Nocturnes

Now it was my turn to look confused. “I don’t understand,” I said.

“The people who found this property for you didn’t check on its history,” said Harris. “It was just in the right area at the right price, and the local agent was so happy to rent it he didn’t see any point in spoiling a good deal by opening his mouth. Nobody from around these parts would ever have considered renting or buying this house, or even recommending it to a nonlocal. In fact, I was the only person who would agree to work on it. It’s not a good house in which to be raising a child, Mr. Markham. It’s not good to allow a child to live its life in a house where another child had its life ended.”

I leaned back against the wall. I welcomed its support.

“A child died in the house?”

“A child was killed in the house,” he corrected me. “Thirty years ago this November. A man named Victor Parks lived here, and he murdered a child in his bedroom. The police caught him trying to bury the remains down by the river.”

“Lord,” I said. “I didn’t know. I’ve never even heard of Victor Parks.”

“Nobody told you, Mr. Markham, so you couldn’t have known,” continued Harris. “By the time you’d rented the house, it was already too late. As for Parks, he’s dead. He had a heart attack in his cell on the very night he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Maybe the thought of an existence spent trapped in a small cell, far away from what was familiar to him, was too much for him to bear.”

Something changed in his voice. It tightened, as if fighting off some unwanted emotion.

“He was an unusual man, Victor Parks,” he said. “He worked as a verger in the church, and helped train the local football teams. In many ways, he was a model citizen. People respected him. They trusted him with their children.”

He paused, and those old eyes were filled with a remembered grief. What he said next caused my hands to tense involuntarily.

“He also gave lessons, Mr. Markham. He taught piano to the children.”

I couldn’t speak. I didn’t want to hear this. It was foolishness. Harris had told David this story, and David had picked up on some details of it to create a fantasy that mixed up his dead brother and the victim of this Victor Parks.

I tried to salvage some semblance of sense from all of this, to return us to reality.

“All of this may be true, but it doesn’t change the fact that these stories are obviously troubling David. Last night I found him in the sitting room. He thought there was a little boy at the piano, and that the boy spoke to him.”

Harris bent down to pick up his paint tin once again. I was about to tell him not to bother, that his services were no longer needed, when he spoke again.

“Mr. Markham,” he said, as he straightened. “I didn’t tell David what happened in this house. He doesn’t know anything about Victor Parks or what was done here. If he’s heard something about it, then it was told to him by someone else. David says he sees a little boy, and you think that he believes that it’s the child who was killed, but Parks didn’t kill a boy. He killed a little girl. Whatever your son is seeing, Mr. Markham, figment of his imagination or not, it isn’t the girl Parks murdered.”

I stood aside to let him pass, and the next question came so unexpectedly that I thought for a moment that an unseen third person had asked it.

“What was her name, Mr. Harris? What was the name of the girl who died here?”

But even as the words left my lips, I already seemed to know part of the answer, and I understood at last why it was that he had agreed to do the work on this house.

“Lucy,” he replied. “Her name was Lucy Harris.”

I did not ask Frank Harris to leave. I could not, not after what he had told me. I could not even imagine what it must be like for him to work in the place in which his daughter had lost her life. What brought him back here, day after day? Why would he torment himself in this way?

I wanted to ask him, but I did not. In a way, I think that I understood. It was the same instinct that made me find excuses to drive past the spot where Audrey and Jason had died. It was a means of maintaining some kind of contact with what they once were, as if some part of them remained there and would find a way to reach out to me.

Or perhaps I hoped that someday I would drive by and see them, however briefly, caught between living and dying, before they faded away forever.

For a time, David had no more bad dreams, and there were no more nocturnal wanderings. Frank Harris finished most of his work on the house and departed temporarily, but not before he tried to speak to me once again of his concerns for David. I brushed them away. It was over. The trouble had passed, and David was himself once more, helped by warm days spent playing with other children in green fields, far from the house in which a little girl had died. I taught my classes, and my own writing progressed. Soon David would commence school, and the normal rhythms of our new life would be established at last.

But the night before school began, David came to me and woke me to listen to the sound of the piano.

“It’s him,” he whispered.

I could see his tears glistening, even in the darkness.

“He wants me to follow him into the dark place, but I don’t want to go. I’m going to tell him to go away. I’m going to tell him to go away forever.”

With that, he turned and ran from the room. I jumped from my bed and followed him, calling to him to stop, but he was already racing down the stairs. Before my foot even hit the first step, he had entered the living room, following the sound of the piano, and seconds later I heard his voice raised.

“Go away! You have to leave me alone. I won’t go with you. You don’t belong here!”

And a second voice answered. It said: “This is my place, and you’ll do as I tell you to do.”

When I reached the bottom of the stairs, there was a boy seated on the piano stool. David was right: he looked somewhat like Jason, as though someone had been given a fleeting description of my lost son and had constructed an imperfect imitation on that basis. But all of the good in Jason, all of the brightness, was gone from this being. Instead, there was only the shell of a boy who might once have been mine, and something dark moved inside it. He wore the same yellow T-shirt and shorts that Jason had been wearing on the day he died, except they didn’t fit quite right. They looked too tight, and there was dirt and blood on them.

And the voice wasn’t a child’s voice. It spoke in a man’s tone, deep and threatening. It sounded obscene, coming out of this small figure. It said: “Play with me, David. Come, sit beside me. Help me finish my song, then I’ll show you my special place, my dark place. Do as I tell you, now. Come to me and we can play together forever.”

I stepped into the room, and the child looked at me. As it did so, it changed, as if by distracting it I had somehow broken its concentration. It was no longer a boy. It was no longer anything human. It was old and stooped and decayed, with a balding skull and pinched white skin. The shreds of a dark suit hung on what was left of its body and its eyes were black and lusting. It raised its fingers to its lips and licked the tips.

“This is my place,” it said. “The children come to me. Suffer the children that come unto me…”

I grabbed David and pushed him behind me, back into the hallway. I could hear him crying.

The thing smiled at me, and it touched itself as it did so, and I knew what I had to do.

There was a sledgehammer in the hallway. Harris had left it there, along with other tools that he pla