"Dad! I Hate You!"

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Thursday, June 15–

4:15 p.m.-

      Our glorious sunny day was shouldered away before noon and replaced by dogmatic clouds. Caleb brought his chess board along and, after an afternoon sidestepping raindrops and shooting at empty beer cans with the BB gun, I've used up all excuses to sidestep it. He has gotten chess out and expertly placed all the noble wooden characters and convinced me it is something I'm capable of learning. I have gathered and lit every cabin candle, four to my right and five on the left. The white queen on my side of the board is rigidly tense at the duplicitous cunning she will soon be suffering in the hands of my ignorance.

      Ten minutes later, eleven pieces of mine are arranged self-importantly on the table in front of him.

Evil lurks only when we let it.

7:50-

      Cabe is standing in an indelicate scraggle of tall grasses, in a hard drizzle, holding a smoldering fat cigar between index and middle fingers of his right hand. My hog boots are on his feet. Most of the rest of him is dry inside a blue plastic raincoat. The hood, with a sharp pointy peak aiming high at the sky, covers all but the bill of his baseball cap. The raincoat is too tight to comfortably contain his fifteen-year old body and layers of clothing inside. The hood of his sweatshirt is bunched up on his back, yielding him a hunchback. He is dry inside plastic. Others are not so dry, and EZ doesn't care.

      My son is determined to conquer his qualms over the dim ominous stairway we discovered in an outbuilding of the farmstead during yesterday's visit....

Yesterday evening, about 6:00--

      The farmhouse is yellow-brown. It has a small second story directly under the peaked roof, as though there's room only for a long narrow bed. The window trim is blood red and I've pointed that out. For some reason the whole house was shoved off its foundation, which now is an overgrown pit filled with small saplings and brush. The red brick chimney still stands in the center of the cavity. Across the high weedy front yard the front door is ajar.

      I have stopped for a pee. Caleb is holding a full can of beer in his right hand and a fat Swisher Sweet in his left. Ten feet behind me he is chattering non-stop, reciting gruesome descriptions of the Blair Witch, which all his friends recently saw and told him about.

      "Seven feet tall and covered everywhere with, like, black hair, with arms and legs as skinny as those trees over there," pointing to a stand of two and three-inch diameter poplars. His imagination is expressing itself. The more he details spooky horrors, the higher his anxiety rises over what we're about to do.

      He has heard of this abandoned old house, and the previous visits I've paid to it. Of course, it's all up to him what he does with my descriptions of night trips, in winter, when my own vaporous breath melded with unexplainable ghostly mists. I never said it was haunted, and he knows "abandoned" means simply "vacant" like everybody else knows that's what it means.

      I stop ten feet from the weather-crazed front door and tell him to go look inside. He walks joylessly. Then stops four feet from the opening and stares into the dark living room.

      "Oh wow. What happened?"

      The living room floor is buckled up lengthwise in a narrow, knee-high wave, exactly what an abandoned farmhouse hardwood floor would look like if one or two seven-foot tall black hairy wraiths were buried beneath it.

      I whispered that to him.

      "See the television along the left side?"

      He leans slightly right. "No, I don't."

      "Well go ahead in--"

      "No! Uh ... you go first." He hurries three steps back and sets a serious face, hands high near his chest, holding his beer and cigar. EZ is standing beside him, looking inside.

      I move to the door and lean in. The television, a 1960's wood console model, is on the right side and out of sight behind the door. "Oh, I'm sorry. It's behind the door."

      I retract.

      Caleb exhorts, "Go in. Please."

      "I haven't been this scar--"

      "Sssh!" He steps back three paces. "I just heard a noise!" eyes round, fingers of his cigar hand splayed wide. "No!, dad. I seriously did." Wild-eyed he glances toward the door ten feet away.

      "What would make the floor come up like that?"

      I step up, step in-- "UHHH!," grunting, staggering back.

      "Dad, knock it off."

