The Walker Place: A Short Story

  THE

  WALKER PLACE

  James A. Moore

  CEMETERY DANCE PUBLICATIONS

  Baltimore

  2009

  Copyright © 2009 by James A. Moore

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Cemetery Dance Publications

  132-B Industry Lane, Unit #7

  Forest Hill, MD 21050

  http://www.cemeterydance.com

  First Limited Edition Promotional eBook

  Artwork Copyright © 2009 by iStockPhoto.com

  Interior Design by Kathryn Freeman

  The Walker Place

  “Chicken.” Larry’s voice teased, but with an edge that was accusatory. The tone said that he not only thought cowardice was funny, but maybe a criminal offense. If he were a fraction less restrained Tom would have called him a bully. He wouldn’t have been wrong.

  “I am not.” Tom’s defense was hardly original, but it was heartfelt.

  “It’s Halloween. We’re supposed to get candy, and we’re supposed to look for ghosts.”

  “It’s Halloween. Our parents are going to ground us forever if we get busted again.”

  The year before, Larry Reddington, Tom Efron and Sam Kramer had all run off to the graveyard four blocks away and tried to summon a ghost to answer their questions about what lay on the other side of death. What they’d summoned instead was the nasty old bastard who cleaned up the cemetery every day, Elliot Burnside, who had called the police on them and locked the gates so they couldn’t just sneak back out.

  Their parents had not been amused. Well, that wasn’t true. Tom’s dad had thought it was hilarious, especially when all three of them spent a week picking up trash at the graveyard after school, and for almost the whole day on the following weekend. Tom hadn’t thought the graveyard could lose its mysterious appeal, but he’d been wrong. It was still creepy and all, but he didn’t much feel like going out there again in an effort to find ghosts. He could think of better things to do than spend a week with that old fart groundskeeper yelling at him.

  “So we won’t go to the graveyard this time.” That was Sam, whose voice had taken on a level of challenge even before the gauntlet was thrown. There was no mistaking that this would be a proper dare, a task that must either be met or dismissed and the latter would almost certainly guarantee the label of coward.

  Tom crossed his arms. “Well then, where are we supposed to go to look for ghosts?”

  “The Walker place.” Sam said the words and Tom looked from Larry to the other boy and knew they’d lost their minds. They were serious, and that was as scary as anything else he’d ever heard.

  Parents didn’t talk about the Walker place. They also got irritated when kids brought up the house on Asbury Lane. Fully a dozen years earlier something very bad had happened at the place and no matter how hard they tried to hide it the parents couldn’t keep all of the details secret. Despite the best efforts of grownups to hide the facts from their children, the internet had made it possible for kids who wanted to know the truth to find it with ease. The simple fact was that every member of the Walker family had been murdered, and no one had ever found out who committed the atrocities. The murders were common knowledge. What was not known was exactly how the parents or the four children who lived in the house were done in. According to Eben Murphy, the mom and the daughters were all raped and chopped into bits while the dad and the boys were forced to watch. Kristen Brockheimer swore that it was devil worshippers. Her dad worked for UPS and she said he had delivered a package up there the day the bodies were found. Megan Powers heard that the oldest boy, Joe, had taken an ax to everyone in the house and then hanged himself, and even if the story wasn’t true, it sounded creepy enough to give Tom nightmares, not that he would ever admit it. Sabrina Cooper said it was all a drug deal gone bad, but she said everything was a drug deal gone bad. She was sort of the local anti-drugs poster, only with moving lips.

  “There’s no way we can get into that place.” It was a weak argument. People had tried to get into the Walker residence before and the door was always locked. The windows were locked, and the whole place was considered off limits.

  “See? I told you he’d pussy out.” Larry’s voice carried a note of disappointment. It was a deliberate note and it was meant to offend and to ignite moral outrage and it was very successful.

  “You tell me how we’re getting in there without getting arrested for breaking a window and then maybe we can work something out.” Tom crossed his arms over his narrow chest and glared at Larry with as much menace as he could muster, which wasn’t all that much.

  Larry smiled and pulled a single key from his jacket pocket. “With the key to the back door, dummy.”

  “How did you?” His voice trailed off.

  “My brother works for the city. He has to check out that sort of stuff. It’s his job.” Larry puffed up and his smile grew even cockier. Tom could have shot him down, pointed out that his brother’s job was to sweep the streets and pick up dead animals from the same—a job he didn’t do all that well, thanks very much—but he bit his tongue. He was far too worried with trying to figure a way out of the latest situation.

  There was nothing he could say that wouldn’t have him looking like a big baby in front of his friends. Oh, they’d still be his friends if he said no, but he knew they’d hold it over him, his moment of cowardice. Larry and Sam would act like they were better than him, simply because he had backed down from entering the scariest house in town, a place a lot scarier than whatever the Jaycees put together this time around, and the Jaycees were pretty much the only haunted house in town. Bowden’s Point wasn’t big enough to warrant one of the places run by Hollywood companies. You got what you got in a small town.

