The Flip (An Angel Hill novel) Read online

  HARD TIMES.

  After almost two decades, Mike finds himself out of a job. With no prospects in Angel Hill, he decides to go into business for himself. He and his friends, Brian, Steven and Keith, form a company to buy cheap houses and flip them for quick profit.

  It was a great plan until their first project turned out to be more than they bargained for.

  WHAT QUALIFIES A HOUSE AS HAUNTED?

  Brian is still grieving over the loss of his parents when something resembling his mother slithers out from behind the bed and screams at him to get out of the house. With nowhere to turn, he tries the empty house he and his partners have just started renovating. The house on Irving has never seen a death inside its walls, and there are no ghosts lurking in its shadows. But that night, Brian senses something waiting in the dark outside the bathroom door for him.

  Steven happens upon a drawing left by the previous owner. Something about the picture entrances him and soon he’s searching every nook and cranny for more, spiraling into an obsession over a girl he’s never met, dreaming that she’s beckoning him to come and be with her in the basement.

  Keith brings a date over to show off his new business venture, but she has a tragic fall and is hospitalized. Hammered by guilt, Keith starts seeing her in the house, broken and twisted, crawling across the floor toward him.

  DOES A CURSE EVER DIE?

  What started as the answer to all their problems turned into a bigger nightmare than any of them could have predicted. And there’s no way out, because, for these four friends, it was too late the moment they stepped inside.

  THE FLIP

  C. DENNIS MOORE

  Prologue

  Sean heard the opening chords of Jimi Hendrix’s “Power of Love” echoing for those few brief moments before the cacophony kicked in and Jimi really got moving. Amy was listening to the Band of Gypsys live album again, one of her favorites. Sean wasn’t a big fan of the live stuff, but he had to admit, he’d yet to hear a studio version of the song that had the power of this one. Without realizing he was doing it, he found himself moving to the music, rocking and nodding his head along against his conscious will. He tried to stop, but damn that had been a groovy band.

  He tried to tune it out and focus on the task at hand, grading the student films that had been turned into him last week.

  He had forty students total this semester, and even with many of the films only running fifteen minutes or less--Audrey DeSpain had turned in a film that was exactly seven minutes and six seconds long, or, as she pointed out six minutes and sixty-six seconds, as if that made her surreal and probably drug-fueled satanic treatise any more impressive--that was a lot of movies to watch, watch again and dissect, then watch again according to Sean’s rule of three, but this had been the final of his Intro to Film class for the past four years. He just wasn’t used to so many students over the spread of his classes.

  Band of Gypsys gave way to Jimi’s Live at Berkeley concert, and he was singing “Hey Joe” when Sean put down his papers and picked up his video camera.

  Amy almost never gave in and went with the experience when he started videotaping, which he didn’t do as often as he wanted--he was a filmmaker at heart, after all--but he knew if he caught her when she didn’t know he was there he’d capture the real her on camera for the first time, finally.

  She was blasting music, so he knew where to find her. He eased open the door to his office and crept into the kitchen, trying not to creak the boards over her head and make her aware of him.

  He opened the basement door and slipped out to the landing, then went slowly down the stairs, moved silently to the wall just outside the front room in the basement where Amy worked. He peered around the corner, making sure she had her back to him. He found her on the concrete floor, where he’d expected to. He couldn’t see it, but he knew that, on the floor in front of her would be her sketch pad. She sat with her legs crossed and was bent nearly to the floor, immersing herself in the sketch. Her fingers would be a black smudge of charcoal. She would probably have it on her face before she was finished.

  Her hips rocked from side to side to the music and Sean focused the camera first on her ass.

  Not bad for a skinny white girl, he thought.

  He wondered what the inspiration had been for whatever she was drawing this time. She found it from everywhere. She’d done half a dozen last month, all of them different interpretations of the same defect in one of the cement support posts down here. He loved the way she saw the world, even if his own limited imagination didn’t allow him to share in it to the fullest with her. Maybe that’s why you’re just a teacher, she’d said once during an argument. She had apologized the next morning, but the damage was done and Sean already knew it anyway. He would never be a famous documentary filmmaker, which was the area he’d been concentrating on recently.

