Chapter 3 - The Boy In The Walls.

The weirdness at Brian’s new house continued unabated over the next week or so. In fact, the odd happenings might have actually increased in frequency. And the new homeowner was at his wit's end trying to figure out what to do.

Perhaps the most annoying thing was that Brian found himself constantly losing things that he’d just set down. After that first missing beer, it seemed like the problem of disappearing items escalated daily. Tools, clothing, food, even some of Brian's personal toiletries, had gone missing, most of the time turning up again a few hours or days later in a totally different spot. The worst depredation seem to be focused on Brian's writing implements – all of which completely disappeared the day after the beer incident - and none of which had yet been found. It was one thing to misplace your keys occasionally, or maybe forget where you put your pen down, but now he was missing scores of things on a daily basis. Brian didn’t think he could possibly be THAT absent minded, could he?

But worse than the fact that things kept disappearing, was the WAY they were disappearing. Half of the time, the missing items would disappear virtually under Brian’s very nose, vanishing mere seconds after he set them down. He would turn his back or go out of the room for just a minute and, *poof*, the thing he had been using seconds before wouldn’t be where he thought he’d left it. Since Brian was all alone on the property, he didn't have anyone else to blame all the misplaced items on. There was nobody to even yell at when he got frustrated by the losses. The entire thing was frustrating, infuriating, illogical, and completely inexplicable.  

Except, of course, if the explanation was that Brian was going stark, raving, mad - which, at that point, seemed to be a distinct possibility. In fact, Brian was starting to seriously think he might need to go see a doctor. Maybe he was suffering from some physical illness, like early onset Alzheimer’s or something? Or, perhaps, all those drugs he’d done over the years had finally caused measurable brain damage? Whatever it was, he was close to losing it for real. At least then he could say he’d misplaced his sanity along with all the shit he kept losing around the house.  

On top of the problem with his apparently faulty memory and missing personal possessions, the strange noises in the house were still waking him up at odd times. It was starting to really freak him out. Every single night, as soon as he’d retreat to his bedroom, the damned rattling and knocking and scratching and creaking would start up. He tried to ignore it, but that was getting more and more difficult. Sometimes the noises were so loud they actually woke him up, even from a deep sleep. And other times he found himself imagining he heard actual footsteps in the downstairs hallways. But if he got up and went down the stairs to investigate, there was never anything there. He’d even taken to searching the nooks and crannies of the house for those fucking ‘droppings’ Honeycutt had mentioned, determined to find the damn pests that were invading his house and his sleep. But he never did find even one single damned pellet of poo. If it WAS rodents or some other furry critters, they were curiously neat and tidy ones.

Which was just another reason why the situation was starting to totally freak Brian out, since the seemingly imaginary noises seemed to buttress his fears about his failing sanity. If he was both hearing things AND his memory was failing, shit was definitely getting serious. That visit to the doctor seemed like it was going to be needed sooner rather than later.

Luckily for his questionable sanity, Brian was interrupted in the midst of his latest rant about his holey memory - after spending ten minutes looking for a box cutter he could have sworn he’d just put down on a pile of boxes in the still full garage - by the well-timed arrival of guests.

While Brian watched, a big silver minivan pulled into the long drive, coming to a stop right in front of where he was standing in front of the open garage doors. Michael waved to Brian from the passenger seat and immediately hopped out as soon as the car came to a stop, trotting over to give Brian a hello hug. Lindsey, who was a little slower because she had to actually make sure the car was in park and the engine turned off, soon joined in with the hugging, explaining that they’d decided to come for a visit and had brought the kids. Michael rationalized that Gus could use the time running around in the fresh country air and Lindsey could get a tour of the place at the same time.

Brian was happy to take a break from the daunting task of going through yet another box of junk . . . which he couldn’t open anyway until he found the missing box cutter. He happily helped Lindsey get Gus out of his car seat, enveloping the boy in a big hug and getting the same in return as the little arms wound around his neck. Meanwhile, Michael unearthed his daughter from where her car seat was strapped in on the far side of the minivan, toting the infant’s carrier around and holding it up so Brian could leave a kiss on the rosebud-pink cheek of the two-month old. Then, with appropriate Kinney Fanfare, he ushered them all around to the front of the house so he could commence with the tour.

Lindsey was appropriately impressed with the huge old house. She gushed over almost everything despite the fact that it was mostly just a barren, empty hull at this point. Brian started off the tour in the living room, explaining all the renovations he was planning, including taking out certain walls to create a more open floor plan, upgrading the windows, the light fixtures, and the kitchen appliances, and explaining about how he was considering redoing the plumbing pretty much wholesale to bring everything up to code. Everybody raved over Brian’s ideas. Lindsey offered a couple of suggestions that Brian didn’t think were bad, although he doubted he’d adopt her proposed decorating scheme, which sounded way too lesbianic and cutesy for his manly tastes.

