Title page

Copyright © 2018 by Brandon Massey

Dark Corner Publishing Edition: April 2018

Dark Corner Publishing

Atlanta, GA

Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

Nana/ Brandon Massey – 1st edition

“Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.”

-- Dorothy Parker

Prologue

As soon as Lily Worthy arrived home that Wednesday night after Bible study, she knew something was wrong.

A crisp October breeze followed her as she parked her Ford Escape beneath the carport and walked into her two-story Victorian. The big house was older than even her seventy-five years, and its frame swayed and creaked when subjected to the slightest pressure. Each footstep registered a squeak in the wooden floorboards; closed doors easily shook the walls.

Lily heard strange noises when she entered her home. The sounds came from upstairs. A frown creasing her oak-brown face, she placed her keys, purse, and leather Bible case on the small glass table beside the doorway. Her strong hands, shaped from thirty-four years working on the assembly line at the local Ford factory in Hapeville, were wracked with arthritis, but at that moment, they did not tremble.

Lily lived alone, much to the dismay of her granddaughter. Lord knows, her southwest Atlanta neighborhood had seen its share of trouble over the years. Packs of unruly youth breaking into the modest homes of the very people who had sustained the community for generations. Just last year, while she was out visiting the sick and shut-in, someone had kicked down her front door and helped himself to her television. Lily had stubbornly refused her granddaughter’s pleas to move into her house in the northern suburbs. If all the good people abandoned the neighborhood and left it to rot, how could things ever get any better?

She cocked her head, listening. Age had not diminished her hearing. She heard a tapping noise, faint but deliberate, and it was definitely coming from above.

But the front door had been locked.

She shuffled down the main hallway, the polished floorboards groaning underneath her black leather boots.

Her house was clean as a model home, thanks to a housekeeper employed by her granddaughter, and Lily’s own meticulous ways. Photos of family and friends adorned the walls, and the rooms were full of old but comfortable furniture, and lots of thriving plants. It was an enormous house for a widower. She and her husband had bought the property almost fifty years ago, in anticipation of filling it with children and happiness. Life had altered the fulfillment of those dreams. Only one year into their marriage, her husband had died in a factory accident, crushed underneath an errant plate of sheet metal. She never remarried, but through fostering, had found plenty of children to share the home with her and fill the rooms with joy.

She saw nothing out of place. Her television still stood on its stand. When the burglar had broken in last year, he’d raged like a hurricane through every inch of the house.

She entered her bedroom. It was undisturbed, the queen-size bed made.

From a Payless shoebox on the top shelf of the closet, she withdrew the Smith & Wesson, snub-nosed .38. The gun, a gift from her long-deceased big brother, was already loaded.

She was stubborn about leaving her neighborhood, but she was no fool.

She went to the back door, off the mud room. It was locked, too. If there was truly an intruder in her home, how had he gotten inside?

Nevertheless, something was going on upstairs.

Although her intuition was strong, it wasn’t strong enough for her to phone the police. What would she tell them? I hear a tapping noise upstairs, please come quick! She could imagine the lazy response from the 911 operator. Eh, another lonely old lady frightened of innocent noises, probably just one of her hundred cats wandering around the house. As Lily aged, she detected a bias against the elderly, a mockery even, as if people would rather forget they existed than deal seriously with them, perhaps because few wanted to accept that someday, they too, would grow old.

Lily went to the bottom of the staircase. Usually, it was dark up there, as she rarely ventured upstairs. The narrow steps, nineteen of them, were bad on her knees, and many years ago, she had reorganized the house to place all of her essential items on the first level.

But she saw a light glowing up there, coming from one of the several rooms on the second floor.

“Is anyone up there?” Lily asked. Her voice was clear and resonant as a bell, the voice of a woman who had conducted many a child through Sunday school for decades.

No one answered, but she heard a soft tap, like fingernails rapping against a wall. Tap . . . tap . . . tap . . . tap . . . tap.

She found the light switch at the bottom of the staircase and flicked it on. Harsh yellow light flooded the stairwell. She squinted, her bespectacled eyes taking a moment to adjust to the sudden brightness.

No one came out of hiding. The staircase was empty.

Sometimes, she wished she had accepted her granddaughter’s offer to find a dog for her. Not only would a dog have been pleasant company, it would have been a welcome protector at a time such as this, would have barked and sounded an alarm to ward away intruders. But Lily was in and out of the house so often each day, involved in so many church and volunteer activities, that she’d worried a dog would get lonely staying home alone.

