1 The Bank of the River Read online

  The Bank of the River

  By Michael Richan

  By the author:

  The Bank of the River

  A Haunting in Oregon

  Ghosts of Our Fathers

  Copyright 2013 by Michael Richan

  All Rights Reserved.

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  www.michaelrichan.com

  ISNB-13: 978-1490425207 / ISNB-10: 1490425209

  ASIN: B00DC1RTCQ

  Published by Dantull (1479263)

  For Max and Thomas

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter One

  Steven Hall slowed down his Accord as he approached the trailer court. It was dark and rainy and a little difficult to make out directions. He noticed reflective numbers on stakes near the ground by each trailer. Seven, eight…he was headed to 56, the trailer of John and Debra Peterson. He turned a tight corner, and no less than four signs encouraged him to slow down (“Children play here!”). He tapped the brakes and let the car slowly idle forward over the first of many speed bumps.

  The time on the car’s display read 7:20. He was too early. He didn’t want to get there before 7:30, the time Debra had said she would meet him. Seven-thirty was after John left for work, an evening shift. Originally Steven had wanted to talk to John. Earlier that day Steven had called him, asking if he would meet with him to discuss John’s father. John had hung up on him, but Debra had called him back later to say she would talk with him – but only after John had left for work.

  Surely it wouldn’t take ten minutes to drive through this trailer court, but as the car inched along past empty lot 15 he was beginning to wonder. Up ahead he had to turn either left or right, but he couldn’t make out which direction the numbers ran. He chose right and drifted until the next reflective number appeared. If he had to backtrack, no problem – better to be a little late in this case than too early.

  John’s father used to own the house where Steven now lived. Fifteen years earlier, he committed suicide in the house; since that time, the house had gone through a succession of owners, ending with Steven. Steven bought the house two months ago. He was fully aware of its history (no thanks to the agent) and fully discounted the idea that it was, as a previous owner had described it, unlivable.

  Just after he moved in, Steven received notice from his company that their office was shutting down and relocating overseas. Steven was too highly paid to be offered a transfer – overseas, all costs would be cut, especially labor. So he found himself in a new house with a moderate severance, time on his hands, and a desire to relax and enjoy a sabbatical before entering the next phase of his life.

  But the relaxation never happened. The first few weeks he was in the house, he wrote off most of the occurrences (he hated that word, it made things sound supernatural, but he didn’t know what else to call them) as normal adjustments to a new house. Every house makes noises. This house, built in the 1950s, creaked and popped throughout the day as the temperature changed. Plumbing could make banging noises for a variety of reasons. There were sounds from the neighborhood that he wasn’t accustomed to yet. None of this was unusual, and Steven adjusted to the idiosyncrasies of the place. But recently there had been some occurrences (ugh) that he hadn’t been able to adjust to.

  The worst was last night, and it had spurred him to make phone calls this morning to try and find out if there was more about the house than he knew from the research he had conducted before he bought it.

  From the first night he’d lived there, Steven had endured the sound of someone knocking in the middle of the night. When it happened, it was loud enough to wake him up, and for a moment he’d think he must have dreamt it. But then it would come again: four distant raps, muffled, as though coming from the front door of the house. The first time it happened he went to the door, expecting someone to be there. When he found no one, he inspected the house thoroughly and went back to bed. When it happened the next night, he began to suspect neighbor kids, so he set up a webcam and let it run for several days. It showed nothing. The knocking continued every night. It always woke him up, even if he tried to sleep through it. Four knocks, twice in a row, separated by about ten seconds.

  A week ago he had the old galvanized pipes in the house replaced with new plastic ones. The plumber assured him this would resolve the problem. Galvanized pipes slowly corrode inside, and his were sixty years old, constricting the water flow and likely creating a banging sound now and again. Eight thousand dollars and four days later he went to bed hoping he’d solved the problem, but at three a.m. the knocking came again. Steven had, for weeks, convinced himself that whatever was causing the knockings was something structural about the house, and that if he could find the problem and fix it, it would stop. But now he was running out of options. And, being honest with himself, the knocking had never really sounded like pipes. It wasn’t a banging sound, it was a knocking. It sounded like a human hand knocking on a door when someone is announcing their presence or wants to be let in.

  He passed trailer 32. Maybe I should just rent a trailer and leave the house, he thought. A rent payment in addition to a mortgage payment doesn’t make sense when you’re unemployed. Steven’s house had quickly gone underwater after he closed, so he knew if he tried to list it he wouldn’t get what he owed. And it would be a hard sell. Its history was the reason he’d been able to buy it so cheaply in the first place. For some reason, people don’t like living in houses that have experienced death, or worse, suicide. This seemed completely irrational to Steven at the time he bought the place. Now he was beginning to wonder.

