Aaaiiieee by Jeffrey Thomas Read Free Book Online Page B

all get old, right?”
    “I suppose.” The man became serious. His eyes looked like they wanted to get through my eye holes. My eyes, thus exposed, felt vulnerable.
    “You live here in old Ed Phillips’s place?” I asked. Supposed to sound casual. My voice broke.
    I am Ed Phillips, I thought he would say then. “Nope. Not if you paid me.”
    “Don’t I know you? You look familiar,” I lied. The only face that reminded me of this man was the one I had on.
    “Lived in town until 1960,” the man replied. “Then moved on to Shrewsbury. I used to be chief of police here…”
    “ McGee? Richard McGee?”
    “That’s me. You know me?”
    “Oh…no…not personally. I know of you.”
    “You a townie?”
    “Yes.”
    “Your family must’ve known me. I’m seventy-seven now.” McGee looked at the Yellow House again and wagged his head, dumbfounded, as if he had aged from the thirty-seven of 1950 to the seventy-seven of 1990 all at once, just before I walked up to him. “Seventy-seven,” he repeated, his breath coming out in ghostly steam.
    I was much less nervous now, much more intrigued. “You know a lot about this place. Ed Phillips’s place.”
    “Nobody knows a lot about Ed Phillips’s place, son. Nobody should, I’d say.” His breath steam reached me now. I smelled alcohol in it.
    “I’m pretty interested in the place, myself. You must be. You were staring at it a minute ago.”
    “I come here about every Halloween night, boy. Just like everybody else does. Like the place ain’t here except on Halloween night. It is but it ain’t.”
    “Very true. But why do you come…to look?”
    “I look.” The old man was lost in his staring again. He appeared troubled. Uncertain. Afraid. “I best be moving on,” he mumbled to himself. “It’s cold…”
    “A lot of funny stories.”
    “What’s so funny? You wouldn’t think it was funny if you seen those cages in the cellar.”
    “What about them?”
    “I don’t know. I don’t know what about them.”
    “You think he was up to no good?”
    “Absolutely, boy. We don’t want to know what he was up to.”
    “Yes we do. We both do…that’s why we’re here. But I thought you were the one who said that Phillips couldn’t have had anything to do with the disappearance of those two old guys. That’s what I always heard.”
    “You heard right.” McGee was able to look at me again, away from the house. “I didn’t think it was him, at first.”
    “But you did later?” No answer. “If you suspected him later then why didn’t you take him in for questioning?”
    “Because by the time I believed it he was gone.”
    “So is that why he ran off? He found out you were onto him?”
    “He didn’t run off.” McGee started at a child’s scream of laughter down the street. He shuddered and tucked his head into his shoulders. “I been drinking and I’m old and tired. I gotta go home now and forget the past until next year if I’m still here. And I suppose I’ll come to look then, too. Almost every year, even when I lived in Shrewsbury…”
    “You never told anyone that you changed your mind about his innocence?”
    McGee squinted at me. “Who are you? Do I know you?”
    “No. I was a little boy when you left town.”
    “You want to know why I changed my mind? Do you? Well, you wouldn’t believe me. Drunken babblings, you’d say. And that’s just what they’d have said back then, if I told them what I saw. You were drunk, chief, they’d have said. You were drunk on the job. I had a problem with it, boy…I couldn’t tell them or they’d have said I was crazy. A crazy drunk. And maybe I was crazy. Maybe I didn’t even see  him…”
    “See who?”
    “Phillips. Ed Phillips. I saw him that night.”
    “What night?”
    “I never told them.”
    “What night?”
    “ You heard that story. About the baby? That baby somebody left on Doc Sullivan’s doorstep that night in October of ‘57?”
    “ Heard it? That’s…”
    “The