Post series: The Child of Hyacinth Road

PART 7

“Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”

“There’s something going on in the house across the street,” Carolyn Weston said.  “There’s a car in the driveway, I’m not sure whose it is, and there’s…”  She trailed off.

“There’s what, ma’am?”

“I just got up for a drink of water, and now there’s lights going on and off in the—oh, now I think I can see a person or something, a shadow, a moving shadow in the curtains…it’s going so fast…my God, what on earth is happening in that house?”

“Okay, ma’am, I need you to focus.  You say there’s a strange car and maybe a strange person there?”

“Yes!  I—no!  I mean, there’s…Oh, my God, now there’s light coming from all the windows over there.  I’ve never seen anything like it!  There’s nobody living in—the house is for sale, and, uh—”

“Okay, ma’am, please stay on track.  You see someone in the house?”

“Yes,” Carolyn said.  “Yes, I just told you there’s someone in the house!  A young man has been showing it lately.  A real estate guy.”

“Okay.  Has this man spoken to you?”

“Uh, no, I—well, actually yes, I met him outside a while back.  If he’s the same one.”

“Well, ma’am, I can send police out if you think there’s—”

“Oh my God!  Oh my God!  Oh my God!…Wh-what IS that!?”

“What are you seeing now, ma’am?”

“I can’t…the light, it’s a tall yellowish thing, and it’s…it’s not human!  It’s getting bigger and closer, and now it’s right outside my window!  And oh my dear Jesus, IT SEES ME!  IT’S STARING RIGHT AT ME!”  Carolyn gave a sharp, prolonged gasp and reeled backward into her kitchen.

“Ma’am?…Ma’am, are you okay?  Are you conscious?  Is anyone with you?  Stay with me, please.…Okay, I’m sending medical and police to your house right now.”

But Carolyn Weston had hit the floor, her solitary life seeping from her with each second her faulty heart failed to pump oxygenated blood to her brain.  The legacy of the house across the street—its new progeny in pale yellow—stood outside, staring at her dead, open eyes through the window of her own living room.

#

The first responders busted down her front door.  Paramedics worked on her for fifteen minutes before they gave each other The Look, placed her under a sheet on a gurney, and loaded her into the ambulance for the slow ride to the morgue.

The beautiful cul-de-sac with the skyline view began to jam with TPD squad cars, soon joined by another firetruck and ambulance.  Neighbors came out in their robes and pajamas to bathe in a gathering sea of red and blue lights set to the squawk of radios and barked orders.  Police would push them back more than once, and for a long time they would learn very little.

#

Parkside Psychiatric Hospital

Office of Chelsea Corcoran, Ph.D.

Excerpts from Intake Assessment of Detective Lt. Gavin Helm, TPD:

The patient is a 51-year-old Caucasian male.  He is a Detective Lieutenant with the Tulsa Police Department.  He is a 26-year veteran of the force.

No pertinent history on record.

Previous psychiatric diagnoses: none on record.

History of violence to self: none reported.

History of violence to others: none reported.

The patient currently reports sudden onset of both suicidal and homicidal ideation.  These are reported by him to be “intense” and “pretty often”.

The patient denies any history of violent behavior, outside of the use of force demanded on occasion by his work as a police officer.

The patient arrived at Assessment & Referral on October 11 in a state of profound agitation; he was cursing and swatting at the air.  The agitation subsided quickly.  When asked how he got to the building, he told me that he did not remember.  A minute or so later, he said “Oh, I guess I drove here”.  He then stated that “I’m being jerked back and forth between worlds”.

The patient became upset once again, talking about being in a house where he found “a guy upstairs with his face torn completely off, flesh and brain tissue everywhere, and sharp ends of his face bones sticking out”.

I observed the patient for a few moments; he continued a pattern of swinging between agitated terror and calm, rational conversation.

The patient was admitted to the Adult Psychiatric Unit later that day.

************

ADDENDUM TO INTAKE ASSESSMENT, OCTOBER 12:

The patient’s wife visited me after his admission.  She confirmed that the patient was the detective called onto the scene of a very gruesome killing last month of a real estate agent at a vacant house in north Tulsa, a house the agent had been showing.  The wife stated that her husband became “aloof, then aggressive”, toward her and their teenaged son.  She stated that he had become violent on more than one occasion, striking both her and their son.  The wife added that on another occasion, the patient threatened them both with a fire poker, which he then used to smash a lamp.  She added that she and her son left home late on the night of October 10, to go to an undisclosed location for safety.  The patient’s wife then broke down in tears.  She said she loved her husband “with all of my heart, as always, but I’m scared for him, scared for us, and for everyone else involved…I do not know what is happening to him”.

#

From Unsolved and Unhinged, Episode 19

…And with the strange and sudden incapacitation of Lt. Helm, it was up to his colleagues at the Tulsa Police Department to take the case from there.  They had already searched every square inch of the house on Hyacinth Road the night they found Brian Best.  Quickly, the dots of history began to connect—and the name Vandewater, all but forgotten over four decades, came back like a flash fire.  The TPD forensics team found a set of outside DNA in the cavity that had once been Brian Best’s face.  But what about the bones that investigators dug from the dirt space off the tiny basement of the house—dirt that had already been disturbed?  The bones lay among shreds of deteriorated plastic.  They included a skull—whose facial bones had been all but obliterated—that appeared to have belonged to a small child.  The DNA taken from the skull had, of course, degraded somewhat but still contained enough useful information.

Science, with its capacity for solving mysteries and hushing the mouths of those who attempt to defy it with the workings of dogma and superstition, has another gift altogether: It can open deeper mysteries.  It can also strike terror in the most jaded of hearts.  Two more exhumations and two more DNA samples linked Will and Chris Vandewater to their three-year-old son, Corey.  Ballistics tests confirmed that the massive damage to the child’s skull was consistent with multiple .38 caliber bullets fired at close range.

