Suckers. Part 11

"That was my next guess!" Theresa insisted.

"Becky! That's not very nice! You apologize to him!" said her mother, in that Scolding Parent voice I've never quite been able to perfect.

"All right, I'm going back inside," I decided. "I'll give him one last chance to come out."

"What if he doesn't?" asked Becky's mom.

"I don't know yet. I'll be back in five minutes, tops."

I returned to the house and stepped into the living room, which was still empty. Once again I got that creeped-out feeling, along with the already present feelings of anger and worry.

"Roger, you're taking this way too far," I announced in a loud voice. "Theresa's in the car crying. Come on out."

No response.

"If you don't come out, I'm going to have to a.s.sume that something happened to you, and I'll have to call the police. I'm pretty sure you don't want to explain to the cops that you were hiding out in an abandoned house just to play a joke on some kids. Get out here."

Still nothing.

Fine. I'd do one last quick search of the house, and then contact the police. What a lousy Halloween. No candy, no creative use of the candy after the kids were asleep, possible trespa.s.sing charges...Thanksgiving dinner with the in-laws was looking better and better.

I went back upstairs and waved my flashlight in every possible place that Roger could fit, all the while sharing a loud running commentary about what I was going to do to him when I found him, which included a list of the top five locations on his body that might serve as the flashlight's final resting place.

He wasn't anywhere upstairs. And there was simply no way he'd let the joke go on this long. Something had happened to him. It was officially time to go for help.

I went back to the staircase. As I headed downstairs, my flashlight beam shone across the face of an old man standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at me. I recognized the face from the newspaper photos. Jarvis Taywood.

I tried to say "What the-," "Holy-," and "AAAIIIIEEEE!!!" all at the same time. It came out as an incoherent gurgle. I dropped the flashlight, which bounced down the stairs and rolled away. The figure was gone.

It took me a good fifteen seconds to realize that I needed to breathe, and another fifteen seconds after that to actually regain the ability to do so. One track of my mind kept insisting that there was a perfectly logical explanation, while another kept saying, "I do believe in spooks! I do believe in spooks! I do I do I do!"

No, I didn't. There was a perfectly logical explanation for this. Roger wearing a Jarvis Taywood mask, for example. Everything would be explained as soon as I walked down the stairs to investigate.

The dark stairs.

I walked slowly, carefully, making sure I didn't fall and kill myself, which would've been a pretty major act of party p.o.o.ping if this did turn out to be a joke. I reached the bottom without any death on my part, then hurried over and retrieved the flashlight.

Then I waved the flashlight beam all over the living room, trying to catch a glimpse of Jarvis Taywood or his ghost. Nothing. Rationally, I knew that the best course of action was to rush outside and tell Becky's mom to call the police, but I also knew that Roger could be in immediate danger. I headed into the kitchen.

Nothing there, either. No place to hide except the pantry.

Inside the pantry, something fell. I let out a rather embarra.s.sing yelp.

I held up the flashlight at a suitable angle for bas.h.i.+ng somebody's head if the need arose, then threw open the pantry door and quickly stepped back.

It was empty. A can of spinach rolled against my feet.

Could a ghost topple spinach? Would it have any reason to?

And then, with a barely audible creak, the inside wall of the pantry slowly began to swing open, like a door.

I pulled it open all the way, revealing another room slightly smaller than the pantry, containing nothing but a ladder leading down into a hole in the dirt floor.

"Whoa," was the best I could think to whisper to myself, and I'm pretty sure I didn't even p.r.o.nounce it correctly.

This was definitely the time to call the police.

Roger screamed from down below.

There was definitely not time to call the police.

I peered down into the hole, but while there was a definite flickering below, I couldn't see anything else. I didn't dare s.h.i.+ne my flashlight down there, or even climb down the ladder, not if I wanted to take the old man by surprise. Instead I turned around, praying that this meant I'd be facing the right direction when I landed, stepped backward, and dropped down into the darkness.

I wasn't sure how far I fell. It was far enough that I dropped to my knees with a jolt of pain, but not far enough to shatter any bones.

When I looked up, the first thing that caught my attention was the old man rus.h.i.+ng at me with a meat cleaver.

I jumped to my feet and swung the flashlight, bas.h.i.+ng him across the face. The old man was knocked to the side, the weapon still in his grasp. He struck the wall and began stumbling back toward me, so I gave him another solid bash with the flashlight and he hit the floor. He didn't move.

We were in what looked exactly like a mobile home with reinforced walls. It probably was a mobile home with reinforced walls. There was a large shelf of canned goods, as well as a shelf of books. The place was lit by a couple of candles and a kerosene lamp.

Roger lay on a bed, his arms over his head and his wrists handcuffed to the metal bedposts. "The guy's crazy!" he shrieked. "He's a total lunatic! A total complete lunatic! Crazy! I'm not kidding, he's crazy! Oh my G.o.d he's crazy!"

"I sort of got that from the meat cleaver," I said, walking over to the bed. "Do you know where the keys to the handcuffs are?"

"They're in his pocket! He's crazy! He was going to eat me!"

I frowned. "He was going to eat you?"

"Yes! He was going to eat my freakin' leg! Have you ever had some crazy guy say he's gonna eat your leg? It's disturbing! It's really disturbing!"