  “Fine. When?” It was the best he could get out now that all the spit in his mouth had dried up.

  “We go trick or treating. We go home. Then we sneak out.” Larry grinned and rubbed his hands together like a mad scientist in an old movie. “You’ll see, Tom. This time we’ll find a ghost.”

  Tom nodded and tried to swallow the dust that had appeared in his mouth. That was what he was afraid of.

  ****

  “So how come no one ever moved into the old Walker place?” Tom asked Mindy, his older sister, when their parents were out for their weekly game night with the other parents on the block. Mindy was seven years older than him and ready to head to college in a year, and was a lot cooler than the big sisters they always showed in movies and stuff. Yeah, she could be a bitch when she had a boyfriend over, but mostly she remembered that Tom had a name and didn’t mind answering questions as long as he left her alone most of the time. She was his big sister, so it wasn’t like they had that much in common, but come Wednesday nights, she had to watch over him and she wasn’t allowed to have boys over when the folks weren’t home so they were stuck together and made the most of it.

  She’d probably answered a million questions in the last hour, while they ate pizza from Carlotti’s, and he could tell her patience was starting to wear thin. He’d planned it that way. This was the last question he intended to ask before giving her some peace and quiet.

  “Okay, you know what a will is?”

  “A will?”

  “Last will and testament?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, Mr. Walker left everything to his wife if he should die. Only she died with him, which means that she couldn’t get the house and everything. If they both died,
all of it was supposed to go to their kids, only all of their children were murdered too, right?”

  “Yeah…” He wasn’t sure where it was going, but the logic of her argument made perfect sense.

  “So, the house and everything in it has to go to someone, only the only people left are the families of Mr. Walker and Mrs. Walker, and they don’t know what to do with the place.”

  “Well, they could sell it.”

  “Yeah,” she answered. “But would you want to live in a house where everyone was murdered?”

  “No way!”

  “See? No one wants to buy the place, because of the murders. So they’re kind of stuck with it.”

  It made perfect sense. Well, almost. “Didn’t some people move in there once?”

  She nodded her head. “Yep. They heard all kinds of creepy noises and left a week later.”

  Tom nodded his head and reached for another slice of the Carlotti Master Munch Pizza, which had everything but anchovies on it. He chewed and Mindy looked away, her eyes drifting back toward the TV.

  He could work with that. Scary noises? Noises couldn’t kill, could they? So he was in good shape. An hour in the house and they’d be gone again and all would be well.

  “Of course, there were supposed to be others, you know.” Mindy’s voice had taken on an ominous tone he knew all too well. When she’d read him stories when he was just a kid she had used the same voice whenever something bad came along.

  “Other whats?”

  “Other victims. People who tried to sneak into the house and were never seen again.”

  “No way.”

  “Way!” She wiped at her mouth with her napkin and he wasn’t sure if she was trying to hide a smirk—she did that sometimes when she was teasing—or if she was serious. “Had a couple of homeless people who tried to sneak in there to sleep and they were never seen again. Well, not alive anyway.”

  He made himself keep eating, because Carlotti’s pizza was his favorite, but suddenly he didn’t have much of an appetite left.

  ****

  Halloween came in with a howling cold wind that was perfect for the day. Leaves jumped and curled and hissed into streams that washed through the air and wrapped themselves into every possible crevice before flying off again. Tom spent the first part of the day at school, wishing he could wear his Jason Voorhees costume to class, but knowing he’d get yelled at for it. So instead he just kept his cool and waited like everyone else.

  When the last bell rang he bolted for home, walking the eight blocks with Sam and Larry and going over the plans. Trick or treating came first, of course. After that, they were all going to get together at Larry’s place for dinner. Mrs. Reddington, in addition to being one of the prettiest moms Tom had ever seen, was also making everyone dinner and letting them sleep over. No one expected there would be much sleep, of course, because there was a marathon of horror movies to watch and Mr. Reddington—who had to be the luckiest man in the world when you thought about his wife—would be making popcorn and handing out sodas. It was what they did every year.

  And then, after the Reddington’s went to bed, they’d be sneaking out of Larry’s bedroom window and heading for the Walker place. Easy peasy, as Larry and his mom were fond of saying. Tom didn’t know if he should be worried because he could spend time with Mrs. Reddington—who made him feel nervous every time she smiled in his direction—or because he was going to see a real ghost or maybe even more than one.

  Mrs. Reddington was the sort who insisted on coming with them when they went trick or treating and though Larry moaned and groaned about it, Tom was secretly delighted. She’d dressed herself in a slinky witch’s outfit that showed off her figure and Tom enjoyed stealing glances—a task made easier because his mask hid so much of his face. He walked into a few things, but it was worth it for the furtive looks he used to study the woman he wanted to marry someday.

  The neighborhood was done up, almost every house on the block was festooned with orange and black decorations and several of the houses had parties going on, a pleasant side effect of Halloween falling on a Friday. There were plenty of adults dressed in costumes too, and more than one man stared at Mrs. Reddington’s creamy cleavage even as all of the kids got candy from the offered bowls of treats. Tom felt involuntary flares of jealousy each time, but wisely suppressed them. They’d carefully plotted out the path they would take, one that guaranteed maximum chances for candy, of course, and halfway through the entire trek across the neighborhood streets they came to the Walker house and everyone stopped and stared.