But this tragic family reunion, though it made headlines, would hardly stack up to what arose from the actions of one forensics team member, who, for security reasons, asked to be referred to as Party X.  After running the DNA sample found on Brian Best, Party X engaged something that came, in her own words, “from a part of my mind that reaches into spaces not occupied by those who live only to satisfy those above them”.  She viewed the results from the DNA found on Best next to those taken from the skull of Corey Vandewater…

…and got a precise match.

When Party X shared her chilling discovery with her colleagues in the TPD Forensics Laboratory, most of them reacted with ridicule, claiming she had simply duplicated the skull DNA in error.  At first, she herself could not believe her findings but she insisted that the DNA was the same, from two unique sources.  Her boss questioned her as to what would lead her to view those particular DNA samples side by side in the first place.  Her reply was that she had grown “powerfully curious”, and since no additional resources were expended in the process, there was no harm done.  Nonetheless, the TPD handed Party X her walking papers, citing insubordination and straying from protocol.  The Tulsa Police Department bumped the 1977 Vandewater case up to a double murder-suicide but left the Brian Best case unsolved.  Needless to say, Party X’s story went viral.  The TPD, however, refused to answer questions.

But you and I know the score.  Two Corey Vandewaters occupied the house on Hyacinth Road: one a long-dead three-year-old whose merciful slumber had been coldly and cruelly disturbed, the other a murderous and destructive monster spawned in the wake of this transgression.  One lived a short life in that house; the other awakened and grew to rule its domain—which extended well beyond those confines.  In its wrath two died, another lost all grip on reality, and still another lost her job.  Each was innocent but got too close to something that didn’t care.

The remains of three-year-old Corey Vandewater were laid to rest in Tulsa’s Rolling Oaks Cemetery, next to those of his parents.  His murderous other form hasn’t appeared since.  Plans to destroy the big stone house on Hyacinth Road hit a snag when two Oklahoma demolition contractors backed out of their bids upon learning of the house’s history.  Finally, a New York-based firm accepted the job and did the honors.  As of this episode, the lot sits vacant and has filled in with grasses and wildflowers.  The only action that neighbors see for the time being involves running off kids who want to party there, and others just looking to grab Hyacinth Road selfies for their social pages.

We will note that this particular episode gave us fits as to whether to call it unsolved or half-solved.  That distinction may well rest with the man we know only from official documents and associates as Brian Best.  After rounds of lively (and often loud!) debate, most of it happening around a table groaning with potluck alcohol offerings, we decided it wasn’t really necessary.  The drinking got a bit happier.

Coming soon on Unsolved and Unhinged, we’ll look at a rare Depression-era glass bird that brought one woman an incredible run of good luck—until she said one wrong word.  Until then, keep looking everywhere.  Except behind you.

PART 6

A pale wave washed by, a dingy white.  He rode its aftermath, took his place in it.  The place was the den in the house in which he grew up, only it wasn’t that house but instead some other house the den had wormed itself into.  People and conversations faded in and out.  At the same time, the room seemed to elongate—seemed to because the change was too subtle; it just happened.  He went outside into the yard that was his but not his.  It was twilight.  People milled about—playing games, talking in small groups, and ignoring a light that emerged near the gate of a garden.  The light approached, getting larger and more intense as it drew closer.  He turned to warn everybody, but they had vanished; the light glided straight toward him.  The air thinned rapidly; his breaths came in labored gasps.  Just in time, the bedroom, with a glow of moonlight from outside, jerked back into view.  He panted in hungry gulps, the air returning him once again from the near-dead.  The bed was real.

So were his hands, one of which touched something cold and moist next to him.  Skin.  A hissing laugh—hthth-hthth-hthth!—inches from his ear.

Brian tore off the covers and bolted to his feet.  He switched on the bedside lamp, nearly knocking it off the nightstand…and saw what he had just touched and heard.  The small figure sat up on the bed, drawing what sounded like the faint sigh of a sleeping child; this settled into a rhythm of sharp breaths.  The large, pallid head balanced somehow on an impossibly small neck.  The ears, at once round and ragged, stuck out.  Under sunken black eyes, where the remainder of a face should have been, hung a morass of stringy tissues and splintered bones of the mouth and nasal cavity.  Sickly thin arms and legs sprouted from a tiny body slickened with a shiny mucus and covered in yellow-brown patches.  Another hiss.  Wet, choked gurgles.  Small child groans born of agonies only it could feel.  Brian tried to scream as this transmuted human form pushed itself up on the covers.  A ball of thick yellowish fluid issued from the hole in its face and hit the bed with a wet thump.  The stench came: a powerful layering of dead flesh, dead blood, getting stronger by the second.

The process of death itself.

It wasn’t that he couldn’t move.  Yes, it was.  Brian stood frozen as this child of rot and agony crawled headfirst down the side of his bed and onto the wood floor.  The black, unblinking eyes locked onto his.  The bony hole of a face respired, in and out, breathing a death stench that now, for all purposes, displaced the oxygen in the room.  At last, Brian managed to turn and run, but the bedroom door slammed shut and he felt two hands seize his legs from behind.  He pulled at the door, to no avail.  He tried to kick his assailant loose; its hands tightened their grip as it slid around to the front and started to climb up his torso.  His screams summoned Phaedra, who began to yowl from the hallway.  Every effort to grab this pulsing, squirming vessel of living death and either snap its neck or hurl it across the room went unfulfilled.  You can’t grab what’s stronger than you and keeps slipping through your hands.  With ten tiny fingers digging into the flesh of his shoulders, Brian staggered backward, all impulses defeated.  As he landed on the bed, the putrid maw of his enemy’s face met his own.  Darkness expanded, consuming the entire room.

#

The world returned in basic stirrings—breath, heartbeat, a dull room tone.  Carpet underneath, a good-sized chandelier hanging in the faint light overhead.  It became clear that he’d been there a while, judging from the position of the moon beyond the wispy curtains nearby.  Soon his eyes confirmed his location: the empty living room on Hyacinth Road.  He tried placing time and space in the blank area between the bedroom struggle and the present.  All that presented was the fact that he was here, now dressed in jeans and T-shirt.  Sandals on his feet.  House and car keys in his pockets.  Brian bolted up and went to the front window, where the moonlight confirmed something else: His silver Hyundai sat in the driveway, neatly parked.  Shoulders still smarting, he fought the instinct to pass out again.  As things began to fall together, he became aware of a new and powerful law: Logic had to be kicked in the balls and revived as a new science in which things added up to the moment.

