THe Old House by the Highway, pt. 6

We left the hospital the next morning around seven. I was in a full leg cast and had been given crutches, which would take me a while to figure out. I had been given a strong dose of serious pain medication and was grateful for the fog of indifference it had lowered over me regarding the night's evens. Monica hadn't said much beyond asking what had happened. I'd told her I'd fallen through the banister and had seen the goat again, and that seemed to be as much as she needed to hear. She'd just nodded and said, “I knew it,” then turned back to her magazine as the doctor came in. I was glad she'd let the issue go for the time being – I was in too much pain to have explained much more. I knew she would have believed me, but I think my silence told her just as much as the whole story could have.

We pulled up to the house and I started to ready my crutches. “No,” she said, putting a hand lightly on my arm. “I'll just be a minute. Stay here and rest.”

I just nodded and let her go, too drugged to care much and relieved in my own cloudy way that I didn't have to go into the house. I may have fallen asleep, but it didn't seem very long before Monica emerged from the house with two duffel bags. She threw them into the backseat of the car, then dug into her pocket. She pulled out the hoof we'd found in the garden and had been keeping on the mantel. It seemed like years ago that we'd found it.

I watched her as she walked down to the highway, waited a few minutes, then ran across the four lanes in one dash. She stopped for a moment, looking at the hoof she held in her hand, then threw it far out into the river.

She came back to the car. “I've been wanting to get rid of that thing ever since we brought it in,” she said. “Gave me the creeps.”

She turned around and unzipped one of the pockets on the duffel bag behind her, then turned back around with a business card in hand. I craned my neck to look at it, but gave up when a nerve went shooting down my neck toward my leg. She tucked it into the dashboard in front of the odometer. “You get some more rest,” she said, and turned the car back on.

“Where are we going?” I mumbled.

“To get some answers,” she said. “Then to a hotel.”

I just nodded and let myself fall back into a blissfully dreamless sleep.

When I woke up again, we were parked outside an unfamiliar ranch style house. A large van sat next to us in the driveway. “J&J Plumbing,” it read along the side. The wording rang a distant bell, but my medication didn't really let me recognize it.

Monica was at my door, opening it and helping me onto my crutches. I got myself upright somehow and began the slow process of moving myself forward, following her up a slight incline toward a well-maintained yard. As I got going, though, some of the painkiller-and-sleep haze started to wear off and the name on the truck struck a chord in me. “We're at Justin's?” I asked blearily.

Monica nodded. “This sonofabitch knows more than he's telling. I'm asking him about the goats.”

She helped me hobble my way up the front walk, then rang the doorbell. There was no immediate answer, so Monica – always the insistent one – knocked on the door. It took a few minutes, but finally Justin, clad in morning stubble and a bathrobe, with a cup of coffee in his hand, answered the door. He looked at us through the screen door, puzzlement and wariness mixing on his face. “Well hi, folks. Didn't think I'd be seeing you again so soon. What can I do for you?”

Monica smiled, but her voice was hard. “Can we come in, please, Justin? We need to talk to you about last night.”

He hesitated, glancing nervously over his shoulder. “Last night? I… uh... Was I drunker than I remember?”

Monica smiled again and opened the screen door. “No, not at all. Nothing like that. But we do need to talk.”

He looked over his shoulder again, then shrugged and opened the door for us. Monica thanked him and as I hobbled by I smiled resignedly. Justin’s eyebrows rose as he realized I was on crutches. “Oh my god, I'm sorry,” he said as I passed into the well-kept living room. “I didn't see that... Are you ok there, Ed? What the hell happened to you?”

Monica closed the door behind her. “That's what we're here to talk about. Could we sit down somewhere?”

“Sure, sure,” he said, his bemusement growing as he looked from her to me and back. “Why don't we go into the kitchen and I'll get you two some coffee. You look like you've had a long night.”

He led the way and I settled into a roomy wicker-backed chair at a large kitchen table. The room was decorated with pictures and ornaments of chickens. I was vaguely grateful they weren't some other barnyard animal. The sound of a running shower came from somewhere down the hall.

Ed settled into the chair at the head of the table after handing us two brimming cups of delicious smelling coffee. The scent of it kicked my brain another gear toward functionality. I took a sip.

Monica looked at hers for a moment, then straight at Justin. “Justin,” she said sternly. “Ed fell down the basement stairs last night when the banister broke. He landed on a pipe and broke his leg.”

Justin nodded soberly. “Well I'm mighty sorry to hear that,” he said, shaking his head. “Those stairs are tricky, I’ll give you that.” I could hear that he meant it, but there was an edge to his voice. I think he was afraid we'd ask him to compensate us for the medical expenses, since he'd installed the banister.

Monica smiled. “Well we’re certainly not blaming you,” she said warmly. “It could have happened to anyone. But we do need you to be honest with us about something.”

Ed looked down into his coffee, as if he knew what was coming.

“What happened in that basement, Justin? There is something not right happening down there and we need to know what it is. It’s not just the smell anymore and I think you know what we mean.” When he was silent for a moment, she continued: “Ed wouldn’t have been going down there in the first place if it was just the smell bothering him.”

Justin nodded, gathering himself before he looked up and spoke directly to me. “I should've told you folks, I suppose,” he began slowly. “But, frankly, I'm something of a skeptic, and I guess I was just hoping it wouldn't ever become... an issue.” He looked at Monica, then took a sip.

