Chapter Twenty

TWENTY

Seeing Master Vale had really lit a fire under Hal, and that third September, Hal decided he was going to take matters into his own hands.

“We have to fight him,” he said to me. “We have to take our goddamn house back.”

So many of Hal’s solutions involved fighting.

I didn’t think it was the right way, but Hal was insistent. I dug out my old research about Master Vale and the missing children and taught Hal everything I had pieced together over the years. We sat at the kitchen table, my crumpled printouts and clippings spread in front of us.

“The bastard has to have some sort of weakness,” Hal said.

I wondered if “bastard” was the best term to use, given what we knew about Master Vale’s upbringing, but I kept my mouth shut.

It was early in the month. The screaming was still just moaning, and the blood was relegated to the third floor. Angelica was around, but none of her friends had arrived yet. There were two ways of looking at this—with deep dread for the terrors that were to come or thankfulness that they were not yet upon us. I took the latter approach; Hal took the former. I had long known that Master Vale was the biggest of the problems in September, but for the rest of the year, he was manageable. I caught him roaming the house a few times, and he gave chase whenever he saw me, but thus far, I’d been able to outrun him. Sure, he’d whispered a few threats into Hal’s ear, but he hadn’t exactly done anything other than piss Hal off. As far as I was concerned, Master Vale was survivable, a problem controlled.

Hal, of course, saw things a bit differently. He seemed to take Master Vale’s presence as a personal threat—whether to his safety, status as master of the house, or general sense of sanity, I hadn’t the foggiest—and he was not willing to stand for threats. Me, I didn’t think that anything the pranksters did was meant to be personal. This was their house first, after all.

“What about fire?” Hal asked. “We could smoke him out.”

“We don’t want the house catching fire,” I said.

“Well,” Hal said, “maybe a little bit of burning will be what it takes to get him out of here.”

“I am not having you burn this house down,” I said.

Hal made a little grumbling noise but went back to flipping through the papers, letting the issue drop. I could hear Fredricka moving about in the dining room, cleaning nervously. She was still acting helpful for the time being. She might even make us dinner later. I hoped for a pot roast.

“What about something with his family?” Hal asked. “Like you did with that boy?”

“Elias,” I said.

“Yeah,” Hal said. “Dig up their bones or something.”

“That doesn’t exactly make Elias go away permanently,” I said. At this point, I had excavated Elias’ mother only two or three times. I tried to reserve that trick for special occasions, like the start of September.

“Maybe we can make it permanent,” Hal said, “if we’re forceful about it. You go up there with that boy and just sing a little song. Maybe with that freak downstairs, we don’t sing to him. We let him know he needs to leave us the hell alone.” Hal might have been eight years out of therapy and ten years sober, but he had never quite given up the idea that all problems can be solved with the right amount of muscle.

And despite the fact that Hal was eight years out of therapy and ten years sober, I still never strayed very far from the rule of not arguing with him. That wasn’t to say we never disagreed, but I found gentler ways of doing so and picked my battles. A very small number of battles.

“Regardless,” I said, riffling through the papers until I found the stack of obituaries for the Vales, “they aren’t buried out in the woods like Elias’ mother. They’re buried in that big cemetery in town. You know, the one by Saint Dymphna’s?”

Hal grunted at the obituaries.

I pointed. “Here’s a picture of George and Penelope’s grave marker.” George and Penelope, apparently set on being a fixture in the town even after death, were buried under a statue of a giant angel, arms outstretched underneath its flowing wings. Their names were inscribed clearly on the stone below the angel. “I think it’d be tough to sneak bones out from there.”

Hal grunted again. “I guess grave robbing is still beneath us.”

I considered that what I had been doing with Elias’ mother was technically grave robbing, but I didn’t want to split hairs.

“Maybe something else to do with his family,” Hal said. “If it has an impact on that boy—”

“Elias.”

“—it has to have an impact on what’s-his-face.” Hal poked his thumb in the direction of the basement.

