Hole: A Ghost Story Read online

  Steve gulped the water, his throat making an audible clicking sound as his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. He sighed, then said, “Yes, I’m sure. You need to know. I was going to leave without telling you, but I can’t. I’m afraid to!”

  “Afraid for who? Afraid for me?” Hank asked.

  Steve nodded.

  “Is this about Dean?” Hank asked. “What he did to you and Mary when you were kids? If it is, I don’t know if I even want to hear it. It doesn’t matter anymore. She’s gone. Unless this is about you. If it’s something you need to get off your chest, then I’m listening.”

  Hank moved around to the opposite side of the table and sat.

  Steve fumbled a cigarette from its pack and lit it. “It’s not just what he did,” he said, his voice low and halting. “It’s what he was. What we all were. Us three kids. You only know the smallest part of the story.” He laughed. “The most normal part.”

  Hank frowned. “I don’t follow…”

  “I’m sorry,” Steve said. Even his teeth were chattering, like he’d caught a chill. “It’s really hard to talk about it. Dean… he threatened to kill me if I ever told anyone. He said it all the time when we were kids. He… Once, I threatened to tell on him, tell what he’d been doing to me. I’d had enough. I was in my tree house, and he climbed up... Well, I’ll spare you the details, but when it was over, I said I was going to tell Mom and Dad what he was doing to me, and he threw me out the door. The tree house was pretty high up. He grabbed me and swung me out, and there wasn’t any emotion on his face. His eyes were just… empty. It was like I was a piece of garbage he was chucking out. I hit a limb on the way down and ruptured my spleen, and when I hit the ground, both my legs broke. They had to take my spleen out, and they fixed my legs with pins and rods. But I knew. I knew if I ever did tell anyone what he was doing to us, what he could do, he would kill me. I knew he wasn’t just threatening, you know, like big brothers will do. He meant it. He would literally kill me.”

  “Jesus…” Hank murmured.

  “But that’s… that’s nothing, really. Compared to the real secret.”

  “And what is that?” Hank asked.

  “We were freaks!” Steve hissed. A cloud of blue smoke twined around his head like a serpentine halo. “All three of us!”

  Hank’s stomach churned. He realized he was as frightened as his brother-in-law appeared to be. The urge to flee was suddenly so strong, Hank had to make a conscious effort to resist it. His ass actually rose from his seat an inch or two, and he had to grab onto the arms of his chair to keep from jumping to his feet.

  Hank wanted to cry out, “No more!” and show the lanky young man sitting across the table from him to the door. He could picture it in his head: grabbing Steve by the collar, marching him across the house and tossing him out the back door on his keister.

  “What do you mean ‘freaks’?” Hank asked slowly, his throat dry and tight. His heart was thumping so hard and fast, the front of his shirt was visibly moving, ticking like a drum head.

  “We could do things,” Steve said. “Things that weren’t normal.”

  Hank shook his head, scowling in confusion.

  “Dean… Dean was the first. I guess it came to him first because he was the oldest.”

  “What?” Hank demanded, frustrated. “What came to him?”

  “He called it the Trick. He could make things move,” Steve said, his hands shaking. “What I mean to say is: he could make things move without touching them. Psychokinesis. That’s the scientific word for it.”

  “That’s... Well, that’s kind of crazy.”

  “I know that,” Steve retorted. “You think I don’t know how it sounds?”

  Hank crossed his arms, narrowing his eyes skeptically. The shadows of tension in his neck visibly diminished.

  Yet, this was easier-- this craziness. He couldn’t deny his sudden relief. This was just another sad outcrop of Klegg family lunacy, easily dismissed. In fact, Hank was already doing it, dismissing Steve’s wild story, even as his brother-in-law spoke it into being. And what was even sadder, Hank was relieved his brother-in-law was crazy. It was preferable to the things he’d feared Steve would confess: Satanic orgies… baby-killing… beastiality. Whatever Mary’s nutty family had gotten up to when she was a kid…!

