The Mansion Read online

  He was halfway up the stairs to the third floor when he heard the whip of the belt through the air again, the deep thud of the buckle hitting the step his foot had just left. But this time there was more: the splinter and snap of wood. He couldn’t stop himself from looking back. His father was wrestling the belt buckle out from the tread of the stair; he’d swung it hard enough that it had broken through the step, breaking through the rotten wood. The sight was a terror, because Shawn knew that whatever hopes he had of an easier go of things—if he could get to the Ruth Suite, lock the door, and wait out his father’s drunk—if his father caught him right now, while he was eye deep in beer and with his own blood dripping down his face, well, Simon Eagle was going to lay into Shawn with everything he had.

  And Shawn was under no illusion that if his father started swinging away at him right now, with the beer and the blood, there would be anything to stop the beating until it was long past the point when it would ever matter to Shawn again.

  He ran. To the top step and onto the landing. Through the open doorway and past the Cleveland Suite, the Adirondack Suite, the Clipper Suite. He could hear his father swearing, the voice almost distant now, stuck on the stairs and having to carefully work his way past the tread that he’d broken, held up by his gimpy knee. Shawn was too scared to smile, but the end of the hall was in sight, which meant the Ruth Suite and what little safety it offered him was near.

  He was almost there when his foot went through the floor.

  For a moment he thought he’d been shot. The pain in his thigh was excruciating, and he was facedown on the floor. Only a second later he registered that the sound hadn’t been a bullet but rather the breaking of the floorboard, and the reason he was on his face was that his leg had gone all the way through the rotting floor. And the pain in his thigh?

  “Bastard,” Shawn whispered to himself. He grunted and closed his eyes. “Shit piss asshole,” he said. He was a quiet boy, and this was the first time he’d used those terrible words that he’d heard his father say so many times, albeit with more success, but there were no other words to use. His father would be past the broken step any moment. There were no windows in the hallway, but the roof was out in great sections. Enough for the sun to come in during the day, and enough to let in water when it rained. Enough to cause the rot in the floors, and enough for the light from the moon to shine down and show Shawn that the burning pain in his leg was from a splinter of wood the size of his thumb pushing through his skin. He could feel blood spilling down past his knee and dripping off the foot that dangled through the floor and hung in space over the second-floor corridor.

  “I’m coming for you, you little shit bastard! There ain’t anywhere for you to go anymore. I’m going to catch you, and when I do, I’m going to beat your head in like a biscuit. You hit me with my own belt? Let’s see what happens when I give you a little taste of it, you pissant dick squeeze. I’m going to need stitches from where you lashed me one, oh,” he laughed, a clownish, manic howl, “but you ain’t going to need stitches by the time I’m done with you, Shawn. You ain’t going to need anything ever again! I’m going to bury your little body in the woods. Dig out the dirt and roll you in there, shovel it over. Let you rot in the ground. The worms will feed on you just fine.”

  Shawn gritted his teeth. He couldn’t stop himself from letting out a moan. He put his palms on the floor and tried pushing, but he couldn’t move his leg. He was stuck like his father said he’d stuck a Vietcong lady back when he was eighteen and in the army, in the last days of the war, sticking his bayonet right through the whore’s crotch, because Simon Eagle knew that she’d take his dollars and then tell the bad guys how to kill themselves an American.

  Shawn suddenly felt both cold and hot at the same time, and he wondered what would happen if he just closed his eyes and tried to go to sleep. Maybe this would all turn out to be a dream, and when he woke up he’d be in his bed, his mother would be asleep in her bed, and his father would have wrapped the truck around a rock somewhere on the road between here and Whiskey Run.

  But the roaring yell of his father let him know that such a dream was out of the question. And it meant that Simon was past the step.

  The hole in the floor was big enough both for his foot and for him to see where his thigh was impaled, but small enough that it was still a bit of an awkward squeeze for him to get his arm through. He reached below where the splinter was lodged in his leg and pushed at his thigh. He couldn’t stop himself from screaming, but he managed to slide his thigh off the sharp piece of wood and then dragged his leg up and out of the hole. It was hell to get to his feet, and his leg barely took the weight, but he could limp.