Wind swirled around the house, sifting through the eaves.

Tap . . . tap . . . tap . . . tap . . . tap . . .

“Hey, anybody up there?” she asked.

Only the soft raps answered.

She gathered her dress in her hand, and, keeping her grip on the revolver, headed upstairs, carefully navigating the creaky wooden steps. Once, as a much younger woman, she had fallen down those stairs while carrying a basket of laundry, and the mishap had landed her in the emergency room with a broken ankle. At her advanced age, ascending or descending such a steep staircase could result in far worse than a stay in the hospital—one more critical reason why she avoided it.

Careful, Lily . . .

She reached the second floor without incident, a light layer of perspiration coating her brow.

As she had suspected, the sound came from the bedroom opposite the head of the staircase. The door was ajar. Inside, the ceiling lamp burned, and the long window on the other side of the room was wide open, the exterior screen lifted, too. The tapping sound she’d heard came from the plastic tips of the cords that controlled the window blinds: the cool night breeze batted them against the wall.

Chuckling at herself, Lily lowered the gun. She was behaving like the jumpy old spinster she despised, spooked in her own house by innocent noises.

She realized why the window was open, too. Claudia, her housekeeper, had visited earlier that day, and she tended to throw open all of the windows while she cleaned, to air out the house. The girl had forgotten to shut this one and douse the light. She was good at her job, but a tad forgetful at times.

Lily tucked the gun away in the front pocket of her wool jacket. She stuck her head out the window. It overlooked the spacious back yard, and was a good fifteen feet above the ground. A lacebark elm tree towered back there, but the tree needed to be trimmed back a bit. Its wingspan came too close to the house, and besides causing possible damage during a storm, could have made it easy for a raccoon or some other agile creature to leap from a branch and right inside through the open window.

She lowered the screen back into place. Then, she placed both of her hands on the wooden edge of the sash, and pushed down.

The window lowered with a squeak and a tremble, but she got it down all the way. Her fingers throbbed from the effort. She rubbed her hands together, her stiff knuckles crackling like dry tinder.

And she noticed, in the glass, the reflection of someone standing behind her.

Lily spun, a gasp caught in her throat.

The room was empty. She was alone.

Her pulse raced, blood pounding in her skull. Had her mind, stimulated by hours of challenging reading each day, finally begun to falter in spite of her best efforts? The prospect of dementia frightened her far more than the idea of a stranger in her home.

She slipped out the gun again, held it in a shaky grip.

“Who’s there?” she said. Her voice was no longer as clear as she’d hoped, and held a discernible note of fear.

A floorboard creaked out in the hallway; a sound it might have made underneath someone’s weight.

An ordinary home invader would not have employed such stealth tactics. These lost kids, she knew, cared nothing for subtlety. They knocked down your door and stomped like the Gestapo through your home, overturning furniture and ransacking through your possessions without any fear of reprisal. That was what had also happened last summer to Cecil Taylor, the kind fellow who’d once lived across the street. He’d been sitting in his recliner watching Family Feud when two teenagers had broken in, pistol-whipped him, stolen jewelry and his TV and computer, drank the liquor in his cabinet, and urinated on his carpet. Cecil had been hospitalized for three weeks and moved to a nursing home afterward.

Whatever was happening here in her house was something different. It was either a wild flight of imagination—which she didn’t accept—or something else.

Lord, give me the strength, Lily prayed. Do not let my strength fail me now.

She tightened her hold on the gun. She crept forward. Entering the hallway, she swung to the left, where she thought the noise had come from.

The corridor was illuminated with light streaming from the bedroom behind her, and from the fixture burning above the nearby staircase. But the hallway was empty.

She released a deep sigh, lowered the gun.

She needed to take her old, tired tail to bed. She could spend all night wandering through the house, chasing shadows and phantom noises. She would call her granddaughter, chat for a few minutes (she wouldn’t tell the girl about any of this, of course), read a bit of Scripture, and let herself drift off to sleep. Tomorrow morning, she’d call Claudia and remind her to close the windows next time she visited, too, since her housekeeper’s oversight had launched this foolish misadventure.

She doubled back and switched off the light in the bedroom. As she approached the staircase again, she felt something slip around her ankles. She looked down and saw a slender, pinkish appendage coiling like a rope around her leather boots.

