The Haunting of Sam Cabot (A Supernatural Thriller) Read online

  *

  My heart sank. I could not believe what I was seeing. For all I knew, the heating system could have been a blast furnace used for melting down ore. It really was that big. Along with all the dials, ductwork, and piping, it took up virtually one quarter of the entire basement. Piping ran off the thing and disappeared into the darkness in every direction like the legs of some giant arachnid. On the front of the Hulk—as I would come to know and name it—there was a large door, probably two feet tall by four feet wide with louvered vertical iron bands that looked strangely like teeth grinning out of some giant and malevolent maw. In some strange way that I could not explain then, the look of that door, hell, the look of the whole thing, unsettled me. An oil burner now protruded from the center of that strange door, but I understood that this probably hadn’t always been the case. This particular heating plant obviously preceded oil-fired systems. It was almost, well, science fiction-looking, like something straight out of a Jules Verne scenario; the main engine for the submarine Nautilus perhaps. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The biggest problem was its condition, which was evident even in the dusky glow of that dirty light bulb. It appeared that it had long since deteriorated to the point of collapse, looking tired and defeated, old beyond rehabilitation. I knew right then and there that the cost of a new one would be well beyond our limited budget.

  Even so, I was curious. My feet finally came unglued from the floor and I went in closer to do a more thorough inspection of the huge rusty thing. I was shaking my head and frowning severely.

  “What’s the trouble?” Carlisle asked.

  “We love the house,” I explained, trying to sound as deferential as I could under the circumstances. “But there’s so much that needs to be done already. It’s, well . . . nearly overwhelming. I’m afraid this is the straw that might break the camel’s back. A heating system is an expense I hadn’t bargained on, and my god, man,” I said amazed. “Look at the size of it. Something like that is going to cost a fortune. No,” I said finally, giving my head a rueful shake. “I don’t see how we would ever be able to afford it.”

  Linda’s heart sank. I could see it in her posture and in the sudden paling of her face.

  “Now let’s not be too hasty,” Carlisle said. “I was gonna tell you after you’d seen it that I’d like to take on the little task of putting a new one in myself. That is, if you folks decide to buy the place.”

  “Little task?” I said amazed.

  Carlisle nodded.

  “We really appreciate your kindness,” I said. “But installing something like this is only part of the cost.”

  “I know that!” Carlisle said crossly. “I didn’t just arrive here on planet earth yesterday, you know. I was talkin about buyin it with some of the money you folks pay me for the house, and then I was gonna install it. How’s that sound?” Carlisle stood there in that semi-dark dungeon of a basement, glaring hopefully at us with those sharp, luminescent blue eyes, his curiously unlined features giving him a strange, almost ghostly cast.

  There’s something wrong here, my instincts told me with a sudden and irrational certainty. What happened outside a while ago was just plain weird, and this certainly doesn’t feel right either. Actually it feels downright creepy. Take your family and get the hell out of here quick because something damn strange is going on.

  But no way could I obey that inner voice. Christ, I couldn’t even move. The silence that followed was palpable; you could have cut it with a knife. I looked at Linda and Linda looked at me, then we both looked back at Carlisle.

  I could tell Linda wasn’t feeling what I was feeling, nor was she seeing what I thought I was seeing. Yes, she had been initially startled, as was I by the sheer and overwhelming enormity of that thing, but in all reality she knew nothing of the nature of heating systems, nor did she actually think there was anything odd about this one. She just wanted the house. She was blinded by that one single focus. She wanted the house. It would be our first home together and she was tired of moving. She wanted to settle down. I couldn’t blame her. I wanted to settle down, too. My feelings were irrational. I knew that. It occurred to me in that moment that my mind must be playing tricks on me. My imagination was huge. I suppose that’s why I needed to write.

