For a few years, I worked as a sports reporter for the local paper. On a blustery autumn day, right before basketball season was set to start, my editor rumbled out of his office and to my desk.
“Hey, where is the Lockard interview at?”
I knew it wasn’t going to be fun, but I told the truth.
“I don’t have it.”
He frowned. “And why not?”
“Because, Ken, I’ve called, I’ve texted him, I’ve gone down to the school. He told me he was too busy with class every time I went during the day, and this week he hasn’t been there at all.”
It was one of those stalemates that I sometimes had with the old man where he knew in his liver that I had done everything I was supposed to – but he was still mad I didn’t have what we needed. In fact, sometimes knowing that I’d done everything right only made him more mad.
“You been to Lockard’s house before?” he asked.
I shook my head, and he lumbered back into his office. I heard him write something with a pencil, then rip the paper out of a notebook. He walked back out and handed it to me. It read: 1298 Pitt Lane Drive.
“That’s his address. It’s just over behind the high school. Go knock on his fuckin door, and if he gives you any trouble, I’ll go get the interview myself.”
“Uh . . . can we do that?” I asked him, looking at the torn piece of paper. “That seems kind of illegal.”
He was already storming off, though, throwing his tattered old Cubs hat on against the windy day. “I don’t care. I’m off to ask the mayor about some dumb bullshit, but I’ll be back later. I don’t care what you have to do, just get the damn interview.”
And then he was gone, bobbing his massive frame down the stairs slowly.
Pitt Lane Drive could be described as “over behind the high school” in the same way the county courthouse could be described as “a little building over on Main Street.” The road was winding and empty, and it took me twenty minutes before I reached the cul-de-sac that served as the dead-end. The whole neighborhood (if it even amounted to that) seemed to be almost carved out of the mountain. The developers had carved an artificial valley out of the hill with steep sides all around that felt like they could snap together at any moment, swallowing all those little houses whole.
Lockard’s house was at the very end, flanked by seven empty homes that loomed like sentries on either side of the street. They were tall, slim little things all built close together so that, in the light of the overcast day, the shadows between them were thick and cumbersome. The kudzu had crept out from the edge of the woods and draped itself along the hillsides, almost touching the backyards of all the houses and making the very ground rustle and shiver in the wind.
The story was well-known around town. Some time before I was born, some jackass with more money than sense got the idea into his head that he was going to build a subdivision stretching all the way out into the mountains, and that was going to be the idea that finally made him rich. The guy bought a bunch of the land and, through some backdoor deal, got the county to pave a road out there. Then he built eight houses, sold three of them, ran out of money and then took a long walk off a short dock at the lake. It was a bad plan from the start. Shockingly, it turns out that the people who buy houses stacked right on top of each other on 1/8th-acre plots aren’t really the type of people that like being 20 minutes outside the nearest town and 40 minutes outside the nearest city. All this to say: the neighborhood was abandoned from birth.
Even the people who originally bought the two other homes had moved away some years later, leaving the row of empty shells on the street as a testimony to a real estate developer’s idiocy. The only thing they were really used for now was teenage parties. One guy had bought one of the homes and tried to turn it into an AirBnB, but that fell through rather quick.
Driving through, the idea of orphans seemed fitting. Lonely little orphans perched alongside each other, skinny and pale.
All of them except for Lockard’s house, where a lamp in bay window spilled yellow light out into the cloudy day, like a strange lighthouse. He had moved up there not long after the incident with his father. I think he wanted to be well way from everyone in town after that, and, if I’m honest, I think people in town sort of wanted him well away from them. Once, there was even an incident where that real estate developer banged on Lockard’s door in the middle of the night, drunk, screaming that Lockard was the reason no one wanted to buy any of the houses. There was a lamp in his bay window spilling warm light out into the cloudy day, and it was warm and comforting, like a candle.
I parked on the street outside, but when I stepped out of the car, I thought the wind might carry me away. It wasn’t late enough in the season for the wind to be cold, but it smelled of dead leaves and autumn storms. It snatched the sound of my knocking away before I could even hear it.
