The Neighbor Read online

“I hate him,” I declared. “I’m glad he’s dead.”

  She sat on a wheeled stool near the crate on which I perched, and she stared at her hands, which were clenched in her lap. “When we were over there today, I really heard him, Malcolm.”

  “All right.”

  “I really did. He said ‘Sweet Melinda.’ And then when we were in the foyer, looking up the front stairs, he said my name … my name and something filthy.”

  She raised her head and met my eyes. This was no hoax. I didn’t know what to say.

  “Stay away from that house, Malcolm.”

  “Why would I want to go there again?”

  “Stay away.”

  “I will. Are you kidding? I’m creeped out. Jeez.”

  “I mean it. Stay away.”

  “Well, you better stay away, too.”

  “I intend to stay away,” she said. “I know what I heard, and I never want to hear it again.”

  “I didn’t know you believed in ghosts,” I said.

  “I didn’t. I do now. Stay away.”

  We sat in silence for a while. At last I said I needed to listen to something that would soothe away the heebie-jeebies, and instead of one of the old vinyl platters, I put an album on the turntable, a collection of Glenn Miller’s best-known numbers. We liked rock ’n’ roll, but at heart we were throwbacks to another musical era.

  Amalia listened to “In the Mood,” but just before the band swung into “Moonlight Serenade,” she said, “This isn’t going to settle my nerves. I’m going to bed and read. I’ve got this novel.” At the side door to the garage, she looked back and said, “Don’t stay out here after dark.”

  “I always stay here after dark.”

  “But not tonight,” she said. “Not for the next few nights.”

  She was clearly frightened. I nodded. “Okay.”

  After she had gone, I listened to “Moonlight Serenade” and then to “American Patrol,” after which I lifted the phonograph needle and returned it to the beginning of the album.

  As “In the Mood” began, I left the garage and went into the alleyway. About forty minutes of daylight remained. I walked to the back gate of the Clockenwall property.

  6

  I was not a particularly brave lad of twelve. I well knew my limitations, and I was aware that if I ever got into a fight with another boy, I was less likely to beat him up than I was to knock myself out. In a confrontation with something supernatural, I would not fare well against an adversary more threatening than Casper the Friendly Ghost.

  Nevertheless, I was compelled to cross the backyard of the Clockenwall place and climb the steps to the rear porch, because I loved my sister more than I loved myself, and I felt that it had fallen to me somehow to resolve this bizarre situation. I had never seen Amalia a fraction as disturbed as she had been when telling me about the lecherous teacher. She was fearless and resolute and more competent than anyone else I had ever known. I was loath to see her diminished by fear, and I was angered and depressed when I thought of her retreating to her bedroom and hiding behind a book, because that’s what it seemed to me she was doing, although I would never have told her so.

  When I crossed the porch of the Clockenwall house, I was not surprised to find the back door ajar, as the front door had been earlier. Stepping into the kitchen, where less sunlight penetrated than previously, I boldly switched on the overhead lights. If the spirit of a dead man had returned home a month after his funeral, there was no way to prowl his house without his knowledge; I mean, surely a ghost is omniscient as concerns what happens in the place that it haunts.

  The dish smeared with dry egg yolk and the dirty flatware were on the table, across which toast crumbs were scattered as before. Clockenwall had not returned to clean up after himself.

  Switching on lights, I went through the house to the front stairs, where something invisible to the eye had earlier descended. Facing the first flight, I stood listening, but there was only silence so deep that the house might not have been located in the city any longer, might have been enveloped by some bubble in space—time and set adrift in eternity.

  At last I thought to ask myself what I hoped to accomplish in that place. I wasn’t an exorcist. My family didn’t even attend a church. My parents weren’t atheists; they were just indifferent to the issues of God and an afterlife, as they were indifferent to everything except what could be eaten, drunk, smoked, and watched on television without inspiring too much thinking. I had no good answer to the question that I’d asked myself; therefore, with what passed for logic in a twelve-year-old mind, I decided that I had been brought to that place by intuition and that I should trust it as a dog trusted its sense of smell.