      Caleb steps up beside me, We shuffle as a unit, and stop a few feet into the room. A harsh 60's-style sofa sits along the outside wall with a littery tumble of broken furniture on top. We contemplate the humped-up floor, notice the interesting aquamarine color of the kitchen  across the room, then consider a hallway at the right.

      "Do you want to go in there?" I nudge him and point toward the hallway.

      Cabe has been staying close to the front door. "No. I don't think there's anything that scares me more than abandoned houses. Not knowing what's around the corner." He motions to the side doorway, "If somebody walked out of that door right now, I'd be like..."

      "Well, just think -- did you hear that?"

      "Yeah."

        A wheezy guttural "Whooo," without origin, but from everywhere. I gaze around the room. A double-sized mattress, slashed and "spilling its guts" I describe, leans against one wall. Lightning-shaped cracks zigzag up the wall and fork into the ceiling.

      I turn to Cabe. His left thumb is nervously stroking the soggy head of his cigar, "Just think if it was night." He puffs the cigar, blue smoke billows.

      EZ is sitting outside the door, panting.

      I am drawn toward the odd colored kitchen and what I see there: place settings arranged on the dinette table, coffee cups still in saucers. Several drawers are open, lolling down. Cupboard doors beckon wide. A chrome and vinyl chair is on its side and the Coolerator fridge leans precariously away from the humped up floor. Avocado green and harvest gold floral curtains hang above a cluttered sink.

      I depict it all to Caleb who, still back at the door asks, "would you do me a favor and look behind you into the hallway?"

      I turn--"HEAAHHH!"

       He lunges to his left--"Dad! I hate you!"--silhouetted in a window frame hung with bedraggled window shades, beer can is held far out on a stiff arm as though intending to offer me a swig. Smoke unfurls.

      Directly across the hallway is a tiny room with a window. It is wide enough only for an overstuffed chair, facing out. A pine board spans the arms like a barber set it up for a little boy who needed hairs cut.

      "Oh my! What is this? Very strange. C'mere."

      "Dad. I hate this. I really do." He approaches, leading his head and eyes far ahead, to maximize the distance between himself and a libidinous foe.

      "Now, what is this little room here, with curtains at the window, and just wide enough to hold that chair with a barber's board."

      "Dad, C'mon. PLEASE!"

      EZ has found her way in and is scouting out one of the bedrooms. Another bedroom at the end of the hall is bathed in yellowish light, both bedframes and mattresses are in remarkably good condition and seem nearly new. One of the two is unusually long, would easily accommodate an abnormally tall body. And I make nervous note of that.

      A door at the end of the hallway is slightly ajar. EZ exits the bedroom and suddenly stops near the door. Her hackles raise as she sticks her nose into the dark gap. A low rumble wavers in her chest. I let out an involuntary sound and turn away shrieking "excuse me" to Caleb who's already scuttling ahead, trying to get out of there fast and calling EZ to "COME!"

      We exit the house but EZ doesn't. We call. Then I look to my right where a window happens to be. She's sitting at the far wall with her nose an inch from the cracked plaster wall, staring. I describe it, then call my son over to witness this oddity. He doesn't want to, and shouts "EZ" from thirty feet out in the middle of the yard. She totters out, appearing distracted.

      "Okay. Let's go," suggests Cabe, and heads for the truck.

      "Let's go around this side of the house," I request, and start toward the corner through a high stand of ferns.

      "Dad. I'm leaving," he yells through a low shield of shrubs.

      "I want to show you the garage."

      "Dad! Dad, I hate you."

      He returns.

      I round the corner of the house where the bushes grow tangled and are rasping against scratched siding, stopping to peer in through a bedroom window. Behind me Caleb is quibbling, "there is no garage."

      "Is too."

      I stop at the soiled second window, nearly opaque with dirt and spiderwebs. "Ooo, look in there."

      "I don't see anything," he asserts, backed hard into a thicket six feet away. "It's a window or something ... a mirror?"

      "Get--"

      "No--"

      "...up close."

      "...I'm not! I'm not going to," bobbing his cigar with emphasis.

      "If I do it will you?"

