Welcome to the Spookshow: (Book 2) Read online

  Contents

  title page

  August 1994

  1

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  gratis

  other works

  copyright

  August 17, 1994

  MAMA WAS GOING through the horrors. Again.

  It happened once a season, if not more, and there was nothing to do about it other than to wait it out. Billie knew better than to get in the way when the bad spells came on. Let her scream or throw things or cry or retreat to her bed for days. Billie had learnt this the hard way and had the scars to prove it. Run for cover and let the horrors run their course.

  She wasn’t fast enough this time. Snatched fast by the wrist, Billie was dragged back to the table in the front parlour.

  “Do it again,” Mama said, pushing the girl into the chair. “Run the cards.”

  Billie shook her head. “I don’t want to.”

  Mama’s hands shook as she pushed the deck forward. Her eyes were puffy from all the crying and her voice hoarse from shrieking. “Sybil Culpepper, do as I say. I need to be sure.”

  Billie quaked and kept shaking her head. “Please, Mama.”

  “Do it!” Mama’s fist came down hard on the table. The deck jumped, causing the top cards to spill down.

  The girl wiped her eyes and reached for the cards with the strange pictures on them. She cut the deck and laid down the first card. The three of swords. Same as last time.

  Her mother’s lips pursed at the reveal. “Don’t stop. The next one.”

  Billie hated when mama made her do the cards. She hated them. Or the cards hated her. They never gave up good tells. Not that Billie understood what the pictures on the cards meant but mama always reacted badly. It was certain to ignite the horrors in her. She turned over the next card.

  Her mother’s hand began to tremble again. She nodded at the girl to go on. “Quickly now.”

  Mary Agnes was her mother’s name but most people in town called her the spooky lady. Or the crazy lady. Never to her face, of course. Never when they came to the house to have mama run their cards or read the sludgy mess of leaves from tea. And they all came, sooner or later, sneaking up the steps, worried the neighbours would see. Mostly the women in town but some of the men too, with their urgent questions or desperate worries. Sometimes Billie would sneak down to the bottom step to listen but the questions were always the same. Will he ask me to marry him? Is she cheating on me? Will I get the money? Will she quit drinking? Should I leave him?

  In town, these same desperate souls would barely utter a word to mama, a hair shy of openly shunning her. They talked about Mary Agnes behind her back, whispering nasty things about the spooky lady, and by proxy, about Billie too.

  “That poor little thing”, they would condescend. Or “The apple didn’t fall far with that child, did it?”

  Billie hated them all for being so two-faced but she hated mama more for letting it get this way. Why couldn’t she just act normal? Or get a regular job, like at the grocery store or the insurance office near the taxidermist shop? Put the cards away and stop being the spooky lady. How hard could it be?

  She suspected that Mary Agnes secretly enjoyed the fear she provoked in the townies. They gossipped about her because they were afraid of her, simple as that.

  “What are you waiting for?” Mama snapped.

  Billie flinched. Each card she laid down made mama shake even more, the tears glistening her eyes again. Billie put her hand on the deck but hesitated before laying down the last card. “Is it bad, mama?” she asked.

  “Depends on the last throw. One way or the other. Do it.”

  It was going to end badly, Billie knew. The cards had run exactly the same as last time and her mother’s quaking was rattling the wobbly table. She slid the last card from the deck, wondering if she was going to get hit this time, and laid it down at the bottom of the cross-shaped formation.

  Mary Agnes ejected backwards as if pushed, knocking the chair to the floor. The whimper breaking her voice escalated into a wail as she backed into the window sill. Billie scattered the cards, flinging them across the table to dispel whatever it was they had foretold.

  Mama shrieked at her to stop. The wild look in her eyes told Billie that the horrors had taken over completely and she wondered which hiding place she would use this time to escape the craziness that was sure to come. Would it be the attic or the dusty crawl-space under the floor?

  The shrieking stopped without warning and the sudden silence frightened Billie more. Her mother held her breath and rushed to the window. Pushing back the faded curtain, she peered outside. This is what she said: “Oh God.”

  From outside came the sound of a car rolling up the driveway, the familiar crunch of tires over the gravel. Who was it?

  Mary Agnes whipped about and, fast as a rattlesnake strike, snatched Billie by the arm. “Run, Billie. Hide.”

  “Who is it, mama?”

  “Do as I say!” she snarled. “Hide in the place where I can never find you. Stay there. And don’t make a sound.”

  “Mama—”

  “Do it!” She flung the girl away and returned to the window.

  Billie ran from the parlour. The hiding spot in the attic was upstairs, accessed by tugging the string on the trapdoor in the ceiling. The crawl-space was closer. She ran for it.

  Closing the basement door behind her, Billie slid back the thin panel that covered the opening to the crawl-space. A cramped tunnel under the floor, used to store old mason jars and broken appliances that Mary Agnes refused to part with. Billie squirmed into the tight space and slid the panel closed after her. It was dark and it smelled bad. She tried not to think about the spiders or the earwigs that crawled about this darkened space.