  Yes, better that Steve had lost his mind, that he was as insane as the rest of his clan. It broke Hank’s heart, but he was not all that surprised. Steve had only kept his peccadilloes hidden a little better than the rest.

  “You don’t believe me,” Steve said, reading his face.

  “It’s a big pill to swallow.”

  “Just bear with me, then. When I’m done telling you the whole story, I’ll prove it to you.”

  “All right,” Hank said calmly.

  Steve frowned, his eyes waxing distant. “I don’t think Dad ever knew about it. No... I don’t ‘think’ he never knew. I know he never knew. He didn’t know about any of it. Not the molestation, and not the Trick either. He was gone a lot when we were kids. Mother raised us mostly on her own, and you know how she is. She didn’t find out for a long time. She lives in her own little fantasy world. Straight out of Leave it to Beaver. So long as we maintained appearances, you know, went to church every Sunday and minded our manners, kept our faces clean and spoke when spoken to, everything was right in her world.”

  Steve looked at Hank with a half-smile.

  “Dean’s my half-brother, you know.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Hank said, surprised.

  Steve nodded. “He is. His biological father was some drunk Mom ran off with when she was fifteen. Of course, nobody’s supposed to know about that. Her old man got tired of her and beat her half to death one night and she left him, went back home in shame, but not before he knocked her up. They were only married a couple months. I think that’s maybe why she turned out the way she did. Got all religious. She was really wild in her younger days. I guess she had a lot of stuff to repent for.

  “Dad adopted Dean after they got married. Had his name changed. After that, you couldn’t get Mom to admit she’d ever been married before, or that Dean wasn’t my father’s biological child. It was like pulling teeth.

  “That’s why she always favored him, though. I think she always felt like she had to make it up to him somehow. Or maybe she just loved his father more than she loved Dad. He was the man she couldn’t have.

  “I think that’s why Dean was so much stronger than me and Mary, too. Different genes. All three of us could do the Trick. Mary was better at it than me. I could barely do it at all. But Dean… Dean was a real powerhouse. He used to move his dresser around for practice. That thing was solid oak. Must have weighed over a hundred pounds, but he could make it slide all around the floor. I saw him lift it up and down like it was nothing. It would float around his bedroom like it was dangling from invisible threads. It was like that Disney movie Escape from Witch Mountain.”

  Hank clasped his lower face, listening with veiled eyes.

  Steve laughed. “I know this sounds like some crazy Stephen King novel, but I’m telling you the truth!

  “Later, Dean found out that Mary could do it, too. Nowhere near as strong as him. Neither one of us could match him, but Mary could do some neat little Tricks. He caught her making her dollies dance around one afternoon when he was babysitting us, and after that he would take her into his room to ‘practice’.

  “Mom didn’t know about it then. It was our secret, the three of us. Dean was fifteen or so at the time, old enough to know how Mother would react if she caught us doing something so weird.

  “He wasn’t sexually abusing us then, but the thing he could do… I think it was messing up his brain. The stronger he got, the more he practiced, the more cruel and arrogant he became. Sometimes he would get nosebleeds when he used his powers. Once, when he lifted up his bed-- and this was with all of us sitting on it-- a capillary burst in his eye, and it got all red and devilish looking. It stayed that
way for weeks.

  “Mom took him to the hospital. They said he’d had an ocular hemorrhage, but there was nothing they could do about it, just observe him. It scared me and Mary, that red eye. He would pull his eyelid down and glare at us. He’d laugh and called it his ‘evil eye’ and chase us around the house. We were only six or seven at the time, I think.”

  Steve stubbed out his smoke and lit another. “I’m not sure when he started molesting Mary, but I know that’s about the time he started molesting me. He came in my room one day when it was just me and him at home. Dad was gone on maneuvers and Mom had taken Mary to the mall to shop for shoes or dresses or something. Dean came in my room, grinning at me with that evil red eye, and he was acting all twitchy and sweaty. I asked him what was wrong and he said ‘nothing’, but I think something ruptured in his head. He’d been practicing. I’d heard his dresser sliding around and thumping on the floor earlier, and he was walking kind of funny, like one of his legs was all noodly. I was playing with my G.I. Joes. He sat on my bed and watched me for a little while, then he said he’d give me his Cobra Commander if I did something for him.