  When suddenly I heard a rapid pounding, I cringed and retreated from the staircase, but only until I realized that I had become aware of my heart drumming. Disappointed in myself, chagrined, I thrust my shoulders back and lifted my head and, telling myself the incredible lie that the Pomerantz family tree branched broadly with generations of warriors, I ascended to the second floor.

  One of the good things about being twelve or younger is that you tend to believe that you’ll live forever. Therefore, you take stupid risks with little hesitation, and sometimes the risk pays off. Except when it doesn’t.

  Upstairs, door by door, room by room, I searched for what I did not know, trusting my intuition to lead me to some revelation, some knowledge or instrument with which Clockenwall’s spirit could be sent back where it belonged, if in fact it had returned from the Other Side to leer at my sister. In the Teacher of the Year’s bedroom stood a desk where someone else might have put a vanity, and I was drawn toward it as an iron filing to a magnet.

  Then a disturbing thing happened. With no memory of having sat down or of having opened any of the drawers, I was in the desk chair and had before me a scrapbook containing newspaper articles about a girl named Melinda Lee Harmony. Sweet Melinda. She’d been a middle-school student who, three months before her thirteenth birthday, disappeared while walking home after classes. Some of the clippings were dated—all from 1949, eighteen years earlier. I pored through them with growing dread, but I couldn’t stop turning pages, as though I had forfeited control of my body. The police, assisted by a large contingent of citizen volunteers, had searched the school grounds, surrounding neighborhoods, and Balfour Park, which lay along the route that the girl usually took from school to home. They found no trace of her. A reward was offered, never claimed. Members of her anguished family, her pastor, and a few teachers at her school spoke highly of her, this gentle and intelligent and charming child of great promise. One of the teachers was Rupert Clockenwall. Three photographs had been provided to the newspapers, all taken soon before she had gone missing. She had been a pretty girl, blond and slim, with a gamine smile, and as I stared at her, I heard myself say, “Such a delectable little tease.”

  7

  I had no recollection of having put aside the scrapbook or of taking a thick diary from another desk drawer. As I paged through this new volume, in an almost dreamlike state, in the grip of cold fear but unable to act upon it, I saw that in handwriting of almost machinelike neatness and consistency, Clockenwall had recorded the events of Melinda Lee Harmony’s captivity, beginning on the day he’d offered her a ride home until—I was compelled to page forward—the day that he killed her, seventeen months later. This was a journal that celebrated depravity, and in the entries that passed before my eyes, he regretted nothing except killing her, lamenting the sudden loss of control during which lust and violence had become for him one and the same thing.

  I heard myself say, “Such a waste, such a pity, she was still so useful.”

  Again, I had no awareness of putting that volume aside or of retrieving from the desk another scrapbook, this one of more recent vintage. In it were articles clipped from the student newspaper at the middle school that Amalia had attended, the school where Rupert Clockenwall had taught English. They were poems and little stories that she had wri
tten for that publication. He had somehow obtained her seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-grade class photos. I noticed the silver cross on a chain around her neck, which she had taken to wearing in those days but no longer wore. There were as well photos taken with a telephoto lens: a younger Amalia sitting on the front porch, standing in the backyard, going to and from the garage that was her safe harbor and mine. Clockenwall seemed to have stopped adding to the scrapbook when my sister was fifteen, and as I came to the blank pages that he had never used, I heard myself say, without intention or control, “A tasty little piece of tail, but too close to home. Too risky. Didn’t dare. Didn’t dare. Wish I had.”

  With no recollection of getting up from the desk, leaving the bedroom, and descending the front stairs, I found myself in the kitchen. I was holding a filleting knife.

  8

  I tried to throw down the knife, but instead gripped it more tightly than ever. If I was in terror of leaving that house and going home with some unthinkable purpose, I don’t recall. I remained in a dreamlike state as I crossed the kitchen to an inner door, opened it, switched on the cellar lights, and went down the steep stairs to that lower realm.

