I have told you how a brick was thrown against the pale blue of my childhood bedroom wall, long ago, by an angry hand.
It is time to tell you how the murder happened.
Thrown bricks are seldom innocent. This one was no exception.
You see, there had been a man’s head between the brick and the wall. The dust got there when the brick glanced off his skull, and shattered against the wall.
The unfortunate man’s name was Roland…Marla-of-the-Windmill’s lover. And – “Eric, the murderer, is my brother,” whispered Marla to me. “But Roland was my lover. Do you see him now? Eric thought we would never know, but do you see?”
I did. Crystal and I saw the bones through the wall and our painting. Neatly Roland fit under the stairs. As we gazed, several childhood memories revived – dried blood on the floor upstairs in the hallway; footsteps, rhythmic and heavy, down the hall toward the stairs, then a solemn pause; and, looking through the crawlspace access in the under-stairs closet, we had seen bones. “Probably a skunk,” Dad had said. However plausible it seemed, we did not wholly believe him.
According to the pictures my sister and I were shown as we prayed – and I knew that Marla looked on, seeing the same things - Eric and Roland had both been working at building the house (which was constructed somewhere between 1906 and 1912) and supposed themselves alone in that upstairs room.
It turned out that Roland had been dating Eric’s sister, Marla, on the sly, and Eric, though accepting Roland into his own society, did not think he was good enough for Marla. In a fit of rage, he threw a handy brick, and did Roland in.
Then, appalled at the “accident”, he dragged the body through the empty house to where the stairwell would be – there was naught but a ladder now – and threw it down to the first level. He finished the job with a shovel which had been used on the house’s foundation, by digging a grave in the sand. No one would ever find it – the future stairwell would be built over it, solid and secret.
It is not clear to us what story Eric told about Roland’s disappearance; what is clear is that guilt tortured his soul.
At times, seeming just as random as the brick dust, there appeared in the hallway during my childhood, bloody streaks and drips, half coagulated, at the spot where Eric threw Roland’s body down.
My siblings and I all saw the blood, spotty on the floor to the right of the grate, and running in streaks down the inside of it. Having no better explanation, we assumed a mouse had gotten out of a trap in the pantry (second door to the right), and gone wandaring around the hallway before passing out in some corner. Always the blood was gone in a few hours, and we assumed that Mom had cleaned it up, as she was prone to scrubbing everything on the double. Yet, she claims she never saw the blood, even when we came downstairs to tell her about it, and she ran up on purpose to see. (It only occured to me much later that it must have been an awfully big mouse to lose that amount of blood.)
There was this sign that Eric’s soul was tormented, and there were also the Noises. Particularly in the fall of the year we noticed them, just when the evenings had gotten truly dark. There were footsteps – slow, measured, like someone of medium weight in a meditative mood was ambling from one end of the hall to the other. They proceeded from the south (where my parents’ bedroom was) toward the stairs, and there paused. Sometimes a sigh followed.
Dad always told us these steps were just the way of an old house, and were joists popping and adjusting with the temperature changes and the thrusts of the wind. We bought the story for years, because he knew so much about building and houses and weather changes that it seemed reasonable to believe him. Anyway, the steps had been there during his childhood, too. He had said so.
As my sister and I sat praying before the mural, and saw these things take place in the visions of our minds, we realized that the steps were Eric’s, and that he was not alone in the crime.
To be continued…
Part 8
Part 9