When Lockard answered the door, something deep in my gut that told me to run and never, ever look back. Dark bags hung under his eyes, and he was more pale than any person I had ever seen. It had only been probably two weeks since last I’d seen him – but the man looked as if he’d aged a decade or more. He smelled of must and tobacco, and the gust of fresh air flooding into the house felt like the house itself was gulping it hungrily.
I didn’t run, though, mostly because he looked so incredibly happy to see me.
“Coach Lockard are you okay?” I asked.
He smiled, then frowned, then tried to smile again but didn’t quite manage it. “I think we were supposed to have an interview this week, weren’t we?” he asked.
“Uhh – yeah – but… Chris you don’t look so good.”
“Yeah, I – uh – I don’t feel it,” he said awkwardly. He looked down at his feet, and then over my shoulder toward the car. He tapped his thumb on the door knob a few times, like he was thinking, and then said, “Paul - can I ask you a question?”
Before I could answer, though, he had stalked off into the darkness of the house, gesturing for me to follow him. When I stepped inside and shut the door, and the sound of the wind faded into a distant whistle. The silence inside, though, had a heft and weight to rival even the wind, though. It was that heavy silence that lives inside funeral homes and the deep parts of old churches. It felt like a solemn kind of gravity, pressing downward as I followed him through dark hallway, past an empty living room and an empty kitchen, to his office behind the stairs. The stairs leading up to the second floor were empty. I’ve gone through this a million times in my head, and that I am sure of. They were empty.
They were empty.
The only lights in the office were the soft blue computer screen and an architect’s lamp aimed toward the keyboard. Darkness shrouded the rest of the office, so thick that I could barely make out the names of the basketball books lining the shelves. If the trophies on the bookshelves hadn’t reflected what little light there was, I might have missed them entirely, but they were all polished and clean, and glinted when I moved. The photos on the wall, too, had the details washed out in the gloom so that each subject looked like a mere suggestion of a person. Old mountain dew bottles were scattered across the desk, and the whole place smelled of must and flat soda. It somehow felt even more silent.
He pointed at the screen. “Paul, can you do me a favor, and tell me what you see there?”
He didn’t really look at the computer as he pointed. Instead, he sort of looked near it, like how a person avoids looking directly at a glare on a sunny day.
“What?”
“Just – tell me what you see there?”
What I’d originally taken to be a screensaver wasn’t that at all. It was actually the full-screen mode on Google Streetview, and it was facing directly at Lockard’s house. It had been taken on an overcast day like today, with dark purple clouds in the background of the photo. Everything looked exactly the same as it had when I’d seen it only thirty seconds ago – with one exception. Standing right beside the bay window was a slim, dark figure with its arms held out straight on either side like a scarecrow.
“That’s – uh – that’s weird, Chris. That you? Or a friend of yours or… something?”
He shook his head. “But you can see it, yeah?”
I nodded. “Yeah, I can see . . .” I tried to think of what to call it, then gave up. “Are you okay? You look like you might throw up.”
In the gloom of the office, he had somehow managed to grow even paler. The muscles in his jaw worked furiously and worked as he clenched and ground his teeth.
“It unnerved me,” he finally managed.
I looked at the figure again, and I could almost swear it had moved a couple millimeters closer. “Yeah it would me too. I don’t think ‘unnerve’ would even cover it, honestly. You could always call the police, you know. I’m not really sure what they’d do, but. . . You had anything like this happen before?”
He shook his head. The blue light from the screen washed his face out and made his hair look much, much greyer.
“Why don’t you let me call Sheriff John?”
He shook his head, staring directly at the computer screen now, like he was transfixed. Again, I got that sense of the figure having moved almost imperceptibly closer on the screen. “I guess you probably need that interview, don’t you?”
The abruptness of it all gave me a feeling like whiplash, or that feeling on an amusement ride when the bottom drops out.
