HAUNTED HEADS

a novella by Gary Canup

Chapter 4

They went out to the front porch where they sat side by side in the swing chair, each with a roast-beef sandwich and a can of diet cola. Outside it was pitch-black. The porch was nearly so; the only light was that which filtered through the living-room windows at the other end of the porch. The windows of the front bedroom to their right were dark.

"It's so peaceful and quiet out here in the country," she said.

"Good place to write, huh?"

"That's just what I was thinking. I haven't done any writing all day. I'll have to put in a couple of hours tomorrow morning before the others arrive."

There was a creak inside the front bedroom.

Nattie looked at him accusingly. "What was that?"

"It's an old house. It creaks during temperature changes."

She continued to stare at him with accusatory eyes.

"How could I have caused it, Nattie? I'm out here with you!"

"Tyler, I'm warning you."

"What do you mean?"

"Is that the way it's going to be, you trying to scare me all weekend in this spooky old house while we're alone? Keep it up and no sex on the roof for you, pal."

"I'm not trying to scare you, Nattie. Honest. How could I have caused a noise in there? You think I rigged it up somehow?"

Grudgingly she began the eating of her sandwich.

They were facing the main road several hundred yards away. They could see nothing of the road until the high beams of a vehicle came crawling along. The vehicles were inaudible and the headlights seemed to pass in another world. The lights flickered through the trees and vanished altogether behind a dense woods.

"My goodness," Nattie said. "I had no idea we were so far from the main road."

"It's not quite as far away as it looks at night."

Outside it was quiet and serene. The only sound was the lulling nocturne of crickets and frogs. Tyler jumped as all of a sudden Nattie released an explosive belch. She continued eating as if nothing had happened.

"Good Lord!" he exclaimed. "Did that actually come out of you?"

"Good old Pepsi," she muttered, taking another dainty bite from her sandwich.

"Jesus, you talk about scaring the crap out of somebody!"

"Oh, lighten up."

"Lighten up? You nearly gave me a heart attack."

"Just a little payback for that little scare you gave me."

"Did my scare actually stop your heart?"

She smiled a little sheepishly then. "Sorry about that. I guess that was rather crude. But my brother and I used to drink cola and have belching contests all the time when we were kids. See, I can reminisce, too."

"I'll bet you blew him away."

"Usually."

"Now I know what we can resort to if we run out of things to do this weekend. We can have a belching contest."

"I would wipe you out, Fenton. You're sitting next to ground zero." She had taken a few more swigs of cola. "Listen to this," and the belch that exploded from her dainty mouth was so thunderous that for a moment the hundreds of frogs outside stopped croaking as if to listen with admiration.

"Jesus Christ!" he said in awe.

"How about that?"

He patted her firm young thigh. "That's my girl!"

She crumpled up her sandwich wrapper, triumphantly swallowed the last of her roast beef, and daintily dabbed at her lips with a paper napkin.

"Did you hear the silence that followed that detonation?" he asked her. "It was as if all the bullfrogs had taken a moment from their own croaking to listen in veneration: they had found their Queen!"

They disposed of their sandwich wrappers and empty cola cans and brushed their teeth in the kitchen. Usually they stayed up late, but they had to get an early start in the morning to prepare for the arrival of their friends, and Nattie had decided to get in a couple of hours of writing before bedtime. Unlike Tyler, who had to drag himself to his computer and for whom the composition of poetry was largely agony, Nattie enjoyed the process of writing and could never wait to resume work on her novel. In the summer months, unencumbered by classwork, she usually put in six hours a day. While she set up her laptop on the kitchen table and went to work, Tyler sat in the living room and tried to read a book, his concentration impaired by what he had seen in the dormer window at dusk, and he was half listening for suspicious sounds from upstairs.

Two hours later the kitchen light went out and Nattie crossed the pool room and entered the living room wearing a mischievous smile. She gently removed the book from his hands, closed it on his bookmark, and placed the book on the side table. She took his hand. "And now I believe you and I have a date up on the roof." She began leading him towards the small door that led upstairs.

"Wait a minute," he hesitated.

She looked at him.

"So how did the writing go?"

"I thought it went pretty well. I revised seven whole pages and wrote two new ones. The chapter is shaping up nicely, I think." She started leading him towards the small door again.

"Just a second."

She looked at him with impatience.

"I'm thinking maybe we should lock up the house this time."

She considered and then nodded. "Good idea. No sense tempting fate any further."

"You lock the two front doors. I'll lock the two back ones."

"The front-porch door has a lock?"

"It has one of those eye-and-hook locks or whatever you call them."

When she went out to the front porch he slipped into the back bedroom, grabbed the Colt revolver and slid it into his pants pocket. Then he went and locked the back-porch door and the kitchen door, his heart pounding. Nattie was waiting for him in the living room with their suitcases before the door that led upstairs. He turned out the light in the pool room.

"Should we switch off the living-room lamp?" she asked.