      "NO! ... what is it?"

      "Okay. I'm here now. You can see it."

      With an expression of great resignation he puffs on the cigar and slowly walks near, stops, leans behind my shoulder, "It's a TV." Then he collapses to the grass when I report fresh blood on the floor.

      We wade through a meadow of chest-high weeds between the house and garage. Succulent June green, dripping with rain. Cabe describes what makes scary movies so scary, and how blood and gore and people dying aren't nearly as scary as a movie like Blair Witch, which only hints at fearsome unknowns, "Although I haven't seen it."

      "It's all psychological."

      "Yeah. I think the scariest movie would be where you never ever see the bad thing, the killer. You know it's there. It does things."

      "It lets your imagination work."

      A slightly open door is the only way into the garage. I squeeze through and stand in the dim. Cabe squints in from outside. Glass-less windows on both sides, green threadbare curtains tattered in strips softly blowing, ballerinas twirling, attached at the head. An old fridge is there, an overturned snowmobile chassis, and wooden boxes of strange looking vials and beakers, which my son has already seen from outside.

      He steps in.

      Barely visible, in the murk at the back, an old wooden staircase slowly can be seen as our eyes adjust. We see it at the same time. Cabe guffaws at the absurdity of "stairs leading to nowhere."

      "No! There's got to be a reason for it. Something's up there. Let's go."

      He abruptly stops chortling, realizing there is a dim opening at the top of the stairs, that they aren't stairs without purpose after all. And that I am serious.

      "No! Dad. NO!" Dread has edged into his voice. And hysteria is raring to go close by on a short leash. "I'm serious." The beer can and cigar, though forgotten, are circled and jabbed to stress his earnestness. "I'm serious. I don't like this."

      "Yeah, well, you said that before, but now you're here. So let's go up there."

      "No. I'm not a-scared of the garage."

      A "clinking" sound through the ceiling above us.

      "What was that?!"

      "I heard it too."

      A narrow wisp of window curtain nudges Cabe's shoulder. He bolts toward the door.

      "Dad!"

      "C'mon. Let's go see what's up there. Something made that noise."

      I step over piles of old boots and tire chains, around a dull old bureau piled with open boxes of electrical fittings and potato utensils and black leather Gideon Bibles. Cabe is tentatively drawing behind as I approach a soiled refrigerator a few feet from the base of the steps.

      "I am not going up there."

      "Come on."

      He puffs the cigar. "No. That's not even--I will go sit in the car, before I go up there. I will not go up there."

       "I'll go if you go."

      He blasts out a cough of smoke and jeers at the notion.

      A dog barks nearby across the meadow, although nobody lives within ten miles and EZ herself is sitting perked up just inside the door.

      I head back into the darkness where the stairs start. Hanging from a peg above the first step is a leather horse collar. Caleb points out another television in the corner behind me. I turn to look.    "Something just stirred against my back." I wheel around to see what, but nothing is there, only dark air, dismal cool air, moving down the steps and through me, although the day is warm and the upstairs should be warmer. I do not mention the curious chill to my son, who would surely reel in his leash and fully discharge hysteria's gush.

      He's already backing away commanding, "Okay, let's go."

      "What's that!?" A timber support holding up the ceiling at the base of the stairs has bizarre symbols along its length where limbs were torn off while making the post. A number eight is plainly visible where two small branches were lopped off.

      "As long as we're here let's go up there."

      "No, I'm not."

      Now we return to tomorrow evening where we left off near the beginning. The steady rain is "plicking" Cabe's rain-jacket as he leads the way, a pointy-headed gnome. He steps right up through the front door of the house and disappears in the dark. I send EZ in, then myself. The light is dim today, partly because the sky is thicker with clouds and partly because it's later in the day. In the odd kitchen colors we paw through utensils, and dare one another to open the fridge, after one of us suggested there could be a dead baby inside.