A scream escaped her.

It was a fleshy thing, alive, and the word snake came to her panicked mind, but somehow she knew it was not really a snake. It was something else strange and terrifying.

The thing drew taut around her boots, lifting her off her feet. She lost her balance and plunged toward the staircase. The gun spun out of her grasp. Arms flailing, she tried to break her fall, but her head slammed against the hard edge of a step. Red-hot pain seared through her, trailed by an inky blackness that leaked into the edges of her vision.

Please, Lord, not yet, not now . . . I’ve got so much work left to do . . .

She was dimly aware that the tentacle still held her, looped around her boots. Floorboards shifted above her. She felt a presence near, and had the lurid vision of a monster out of a nightmare, something inhuman that possessed a giant tongue that it was using to suspend her at the top of the stairs.

Blood trickled into her eyes and mouth. Using her weakened arms, she attempted to push against the steps and lift herself up. She managed to raise her body about an inch. Trembling, she twisted her head around, blades of pain chopping down her spine.

She saw who was standing at the top of the stairs.

Her blood-stained lips formed the word: “You . . .”

And then she was released and was falling down the long staircase, tumbling into perfect darkness.

Part One

1

Troy was the first to meet the woman.

On Saturday, November 1st, the funeral service for Lily Worthy commenced at eleven o’clock in the morning, at Lily’s longtime church home, Riverside United Methodist Church, in East Point, Georgia. Hundreds of people attended the ceremony. Over the years, Lily had touched the lives of many, and her untimely death left an indelible scar on the hearts of those who had loved her so much.

She fell down the stairs in her own damned house, Troy thought. He sat in the front pew of the sanctuary with his family, as the twelve-member choir launched into a soaring rendition of Amazing Grace. Lily had been seventy-five, but in excellent health. Her tragic accident was so unexpected that it was difficult to believe, like something out of a sad dream from which you soon hoped to awaken.

He knew his wife, Monica, was tortured by the same thoughts.

Troy had kept his right arm wrapped around Monica for most of the service. Monica trembled, sobs shaking her slim frame. He stroked her dark, curly hair, but said little. Nothing he could say would make Monica feel any better just then; holding her was enough.

For years, he had seen Monica trying to convince her grandmother to move out of the old house. Her pleas had grown desperate last summer, when someone had broken into Lily’s home and stolen valuables. But Lily was nothing if not stubborn. When her neighbor, Ruby Brown, had called them early in the morning last week and could barely speak through her sobs, Troy had expected the worst.

Went to see Lily so we could take our morning’ walk . . . I had a key to her house, you see, since we been neighbors so long . . . and she was layin’ at the bottom of the stairs and it looked like she musta been there all night . . .

Although crime had been a concern in Lily’s neighborhood, foul play had never entered the picture. There had been no signs of forced entry, no evidence of a robbery, and thus, no police investigation had been opened. The conclusion, supported by an autopsy, was that Lily had gone upstairs for some reason and on the way down she’d lost her balance, tumbled down the steps, and snapped her neck. Accidental falls at home accounted for thousands of deaths each year, and many of the victims were elderly.

Troy buried his face in his wife’s hair as the choir’s singing echoed throughout the large, high-ceilinged sanctuary. Hot tears slid from his eyes. Lily had disliked him when he’d first begun to romance her cherished granddaughter during their residencies at Emory, considered him a silver-tongued lothario using his burgeoning medical career to entice women, but over time, he and the tough old lady had brokered a truce. He believed giving her two adorable great-grandkids had helped in that regard.

His mother, Pat, sat on his left. She was keeping his kids under control: seven-year-old Lexi and five-year-old Junior. Both of his children were in elementary school but still too young to really understand what was going on, and he questioned the wisdom of bringing them to the service, but Monica had insisted they pay tribute to the woman they knew as “Gran Nana.” He was in no position to deny Monica anything she requested. Lily was the only family she had ever known.

Lily had taken in Monica’s birth mother, a teenager at the time. After living for only two weeks under Lily’s strict rule, the girl had come home and announced she was pregnant, the father unknown. She stayed around long enough to give birth to Monica, signed her over to Lily’s care, and cut out of sight. No one had seen her since.