“I can come back later,” I lied. “Chris, buddy, you don’t look great.”
He kept glancing at the screen as he started toward the door, gesturing for me to follow. “No, no. Let’s go to the living room and do it there.”
I followed him out of the office and into the living room. He turned on a lamp in the corner, flooding the room with light. I sat down in a chair facing the window, and he sat across from me before pausing, looking over his shoulder, and then changing to a different chair.
I sat the recorder on the table.
“So – how is the team looking this year?”
***
Ken was alone in his office when I arrived, playing solitaire on one screen with a Cubs game on the other. Ken’s office smelled of stale coke and chewing tobacco instead of old mountain dew, but it still made me nauseous.
“You okay?” he asked.
I sat down on the couch he kept in the corner, then took a deep breath. I wasn’t sure what to say – or if I should say anything at all. It seemed more than a little presumptuous of me to be worried about a man old enough to be my dad. I’d tried explaining it a few times on the car ride back down the mountain, and each time had sounded more ridiculous than the last.
“Honestly? I don’t know.”
Ken spit into an empty coke bottle. “You get the interview with Lockard?”
“Yeah I did, but – uh – I think something’s wrong with him. And - I sort of don’t know what to do about it.”
“He wasn’t dead or something was he?”
I shook my head. “No, I think he might be having some kind of mental break or something.”
“Or someone’s playing some really strange pranks on him” is what I didn’t say.
Ken leaned back in his chair, folding his hands across his stomach. “I mean – Lockard’s a big man, he can handle himself. Might be having a rough time, but –“
I shook my head. “No, no. Ken, this is something else.”
He looked at me for a moment, and I thought I saw ghosts swimming behind his eyes. “You look worried,” he finally said.
“I don’t know if it’s worry or not. It feels almost more like – dread? You remember that time you sent me to cover that car accident?”
He nodded.
“I stood there off the road while they – uh – ya know . . . pulled them out. It feels like that. I don’t really know how to describe it.”
He frowned, looking out the window at the overcast autumn day. He was silent for a long minute, wetting his lips a few times before he finally spoke. “I don’t think you were alive for the Newsom murders, but I’m sure you know what happened. Horrible stuff. I was working in the city then, and I must have been about 30 or so, but my editor at the time wanted pictures from the crime scene. Nothing gruesome, just pictures of the house and the area where it all happened. All eight of us, my editor included, drew straws to see which of us had to go. I drew the short one.”
“The weather was a lot like today, now that I think about it. But I remember getting this feeling while I was standing there that I was close to something that made the world a darker place. I never really felt like I was in any kind of danger. I mean – hell, there were cops swarming everywhere – but I got the sense while I was standing in that front yard, that I was standing a little too close to something that was dangerous. I was rubbing elbows with something that I didn’t understand.”
I swallowed and tried to speak, but my throat had gone dry. “Yeah,” I managed. “Like that.”
He nodded. “It’s an uncomfortable feeling.” We sat in silence for a moment before he took a deep breath and continued. “I wish I could help, but Lockard’s never liked me. Go on over to the school and see Alex Long and talk to him about it.”
“I’ll do it after I type up the interview.”
“No, leave me the recorder and I’ll transcribe it for you. It’ll save you some time later.”
“You sure?”
He pointed to the Cubs game playing on the computer’s screen. “Not like I’m doing anything important.”
***
The high school let out early on Wednesdays, so most of the kids were gone when I arrived. The wind was still blowing, and small drops of cold rain were just beginning to filter down from the soot-colored clouds, falling on the children, mostly poor and ragged, who were still waiting for their parents under the front awning. The janitors had already mopped the floor by the main entrance, so the air inside smelled of ammonia and that seeping stink that’s peculiar to teenagers. It wasn’t cold enough to turn the heat on, but it was too cold to have the AC running, so the air felt unsettlingly still and quiet.
