She picked up the handset and put it to her ear. An electronic voice was suggesting she try her call again. She terminated the message and hit redial. After three rings, she got the Damerows’ answering machine.
She hung up.
Her spell of light-headedness had passed, but she still didn’t trust herself to stand. Instead, she looked to the item that had interrupted her outburst—her pager—and saw the latest message was a weather update from her service provider: severe thunderstorms were coming.
She erased the bulletin and tossed the pager on the coffee table.
“Get a grip, Humble,” she whispered.
Finally, she got up and returned the phone handset to its base. On the built-in answering machine, she found the light-up display blinking, indicating a new message. She hit the machine’s “play” button and listened to her own words echo from the speaker.
“Isn’t that what humanity is, one big cesspool teeming with psychopaths? How the fuck can one cop change that? I can’t. There, I said it. Shit, I might as well put an end to this whole thing right n—”
Her mouth hung agape. Along with the lost memory of retrieving her pistol from the desk, she’d apparently hit the phone’s record feature, capturing every disturbing word she’d spoken. Most unnerving of all, the agitated voice on the recording sounded eerily like someone speaking their final words before ending their life.
“This is nuts.”
Standing by the phone, she found herself reflecting on the clawing words of Frank Atkins.
“There are going to be more bodies, and soon.”
She didn’t know what had just happened, but after her long day of one frustration after another, the incident had drained the last of her patience and left her thirsty for answers.
Melissa slid back into her shoes and snatched her car keys off the end table in the entry hall. She knew she wasn’t crazy. Though she couldn’t remember it, she’d spoken to someone at the other end of the phone line.
Now she wanted to find out who.
CHAPTER 25
Lori sat with BJ on the floor of the living room, poised over the half-completed layout of a small Lego city they’d constructed while watching Monsters Inc. on Blu-ray. She enjoyed babysitting the boy. He was well behaved, fun to watch, and boasted an impressive imagination. He’d not only made a collection of buildings and vehicles from the construction blocks, but had also given them certain roles to fulfill within their fabricated community, including a police force, a taxi service, a grocery, and a postal system. Lori found that to be the funniest bit of all, especially since he claimed all the citizens were dinosaurs.
While BJ finished up the last touches on his latest creation, she glanced out the window to where the light had been replaced with darkness.
Getting up, she said, “Okay, trooper, almost time for bed.”
BJ looked shocked. “No way. I’m not tired.”
She frowned. “Sorry, the rules are the rules. I’ll bet once you’re under the covers, you’ll fall—”
“I’m not going to bed until my dad gets home,” he interrupted.
He glanced to the hall leading to the staircase, and she noted the unmistakable look of fear in his eyes.
She smiled. “I think I know where this is going. Are you afraid of monsters coming out of the closet, like in the movie?”
He simply stared at her.
“I thought so,” she said. “Well, there’s nothing to fear, because I’m a federally-registered monster exterminator with a black belt in butt-kicking. Just tell me where to find this goon, and I’ll scare him so bad he’ll jump out of his underpants!”
He didn’t smile like she’d hoped, but he also didn’t resist when she took him by the hand and started toward the stairs.
Moments later they stood in the middle of BJ’s room, the young boy at her side. They faced his closed closet door, ready for a showdown with whatever lay within.
Without saying a word, the two attempted to perceive any faint noise that might give away an interloper hidden within the walk-in closet. In that labored calm, the empty house downstairs seemed miles away. Lori marveled at the lack of common sounds she expected to hear in such a quiet background: the settling noise of the house’s foundation, crickets chirping on the outside windowsill, a wind-rattled screen.
Yet, nothing.
“Well, kid, what do you think?” she asked.
In no more than a whisper, he said, “I guess he’s not here right now.”
She squeezed the boy’s hand, holding back a smile that threatened to destroy her look of sincerity. She couldn’t help it. He looked so serious, so ardent in his belief that a supernatural beast occupied his closet. She remembered her own childhood years, recalling the nights spent with her favorite blanket wrapped tight around her shoulders, convinced a slime-slicked crocodile dwelled in the darkness below the box-springs. Now she knew the phantom creature never existed, but at the time, it seemed like a tangible, living thing. She understood how BJ could believe this fiendish whatever-it-was occupied his world.
“Sometimes I hear him moving in there,” the boy told her, speaking in the same quivering whisper.
She squeezed his hand again when it trembled in her palm.
“So who is this doofus? He’s obviously too scared to show himself with me here.”
She listened quietly as BJ told her about his fictitious tormenter. It took some time. At first he refused, saying if he revealed anything about the monster it would hurt his dad and sister. But after her reassurance that most monsters peed their pants at the simple mention of her name, she finally got him to open up.
He told her the creature had pushed him in the pool the other day and threatened him to keep quiet about it. If he ever told anyone what really happened or even mentioned he’d seen his tormentor, the beast promised to punish his family.
Now she understood. Paul had told her about the pool incident when he’d first shown her around the house, pointing out the new safety locks he’d installed on the sliding glass door that opened onto the back deck. BJ had obviously concocted this evil being to deal with his guilt over breaking the rule of not going near the pool without supervision, but now the being seemed unquestionably real to him.
She knew it probably wasn’t healthy to support the falsehood’s existence, but she decided to humor the boy in order to help him get to bed. She’d simply rely on the same imagination that spawned the ghoul to destroy it.
“Well,” she said, “I don’t hear anything in there right now, which probably means he chickened out and ran when he heard I’d be coming over. These guys know how dangerous I am. In fact, he probably won’t ever come back now that he knows we live in the same neighborhood. I’ll check just to be sure, though.”
BJ nodded but didn’t come any closer.
With a wink of encouragement, she opened the door and clicked on the light. Clothes hung in a line along a rack to the right, while shelves from floor to ceiling held various toys on the left.
“Wow! Check out this stash. Santa must clock some serious overtime when he visits your house each year.”
He didn’t reply but came a little closer, halting at the doorframe. He watched while she searched through the clothes, under stuffed toy animals, and along the uppermost shelves.
“No goblins in here, kiddo.”
The boy’s features remained gray. “He stays back there,” he said, pointing past her. “Back in the crawlspace, that’s where he lives.”
She looked to a second door at the far wall that no doubt led to an attic or storage space behind the walls between BJ’s room and his father’s study. “Okay, let’s check it out,” she answered. She crossed to the entry without pause, showing him he had nothing to fear.