While they were traipsing slowly around the now totally cleared out main floor, almost-three-year-old Gus was busy zooming around and around the empty rooms. Brian hadn’t kept any of the old furniture in the living room, dining room or study areas. It was all sitting in the driveway waiting for the local Goodwill to come pick it up at the end of the week - well, at least the stuff that wasn’t so broken or torn up that he’d just thrown it in the dumpster. But, since there was nothing much there for Gus to hurt, the parents just let the little boy go, only checking in on him once in awhile as he dashed from room to room, pretending to be an airplane with his arms spread wide like wings.

They had just finished up the tour of the main floor and were about to head upstairs so Brian could show them the second floor, when it became obvious that JR needed a diaper change. Lindsey offered to go take care of it, laughing at the way both men’s noses had wrinkled up at the stench as they pointedly stepped away from the smelly bundle of baby. Brian directed her to the upstairs guest bath, which was the only one other than his own master bath that was operational. Meanwhile, Michael and Brian went to round up Gus, who had disappeared a few minutes before.

“Hey, Brian. I suspect your son is probably ready for a snack by now. I stuck some crackers and juice in my bag before we left. Why don’t you see if he’s interested and I’ll meet you back in the kitchen when I’m done with Stinkypants here,” Lindsey yelled back over her shoulder.

Brian thought that was an excellent idea. However he turned his nose up at the tiny package of crackers with some awful, processed cheese spread on them that he found when he dug through Lindsey’s bag. He knew he could do better, especially since he’d just made a trip to the big grocery store in the city the day before. He headed off to the fridge and easily located the low-sugar sodas that he’d stowed in the back in preparation for his son’s visits, and put one of those, along with a bowl filled with some baby carrots, on the retro 70s-style formica-topped kitchen table.

The table was one of the few items he’d found in the basement that had been in good condition and which he’d decided he was keeping. It was kitchey but hip, and would actually fit in quite well with the decorating scheme he had in mind. So, after spending the prior afternoon cleaning it thoroughly, he’d lugged it up the stairs to the kitchen, along with the matching set of four chairs. He was rather pleased with how it had turned out when it was all cleaned.

Brian added a couple of beers to the spread for himself and Mikey, who came in right then with Gus in tow. Gus cheered at the proffered snack - he loved carrots and would eat them by the handful - and promptly dug in. While they were sitting there, chatting, sipping their beer, watching Gus eat and waiting for Lindsey, Michael was occupied scrutinizing his old friend.

“You still don’t look like you’re getting much sleep, Brian,” Michael eventually voiced his concerns when they’d come to a pause in the conversation.

“No. I’m not. I’m still hearing all those weird noises every night,” Brian confessed with a resigned grimace. “I have no idea what’s causing it, though. I even looked around for those droppings Honeycutt warned me about, but I haven’t found anything, so I’m at a total loss here. All I know is, it’s getting really old, really fast.”

“That sucks, Brian. Have you called the pest control guy yet? It sounds to me like you need professional help here. Soon. Before you’re so exhausted you hurt yourself or something.”

“Nah. I haven’t finished clearing out all the shit from the basement, so I doubt they could find the pests to kill them even if I did call somebody. It’s a fucking maze down there.” Brian ran his hand over his head, forgetting in his exasperation that he was messing up his carefully styled hair in the process. “I’m working at getting all that crap out of there as fast as I can. There’s a metric fuck ton of junk in those boxes, though, so it's going to take me a while yet to go through it all.”

“Well, I’m glad it’s you and not me,” Michael returned, trying to lighten the mood with a little teasing. “So much for all that good, clean, country living, right? Sure you don’t want to move back to the decadent city with all us heathens?”

That did make Brian laugh finally. “If things around here keep up the way they have been, I might just have to, Mikey. Between not getting any sleep and all my shit constantly disappearing all the time, I’m about ready to chuck it all.”

“What do you mean, all your shit disappearing?” Michael asked with concern.

“Just that. All my stuff keeps disappearing. Tools, pens, you name it. Anything I leave out seems to vanish as soon as I turn my back. I look around for half a minute and it’s gone. It’s driving me crazy. Sometimes, whatever it was turns up again later, usually in the last place I would have thought to look for it, but never where I remember putting it,” Brian explained, his tone evidencing all the frustration he was feeling.

