The Agony House Page 5

  He finally caught the string and pulled it. The bulb clicked on.

  The attic was a lumpy and angular space, unfinished and unfit for habitation by man or beast. A scaffold of roof supports crisscrossed above, supporting sheets of plywood—some of which were new, but most of which were a dark, swollen brown that said they’d been soaked down one time too many. The house had five gables, and all five were evident in the swoops and peaks of this impressive overhead space. In some spots, it was easy to stand upright—and you couldn’t touch the ceiling, not even if you jumped—but in others, you’d have to crawl.

  The floor was not so much a floor as another layer of more plywood, dropped across the ceiling beams of the next level down. It creaked and bent with every step they took.

  The air smelled gray and green, sharp and soupy. The attic was at least thirty degrees warmer and much, much moister than Denise’s room. She was already sweating through her clothes when she said, “Well, here you go. This is all there is to see. Let’s go, please? You could steam rice up here, I swear to God.”

  He ignored her. “Are we alone in this attic?” he asked the empty space.

  As her eyes adjusted to the uneven light, Denise stared around, noting the four chimneys that shot from the floor and went up past the ceiling. Their mortar was crumbled, and their bricks were sagging. A good sneeze would send them scattering, and if it did, maybe the roof would come down too.

  She didn’t like the thought.

  She also didn’t like the squishiness of the plywood under her sandals, or the grimy feeling on every inch of her skin, even between her toes. She didn’t like the fluffy, rotten look of the insulation between the gaps where the plywood didn’t reach. It was a gross shade of yellow, eaten up with what looked like soot or mold. And she really didn’t like the old hatchet she saw lying under one of the tiny attic windows.

  “Um … Terry?” She pointed at it.

  “So?”

  “There’s an ax. In the attic.”

  He gave her a look that said he thought she was an idiot. “How do you think all those people got up on the roofs, when the Storm came? They didn’t all climb out a window and swim.”

  “They hacked their way out? Why would so many people have axes in their attics?”

  “It wasn’t exactly the first hurricane the city ever saw, or the first flooding. Naw.” He shook his head. “People learn. They remember. And then they put an ax up in the attic, for next time the water comes around.”

  She shuddered, feeling worse about the fact that the old bit of hardware wasn’t a potential murder weapon. Somehow, its true purpose was even more horrible. “Look, man. It’s probably not healthy up here,” she warned. “Come on, let’s go back downstairs.”

  Terry ignored her, and asked the attic, “Can you tell us your name?”

  A faint puff, just the barest whiff of roses drifted up Denise’s nostrils. She flinched, tensed, and looked around—but saw nothing. No footprints. No ghosts. Just Terry, holding up his recorder like the Statue of Liberty’s torch.

  He fired a hard look at her. “Did you hear that? I heard something, over there, behind you.”

  “Oh God, do not try to creep me out. I will not appreciate it.”

  He stumbled past her, his foot sticking in a seam between two pieces of plywood. He yanked it out and went to the nearest chimney column—the largest of the four. It was almost twice the size of the rest; Denise couldn’t be certain which fireplace it served, but she thought it must go down to the big one in the parlor.

  He asked, “Do you have a flashlight?”

  “Sure,” she told him. “Let me just pull one out of my butt.”

  “I don’t want your butt-light, and I don’t think …” He peered into a corner full of shadows. “I don’t think I need it. I see something. There’s something back here.”

  “Please tell me it’s not alive. Please tell me it’s never been alive.”

  “Not since it was a tree.”

  She came up behind him, and looked over his shoulder. “What? Oh,” she said, intensely thankful to see something so harmless and ordinary stuffed behind the bricks. “It looks like … a book?”

  He reached in slowly, in case of bugs or bats or anything else that might bite, and pulled out a rectangular brown shape wrapped in layers and layers of crinkly plastic-looking stuff. He unwound the film to reveal a package that was heavier than it appeared.

