The House on Maple Street nad-19 Read online

  Trent and Laurie came behind, more slowly, listening. There was a moment of almost unbearable suspense when the only sounds were the little kids’ footsteps on the stairs, and then Lew bawled up at them from the kitchen: ‘KEEP IT DOWN, CAN’T YOU? YOUR MOTHER’S TAKING A NAP!’

  And if that doesn’t wake her up, Laurie thought, nothing will.

  Late that night, as Trent was drowsing off to sleep, Laurie opened the door of his room, came in, and sat down beside him on the bed.

  ‘You don’t like him, but that’s not all,’ she said.

  ‘Who-wha?’ Trent asked, peeling a cautious eyelid.

  ‘Lew,’ she said quietly. ‘You know who I mean, Trent.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, giving up. ‘And you’re right. I don’t like him.’

  ‘You’re scared of him, too, aren’t you?’

  After a long, long moment, Trent said: ‘Yeah. A little.’

  ‘Just a little?’

  ‘Maybe a little more than a little,’ Trent said. He winked at her, hoping for a smile, but Laurie only looked at him, and Trent gave up. She wasn’t going to be diverted, at least not tonight. ‘Why? Do you think he might hurt us?’

  Lew shouted at them a lot, but he had never put his hands on them. No, Laurie suddenly remembered, that wasn’t quite true. One time when Brian had walked into his study without knocking, Lew had given him a spanking. A hard one. Brian had tried not to cry, but in the end he had. And Mom had cried, too, although she hadn’t tried to stop the spanking. But she must have said something to him later on, because Laurie had heard Lew shouting at her. Still, it had been a spanking, not child abuse, and Brian could be an insufferable cheese-dog when he put his mind to it.

  Had he been putting his mind to it that night? Laurie wondered now. Or had Lew spanked her brother and made him cry over something, which had only been an honest, little kid’s mistake? She didn’t know, and had a sudden and unwelcome insight, the sort of thought that made her think Peter Pan had had the right idea about never wanting to grow up: she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. One thing she did know: who the real cheese-dog around here was. She realized Trent hadn’t answered her question, and gave him a poke. ‘Cat got your tongue?’

  ‘Just thinking,’ he said. ‘It’s a toughie, you know?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said soberly. ‘I know.’

  This time she let him think.

  ‘Nah,’ he said at last, and laced his hands together behind his head. ‘I don’t think so, Sprat.’ She hated to be called that, but tonight she decided to let it go. She couldn’t remember Trent ever speaking to her this carefully and seriously. ‘I don’t think he would… but I think he could.’ He got up on one elbow and looked at her even more seriously. ‘But I think he’s hurting Mom, and I think it gets a little worse for her every day.’ ’She’s sorry, isn’t she?’ Laurie asked. Suddenly she felt like crying. Why were adults so stupid sometimes about stuff kids could see right away? It made you want to kick them. ‘She never wanted to go to England in the first place… and there’s the way he shouts at her sometimes…’

  ‘Don’t forget the headaches,’ Trent said flatly. ‘The ones he says she talks herself into. Yeah, she’s sorry, all right.’

  ‘Would she ever… you know…’

  ‘Divorce him?’

  ‘Yes,’ Laurie said, relieved. She wasn’t sure she could have brought the word out herself, and had she realized how much she was her mother’s daughter in that regard, she could have answered her own question.

  ‘No,’ Trent said. ‘Not Mom.’

  ‘Then there’s nothing we can do,’ Laurie sighed.

  Trent said in a voice so soft she almost couldn’t hear it: ‘Oh yeah?’

  During the next week and a half, they drilled other small holes around the house when there was no one around to see them: holes behind posters in their various rooms, behind the refrigerator in the pantry (Brian was able to squeeze in and just had room to use the drill), in the downstairs closets. Trent even drilled one in a dining-room wall, high up in one corner where the shadows never quite left. He stood on top of the stepladder while Laurie held it steady. There was no metal anywhere. Just lath.

  The children forgot for a little while.

