288 Cherry Hill

by Lea S. Coker

Photo by Byron Johnson on Unsplash

Joseph got the call early in the morning, the the shriek of the telephone ring shattering his restless dreams into waking. For a moment he lay in bed with the phone cradled against his ear as his eyes adjusted to the light that slanted through the blinds.

“Who is it?” his wife Marta whispered. Her breath was hot against the back of his neck, and he motioned her away and sat up so that his legs slipped from the warm bedclothes into the chilly morning air.

“Hello,” he said, cupping the receiver against his mouth. “Hello. Joseph Blake at Blake’s Plumbing and Electric. Who is this?”

The voice was muffled, chortling now and then into a disjointed word or phrase. It was a woman’s voice, and the garbling was shrill, almost frantic. “Hey there,” said Joseph. “I can’t hear you. Can you try to call me back?”

And then suddenly the line cleared and he heard the woman as distinctly as if she were in the room with him: “Joe? Joseph Blake? I need your help. 288 Cherry Hill.” Then the dial tone echoed in his ear.

Marta lay staring at him with her hair spread on the pillow. “Who was that, Joe?” she said again. He stood and began to pull on his jeans. “I gotta go,” he replied. “Someone’s got an issue at Cherry Hill.”

Marta looked at him for a moment longer, then rolled towards the window, her bare shoulder a sheen of light against the dark coverlet. “OK then,” she said. “If you got to.” He shut the door gently behind him and left her to sleep.

The cold air had hardened to a frost on his utility van’s windshield, and he took a moment to scrape the ice away with his fingertip before he pulled from his driveway onto the quiet street and slowly headed west. He hadn’t been to the Cherry Hill neighborhood in years, decades perhaps, but he knew all the street numbers from his years running newspapers. Number 288 was a large, rambling Victorian that had long been unoccupied. In his youth it had been the home of a wealthy and reclusive couple who spent most of their time in Florida. When they passed away, the house had fallen into disrepair as an estate dispute dragged on, but he had recently seen the house listed in a real estate catalog.

Now he pulled his van to the curb and idled for a moment. The house’s previously rose-pink paint had faded to an indistinct pastel color, and the windows were blank as sheets of paper. Joseph could imagine a variety of plumbing or electrical problems with a building as dilapidated as this one, and he sighed. It might be a long morning. No lights shone from the house, but suddenly a front window opened, then slammed shut.

Joseph got his toolkit from the back of the van and walked slowly up the steps to the front porch. The wood on the front door was ragged with wear, and a somber lion’s face in bronze formed the door knocker. But before he could reach for it, the door opened.

“Joseph? Thank God,” said a voice. Joseph stepped inside and was enveloped in a dimness that felt heavy, as if cotton gauze was wrapped around his eyes. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come.”

When his eyes adjusted to the dark foyer, he saw that the woman who stood before him was beautiful, overwhelmingly so, with spirals of dark wavy hair drawn back from her face and wide brown eyes. There was a vague familiarity to her too, but he couldn’t place it. Then he saw the wastebasket behind her. Even in the cloudy light, the gore was unmistakable: crimson streaks smeared out from the basket across the dusty floor, and a dark shape was crumpled in the container. For a fleeting moment, he fancied the blood was paint and he stood in the wings of some theater before a production, but the smell was heavy, and every hair stood up on his arms and neck as he stepped back against the door in horror.

“You have to help me,” the woman whispered. “Please. I don’t know what I did.”

Joseph tried to speak, but his voice wouldn’t come. He saw the woman wore surgical gloves, the rubber pale as moonlight as she stretched her palms to him. “Please,” she said.

“OK,” he managed to say. “Whatever you need. I’ll help.” As he spoke, he moved his eyes to take in the room: it was completely empty, save for the dreadfulness piled into the wastebasket, and he listened to the silence for a second before he slowly set his toolkit down on the floor.

“Can you take him out of here,” said the woman. “He needs to go.”

“Sure,” said Joseph. “I can do that.” They stood still, eyes locked in what felt like an endless moment until she stood to the side and pointed at the basket.

“He’s in there,” she said. “Please, take him away.”

Joseph moved to the center of the room. He felt as if his feet were mired in quicksand, so hard was it to walk, and he fought back bile as he bent above the dark mass in the container. The basket was so heavy that he staggered and almost fell as he grasped at it. The dark cloth looked like a suit draped across the top,and the fabric was rough against his face as he stood with the wastebasket balanced against his body. The woman had opened the door. A gleam of light fell across her so that he could clearly see the outlines of her bones. He had seen her before, he knew it, but terror crowded all memories from him, and he staggered blindly forward with his horrifying burden.

“Thank you, Joe,” she murmured. “I knew you’d help.” She latched the door behind him, and he heard the click of the bolt.

In the brightening morning sunshine he stood with the wastebasket pressed against his chest, his heartbeat louder than a timpani in his ears. Then the terror fully caught him and he stumbled towards the van, fumbled at the door and slid the wastebasket inside. His horror increased when he saw his fingers were sticky with blood from the slow ooze, and blood had trailed behind him like a path of petals from his van to the porch.

“My God,” he whispered. “Jesus fucking Christ.” He had to leave, to get away before she came at him with an ax or hammer or whatever she had used to dismantle whomever was in the basket.

But then it dawned on him: he had left his toolkit inside the house. And as he got into the front seat of the van, heart pounding, the gravity of the scenario increased: his hands were covered in blood, as was his van, and he himself was carrying the body away from the scene, his toolkit missing. As he screeched away from the house he saw the “For Sale” sign in the front yard and the driveway conspicuously empty of any vehicle. Was this some set-up? How had she even known to call him? Furthermore, if Marta was asked where he had been last night, she would say she didn’t know, because he hadn’t been home until almost dawn. He had been with a woman on the other side of town and Marta wouldn’t speak to him when he came home, only turned her naked back to him and nestled deeper into the pillows.

And behind him the basket slid with a “thump” against the side of the van at every brake and turn, so that it seemed to him as if the dreadfulness was rising to life as some demon beating against the walls of the van, trying to break free. He couldn’t bear it any longer. As the road curved past a gully, he lurched to the curb, reached back and slid the van door open and flung the basket so that the whole thing flew over the edge, out of sight.

Joseph drove the rest of the way home with shaking hands. Before he went inside, he scrubbed his hands and arms clean in the cold water of the outside tap until his fingers were numb. Then he went into the house.

Marta was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee, her long legs propped on a chair.

“Hey babe,” he said. “I gotta change, that was a messy one.”

“How was Cherry Hill?” Marta asked. “Did Trish get him?” He was halfway up the stairs but stopped. “What?”

“You know. Trish from my sorority.”

He came back down the stairs. “I don’t know, Marta,” he said. “Why don’t you fill me in.”

“Whoa,” Marta said. “You mad or something? I just remembered after you left that my friend Trish called the other day and told me she was moving to a house nearby. I’m supposed to go visit sometime. Anyway, she said there was this raccoon in the basement that she’d been trying to get rid of for a few days. I told her to call you if she needed help.” Marta took a sip of coffee and smiled at him. “You’re always so great at the odd jobs,” she said. “I thought you’d love to help a damsel in distress. Now go change and I’ll get you your breakfast.”