  Something with a multitude of legs scuttled out from between the wrappings, and Terry shrieked. He dropped the book. It landed with a thud, and stirred up a mighty puff of dust that left both kids coughing and wiping at their eyes. When the debris cleared, they could see that the book was wrapped in a final layer that once might’ve been a garbage bag, or a grocery bag.

  They crouched beside it, unwilling to touch anything until they were certain that all resident insects were gone.

  Denise extended a finger and picked at the sack until the book slipped loose—a thick, dirty volume, tied up with two loops of twine. She rubbed a place where she figured a title ought to be, but turned up nothing but a gritty film. Then she tugged at the strings. They came undone easily, and fell aside.

  “It’s a photo album, or … or something.” Terry poked at the spine, but it wasn’t really a spine. The album wasn’t a properly bound book, but a collection of pages that were held together with three rusty metal rings.

  Denise slipped her thumb under the front cover and flipped it open.

  The topmost page was faded, and the edges were crinkled with age—but the text and illustrations were as bold as if it’d been printed there yesterday.

  “What. In the hell. Is this?” Terry asked, pausing between the words like he might need an inhaler.

  “It’s … a comic book. Not a real published one, I mean …” Denise fiddled with the pages, pushing them forward and backward. “The art doesn’t look printed. It looks like …” She held it up to her face, breathing in old paper and mildew. “It looks like it’s drawn right onto these pages. I’m pretty sure.”

  Terry leaned past her and flipped back to the title page. “Here it is: J. Vaughn. It’s right there. That’s who wrote this, and … there’s nothing about an artist, so I guess he drew it too. I’ve never heard of Lucida Might.”

  “Me either.” A plump bead of sweat rolled down off her nose and splatted right on the sheet, beneath the V in “Vaughn.”

  “Gross.”

  “Well, it’s hot up here. And it’s dark too,” she added, glancing toward one of the windows and seeing the last seam of sunset slipping through the glass. “Let’s take this downstairs and get a better look at it.”

  “And maybe clean it up a little.”

  “Totally.” She reached up to the light bulb string, and yanked it until the bulb turned off.

  Back downstairs in Denise’s bedroom, beneath the ceiling fan light, she pulled a couple of socks and a pajama top out of her dirty clothes pile. Terry made a face about it, but she told him, “They’re cleaner than the book, aren’t they?”

  “They’re clothes.”

  “They’re not underpants. Get a grip.” She tossed him the pajama top, and shoved the socks one over each hand, like gloves. “Now hold up the book while I wipe it down.”

  With a little patience and a whole lot of “ew” noises from Terry, they got the peculiar album as clean as it was going to get. When they were finished, it looked like it’d only been stuck in a box for twenty years—rather than stuffed in an attic for a hundred.

  “It can’t have been up there for a hundred years,” Denise argued when Terry suggested it. “They didn’t even have comics a hundred years ago.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Upon reflection, she wasn’t sure at all. She didn’t know much about comics beyond the holy trinity of Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman—plus whoever Marvel was building up for a summer blockbuster. And if she was honest with herself, or with Terry either, she’d only read a small handful of actual comic books,
mostly at the library. Her knowledge of comics came almost exclusively from TV and movies.

  She cleaned up her objection. “I don’t think they had comics a hundred years ago, but even if they did, they wouldn’t look like this. Look at the clothes Lucida and Doug are wearing. Look at the movie theater behind them, and the cars on the street. This isn’t that old.”

  Terry squinted down at the page with the shadowy man, evaporating into bats and spiders. “I bet you’re right. This wouldn’t survive a hundred years up there. Not even wrapped in plastic. Not even sealed in Tupperware.”

  From downstairs, a loud shout rose up—followed by an even louder, “Yikes!”

  Denise and Terry sat upright. “Mom?” Denise called out, but when no one answered, she scrambled to her feet. Terry followed suit, leaving the book on the floor behind them.

  Denise was out in the hall, and at the top of the stairs in a heartbeat. “Mom, are you okay?”

  “Fine,” came the answer, but it came from Mike. “She’s fine.”