Michael, half-joking, offered his opinion. “It sounds to me like you’ve got ghosts, Brian, not rats.”

Brian laughed along with his friend at that absurdity, tilting the neck of his beer to clink it against Michael’s in a sort of toast to the man’s hilarious joke.

“It’s prolly the boy that lives in the walls,” Gus piped up from where he was sitting, almost forgotten by the adults, while he’d been quietly munching away at his snack.

This apparent non sequitur cut short the grownups’ laughter.

“What was that, Gus?” Brian questioned him.

“It’s prolly the boy that lives in the walls,” Gus repeated himself, but the adults continued to stare at him dubiously, so the boy hurried on to explain further. “I seed a boy when I was pwaying airplane ‘afore. He was pretty. He had yellow hair and he smiled at me. I axed him what his name was but he din’ say nothin’. But I ‘members what Mommy said ‘bout being p’lite, so’s I nin’trduced myself and told him I was Gus and I lived wif my mommies but I was here to see my Daddy t’day. Then I axed him where he lived and the boy pointed to the wall,” Gus mimicked the action he’d witnessed by pointing to the back corner of the kitchen, beyond the row of cabinets, where there was a huge, old, oak baking hutch standing in the corner in front of a seemingly solid stretch of wall.

“You saw a boy? In here?” Gus nodded and stuck another carrot in his mouth. Brian looked around the kitchen again, but nothing looked different or at all out of place, so he returned his attention to his son. “Where did this boy go, Gus?”

“Dunno. That’s when Mommy calleded me, so I had to go find her,” Gus answered, seeming completely unconcerned about the disappearing boy he’d supposedly made friends with. “He must’ve gone back into the wall where he lives.”

Brian and Michael just sat there, blinking at each other, dumbfounded and really creeped out, but not knowing what to say. Brian hesitated to ask Gus anything more, not wanting to scare the child. They both felt goose bumps popping up all along their spines, though, and Michael could have sworn the temperature in the kitchen suddenly dropped about five degrees. All the laughter and teasing of just a few minutes before was completely forgotten.

Before they could get too freaked out, however, Lindsey arrived, walking into the kitchen with a gurgling, happy, cooing baby in her arms, all smiles and homey reassurance, making Brian feel suddenly silly for his unfounded moment of superstition. Gus was probably just imagining things, the way all kids did, right? He reminded himself that he didn't believe in ghosts. That there had to be some other, logical, explanation for what Gus thought he’d seen. There HAD to be.

Lindsey asked Gus if he was done with his snack and when the boy said yes, they all trooped upstairs together for the final bit of the official tour. Neither man mentioned to Lindsey what Gus had said. Brian did make a point of keeping hold of his son’s hand for the rest of the visit, not wanting the boy to wander out of his sight again.

Lindsey continued to rave about the house and Brian's renovation plans. She was even more excited when Brian took Gus into the empty guest room right next to his and told the boy that was going to be his room for when he came over to stay the night. Gus squealed so loudly at that announcement that Brian was almost worried about permanent hearing loss. Brian only got the little imp to quiet down by threatening him that, if he didn't stop yelling and bouncing around, Brian wouldn’t let Gus help decorate the room. Gus quickly clamped both his hands over his mouth, but even then you could hear the occasional squeak of happiness and he was still bouncing just a bit on his toes. Brian just tousled the excited boy’s hair and didn't call him out on it. He was almost as excited as his son was to finally have a place for Gus to stay so they could start having regular overnight visits.

After that, Lindsey announced that it was time for her to head out. She wanted to get home in time to start dinner for Mel, who'd had a trial that day and would no doubt be exhausted. Brian walked them all back down to the car and helped Gus into his car seat. At the last minute, though, Michael decided to stay a bit longer and help Brian for a few hours with his basement sorting. Brian was more than happy to get the help and happily agreed to drive his friend back into town later.

The two men waved goodbye to Lindsey & Gus as the car rattled down the gravel driveway before turning back towards the waiting mess behind them in the garage. It was a daunting task. Even after Brian had been working at it for a few weeks, there were still so many boxes and piles of crap that it could conceivably take them months to wade through it all. Brian sighed, clapped his friend on the shoulder and waded back into the fray. Michael followed on his heels, prepared to do battle at his best friend’s side.

While they worked, they began to talk some more, and of course they ended up back on the topic of Brian's house woes. Michael was convinced, after Gus’ earlier disclosure, that Brian had a ghost in his house. Brian scoffed, but since he wasn't able to definitively refute a lot of what Michael was saying, and didn't have any better explanation, there really wasn't any way to stifle his friend’s flights of fantasy.

