapers, behind pillows, under furniture, but came up empty handed. He went to the dining room next. He was opening the doors to a large cabinet—more out of curiosity as to what it held than any expectation of finding a phone—when he sensed movement behind him. He turned just as a kid whacked a hockey stick across his back. Noah cried out in surprise and pain. The kid swung the stick again. Noah absorbed the blow with his left side, then grabbed the stick’s shaft. The kid was half his size. A few good shakes caused him to release his grip and tumble to his ass.

Noah cocked the Titan hockey stick like a baseball bat but didn’t swing it. “It’s okay!” he said. “Calm down. I’m not going to hurt you.”

The kid glared at him from behind a piece of oval cardboard with slots cut out for eyeholes and a dozen stitches drawn on it in black felt marker. The flimsy Jason Voorhees goaltender mask was strapped to his head with pieces of shoelace.

Steve appeared a moment later and stared at the kid. “Jesus!”

“He came from nowhere,” Noah said. “Started whacking me with this fucking hockey stick.”

“Who are you?” Steve asked the kid.

“I live here,” the boy replied