I once read a description of liminal spaces as being: “places that are waiting for something, or places that are between states of being.” That’s what empty schools have always felt like to me. Kids breathe life into the place, like a child playing with a doll. The energy is a part of what makes the building a school, so, without them, even with all of the other trappings intact – there is a sense that some core component is somehow missing.
Alex Long was a long, portly man behind a thick desk. He wore the same uniform of a white shirt with khakis and circular spectacles every single day, with only the tie changing between the days. Today’s was green with silver stripes.
He’d been the principal at the school as long as I could remember, and his long tenure gave the man an air of sturdiness. He seemed less a member of the school than a fixture of it, as welded into the foundation of the place as a door frame. Honestly, the man always reminded me of a water fountain – something boring and necessary that you never really pay attention to until you need it. It was widely debated why he’d never moved up into the school board or higher administration. Some people believed he’d had arguments or affairs with someone that stunted his career, but others thought he was just a man that didn’t much like change, and preferred right where he was. I always thought it was probably the latter.
“Paul!” he said with a smile, standing up to shake my hand. “Sit down, sit down. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
The man’s office contained a large window that faced the school’s inner courtyard. The grey light filtering through the afternoon coiled around everything in the office. A small banker’s lamp cast the only other light inside the room, spilling across the desk lazily. As I sat down in the straight-backed chair, thunder rumbled outside.
We exchanged the usual how-are-you’s and fine-thank’s and a couple more pleasantries before I brought up the actual subject of my visit.
“I actually stopped by because I wanted to ask you about Coach Lockard,” I said.
He raised an eyebrow and gave a small laugh. “Well, I think the athletic director would be a much better person to talk to about Lockard, don’t ya think? I know you have his number…” The last words trailed off, like he was confused, or concerned that the subject was being brought up.
“It’s – uh – not to get a quote or anything,” I said. “I actually went and talked to him today. He’s – He’s – I’m sorry, I don’t really know how to say it. I guess I’m a little worried about him. When I showed up, he was looking at his house on Google Maps and asked me if I saw something there and – he just didn’t look good. I’d have gone to Clinette about it, but…”
Bradley Clinette was the school’s athletic director, and renowned across the county for just how little work he actually managed to do. The man was a walking example of charisma mechanics in real life. It didn’t matter how little work he did or how inept he actually was, because he only ever needed to smile and talk for ten minutes, and every person that was mad at him would usually walk away kicking themselves for being mad at him in the first place.
Long’s eyes narrowed, and he spoke quietly. “What did he ask if you saw?”
“Some kind of figure or something on the photo. It was right outside of his house.”
Long closed his eyes and took a deep breath as he pushed his glasses up his nose. In all my life to that point, I’d never seen a man age before my eyes, but it was like the weight of what I’d just told him pressed down on him like a decade, pushing him into a slouch and weighing down the wrinkles on his face.
He took a long, deep breath and let it out, shuddering.
“Did you see anything?” he asked quietly, with a voice like dry autumn grass.
I nodded.
He took a key from his pocket and leaned over to unlock the bottom drawer of his desk, removing a bottle of whiskey. He twisted the cork off in a practiced motion and leered at me over the bottle as he grabbed two glasses from the same drawer. He poured the amber liquid into both glasses and then slid one across the desk.
“I’ve been worried about him for a while now,” he said.
I sipped the burning liquid. The warmth chased off a chill that I hadn’t quite realized was there.
“What were you worried for?”
He took a much longer sip than me. “Off the record?”
“Off the record. I mean – if we’re on the record, I think I’m already in a lot of trouble,” I said, holding up the glass. “Cant imagine this is really peak professionalism for either of us.”
He nodded. “Yeah, I suppose you’re right. To answer your question, though – because of his age.”
“I’m confused. He’s not that old, is he? Mid forties or something?”
“Fifties, but you’re right. He’s not that old, but he’s almost to the same age his father was when all the – unpleasantness – happened.”
“I don’t really understand,” I said.
He sighed and looked out the office window. The clouds outside were now so dark that the office itself seemed dark, and I noticed that, without noticing, we had both shifted forward in our chairs, closer to the light from the little banker’s lamp.