  “Oh, Sam,” she pleaded, and I was lost. I had never been able to say no to her. I knew I was being foolish and I would think later that there wasn’t anything more to my decision to buy the house than the simple fact of those soft, brown, pleading eyes of the woman I loved, staring at me from out of the dimness of that gloomy basement. But I never did totally convince myself of that.

  Because there was something else to it. Something I buried deep inside me and didn’t dig up until it was far too late.

  Carlisle was looking expectantly at me, as was Linda. Sean too.

  You see, I felt, an attraction toward that rusty old heating system.

  Welcome home, Sam. We’ve been waiting for you.

  But at the same time, I felt sort of repulsed at the idea of it.

  And these emotions together added up to a confusing sort of ambivalence; a simultaneous attraction toward and repulsion against that great fire-spewing thing that sat dormant, but somehow alive, in the dark mausoleum of Carlisle’s basement. And I could see by the look of smug satisfaction on Carlisle’s face that he knew it. Linda didn’t see it. Her focus was singular. At that moment, she knew only one thing. She wanted the house. But me, suddenly I couldn’t keep my eyes off it. Nor my hands. Involuntarily my feet began to move and I went over and touched it, tentatively at first, and then I touched it in several other places. I was touching rusty metal, but I was feeling soft, sinuous flesh. God in heaven, I was stroking the wretched thing and Carlisle and Linda were standing there watching me and neither of them said or did anything. When I realized what I was doing, a sudden chill ran up through my arms and into my spine. I grunted involuntarily and pulled my hands back in revulsion, and the two of them just stood there as if nothing at all had happened. I wiped my hands on my jeans, trying like mad to wipe that feeling away.

  “I need to get out of here,” I said, as I turned and almost stumbled in my haste to exit the basement.

  “What’s wrong?” Linda asked, taking Sean by the hand and following me out into daylight. “You’re as white as a sheet.”

  “I just needed some air,” I said, breathing in harsh rasps.

  “I know what’s wrong with you,” she said suddenly.

  “You do?”

  “Sure. Your blood sugar’s screwed up. You haven’t had anything to eat this morning. You refused to have breakfast with me and Sean, remember? Said you were too nervous to eat. Do you feel hungry?”

  “Yeah, I guess a little,” I said, but I knew that wasn’t it.

  Sean was asleep on his feet, leaning against his mother, almost falling over. “Here,” I said scooping him up. “I’ll put him in the car for a nap.”

  I took him to the minivan and laid him on the back seat. He was asleep before I turned back to Linda and Carlisle.

  Carlisle was staring into the basement. “You know, it’s even possible this one ain’t beyond hope,” he said, speaking of the heating system. “Always did work okay. Just hasn’t been used in a lot of years.”

  I looked narrowly at him. “It’s so big,” I said. “And rusted.” I don’t know why I was arguing. I knew the heating plant would be staying. I felt its magnetism even from a distance. It was calling to me, (Welcome home, Sam) and I found myself wanting very badly to touch the loathsome thing again. Gooseflesh crawled across my body like a rash.

  “Awe, the rust ain’t nawthin,” said Carlisle. “I’ll have her cleaned up in no time at all. You’ll see.” His eyes glowed with smug satisfaction.

  Suddenly, and I swear involuntarily, I turned and ducked back into the basement, leaving Linda standing there bewildered. “Keep an eye on Sean,” I told her as I went. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

  “Okay,” came the soft, slightly befuddled r
eply.

  Carlisle followed me in, as I suspected he would. I was standing there re-inspecting the Hulk, touching it here and there, gawking wide-eyed, thinking about its size, contemplating its long life and imagining the bodies it had kept warm over the years, and Carlisle said, as if reading my thoughts, “Big house.” It was as if this explained everything. “Started out as a wood burning furnace back in the nineteenth century, then during the depression they updated it so that it would burn coal. Converted to oil sometime in the fifties. Now I ain’t gonna lie and tell ya it’s a corker of a high tech system or anything. Cause you can see with your own eyes that it ain’t.” His voice was soothing, almost hypnotic. “But I will tell ya one thing. It’ll heat this old house more efficiently than any of those new-fangled tin-gimmicks they call furnaces nowadays. I know that from experience.”