  “God, I wanted his Cobra Commander so bad, so I asked, ‘What?’

  “He grinned and said, ‘You have to say ‘yes’ first, or no deal.’”

  Steve blinked his glimmering eyes, a bitter smile twisting his lips. “I think you can guess what he wanted me to do... and I did it. I didn’t understand what it was I was doing. It seemed kind of gross, but no worse than eating a bug, and I wanted that fucking Cobra Commander! After that, he was always coming after me when nobody was around. First it was just… um, you know... oral stuff. But then later, he wanted to do other things to me. He just got crueler and more demanding… nastier, too. He started doing… things to me… with our toys… stuff around the house like soda bottles, knife handles. It was awful, and the whole time, he would say all these vile things, like he was going to cut me open between my legs and rape me like a girl… or… or cut my throat and skullfuck me after I was dead—!”

  Steve was trembling so violently his chair was squeaking. Tears rolled down his cheeks.

  “Take it easy, Steve,” Hank said. “My God…”

  Steve wiped his face and sniffed. He paused a moment to get himself under control, then went on:

  “He started smoking dope, listening to heavy metal. He went to the library and checked out a bunch of occult books, then snuck a Ouija board into the house, something Mother strictly forbid. He would hold these séances and make Mary and me join him. He made us get undressed, all three of us, and we would have to chant these incantations he’d made up. He would make little cuts in our palms with his pocket knife and drew symbols on our chests with the blood. He would call on some demon named Nartholep or something like that, and sometimes he made us practice the Trick together, even though it hurt to do it. Made me and Mary both feel sick and dizzy.

  “He finally got caught, though. Not molesting us. He never got caught doing that. Mother came home and caught him practicing the Trick.

  “She was supposed to be at work, but she got sick that day and came home early. Dean was playing his records real loud. KISS. God, Mother hated those records! She only put up with it because he was her little golden boy. So Mom comes in, and me and Mary were in the living room watching Gilligan’s Island. We see her walk in the door. We knew what Dean was doing, but we didn’t warn him. We wanted him to get caught. Mom hears the music blaring and goes stomping into his room, and she sees him laying there on his bed, listening to KISS, and there was the record album, floating in the air above his bed!”

  Steve laughed.

  “Dad was gone, of course.

  “Mom just went ballistic.

  “She cleaned house. That’s what she called it when she went on one of her rampages. She called her pastor and a whole group from her church came. They turned the house upside down. Threw out everything that even smacked of the occult, and then they exorcised Dean.

  “None of us understood what we could do. Mother said it was the devil, so that’s what we believed. I think Dean believed it, too. Or it played to his ego. I don’t know. All I know is that it was terrifying to me, at the time. Mother attended this strange little fundamentalist church out in the boonies. I think they’re called Charismatics, or something like that. I’m not too sure about that kind of stuff. I know Dad hated them. He despised those holy rollers. He didn’t believe in talking in tongues or exorcisms or any of that kind of stuff, but Dad was gone, so Mom had free reign.

  “Her congregation gathered around Dean in a circle after it was dark, and they prayed for the devil to come out of him. Dean howled and talked in gibberish. He laughed at them and… I think he even exposed himself to them. Tried to piss on Pastor Sonny. It was a madhouse that night. The floors were shaking and pictures came flying off the walls. Mary ran to her bedroom and hid in her closet.

  “It went on all night. Dean talked in all these different voices, saying he was going to skullfuck them all in hell and just… all kinds of horrible things.

  “Finally, though, he collapsed, and he acted like he’d been cured, like the devil had came out of him. I don’t know if he was playing along or if he really believed he’d had the devil in him. Who knows? Maybe he really was possessed. After that, though, he acted like he’d turned over a new leaf. He said he’d gotten saved and started going to church.

  “Mother was triumphant. She was religious before, but after the ‘miracle’ she witnessed, after God saved her favorite child, she was just… rotten with God. I’m sorry. That’s the only way I can describe it.