“Master Vale.”

Hal raised an eyebrow at me. I could see an old irritation throbbing in his head. He didn’t like that I called the man downstairs Master, that I was reverent enough to give this man in our basement a name or any sort of attention. Years ago, this might have been a bigger issue. However, Hal’s therapy was telling him that it was irrational to feel jealous of a man who had been dead for over a century and wished to seriously harm both of us. Hal listened, albeit reluctantly.

We didn’t solve the problem that day. The best solution we could come up with was finding something that could reconnect Master Vale with his family (I don’t think he’ll be happy to see them, I said. That’s the point, Hal said), but we had no idea where to start looking for something like that, or even what we’d be looking for. Hal scoured a few antique shops in the area on the off chance that some Vale family heirloom was on display, but didn’t have any luck. Eventually, he started poking around in various corners of the house (pointedly avoiding the basement) and managed to find something hidden under some floorboards in the attic. I wasn’t particularly happy he was prying up floorboards, but I decided it was a battle I wasn’t willing to fight.

“Look.”Hal beamed, holding the item out for me to examine—a long object made of thick wood, faded pale with time and use and coated with dust. On one side was a handle, with finger grooves molded into the wood; the other side was wide and flat.

“It’s?.?.?. a paddle?” I asked.

“Yes,” Hal said, scrubbing some dust off the wood. “And look right here—the initials G.V. And look what’s written there.”

Inscribed along the side of the paddle were the words “Master of the House.”

“Do you think George beat his children with this?” I asked, turning it over in my hands. I wasn’t so sure I enjoyed holding such a thing. I was also wondering if Hal had put the floorboards back in place in the attic, or if that was to be my responsibility.

“Maybe,” Hal said, looking at the paddle as if it were a holy relic. “I suppose there weren’t many spare-the-rod sorts of people back in those days.”

“It looks really worn,” I said. If Violet’s letters about George Vale were to be believed, he got quite a lot of use out of the thing indeed. The middle of the paddle—the part that had likely come into contact with the most skin—was dim and faded, the wood smooth.

Hal took the paddle from me. He smacked it against his palm like a batter about to step up to the plate, certain of a home run in his future. “All the better,” he said. “I bet just one look at this and old Vale downstairs will turn tail and run.”

Something told me that Master Vale was not the turning-tail type, but I said nothing.

By this point, September was in full swing, and Hal insisted upon going down into the basement to confront Master Vale as soon as possible. I wondered if we’d ought to wait until October, but the compromise we reached was that we would do it during the day instead of at night.

We developed the sketches of a plan. We would go down into the basement, find Master Vale, and then?.?.?. show him the paddle.

“Do you think we’ll have to hit him with the paddle?” I asked as I stood outside the basement door with Hal, flashlight in my hand. To me, there seemed to be many details still to iron out.

But Hal already had his hand on the doorknob. “I don’t think so,” he said with absolutely no evidence to support his opinion.

So down we went.

The basement door creaked open. We hadn’t yet put the boards or the Bible pages up—that would come later. Hal flicked the light switch and an insufficient yellow glow illuminated what lay below. Nothing but stairs in front of us.

The basement was ancient and unfinished: dirt floors like back in the old days, plain brick walls, and exposed wooden beams that gave us a peek into how the house was supported. Cobwebs clung to the corners in huge clusters. I didn’t even want to think about what sort of critters lived down here. There were no windows, making me realize that doing this during the daytime, as I’d insisted, had minimal advantages. The air was thick and clammy, and there was always that smell that we couldn’t quite place but that seemed like an indication of something very wrong.

Hal descended the stairs first, the paddle slung over his shoulder like a baseball bat. I followed him with the flashlight, my hands feeling very weaponless all of a sudden. I felt like a fool, but I clung to Hal’s shoulder with my free hand, desperate to stay close.