  Steven was always rational, circumspect, skeptical. It was the thing that had, at first, attracted but eventually repelled his wife. They divorced seven years ago in what had seemed to Steven a completely ridiculous way; suddenly, with a barrage of complaints from left field that left him bewildered, and no willingness to explore solutions. Jason, his son, was now in college learning to be levelheaded like his dad. He was a busy student, and Steven saw him only occasionally when Jason could fit him in between his studies, part-time job, and friends. He knew Jason loved him, but at twenty he was enjoying life on his own with friends and roommates, and his priorities were his own. He often missed appointments they made, just forgetting about them. Steven felt that leaving him with his independence for a while was the best thing.

  He was now deep in the trailer park. The trailers back here were newer than the ones up front. At the entrance the trailers looked fenced in with little patches of grass, as though they were trying to be houses with permanence. Back here they looked ready to leave on a moment’s notice. Trailer 48 on the left, and it was 7:28. He was fine.

  Debra had seemed friendly on the phone, the opposite of John. She told him that John had received similar calls over the years and had developed a method for handling them. Sometimes he saved the “fuck off” until after he hung up on them, sometimes not. But she always felt sorry for them and had called a few of them back, as she had done with Steven. Her voice seemed full of pit
y. He quickly agreed to meet her that night, and she warned him not to come before John left for work.

  Number 56. Seven-thirty, right on the dot. No car next to the trailer, but the lights were on. He pulled his car into the short driveway.

  He couldn’t be sure, but as he stepped out of the car he thought he saw people peeking through the blinds from neighboring trailers. This is like living in a fishbowl, he thought. He walked to the door and knocked. There was nothing outside except a few children’s toys scattered around the cement slab that extended from the trailer to form a small porch.

  This has to work, he thought. I don’t know what else I can try. She has to have some answers.

  Chapter Two

  “Debra?”

  “Hi, come in,” Debra said, stepping back from the door. Steven stepped up twice into the trailer and was assaulted by the smell of cat urine.

  “Well, have a seat over there,” she said, motioning to a small couch that was half occupied by Walmart bags. Steven noticed how crammed the place was – stacks of papers, boxes, storage tubs. The living room held the couch and a television which was tuned to Jeopardy. Debra pulled a chair out from under a kitchen table about six feet away from Steven and sat. She lit a cigarette.

  “I hope you don’t mind if I smoke,” she said. “It is my house.”

  “Of course. No, I don’t mind,” Steven said. “Thank you for calling me back.”

  “Well, as I said, John just doesn’t want to have anything to do with it anymore. He’s tired of it, and I understand. It’s bad enough to lose your father let alone a suicide. Not to mention the shame. But I spent some time in that house, so I have some idea.” She picked up a remote from the table and turned off the television.

  Steven swallowed. The cat piss smell stuck in his throat. The cigarette smoke was preferable. “What did you hear there?” he asked.

  “Hear? I never heard anything. It’s what I felt. We’d go over to help Ben, John’s dad. He was getting worse and worse, dying slowly. He had a nurse come in and visit him each day, but John was real close with him, and wanted to visit every day too. At first I would go with him, but after a while I stayed home. It got to be too much.”

  “I imagine watching him die would be difficult,” Steven said.

  “Well, yes, it was, but that wasn’t the reason. I liked Ben. And I wanted to help. But every time I’d walk in that house, especially those last few weeks, it felt miserable. Not because Ben was dying,” she paused. “It was something else. In the house with him. You could feel it in the air, like a thickness. Very dark, very evil.”

  Steven cleared his throat and adjusted a little on the couch. He was never comfortable when people brought up irrational things like the word evil, or the word God, or anything supernatural, and he was a little self-conscious of how he appeared to people when they did. He was sure they could see his reaction, his discomfort, and this bothered him. He noticed a few other things in the trailer: a cross over the door, little pictures of Jesus here and there. Religious tracts on the table next to the couch. His comfort level was falling rapidly.

  “Oh, you don’t believe, I take it?” Debra asked.

  “It’s that obvious?”

  “Like I sprayed you with vinegar,” she replied.

  “I guess not. I mean, I respect that you do, and —”

  “Yeah,” she cut him off. “You don’t gotta do that. You don’t believe, that’s fine, I don’t care. I didn’t used to believe either, so I know exactly how you feel.”

  “Something changed your mind?”

  “Yeah,” she snorted. “That house.” She stood and crushed her cigarette. “Look, I’m gonna tell you the same things I told the other two who came to see John about that place. And I can’t pretend it was something it wasn’t. There’s something seriously wrong with that house. And I don’t mean it’s built wrong, or the electric don’t work right. It’s an evil in the air inside, you can feel it. And it’s still there. I felt it even after Ben died. If there’s anything that qualifies in your book as evil, you need to apply it to that house.” She walked to the refrigerator. “You want something to drink? I got lemonade or beers.”