The thing in my bedroom, my phone…The basement, the fucking basement!

Brian marched toward the back of the house.  He passed through the kitchen and into the garage, where his sandals padded over what felt like clods of dirt.  In the utility room, the door to the tiny basement hung wide open.  The clods got bigger on the steps, and a sandal skidded on one as he made his way down.  At the bottom he fumbled for the string and turned on the bare bulb.  Dirt nearly covered the floor near the opening at the back.  Brian stepped toward it—and froze.  The patch of soil he’d hacked with the trowel was no longer a patch but instead a hole big enough…for something to have crawled from it?

Brian backed away.  He turned and stumbled but recovered and went back up.  In the kitchen a sound stopped him.  Hthth-hthth-hthth-hthth.  The laugh, a half-wet expulsion, through the teeth.  He cocked his head.  The front hall?

Hthth-hthth-hthth-hthth.  Again, followed by a soft patter, like running feet.

Brian padded into the front hall and flipped a light switch.  The staircase flared into view, a muddy glare of wood tones.  More soft impacts guided his eyes toward the bannister at the top.  Through it, a pale sliver of something darted down the hall.

“Hey!”

The room tone, made heavy by the central air not being on, and by the absence of refrigerators and other life-affirming machinery, bore down on him, crowded his head.  He started upstairs.  The wood gave sporadic creaks under his feet.

He stopped at the top.  “Okay, I’m here!  I’m here right now, you little shit.  It’s your turn.  Right here if you want it!”

Silence.

“Did you hear me?”

All the doors stood wide open, except for the last one on the left, near the end of the hallway.  In a state of half exhaustion and half delirium, Brian started toward it.  He pushed it open and flipped on the faint overhead light.  A sound came from the closet at the back of the room: a crinkling of something wet and organic behind the louvered doors.

“I don’t care who or what you are, I don’t care where or when you came from.  What I do know is that you’re on my turf.  Yeah, you brought me here, or made me drive here or whatever the fuck you did.  But guess what?  We’re done.  We’re done here, we’re done at my house, and everywhere else.  You got that?”

Silence.

“I’m dead serious, you ugly little fuck!”

He struggled to suppress the trembling in his breath as he started toward the closet..  Another sound came from it—an exhalation, deep and forceful, as if from a bigger respiratory system.  One of the closet doors shook.

It wasn’t that he couldn’t move.  Yes, it was.  Brian’s heart thumped against the prospects before him.  He stepped forward and the closet doors crashed open with a tearing, splintering sound.  Chunks of wood and metal hinges flew.  Brian screamed as a pair of moist, elongated arms—the arms of something now over six feet tall and the color of a rotting grapefruit—locked around him and pulled him to the floor.  His screams echoed through the empty room as he kicked and struggled to no avail.  The thing pinned Brian on his back, where he saw the last thing he would ever see: a large head, pale and mottled, with a pair of deep-set black eyes, perched on a veiny, pulsing neck.  It reared back with a piercing squeal, its mouth stretching to expose a set of long, bladelike teeth that plunged into Brian’s face, crunching bone and ripping away a mass of flesh and eyes and brain with one splitting burst of agony.  Then nothing.

PART 5

Brian poured a glass of rye on the rocks.  He kicked back on his sofa, swigging and hoping for a wave of release followed by apathy about the whole thing.  Apathy, even a joke.  Mina would have provided the latter.  She’d have gone straight for the gut.  It’s all a test involving you—they’re deliberately shooting themselves in the foot to see how you’ll deal with manufactured juju.  No one’s haunting the house, the company is haunting you.  His face would turn to stone, she’d shove his shoulder, then they’d both burst out laughing.  After five years it was still about the things that might have happened, and not how things actually were!  Nothing was going to send Mina back to him on a sparkling saucer, but there were little solace grabs in the idea that two failed flings and the sparing of jail time after the strip mall incident were maybe her doing.  She was a benevolent little cloud hanging there.  Good, then maybe she’d also take care of everything that threatened to kill his career.

Brian tipped his glass of rye again—and cocked his head toward the opening of the hallway.  A sound issued from the back of the house: something moving at a strange galloping pace.

Phaedra?

Brian reached the doorway of the spare room and stopped cold.  It was her, all right, running circles around the room.

On the walls.  With feet sure as those of a squirrel on a tree.

  “Phaedra!  What the fuck!?”  Brian charged in, clapping his hands, but this didn’t faze her.  She kept her delirious orbit around her owner, around the furniture and boxes below, without breaking her stride.  “Phaedra!”  He watched as his cat continued her revolutions, leaping over the doorway and the window each time.  At last she flew off the wall, bounced on feet of air, and shot through the door.

He found her sitting on her haunches in the kitchen, gulping in air, her eyes narrowed to slits.  He stood guard, confused.  Was she going to fall over dead?  Attack?  Never mind, no good trying to process.  Brian waited for time that stretched, retracted, doubled back on itself.  At last Phaedra’s eyes opened to the familiar world around her.  Her breathing settled, and she rose onto all fours.  “Oh…sweetheart!”  Brian extended both hands, and his loyal companion walked into them.  He brought her up and rested his chin on the top of her head.  Her motor ran.

A new world churned with what eyes and ears could pull in and brains couldn’t process.  The old one, a world of numbers and contingencies and quotes, had been assassinated and replaced.  With Phaedra now crashed on one end of the sofa, Brian composed himself enough to do something that might engage the real world for a change: record a voice memo about events of the last couple of weeks, on and off Hyacinth Road.  It didn’t matter what bizarre shit came from his mouth; the restoration of reason and sanity demanded it of him.  His phone had other ideas:

NEW RECORDING JUNE 11, 1977 01:03

NEW RECORDING JUNE 11, 1977 06:20

NEW RECORDING JUNE 11, 1977 01:09

NEW RECORDING JUNE 11, 1977 00:52

Brian went to the array of little glitches and tricks that phones have or might be capable of having—opening apps at random, deleting notes, etc.  This new development

might have made the list, had it not been for four certain digits.