  She heard the thunder on the porch steps, then the lightning of the front door being kicked open. Mary Agnes screaming and the sound of something crashing to the floor and reverberating through the floor joists over Billie’s head. And then the snarl of a man’s voice.

  Billie knew nothing of her father. The man had been absent most of her life and her mother never spoke of him. But she knew it was him stomping and bellowing in the kitchen above her. There was more crashing and banging and then it ended with a heavy thud that rained dust from the floorboards over Billie’s head. Everything went still and her mother stopped screaming and then the male voice called out her name.

  Billie, it bellowed. Billie, where are you?

  Billie made herself very still as she listened to the footfalls stomp through the house, the voice hollering her name. She almost screamed when something touched her ankle. Clenching her jaw to keep her mouth shut, she kicked at it but it coiled up around her thin bone ankle and squeezed. So cold it hurt. Unable to turn around and see what it was, she pictured a snake wrapping itself around her leg but no cold-blooded snake was ever this cold. Whatever it was that was in the crawl space with her, it too spoke her name but soft
, like a whisper. Billie clamped her hands over her mouth to stay silent, wondering if it would be better to take her chances with the stranger tearing through the house.

  The bellowing above ceased. Billie heard the scraping sound of something being dragged across the kitchen, then the clap of the screen door and something thudding down the porch steps. An engine rumbled to life, followed by the scattershot sound of gravel spraying as the car sped from the driveway.

  Bashing out the thin panel, she scurried from the crawlspace but the grip coiled around her ankle pulled her back. This time she screamed and kicked out like she was on fire. It released her and she tumbled out onto the basement steps and peered into the narrow space. There was nothing there.

  “Mama!”

  No answer came. Barrelling into the kitchen, her shoes crunched over shards of broken china. The checkerboard tiles of the floor were a collage of smashed dishes and shattered glass. She didn’t want to look at the blood but the puddle of dark red pulled her eyes like a magnet. It didn’t look real, there was so much of it. Flies were already buzzing over it.

  The blood smeared across the floor like someone had mopped with it, from the sink to the front door. Leap-frogging the stuff to avoid stepping in it, she followed the trail out the front door where the blood tracked over the porch and down the wooden steps. The blood stopped there.

  She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t want to go back inside the house. Billie was afraid that she would be blamed, that this was somehow her fault. So she ran. A third of a mile through the little town all the way to her aunt’s house. The police were called and Billie was settled onto the sofa, her aunt smoothing her hair back and cooing to her that everything was going to be okay.

  Billie curled into a ball while the grown-ups fretted and paced back and forth. Her aunt Maggie could not sit still, impatient for answers as she straightened this object and fussed with that. The policemen came but they just seemed to stand around and tell her aunt to calm down. Billie’s ankle stung and, remembering the snake she felt, checked to see if it had bitten her. What she found her bruises that looked like fingerprints on her skin and bloodied scratch marks, as if someone had clawed her sharp with their nails. Before the next morning, the scratches would become infected and her missing mother was never seen again.

  1

  THE MARK ON her ankle never went away. Even now at the age of twenty-nine, it was still there. White scar tissue left behind after an infection so bad that the doctor at the time feared it was gangrene.

  Sometimes it still itched, a phantom pain from so long ago. Pedalling her way through the streets of Hamilton, she felt it as she pushed the bike through traffic. Exertion often brought it on and Billie exerted herself now, late as usual.

  Fighting rush hour traffic on King Street was a losing battle. Too many cars and too many thoughtless drivers hostile to anyone on a bicycle. Swinging right, she cut through an alley to get on Wellington and try her luck on Cannon Street.

  Jen's party had started half an hour ago and Billie had promised her oldest friend that she would help out running the shindig so that Jen was free to do the meet-and-greets. How pissed was Jen likely to be? Billie didn't even have a good excuse for her tardiness. She had biked over to Gage Park to soak up the first hot day of the summer and had simply lost track of time. She had lost track of everything actually. Another foggy spell had come over her sitting in the grass, when the outside world simply faded away. Lost time. She would snap out of the fog, wondering where the hours had gone.

  An excuse wouldn't work, she realized as she chased down Cannon Street. Jen knew of her foggy spells. And Jen hated them, having witnessed more than her fair share.

  “You need to focus,” Jen had scolded more than once. Like everyone else in her life. “You can't just tune everything out, Billie. You need to stay in the moment.”

  Focus, or the lack of it, had been a constant companion all of her life. A recurring theme on every school report card until a learning disability had been recognized. Even then, the cause of the disability had never been diagnosed with any accuracy. Billie had gotten used to being written off as flighty or wool-headed so many times that she had even given up on herself. It was a different story hammering down the streets on her bike. The speed and muscle and heightened senses cleared away the fog like a strong wind and brought clarity to the fore. If only she could ride her bike forever, everything would be fine.

