[#069] The Hook

The long, black flag of a curtain whipped in the window at the top of the house.

"I'm not crazy, right?," Cal said as he unfolded himself from the squad car and sank his boots into the muddy earth.

Jen climbed out and rubbed her arms, shivering in the half-hail rain. Chunks of ice thumped across the roof of the car and beat down on the brow of her hat, but neither of the country deputies paid mind to the November storm as they stared up at the simple cloth flailing from the turret of the ruined Victorian.

"I was right, wasn't I?" Cal added.

His partner blinked at the fabric billowing in the wind, as dark as the still room beyond. "You're right."

"It was definitely closed."

"Been closed for years."

"Since MacReady died."

Jen's eyes trailed down the falling rain to meet her partner's gaze, but he wasn't looking at her. He studied the curtain with an intensity she couldn't will herself to match after the night she'd had. "You don't really think he's in there, do you?"

Cal turned to her. She swore she saw a glint trailing down his cheek.

"It's been thirteen years, Cal."

"And I guess his body will wash up in the creek any day now?"

She sighed and breathed in the cold, wet air of early winter. "The guys told me all about it. Billows and Temper, they've been on the force long enough to know what they're talking about. You don't survive a fall like that."

Cal shut his eyes and listened to the sounds of the storm. Thunder carried from above, and with it came a cavalcade of scratches and thumps as the hail wore away at the structure. And something else flowed down from the curtained room, though Cal prayed it existed only in his mind, a distant whisper beckoning him to the top of the turret: "Come on up, Calvin..."

"What'd you say?"

He shook himself out of his head and glanced back to meet the mixture of pity and suspicion in Jen's eyes. He waved a hand at the house. "Do you know why the windows aren't boarded? Even on the first floor?"

"I hadn't really thought of it."

"It's because nobody who grew up in Summerdown Grove is taking one step into that house. Ain't nobody in the county who can forget what MacReady did. Now someone's poking around in his house and leaving the attic window open in the middle of a thunderstorm. You don't do that if you want to stay hidden.

"You do that if you want someone to see it. You do that to make dumb cops like us walk into a trap."

Jen watched the curtain ripple. She imagined the corner bending up into a little finger, calling her into the attic. Her hand found its way to the radio inside the car before she knew what it was doing, but the waves rolling from the speakers returned only static. She dropped it in the seat and pulled up her belt.

"Just some kids," she grumbled. "People want to forget that stuff. They aren't gonna pass that story down. To the kids on this street, it's just a big, empty house."

Cal bent over and spat his dinner into the weeds beside the road. Jen grimaced and looked away before making her way around the hood and picking up her partner's hat, shielding his head from the falling hail. When he finished, Jen loaded her partner into the squad car and gazed up at the flapping curtain.

"Stay here," she said.

He watched her outline melt into the growing darkness between the car and the house, words failing as he sat alone beneath the rain and ice and thumping metal. The steady patter of the storm proved soothing, and his stomach came around before a quarter-hour passed. A shame grew inside him with the realization his partner had to carry on without him. The clouds withdrew a moment later, the better part of their burden shed on the muddy slopes up to the porch, and Calvin knew the time had come to step out of his cage and do his job.

Wooden planks twice his age creaked beneath his weight as he climbed the front steps. A single bench swing rocked back and forth on its chains from the far end of the covered porch, beams swollen and cracked from the rain seeping in sideways over thirteen years. The door swung open beneath the slightest touch, as if the latch had long since buckled under some heavy weight. Calvin pulled a flashlight from his belt and clicked it on, igniting the beam over a thin smoke curling from the wick of a recently extinguished candle.

Every ounce of will in his body strained against his instinct to run. He thought of Jen, and he closed the door behind him as he glanced up the hall.

Shadows oozed from the cobwebbed corners all along the corridor. The air grew thicker as he climbed the stairwell into the upper floors, hot and suffocating like the breath of a giant hovering inches from his face. A familiar shape gleamed in the darkness of the third floor landing, and Cal's heart froze up as he knelt to pick up Jen's revolver.

"Come on up, Calvin."

He leaped upright, pistol shaking in the air before him. Nobody else stood on the landing. The only door hung open halfway down, a blue glow shining on the bottom of the attic steps. A shadow spread across the moonlight, and Calvin lost it. Down the stairs he fled, shooting down the hillside and leaping into his car.

One last look at the attic window revealed the face of a distant figure grinning down at him as he fled into the night.

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Jen smiled as she watched the squad car tear off down the street. She knew her partner would tell the others, and the others would come on up. That was fine.

They thought she was a victim. They wouldn't be looking for Jen.

They would be looking for her father.