The House on Deer Creek Road: Part 2

By J. L. Thurston

Willow, are you sitting down? Your mother’s dead. They found her this morning. They need you at the Porter Police Station.

Creak, creak, creak, creak.

She was found on the entryway floor, face-down, Willow. She’d been dead for four months. The electricity company, they shut her off but they were concerned, you know. Sweetheart, the cops performed a wellness check found her rotting on the floor. The stained floorboards have to be replaced.

She was lying there. No one knew. No one cared. Willow, hush. Listen. Can you hear her? Can you hear your mother? Look at her, lying there. She’s looking right at you. What is she saying?

“Come with me into the basement, Willow. Come with me.”

I snored so loud I woke myself up. I spent the wee hours of morning dozing on the couch while Jane crawled around on a blanket, surrounded by toys. She wiggled her way around, drooling on each item in turn.

That’s when the piano began to play by itself. Not a song. Just the plink, plunk, plunk as if a child were noodling on the keys.

The piano was in the foyer, a useless space just off the entryway where excess junk was kept in heavy cabinets and shelves. The piano was against the wall, an upright Steinway stained a dark cherry color. The keys weren’t moving. It seemed that the strings inside it were making the sound somehow. Mice could do that if they were inside. Mice could also make creaking sounds in the attic and knock over teetering boxes.

The playing of the piano relieved me. Mice made sense. I should have left right then and there. Very soon, I’d be so deep into the darkness of the house, but at that moment I could have walked away undamaged. But mice made sense and I guess the mind relies on simple, safe explanations when faced with fear and uncertainty.

I called the local exterminator, waking him up, and made an appointment. I had plenty of time to run to the supermarket in Porter before he’d come check for mice.

I’ll admit, driving my truck away from my house with my dog in the back and my daughter riding shotgun, I felt the most normal I’d ever felt in my whole life. I’ll admit, I was smiling.

It was that day at the supermarket that I met Nyla. Stumbling upon her was like finding a hundred bucks on the sidewalk. I wasn’t expecting her, but as soon as I saw her, I wanted to keep her.

We were different in the best ways, and alike in important ones. I was sand, and she was an acorn. I was a fallen branch, and she was a bonfire. Does that make sense? I don’t know, that’s just how it was.

You’ve seen her picture, I’m sure. It was all over the news. That one photograph, the one with her hair down, the black coils bouncing all around her, that one is my favorite. I like it because it is just how she looked when I first saw her. Her eyes were sparkling, her smile was genuine. It was a meal after weeks of starvation.

I had never before looked at a person and physically reacted to them the way I did with her. I was nervous and uncomfortable. I began to sweat. I had a hard time thinking straight because my brain just wanted to focus on her face and her voice and her confidence.

Nyla’s first reaction to seeing me was to flirt with the baby. I stood there awkwardly, trying to remember how to breathe. Nyla told Jane she was adorable and don’t ever let anybody tell her different. Nyla worked at the supermarket. She asked if she could help me because I was struggling with the car seat and the cart. I didn’t know the car seat fit on the top of the cart. Nyla talked a lot. She didn’t mind that I didn’t.

Followed me to the register and said goodbye. She blew Jane a kiss and said a few goodbyes to her. When she was out of earshot, the cashier became a talker, too. She told me all about Nyla. Poor Nyla, she lost her baby to SIDS. She’d never been the same. She only smiles when she sees kids. She seemed to like me.

No one ever really seemed to like me. Except for Mrs. Jones and she was stuck in a nursing home. Well, Aunt Pat liked me, too, but that was it. The idea that Nyla seemed to like me lit a fire in me that suffocated all the uncertainties that plague my soul throughout each day. It was a warm thought, one that made me want to find her and talk to her again.

It dawned on me that Nyla and I were alike in an important way. We were alike in that we both wanted to be good mothers. Nyla lost her chance, and it wasn’t her fault. That didn’t seem fair to me at all.

I did a thing I normally never ever do. I went back and found Nyla and asked her out to coffee. I had to wait for her shift to be over, but she said she’d love to hang out. I didn’t know what to do, so I went to the house and put away groceries. I cleaned, I changed my clothes, then I changed them back. Jane cried for food, diaper, and diaper again because I don’t think she was finished the first time. She seemed to like it when I made shushing sounds at her. That made me smile.

