Abigail Shatten was losing patience with her brother Nathaniel. It was getting on for winter, and the old fool hadn’t begun to split fresh stovewood. “Cold snap comin’”, she said. “If you don’t get crackin’, we’re gonna freeze by Christmas.”
“Quit your naggin’, Abby,” he grunted. “Plenty of time for that. We got enough for a week, and we ain’t even had a hard frost yet.
“You’re the laziest man who ever walked the earth, Nate Shatten! At least go milk Belle and Bossie! Can’t you hear them blattin’, out to the barn?”
“Hearing ain’t as good as it used to be,” said Nate. “But I’ll take your word for it.”
He heaved himself slowly out of his worn old easy chair next to the stove and plodded to the mudroom in his carpet slippers, where he traded the slippers for his boots and put on his barn coat. Abby was right, as usual, damn her – there was a nip in the afternoon air, and he wished he were wearing more than his long undershirt under the coat. He started with Bossie, who was thirteen. Might be her last season as a milker. She was a sweet old girl, and he hated the notion of sending her to the knacker. But of course she wasn’t a pet.
He fetched a clean pail, a wet sponge and the milking stool from the cooling room. He sat down on the stool, hearing his rheumatic knees pop, and cleaned Bossie’s teats, making sure they were free of cuts or scratches. Then he put the pail under her and started milking, leaning forward to place his forehead in the warm hollow of her flank for leverage. She groaned with elief and pleasure as the milk, rich with with globs of butter-fat, jetted into the pail.
And just like that, she disappeared, along with the barn itself. Nate fell forward through the empty space where the cow had been, and cried out in terror. But he couldn’t hear his own voice. All at once it was bitter cold, and he was shivering in the old four-poster next to Abby under three blankets and a quilt, trying to stay warm.
Four days later, with the temperature still below zero, a neighbor noticed there was no smoke coming from the farmhouse chimney. She called the town policeman, and he found the Shattens frozen to death. There was some tittle-tattle over the fact that they were sharing a bed. Hiram Turnbull, the postmaster, fed the gossip at Town Meeting that year by saying that neither one of them ever sent or received any mail. “Queer folks,” he pronounced. “Kept to themselves. God only knows what they got up to in that old house after their last two cows died.”
Whatever it was, they kept on getting up to it in the boarded-up farmhouse for years after their deaths.
******
Van Weeks and Chris North had been buddies since elementary school, and at Wayne Bridge High they stayed tight. They were big guys and both of them were on the football team, Chris as a linebacker and Van as an offensive tackle. Nobody, on or off the field, messed with them, not even their teachers.
Their grades were bad because they seldom bothered to do their homework, and spent their time in class passing notes to girls they bragged about fucking, throwing spitballs at sissy-boys, and drawing crude pictures of cocks and cunts in their notebooks.
Mr. Kimball, their math teacher, lost patience with them one morning in November after football season was over, and told them that if they didn’t get their grades up, they wouldn’t graduate. Chris, who was sightly more articulate than Van, said, “I’m real sorry, Mister K., but you must be mistaking me for someone who gives a shit.” Van howled with laughter.
Kimball reported them both to the principal, and he suspended them from school until after the Christmas break, saying that they’d have to apologize to the math teacher and repeat his class in January. They never came back to school.
Van’s father, an insurance executive, had run off with his secretary when Van was six, and although the alimony payments came from time to time, his mother Mary still had to work shifts at the local Walmart to support her son and herself. She was far too stressed out to do anything about Van’s aggressive tendencies.
Chris’s parents were still together, and devoted to one another. They were proud of his football exploits, and not much bothered by his bad grades. Chris’s dad was a high school dropout himself, but despite that, he wound up owning a Ford dealership in Keene. He often said that the only good school was the school of hard knocks, and any man could get rich if he was willing to work hard. For Chris’s sixteenth birthday, his father gave him a fire-engine red Ford F-150 pickup with all the options, including a crew cabin, oversized tires, and a low-gear setting which turned it into a gigantic All-Terrain-Vehicle.
“This puppy will climb a goddamn mountain, if you take it slow,” he said. “It’s a cop magnet, though, kinda like a sports car, only bigger and meaner, so don’t drive drunk, and watch the speed limit when you’re on the highway. Off-road, you can tear up the woods all you want, but don’t think you’re some kind of Superman. Use the seat belt, just in case you hit a tree or a rock.”
