The Spite House(74)

These questions ran themselves ragged in Eric’s head until another pulled itself into the clear. What about Masson’s niece and nephew?

Those kids were as present in the house as Masson and the woman were. Where were their graves? Why wouldn’t they be buried near the relative who cared for them? Could it be because Masson did something to them? It seemed unthinkable. The time he spent reliving Masson’s life, feeling his thoughts and emotions, gave Eric no indication that Masson was capable of such evil, but what did he know? The war could have changed him, the trauma eroding his decency and sanity over time. Or maybe it had to do with coming back to life. The determination to fight off death and seek revenge or righteousness consuming you until you were barely the person you were before. That was what some people used to think of his grandfather, Eric remembered. After the fire, some said he was a changed man, and others responded, “Well, of course he is. Someone tried to kill his family and he almost died. That would change anyone.”

“Oh no,” the gossipers said. “That’s not it. Ol’ Fred is a different kind of different.”

Not for the first time, Eric thought of something he hated to think about. An early Sunday morning when he was visiting his grandparents. His grandmother brought him to church before service started so he could help fold programs and clean pews. She dropped him off in the lobby and told him to wait while she went to the restroom, but he drifted into the nave when he heard two older women mention his grandfather.

“I’m never gon’ get used to seein’ Ol’ Fred in here,” one woman said. She and her friend sat at one of the front pews, their backs to the nave’s entrance. She spoke a little louder than she needed to. Eric could see a large white hearing aid in her right ear. “Never, never, never.”

“Well if he’s here, at least that means there’s no devil in him,” her friend said, matching the first woman’s volume.

“Yeah, you say that.”

“I know it. God won’t let a devil into the church.”

“God wouldn’t kill a man and let something come back pretending to be human, either,” the first woman said. “You know, sometimes I test him. I call him anything but Fred to see if he’ll correct me. He don’t. You know why?”

“’Cause he’s being polite,” the second woman said.

“’Cause that ain’t his name. ’Cause the real Fred died in that fire and some devil took his spot.”

“So you say.”

“I keep telling you.”

“And I keep hearing you every Sunday, and praying you don’t scare yourself any sillier with these ghost stor—” She stopped, shivered, and turned to see Eric in the aisle. He must have gotten too close, made a noise. The way she shivered, though, wasn’t like she was cold. It was like she felt a bug deep in her ear. Eric remembered his grandfather saying that when you shivered like that, it meant someone had walked on your future grave.

The two women stared at Eric like he was doing something odd and vaguely menacing. Holding a lit match and letting it burn to his fingertips, or shaking a jar with a wasp in it and teasing at opening the lid, all with a smile on his face. It unnerved him to see how unnerved they were. What did they think he was going to do? Run and tell his grandfather? And then what? What did they think “Ol’ Fred” could do to them? Part of him had been tempted to run and tell his grandfather on the spot just to see what would happen. To see if he could really give them a look that made the buzzards follow them. The thought made his heart race with an emotion that confused him. An unsavory but undeniable pride in the slightest possibility that his grandfather could do such a thing. He couldn’t stop smiling about it all through that Sunday’s service, and had nightmares about large scavenger birds devouring helpless old women for a week after.

Now, it was something Eric had to consider about his daughter. Could she do some of the things they said his grandfather could do? Might she be even stronger, since she not only had come back from the dead, but was the child of someone who should have never been born?

Peter Masson’s house should have never existed, and now it was a magnet for the otherworldly. It was sentient in its own way, made up, as it was, of the lost lives that were trapped within it, and maybe it had drawn Eric to Degener in the first place. That was the best Eric could make of it. That the spite house caught his eye and lured him in to get closer to him and his daughters because of what his grandfather passed down to him. They weren’t supposed to exist either. Just like the house, they were here because of a man who refused to stay dead.

Frederick Emerson had something in common with Peter—a consuming anger that twisted a righteous cause. The difference was that Frederick got what he came back for, because that was the kind of man he was. Eric remembered the stories about how his grandfather had made sure that each of the men who burned his house down with him in it met a bad end. A late-night car wreck, a hunting accident, a perfectly bad fall while doing roof work. Each man’s death looked like random misfortune, but everyone who knew him knew Ol’ Fred made it happen. Eric was moving past wondering how it was possible for his grandfather to do what he did, and instead was focused more on why he lacked his grandfather’s will and strength. If he could go back, he’d ask the old man to teach him everything. Teach him to make things happen.

Eric wasn’t in a position now to know all that his grandfather knew, but he could look into what had happened to Masson’s niece and nephew, see what role they played in all of this, what answers they could provide. After his visit to the cemetery he went back to the Degener library, where the librarian looked at him almost the way the old women at his grandparents’ church had years ago. She had more sympathy in her expression, though. A hint of guilt, too? Like she’d lied to a homeless man about having no change to spare. Did he look that much worse to her now than he did two days ago?