Growing up without knowledge of her biological parents would have been an insurmountable obstacle for many children, but Monica had the iron-willed Lily in her corner. She had blossomed under Lily’s loving but stern parenting style. Zoomed through school with stellar grades and graduated as valedictorian of her high school. Finished summa cum laude at Spelman. Went to Duke Medical School. Came back home to ATL and did her residency in pediatrics at Emory, where Troy was also completing his residency in radiology. They had been together ever since.

“She was all I had,” Monica said softly. She dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief, but couldn’t stanch the steady trickle of tears.

Troy took his handkerchief and gently brushed it across her damp cheeks. He hated to see her in pain, wished there was something he could do to alleviate her anguish, but this was one of those rare times when even his considerable powers of persuasion came up short. There was nothing to do but to allow grief to burn through her.

“She was all I had,” Monica said again, in a broken voice.

“You have us, baby,” Troy said, and squeezed her, but he might as well have been speaking to Monica from the bottom of the sea.

The choir was singing at a feverish pitch:

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see . . .

The sanctuary’s acoustics amplified the voices of the gifted choir. The three-piece band—keyboardist, drummer, and guitarist— played the old song with all the verve of touring musicians rocking at Phillips Arena in front of a crowd of thousands. He doubted there was a dry eye in the whole building.

His cell phone vibrated in his suit jacket pocket. His secondary phone. It was in poor taste to step out, but the truth was, he needed some fresh air or else he was going to implode.

He kissed Monica on the temple, told her he’d be right back. Immersed in grief, she barely registered his presence anyway. But as he rose from the pew, his mother gave him a questioning glance, and Junior looked as if he wanted to hop out of her lap and go with him. He ignored both of them.

The funeral attendees favored him with sympathetic looks as he hurried down the long aisle. It was a sea of grief-stricken faces, most of them black, but many white, Hispanic, and Asian, too. Lily’s charity had known no color.

“God bless you, Dr. Stephens,” the usher said, and opened the sanctuary doors for Troy.

Troy went through the carpeted lobby and stepped outside onto the front walkway. It was a blustery day, and his wool Armani suit failed to protect him against the biting air. Shivering, he walked down the flagstone steps and onto an island of dormant grass, taking shelter beside the thick trunk of an immense oak tree. The branches quivered in the breeze, shedding crisp leaves dipped in autumn colors. He would have appreciated the natural beauty of the scene if he hadn’t been distracted with other thoughts.

He slipped his cell phone out of his pocket. The caller had left a voice mail. He listened to the message with growing annoyance.

No respect for boundaries, he thought. I’ll have to address this, but not now.

He deleted the message. Pocketing his phone, he turned back to the church entrance.

That was when he noticed the woman.

She leaned against the wrought-iron railing that encircled the church’s front entrance. She wore all black: one of those big church Derby hats with the wide brims, sunglasses, pants suit, pumps. Gazing out at the parking lot, she smoked a cigarette. From a distance, he couldn’t discern her age, but she had the bearing of confidence, and sexiness, too.

There also seemed to be something . . . familiar about her.

Buttoning his jacket, he walked toward the church. The woman’s face tilted in his direction, and why not? He was six-two, broad-shouldered, good-looking and well-dressed; he’d heard on more than one occasion that he resembled Denzel Washington. He fully expected to catch her eye.

As he mounted the steps, she smiled at him.

Willowy as a tree, she was tall for a woman, perhaps five-nine without her pumps. She had full lips, lined with cherry-red lipstick. From a distance, he’d thought she might be his age, but as he drew closer he realized his estimation was way off. This woman’s face was lined with wrinkles. She was easily old enough to be his mother.

Jarred by the realization, he lost his footing on the last step and nearly fell down.

“Careful there, darling,” she said, in a throaty voice that reminded him of a bluesy lounge singer. “If you hurt yourself, I’d have to go inside and find you a doctor.”

He laughed, self-consciously, and smoothed down the front of his jacket.

“I am a doctor, actually,” he said.

“That so?” She exhaled a wispy column of smoke, and he noticed it was a hand-rolled cigarette; the smoke smelled of a bracing, spicy fragrance, as if she were smoking some odd blend of herbs. “Then you must take issue with my smoking, hmm?”

“To each his own.” He shrugged. “We all have our vices.”

Offering a polite chuckle, she glanced away. Her hat shifted slightly. He noticed thick curls of white hair peeking out from underneath.

Why did she seem so familiar? He couldn’t put his finger on it, but the thought wouldn’t go away.

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