NEW RECORDING NO. 1:

(hiss, growing louder…then fading out)

(a piano, playing softly, then the tune trails off)

(voices, apparently male and female, muffled and unintelligible, in dialogue)

(gap)

 (more dialogue, becoming louder, words maybe “indulging”, “worthless”, and “needs to end”…an angry yell, a door slams)

(under the breath, unintelligible)

NEW RECORDING NO. 2:

(hiss…then fades out)

(a sequence of soft murmurs and sobs)

Male voice: “You need to stop that.”

Female voice: “Leave me alone!  I can’t deal with you right now.”

“Leave you alone.”  (mocking laugh)  “Leave me alone, she says.”

 (a loud yell, then more sobs)

“Stop it!  Stop crying, now.”

(sobs continuing)

“I don’t—I can’t…”

 “You listen to me, Chris!  We’ve been down this road more times than I care to remember.  And where does it take us, every time?  You’ve seen the things he’s done.  That stuffed dog on the stairs I tripped on, that screech the other night just as I swallowed a bite of meat!  There are things at work in him that we cannot have in this house!”

“Let me conveniently remind you, Will, he can’t even walk!  But I suppose it’s another one of your holy delusions that he can.  And you blame him for your own stupid accidents?”

“He’s not human, Chris.  He will never enter the kingdom of God.  He is the devil’s work!  You think three years is gonna change that?”

(a wet gurgle, then what sounded like a hissing, snickering laugh—hthth-hthth-hthth!)

“D’you hear that?  Look at him!  D’you believe it now?”

(hearty laugh)  “Well, that’s rich, isn’t it?  A real beauty it is!  He’s a handicapped child, Will!  And you think he’s threatening you?  A child, for Christ’s sake!”

“You shut your foul mouth, woman!”

“Ohhh, yeah.  It’s so cute the way you learn things years after the fact.  Talk about the same old road, do I have to remind you YET AGAIN why we’re in this together?  The tests looked bad early on, you knew what the doctors said as well as I did.  But by all means, Will, save a baby that doesn’t have a chance!  And of course I went with it, and you damn well know why.  Because I was afraid of you and your father, that’s why.  I didn’t know what you and your church or corporation or whatever it is were capable of doing!”

“Shut your mouth, now!  Shut up!”

 “Keep him alive and suffering, let him be sick and mute and deformed, let him stop breathing time after time, and be brought back for round after round of this joke of a life, because guess what—we’ll both go to hell if we don’t.”

“I’m warning you, Chris!  I’m warning you with the wrath of our Lord!”

“He never should have lived like this.  And it had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with God or Satan or angels or devils.  That’s what you can’t seem to accept, no matter what.  Look at me right now, Will.  Look in my eyes.  I’m so goddamned exhausted I can”…sobs… “I can barely see straight!  Get a good look, Will, because with you I AM IN HELL!  He’s your seed!  And you know what?  Maybe he IS out to get you!  Ha, ha!  Yeah, Will, better be watching over your shoulder, woo-hoooo!”

“Unclean whore!”

(a hard slap, a yelp…quick footsteps moving away)

“He’s all yours, Willy boy.  A chip off the old dick!”

(hthth-hthth-hthth!)

 (long gap)

(sobbing, and footsteps reentering the room)

“Blood of Christ, save my poor soul!”

“Will!…Will, what the fuck—Will, no!  NO!  You can’t—”

(loud report, like a gunshot…a thud…another shot…and another)

(a loud screech, rising in tone)

 (another gunshot…a couple of sharp gasps, then a wet wheezing sound, prolonged then fading…)

(two more shots)

(silence)

 (panting, then the wavering whimper of a man, rising from the throat)

NEW RECORDING NO. 3:

(the hiss, rising louder than before, prolonged…cuts off)

(a sound like the pump of a spray bottle and wiping of a surface; repeats several times)

(male voice returns, barely audible, like an incantation or prayer, lasting a minute or so)…“Rest you, son.  Rest at last.  May all malevolent spirits be gone from you, in Jesus’ holy name.”

(long gap)

(some rustling, then soft impacts, like the tapping of something)

NEW RECORDING NO. 4:

 (whisper): “Blood of Christ, save us all.”

(a gunshot, a thud)

(a faint tone rising in pitch…cuts off)

The living room felt like a box.  The air in it shrank, made itself harder to find.  Brian knocked back the rest of the rye and went, shaking and rubber-legged, to the kitchen for a refill.  He took a big swig of grain medicine and drew several deep breaths against the trip-hammering of his heart.  He returned, sat down, and fumbled for his phone.  Two parents.  A sickly child.  Some kind of religious thing.  And a whole family dead, in that fucking house!

Brian went back for another listen, starting with the first of the four recordings marked with the year of disco and the Son of Sam.  At the instant his finger hit PLAY, his screen went white.  “Fuck,” he muttered.  The voice memo app returned—empty.   Brian exited the app but came back to the same blank queue.  He repeated this twice then chucked his phone onto the floor.  Phaedra, splayed in deep relaxation, didn’t budge.

He went out to sit on the deck.  The September air had begun to cool a bit.  Maybe it, combined with the rye—and the weight of sheer mindfuck overload—wouldn’t let him think anymore, except to have the sense to fall into bed.

PART 4

The young couple, a software CEO and a fitness trainer, gave off a cheerful energy he hadn’t seen in a while.  Like the professor before them, they admired the well-flowing interior.  They also made a point of groaning at the Berber carpet in the living room.

Here were two women who knew what they wanted and didn’t want, Brian thought.  Of course, this trait could be a double-edged sword with prospects, but it often helped things along and led to fantastic sales.  He fessed up to agreeing on the carpet matter.

“Allergy city,” Kelli said.  Her wife Ginger nodded.