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” Sally groused, as the kids rumbled down the steps and into the living room. “It’s that stupid …” She gestured at the nearest window. “The window. I was going to clean out all the old paint and rethread the rope, so we could open and close it again.” She cradled her right hand in her left, and hissed and breathed and stomped around to take the edge off the pain. “Stupid old single-panes. Stupid old ropes.”

  Mike took her injured hand and checked it out himself. “It’s not that bad. Nothing broken, all right? You’ll just have a great big bruise, in the morning.”

  Sally reclaimed her hand and squeezed it some more, wringing out the dull throb of an injury that was already starting to swell.

  “Windows like this, they’re on a rope-and-pulley system,” Mike explained. “Half of ours are painted shut, and the other half are missing their ropes and weights. But this one.” He indicated the problem child in question. “We wrestled it open and the line snapped, and the window dropped shut on your mom. It could’ve been a lot worse—nothing broken, nothing bent. Only a bruise,” he said again, in case saying so could make it true.

  “All the work it took, all the paint stripping and sanding just to get it open … I never would’ve thought it could fall shut so fast,” Sally mused, still massaging her right hand with the left. “It was strange. It shouldn’t have happened.”

  “Those old nails must’ve been holding it up and they … rusted out, or … something,” Mike said, gesturing at a few loose, round-headed nails rolling around on the ground. “We’ll have to be more careful, that’s all.”

  Denise let out a long, tense sigh, and sat down on the fireplace’s brick-lined bottom. “We’re going to need better health insurance.”

  Terry checked his phone. “And I’m going to need to get home. Dad won’t be back for a while, but I should get supper started.”

  Sally knitted her brows in his general direction. “Seriously?”

  “I’m an excellent cook,” Terry said proudly. “He’s pretty tired when he gets off work, so … I try to have something ready for him.”

  He was politely excusing himself, so Denise helped him out. “I’ll get your bag. You left it in my room.” A moment later she returned, with his backpack, which felt like it was full of rocks. “Here you go. I’ll um … I’ll catch you later.”

  “Let me know what you find out about that comic. Here, actually …” He reached into his bag and pulled a pencil stub that was only an inch or two long, with an eraser nub that was chewed down to nothing. He spied a napkin on the dining room table, and he wrote on it. “Here’s my phone number. Give me yours.”

  She tore the napkin in half and obliged him. “Okay, here you go.”

  “What comic?” Mike wanted to know.

  “It’s … kind of weird. I’ll tell you later.”

  Denise really did mean to tell Mike later, but later, it was time to sit around with Sally and an ice pack, and time for him to fret over his wife like she was a baby bunny. He forgot all about the passing reference to comics, and Denise forgot to fill him in.

  Later, it was alone time upstairs in her bedroom with her phone.

  She had no other Internet access, not yet, and maybe not for a long time. Getting the power working and the plumbing un-leaky was more important than getting Wi-Fi set up. Mike could leech Wi-Fi from a coffeehouse when it was time for him to go back to work, that’s what he said—and Denise could do the same. She had a laughably old laptop and a printer for schoolwork, both of them propped up on a couple of milk crates beside her closet, gathering dust at the moment. But for connection to the outside world that wasn’t reliant on borrowed Wi-Fi … all she had was this out-of-date iPhone that her mom had found on Craigslist. It’d been her sixteenth birthday present.

  It was better than nothing.

  Denise sat cross-legged on her bed, phone held longwise between her fingers. She used her thumbnail to turn off the sound so she wouldn’t hear the text clicks, and went searching for “lucida might and the house of horrors” or anything related to “j. vaughn.”

  Down the Internet rabbit hole she went, and an hour later she’d learned a great deal about Lucida Might and her enigmatic creator.

  For starters, he was allegedly “one of the great golden age masters of comics,” according to Wikipedia. The article had been edited a handful of times, as a couple of guys had gone arguing back and forth over whether he was now “largely forgotten” or merely “little known,” because apparently some people cared a lot about that kind of thing; but the meat of the page appeared to be generally agreed upon.