We reached the bottom of the stairs and looked around, trying not to show each other how nervous we were. The basement was huge, spanning the entire footprint of the house, and in the dim light and with the support beams obscuring the view, it was difficult to see from one side to the other. From where we stood, the basement seemed empty, save for a few boxes, but I wouldn’t have described it as calm or still. It felt like the moments before a thunderstorm hits, when the air is sweet and unmoving but the sky is black and you know you had best get to shelter fast.

“Do we just?.?.?. call out for him?” I asked.

Hal and I had the exact same amount of information about and experience in this endeavor, but Hal was the sort of person who had answers when I had only questions. “Not just yet,” he said.

We didn’t move. We stood by the stairs, looking around, our bodies like tightly wound springs. I thought I saw the lights flicker, but I might have been mistaken about that. I could hear Hal breathing next to me, heavier than he would have liked, probably.

“Should we look around?” I asked.

“Yes,” Hal said, as if lingering, motionless, by the stairs for a few moments before moving had been a very precise part of his plan and had nothing whatsoever to do with nerves.

We started moving slowly, turning first to the left of the stairs to examine the portion of the basement directly underneath the living room. I shone the light into the dim section of the room, revealing only dirt and cobwebs. The light landed on a glimmering spiderweb with a large spider sitting in the middle of it. I crinkled my nose. The lights flickered again, and for a split second, only the white beam of the flashlight was visible. I wasn’t mistaken this time.

“Where are you?” Hal said. It would have been a cry for Master Vale, had he not said it so quietly, barely loudly enough for even me to hear.

We turned back to the stairs to examine the other half of the basement. The only sounds were the scrapes of our footsteps on the floor and our shaky breathing.

At the far side of the basement, there was a brick wall carving off something that could have been a separate room if any of the house’s previous owners had been brave enough to renovate. The entrance to that room was large and open, but we could see only darkness inside, and the remainder of the room was obscured from our view. I had a feeling we were saving that section of the basement for last.

We shuffled around the middle of the basement, me shining the flashlight into corners and Hal smacking the paddle against his palm. “C’mon,” I heard Hal whisper—not to me.

We heard something rustle to our left and I shone the light at the source of the noise—a mouse scurried along the wall.

“Do we have mice?” I whispered.

The lights flickered again. In the darkness, we heard something that sounded like a scream silenced abruptly.

Hal and I caught each other’s eye.

No point in delaying it further. We turned towards the little room on the far side of the basement. Hal lifted the paddle in the air at his shoulder, prepared to swing. I held the flashlight in front of me. Inch by inch, we drifted towards the darkness inside the room.

The lights flickered again. Again. Each flicker brought a second of a scream, snuffed out as soon as the light returned.

The smell was definitely more noticeable now, practically visible. There was a palpable sense of not okay surrounding us, a sense that we had ignored several warnings and it was now too late. If you had asked me, I would have said it was no longer daytime outside. But then, if you had asked me, I would also have said it was no longer now outside. I wasn’t sure how, but something felt very much like then in this basement.

The lights were flickering faster now, the screams connecting to form a continuous sound rather than a punctuated one.

We walked inside the little room.

Of course, there he was, blinking into existence as the lights worked into a frenzy, the time frame of the world around us shifting from now to then. There was a light dangling from the ceiling above him in the then, and we could see the room clearly even in the dimness. He had a whole workstation set up in the little room, with various tools and sharp things hanging from the walls and a wooden table in the center. On the table, tied down by the wrists and ankles, was Angelica. She was wearing her not-quite-blue-anymore dress and her dirty hair was everywhere. She wasn’t screaming just yet, but it looked like she ought to be at any moment. Angelica rolled her head to the side and caught my eye. She didn’t seem particularly surprised to see Hal and me standing in the doorway. She had been directing us down here for quite some time, after all.

Master Vale stood in the corner, his back to us. He seemed to be considering the tools on the walls, making a decision. He had one arm tucked behind his back, with his other hand hovering in the air, wavering in front of his shining gadgets. Choosing. The screaming noise was coming from him.

