The House on Maple Street nad-19 Read online

  It might have been something else entirely, of course, but the spore idea felt right to Trent, and although he was the oldest of the Bradbury kids, he was still young enough to sleep well after eating a pepperoni pizza at 9:00 P.M., and to believe completely in his own perceptions and intuitions. And in the end, it didn’t really matter, did it? What mattered was what had happened. And, of course, what was going to happen. When Trent left the wine-cellar this time, he not only snapped the padlock’s arm closed, he took the key as well.

  Something terrible happened at Lew’s faculty party. It happened at quarter of nine, only forty-five minutes or so after the first guests arrived, and Trent and Laurie later heard Lew shouting at their mother that the only goddam consideration she had shown him was getting up to her foolishness early – if she’d waited until ten o’clock or so, there would have been fifty or more people circulating through the living room, dining room, kitchen, and back parlor. ‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’ Trent and Laurie heard him yelling at her, and when Trent felt Laurie’s hand creep into his like a small cold mouse, he held it tightly. ‘Don’t you know what people are going to say about this? Don’t you know how people in the department talk? I mean, really, Catherine – it was like something out of the Three Stooges!’ Their mother’s only reply was soft, helpless sobbing, and for just one moment Trent felt a horrible, unwilling burst of hate for her. Why had she married him in the first place? Didn’t she deserve this for being such a fool?

  Ashamed of himself, he pushed the thought away, made it gone, and turned to Laurie. He was appalled to see tears pouring down her cheeks, and the mute sorrow in her eyes went to his heart like a knife-blade.

  ‘Great party, huh?’ she whispered, scrubbing at her cheeks with the heels of her palms. ‘Right, Sprat,’ he said, and hugged her so she could cry against his shoulder without being heard. ‘It’ll make my top-ten list at the end of the year, no sweat.’

  It seemed that Catherine Evans (who had never wished more bitterly to be Catherine Bradbury again) had been lying to everyone. She had been in the grip of a screaming-blue migraine for not just a day or two days this time but for the last two weeks. During that time she had eaten next to nothing and lost fifteen pounds. She had been serving canapes to Stephen Krutchmer, the head of the History Department, and his wife when the colors went out of everything and the world suddenly swam away from her. She had rolled bonelessly forward, spilling a whole tray of Chinese pork rolls onto the front of Mrs. Krutchmer’s expensive Norma Kamali dress, which had been purchased for just this occasion.

  Brian and Lissa had heard the commotion and had come creeping down the stairs in their pajamas to see what was going on, although both of them – all four children, for that matter – had been strictly forbidden by Daddy Lew to leave the upper floors of the house once the party began. ‘University people don’t like to see children at faculty parties,’ Lew had explained brusquely that afternoon. ‘It sends all sorts of mixed signals.’ When they saw their mother on the floor in a circle of kneeling, concerned faculty members (Mrs. Krutchmer was not there; she had run for the kitchen, wanting to get some cold water on the front of her dress before the sauce-stains could set) they had forgotten their stepfather’s firm order and had run in, Lissa crying, Brian bellowing in excited dismay. Lissa managed to kick the head of Asian Studies in the left kidney. Brian, who was two years older and thirty pounds heavier, did even better: he knocked the fall semester’s guest lecturer, a plump babe in a pink dress and curly-toed evening slippers, smack into the fireplace. She sat there, dazed, in a large puff of gray-black ashes.

  ‘Mom! Mommy!’ Brian cried, shaking the former Catherine Bradbury. ‘Mommy! Wake up!’ Mrs. Evans stirred and moaned.

  ‘Get upstairs,’ Lew said coldly. ‘Both of you.’

  When they showed no signs of obeying, Lew put his hand on Lissa’s shoulder and tightened it until she squeaked with pain. His eyes blazed at her out of a face, which had gone dead pale except for red spots as bright as dimestore rouge in the center of each cheek. ‘I’ll take care of this,’ he said through teeth so tightly clamped they refused to entirely unlock even to speak. ‘You and your brother go upstairs right n…’ ‘Take your hand off her, you son of a bitch,’ Trent said clearly. Lew – and all the party-goers who had arrived early enough to witness this entertaining sideshow – turned toward the archway between the living room and the hallway. Trent and Laurie stood there, side by side. Trent was as pale as his stepfather, but his face was calm and set. There were people at the party – not many but a few – who had known Catherine Evans’s first husband, and they agreed later that the resemblance between father and son was extraordinary. That it was, in fact, almost as though Bill Bradbury had come back from the dead to confront his ill-tempered replacement.