So in the course of about a minute I'd gone from exploring a haunted house to dealing with a meat-cleaver wielding cannibal. Life is quaint sometimes.

"Just calm down," I said. "I'm not going to let him eat your leg. I'm going to go over there, get the keys, set you free, and then we'll go back upstairs where n.o.body ever gets eaten."

"Are you sure he's unconscious?"

"No. That's why I'm going to drop a can of..." I picked a can off the shelf, "...yams on his head."

"Maybe a book would work better," Roger suggested.

I looked over at the other wall. "They're all paperback."

"No, I saw a hardcover one."

I surveyed the bookshelf, and there was indeed a thick hardcover novel. I pulled it off the shelf. "The Stand! Perfect! He'll be out for hours!"

"Maybe you should drop the can of yams too, just to be sure," said Roger.

"Good thinking."

I turned around and saw that while I'd been trying to find a suitable object for dropping on his head, the old man had recovered and was sitting against the wall, meat cleaver balanced on his knees. "I'm sorry," he said, giving us a sheepish smile.

I really wasn't sure what to say to that. "I'm, uh...sorry, too."

The old man nodded as if my apology were acceptable. "I'm Jervis Taywood."

"It's Jervis! I knew it!"

"I knew I was going to be discovered sooner or later," said Jervis. "But I just couldn't do it. I couldn't stay below all the time. Sometimes you've got to get up and wander around the house, you know?"

"Absolutely," I agreed.

"I felt horrible abandoning my family and all, but these...these rages...I got to the point where I couldn't control them."

"So these are like, drag people to your underground lair and threaten to eat their leg kinds of rages?" I asked.

Jervis nodded. "Yes, basically." He glanced over at Roger. "I wouldn't really have eaten your leg. I may have scooped out a forkful, but it never would have made it to my mouth."

"Shut up you crazy lunatic son of a-!"

"Chill, Roger," I said, setting a rea.s.suring hand on his leg, which was probably not the best location for a rea.s.suring hand at that particular time and which elicited a shriek of horror.

"I don't know what sparked the rage tonight," Jervis said. "Okay, well, I do. It was that whole 'ghostie ghostie ghostie' thing and that annoying whistling. It just set me off. But I never meant to grab your friend and drop him down here. I guess I wasn't expecting to see him standing right there when I opened the pantry door."

"I can understand that," I said. "It's not the best sight in the world. So you faked your death and went to live down here, huh?"

"I didn't fake my death. I just disappeared."

"What about jumping into the vat of molten plastic?"

"Who said I did that?"

"I heard it...uh, I dunno, somewhere..."

"Did you hear it from the legitimate news media?"

"No, probably not," I admitted.

"That's a pretty dumb way to commit suicide, don't you think?"

"Yes, probably."

"Just how old are you?"

"All right, knock it off," I said. "I don't need to be lectured by somebody who goes into cannibalistic rages."

We sat in silence for a long moment.

"So what now?" asked Jervis.

"I'm not quite sure," I said.

We sat in silence for another long moment.

"I guess we leave," I decided.

"That works for me," said Jervis. He removed a small pair of keys from his pocket and tossed them to me. "Sorry about the handcuffs. They're meant for me. You know, when I get those rage things."

I unlocked the cuffs. Roger immediately sat up and began vigorously rubbing his wrists, trying to restore circulation.

"Don't worry," said Jervis. "I'll try to do better in the future. You're not going to tell anybody about me, are you?"

"No, your secret is safe with us," I said.

"This is the police!" a voice shouted from above. "If anyone is down there, make yourselves known!"

Jervis shrugged. "I'll get psychiatric help rather than jail, right?"

"Yeah, I think that's probably a safe bet."

"Okay. Could you guys maybe, you know, go up there and kind of plead my case before they come down here? Maybe not your friend so much," he said, looking at me, "but you seem nice enough."

"Sure," I said. "Come on, Roger."

We walked over to the ladder. "We'll be right up!" I announced.

Jervis was gone when the officers went down the ladder.

My first thought: "Oh my G.o.d, he was a ghost after all!"

My second thought: "Check the closet, moron."

They did. And the fake back wall revealed a small tunnel, which eventually emerged into the pantry of the "abandoned" house next door.

The police never did find him.

And yes, I got in a lot of trouble when Helen came home.

So to close, I just want to say that if you hear eerie sounds in your house at night, and you have a pantry, and your home was built under circ.u.mstances that would have enabled it to be constructed over a buried mobile home, you can never be too careful...

Oh, and on one final Halloween-related note, who in the world decided that those piddly little miniature candy bars should be called "Fun Size?" That's not fun size! Fun size would be a block of chocolate the size of a wooly mammoth!

Thank you for your attention.

A Harry McGlade Mystery by JA Konrath "It's my husband, Mr. McGlade. He thinks he can raise the dead."

The woman sitting in front of my desk was named Norma Cauldridge. She had the figure of a Barlett pear and so many freckles that she was more beige than Caucasian. She also came equipped with a severe overbite, a lazy eye, and a mole on her cheek. Not a Cindy Crawford type of mole, either. This one looked like she glued the end of a hotdog to her face. A hairy hotdog.