His entire body seemed to brighten as he made his decision. He lifted a large hammer from the wall, the metal head thick and heavy. He tested the weight of it in his hand as he turned around.

Now that we could see his face, we realized that he hadn’t been screaming at all. He was laughing. His red-rimmed eyes were wide with delight, those of a child on Christmas morning. His rotting teeth were bared in a grin that seemed as if it would split his lips at the corners. He was overjoyed. He was ecstatic. He walked towards Angelica, the hammer in his hand. He seemingly couldn’t see us, or at least was too distracted by the task in front of him to care about our presence.

Hal was frozen next to me. He had stopped breathing normally, instead taking in small sips of air with tight little gasps. The paddle had lowered to his side but I could still see it shaking in his hand.

We should do something,I thought. We need to intervene. We need to help Angelica.

But I knew anything we did would be futile. After all, this was then, not now. What had happened to Angelica had happened a very, very long time ago. I knew how this story ended. I had read the newspaper clippings. I knew about her disappearance. But most of all, I had seen her. I knew what had happened to her head.

Master Vale stood by Angelica’s side. His laughter was louder now, a shrill, piercing sound that seemed to be hurled from his very core, snapping through his parted teeth and seeping out his bulging eyes. He started to raise the hammer.

Angelica didn’t look at him. Her eyes were still on me, her face placid.

Stop looking at us, Angelica,I thought. Look at him. Do something. Struggle. Run away. Don’t let the thing that is about to happen to you happen.

But I knew how difficult running away could be.

Master Vale held the hammer high above his head. He hadn’t blinked in what seemed like ages. His mouth was a shriek, pure sound.

Then the thing that had happened to Angelica’s head happened.

Her mouth opened. I couldn’t tell if in surprise, pain, or just reflex. If she made a noise, it couldn’t be heard over the sound of Master Vale. She didn’t stop looking in my direction, but one of her eyes wasn’t quite solid anymore.

And then it was all over for Angelica.

I heard Hal make a little noise next to me, a kind of choked gasp. My own breathing sounded much louder—too loud, really. Knowing how this story ended didn’t make watching it any more bearable.

When Master Vale was finished with his hammer—and it was quite clear when his job was done—he let his hand drop to his side. The hammer clanged onto the floor. His face was still a mad slash of delight but his laughter was a low wheeze now, his thin shoulders rising and falling heavily with his breath. He looked satisfied, proud, like he had just painted a masterpiece. He leaned forward over Angelica and planted his hands on either side of her head, fingers digging into her skin like needles. He lowered himself down to her, his mouth gaping and teeth bared, pale gray tongue leaking a string of drool as it stretched out to taste and—okay—that part I didn’t see coming. There was only so much you could tell about someone’s death from looking at their shattered skull, I supposed. My stomach lurched.

Hal screamed.

Master Vale’s head snapped up. His nightmare eyes met mine. The smile fell from his face and was replaced by a snarl. He bared his teeth. They were covered in blood.

Shit shit shit.

Master Vale pushed Angelica’s head aside and straightened to his full height. He made a sort of hissing noise and slowly started towards us, crossing from behind the table. He licked at his teeth, his mouth leaking red.

I began backing up but Hal, gulping, stood his ground. He held up George Vale’s paddle. His hand trembled.

“Hal,” I whispered, tugging at his shoulder, “we need to leave.”

“Theodore Vale,” Hal said, his voice loud but wavering, “do you recognize this?”

If Master Vale recognized it, he gave no indication. His long legs walked him closer. He was starting to grin.

“Hal?.?.?. ,” I said.

“This is our house,” Hal said, his voice increasing in conviction, but only by an ounce, “not yours. It’s time for you to get out.”

Master Vale’s grin was wider now, and he was starting to laugh again. The noise rattled out of him, as thin as the wind.

I tugged harder at Hal’s shoulder. “We need to leave now.”

