Майкл Корита - If She Wakes

In her thirteenth summer, she used that power of imagination to win twenty dollars. That summer, when Mom was doing better and Shannon was distracted by the acquisition of her driver’s license, a neighborhood boy named Jaylen dared Tara to go into the house alone and appear in a window on each floor, including the turret window of the supposed woman in white. If she did, he said, he’d give her twenty dollars and something she pretended she wanted nothing to do with: a kiss.

“Just the money, creep,” she’d told him, but he was tall and handsome and had impossibly beautiful brown eyes and played on the basketball team, and, highly appealing to Tara, he told the most creative of the dumb scary stories about 1804 London Street. He was also black, and to Tara this seemed both exotic and undeniably Scout Finch — approved. If there was anything not to like about Jaylen, Tara hadn’t yet discovered it.

He’d forced the front door open with a screwdriver, and then they’d both run away, sure there was an alarm, and hid behind a tree up the street. A few minutes went by and nothing happened, but he told her to wait awhile longer.

“It’s probably a silent alarm, like they have in banks,” Jaylen said, and Tara found that very wise.

No police came, though, and eventually Jaylen decided that the silent alarm must have been deactivated, probably because they weren’t paying the bill, just like nobody paid to keep the lawn mowed. The house was fair game, and the dare was still on.

“You don’t have to,” he said when they reached the porch. His voice was soft and serious, and Tara realized that now that it had progressed from talk to possibility, he thought it was a bad idea and wanted out, the classic game of chicken that had gone too far. Facing the cracked porch steps and the tall weeds and the filthy windows with crude phrases written in the dust, Tara felt a surge of fear rise up, but she fought it down. She was Scout Finch, after all, and she could not only play with the boys but beat them at their own games. And take their money.

And, maybe, get a kiss.

“I’ll wave to you from the windows,” she said, and she pushed through the door and into the musty foyer. Stairs rose to the left, ascending into shadows, and in front of her a wide hallway led to what had to be the living room. To the right was a formal parlor or sitting room, old-fashioned chairs positioned around a china hutch that was filled with blue-and-white dishes and crystal glasses. In the center of the room was a puddle, and above it the ceiling sagged around a massive water stain.

The floorboards creaked like trees in a windstorm, but they held, and she reached the first window, looked outside, and saw Jaylen staring apprehensively up at the house. He appeared gravely concerned, more scared than Tara, and this gave her confidence. She grinned at him and waved. Relieved, he waved back, and then hollered that she could come out.

“You don’t need to do ’em all! You win! Come back out!”

He wants that kiss, she thought.

Her confidence grew, and she shouted back that she was going to do them all, and then she walked confidently to the stairs.

The problem was the lack of light. A lot of the windows were shuttered and those that weren’t were covered with years of filth, so only the dimmest light filtered in, and since she didn’t know the house, each step into the darkness was a journey into unfamiliar territory. That built confusion, and confusion fed fear.

She was no longer smiling when she reached the second-floor window, and if Jaylen had yelled at her to come down again, she might have listened. But by now he seemed resigned to her determination not to quit, so he just waved back, silent and seeming very far away.

It took her some time to find the turret window. She was moving too fast, and she took wrong turns, and with each wrong turn, she felt her panic escalate. She was breathing raggedly and she was sweating even though it was cool in the house, and there was a terrible smell coming from behind one of the closed doors, and it took all of her imagination and willpower to fend off the images of a rotting corpse. She stopped, took a deep breath, and said, “Pass the damn ham, please,” a Scout Finch quote that delighted her endlessly, particularly when she used it in situations where it made no sense to anyone else.

The line was a reminder of the power of imagination. There was no ghost in 1804 London Street, nothing worse in here than the lingering smell of old cigar smoke, which Tara hated because it reminded her of Mom’s cigarette days. The house was as harmless as Boo Radley’s home in Maycomb, Alabama, and she was as brave as Scout Finch.

She walked on down the hall through the darkness. When she finally found the turret window, she saw Jaylen pacing the yard nervously, and she had to rap on the glass with her knuckles to get his attention.

This time, instead of waving at her, he beckoned urgently, the message clear: Get out of there!

She was ready to go. More than ready; she’d held the panic off for as long as she could, but now the dark and the smells and all those images of what might lurk behind each closed door were piling up, gleefully crowding the space in her mind, a race to see which one would break her.

She was concentrating on staying calm and watching where she put her feet, sure that there would be rusty nails or a piece of broken glass or an ax matted with hair and blood — Stop that, Tara, stop that! — and in the intensity of her focus, she completely overshot the main staircase and found herself on an unfamiliar one, tighter and steeper.

For a second, she hesitated, considering going back. Then her hand brushed a cobweb and that made her give a little cry and a jerk, and the steps creaked ominously underfoot, and now she was running, but she ran down, following instinct — the front door was below her, so down was the right direction.

She’d never been in a house with two staircases, and so the idea that it might not lead to the same place as the main stairs never occurred to her. Even when she reached a landing and the staircase bent in an unexpected direction, she trusted it. She had to go down to get out, and down she went, rushing and gasping for breath and feeling her way along the wall with her hand because it was nearly full dark here, and she couldn’t see anything beyond the next step.

When she arrived in the cold room that smelled of damp stone, she realized her mistake. She’d bypassed everything and gone straight from the third floor to the cellar. Something rustled in the darkness to her right, and she scampered away and smacked into the wall, then ran right into a cobweb. She screamed, tearing at the sticky threads with both hands. She was no longer Scout Finch; she was Tara Beckley, known as Twitch to her sister, and she was earning the nickname now.

She backed up; her foot skidded on something wet and slick, and then the rustling sound came again, and she whirled and shouted.

That was when she saw daylight.

There was only a faint line of it — it looked as if someone had drawn it with yellow chalk on the dark stone wall — but it was there. She stared at it, gasping and crying, and thought about her options. She could run back the way she’d come and hope to find her way out, or she could cross the darkness and trust that light, however faint.

She trusted the light.

She fell twice crossing the cellar, banging her shin painfully into something hard and metal and then scraping her forearm on a rusted pipe that seemed to be a floor support, but she made it to the other side, and there she saw that the daylight was no illusion. There was a door here. Two of them, actually, heavy steel doors that might once have met squarely in the center but no longer did, offering just enough of a gap to let the light filter through.