  ‘I want you to go upstairs,’ Lew said. ‘All four of you. There’s nothing here to concern you.

  Nothing to concern you at all.’

  Mrs. Krutchmer had come back into the room, the bosom of her Norma Kamali damp but reasonably free of stains.

  ‘Get your hand off Lissa,’ Trent said.

  ‘And get away from our mother,’ Laurie said.

  Now Mrs. Evans was sitting up, her hands to her head, looking around dazedly. The headache had popped like a balloon, leaving her disoriented and weak but at last out of the agony she had endured for the last fourteen days. She knew she had done something terrible, embarrassed Lew, perhaps even disgraced him, but for the moment she was too grateful that the pain had stopped to care. The shame would come later. Now she only wanted to go upstairs – very slowly – and lie down.

  ‘You’ll be punished for this,’ Lew said, looking at his four stepchildren in the nearly perfect shocked silence of the living room. He didn’t look at them all at once but one at a time, as if marking the nature and extent of each crime. When his gaze fell on Lissa, she began to cry. ‘I’m sorry for their misbehavior,’ he said to the room at large. ‘My wife is a bit lax with them, I’m afraid. What they need is a good English nanny…’ ‘Don’t be a jackass, Lew,’ Mrs. Krutchmer said. Her voice was very loud but not very tuneful; she sounded a bit like a jackass in full bray herself. Brian jumped, clutched his sister, and also gave way to tears. ‘Your wife fainted. They were concerned, that’s all.’ ‘Quite right, too,’ the guest lecturer said, struggling to extract her considerable bulk from the fireplace. Her pink dress was now a splotchy gray and her face was streaked with soot. Only her shoes with their absurd but engaging curly tips seemed to have escaped, but she looked quite unperturbed by the whole thing. ‘Children should care about their mothers. And husbands about their wives.’

  She looked pointedly at Lew Evans as she said this last, but Lew missed her gaze; he was marking Trent and Laurie’s progress as they assisted their mother up the stairs. Lissa and Brian trailed along behind, like an honor guard.

  The party went on. The incident was more or less papered over, as unpleasant incidents at faculty parties usually are. Mrs. Evans (who had slept three hours a night at most since her husband had announced his intention of throwing a party) was asleep almost as soon as her head touched the pillow, and the children heard Lew downstairs, booming out bonhomie without her. Trent suspected that he was even a little relieved not to have to contend with his scurrying, frightened mouse of a wife anymore.

  He never once broke away to come up and check on her.

  Not once. Not until the party was over.

  After the last guest had been shown out, he walked heavily upstairs and told her to wake up… which she did, obedient in this as she had been in everything else since the day when she had made the mistake of telling the minister she did and Lew that she would. Lew poked his head into Trent’s room next and measured the children with his gaze. ‘I knew you’d all be in here,’ he said with a satisfied little nod. ‘Conspiring. You’re going to be punished, you know. Yes indeed. Tomorrow. Tonight I want you to go right to bed and think about it. Now go to your rooms. And no creeping
around, either.’ Neither Lissa nor Brian did any ‘creeping around,’ certainly; they were too exhausted and emotionally wrung out to do anything but go to bed and fall immediately asleep. But Laurie came back down to Trent’s room in spite of ‘Daddy Lew,’ and the two of them listened in silent dismay as their stepfather upbraided their mother for daring to faint at his party… and as their mother wept and offered not a word of argument or even demurral. ‘Oh, Trent, what are we going to do?’ Laurie asked, her voice muffled against his shoulder. Trent’s face was extraordinarily pale and still. ‘Do?’ he said. ‘Why, we’re not going to do anything, Sprat.’

  ‘We have to! Trent, we have to! We have to help her!’

  ‘No, we don’t,’ Trent said. A small and somehow terrible smile played around his lips. ‘The house is going to do it for us.’ He looked at his watch and calculated. ‘At around three-thirty-four tomorrow afternoon, the house is going to do it all.’