I met Nyla at the little café next to the courthouse. We sat outside at a metal table. I learned that she knew all the lyrics to Hamilton and owned every book written by Isaac Asimov but I knew she was joking because he had hundreds of stories.

Everything about Nyla was enthusiastic and upbeat. We were so different that way. Usually, when a person wants to talk, and talk, and talk, I get frustrated and I feel like little prickly spikes are sticking out of my skin in all directions. But, oddly, when Nyla talked, I didn’t get any pricklies at all. Not like that. I got a different kind, and they were sort of pleasant.

She held Jane, fed Jane, and burped Jane. She talked about her baby girl’s short life. Her eyes got huge and watery. She told me her daughter was an accident. The result of a mistake made on a bad night. She told me she loved her daughter more than anything and will miss her forever.

I felt guilty. I couldn’t tell her I’d given my baby up. We were so different, but also alike.

She knew about the house on Deer Creek Road. You see, Nyla was the first to tell me that it had a reputation in Porter. Everyone knew it was haunted, she said. I didn’t laugh, and I think she wondered if maybe it really was haunted. But when I invited her to come over for a home-cooked dinner, she didn’t refuse. I thought she looked excited. That made me nervous.

She followed me to the house. She didn’t have a car, she had a scooter. It was cute and made me smile. I wanted to ask her if bugs ever flew in her mouth, but I didn’t because the exterminator was waiting on the porch. He was banging on the door but stopped when he heard my tires on the gravel.

The exterminator was one of those nice guys. Middle-aged, friendly, like a family-type guy. He gave Bones a lot of scratches behind the ears. Bones wouldn’t get out of the truck. I apologized for making him wait. I had forgotten all about calling him.

He told me he was worried about the old guy inside the house. I felt my stomach start to harden as I told him I was the only one who lived there.

“Ma’am, I don’t want to alarm you,” he said. “But there’s someone inside. I can see him moving around through the window. Tall, thin, hard of hearing? He was walking sort of hunched over.”

The front door, you’ve seen, has a huge oval window. With that floral design frosted over it you can’t look in and see the inside too clearly. You can bet Nyla and I had our faces pressed to that glass, trying to see the person the exterminator was describing.

Nyla wanted to call the cops. I thought about the creaking in the attic. I let the exterminator make the call. It took a while for a squad car to arrive and when it did I was disappointed to see an overweight police officer in his late sixties roll out of the car. He was not the nice, friendly, family-type guy like the exterminator. He was the jaded misogynist who thought two hysterical women were frightened of a big, old house and needed reassurance. I firmly clamped my jaw shut as he followed me, Nyla- who was holding Jane- and the exterminator around the house. There was no sign of trouble, but also no sign of mice. We looked in every room, except the basement. At that time, I still did not know where the basement door was. We even circled the house, inspecting the windows, the garden, the shed, the side porch, and the garage.

No one was there.

The police officer left, smiling slyly. I did not like his face. The exterminator left after charging me fifty bucks for his time. I liked him less after that.

Nyla stayed. She played with Jane in the kitchen while I cooked. It took more time than I thought it should, but luckily Nyla was a master when it came to babies. Jane hardly had time to fuss for anything before Nyla’s skilled mind figured it out. Mentally, I added a new item to Aunt Pat’s checklist of needs.

6. Nyla knows best.

I’m a great cook, and I wanted to impress her. I was clumsy, though. Probably because I wasn’t familiar with the kitchen. Nothing inside it, save for the food I’d just bought, belonged to me. And I had to wash everything before using it because there was an inch of dust coating every item.

Nyla was all eyes. She watched me cook, she watched the windows, she looked at all the oddities in my mother’s house. She asked about the dried herb bundles. She touched the half-melted candles. I don’t know if she chose to ignore the jars of bugs or if she simply did not see them.

That was when Bones began to lose it outside. He was in the side yard, just outside the kitchen. He was snarling, barking like a dog who was ready to kill. By the time Nyla and I got outside, the dog had backed himself up to the tree line. He was foaming, barking directly at the garden.

Minutes ago, we had walked through that garden with the cop and the exterminator. Nothing had been amiss. Now, the wild-growing foliage was uprooted and tossed all about. Scratches traced through the dirt. They were so deep and so long I don’t even think a bear could have made them.

We stared and stared. It just didn’t make any sense.

Return for nightfall, Day Two at the House on Deer Creek Road