      We return through the living room. Cabe marvels how easily EZ explores scary places, like the hallway that so raised her alarm yesterday. We move into the hall. I peer through the slightly jarred door and recoil in shock, then tell Cabe to have a look. He does, with the same reaction. A tumble of carpet is curled up against the inside of the door, pushing and flexing dead body-ish as the door is pulled out.

      "Let me see you go sit in that chair." It's the overstuffed one all alone in the tiny narrow room with a window up high.

      The boy sends dog in first, who doesn't growl or do anything but sniff then walk out bored. He removes the board, and I'll be damned, sits right down in his high pointed hood and pulls languorously at his cigar.

      We leave the house and head for the garage.

      "Do you really want to go in there?"

      "Do you?"

      "Not really. I mean, I've been there. I can go if you want, but I don't want to get wet going all that way."

      "Have you been upstairs before?"

      "No. We can go if you really want to, but I don't want to walk through all these wet weeds."

      "Well, no. If you don't want to go we don't have to go. But what else we gonna' do?"

      "That's right. We're here so you can face your fear. Okay, let's do it."

      "Fine."

      Cabe takes the lead through the bushes beside the house and past yesterday's scary windows, through the rain-soaked meadow and into the garage.

      One of us realizes suddenly that it'll be too dark to see much upstairs by the miniature penlight Cabe is carrying. The other impulsively suggests that we don't have to go up there.

      A stair is stepped, a left foot raised onto the second.

      "Creak."

      "Whoa!," one of us blurts. "Guess the stairs won't hold. Let's go home."

      Cabe steps up, an obvious first scout. I mean, he's much lighter. The staircase quivers side-to-side when he puts weight on the third step, so he decides the hog boots on his feet are too stiff for precise ankle flex, and steps back down.

      "Let's send EZ up."

      I call her over and point up the stairs, but she doesn't clue in and wanders away to sit by the door and watch the rain.

      I take charge, reasoning that, after all it's only a groaning attic and offers nothing to be fearful about. Taking a big breath to make me lighter I mount the steps halfway, and turn around to see what can be seen eye-level to the attic floor. Nothing is there but darkness and a bright open window and two coal-glowing eyes at the far end.

      "Nope. Nothin' up here but those two glowing eyes," I sing, and unemotionally de-mount.

      Cabe can't wait. He climbs a bit higher than me to account for his stature, swipes the penlight in a brief arc and agrees with my conclusion, except for the old lampshade in the corner, and an empty mason jar, and "dismembered arms and legs," and steps back down.

8:55-

      East and north is a little-used road named Moose. It gave me a scare last year, while out on an exploration outing in the rain, greasy and unpredictable, so back then I'd turned around and gotten the hell out. I am determined to "take" Moose Road this year and the conditions are right for a re-match.

      The rain is fully committed, and so seems my foe, the road, at least as muddy and wet as it was back then, ruts now brimming with orange silty water. We put the truck in four-wheel and launch away, a couple of macho guys in their high-ridin', phallically-tired truck. We splash through with little trouble, launching mucky brown gushers ten feet high over roadside swamps. I am sure my son is impressed and, when all is done, will surely think more highly of this sport--and of my expertise as a smart seasoned mudder.

      We're seeking Summit Trail, the road I got lost on and finally found Holyoke one night last winter. It appears out of the rain on the right, and looks as wide and easy to drive upon as it was back then. I swerve on to it and quickly regret having done this because the front tires seem to have detached from the steering wheel and do not respond, or are taking a coffee break minute before answering my call. The truck does not want to go straight, rather sideways, fishtailing either right or to the left, or both simultaneously as I, casting out curses, fight for ownership of the road.

      Cabe chooses to be silent after asking "What's the deal with this one?" Although, I see him semi-discreetly screwing up his face in ghastly mock terror, mouth hideously wide, nostrils flared, eyes gazing terrorized at approaching dumb doom. Then he grimaces disgustingly in his mawkish charade, and puts a hand to his mouth in a patronizing depiction of pain, fingernails scraping wildly against his shuddering teeth. Hah Hah.

      In a half-mile we come to a turn-around and do likewise.

Supressing My Instinct to Run | Contents