"No. Leave it on."

"Are you all right, Tyler?"

"I'm fine. Why?"

"You look a little strange."

"I do? I feel fine."

"Well, get ready to feel even finer," she smiled. "Let's up to the rooftop, Rudolph." She handed him his suitcase, pulled open the door and began feeling for a light switch.

"Let me go up first."

"Why?"

"I know where the lights are."

"Then lead the way up with your shiny red nose."

He did not quite understand her use of Christmas imagery but then she was in a festive and generous mood and he supposed it meant that she was going to give him a special gift tonight.

He flicked on the light and peered up the staircase. It was steep and narrow and the steps were numerous. He felt dread and anxiety as he slowly began to climb the steps. His free hand in his pocket was gripping the pistol. He wondered if the damn thing would even fire. It had been a relic even when his grandfather had purchased it. He went up the steps with a sense of ominousness. He would never understand why the people who had built this house had constructed a staircase with so many steps.

"Honestly, Tyler, could you be any slower?"

She was right on his heels and was playfully pushing him. He almost spoke sharply to her but held his tongue. A double window at the top of the stairs looked out on the absolute blackness of night. His reflection gradually appeared in the glass of one of the windows as he mounted the steps, and he could see what she had meant about his face looking a little strange. He finally reached the top of the staircase and peered down the attic room. There were numerous hiding places and an intruder could have been lurking in any one of them.

"One side, slowpoke." She nudged impatiently past him and strode along with her suitcase, glancing about.

The upstairs, indeed, was little more than a fixed-up attic. The ceiling sloped at the apex and a broad red-brick chimney stood crookedly between the two beds. A light bulb hung from a wire at either end of the long narrow space and both of them were glowing. An alcove looked out through the pair of dormer windows to the front of the grounds where the BMW stood veiled in darkness. There were chests of drawers, trunks, and many low closets — many hiding places. He set down his suitcase but kept his hand in his pocket gripping the Colt.

Nattie stood in the alcove with her arms out, beaming happily. "Tyler, it's so quaint up here! How come you showed me every room but this one?"

"Grandfather died up here."

Her face fell. "Oh." She looked at the pair of beds. "Which one?"

"That one." He pointed to the nearer bed.

"Then we'll sleep on the bed by the windows."

"We're not going to sleep in the back bedroom downstairs?"

"No, I want to sleep up here, darling!"

She was unpacking her suitcase, humming and prancing around with her folded clothing, looking for empty drawers. With his hand still in his pocket Tyler gazed about at all the possible places where an intruder might be hiding: beneath the beds, behind the crooked chimney, inside one of the many closets. There was no sign anywhere that anyone had been up here. But he had seen somebody up here at dusk, he knew it. "Are you sure you don't want to sleep downstairs?"

"We'll save the downstairs bedrooms for our guests."

Nattie began to get naked.

She unlaced and removed her shoes, unzipped her cutoffs and slid them down her legs and stepped out of them. She shrugged off her T-shirt and tossed it onto another old homemade chair with a rope bottom and a rope back. She rarely wore a bra and her nipples were already erect with excitement. She peeled her panties down to her ankles and stepped out of them and tossed them onto the T-shirt. There were no curtains on the windows but Nattie did not care. Who would be looking in? And besides, she was proud of her body. Tyler never thought he would see a naked woman in Grandfather's house.

"Is that a pistol in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?" she said. "Come on, big boy, get out of those clothes."

And then it happened. Tyler stood staring, horror-stricken, at the alcove. Standing there, not ten feet from Nattie, was Grandfather.

"I found this old quilt in a trunk," Nattie was saying. "We'll spread it out on the shingles to cushion our amorous exertions. I hope you are in full possession of your stamina tonight. I feel like going for a couple of hours at least."

She looked at him.

"Well, come on, Tyler, how come you're not getting undressed?"

Grandfather was puritanically regarding naked Nattie. He wore on his face an expression of absolute loathing. He looked as though he desired to kill her.

Heading towards the dormer windows, and therefore straight towards Grandfather, she began to sing impishly: "Up on the housetop, click click click, I'll pull down your pants and suck your —"

"Stop it!" he shouted.

She looked at him with alarm. "What's wrong?"

She had halted only inches away from Grandfather. The old man really did look as though he wanted to kill her, and Tyler truly feared for her safety.

"Darling, come here," she said. "You're acting as though you're afraid of me."

She noticed his horror-stricken expression.

"Now, Tyler, you are wearing that same look on your face that I saw down in the driveway. Now I don't think you are deliberately trying to scare me. I don't believe you would do that to me, especially after I warned you not to. Are you trying to scare me, Tyler? Because I'm not falling for it this time."

"No," he confessed.

"So you're really seeing something, is that it? What are you seeing, Tyler? Why do you keep glancing over there?" She looked straight at Grandfather, then back at him with perplexity and concern.

"Don't you see it?"