  He kept going down the hall toward the Ruth Suite, leaving the hole in the floor behind him.

  Step, drag. Step, drag. A cruel mimicry of his father’s own steps. But Shawn kept going. He was so near to safety—even of the momentary kind—that he couldn’t stop, so near to where he had left the door of the Ruth Suite open, a welcome respite.

  The door was closed.

  “Bastard shit piss asshole,” Shawn said.

  He knew he’d left it open. He’d brought his baseball cards up with him—a measly collection of doubles or triples that his friends at school had handed down to him—and when he’d gone back to the cottage, he’d been sure to leave the door open to the hallway.

  Eagle Mansion was playing tricks on him. It was his great-grandfather, his grandfather, reaching out to make sure that Shawn learned how to respect his father.

  It couldn’t be locked, could it?

  He turned the doorknob, slowly, gently, remembering the feel of the doorknob falling off in his hand on the second-floor landing. The knob turned noiselessly, but when Shawn pressed on the door, it didn’t move. The room was locked. From the inside.

  He turned and took a staggering step to the suite across the hall, but the door there was warped solid into the frame.

  Step, drag.

  “Nowhere to run, boy? How do you like that, you little shit bastard?”

  In another time, the hall would have been beautiful in the moonlight. Some of the holes in the roof had come from storms blowing off shingles and from rot, and some of the holes had come from falling branches or from the building falling into disrepair after the repeal of Prohibition, but the result was an uneven patchwork of gaps and holes, some larger and some smaller. It meant that the moonlight silvered through like so much magic. But this wasn’t another time, and Shawn, his back now against the end of the hall, could see his father limping toward him. Simon let the belt buckle swing back and forth now, a pendulum of pain waiting for him.

  Step, drag. Step, drag.

  Shawn started laughing. What else was there to do?

  Simon stopped, and in the dim light, Shawn could see his father grimace, as if the sound of Shawn’s laughter was causing him physical pain. Of course, that only made him laugh harder.

  “Oh, you think this is funny, you shit bastard? Let’s see if you’re still laughing a minute from now.”

  Step, drag.

  Shawn pressed his hand against the wound in his thigh. It burned, but something in the pain made him feel brave. “Shit donkey,” he said tentatively.

  “What?” Simon stopped again. The anger in his face had turned to confusion. “What did you say?”

  And braver still. “I called you a shit donkey,” Shawn said, his voice clear and calling down the open hallway. “Bastard shit piss asshole!”

  “Who the hell do—”

  The words came to him. “I hate you. You’re nothing but a stupid drunk. I’m not afraid of you,” he said to his father, though as he spoke, he realized he’d never been more scared in his young life.

  Simon paused, and then he let the belt flick back and forth, back and forth, and Shawn knew that it was all over. His father was going to catch him, and his father was going to beat him. He was going to swing the belt over and over again, battering Shawn until he was just a sack of blood and gr
ound bone. He wondered if his mother would be able to recognize him at the funeral, if there would come a point when his father would stop brutalizing him, or if Simon would quit smashing him with the belt buckle only when he had turned to soup.

  Step, drag.

  And then it happened. His father, so focused on Shawn, didn’t see the hole in the floor.

  The moonlight turned into something syrupy and gold, a flicker of clouds across the sky. There was a tearing sound, wood shrieking under his father’s weight, and Shawn watched as Simon pitched forward, his leg breaking through the same hole that Shawn had made. For a moment, Shawn thought that would be it, that his father would push himself out the same way Shawn had, and then it would be good night, Shawn, are you ready for one of Daddy’s tune-ups? But as Simon’s adult-sized body hit the rotted out floorboards, the wood cracked and splintered beneath him. A larger hole opened. First, Simon’s good leg went through, and as the bulk of his weight hit the floor, the rest of the floor gave way.