“What do you know about Chris’s family?” he asked.
“His father killed some people. Had some kind of mental break or something.”
Lockard’s father, the elder Coach Lockard, and the things he had done sat in the hazy valley between shameful secret and whispered legend. Nobody liked talking about it at the best of times, and very few people would. Because of that, most of the young people had filled in the gaps with different stories of their own: he’d lost his mind, he’d been possessed, he’d been having multiple sexual affairs and they were all about to come out. All of those explanations were some varying degree of illogical, but they all drove toward explaining the same unavoidable fact: one day, without warning, a lot of people had died.
Even working at the paper, where you’d expect people to be more fearless about that kind of stuff, I had hardly ever learned a thing. The secretaries just shook their heads and called it, “nasty, unpleasant business” while Ken would just shake his head and tell me to leave it alone. No one would ever really forget about it, but it was still too painful for a lot of people to go out of their way in remembering it.
“Everyone knows that, but do you know how his grandfather went?”
I shook my head. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Principal Long, but I’ve never really been the type to keep up with how people die. I’m gonna guess it wasn’t old age with a bunch of family members around, though, was it?”
“Walked into the woods and never came back. He was part of the city council, you know. Middle of a meeting one day, he just up and walked out. Poof. Never seen again.”
“No, I didn’t know that. Actually I kind of wish I still didn’t know it.”
“You know how superstitious people are. If you ain’t one of the gossips, you prefer to leave that stuff alone. It’s one of those things that feels like bad luck just talking about it, ya know?”
I nodded. “I just wanted to ask about it. He seems like something’s going on. I don’t really know what, but I just felt like I needed to make sure someone else knew about it.”
Principal Long licked his lips and sniffed nervously, then sighed. Outside, thunder rolled again.
“I suppose I should probably go up and check on him.”
“I think that would be a good idea.”
He lingered still for a moment, and, just like with Ken, I thought I could see the ghosts swimming behind his eyes. The room crowded with hazy memories of events long past, as if the Senior Coach Lockard had been standing in the corner of the room this whole time. I knew what Long was going to ask before he did.
“Will you ride up there with me? I’ll pick him up and get him out of the house a bit so he’s not alone. Maybe that’ll help. I just –“ he trailed off, and I didn’t make him finish the question.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll go.”
He let out the breath he’d been holding and nodded. We finished our drinks, then walked out of the school and into the rain. It was coming down hard now in long, sweeping curtains beneath the rolling thunder and lightning.
Our ride back up into the hills seemed to take so much longer. I’m not sure whether I just was driving slower because of the rain, or if it was the growing feeling of dread in my stomach, but each second dragged and strained against its limits as we went until time seemed to stop, and there was only the storm and the wind and the mindless drone of the engine as the car wound further and further up into those dark, old hills.
The same empty houses lined that solemn street, but they felt different now. Their dark second-floor windows felt like staring eyes as we passed under them, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that behind each shut door lay a dark thing – waiting for some unknowable sign to emerge.
“Paul!” shouted Principal Long.
I blinked, dragged from whatever well my imagination had dug for me. “I’m sorry, what?”
“You just gonna stare at the steering wheel or…?”
Completely on autopilot, I had stopped the car in the same spot where I’d parked earlier. How long I’d been sitting there thinking, I wasn’t sure, but judging by Long’s tone, I guessed he’d said my name at least a couple of times already.
“Sorry, I was just –“ I shook my head, “I don’t know. Sorry.”
His only response was a frown. We both climbed out into the pouring rain and ran up the walkway. The small front porch was shielded from the rain, thankfully, and we huddled under it.
“Goddamn this rain,” said Long, shaking the water from his soaked hair.
“Principal Long,” I whispered.
“What?” he snapped, “Speak up!”
I pointed to the three-inch gap of yawning darkness between the door and the frame. ““Door’s open.”