“My father,” he continued, “was real eccentric, like I told you last night. And, like I said, as he got older, he started keeping animals as pets that should never have been let in that house. He had pigeon roosts and chicken coops inside, some wallows for pot-bellied pigs out back. I told you about his fox. He had a donkey or two out there from time to time, even some giant godawful lizards. I don't even know what all he had most of the time ‘cause the place smelled awful, and with my allergies I could hardly be there ten minutes without sneezing my head off.”

He took another sip.

“Well, one day I went over there and he had a new 'pet.' A big old billy goat he called Rex. He was just in love with that thing, Lord knows why. The animal smelled terrible, just crapped anywhere it felt like it, and chewed on everything in the house. Just a lousy animal. But Dad had a soft spot for it. Kept it at his side all the damn time. Let it go anywhere it wanted.” He shook his head. “The next time I went over there was a few months later, and, well, he'd started up a whole herd of goats! A whole damn flock of 'em. Must have ten, fifteen goats roaming through his house.” He chuckled derisively, then looked at me.

“I mean, can you imagine? An old man, in his seventies, living in a house with a pack of goats! And the damn things are dumb as a box of nails – can't walk down stairs but they can damn well walk up 'em. And here's my old man, who thinks they're the be-all, end-all of domestic pets, and he’s carrying eighty, ninety-pound animals down flights of stairs when they get themselves stuck at the top.” He took a long sip. “I told him, I said, 'Dad, you can't keep doing this. Those animals would be better served living outside where there ain't any stairs.’ I said, ‘You're gonna fall down one of these days and break your damn neck.' I offered to build a shed outside for them to sleep in, but he wouldn't hear of it. Said something about how his babies were worth the risk. I just left. Couldn't stomach the thought of my father living like that. Had to get away, you know?”

He looked down into his coffee again, as if the scene were playing out on its surface, then started speaking again, softly. “Well,” he said, “it didn't take long for the locals to give him that nickname I told you about, and damned if I didn't join in. Some things are tough to face like a man. I should've gone over there and built him a shack for the damn things whether he liked it or not, forced him to listen to me, but it seemed like his dignity was already near gone. I didn't want to go bossing him around, taking the last of it away, you know?”

I nodded when he looked up, but he looked away again, out through the glass doors onto a patio where a large grill shone in the morning light. “After a few weeks I went back over there to check on the old man, and... I couldn't find him anywhere. Him and his goats, just nowhere to be found. The chickens were there, and the dogs and the cats sniffing at 'em like they hadn't been fed in ages. But no goats and no ‘Old Goat Man.’ But his old station wagon was there. I let myself into the house and... well... you know that smell you were telling me about. I hope to hell it ain't ever been as bad for you folks as it was when I walked in there. Smelled like animals and their shit and something rotten. I went down there and...”

He sighed and looked back at us, his eyes filled with sorrow. “There was my old man, dead in the corner. His leg was broken.” He nodded at me. “Just like yours. The bone was sticking up through his skin and all that. And he was... he was gone, must have fallen down there and couldn't get back up and wasted away, or maybe hit his head, too. Probably carrying a goddamn goat down there for something. And all those goddamn goats were down there with him. Stupid bastards followed him down the stairs, except of course they can't walk down stairs. So they' all fell. And they all broke their damn legs, too, falling down the stairs. So none of 'em could get the hell back up! And they...” He shut his eyes against the tears. “By the time I got there they'd started...”

I held up my hand to stop him. I knew what he was about to say and I didn’t need to hear it. But he shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut. “They’d already gotten to eating him. My old man. Goats'll eat just about anything if they get the notion... and not just that, but they got the taste of meat and it looked like they started going after each other down there, too.” He opened his eyes again. “It was like something out of a horror movie, I tell you. All these dead goats laying around, and my old man, stripped down to bones in some places, with the live ones mostly limping around like zombies, all covered in blood...”

He stopped talking and swallowed, then took a few bracing gulps of his coffee. He looked back at Monica and me. “I should've known better, really, than to try to cover it up. I had a closed-casket funeral for him, told everyone he'd died in a farming accident and left it at that. Nobody except me and the coroner and undertaker knew what'd happened. I got all those goats and carcasses out of there, and I just hoped if I fixed the place up, there'd be no need to tell anyone. Just get it off my hands, you know. It's a nice house, structurally, and all.” He paused. “I should've known something like that would leave a mark on a place. You can't expect that kind of thing to just go away. But I've never been one to believe in ghost stories and all, so I just hoped... I should have at least put a new basement in, with a decent floor and lighting, but I just... I couldn't bring myself to go down there any more than I had to. I just left it.”

He looked right at me. “I'm awfully sorry, Ed,” he said. “I should've known better.”

I just nodded. It all made so much sense when it was said aloud. I'd been right all along but hadn't been able to voice it. Monica put her hand over mine on the table.

* * *

We sold the house shortly thereafter and were able to negotiate to be released from the mortgage. We moved back to the city, our experience with rural life having scarred us both for good.

We never found out if he told the next buyers about what had happened to his father or to us, but when we came back to check that everything was out, a cement floor had been poured in the basement and a new wall was being put up over the old stones.

It still smelled terrible.


THE END!