The three reached the spacious den by way of the kitchen, when the trainer stopped in her tracks.  “Oh.”  She sniffed the air sharply—and quickly clasped both hands to her nose.  “Oh…Jesus!  What in the—”

“You okay, Ging?” Kelli asked.  “What’s the—oh, God!”  She covered her own mouth and nose with a hand.

“What is it?” Brian asked, a familiar panic rising in his voice.

Ginger shuddered.  “I…excuse us.”  She bolted for the back door and unlocked its large deadbolt.  Kelli followed her onto the patio.

Ginger put her hands on the short, curved stone wall and retched into the grass.  Brian started to intervene but realized, as with the professor, that he could only let the scene play out.  So this place has already sent one person packing, and now it makes you puke.  Shall I prepare the paperwork?

Brian approached the couple as they sat down.  The young, robust fitness trainer slumped into her wife’s arms; she panted a bit.  After studying her a moment, Brian attempted to break the newly formed ice: “I am so, so sorry.  I wish I—”

Kelli raised a palm at Brian and shook her head.

Brian excused himself and returned with two bottles of water from the dorm-sized fridge he’d kept in the garage.

“Can you tell me what it was you smelled back there?”

The trainer broke from her wife’s arms, took a water, and sat up straight.  Her voice hitched.  “I don’t know how to explain.”  She took a gulp from her bottle.  “It started in the den.  It was like nothing I’ve ever smelled before, not in my whole life.  There was almost a-a texture to it.  A way of feeling something as it happens, like…like I was witnessing…”

Brian leaned in.  “Witnessing what?”

She looked at Kelli, then back at their host, her voice shrinking.  “The process of death itself!”

Brian gulped hard.  “I’m not sure what to say right now, other than once again I’m truly, truly sorry for your experience.  I will check into things right away.”

Something caught Ginger’s eye; she clapped a hand to her mouth again.  She pointed at the kitchen window behind Brian.

Holy shit.  What now?

Kelli shot to her feet, her eyes trained on the same spot.  “Now tell me you don’t see that!”

Brian peered at the window, moved closer to it, stared even harder.  He turned and gave an emphatic shrug.  “See what?”

“That thing!” Kelli said.  “A head, it’s big as a basketb—it’s gone!  Just now, it’s gone.  It was right there, inside that window!”  She ran a hand through her hair.  “Its eyes were all black, and the rest of the face”—she gulped hard—“was hanging by a thread, looked like it had been…ahhh, God!”  She took her silent, trembling wife by an arm, helping her to her feet.  “It’s cool, honey, we’re getting out of here right now.”  She turned to Brian and shifted gears.  “Sir, I do not know what you’re trying to pull here, but what I do know is I’ve got your business card, and your immediate supervisor’s going to hear about this right away!  You understand me?  My wife has been dealing with PTSD for a long time, and you apparently think it’s funny, for whatever reason, to trigger her by staging some stupid Amityville shit like this?  Are you even a real—are you trying to sabotage your own job?

“What!?” Brian half-shouted.  “Oh, my God, no…no!  I’ve told you I have no idea what’s going on with this place, but please, please, can you just—”

“Then you’d better get a clue, and fast.  We’re going to your boss, and we could take this to the Real Estate Commission!”  Kelli thrust an index finger toward the side of the house.  “You open that damned gate right now and let us out of here!  We are not going back through that house!”  Brian stood silent.  “Move!” Kelli ordered.  He did, and the three trudged in silence toward the big wooden gate, Kelli holding Ginger tightly.  Brian lifted the heavy black latch; the couple disappeared around the corner of the house and into the driveway.  Brian’s throat spasmed and his hands shook like leaves.

He plopped down onto the barstool at the kitchen nook.  Hannah, the division manager, was attending a real estate conference in Las Vegas.  Brian jumped ahead to text his boss about the day’s events, in the interest of her hearing about it first from a reliable steward of the company.  This would be loads of fun, since he’d already told her about the professor and she didn’t know what to make of that.  After some grilling, Hannah urged Brian to leave any legal repercussions up to her and the regional management.  She added: “I don’t begin to understand how the patterns available to the human mind get bent into such tapestries, but I will say that once that happens, those tapestries have a way of reprinting themselves on anything that happens to be within distance.  Your trick is not to get too close.”

Hannah had never talked like that before.  A beautiful burst of metaphor—well-put, and at the same time so alien.  The call ended on the note that whatever kind of shit she was smoking in Vegas, it wouldn’t be pretty to see how she’d react when it wore off.

On the drive home, something else hit him: A CEO of anything probably had enough legal connections to sue him into a cardboard box under a bridge.  It didn’t matter what his senses couldn’t pull in.  Both women smelled something deathly and described a head with a mangled face looming in the kitchen window of the house on Hyacinth Road.  With them and the professor, it was now three against one.  And the traffic was getting heavier.

PART 3

Brian’s grocery list reflected the usual haul.  Since Mina had been gone, he’d shackled himself to a dull culinary routine—soups, baked potatoes, and the like—this after he’d begun eating regularly again.  Not that the occasional impulse buy didn’t happen.  This time he threw in the ring bologna he’d always looked at but never bought: pink meat product in a bright red rind, jam-packed with nitrites and a taste like nothing else.  Its packaged shape always suggested the seat of a typical public toilet.  He laughed, dismissing what he decided was a useless food hang-up.  He left the deli meat section with the toilet seat bologna and headed toward the checkout line.  A woman pushed her cart past him in the produce section; a small boy dangled his legs through the front holes.  With a reflex as natural as breathing, Brian smiled at the boy, then at the woman.  The child’s eyes grew big and he let out a loud scream, burying his head in his hands.  The woman stopped.

“What?  What is it, shugs?”

The boy kept whimpering into his hands.

Brian stopped and turned back in their direction.

“What is it?  Did you see something?”

The child looked up and pointed straight at Brian.  “Bad face, Mommy!  Bad face!”

His mother gasped.  “Honey, that’s not a very nice thing to say.”

His finger stayed put.  “But it’s all tore up!  Man’s face is tore up!”