  There were no punishments in the morning; Lew Evans was too preoccupied with his eight o’clock seminar on Consequences of the Norman Conquest. Neither Trent nor Laurie was very surprised at this, but both were extremely grateful. He told them he would see them in his study that night, one by one, and ‘mete a few fair strokes to each.’ Once this threat in the form of an obscure quotation had been given, he marched out with his head up and his briefcase clasped firmly in his right hand. Their mother was still asleep when his Porsche snarled its way down the street.

  The two younger kids were standing by the kitchen with their arms around each other, looking to Laurie like an illustration from a Grimm’s fairytale. Lissa was crying. Brian was keeping a stiff upper lip, at least so far, but he was pale and there were purple pouches under his eyes. ‘He’ll spank us,’ Brian said to Trent. ‘And he spanks hard, too.’

  ‘Nope,’ Trent said. They looked at him hopefully but dubiously. Lew had, after all, promised spankings; even Trent was not to be spared this painful indignity. ‘But, Trent…’ Lissa began.

  ‘Listen to me,’ Trent said, pulling a chair out from the table and sitting on it backward in front of the two little ones. ‘Listen carefully, and don’t you miss a single word. It’s important, and none of us can screw up.’

  They stared at him silently with their big green-blue eyes.

  ‘As soon as school is out, I want you two to come right home… but only as far as the corner.

  The corner of Maple and Walnut. Have you got that?’

  ‘Ye-ess,’ Lissa said hesitantly. ‘But why, Trent?’ ’Never mind,’ Trent said. His own eyes – also green-blue – were sparkling, but Laurie thought it wasn’t a good-humored sparkle; she thought, in fact, that there was something dangerous about it. ‘Just be there. Stand by the mailbox. You have to be there by three o’clock, three-fifteen at the latest. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ Brian said, speaking for both of them. ‘We got it.’

  ‘Laurie and I will already be there, or we’ll be there right after you get there.’

  ‘How are we going to do that, Trent?’ Laurie asked. ‘We don’t even get out of school until three o’clock, and I have band practice, and the bus takes…’

  ‘We’re not going to school today,’ Trent said.

  ‘No?’ Laurie was nonplussed.

  Lissa was horrified. ‘Trent!’ she said. ‘You can’t do that! That’s… that’s… hookey!’

  ‘And about time, too,’ Trent said grimly. ‘Now you two get ready for school. Just remember: the corner of Maple and Walnut at three o’clock, three-fifteen at the absolute latest. And whatever you do, don’t come all the way home.’ He stared at Brian and Lissa so fiercely that they looked back with frightened dismay, drawing together for mutual comfort once again. Even Laurie was frightened. ‘Wait for us, but don’t you dare come back into this house,’ he said. ‘Not for anything.’

  When the little kids were gone, Laurie seized his shirt and demanded to know what was going on.

  ‘It has something to do with what’s growing in the house, I know it does, and if you want me to play hookey and help you, you better tell me what it is, Trent Bradbury!’ ‘Mellow out, I’ll tell you,’ Trent said. He carefully removed his shirt from Laurie’s tight grip. ‘And quiet down. I don’t want you to wake up Mom. She’ll make us go to school, and that’s no good.’

  ‘Well, what is it? Tell me!’

  ‘Come on downstairs,’ Trent said. ‘I want to show you something.’

  He led her downstairs to the wine-cellar.

  Trent wasn’t completely sure Laurie would ride along with what he had in mind – it seemed awfully… well, final… even to him – but she did. If it had just been a matter of enduring a spanking from ‘Daddy Lew,’ he didn’t think she would have, but Laurie had been as deeply affected by the sight of her mother lying senseless on the living-room floor as Trent had been by his stepfather’s unfeeling reaction to it.

  ‘Yeah,’ Laurie said bleakly. ‘I think we have to.’ She was looking at the blinking numbers on the arm of the chair. They now read

  07:49:21

  The wine-cellar was no longer a wine-cellar at all. It stank of wine, true enough, and there were the piles of shattered green glass on the floor amid the twisted ruins of their father’s wine-racks, but it now looked like a madman’s version of the control-bridge on the Starship Enterprise. Dials whirled. Digital read-outs flickered, changed, flickered again. Lights blinked and flashed.