  I just gawked and said nothing.

  “Tell ya what I’ll do,” Carlisle went on. “I’ll get a couple of my friends out here, experts in the heating business—you know, to have a look at her, see what they think. If we can fix her up, that’s the way we’ll go, if not, then I told ya, I’ll put a new one in. And when Francis Carlisle says he’ll do somethin, you can count on him doin it. We’ll have you some heat in here before you can say abracadabra, and you can put your money on that, mister.”

  But it was Carlisle putting his money on it, and that made all the difference in the world.

  Outside Linda began to scream. I ran from the basement in panic. She was loping toward our minivan which was rolling steadily backward down the sloping driveway toward the woods. Sean was in the front seat sitting behind the steering wheel. I could see his pale, panicked face through the windshield. Somehow he’d managed to get himself up there and had knocked the gearshift out of park and into neutral. Of this I was incontestably certain. I began to run like mad but Linda was closer and there was no hope that I could reach it before she did.

  Linda’s fleet footedness saved the day. Luckily the grade was only gradual here and the van was not going very fast. Another thirty feet or so and the grade steepened drastically where at the bottom it met the woods which were bordered by an ancient rock fence.

  Linda reached the driver’s door on a run, yanked it open and threw herself into the moving vehicle at her own peril. In another moment I heard the engine rev and saw the van reverse direction. Presently she was driving past me where she parked kitty corner to the house in a small hollow where there was no chance that it could roll again. She set the parking brake and removed the keys. After hugging Sean she put him back in the rear seat and told him to stay put.

  We fell into each other’s arms as our hearts hammered against each other’s chests in twin staccato rhythms. We both agreed that we’d done a dumb thing by leaving Sean in a vehicle parked on a grade. We vowed never to be that stupid again.

  “Active little feller, ain’t he,” Carlisle commented, not for the first time that day.

  Neither Linda nor I bothered to reply.

  I should have taken it all as a sign: Welcome home, Sam. We’ve been waiting for you; Carlisle’s odd way; the vision of burning bodies writhing in pain; the Hulk and my strange attraction to it; our son’s near death experience at the wheel of our minivan. But I didn’t. I was too caught up in the house and its myriad wonders to see beyond my own better instincts.

  Chapter 3

  That afternoon after leaving Farnham House we mulled over the pros and cons of taking on a project of such magnitude. Meg, John, Linda and I all sat around their kitchen table discussing it. They were both enthusiastic, and agreed to help as much as possible. Truth was, they had their daughter and grandson home and I believe they would have said and done anything to keep it that way.

  Later in the week, after a bunch of dickering and wrangling, we struck a bargain to buy the house directly from Carlisle. At least temporarily, he would be the mortgage holder. We’d saved enough money for a sizable down payment. We had a local lawyer draw up the papers. At the signing, we gave Carlisle the down payment with a written promise that we would make the mortgage payments directly to him each month until we found ourselves in a position to refinance the loan through a mortgage lender. I would think later that if it had been any other way, we would have turned around, gotten in the car, driven away from that place and never looked back. But I always knew deep in my heart that this was a lie. It had been more than Carlisle’s generosity that made us stay. For one thing, it was that disappointed look on Linda’s face when I had hedged for a moment when faced with the sheer enormity of tasks we were about to embark on. But even more than that it was that strange mix of emotions I’d felt while inspecting the Hulk, and touching it and stroking it. It was a feeling that somehow mixed excitement with fear, a predilection that caused my head to buzz dizzily and left a dry, metallic taste in my mouth. A feeling I knew down deep, in some primitive part of me—perhaps the reptilian part that still lies waiting and watchful at the base of every human being’s brain—was bad. But I felt powerless in the face of it. I could no more have walked away from that house than I could have put a gun to my own head and pulled the trigger. This was an incontestable truth.