His mother turned to Brian and gave an uneasy chuckle.  “I am so sorry.  It’s—I don’t know, his imagination.  You know how little ones can be.”

Brian hesitated.  “No worries.”

The boy covered his face again. “Wanna go Mommy, wanna go now!”

The mother mouthed something to Brian that looked like “It’s all good”.

At the checkout the young cashier studied Brian.  “Are you okay?”  When she repeated the question, he snapped to.

“Oh… yeah, yeah.  I’m good.”

“You’ve been saying something about a bad face,” the cashier said.

“I-I’m sorry.  Really, it’s nothing.”

The sacker, a gawky kid with a spider tattoo on his neck, leaned toward his coworker: “He probably saw your ex-boyfriend.”

She rolled her eyes and mouthed something at him; he laughed.  Brian paid for his groceries and left.

The drive home seemed like a distraction from the things that began to add up.  The little boy’s terror, Phaedra’s episodes, and whatever spooked the professor at Hyacinth Road amounted to a real and consistent traffic.  Brian guided his Hyundai as a sick chill seized his core—the specter of new world forming around him, filled with things only cats, children, and other people could see and hear.  Things loud and elusive.  And tore up.

#

Indeed, it was often the little things that could make or break a moment.  Things that settled the soul and reassured with familiarity.  In this case, it was the taste of bologna.  Microwaved in barbecue sauce, it made the perfect lead for sides of oven fries and green beans.  Throw in a slice of Texas toast, and you had a decent home clone of a plate at most any barbecue joint.  Brian sat, wolfing down chunks of the pink stuff, gourmandizing the idea of food as escape.  Maybe comfort food wasn’t a myth after all, because the way it went down was a most satis—

Bweeeeeeeeaahh!

The squeal came from directly behind him, as loud and piercing as an air horn.  He shot up from the table.  Phaedra!  Is she hurt?  But as quickly as this thought came, a fact came down harder: He couldn’t breathe.  Every impotent lunge forward brought nothing.  A ripped suit in deep space.  Vacuum.  He stood, made a fist, and cradled it in the other hand.  He pumped feebly at his abdomen.  Again.  Again.  And again.  The mass of meat in his throat didn’t budge.  Twice more, and it dawned on him that he was going to be the gluttonous kid in the first aid video he’d seen in middle school, only not so lucky.  Worse, every pump began to aggravate a nausea that threatened to hasten his demise by flooding his lungs with undigested dinner.  The chair, dumbass!  Brian positioned his gut against the curve of the backrest and thrust against it.  Nothing came but a sharp blast of pain in his abdomen.  And he was about to throw up into himself.  Death had a scale of nobility, and this was not going to be a hero’s exit.  Brian shut his eyes, gave one more massive thrust against the sharp wood…and a wet clump of processed beef product flew onto the table.  He toppled backward; his ass hit the floor and his stomach convulsed as the rest of the evening meal spewed into his lap.  He worked himself to his knees, his stomach heaving bile between gulps of fresh, glorious air.  He fell back onto the kitchen floor, his awareness at a new height.  I’ve saved myself!

Brian changed into shorts and a T-shirt, scrubbed the kitchen, and did the laundry.  He dumped clean clothes and towels on his bed.  The shock from nearly dying had given way to a strange blend of duty and fatigue.  A soft meow issued from behind him.  Phaedra stood there with attentive eyes.   I’m here, and I won’t judge you.  He picked her up and pulled her to his cheek; she nuzzled him and purred as he carried her into the living room.

The pain from the chair knifed his gut as he plunked onto the sofa.  As he had done while driving home from the grocery store, he began to run events through the central reality filter of his mind.  A new wave of shakes hit him as he replayed tonight’s close call and fixated on how a fucking piece of meat nearly left him sprawled on the kitchen floor, open eyes still pleading for another shot at success, at love, at making an impact with anything he did.  A couple of shots of rye steadied him enough to overcome this and to remember his obligation to two hard facts:  He was alive, and a house had to be sold.

PART 2

Brian stretched out on his sofa, captivated by an episode of the series he’d been following.   Watching interviews with North Vietnamese and Vietcong war survivors was like getting stories from another planet.  These stories had existed for a long time, but no portal opened up to let them in.  When it did, you got to hear from the other side and you found people like you, with families and homes and jobs.

But watching films always carried a side effect: reminders of the solid video producing career Brian ditched in favor of selling more tangible chunks of the American Dream.  Mina was the center of his own dream until the night they quarreled and she went for a drive to cool off.  Brian’s girlfriend of three years, the orthopedic nurse with sky-blue eyes, drapes of raven hair to the shoulders, and a razor-sharp explanation for anything, turned her Mazda onto 36th Street near a blind hill, into the path of a pickup truck carrying a pair of gentlemen malfunctioning on beer at 70 miles per hour.  Mina flew backward through the rear windshield and landed in someone’s yard—all three sections of her.  The driver of the truck died at the scene; his buddy lingered in the ICU for a month before the tubes came out.  The rage seized Brian like a hot band around the head, forcing things from him that he hadn’t experienced since his school days as both bully and bullied.  One night he found perfect surrogate for those who couldn’t be there to suffer his wrath.  The guy zoomed, smirking, into the strip mall parking space into which Brian had been signaling to turn.  Under that smirk, of course, he also beat his wife.  He tortured animals.  He stank of cheap aftershave and wore the words Be All to End All, not just on both arms but on his whole fucking being.  These things destined him to have his nose broken and both eyes pounded shut by an All-Duty-No-Glory Avenger who parked two rows over and waited for him to return with his goods.  A kink in life’s random fabric—and the absence of security cameras—had helped the Avenger avoid being tracked down and arrested.  It was the bully between his ears who reminded him that his ambition died that night on 36th Street, and who now told him he’d sunk so low that he needed to sell his cameras and drones and give it all up.  You’re one of those people now.  But the world still has to feed your miserable ass, so you might as well do something to serve the deserving.  Houses, yeah, go learn how to sell houses.  Make good people happy, and the company will take care of you if you do right by them.  From then on, it was love.  A forceful, self-punitive love.