  ‘Yeah,’ Trent said. ‘I think so, too. That son of a bitch, shouting at her like that!’

  ‘Trent, don’t.’ ’He’s a jerk! A bastard! A dickhead!’

  But this was just a foul-mouthed version of whistling past the graveyard, and both of them knew it. Looking at the strange agglomeration of instruments and controls made Trent feel almost sick with doubt and unease. He was reminded of a book his dad had read him when he was a child, a Mercer Mayer story where a creature called a Stamp-Eating Trollusk had popped a little girl into an envelope and mailed her To Whom It May Concern. Wasn’t that pretty much what he was proposing they do to Lew Evans?

  ‘If we don’t do something, he’ll kill her,’ Laurie said in a low voice. ‘Huh?’ Trent whipped his head around so fast it hurt his neck, but Laurie wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at the red numbers of the countdown. They reflected backward off the lenses of the spectacles she wore on schooldays. She seemed almost hypnotized, unaware Trent was looking at her, perhaps even unaware that he was there. ‘Not on purpose,’ she said. ‘He might even be sad. For a while, anyway. Because I think he does love her, sort of, and she loves him. You know – sort of. But he’ll make her worse and worse. She’ll get sick all the time, and then… one day…’ She broke off and looked at him, and something in her face scared Trent worse than anything in their strange, changing, sneaking house had been able to do. ‘Tell me, Trent,’ she said. Her hand grasped his arm. It was very cold. ‘Tell me how we’re going to do it.’

  They went up to Lew’s study together. Trent was prepared to ransack the place if that was what it took, but they found the key in the top drawer, tucked neatly into an envelope with the word study printed on it in Lew’s small, neat, somehow hemorrhoidal printing. Trent pocketed it. They left the house together just as the shower on the second floor went on, meaning their mom was up.

  They spent the day in the park. Although neither of them spoke of it, it was the longest day either of them had ever lived through. Twice they saw the beat-cop and hid in the public toilets until he was gone. This was no time to be caught playing truant and bundled off to school. At two-thirty, Trent gave Laurie a quarter and walked her to the phone booth on the east side of the park.

  ‘Do I have to?’ she asked. ‘I hate to scare her, especially after last night.’ ‘Do you want her in the house when whatever happens, happens?’ Trent asked. Laurie dropped the quarter into the telephone with no further protest.

  It rang so many times that she became sure their mother had gone out. That might be good, but it might also be bad
. It was certainly worrisome. If she was out, it was entirely possible that she might come back before…

  ‘Trent, I don’t think she’s h…’

  ‘Hello?’ Mrs. Evans said in a sleepy voice.

  ‘Oh, hi, Mom,’ Laurie said. ‘I didn’t think you were there.’

  ‘I went back to bed,’ she said with an embarrassed little laugh. ‘I can’t seem to get enough sleep, all of a sudden. I suppose if I’m asleep I can’t think about how horrible I was last night…’ ‘Oh, Mom, you weren’t horrible. When a person faints, it isn’t because she wants to…’ ‘Laurie, why are you calling? Is everything okay?’

  ‘Sure, Mom… well…’

  Trent poked her in the ribs. Hard. Laurie, who had been slumping (growing smaller, it almost seemed), straightened up in a hurry. ‘I hurt myself in gym. Just… you know, a little. It’s not bad.’

  ‘What did you do? Jesus, you’re not calling from the hospital, are you?’ ‘Gosh, no,’ Laurie said hastily. ‘It’s just a sprained knee. Mrs. Kitt asked if you could come and bring me home early. I don’t know if I can walk on it. It really hurts.’ ‘I’ll come right away. Try not to move it at all, honey. You could have torn a ligament. Is the nurse there?’

  ‘Not right now. Don’t worry, Mom, I’ll be careful.’

  ‘Will you be in the nurse’s office?’

  ‘Yes,’ Laurie said. Her face was as red as the side of Brian’s Radio Flyer wagon.

  ‘I’ll be right there.’

  ‘Thanks, Mom. Bye.’

  She hung up and looked at Trent. She drew in a deep breath and then let it out in a long, trembly sigh.

  ‘That was fun,’ she said in a voice which was close to tears.

  He hugged her tight. ‘You did great,’ he said. ‘Lots better than I could have, Spr – Laurie. I’m not sure she would have believed me.’