Some of the color seemed to drain from his face, then, and I have to admit, I was grateful for that. It feels stupid to say that my stomach dropped at seeing something as simple as an open door, but it did – and the same thing happened to a man even older than me.
“Do we knock?” I asked, quietly.
He looked at the door, and then at me, and then back at the door. He reached out a hand and touched the handle the way you might check to see if something is hot, touching and recoiling quickly. When nothing happened, he placed his palm flat against the door and pushed it all the way open.
“Chris?” he called.
There was no answer.
“Chris!? It’s Alex, Chris! You – uh – you alright in there?”
He leaned forward as he spoke, craning his neck to look further into the dark.
The silence inside was warm and dry and stale. It hovered near the open door and pooled around our feet, smelling of must. The stairs to the left disappeared into the second floor, and the hallway stretching ahead was empty as far as we could see.
Mr. Long looked at me. I shrugged.
“Should we – I mean, do you think we should call someone? Or maybe he went out?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I honestly don’t think he could have left.”
We looked at the garage. We couldn’t see inside, so there was no telling whether his car was there or not.
“So – you think we should call someone?”
In 26 years, I had never felt more like a helpless child than I did standing on that porch. “Mr. Long – I really don’t know.”
“I’ve got an idea, hold on,” he said.
Long fished his cellphone from his pocket. He unlocked it, hit a few buttons, and then held the phone between us as it rang on speaker. After a long moment, a soft ringtone floated out from the house, barely audible over the loud hushing of the rain and the periodic rumbles of thunder. Long let it ring until a familiar voice picked up and said, “You’ve reached Coach Lockard. I’m sorry I can’t come to the phone right now but leave your name and number, and I’ll see you when I crawl out from under your bed tonight.”
Long threw the phone away from him like it had sprouted thorns. He turned from a pasty white to an alabaster green as he worked his mouth, trying and failing to say something. He wheezed and puffed but couldn’t conjure any words as he backed out into the rain. He slipped on the wet stone of the walkway, fell backward, and continued crawling away, trying to watch the front door even as his head swung back and forth wildly, searching for some kind of monster.
“Mr. Long!” I called after him, but he was already in the car, shaking his head and starting the car as he pulled his knees up to his chest.
I heard Coach Lockard’s ringtone again from somewhere inside the house. Mr. Long’s phone had come to a stop in the wet grass. When he’d thrown it, the fall had caused it to redial. The screen was spiderwebbed and stuttering as rain seeped through the cracks. The ringtone played for a moment, then went silent again.
As much as I wanted to run far, far away from that place, something deep pushed me through the threshold and into that dark house. From the moment I passed inside, the rain seemed far, far away. The floor overhead creaked as the house swayed and settled in the storm. I didn’t bother looking through any of the other rooms, for some deep feeling told me that, if Lockard were still inside the house at all, he’d be in that back room again, still staring into the computer screen at – whatever that thing was.
“Lockard?” I called.
There was no answer, and I rounded the back corner to enter that office for the second time in a day. Just like earlier, the blue light of the computer screen and the small little architect’s lamp were the only light. Just like earlier, the screen was taken up by a Google streetview image, but unlike earlier – there was no Coach Lockart anywhere. There was an addition to the streetview image, however: my car, complete with Mr. Long curled into the fetal position in the passenger’s seat.
Coach Lockard’s ringtone sounded again. His phone was on the floor and lit up as it buzzed with a musical chime. The name across the front read: Chris Lockard. I frowned at it and opened it.
“Coach Lockard?”
I hadn’t intended it as a whisper, but the tiny office and the whole house seemed to weigh noise down so that mustering up anything louder felt like a monumental effort.
Lockard’s voice came through the phone, same as ever. “Paul, you shouldn’t be here.”
“We came to see if you were okay,” I said. “Are you here?”
The ceiling directly over my head creaked ominously and a small bit of dust fell from the ceiling onto my face as I looked up.
There was a pause before he answered.
“Yeah.”
