999_ Twenty-Nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense - Al Sarrantonio [75]
“Not in this house.”
“What do you mean?”
“We don’t have a basement, remember? You’d have to get down on your belly and slither beneath the house, with all that muck down there.”
“Hah, you’re right! Certainly wouldn’t want to do that!” Herb’s stomach shook as he laughed. “Thank God the damned bathroom’s new.”
In fact, the bathroom, clean and professionally tiled, was one of the things that had sold them on the house. Herb liked long showers, and Iris—who, unlike Herb’s first wife, had never had to make time for children—was given to leisurely soaks in the tub.
The rest of the place was in, at best, an indifferent state of repair. The rain gutters sagged, the windows needed caulking, and, if the house were to serve as anything more than a summer retreat from the city, the ancient coal-burning furnace in an alcove behind the kitchen would have to be replaced. Eventually, too, they’d have to add more rooms; at present the house was just a bungalow, a single floor of living space crowned by a not-too-well-insulated attic littered with rolls of cotton wadding, damaged furniture, and other bric-a-brac abandoned by the former owners. Who these owners were was uncertain; clearly the place hadn’t been lived in for years, and—though the real estate lady had denied it—it had probably been on the market for most of that time.
The two of them, of course, had hoped for something better; they were, in their way, a pair of midlife romantics. But Herb’s alimony payments and an unexpected drubbing from the IRS this April had forced them to be practical. Besides, they had three acres’ worth of woods, and stars they could never have seen from the city, and bullfrogs chanting feverishly in the marsh behind the house. They had an old woodshed, a swaybacked garage that had once been a barn, and a sunken area near the forest’s edge, overgrown with mushrooms and moss, that the real estate lady assured them had been a garden. They had each other. Did the house itself need work? As Herb had said airily when a skeptical friend asked if he knew anything about home repair, “Well, I know how to write a check.”
Secretly he nourished the ambition of doing the work himself. Though he had barely picked up a hammer since he’d knocked together bookends for his parents in a high school shop class, he felt certain that a few carefully selected repair manuals and a short course of This Old House would see him through. If fate had steered him and Iris toward that creature of jest, the “handyman special,” well, so be it. He would simply learn to be a handyman.
And fate, for once, had seemed to agree; for, among the artifacts left by the previous owners was a bookshelf stacked high with old magazines.
Actually, not all that old—from the late 1970s, in fact—but the humidity had aged them, so that they had taken on the fragile, jaundiced look of magazines from decades earlier. Iris had wanted to throw them away—“Those moldy old things,” she’d said, curling her hp, “they smell of mildew. We’ll fill up the shelves with books from local yard sales"—but Herb refused to hear of it. “They’re perfect for a country house,” he had said. “I mean, just look at this. Home Handyman. Practical Gardener. Growing Things Organically. Modem Health. Perfect rainy day reading.”
Luckily for Herb, there were lots of rainy days in this part of the world, because after three months of homeowning it had become clear that reading do-it-yourself columns such as “Mr. Fixit"—a regular feature in Home Handyman magazine—was a good deal more fun than actually fixing anything. He’d enjoyed shopping for tools and had turned a corner of the garage into a rudimentary workshop; but now that the tools gleamed from their hooks on the wall and the necessary work space had been cleared, his enthusiasm had waned.
In fact, a certain lassitude had settled upon them both. Maybe it was the dampness. This was, by all accounts, one of the wettest summers on record; each week the local pennysaver sagged in their hands as they pulled it from the mailbox, and a book of stamps that Iris bought