Behind Master Vale, the table with Angelica was fading, going back home to then. Now it was just Master Vale and us. The lights flickered out, and the basement seemed hopelessly dark. Now there was just the beam of my flashlight, and I was having a difficult time holding it steady.

“Get out of our house and leave us alone,”Hal shouted.

Master Vale was quite close indeed. Hal craned his neck to look at him, raising the paddle even higher in an effort to seem intimidating. It didn’t work.

“Go away right now,”Hal shouted, “or I will beat you like your father did.”

I let out a little whimper.

Within seconds, the smile on Master Vale’s face was replaced by rage. In one fluid motion, he raised his open hand and smacked the paddle right out of Hal’s shaking fist. It clattered across the room, useless.

“Run,”I screamed to Hal, my feet already moving me backwards. This plan was not going to work. I raced towards the stairs, stumbling over dirt and uneven ground in the darkness. There was the sound of cursing behind me, Hal finally coming to his senses and following after me. I didn’t need to look back to know Master Vale was behind us. I heard Hal’s body bump into support beams as he ran, heard him curse and cry out. The flashlight I was still somehow holding was waving wildly, the light erratic. It didn’t matter. We just needed to get to the stairs, get out of the basement, and never come down here again.

“Margaret,”Hal called out. I was at the stairs already, but I turned around, shone the light in his direction. Hal was on the ground. He had fallen. His fingers dug into the dirt as he tried like hell to pull himself back up and resume running, but Master Vale had him by the legs, his needle fingers stabbing into Hal’s calves. Master Vale pulled Hal back with a powerful motion and Hal’s fingers left grooves in the dirt. “Margaret, help!” Hal cried. His face was desperate, tearstained.

Fuck.For a moment, I didn’t know what to do. Then something in the corner of the basement caught my eye. The paddle. I dropped the flashlight and rushed over to it. I closed both fists against the wooden handle, felt the weight in my hands.

The beam of the flashlight cast light only across the floor. I could barely see Hal’s body, only his white face and groping hands as he screamed and fought against Master Vale. Master Vale’s face was all grooves and shadows, but his eyes and teeth gleamed through the darkness. Snarling, Master Vale lifted his head and—with a mouth that seemed too wide—sank his rotted teeth into Hal’s leg.

Hal screamed.

And then I was there, paddle in my hands, swinging like I was trying to win a prize at the strong man game at the county fair. The paddle connected with the side of Master Vale’s head with a wet thunk, and his teeth were wrenched from Hal’s leg. His thin body bounced to the side and Hal pulled himself free, scrambling to his feet in a half crawl, half sprint towards the stairs. I was right on his heels.

When we reached the stairs, we could see the door—still open; light shone down at us. Upstairs, it was still daytime, still now, only a few feet away. We scrabbled up the stairs, our legs barely remembering how to work. I dropped the paddle in favor of a two-handed grip on the railings, pulling my shaking body up step by step.

The door slammed shut.

We heard a growl behind us, at the bottom of the steps.

Hal threw his body against the door, both fists clutching the doorknob. He twisted and pushed. The door was shut tight.

Master Vale was behind us. He crawled up the stairs, long limbs bent like a spider’s. That scream-laugh of his started again. His bloody mouth re-formed into a cracking grin.

I pounded my hand against Hal’s shoulder. “Open the door,” I screamed.

“I’m trying,”Hal barked. His voice was broken, more tremor than words.

Master Vale was halfway up the steps.

I turned, pushing my back into Hal’s body, trying to create more distance between us and the nightmare man crawling his way up the stairs. Hal slammed his shoulder into the door over and over, each impact loud and rattling. It sounded like his arm might break before the door did.

That scream-laugh was so loud, it knifed its way into my ears, sliding into my brain. Master Vale was only feet away. He grabbed at me, gnarled fingers scraping at my shoe. I kicked his hand away but he reached out farther.