  One day about a month later, after Lew had gone back to teaching full-time, Brian came to Trent and told him there was another crack in the plaster on the third floor, and that he could see more metal behind it. Trent and Lissa came at once. Laurie was still in school, at band practice. As on the occasion of the first crack, their mother was lying down with a headache. Lew’s temper had improved once he was back at school (as Trent and Laurie had been sure it would), but he’d had a crackerjack argument with their mother the night before, about a party he wanted to have for fellow faculty members in the History Department. If there was anything the former Mrs. Bradbury hated and feared, it was playing hostess at faculty parties. Lew had insisted on this one, however, and she had finally given in. Now she was lying in the shadowy bedroom with a damp towel over her eyes and a bottle of Fiorinal on the night-table while Lew was presumably passing around invitations in the Faculty Lounge and clapping his colleagues on the back. The new crack was on the west side of the hallway, between the study door and the stairwell.

  ‘You sure you saw metal in there?’ Trent asked. ‘We checked this side, Bri.’ ‘Look for yourself,’ Brian said, and Trent did. There was no need of a flashlight; this crack was wider, and there was no question about the metal at the bottom of it. After a long look, Trent told them he had to go to the hardware store, right away.

  ‘Why?’ Lissa asked.

  ‘I want to get some plaster. I don’t want him to see that crack.’ He hesitated, then added: ‘And I especially don’t want him to see the metal inside it.’

  Lissa frowned at him. ‘Why not, Trent?’

  But Trent didn’t exactly know. At least, not yet. They started drilling again, and this time they found metal behind all the walls on the third floor, including Lew’s study. Trent snuck in there one afternoon with the drill while Lew was at the college and their mother was out shopping for the upcoming faculty party.

  The former Mrs. Bradbury looked very pale and drawn these days – even Lissa had noticed – but when any of the children asked her if she was okay, she always flashed a troubling, over-bright smile and told them never better, in the pink, rolling in clover. Laurie, who could be blunt, told her she looked too thin. Oh no, her mother responded, Lew says I was turning into a blob over in England – all those rich teas. She was just trying to get back into fighting trim, that was all.

  Laurie knew better, but not even Laurie was blunt enough to call her mother a liar to her face. If all four of them had come to her at once – ganged up on her, so to speak – they might have gotten a different story. But not even Trent thought of doing that. One of Lew’s advanced degrees was hanging on the wall over his desk in a frame. While the other children clustered outside the door, nearly vomiting with terror, Trent removed the framed degree from its hook, laid it on the desk, and drilled a pinhole in the center of the square where it had been. Two inches in, the drill hit metal.

  Trent carefully rehung the degree – making very sure it wasn’t crooked – and came back out.

  Lissa burst into tears of relief, and Brian quickly joined her; he looked disgusted but seemed unable to help himself. Laurie had to struggle very hard against her own tears. They drilled holes at intervals along the stairs to the second floor and found metal behind these walls, too. It continued roughly halfway down the second-floor hallway as it proceeded toward the front of the house. There was metal behind the walls of Brian’s room, but behind only one wall of Laurie’s.

  ‘It hasn’t finished growing in here,’ Laurie said darkly.

  Trent looked at her, surprised. ‘Huh?’

  Before she could reply, Brian had a brainstorm.

  ‘Try the floor, Trent!’ he said. ‘See if it’s there, too.’

  Trent thought it over, shrugged, and
drilled into the floor of Laurie’s room. The drill went in all the way with no resistance, but when he peeled back the rug at the foot of his own bed and tried there, he soon encountered solid steel… or solid whatever-it-was. Then, at Lissa’s insistence, he stood on a stool and drilled up into the ceiling, eyes slitted against the plaster-dust that sifted down into his face.

  ‘Boink,’ he said after a few moments. ‘More metal. Let’s quit for the day.’

  Laurie was the only one who saw how deeply troubled Trent looked. That night after lights-out, it was Trent who came to Laurie’s room, and Laurie didn’t even pretend to be sleepy. The truth was, neither of them had been sleeping very well for the last couple of weeks.

  ‘What did you mean?’ Trent whispered, sitting down beside her.