  “A beer would be nice.”

  Debra pulled two beers, popped one for Steven, and handed him the can. She sat back down and started another cigarette. Steven took a sip and asked, “You never saw anything? Heard anything, like knocking?”

  “Never heard any knocking. But I didn’t need to. The sound of Ben gasping for air was enough to send chills down your spine, make you realize how awful dying can be. All you had to do was look at him to know something was wrong. The doctors couldn’t figure it out. They tested him for everything, but in the end they said he just lost his will to live, that’s what was causing him to deteriorate, to kill himself,” she scoffed.

  “You don’t think that was true?” Steven asked.

  “Mister, he took a spoon from the kitchen drawer and gouged out his eyes before he killed himself. Bet the real estate agent didn’t tell you about that,” she said, flicking an ash into the tray beside her. “Does that sound like depression to you?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe psychosis,” Steven replied.

  “Or maybe there was something he didn’t want to see anymore,” she said, becoming a little irritated. “Something that drove him to blind himself, so he wouldn’t have to see it. And when that didn’t end it, he took a steak knife from the same drawer and cut through his own throat. And I’ll tell you something. Ben wasn’t crazy at the end. At that point he knew what he was doing. No dementia, no weird behavior, nothing like that. You could tell. The longer I stayed in that house, visiting him, the more I understood it. It didn’t surprise me that he did it.”

  “Honestly, that seems a little crazy,” Steven said. “I mean, I understand how the doctors would think that.”

  This approach didn’t seem to sit very well with Debra. She stood again, this time a little more quickly. “Listen, I’ve told you. I’ve warned you, that’s what I felt I should do when you called, ‘cause I know what that house is like and I’m sympathetic, even if John isn’t. So there, I’ve done right by you. Whether or not you believe me is up to you, but I’ve done my part, told you what I thought you should know. So I guess we’re done now.” She moved toward the door.

  Steven stood, a little surprised at the sudden end to the discussion. He regretted that his rationality clashed enough with her superstition that it was angering her, but he didn’t know any other way to approach it, and it seemed she didn’t have much else to offer. He sat the beer down on the table next to hers and followed her. She opened the door for him, and he stepped through.

  “Look, if I’ve offended you, I’m very…”

  “I’m not offended, I’m just not very patient. What are you gonna do?” she asked him as he stepped down to the cement slab.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he replied.

  She sighed. “Listen, do you have a priest, or a pastor?”

  “No,” he replied. “I don’t go to church.”

  “That’s too bad,” she said, grabbing the door handle. “It’s like they said in the movie. You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

  Then she shut the door.

  Chapter Three

  Thanks to Seattle traffic, Steven arrived home an hour later. During the drive he had plenty of time to think about what Debra had to say, which seemed damn little. It was hard to analyze something you didn’t take seriously. He’d been hoping she might have once heard her father-in-law comment on the house, something that might have given him a direction to pursue, but instead all he got was “evil.” Evil was for the irrational, the superstitious, and the simple minded. Steven was none of these things, and evil held little meaning for him.

  Still, she didn’t seem like a crackpot, the Jesus pictures aside. Most people who believed in religion weren’t crackpots, Steven felt, just misguided. And he had no doubt she sincerely believed what she was saying. He just felt there must b
e more simple explanations. Evil was too handy a catch-all for the unexplained. It was just as likely the knockings were hallucinations on his part, and seeing a doctor to rule out a brain tumor might be a step he’d have to consider.

  He pulled into his driveway and walked to the basement door. Once he threw the deadbolt and pushed it open he felt a stab of concern. The familiar buzzing of the house alarm didn’t go off – he was sure he had armed it before he left. He walked to the keypad where he would normally punch in a code to disarm the alarm, and it was dead – no readout. Perhaps the electricity was off? No, lights were on next door. Light was shining down the stairwell that led up to the kitchen, from a light he always left on when away.

  Steven felt his heart rate pick up. Someone is, or was, in the house, he thought. Somehow they shut down the alarm system. I’ve probably been robbed...or am being robbed. He contemplated quietly searching the house, but felt unarmed – what would he do if he ran into someone? Considering his options, he decided to announce himself. He walked back over to the basement door, opened it, and slammed it shut loud enough to wake the neighbors.

  In response, there were footsteps above him, moving rapidly. Fuck, they’re upstairs right now, he thought. Steven reached for his cell phone and dialed 911.

  -

  “Nothing,” said the second cop, returning from downstairs to the kitchen where Steven and the first cop stood. The first cop was filling out some paperwork. He spoke while he wrote.

  “No forced entry. Are you sure you set the alarm? Sometimes people forget, more often than you realize.”

  “I’m almost positive I set it,” Steven replied.

  “You could have the alarm company run a test, see if everything is working properly,” the cop replied.

  “But the footsteps? I heard someone up here,” Steven said.