“Fuck.”Hal’s cries were desperate and shrill. He reminded me of Katherine as a child.

Master Vale’s fingers grazed my ankle. I felt a whirlwind of confusion and shaking and bellyache and hunger and choking and a sick, inexplicable laughter that all must’ve been reminiscent of the day he died.

Suddenly, on the stairs below us there was a figure barricading us from Master Vale with its body. The figure was small yet powerful, unmoving.

Elias.

Elias stood so close to me on the steps, we were nearly touching. His ashen face was placid as he stared down at Master Vale below him. Master Vale gnashed his teeth at Elias, hissing like an animal. He crept closer up the stairs.

Elias’ face opened. His eyes went red and his jaw gaped and his fangs glistened and that jet-engine noise made the doorknob shake behind us. Master Vale’s body stiffened, his back arched like an angry cat’s. Air rattled through his throat, gasping his reply at Elias’ audacity. His fingers like claws, he swiped through the air towards Elias’ face, and I remembered Angelica’s head again—it was a very similar motion.

Elias sank his teeth into Master Vale’s hand, pockmarked with lesions and pus and now something black and oozing.

Master Vale let out a noise that was definitely not laughter anymore. He wrenched his hand from Elias’ mouth and scampered back down the stairs, crawling across the dirt of the basement until he disappeared into the blackness, gone.

The door opened and Hal and I, a pile of profanity and ragged breathing, tumbled back into the bright daylight of the kitchen. Hal slammed the door behind us, not giving a second thought as to whether Elias needed to follow. I was sure he was fine.

We lay on the kitchen floor for several minutes, panting and cursing and—in Hal’s case—bleeding everywhere. The sunlight shone through the windows and there was a faint chirping of birds outside, punctuated by the occasional slams of feathered bodies hitting glass. It was now again, solidly now.

“I don’t think the paddle is going to work,” I said.

Hal let out a string of profanities in response.

I helped Hal up to the bathroom to deal with the mess of his leg. I sat him on the toilet lid and knelt in front of him, washed the blood off his leg, and applied liberal amounts of hydrogen peroxide while Hal kept up his cursing and periodically punched at the wall. Master Vale had left a jagged semicircle of knobby teeth marks along Hal’s ankle, as well as several scratches along his calf. It didn’t look like stitches were needed, but it didn’t look pretty. Lord knows what kind of infection one might catch from the dead man in one’s basement.

By the time I wrapped his leg in gauze, Hal looked defeated. He stared down at his hands in his lap and took sad, deep breaths.

“What are we going to do now?” he asked someone, possibly me.

I wrapped the gauze around his leg one final time and taped the edge down securely. I stared at my handiwork before looking up at Hal. His eyes were bloodshot, his face slack. He looked lost.

“We play by the rules,” I said.

Later that day, we called Father Cyrus back. He gave us a Bible and we tore the pages out of it to hang on the back of the door. Father Cyrus flinched the whole time but understood that it was for the best. We found some boards and nailed the door shut, Father Cyrus saying one last emphatic prayer as the final nails sank into the wood. And that was the rule from that point forward. Never remove the Bible pages from the back of the basement door. Keep the door closed and boarded up at all times. Don’t open the door, not even a crack. And definitely not in September.

Hal was silent the whole time Father Cyrus was there, save for when he needed to recite his parts of the call-and-response prayers. His eyes kept twitching over his shoulder. He rubbed at his ears. After Father Cyrus left, Hal shut himself in his office. Working on a novel. Or something.

---

—A few days later, we saw Elias again. We were making dinner in the kitchen, me at the stove and Hal at the table, and we noticed him staring at us from the corner. Hal shook himself out of his stupor just enough to smile at Elias. Elias seemed to have our backs, after all.

“Hey, kid,” Hal said. He stood up from the table and walked over to Elias, then bent down, so the two were at the same height. “I just wanted to say thank you. For what you did down there.” He reached out a hand, his palm open, a kind gesture.

Elias bit him.