"See what?"

Tyler nodded towards the alcove, but Grandfather was gone.

"Tyler, what is wrong with you?"

He slumped down on a rope-seated chair and rested his forehead against his hands. "Nothing," he muttered.

"What do you mean, nothing? You're acting bizarre."

"I am?"

"You're acting like you saw a ghost or something. Did you see a ghost, Tyler?"

"Don't be silly."

"Oh, my God! Did you see the ghost of your grandfather?"

"That's ridiculous, Nattie."

"Is it?"

"I'm just tired, is all," he responded. "You know I didn't sleep well last night. And the long drive down here together with that long walk really fatigued me."

She eyed him skeptically. "So are you ready to fuck?"

"Don't be crude."

"Why not? Because your grandfather wouldn't like it?"

"Grandfather is dead."

"Is he?"

"Ghosts don't exist. I'm just tired, that's all."

"Too tired to go out on the roof?"

"Tonight I don't think I'd last two minutes let alone two hours."

She made a disappointed scoffing sound, dropped the quilt dramatically on a chair, and walked over to the bed by the windows, began turning down the sheets and fluffing the pillows.

"I'm sorry, Nattie. I know how much in the mood you were."

"Don't flatter yourself, Romeo."

"Please don't be angry. I am not rejecting you. I would never do that."

"It's no big deal. It was your stupid fantasy."

"We'll do it on Sunday. Sunday for sure. How's that?"

"Look, Tyler, I don't know what's going on here. I don't know if you're putting me on with these absurd melodramatics or what. But if you are, then it's extremely cruel and upsetting, and I will not stay with a man who treats me like that, you know I won't. And if you are not putting me on and are really seeing things . . ." she chortled and shook her head at the preposterous sound of it ". . . then you need to get help at once."

"We'll do it on Sunday," Tyler repeated hopefully, as though that put everything back to normal again.

"Whatever." She climbed into bed and got under the sheet and turned her back.

"So we're sleeping up here for sure?"

"I am. You can sleep wherever you like."

He stood gazing at her bare back. "I love you," he said.

She made a slight retching sound and stared out the window.

He started to leave.

Nattie sat up in outrage and in so doing the sheet fell to her lap and exposed her breasts. Her nipples were no longer erect.

"What? You're not even going to sleep with me?"

He faced her again.

"I do not believe this," she said. "I really don't like being rejected, Tyler. When have you ever turned down sex with me?"

"I just told you, I am not rejecting you. I'm just not in the mood anymore."

"What changed your mind?"

"Nothing changed my mind. I'm just not in the mood. I'm tired. I think I ate some bad roast beef."

"That's a lot of excuses. You sure you don't have a headache as well?"

"Don't be angry."

"Don't be angry — right. Maybe you're just afraid you can't get it up in your grandfather's precious house."

He glared at her. He was starting to get a little angry himself now. He fingered the pistol in his pocket. "Maybe it was all that belching that turned me off."

She laughed sarcastically. "Yeah, blame it on the belching. Do you really expect me to believe it was that?"

"It was really quite vulgar, you know."

"What's with all these dainty sensibilities all of a sudden, Daisy-Belle?"

"You really can be a bitch sometimes, Nattie."

"Right, that's the problem. It has nothing to do with you. I'm a bitch. I'm Nattie the belching bitch."

He turned and headed for the stairhead.

"That's right, go fucking sleep downstairs!"

"I'll be right back, Nattie. I just have to use the bathroom."

He went casually down the steps to the living room. He strode into the back bedroom and, in the dim indirect light from the living room, removed the Colt from his pocket and examined it. Maybe he should throw it out. In his present mental condition could he trust himself with a gun? Unsteadily he returned the revolver to the fold of newspaper on top of the bureau. He used the bathroom only because he had told Nattie that he would, then he turned off the living-room lamp. The downstairs was utterly dark now except for the light that came from the open doorway to the staircase. The light guided him to the steps, and he closed the door behind him and proceeded slowly up the stairs. He switched off the first light by pulling the chain. He peeked into the alcove, gazed all around, but there was no further sign of anything mysterious or unexplained. He undressed to his boxer shorts and turned off the second light and in the pitch darkness climbed under the bedsheet next to Nattie. She did not move and kept her back to him. She was either asleep or just pretending to be, probably the latter. "Good night, Nattie," he whispered. There was no reply. He turned on his side with his back to her. He stared into the blackness. The apparition had appeared thin, bent, and in possession of a full head of silvery hair, just as Tyler remembered his grandfather the last time he had seen him. At the funeral. In his box. He closed his eyes. When he heard a car passing along the narrow gravel lane, a lonely desolate sound, he opened his eyes again, and thought he saw, in the faint residue of fleeting light from the car's headlights, Grandfather lying in the deathbed though not dead, the old man glaring at him with reproach and warning. Tyler Fenton shut his eyes, tightly, and feared he was losing his mind.