“C’mon, Pop, there’s no seat-belt law in New Hampshire,” Chris said.
“But there is in my house,” his father replied. “Promise me you’ll buckle up every time you take the truck out, or I’ll take it back to the lot and sell it to someone who isn’t an idiot.”
“I’m not an idiot.”
“Then stop acting like one.”
Chris thought of telling his father to go fuck himself, but when he was a kid, Mr. North used to beat him with his belt when he sassed off. He was a big man, almost as big as his son, and still good shape. So he just said, “Whatever.”
Van didn’t have his own car, and Mary Weeks – she still used her married name – needed the battered old Ford Escort to get to and from work and to do the grocery shopping. But he wouldn’t have been caught dead in the Escort, anyway. The 150 was more his style. Chris called it his pussymobile, and the hot girls in his and Van’s class didn’t need much persuasion to climb in with the football heroes and go off with them, one couple in front, one in the back. Wayne Bridge was full of dirt roads that ended at secluded places in the woods, and the two boys had scored a number of times, giving the truck’s suspension a workout, but always remembering to use condoms, because neither of them were idiots. There had been one girl, Marcy Dubois, who got into the truck readily enough, but when Chris began putting the moves on her in the back seat, she tried to fight him off. “Stop it, Chris!” she yelled. “I’m not a whore!”
“Fifty bucks says you are,” Chris replied. She considered the offer for a moment. “Seventy-five,” she said. “Not a problem,” said Chris. And after she tucked the money into her purse, the truck began to rock again.
But during the week between Christmas and New Year’s, Marcy and her friends were home with their families, and the two boys were at loose ends. Deer season was over, or they could have gone hunting, for they both had rifles. Van’s was a Remington pump-action Gamemaster his father had given him for his sixteenth birthday, and Chris had an AR-15 he’d gotten for Christmas. Van had been scornful of his buddy’s weapon when he first saw it.
“The barrel’s too short for hunting. Can’t be accurate beyond twenty-five yards.”
“It doesn’t have to be long-range accurate, Davy Crockett. Cyclic rate of fire is what counts. Fifteen rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber – I can shoot as fast as I can squeeze the trigger.”
“You got a bump stock? I thought they were illegal.”
“In the ‘Live Free Or Die’ state? Gimme a break! Gun dealer over to Rindge fixed me right up, for a hundred and fifty bucks under the counter. First sight of ol’ Bambi, and down he goes, bap-bap-bap-bap-bap!” Meantime, you’re standing there fiddling with that pump rig, tryin’ to jack a second round into the chamber.”
“Guess you aren’t planning on eating the venison,” Van said.
“Why not? My man, this is a military weapon. It fires high-velocity full-metal-jacket rounds. They go right through the body. You might could say they even tenderize the meat a little.”
Van tried to think of something smart to say, but all he could come up with was, “Well, whoopie-doo.”
As it happened, neither of them had killed a Bambi during the season, because they’d never learned how to identify deer sign, and couldn’t keep quiet in the woods. They clomped through the fallen leaves and branches, gabbing loudly enough to scare the deer into the next county, and once, to their embarrassment, they’d gotten hopelessly lost in a small forest tract right behind Chris’s house, and had to holler until Mr. North came out and found them. He almost pissed himself laughing at them, and when he was done, he said, “Well, maybe you’re morons instead of idiots. And Chris, sling that rifle, or point it at the ground! Jesus, didn’t you hear a word I said about basic hunting safety? Or maybe you’re so mad you want to shoot me and tell the cops you took me for a deer? Good luck with that, genius.”
Chris had been so humiliated that Van saw his lower lip trembling, as if he were about to cry. Mr. North could be a bastard sometimes, and Van felt a surge of rage. Fortunately it passed before he found himself leveling the Gamemaster at his friend’s father. He knew he had a quick temper. Sometimes it flared up so fast it scared him.