  The look on Simon’s face as he began to fall was not one of fear or even surprise, but of pure unadulterated rage. Absolute hatred.

  It gave Shawn perfect clarity: he realized that if it wasn’t this time, sooner or later, his father would kill him and his mother. Someday. He’d do it someday, as easily as squashing a bug. Do it because he could, because for all Simon’s grandiose dreams of bringing Eagle Mansion back to its former glory, his father knew he was a small man trapped in a small life. Someday he’d realize that nothing was going to change that, and that would be the day he killed Shawn and his mother.

  Fortunately, for Shawn, that day wasn’t today. Snow and rain, carpenter ants, neglect. Rot and ruin and cut corners in the initial construction. All together, it meant that Simon broke through the floorboards in the hallway of the third floor, plunged ten feet to the hallway of the second floor, and broke through that floor as well, falling another six feet onto a partially collapsed craps table in the casino.

  On the way down, Simon tore a nine-inch gash in his arm that went as deep as bone, knocked out two teeth, and hit his head hard enough to knock him out for an hour and leave him with blinding headaches for nearly three months. Last but not least—Shawn’s favorite of all the injuries his father sustained that night, the one that finished the job on his father’s knee—a broken kneecap, a torn ACL and MCL, and ligament damage, what the doctor called a “catastrophic injury.”

  But Simon’s appointment with the doctor was still a few days off, because Shawn didn’t even stop to look down through the hole in the floor. He thought his father might be dead—he hoped that his father was dead—but he was afraid that maybe his father was fine. That maybe his father, an iron man who ran red hot, was picking himself up off the floor and heading back to the stairs, belt in hand, to finish the job he had started. So Shawn limped to the hole in the hallway, and carefully, gingerly skirted it, staying as close to the wall as possible. Once he was past it, he pulled his bleeding leg with him down the stairs, jumped painfully over the missing riser, and lit out the door and across the weed-choked lawn into the groundskeeper’s cottage to get his mom.

  He didn’t remember most of what happened after that. He didn’t remember putting on clothes and shoes and helping his mom out to the truck. He didn’t remember that she passed out as soon as she was in the passenger seat. He didn’t remember the long, two-footed, lurching drive into Whiskey Run or the way his shoe filled with blood. He didn’t remember the hot fear that he would round a bend in the road and the scratched-up headlights would reveal his father waiting for him, standing in the middle of the road, still swinging that belt. He didn’t remember parking in front of Dr. Learner’s house and leaning on the horn until the doctor came out. He didn’t remember the ride from Whiskey Run to Syracuse with his mother in the volunteer ambulance, the stitches he himself got, or refusing to leave her room during the surgery to repair the bone around her eye, or even being carried out screaming by two orderlies at the surgeon’s orders.

  There was a blank spot there, even now, more than twenty-five years later. He didn’t remember his mother, on their third day in the hospital, calling somebody—who? Shawn realized he never found out—in Whiskey Run to go out and check to see if his father was alive. He didn’t remember how he and his mother got back to Whiskey Run, or why she didn’t finally listen to Aunt Beverly’s pleas to leave, but he remembered the relative peace they had for the next forty-two days, because by the time Simon was found, lying where he had fallen through not one but two ceilings, Shawn’s father was near death. Another day would have done it, Dr. Learner said, maybe even another few hours. Blood loss and exposure. Dehydration. An infection in the gash in his arm. The concussion. The knee, ballooned and rot-black. And of course, on top of all that, Simon Eagle had the shakes. DTs. No booze in his system might have been the worst of it all.

  “The man’s a wonder,” Dr. Learner said to Shawn’s mother. He’d come out to the groundskeeper’s cottage at the end of the week to check on Shawn’s and his mother’s stitches, to look at how the incision was healing on his mother’s face. “The amount he drinks you’d think he’d be dead already, but the word around town is that you always get your money’s worth out of Simon Eagle. Drunkard or not, he’ll outwork any two other men. But with his drinking? I’d think that stopping cold like that could have been enough to kill him on its own. Forget the injuries. Vomiting up until there’s nothing but cruel yellow coming out, and pardon my language, but shitting a river and then still going until it’s the same from both ends? It’s a wonder he could survive going without alcohol. Add to that what he got from falling through the floor, let alone lying there in such a state for so long.”