  “Dean got all religious, too. Of course, it was just a sham. He never even stopped fucking us. That didn’t stop until he went away to Bible College to be a preacher. Even then, when he came home on breaks, I could count on him trying to blackmail me into giving him some head at least once or twice while he was home. He would threaten to tell everyone I was queer. All my friends in school. Mom and Dad.”

  “Ugh,” Hank groaned.

  “I never saw him do the Trick after the exorcism. I know he can still do it, because sometimes things move around when he’s mad or anxious. Glasses will turn over or pictures will fall off the walls. Sometimes lightbulbs will blow. Just little things. I don’t think he intends for those things to happen. I think he can’t help it. He knows it damages his brain, now. He told me that once, after he graduated from college. He tries not to do it, because he’s afraid he’ll have a stroke or something.

  “But it’s too late, really. Whatever it is he can do, it’s already destroyed his mind. He’s completely insane, Hank. He’s paranoid and he has some kind of narcissistic messiah complex. The problem is: he’s also very, very clever.

  “I’m afraid he’ll know I told you, but after I get home, I’m packing my things and heading toward the coast. Mary was the only thing that kept me around here anyway. Now that she’s gone, there’s nothing left here for me.” He smiled. “I’m going to rent a little cottage by the Atlantic.”

  The smile faded, and his eyes filled with dread once again. “The only reason I’m telling you this is because I’m afraid for you, Hank. The one thing that always set Dean off was threatening to expose him--

  “And that’s what you did at Mary’s visitation...

  “You threatened to tell everyone what he did.”

  27.

  Hank sat in his office, mulling over all that Steve had said before departing. It was 9:00 p.m.. Steve was gone now, probably forever-- said he was leaving for the East Coast. Hank actually believed that, too. His mother had dropped by as Hank’s brother-in-law walked out the door, and she’d spent an hour with Hank before heading back to Tennessee with her rancher husband Trent. Billy Joe and his wife and kids and Hank’s sister Sue had stopped in to say their good byes as well. Everyone was gone now, leaving him to his thoughts. Hank was finally alone.

  Alone. The most unpleasant word in the English language.

  The house was too quiet. Th
e only sound was the susurration of the central air conditioning system. That, and Hank’s desktop computer, humming faintly.

  The monitor was displaying a website about people with psychic powers.

  After Steve told him “the whole story”, he nervously said he was going to prove it to Hank. “Now I’m not very strong. Dean is the gifted one, but I can do little Tricks,” Steve had explained-- hedging his bets now, Hank had thought.

  Hank had watched, trying to be open-minded, as Steve took a cigarette from his pack and stood it up on its filter in the center of the dining room table. It took him a few attempts to get it to stand upright because his hands were shaking so bad, but he finally got it, then he sat back and stared intently at the white paper tube of tobacco.

  Nothing happened at first, and Steve laughed breathlessly. “I’m out of practice,” he said, blushing.

  “Take your time,” Hank had replied.

  Steve held his hands to either side of the cigarette then, open palms bracketing it on both sides about twelve inches apart. He set his face and held his breath and made a strained expression. Hank thought he looked more constipated than psychic, but kept his opinion to himself… and somehow managed to keep the little smile the thought threatened to tease from his lips from surfacing on his face.

  As Hank watched, the cigarette had wobbled, then dropped over.

  It could have been the wind, or some trick of static electricity… but then it seemed to do a little jig, swinging in an erratic circle, like a compass needle in the center of the Bermuda Triangle.

  Despite his skepticism, Hank was impressed. Not that he thought it was a display of genuine psychic ability. He only thought it was an neat illusion.

  Steve was triumphant. He beamed at Hank after dispensing with the Uri Geller act. “See?” he said. He grinned widely, eyes gleaming.

  “Yeah, that’s pretty wild,” Hank had humored him.

  Steve had talked for a while after that, just babbling really, and Hank had listened to him. He didn’t think the young man was purposefully trying to deceive him. Steve was obviously tainted by his brother’s sickness.