  Welcome home, Sam. We’ve been waiting for you.

  *

  When I was in Afghanistan the helicopter I was traveling in got hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. We were reinforcement troops on our way to a hot LZ where Taliban forces were engaged in an intense firefight with Army rangers. Word was, casualties were heavy. I was angry because some of the men in that unit were my friends, and I was frightened because nearly every action I’d entered into since coming to Afghanistan had resulted in casualties, sometimes heavy. The laws of chance said that eventually my number would come up.

  My number came up big time that day. The chopper never made it to the LZ. Like a trapdoor spider crawling up out of a hole in the ground, a sniper holding a rocket-propelled grenade launcher appeared out of nowhere. Too late for the pilot to take evasive action, the sniper fired his weapon. The grenade slammed through the cabin wall just beneath the instrument panel and exploded killing both pilots instantly. I was sitting on a canvas mesh seat midway back behind the pilot seat just beyond two other soldiers, both my friends. They were both killed. But I wasn’t touched. Not a single scratch.

  All afire, the Blackhawk helicopter spun and cartwheeled for several minutes before striking the ground and exploding. I remember vividly those last terrifying moments before we struck. It’s one of those things you hope someday you will forget but never quite do. I still wake up occasionally in the night in a cold sweat with the sensation of falling and burning, thinking that these must be the last moments of my life. They weren’t, but there have been times since that day that I wish they had been.

  I woke up in a field hospital with my left arm in a cast and bandages over a good part of my body being told how lucky I was. My elbow was shattered. They’d installed a pin in it and if all went well I would most probably regain the use of it. I’d been burned but not badly. When the chopper hit the ground, somehow the impact and the explosion together had thrown me clear. No one else had been thrown clear. Just me. I was the only survivor out of ten men. How that happened I will never know. For months afterward the guilt consumed me and nearly destroyed me. The unit chaplain later said that I had survived because God had other plans for me. Easy and convenient answer. One that’s used a lot when all other explanations fall short.

  I never believed the chaplain, of course. I tend to believe that chance rules the universe and that I was the only survivor because I was in the right place at the right time. Simple as that. The laws of chance had struck again, and again they were in my favor.

  When we made the deal to buy Farnham House I caught myself wondering if I had again found myself in the right place at the right time even as this nagging little voice inside me—a voice I should have listened to but ignored—kept telling me that it just might be the other way around.

  But we bought the place, regardless
of those mixed emotions (which I kept to myself for reasons I can’t explain to this day). And I did love it, just as much as Linda, I suppose. Maybe more. There was never a moment of doubt about that. And in time, those initial inner-admonitions passed. And over the next several weeks I would catch myself wondering if the feelings had even been real.

  *

  The movers deposited our household furnishings in a storage unit on the outskirts of Davenport. John and Meg simply did not have room for us and our things.

  If it had been left up to me I would have just as soon placed a mattress on the floor of our new/old house and camped out during the restoration. But I was overruled by all. I was browbeaten into submission, nullified by a louder chorus of voices than my own, that we would be much more comfortable sleeping in John and Meg’s spare bedroom than a dusty old house in the process of restoration. In the end I relented. They were right, of course. I was just being stubborn.

  And we were grateful to Carlisle for taking over the responsibility of the heating system. On that first day he’d said he would use some of the money we gave him for a down payment, and he was true to his word. When I started to protest he told me it was his obligation and that he needed to stay busy anyway. So we relented and gladly left him to the task, feeling indebted to him for such a gracious gift.

  “Heaven sakes,” he’d said, dismissing our gratitude with a flap of his hand. “Don’t fret yourselves over it. You know as well as I do that I got myself a good deal just by selling this old elephant. Nobody else wanted it except you folks. Christ, I thought I was gonna have to go to the grave with it still on my hands. It was the least I could do.”