  In that windowless place, entirely below ground, with its block walls and earthen floor, I found a small wooden table and two chairs, as well as a bookcase containing volumes suitable for a girl twelve-going-on-thirteen, stories of horses and romance and adventure. On the floor lay a stained and moldering mattress, and in the concrete-block wall above it was fixed a ringbolt from which trailed a chain and manacle.

  In the corner near the furnace, I stood swaying, gazing down at the hard-packed earth, from which had over time fluoresced both bright white and yellowish crystals finer than salt in patterns that were vaguely reminiscent of voodoo veves. Now Clockenwall shared with me his images—memories—of burying the murdered girl in a deep bed of powdered lime to facilitate decomposition and to control the odor. In my mind’s eye, I saw him tamping a layer of soil atop the lime, weeping as he worked, weeping not for the girl but for the loss of his toy. Melinda had been in her grave for so many years that no foul odor lingered.

  I looked up from the floor and stared at the knife, wondering for what purpose he had made me take it from a kitchen drawer.

  Upstairs, Amalia called my name.

  9

  Wide-eyed, wondering, Amalia came down the cellar stairs, her footfalls echoing hollowly off the plank treads. The novel that she had been reading failed to engage her, and she couldn’t be distracted from thinking about the voice that had spoken to her in this house earlier. As twilight approached, she had looked out of her window and had seen the Clockenwall house filled with light once more.

  “I went to the garage,” she said, “you weren’t there, but an album was playing, and I just knew where I’d find you. It’s my fault you came here. I mean, what’re you going to do when I tell you to stay away from this place, you being twelve and a boy and careening toward puberty? You’re brave—okay?—but we should get out of here.”

  She had glanced at the mattress as she came off the stairs, but the horror of it registered with her only on second glance, when she seemed to see the ringbolt, the chain, and the manacle for the first time.

  Yet surely she couldn’t fully understand what had happened here. Maybe she’d never heard of Melinda Harmony, who had been kidnapped a year before Amalia was born. Remembering Mr. Clockenwall’s creepy interest in her, however, my very bright sister seemed to deduce that the chain and the manacle were evidence of imprisonment and that the filthy mattress had served not merely as a place of rest. The color drained from her face, although when she turned her attention to me once more, she seemed perplexed but not afraid.

  Desperate, suddenly breaking into a sweat, I tried to tell her to run—run!—but I was denied my voice.

  “Malcolm? What have you found? What’s happened here?”

  “Delicious memories,” I said, and though the voice I heard was mine, I was not the one who had spoken.

  I had been standing with the knife held down at my side, against my leg. Now she saw it. “Sweetie, what’re you doing with a knife?” She looked toward the furnace, into darker corners of the cellar. “Is someone here, are you in danger?”

  Moving toward her, I heard my voice declare, “If I’d seen you first, I never would have bothered with the other girl.”

  Amalia’s eyes widened further, and she backed away from me.

  At the head of the stairs, the door slammed shut. I figured that if she could get to the top of the steps ahead of me, the door would prove to be locked.

  She was my sister, beloved, who had stayed in my room around the clock when I’d been eight and suffered with a case of the flu that nearly killed me. She was my sister, whose clarinet playing inspired me to find the music in me, to settle on the saxophone, which had fast become the key to my identity. I loved her as I loved no one else, as no others had allowed me to love them, and if I were to kill her under the influence of some malign spirit, I might as well then kill myself.

  I was the one who lumbered and stumbled through life, who lacked physical grace, but in this case, Amalia was the one who misstepped, fell backward, and sat hard on the third step as I raised the knife. Her green eyes were as deep as an arctic sea, shining with cold fear, sudden terror.

  As the knife reached the apex of its arc, I saw around her neck the silver cross that she had worn in middle school but never since. She must have put it on before leaving our house, as if she’d known that she would not find me in the garage, that once again she would have to enter this hateful place.