  Mrs. Reddington stared hard at the house and Tom wondered what, if anything, she knew about the secrets that were locked inside the place. For a moment he thought she might actually cry with the way her lower lip trembled, but then she closed her eyes and quickly crossed herself—an unusual thing to see a witch do, surely—and told them it was time to get to the next house in a voice that was almost normal. And then they were off, seven kids total and one parent to watch over them, and he forgot about the house for a while.

  After they got back to the Reddington house—minus Megan, Sabrina, Jason and Eben who were all dropped off at their own houses—the world’s prettiest witch handed them all plates of spaghetti and meat sauce and then changed herself into the world’s prettiest friend’s mom again. Mr. Reddington kept his word and made popcorn with insane amounts of butter and salt, and they ate until it was hard to move, all the while watching some of the newer horror movies, which had been edited for content and formatted to fit the TV, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.

  At nine-thirty they were put to bed, and even though they were maybe getting too old for kisses good night, Mrs. Reddington kissed them each on the cheek anyway and only Larry didn’t blush because of it. It seemed crazy to think she might not realize how amazing she was, but that appeared to be the case.

  At ten o’clock Tom was just drifting toward sleep when Larry shook him awake. “It’s time.”

  Tom nodded his head and clamped his lips shut against a moan of panic. The Walker house scared him, more so since he’d seen the fear on Mrs. Reddington’s angelic face earlier.

  Sneaking out was not hard. It never is, really, for ten-year-old boys on a mission. Larry gathered his Ouija board and they carefully climbed out of his bedroom’s ground floor window, moving single file and dressed in their costumes again, because Halloween only comes once a year and costumes are far too cool not to wear. Batman—Larry—a ghost named Sam and Jason Voorhees practically slithered across the lawn and then scurried through the shadows as they covered several blocks. Jack-o-lanterns leered and screamed in silence from stoops and porches, their eyes and mouths flickering with orange light, and the sweet smell of roasting pumpkin seemed to permeate the cheap hockey mask that covered Tom’s face. The air was cold enough to stop sweat from spilling across his eyes and despite himself he felt a grin growing on his lips as he anticipated the possibilities of a visit with the specters of the dead.

  They crept across lawns and down streets and people saw them, perhaps, but if they did they paid them little mind. They were grownups and the time had come for them to have their older Halloween fun. Or maybe, they simply remembered being ten and celebrating the scariest night of the year.

  And all too soon the Walker place was looming over them. Earlier he’d been too enthralled by Mrs. Reddington’s beautiful face to notice the house that he ignored most times, but now, in the darkness, he couldn’t help but stare at the old structure that seemed too large somehow, too dark and too menacing. The windows were closed, he could see the glass panes, but they refused to cast a reflection from the moon or the stars above. The wraparound porch was strong and sturdy, the boards seemed perfectly even and yet they gave a sense that anyone walking across them would risk falling to his death. The doors, surely no larger than the doors at his house or Larry’s, seemed too big, swollen and distorted. The knobs were thick cut glass, beveled into the shape of oversized diamonds, but even that glass re
fused to offer a glimmer of refracted light. They seemed instead to absorb the very night and hold onto it greedily.

  There was a small part of Tom that looked forward to entering the house, the same part that thrilled at lurking among the dead a year before. Somehow, that inner voice seemed quieter this year, tinier, a fading ghost of courage that spoke out as loudly as it could and still only managed a whisper.

  Larry coughed into his hand, and Sam, who sometimes had asthma and sometimes did not, sighed out a soft, whistling breath from lungs that seemed smaller than they should have. Knowing that they were both scared too helped Tom’s tiny flame of courage bloom larger than before.

  “How long are we staying?” Sam’s voice was even squeakier than before.

  Larry got braver just like that. His infectious grin grew a bit broader and Tom’s eyes widened for just a second as he realized a simple truth: Larry was braver because he knew Sam was scared. They were more alike than he had ever realized. Of the three of them only Sam still seemed to feel the worst of the fear.

  “We’re in for as long as it takes, dummy.” Larry moved up the stairs with all the courage in the world and Tom made himself follow before he could think about it. A moment later they were both looking back at Sam, and Tom felt another thrill: the last of them was more afraid than he was. It was a good feeling.

  All of the courage drained from them as soon as Larry’s hand on the back doorknob turned and the door opened. They’d known it would open, of course, because Larry had managed to sneak off earlier and unlock it. Still, the squeal of hinges was enough to send shivers across young flesh.

  Flashlight beams cut through the darkness that filled the old house, carving tiny gashes of illumination that hardly seemed significant against the weight of night they tried to hold at bay. Larry was the first to walk inside. Larry was always the first. He was brave that way. Still, his hands trembled a bit and the beam from his light jittered against the floor and then the far wall.