The music on the series soundtrack popped, Brian thought.  It was more than just a background; it was a cellist bent on wringing every possible sound from the instrument.  Percussive slams of the bow.  Plucked notes reverberating.  Whole chords pulsing in and out, bending and making hairpin turns, a musical Formula 1 road course.  And the squeals—desolate cries of one left in darkness, spidering out then reducing to one siren-like moan.  A moan that seemed to linger after the other music had stopped.  Isolated.  Coming from somewhere in the house.

Phaedra acted weird when he came home, Brian recalled.  She started to greet him with the usual rub of her face on his shin, then she recoiled as if he smelled of dog.  She didn’t want him to pick her up.  He’d grown accustomed to the vagaries of cat behavior, but now his gray-and-white shorthair had jumped from her throne of entitlement to some place where things poked and prodded her, changed her into something contrary and skittish.  “What is it, Phae?”  Brian went to the hallway, where he stopped and froze.  His cat stood facing the wall near the spare room, her back arched as if something had compacted her.  Her eyes darted about.  Drool dripped from a mouth that trembled with something between coiled rage and pure terror.  Her sound dropped to a beastly growl that had never before issued from her.  “Phae?  Sweetie?”  At once she jumped and swatted at something above her head.  She started after it, then came to a sharp halt at the door of the spare room.  Whatever she saw had apparently gone in there.

Brian turned on the overhead light.  He wiped Phaedra’s mouth and hauled her into his arms.  Her motor purred and she nuzzled his cheek; she had returned.  But her eyes told a different story, not one of comfort or security.  Maybe a kind of seizure, something to keep an eye on.  He sat Phaedra down and surveyed the chair, file cabinet, and stacks of boxes—none of which held a single clue as to his cat’s all-new behavior.

#

The first showing of the house on Hyacinth Road brought a recently widowed University of Tulsa professor.  He was chatty, recounting some recent travels and conceding a slowness to start over after his loss.  The question loomed as to why a single person would be interested in buying a house that size.  The answer, of course, flew like a flag: Who gives a fuck, as long as he has the money!  The professor scarcely made it past the checkered tile of the front hall before he stopped, his head cocked toward the floor.

“What is it?” Brian asked.

“That.”  The professor pointed at his feet.  “Don’t you hear it?  Don’t you feel it?”  Brian shook his head, and the prof described in detail a metallic pounding.  “Like someone banging a hammer on a piece of pipe or something.”  Brain strained to listen.

The two reached the kitchen.  “There it is again!” the prof declared.  Again, Brian shook his head.

“But it’s as loud and real as can be!”

Great, Brian thought, recalling plenty of awkward moments in the business, but nothing like the task of denying a prospect’s word without implying that he was delusional.  Four fast years in real estate had won him the ability to think on his feet and maintain a sense of humility.

“Hmm.  I suppose this is the moment when I go back to check what they call idiot bells.  Those ring when something needs attention.”

But something had sucked all of the humor out of the professor, whose already sallow complexion was now milk jug white.  Brian leaned in.  “You okay?”

“I…I don’t want to be rude, but I have to go.  Right away.”  Without the smallest apology, the prof turned and left, closing the front door behind him.

Brian went to the kitchen and took a seat at a barstool.  The house was certified to be in excellent condition.  Apart from the weird smell in the little storage area, there wasn’t much more to go on.  As he reviewed things, he became aware of another prospect, implausible but not impossible: Someone might be fucking with Brian Best.  Had the parking lot altercation finally caught up with him?  Even if so, who would (or could) go to the trouble required to freak out a prospective buyer by staging noises, sensations, and smells.  The logistics were next to absurd.  Since he neither heard nor felt the pounding that spooked the professor, he could link nothing to trickery or a problem with the house.  Let it cancel out and move on, Brian concluded.

#

Phaedra met him at the door that evening.  She gave her usual “where the hell have you been” meow and implored him to scoop her up.  He did, and she purred.  Brian cuddled her, planting kisses on the top of her head, and his mind went to the hallway episode.  There was no explaining cats, period.  As long as his loyal companion was okay now, he had no reason to belabor things, only to be watchful.

PART 1

The following is an excerpt from Episode 19 of the award-winning online series, Unsolved and Unhinged.  The program is known for its investigative and dramatic language, and for its blending of facts, eyewitness accounts, and conjecture.

The Holy Ghost seized young Richard Vandewater.  Growing up dirt-poor in Turlock, California, Richard fell under the spell of the Pentecostal Church, whose hallmarks included tent revivals that came through town.  The Ghost told teenaged Richard to go forth and multiply, in both family and wealth.  His people, if they loved him as an instrument of the Lord, would help him make the latter happen.  So Richard went forth and found lots of those people in Oklahoma.  He moved to Tulsa, already home to iconic televangelist Oral Roberts and his empire.  There he founded Vandewater Enterprises, and turned a church into a fast-growing media company.  And his people, just as the Holy Ghost had promised, made him wealthy.  Soon he married and multiplied.  But later his eldest son William, who helped to spread his father’s word as the fearsome and literal truth, slipped up and strayed from the Lord.  He met a young music store employee named Christine Pritchard, whose piano playing and silky demeanor stirred his carnal lust.  Christine received William’s seed.  At first, Richard became enraged, as he saw was good and right in the Lord’s scheme of things.  He scrambled about, engineering the cover-up of his son’s fornication and the prospect of an out-of-wedlock child—something that was sure to tarnish him and threaten his domain as a Chosen One.

