“I told Jake I wasn’t scared. I said I’d go into The Crawford House and spend a half hour and that only a yellow-belly turned and ran out with a scalpel. I boasted that I’d hang out in there – maybe even have a chat with Blane Crawford.” Max sighed and rolled his head back. “Man, I regretted that big talk the second we stepped into the woods with our flashlights. I spent the entire walk, and it took us a good twenty minutes, thinking I might puke.
“When we got there, Jake had this look, this laughing, mocking look, and it made me so mad. It was the only thing that got me into that house. Otherwise, I tell you, I’d already come up with a half a dozen excuses for why I wasn’t going in. I knew I’d lose face in front of my buddies if I backed out. I could have lived with that, but Jake was my brother. I’d have to deal with his taunting twenty-four hours a day until forever. At least that’s what it seemed like at the time. I mustered every ounce of courage in my body and went in.”
17
Max paused, wishing he could tell the story without the memory that went with it, but it arrived, unbidden from the darkness of his memories.
“It smelled,” he shook his head trying to remember, “like the forest, but it was also dank, and I could smell chemicals. I realized later it was from the embalming stuff that had never been removed. And there was a smell of something dead. I tried not to think of Blane Crawford, but that was next to impossible. I told myself it was just a raccoon stuck in the old chimney or something. I could have stayed on the first floor. I wanted to. But I knew Jake would grill me about the basement. I had to go down there, or they’d know I’d wimped out.”
“So, you went?” Ashley asked, her eyes big in her tanned face.
“I went,” Max agreed. “I walked down the stairs on legs like Jell-O.”
“I love the cherry kind,” Sid announced.
Ashley cast him an incredulous look, and he blushed red.
“Me too,” Max offered. “But that night I didn’t want to think of anything red or jiggly. It was so dark. I had this weak little flashlight that barely lit the path in front of my feet.”
“What did you see?” Ashley asked.
Max remembered stepping off those soft groaning stairs into a dark hallway. There were doors open and hanging off their hinges. Through the first door, he saw the embalming room, the tiled floor littered with leaves and dirt. The walls were peeling and the ceiling was a mass of water damage. As he’d shone his flashlight into the room, he’d spotted a huge spiderweb in one corner, and his light lit up a spider who seemed to cast a thousand glowing eyes on him.
“There was a metal table in the embalming room. A tile floor with a drain all clogged with leaves. Spiderwebs everywhere. I saw a sink in the corner filled with a dark liquid-like goo. I don’t know what it was. It was probably just water and dirt, but…” Max closed his eyes. “It scared the crap out of me. I left that room and went into the next one. The coffin room.”
Now he stopped, realizing his ice cream had begun to melt down his hand and drip onto his shoes.
“Oops.” He licked the ice cream off his hand and grabbed a pile of napkins to wipe it from his shoes, before standing and throwing his ice cream in the trash. His appetite for sweets had disappeared.
“There were maybe five coffins. A couple had their lids open. I could see the satin lining inside all spotted with mold. I didn’t want to walk around in there, but I did. I kept thinking I’m down here, and Jake’s gonna ask how many coffins? What color were they? It was absurd, but I couldn’t help it.
“I walked deeper into the room. The carpet was gross, but in one spot, it was black. A long black mark, like a coffin had been there and left a burn mark or… or something, had leaked out of it.”
He’d pictured Blane Crawford then, seen him so clearly decaying in that coffin, huge maggots on his face that he’d turned and fled. Max had sprinted full speed into a coffin. The coffin hadn’t tipped over, but it had rocked hard on its base, and the impact had hurled Max backward. He’d landed on his back, the wind knocked out of him. His flashlight had skidded across the room.
“It took me a minute to stand up,” he continued. “I was seeing stars, and the next day I had a bruise the size of Texas on my chest.” He winced, remembering the purple black bruise that had throbbed for days.
“And then?” Ashley asked, her hands gripping the bench beneath her.
Sid, too, sat on the edge of his seat as if poised for flight.
“And then I got the hell out of there,” Max said. “I grabbed my flashlight and ran upstairs and out the door.”
The flash of disappointment in Ashley’s face was undeniable, but Sid grinned, as if relieved there were no more horrors to reveal.
“What?” Max asked Ashley.
“You left something out,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest.
A little flutter of fear lit in Max’s belly. He grinned and looked away.
“That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.”
“Come on. We’ve seen scary stuff too. If you tell us, we’ll tell you,” Ashley said.
Sid’s mouth dropped open. “Ash, you said-,” he started, but Ashley cut him off.
“I know what I said.”
Max looked back and forth between them. He didn’t want to share the story, largely because, in the fourteen years since he’d walked into The Crawford House, he’d learned to dismiss what he’d seen. He didn’t want to remember it. He preferred to believe his brain had been so high on fear and then shock after running into the coffin that he’d simply imagined the next part.
“Tell us,” Ashley insisted.
Max chewed his tongue. He shouldn’t tell them. Teachers were role models. They reminded kids the boogeyman wasn’t real, that monsters didn’t exist. He was supposed to say, Stop doodling werewolves in your notebook. Those aren’t real.
Instead, he opened his mouth and spoke. “After I fell, I had to lay there for a few minutes. It felt like an hour, but it might have been only five seconds. Finally, I rolled over and started to get up. I was looking at the flashlight. It illuminated the floor beneath one of the coffins.
“Suddenly, I heard this horrible creak, like when you push open a door and the hinge is so rusted it screeches like an angry cat. I was on one knee by then, and I froze. I mean froze like my blood turned to ice. I didn’t take a breath. I realized it wasn’t a door I’d heard but a coffin. In the beam of that light, I saw a foot step down as if someone were climbing out of the coffin above it. And then the other foot came down. The skin on the feet and legs looked rotten, blackened, and kind of curdling.”
Sid shook his head from side to side, and Max half expected him to clamp his hands over his ears and start crying. Ashley looked equally horrified, yet strangely unafraid.
“The feet turned as if the thing above them had spotted me across that room. And it had. It was pitch black except the little halo of light from my flashlight. The only thing I could see were those feet, but it could see me. I felt it watching me. I bolted. I jumped up and ran for my life. I still remember running up those stairs.”
Max’s arms broke out in goosebumps.
“I’ve never experienced anything like that adrenaline rush since. I could have outrun the fastest kid in the school right then. But I also felt… heavy. As if something were pulling me back. Not touching me, but pulling me just the same.”
He stopped and let out a shuddering breath. “The guys laughed when they saw me come out. I barely acknowledged them. I sprinted home without looking back.”
Sid put his hands to his mouth, eyes still wide.