  Dr. Learner was working in the curtained-off “room” of the groundskeeper’s cottage so that Shawn’s mother had some privacy while he examined her, but even though Shawn was supposed to be attending to his homework, he could hear every word, and he was pretty sure that Dr. Learner meant for him to, because the good doctor made no attempt to lower his voice.

  “Some might say that had you waited another day or two to call in your concerns about your husband, or if you had never bothered, you might have been better off, Mrs. Eagle.”

  His mother’s reply was too soft for him to hear, but Dr. Learner’s voice stayed at its normal volume. “So he ain’t drinking now. Do you think that’s going to last once he’s out of the hospital and back home? I’ve tended to you with my mouth shut for all these years, dear, but one of these days he isn’t going to leave anything for me to fix. You might not want to hear it, but it would have been a good thing for you if your son had finished the job. He’s a brave one, Shawn is, but when you start something, you have to finish the job.”

  Shawn gasped.

  Standing in the husk of the groundskeeper’s cottage more than twenty-five years later, he could have sworn that he had just heard the doctor’s words echoing through the air: “finish the job.” But he knew it couldn’t be true. Dr. Learner had died when Shawn was in college.

  And by then, Shawn had finished the job.

  Shawn took a step toward the door. The outside beckoned. Out there, in the late-afternoon sun, he could imagine a different history.

  That had all been so long ago. A memory he hadn’t wanted to come back to, even if the aftermath, those forty-two days when his father was in the hospital, were the closest thing to peace he’d had as a child. The funny thing was that despite Dr. Learner’s skepticism that Simon would stay off alcohol, when Shawn’s father came home from the hospital, he did keep dry. For a long time, Simon didn’t have another drink. He was on crutches until the spring. That had been a desperate winter, with money even tighter than normal, and snowdrifts pushing almost against the eaves of the first story. But Simon stayed sober, through all of it. He stayed sober for almost two years. He didn’t touch another drop of alcohol, didn’t raise his hand, didn’t so much as raise his voice.

  For nearly two years Simon Eagle was sober. Twenty-three mont
hs he was sober, to be exact.

  But nothing lasts forever.

  TWENTY-TWO

  * * *

  RUN

  Emily still hadn’t gotten used to the idea of not working, but she figured she was just going to have to deal with it. She was going to be at loose ends for as long as they were in Whiskey Run. Billy had a purpose: he was here to work with Nellie, to figure out how to turn her into Shawn’s next few hundred billion dollars. If it worked out, she and Billy would get to go along for the ride. And Billy, being Billy, was going to be working odd hours. It had been years since she’d seen him truly consumed by a project, but when he was, he forgot about niceties such as meals and showers and clocks. Bedtime became an abstraction to him. By the end of a month he’d be completely divorced from anything approaching a normal schedule. It was like he and whatever computer thing he was working on were having some sort of private conversation that was so darn interesting he just couldn’t stand to go to sleep. Interesting to Billy, at least. She cared about his work because she cared about him, but she was secretly a bit of a Luddite. Sure, she liked her new running gear and had been happy to spend money on things like new skis and camping equipment, good restaurants and vacations, fancy coffee and the occasional concert, when she had actual money to spend, but when it came to computers and tech stuff, well, she was willing to pretend to pay attention.

  But with Billy working on Nellie and keeping his own mad-scientist schedule, she was going to be left to her own devices. If she wasn’t going to go crazy locked up in this ridiculous mansion all winter, she was going to have to keep herself busy. So this first morning after sleeping in the Nest she’d gotten up early, before the sun. Not that getting up before the sun was a particularly impressive feat on the second day of November. Billy was already up and working.