William and Christine married hastily.  A grandson, Corey, was born in 1974 with hydrocephalus and a host of cardiovascular and neurological problems that kept him from walking and talking.  Richard, after bearing witness to William and Christine’s love and diligence in caring for the child, changed his tune and rewarded his son and daughter-in-law.  A big stone house went up in an exclusive section of Tulsa’s Gilcrease Hills—spoils to the young Vandewaters, who would keep the child a secret while doing God’s work.  But after three years in that house—three years of Corey nearly dying of this seizure or that respiratory failure—William Vandewater began to tell his father that there were other things at work, too.  His son, endowed with a precocious will he was unable to express in words, was nonetheless angry and vengeful at his lot.  Corey wanted to die.  It showed when his eyes sank back into his face and fixed on his father.  If kept alive, he would punish his father for making him live in misery.  And that displeased the Lord while appeasing Satan.  From his wheelchair, Corey began to do things.  Without his hands.  Toys would show up on the stairs at night.  A glass lamp exploded, sending shards into William’s neck and arm.  A tire blew on the Broken Arrow Expressway, causing William to crash his BMW into a retaining wall and break a few ribs.  Soon, Corey developed a snickering laugh, hthth-hthth-hthth!—through the teeth, snakelike.  Other times he would let loose with sudden and piercing screams.  Satan is testing us, the young Vandewater proclaimed.  His father agreed.  You are right, son, and you must be stronger!  William and people from his father’s circle began to hold meetings at the house with hopes of casting out whatever foul spirit had seized Corey.  But Christine, exhausted and at the end of her rope, turned.  Her husband had gone off the rails, and she had to protect her child.  It was now two against one.

Police found two adult bodies, each with massive gunshot wounds to the head, in the living room of the Vandewater home on a humid night in June 1977.  A .38 caliber revolver lay near William, with his fingerprints on it.  A small wheelchair stood empty nearby, a prelude to what left investigators baffled: Three-year-old Corey Vandewater, known to his father’s inner circle but kept a secret from the general public, had vanished without a trace.  The story hit big at first, then took a back seat to the Girl Scout murders at a camp in Locust Grove that same week.  Police ruled William and Christine Vandewater’s deaths a murder-suicide.  Richard Vandewater, at first crazed with grief and rage against the forces that took his son and his family, eventually accepted their deaths but could not accept the mystery of his grandson’s disappearance, let alone his son’s implication in it as well.

After a long investigation, which the family called “sloppy” and “haphazard”, Corey’s case went cold.  Rev. Richard Vandewater fell over dead on a turkey hunt in 1980.  His media empire began to crumble.  His most visible legacy consisted of dead-end debate and speculation, and cast a pall over one Tulsa neighborhood—one that faded but would return decades later, in a big way.

#

Hyacinth Road curved upward through a wooded area of Gilcrease Hills, terminating at a perfect vantage point for the downtown skyline a few miles to the south.  It was the only stretch of pavement in Tulsa that bore its name.  The large stone house stood at its dead end.  A circular drive split off toward a tall iron gate anchored by sandstone pillars and ended at a three-car garage.  The remaining front lawn sported landscaped beds dotted with clumps of liriope and hybrid poplars whose small leaves gave a crisp rattle in summer breezes.  From all appearances, the house’s four decades had been kind to it, even lent it a near-timeless look not common to houses of that era.

Brian Best began his preliminary once-over upstairs.  In his fourth year as a realtor, he continued his policy of sticking to the basics when showing a house, avoiding the use of superlatives like “peach” or “gem”.  If a prospective buyer got hooked, it happened naturally.  Gilcrease Hills was new territory, a chance to build on the impressive sales he’d scored in Villa Grove and Florence Park.

The house on Hyacinth Road changed hands a number of times since 1977.  Its occupants were, of course, a succession of upper middle-class people—mostly families, whose behaviors didn’t contribute to any notable history.  Not that the neighborhood rumor mill didn’t put out.  One morning, Brian struck up a conversation with one of the neighbors, an elderly Ms. Weston, who used oxygen and whose blunt manner conveyed that she wasn’t impressed with you, no matter what you did or said you did.  She had moved into the neighborhood during the late Eighties and admitted to being a people watcher.  Sometimes, she said, the gossip got too good, too juicy—the only way that life on such a small, isolated street could keep an interesting face.

The father of the family that last vacated the big stone house was a senior hotshot in a prominent law firm.  One story related to Ms. Weston was that he’d been canned after getting caught with a young paralegal on a conference table after hours.

“Legs, tongues, and pie filling,” she deadpanned.

Another story went that the family could no longer afford the house and keep two kids in private school, and the man of the castle was not happy.

“I like the first story,” Brian chuckled.  “Lends the place some character, for better or for worse.”

Ms. Weston cleared her throat.  “I’d say he was about your age.  What are you, about forty-five, fifty?”

He paused.  “I’m thirty-seven.”

Brian checked the closets and windows of the four spacious bedrooms upstairs.  All bathroom fixtures and plumbing were secure and drip-free.  The downstairs rooms, including a den, a kitchen, a dining room, and a library/study that perked his envy, looked fine as well.  In a utility room off the garage, something else caught Brian’s eye: a narrow door, which he opened with little thought.  Beyond it, a few bulkhead stairs led down to what amounted to a dark, tiny joke of a basement.  At most, the space would hold a few average-sized boxes.  Brian pulled a string and lit up a bare bulb on the ceiling.  In an opening at the back of the space lay something even more curious: a patch of bare earth about five or six square feet in area.  In the faint light, Brian tapped it with a foot; it gave a bit near the center.  This odd caesura in construction didn’t appear to pose any structural risk; still it was nothing he had ever seen.  In the garage he retrieved a trowel he’d kept for making small touch-ups to flowerbeds.  When he returned he squatted and plunged the blade into the soft spot in the dirt.  Another stab.  A third, and a loud whistling sound, like air rushing through a tiny space, issued from the soil.  The sound lasted a few seconds, then shut off.  Brian stared at the hole, knowing that the average trowel would not likely rupture a steel gas line.  But there was a smell—a strong odor of decay, like a small roadkill, that lingered.  An outgassing from the soil, maybe.  Still, that didn’t explain the whistling noise; there was something organic to it, too.  Something almost animal.  Brian grimaced as he refilled the hole and patted the dirt down.

He hung the trowel back on its hook.  Nothing here, he thought as he went back inside to wash his hands.  Who, apart from kids playing hide-and-seek, would spend any real time in such a tiny space?  And if there were people to call, they would hold office at the Bureau of Unaccountable Shit.  All was good with the house, and what couldn’t be explained needed no attention.