He and Chris had passed the abandoned house and barn on the shore of Stebbins Lake dozens of times since they’d gotten the truck. It had belonged to an old couple – brother and sister, people said – who had been found dead in the house some years back. Atop the slope that rose behind it was a big, fancy house owned by one of Wayne Bridge’s bankers, a man who was also active in local politics, and had served two terms as a Republican in the state legislature. He’d wanted to buy the abandoned property, raze it, and put up a lakefront cabin with a dock and a boat, so he could troll for bass in the summer and go icefishing once the lake had frozen over. But there was a problem involving the title to the derelict house and barn. Either there wasn’t one, or it was lost somewhere in the Records Office in Concord. The frustrated banker took to calling it a ghost title that was haunting the property, and joked sourly about calling an exorcist.
Two days after Christmas, the boys were cruising along the lakeshore road, at loose ends, looking for something to do. It had been an open winter so far, and there was no snow on the ground. On impulse, Chris pulled off the road and parked on the shoulder in front of the abandoned house and barn.
“What’s up, man?” Van asked him.
“Let’s check out the house. Maybe there’s some interesting stuff in it.”
“It’s boarded up. And there won’t be anything inside but spiderwebs.”
“You never know. Maybe the old folks left some pots and pans behind, or an antique chair that’s still usable. Out-of-staters buy shit like that on E-Bay, quaint Ye Olde New Englandy crap. Worth a shot, anyway. You got anything better to do?”
“I guess not. But pull the truck around to the back of the house, so nobody gets curious about it.”
There was a faint track between the house and barn, overgrown with weeds and strewn with rocks. The Ford rolled down it easily, and Chris parked it behind the house. “See that?” Van said. “The back door and windows are boarded up, too.”
“That’s why Jesus invented tire irons, my man,” said Chris.
Their guns were mounted in the rack behind the truck’s front seat, and by unspoken agreement, they took them down and slung them across their backs. Chris gave Van the powerful Maglite from the emergency kit, and pocketed a couple of scratch-to-light flares.
“What do we need those for?” Van asked him.
“It’s bound to be dark in there. Besides, there’s nothing like a flare for starting a fire, if you happened to need one for some reason.”
“Holy shit, you want to burn the house down?”
“Whoa, I never said that. It’s a cold day, is all.” He grinned.
The rotten plywood boards over the farmhouse’s back door yielded easily to the pry end of the tire iron, and Van kicked in the equally rotten door. They expected black darkness, but gray light from the overcast sky seeped through several cracks in the western wall of what proved to be the kitchen. In the dimness they could make out something large and black.
“Jackpot!” Chris said. “Look at that stove! Solid cast iron! Four top burners and an oven! It’s got to be a hundred years old! If we can horse it out of here and into the truck, it’ll go for two, maybe three thou. Tank next to the oven for keeping water hot, chimney pipe’s still attached, and it even has that gadget for lifting the burner lids.”
“Let’s check the bedroom,” said Van. “Maybe there’s an old four-poster bed frame. My mother watches that Antiques Road Show program on tv. Something like that can be worth a ton.”
“Specially if a brother and sister used to do the dirty in it.”
Chris snorted. “Doubt if that’d be a selling point for anyone but a pervert like you.”
Van started to cuff the back of Chris’s head, but the blow never landed. The light in the room dimmed, and the air grew hard to breathe, as if it had turned into smoke. He saw a man and a woman standing in the doorway to the bedroom. The woman wore a full-length white nightgown gone slightly yellow due to age and repeated washings with harsh soap powder. A few straggly tendrils of gray hair escaped the kerchief that was wrapped around her head. The man’s faded blue nightshirt reached his ankles. He was as bald as a skull.
“See there?” the woman said. Her voice was a crow’s rusty caw. “You forgot to bank the coals in the stove, Nate Shatten! Fire’s out! How d’ye expect me to cook breakfast?”
“Oh, stop naggin’ me, Abbie. Fire probably just needs another couple logs and a poke or two. I’ll tend to it.” He hobbled painfully into the kitchen, coming straight at Van as if he couldn’t see him.
“Hey! No! Stop!” Van yelled in panic. “Get away from me!” But the skeletal old man ignored him. Van unslung his rifle and fired a shot at him. It passed through the apparition and struck Chris in the belly. Chris was already holding his AR-15 in firing position, and the shock and pain made him start squeezing the trigger spasmodically as he began to fall. Four bullets hit Van in the face, and he went over backwards, dead before he hit the floor. It took Chris longer to die, but one of his abdominal arteries had been severed, and he bled out within five minutes, screaming in agony.