  ‘About what?’ Laurie asked, getting up on one elbow.

  ‘You said it hadn’t finished growing in your room. What did you mean?’

  ‘Come on, Trent – you’re not dumb.’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ he agreed without conceit. ‘Maybe I just want to hear you say it, Sprat.’

  ‘If you call me that, you never will.’

  ‘Okay. Laurie, Laurie, Laurie. You satisfied?’ ’Yes. That stuff’s growing all over the house.’ She paused. ‘No, that’s not right. It’s growing under the house.’

  ‘That’s not right, either.’

  Laurie thought about it, then sighed. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘It’s growing in the house. It’s stealing the house. Is that good enough, Mr. Smarty?’

  ‘Stealing the house…’ Trent sat quietly beside her on the bed, looking at her poster of Chrissie Hynde and seeming to taste the phrase she had used. At last he nodded and flashed the smile she loved. ‘Yes – that’s good enough.’

  ‘Whatever you call it, it acts like it’s alive.’

  Trent nodded. He had already thought of this. He had no idea how metal could be alive, but he was damned if he saw any way around her conclusion, at least for the present. ‘But that isn’t the worst.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘It’s sneaking.’ Her eyes, fixed solemnly on his, were big and frightened. ‘That’s the part I really don’t like. I don’t know what started it or what it means, and I don’t really care. But it’s sneaking.’

  She ran her fingers into her heavy blonde hair and pushed it back from her temples. It was a fretful, unconscious gesture that reminded Trent achingly of his dad, whose hair had been that exact same shade.

  ‘I feel like something’s going to happen, Trent, only I don’t know what, and it’s like being in a nightmare you can’t get all the way out of. Does it feel like that to you sometimes?’ ‘A little, yeah. But I know something’s going to happen. I might even know what.’

  She bolted to a sitting position and grabbed his hands. ‘You know? What? What is it?’ ‘I can’t be sure,’ Trent said, getting up. ‘I think I know, but I’m not ready to say what I think yet. I have to do some more looking.’

  ‘If we drill many more holes, the house is apt to fall down!’

  ‘I didn’t say drilling, I said looking.’

  ‘Looking for what?’

  ‘For something that isn’t here yet – that hasn’t grown yet. But when it does, I don’t think it will be able to hide.’

  ‘Tell me, Trent!’

  ‘Not yet,’ he said, and planted a small, quick kiss on her cheek. ‘Besides – curiosity killed the Sprat.’

  ‘I hate you!’ she cried in a low voice, and flopped back down with the sheet over her head. But she felt better for having talked with Trent, and slept better than she had for a week. Trent found what he was looking for two days before the big party. As the oldest, he perhaps should have noticed that his mother had begun to look alarmingly unhealthy, her skin drawn shiny over her cheekbones, her complexion so pale it had taken on an ugly yellow underlight. He should have noticed how often she was rubbing at her temples, although she denied – almost in a panic – that she had a migraine, or had had one for over a week. He did not notice these things, however. He was too busy looking. In the four or five days between his after-bedtime talk with Laurie and the day he found what he was looking for, he went through every closet in the big old house at least three times; through the crawlspace above Lew’s study five or six times; through the big old cellar half a dozen times. It was in the cellar that he finally found it.

  This was not to say he hadn’t found peculiar things in other places; he most certainly had.

  There was a knob of stainless steel poking out of the ceiling of a second-floor closet. A curved metal armature of some kind had burst through the side of the luggage-closet on the third floor. It was a dim, polished gray… until he touched it. When he did that, it flushed a dusky rose color, and he heard a faint but powerful humming sound deep in the wall. He snatched his hand back as if the armature had been hot (and at first, when it turned a color he associated with the burners on the electric stove, he could have sworn it was). When he did that, the curved metal thing went gray again. The humming stopped at once.