  JOSEPH P. VAUGHN (born circa 1910?—d. sometime in March, 1955) was an American author and artist, widely considered to have been one of the great golden age masters of comics. Best known for the Lucida Might comics.

  BIOGRAPHY

  Little is known about Vaughn’s personal life, including his exact date of birth. According to some sources, he was a talented finish carpenter who took up the visual arts in the wake of a back injury, and found success in the precode publishing industry. He was active from the late 1930s through the mid-1950s, when the Comics Code Authority regulations effectively ended his career. The remains of his estate were represented by Marty Robbins at All Hands Literary Agency up through 1996, when the agency folded.

  CAREER

  Although Vaughn produced over a dozen short-run comics during his prolific career, he is best known for creating Lucida Might. In the Lucida Might stories, the titular girl hero has many adventures—often in order to rescue her boyfriend, the hapless Doug Finch. With her wits and her fast-talking, fast-shooting skills, she fights everything from mummies in an Egyptian tomb(1) and Eastern Bloc terrorists with nuclear aspirations(2) to mafia dons(3) and corrupt police departments(4).

  Vaughn was a regular guest of science fiction and comic book conventions around the country, although these events were not (at that time) as large and media-centric as they have become in more recent years. By all reports, he was an enthusiastic panelist who enjoyed talking about his best-known heroine to fan audiences.(5)

  LUCIDA MIGHT

  The comic’s tagline, progressive for its time, was “When no man can save the day … when no man can answer the call … when no man can solve the mystery—Lucida Might!” Sometimes described as noir or pulp, the Lucida Might comics were marketed alongside such staples as Weird Worlds, Detective Comics, and Amazing Stories. Initially published by the now-defunct Future Age press, Lucida Might was in print for thirteen years. It was syndicated nationally in dozens of newspapers, and collected into countless digests. It even spawned a short-lived television show (Lucida Might: Girl Adventurer—1951-1952). But when the Comics Code Authority seized control of the industry in 1954, Vaughn disappeared—leaving behind a vast pop culture legacy and many unanswered questions.

  COMICS CODE AFTERMATH

  Some said Vaughn quit writing because of the CCA’s strict regulations, which effectively prohibited
not only gore and violence, but people of color and women in nontraditional roles. Therefore, Lucida Might’s feisty, rule-breaking heroine was no longer welcome on newsstands or in comic shops. [Needs citation] Her rueful refrain of, “Doug won’t save himself!” did not align with the new standards.

  ARCHIVE

  Some of Joe Vaughn’s papers are archived at Tulane University, in New Orleans, where he lived and died. The special collections library lists a collection that includes letters, drafts of comics both published and unpublished, and limited edition digests.

  The article continued, mostly with a list of known Lucida Might comics and a bunch of footnotes, but Denise didn’t see any mention of a “House of Horrors” on the list. The closest thing to a vampire comic was one where Lucida fights a “monstrous cave beast” … and the cave beast in question was only vaguely batlike. There was no Lucida Might vs. Dracula on the list, or anything like that, either.

  Not that the list was guaranteed to be all-inclusive.

  Denise’d had enough teachers yelling at her about citing Wikipedia to think for one hot minute that it was the end-all and be-all of research, but she always considered it a safe place to start—and it did mention the archives at Tulane.

  She left the list and scrolled back up, to the last biographical bit.

  CIRCUMSTANCES OF DEATH

  In 1955 Joe Vaughn was found dead in New Orleans. He’d fallen down a set of attic stairs and broken his neck. Police investigation suggested that the home’s owner had gone missing sometime before, and although Vaughn was found on March 5, he might have been dead for several days by then. The home’s owner was never found.

  A terrible sensation filled the pit of her stomach. The math was just terrible: Terry said somebody famous had died here, and Joe Vaughn had died in a house in New Orleans. What were the odds that it was this house, where she’d found his manuscript? Better than zero.

  She looked toward her bedroom door, but couldn’t see too far into the hall; she didn’t get a peek at the attic door, too tall and too thin, with its stairs inside that only a gymnast could navigate in one piece.