“Chris, we just want to help. I brought Principal Long. If I come upstairs will you just talk to me?”
“No!” he hissed. “Do not go up those stairs. Just – just don’t. Please.”
Another creak sounded overhead.
My own phone started to vibrate, and when I pulled it from my pocket, I saw that the caller ID read: Chris Lockard.
“I’ve got another phone call, Chris. Its – uh – it’s you.”
The line went staticky for a moment, and I answered the other phone call. When I put my ear to my phone, the voice on the other line was still Chris’s but it was harsh and gave me the feeling of someone smiling too widely. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I could hear the sound of joints and tendons straining, like rope being pulled too taut, and every word seemed mechanical and wrong.
“Hello, Paul. I am glad you came by. Sorry, I did not hear you two. I was upstairs and did not hear you come in. Please, come on up.”
What initially sounded like the rain filtering through the phone began to sound more and more like every word was being undercut by a gentle “ssssssssssssss” noise.
Chris’s phone made a noise in my hand, and I raised it to my ear.
“I suppose it’s telling you to come upstairs now, isn’t it?” he asked. “If not, it’s going to.”
“Chris – what’s going on?”
“Don’t listen when it does.”
“Chris – ‘it’ is you. I know what you sound like. That’s you on the other line.”
There was another long pause, and I raised my phone up to my ear again.
“Upstairs… upstairs… upstairs… upstairs…” was the only thing it said, alongside a loud thudding that I heard directly over my head, like someone was banging something large and heavy and wet against the floor as hard as they could.
I was grateful I hadn’t eaten, as I was sure I would have thrown up if I had. My heart felt like it was about to explode in hot and suffocating air. I felt like I couldn’t catch my breath, as every breath felt stale and dry. Doing anything at all felt impossible, but I raised Chris’s phone to my ear again.
“Chris… please. Just – whatever this joke is, just please cut it out. This isn’t funny.”
Thud. Thud. Thud.
On the computer, the Google Streetview changed, twisted upward to look at the second floor, where Chris Lockard stood in the window, smiling and waving. The view turned back toward the other houses on the street, where shadows stood in all of the windows.
“Paul,” said Chris quietly. “You need to get far away from this place. Right now.”
I tried to swallow and barely managed that. “Chris I don’t think I can. I really don’t think I can.”
Thud. Thud. Thud.
The sound of the floor overhead splintering under the weight of the banging shook me out of whatever stupefied state I’d been stuck in. I ran, holding both phones in my hand and rushing down the hall and out into the pouring rain as quickly as I could, not daring to look at the stairs beside me for fear I would see something crawling or skittering down them after me.
I didn’t stop until I was inside the car, tearing away from that accursed, fell place. I didn’t even dare to look at the windows of the houses as we passed. Long kept his face buried in his knees as we drove hell-knell through the storm and back into town. We didn’t stop until we reached the paper’s parking lot, where we both wandered inside in a daze, soaking wet and pale, looking like we’d seen a ghost.
Long didn’t speak again for a few days if I remember right. Might have been a week. After we got back to the paper, they called some people to come and get him.
Ken lumbered in some time later, where he found me sitting in his office watching the never-ending stream of live baseball games and reruns. He walked as gingerly as a man of his size could, and sat down in the chair. He drew the curtain on the door and turned on the little lamp on his desk. The office had gotten dark in the late afternoon, as the rain had continued coming down, and the gloam of evening had begun to creep out of the corners.
“You guys saw something up there?” he asked quietly.
I nodded. “I think you should call the police,” I said quietly, not taking my eyes off the baseball game. It was an old game, a rerun, but the field was bright, and everyone looked happy and cheerful. I liked it. It was comforting. “I think Lockard’s dead.”
Ken blinked, but didn’t look surprised. His face remained carefully expressionless as he reached over and pulled the phone from the receiver, hit a button on the speed-dial list, and sat back in his chair, resting his hands on his gigantic belly.