  The day before, in the attic, he had observed a cobweb of thin, interlaced cables growing in a low dark corner under the eave. Trent had been crawling around on his hands and knees, not doing anything but getting hot and dirty, when he had suddenly spied this amazing phenomenon. He froze in place, staring through a tangle of hair as the cables spun themselves out of nothing at all (or so it looked, anyway), met, wrapped around each other so tightly they seemed to merge, and then continued spreading until they reached the floor, where they drilled in and anchored themselves in dreamy little puffs of sawdust. They seemed to be creating some sort of limber bracework, and it looked as if it would be very strong, able to hold the house together through a lot of buffeting and hard knocks.

  What buffeting, though?

  What hard knocks?

  Again, Trent thought he knew. It was hard to believe, but he thought he knew. There was a little closet at the north end of the cellar, far beyond the workshop area and the furnace. Their real father had called this ‘the wine-cellar,’ and although he’d put up only about two dozen bottles of plonk (this word had always made their mother giggle), they were all carefully stored in crisscrossing racks he had made himself.

  Lew came in here even less frequently than he went into the workshop; he didn’t drink wine. And although their mother had often taken a glass or two with their dad, she no longer drank wine either. Trent remembered how sad her face had looked the one time Bri had asked her why she never had a glass of plonk in front of the fire anymore.

  ‘Lew doesn’t approve of drinking,’ she had told Brian. ‘He says it’s a crutch.’ There was a padlock on the wine-cellar door, but it was only there to make sure the door didn’t swing open and let in the heat from the furnace. The key hung right next to it, but Trent didn’t need it. He’d left the padlock undone after his first investigation, and no one had come along to press it shut since then. So far as he knew, no one came to this end of the cellar at all anymore. He was not much surprised by the sour whiff of spilled wine that greeted him as he approached the door; it was just another proof of what he and Laurie already knew – the changes were winding themselves quietly all through the house. He opened the door, and although what he saw frightened him, it didn’t really surprise him. Metal constructions had burst through two of the wine-cellar’s walls, tearing apart the racks with their diamond-shaped compartments and pushing the bottles of Bollinger and Mondavi and Battiglia onto the floor, where they had broken.

  Like the cables in the attic crawlspace, whatever was forming here – growing, to use Laurie’s word – hadn’t finished yet. It spun itself into being in sheens of light that hurt Trent’s eyes and made him feel a little sick to his stomach.

  No cables here, however, and no curved struts. What was growing in his real father’s forgotten wine-cellar looked like cabinets and consoles and instrument panels. And, as he looked, vague shapes humped themselves up in the metal like the heads of excited snakes, gaine
d focus, became dials and levers and read-outs. There were a few blinking lights. Some of these actually began to blink as he looked at them.

  A low sighing sound accompanied this act of creation.

  Trent took one cautious step farther into the little room; an especially bright red light, or series of them, had caught his eye. He sneezed as he stepped forward – the machines and consoles pushing across the old concrete had stirred up a great deal of dust. The lights which had snagged his attention were numbers. They were under a glass strip on a metal construct which was spinning its way out of a console. This new thing looked like some sort of chair, although no one sitting in it would have been very comfortable. At least, no one with a human shape, Trent thought with a little shiver.

  The glass strip was in one of the arms of this twisted chair – if it was a chair. And the numbers had perhaps caught his eye because they were moving.

  72:34:18

  became

  72:34:17

  and then

  72:34:16

  Trent looked at his watch, which had a sweep second hand, and used it to confirm what his eyes had already told him. The chair might or might not really be a chair, but the numbers under the glass strip were a digital clock. It was running backward. Counting down, to be perfectly accurate. And what would happen when that read-out finally went from

  00:00:01

  to

  00:00:00

  some three days from this very afternoon?

  He was pretty sure he knew. Every American boy knows one of two things happen when a backward-running clock finally reads zeros across the board: an explosion or a lift-off. Trent thought there was too much equipment, too many gadgets, for it to be an explosion. He thought something had gotten into the house while they were in England. Some sort of spore, perhaps, that had drifted through space for a billion years before being caught in the gravitational pull of the earth, spiraling down through the atmosphere like a bit of milkweed fluff caught in a mild breeze, and finally falling into the chimney of a house in Titusville, Indiana. Into the Bradburys’ house in Titusville, Indiana.