  All journeys come to an end and Billie's ended before a brightly lit storefront on James Street. Retro patio lights strung over the entrance gave the shop a festive ambiance that matched the music streaming from the open door and the people milling on the sidewalk. A party in progress. Billie leaned her bike against the parking meter and slid the lock through the spokes.

  “Billie!” came a voice at her back. “Where have you been?”

  Billie snapped the lock shut and turned just in time to catch the tight embrace of a young woman in a floral print dress.

  “Sorry, Jen.” Billie leaned back from the hug and took in the storefront. “I got caught up. Did I miss anything?”

  “Nah. People just started showing up. Let's get you a drink.”

  Letting her friend lead her inside where the music was louder and the air stuffier, Billie felt her angst over being late fade away. Jen had a charming way of disarming tension and dismissing anxieties among anyone in her presence and for that Billie was grateful. Aside from being the constant peacemaker, Jen Eckler was Billie's oldest friend. Their shared history stretched all the way back to the hormonal sewer of small town high school and had thrived ever since. To an outside observer, they seemed an unlikely pair. Where Jen's smile was bubbly with enough warmth to melt igloos, Billie's smile was a lopsided affair often misinterpreted as a sneer. This did, however, lend itself to an uncanny Elvis impersonation that Jen, if plied with enough cocktails, never failed to cajole out of her old friend.

  “The shop looks great.” Billie said, scanning her eyes over the interior. The Doll House was long and narrow with racks of dresses flanking one wall and a larger area in the back. “You were right about the lighting. Makes a world of difference. Intimate.”

  “Do you think?” Jen plucked a beer from the tin tub of ice near the counter. “I keep going back and forth on it. Thanks again for your help.”

  “I didn't do much more than slap paint.” Billie clinked her bottle against Jen's champagne flute. She had donated more than a few hours of labour to help Jen turn an old shoe store into her new dress shop. After months of hard work and stress, the shop finally opened last week. A soft launch, to work out the kinks before tonight's official opening party.

  “That was plenty and I totally appreciate it.” Jen raised her glass and sipped. “You have a dress coming to you. I'll fit it for you too.”

  “Thanks.” Billie's smile went lopsided as they both knew that she would never come in for a fitting. Her friend's dresses, both the vintage kind and the newer ones she designed herself, were gorgeous and colourful and eye-catching. All of which was the antithesis of how Billie dressed.

  Billie surveyed the shop with its pink walls and black accents. Slapping pink paint on the walls, she thought Jen was crazy for going with the colour but as usual her friend had pulled it altogether in her arch style. Swanky and fun, with a wee bit of edge to it. “So,” Billie said, “how does it feel to be an official business owner?”

  “Exhausting.” Jen plunked down on the church pew set against the wall. “I practically live here now. And Adam keeps complaining that I’m never home.”

  Billie took a seat beside her friend. “Learning curve. I'm sure it'll get easier when you work out the bugs. You hire anybody yet?”

  “I can't afford to.” The bubbly demeanor leaked out of Jen's smile as she contemplated the future. “It'll just be me for a while. Unless I want to borrow more money from dad. But I can't do that.”

  “Can't or won't?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Is he here?” B
illie asked.

  Jen craned her neck to scan the crowd. “Yeah. He's around somewhere. Probably in the back, fixing something.”

  “He never stops, does he?” Billie stood and sauntered for the door behind the counter. “I’m gonna go say hi.”

  “Okay, but don’t disappear back there,” Jen waved her flute at her. “Tammy and Kaitlin will be here soon.”

  Pushing through a drape of beads hanging over the door, Billie stepped into the chaos of the backroom. A clutter of hanging clothes and boxes of material narrowed the usable space to little more than a path to the end where the back door was propped open. Stepping out into the night air, she found a middle-aged man with a prominent gut wielding a cordless drill.

  “Hey Mr. Eckler,” she beamed. “The foreman blew the whistle hours ago. Time to punch out.”

  Mr. Eckler removed the galvanized screws clamped in his teeth and gave her a quick hug. “Hello Billie. It’s good to see you.”

  “Put the work away, huh. Come join the party.”

  “Oh,” he shrugged, nodding at the metal grate over the back window. “I just needed to get this grate secured properly. Can’t be too careful, you know, now that the shop is up and running.”

  “Jen did a great job on the place. You must be proud of her for finally getting it up and running.”

  “I am,” he smiled at her. “I am no matter what. I just hope she’s ready for what’s coming. Running a business is hard.”

  “I wouldn’t know.” Billie leaned against the rotting wooden fence. “But she has you to help her. Advise her and stuff.”

  “True, but only so far. At some point, you gotta sink or swim on your own. Otherwise what’s the point? Hold that end up for me, would you?”

  Billie held the grate in place while Mr. Eckler drilled the screws into place. “Tell me how you’re doing,” he said. “You swimming or sinking?”

  She shrugged. She hated questions like this. As innocuous as the inquiry was, she still interpreted to mean ‘what are you doing with your life’. Groan. “Neither, really. Doing the backfloat. Drifting around.”

  “Drifting? You still working at the bar?”