“Hey, Jerry,” he said. “No, I’m not calling about that, I promise. I think you need to send a couple guys up to Lockard’s.”
There was a mumble I could barely hear through the phone and Ken turned to look at me, the receiver still pressed to his ear.
“Paul was up there today with Alex Long. He’s a little spacey right now, but – seems like they both saw something. He said Lockard’s dead.”
More mumbling.
“I’ll be here,” said Ken, and hung up the phone.
“They’re not gonna believe us, Ken. I don’t believe it.”
Ken nodded. He reached under his desk and opened the mini fridge there, pulled out one of his endless supply of diet cokes, then handed it to me. He reached for another, this time for himself.
He pulled my voice recorder from his pocket, then laid it on the table and stared at it for a moment, like he was thinking, before turning away to watch the game with me. And we both sat there, in the quiet, sipping coke until the phone rang, and I heard Sheriff Gregson’s voice on the other end.
Everyone else had already left and the building had settled for the evening when Sheriff Jimmy Gregson walked in, a lot of confused concern on his face as he lumbered up the stairs with his thumbs tucked into his belt loops. His felt hat was covered with rain and so was his green jacket, and he smelled strongly of cheap body spray, like he was covering something. I vaguely wondered if he’d been drinking.
Ken turned the sound of the game down, but left it just loud enough to keep the room from being silent. I was grateful for that.
“Sheriff,” he said.
Sheriff Gregson nodded. “Ken. Paul.”
I waited, trying not to hyperventilate.
Not getting a response, Gregson shrugged and took his hat off, looking around for a place to set it down. He dropped it on Ken’s desk and rubbed his bald head.
“Paul . . . you need to tell me what happened today.”
“Can’t you ask Principal Long?” I asked. I tried to speak normally, but it came out dry and cracked.
He shook his head. “No. He – uh –“ the sheriff held hands with the palms open bit his lip as he tried to summon the words, “well, he’s not doing well. Honestly, you don’t look like you are either.”
I shook my head. “I’m not.”
He pulled up one of Ken’s chairs and sat down. “I need you to try, son. Even if it takes us all night, I need you to try.”
And I did. It took until all of the street lamps in the parking lot were glowing orange through the wet fog that had swept in as the sun went down – but I did it. And all the while, baseball reruns played, like a strange soundtrack. Hits and cheers and old commercials and Ken spitting tobacco into an empty coke can. And then it was over – and the sheriff was staring at me with a troubled look on his face, licking his lips uncomfortably.
“You said you talked to him earlier today?” he asked.
I nodded.
He shook his head. “Paul, that’s not possible.”
“Why?”
Gregson rubbed his head again nervously. “I don’t wanna get too graphic, but – uh – we found Lockard. He was in his house, but… he’s been dead a while. Couple of days, at least.”
“This ain’t CSI,” said Ken. “How the hell can you know that?”
Sheriff Gregson swallowed and nodded, then tapped his nose. “Someone can start to rot – uh – pretty quickly when it’s hot and wet, but . . . they don’t rot that quickly. He was – Lockart was pretty far gone. Just trust me on this one.”
“I saw him earlier today,” I said, looking to Ken for support. “I swear I did, just ask Ken. I – I –“
And Ken and I came to the same realization and looked down again at the voice recorder. A second later, Sheriff Gregson did the same. Ken reached for the recorder and hit play on the last file. The crackling speaker of the little microphone was easily louder than the quiet hum of the baseball game, and I listened to myself speaking.
“So how are you feeling about the season so far? I know you guys have your first official game this week, right?”
The only response was a stifled giggling that sounded like it was some feet away from the microphone.
I heard myself laugh and respond “Yeah I can understand that. And how many seniors did you actually graduate?”
More giggling.
I mouthed the words with the recorder this time, remembering the formula I always used for these interview. “And how are you feeling about the new crop of freshmen?”
And I never got a response. In the entire 42 minute recording – I never received a single response. It was only me and the giggling. I still hear it sometimes - in the fall usually, whenever it’s quiet.