“Maybe we could ask Ma’s priest to come out here and perform an exorcism or something,” Michael suggested, taking Brian-the-Atheist by surprise.

“How about, we don't, Mikey,” Brian scoffed with a derisive laugh. “The LAST thing I need is some mangey, hypocritical, old gasbag coming out here, drenching everything with liters of Holy Water and then asking me for a substantial donation for his church afterwards. Besides, he’d probably refuse to come as soon as he found out he was supposed to be blessing a gay man’s house.”

“Yeah, you say that now, Brian, but what if your ghost moves on from just taking your stuff and starts doing really freaky stuff. Like making dangerous shit fly through the air at your head or causing the walls to bleed or something like that?” Michael suggested with all due seriousness. “You have no idea how bad it could get, you know. I mean, maybe you should do some research on the history of this place, just to see if there's something really bad that happened here. That way you'd know what kind of danger you're in. Like, if it’s built on an Indian Burial Ground, or there were witch trials held here, or maybe a mass murder or something like that.”

Brian huffed a disbelieving snort at his over-imaginative friend. “I  think you've watched far too many bad horror movies, Mikey.”

The two of them looked at each other silently for a full minute . . . and then they both broke out laughing.

“You might be right about that, Brian,” Michael agreed, clapping the taller man on the shoulder and turning back to the latest box he was excavating. “I guess I should stick to superhero movies instead, huh? I was really starting to freak myself out there.”

They laughed the moment off and went back to their unboxing after that, both of them avoiding the topic for the next two hours. The help, as well as the company, seemed to make the work go a lot faster. They made a serious dent in the pile of crap, toting out several piles of paper, bags of cans, and quantities of other stuff that could all be recycled, plus a lot of trash destined to end up in the local landfill. They even got through one large box of what appeared to be lost family memorabilia. Nothing in the box appeared to be of any real monetary value, though, so Brian simply added the majority of that stuff to his Goodwill piles. The only items he decided to keep for himself were an old, stoneware crock pot and a collection of about twenty-five wooden spoons of various sizes and shapes that looked antique and which he thought might be useful in the kitchen.

They mutually decided to call it a day before starting into the next box. Brian was tired and Michael was more than ready to head to his own home. He might have shut up about the ghost stuff, but the big, old, creepy house still got to him and he was more than ready to get the hell out of there before it got dark. He just wished he wasn't leaving his friend there all alone again.

“You sure you don't want to stay in town with me and Ben tonight?” Michael asked as they wiped the dust off their hands and shoved a few boxes around so as to make a clear aisle to the door. “You know you're always welcome to our guest room. Even just for a night or two, so you can get some sleep without being woken up by crazy noises all night.”

“Thanks, but no thanks, Mikey. I've got too much to do around here to be hanging out with you for the next two days. I figure I'll just keep plowing through this stuff as fast as possible and hope that once it's all cleared out, I can get an exterminator out here who will know what’s what. I seriously think that everything will sort itself out as soon as I can get started on the real renovations.”

“Well, just keep it in mind, okay?” Michael insisted, causing Brian to smile down at his friend. “Who knows,” Michael added with a teasing glint to his eye. “Maybe you're right. Maybe, once you've gone through all this junk down here, you'll find the cursed object that's summoning the evil poltergeist and, after you get rid of it, your haunting will finally cease.”

“Fuck you, Mikey,” Brian shook his head and playfully punched his delusional friend in the shoulder. “I'm going to have to have a serious talk with your husband and see if we can't limit your movie watching time until you come back down to reality with the rest of us rational folks. No more horror flicks for you. Only porn and maybe the occasional classic western, but definitely no more scary shit, you got it?”

Michael laughed and smiled back at Brian, but was happy enough to be heading to his own, definitely NOT haunted home for the evening. He climbed over the last box blocking the way out of the garage and started walking around to the front door, leaving Brian to close the garage doors behind them. Brian turned to survey the scene one last time, thinking through where he wanted to start the next day and trying to calculate how much he could reasonably get done by the end of the week.

Not enough, he thought with a quiet sigh. Not nearly enough.

He reached up to grab the handle of the big overhead garage door, but then paused right as his eye landed on something glinting in the slanting light coming in from the lowering sun.

There, sitting on top of the pile of boxes right next to where he and Michael had been working, was the box cutter he’d misplaced earlier in the day. The one he'd been looking for when Lindz and Mikey had arrived. The box cutter that definitely hadn’t been there before.

Brian stepped backwards, yanked the door closed and hurried off after Michael, thinking that maybe he'd change his mind and stay in town that night after all.