Nate walked right through him, as if he’d been no more substantial than a mist. He stopped next to the stove. “Did you hear something, Abbie?”
“Nary a thing,” she snapped. “Now hurry up and get that fire goin’ before we both catch our deaths of cold.”
“Damndest thing,” Nate muttered. “Could have sworn I heard gunfire.”
“You said yourself that your hearing’s no good. Probably some squirrel up in the attic dropped some acorns on the floor. I’ve asked you and asked you to get rid of the pesky things. They’re as dirty as mice and even more destructive.”
“Squirrels are nothing like mice! I like squirrels. They’re industrious creatures, and they’re kind of handsome, with their bushy tails and all.”
“You have a strange notion of handsome, is all I’ll say.”
“Handsome is as handsome does,” Nate replied.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s just an old saying.”
“You and your old sayings. I’m fed up with them. Why don’t you say something new, for a change?”
“All right. I wish I’d married Pauline Whitehead. She fancied me, and she wasn’t bad looking.”
“She didn’t fancy you. She fancied the farm. And she was rude to me.”
“So you chased her away.”
“She didn’t understand you. You would have been miserable with her.”
“You always think you know best, don’t you?”
“I do know best, where you’re involved. We’ve been happy together, haven’t we?”
“Happy enough, I suppose. Not sure I know what happiness means.”
“Well, it’s not all hearts and flowers, no matter what some folks say. It’s comfort and steadiness and knowing you can trust the person you’re with. That’s all you can ask for in life.”
“I wish I’d asked for more.”
“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”
“So who’s trottin’ out old sayings now?”
The old woman gave a ghost of a laugh. “All right, Nate, you got me. But the saying’s true.”
“It’s cold comfort.”
“Too bad for you. You have to make the best of things.”
“I reckon you’re right.”
The couple went on talking for awhile, bickering in a fond way, but their voices faded away, and so did they. Soon the kitchen was empty, except for the two corpses on the floor.
******
The cops didn’t know what to make of the scene. The forensic team quickly established that the two young men had fatally shot each other with the weapons found near their bodies, and there was no sign that anyone else had been in the abandoned house at the time of the murders. But what possible motive could they have had? Chris North and Van Weeks had been best friends since childhood, and although each of them had beaten up other boys in the schoolyard, they’d never fought with one other. A police psychiatrist raised the possibility of a suicide pact, but in the first place, the death wounds were not self-inflicted, and in the second place, neither of them had ever shown the slightest sign of suicidal tendencies, or even mild depression. So both deaths were ruled accidental, and the cases were closed.
Chris’s funeral service, at Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church, was well-attended, and the Governor of New Hampshire spoke a brief eulogy, because Mr. North was a loyal Republican with deep pockets.
Some of Mary Weeks’s women friends gathered with her in the chapel of the crematorium where Van’s body was reduced to ash, more to comfort her than to mourn her son’s passing for none of them had liked Van very much.
There’d been a lurid article in the Monadnock Sentinal about the incident, headlined “Death Finds Local Boys In Haunted House,” and the brief furor it caused was embarrassing to the head of the Wayne Bridge Chamber of Commerce, a close friend of the banker who wanted to buy the property. The two men commanded some influence in Concord, and in short order the missing title was found and the sale was made. The money went to the only living relative of the brother and sister, a distant cousin who lived in Rindge and had almost forgotten he had kin in Wayne Bridge. The lakefront cabin and its dock were built by a local contractor, who kept the cabin’s exterior rustic, but equipped it with modern, comfortable furniture, a pellet stove, and full plumbing. The banker was delighted, but although the lake was full of bass and he was a good fisherman, he never had any luck. In time he sold the place and bought a luxurious hunting and fishing “camp” on Lake Winnepesaukee. The new owner of the Stebbins Lake place was more interested in sailing than fishing, and added his little sloop to the others that made up the Monadnock yacht club. The boats raced every Wednesday and Saturday afternoon during the summers. All the sailors remarked that no matter what kind of breeze was blowing at the starting line, it always died to a dead calm at the marker buoy off what had once been the Shatten house.