  As the knife came down, I realized that she had bought the tiny silver cross on the silver chain and had begun wearing it when she’d been thirteen, after the first time she’d caught Rupert Clockenwall staring at her, the day that she’d been in our backyard working on the art project. She must have wanted to ward off his evil, to feel protected in this world where none of us is ever truly safe.

  Down came the knife, with less force than Clockenwall wanted, with a different target than he intended. When the blade thrust deep into my thigh, I screamed, and with the scream, I cast him out.

  A shriek ricocheted from wall to wall, issuing neither from me nor from Amalia, and in that windowless room, where a mere draft could have had no source, there sprang up not just a draft but a wind, cold on that summer night, churning around the cellar, spinning up dust and the soft white and yellow crystals that marked the grave, a wind that was the embodiment of inhuman rage.

  I tore the knife from my thigh, threw it down, dropped to one knee, bleeding but not yet in pain, clamping one hand over the wound.

  Amalia came to her feet as the wind seemed to gather itself into a battering ram, whereupon it slammed into her with such velocity, such force, that the rubber band holding her ponytail snapped, and her blond tresses stood on end as if she were a candle and her hair the flame. I thought that she would be lifted off her feet, and the pendant stood straight out from her, to the length of the chain, as though it would be torn from her and blown away. She seized it with one hand and held it to her throat.

  Then I heard again the sound that had awakened me and drawn me to my window the previous night, when all this began, a sound like steel stropping steel. As before, it came three times, but now it sounded less like a sword drawn from a scabbard than like some great metal door scraping open across a threshold. The roaring, whistling wind seemed to blow away through that unseen door, and the cellar fell quiet, still, all dust drifting toward the floor.

  Because Amalia always was as resilient as she was strong, as strong as she was smart, she knelt beside me, and wasting no time exclaiming about what we had just witnessed, she said, “Your leg, the wound, let me see.”

  Blood had streamed between my fingers, darkened the leg of my slacks, spattered the floor, but when I took my hand away from the wound, my trousers were not ripped. In wonder, I raised my hand and saw that the blood dripping from it a moment earlier was nowhe
re to be seen. The pants were no longer stained, the floor without a single crimson spatter. The blade of the knife gleamed, as clean as if it had just been washed.

  I got to my feet, physically as whole as I had been before I entered that house. Amalia rose, too, and met my eyes, and neither of us could speak. She put her arms around me, and I hugged her, and after a while we went up the stairs to the kitchen.

  Together, we went through the quiet house, turning out the lights that I had left on. Before we departed, I showed her the scrapbook about Melinda Lee Harmony, the diary, and the scrapbook to the pages of which her own middle-school class photos had been fixed with Scotch tape.

  Still, neither of us spoke. We had no need to put our recent experience into words, for we understood the meaning of it in our hearts.

  We closed the door, descended the porch steps. Night took the last purple from the sky as we crossed Clockenwall’s backyard.

  At the rear gate, Amalia said, “So the Glenn Miller stuff didn’t soothe your nerves.”

  I said, “I should have played a Guy Lombardo album.”

  10

  We didn’t want to go back into that house ever again. We didn’t want to talk about what had happened there or be questioned about it.

  Using a typewriter in a research room at the public library, my sister wrote a letter to the police, reporting in some detail what they would find in the Clockenwall residence. She made sure that she wiped all fingerprints from the paper and envelope before mailing it at a post office twelve blocks from our house.

  Maybe they thought the letter was a hoax. But they had to check it out. The story was a sensation for a week, which was a long time in a year when the news was full of big stories about war in Vietnam and race riots in America’s cities.

  Having found the scrapbook devoted to Amalia, the police came by to speak to her, and she told them how Mr. Clockenwall had spooked her on those two occasions when she was thirteen. But she said not a word regarding our adventure. Perhaps because she never lied and had about her a palpable air of truthfulness, they never thought to ask if she had recently been inside the house of murder or if she might be the one who had written the letter. I do not believe the cops were careless or incompetent in their investigation; what I think is, because of Amalia’s great good heart and the purity of her gentle soul, some Power that watches over us ensured that she would be spared the ordeal of being the object of a media frenzy.