  The speakers spat forth a serious of high, lilting notes under a stereo effect pedal and Sean knew the random shuffle she’d put her player on landed on the Jimi Hendrix tribute album and Prince was doing his own rendition of “Red House”, this one called “Purple House” and he froze. This was one of the songs that always got Amy hot and if she started to feel something and decided to postpone the drawing to come say hi to him, she would turn around, find him standing there with the camera, and that would be it for his chances for the rest of the week. She didn’t like being filmed behind her back, so to speak, which he was hardly ever able to do anyway; Amy had a knack for knowing things. It drove him crazy sometimes, but as she liked to say, “It is what it is.”

  Instead, she kept drawing and the swaying of her body gave away how she was feeling the music. Sean had to admit, the sight of her did something to him, it always had. He knew men always looked at her, but he could hardly blame them. She looked like a taller Anne Hathaway with ten fewer pounds and glasses. It was the glasses that did it, he knew. They gave her that naughty librarian look, which was funny considering how they met.

  Prince got to the solo and she stopped drawing. He would have bet anything her eyes were closed and she was losing herself in the music. When Prince screeched Jimi’s line about going back over yonder, Amy’s head cocked and he could tell, even from behind her, that she was smiling.

  The final notes rang out but Sean was lost in the camera, and he forgot to stop moving while the mp3 player thought about what to play next. He also was watching Amy through the lens and not paying attention to anything outside that range, and when he stubbed his toe on the doorway, he stopped and said, “OOOHHHHHHH!”

  The noise startled her and she whirled around to find him. He saw the anger flash across her face for only a moment, then she saw he was in pain and she stopped scowling and said, “What did you do?”

  “Fire” started playing from the speakers.

  “Stubbed my toe on the thing,” he said.

  “The thing?” she said.

  “The doorway,” he said, motioning toward it with his head. He acted as if he wanted to kick the doorway in retaliation, but that was sort of the root of the problem in the first place.

  “That’s what you get for sneaking up,” she said, then turned around, back to her sketch, the sway of the music broken, but her foot still moved to the beat.

  “I wasn’t sneaking,” he said. “I was filming.”

  “All the more reason. I’ve told you not to do that. I don’t like it. Not now, not never gonna.”

  “You talk to your college professors with that mouth?”

  “Every single one,” she said, then was silent, having closed the book on the subject.

  He put the camera down and rubbed his throbbing foot, still watching her. Amy’s body language spoke volumes and Sea
n knew he had broken whatever spell she’d been under, and she wasn’t happy about it. Damn, he thought. Now I’ve done it.

  He had to find a way to get her back into the groove; she was happiest in those moments, and seeing her happy was one of the great joys of his life. He heard Dr. Miller at school telling him his motives were selfish, that Sean’s only impetus for pleasing Amy was because of how it made Sean himself feel. Sean told that old fuck to mind his own business. What difference did it make, as long as Amy was happy?

  He sat cross-legged on the floor behind her and rubbed his palms up and down her spine. He leaned in close and kissed the back of her neck, breathing “I’m sorry, babe,” against her skin.

  She stopped drawing and sat up closer to him, pressing her back into his hands. When she was relaxed, Amy got a certain tilt to her head on her long neck. When she was turned on, there was a particular set to her lips, like she was trying to hold in a sigh.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said. “I just love how you look when you’re sketching. So natural.”

  He kissed her again while his thumbs dug into the muscles in the small of her back, rubbing in circles along her waistline.

  “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met, and it still gets to me sometimes that you choose to be with me.”

  “For how long is up to you,” she said, “so stop trying to be sneaky.”

  “I know, I’m sorry. It’s just, the way you move when no one’s watching . . . It’s perfect. It’s everything a body should be.”

  “Shut up,” she said, “you’re stupid.” She chuckled and shook her head.

  “No, I’m being serious,” Sean said. “You’re the ideal, babe. You know that. And sometimes I just want to capture that.”

  “Mmm,” she said. “Maybe one day. We’ll see. How’s the grading going?”

  “Same as it always goes,” he said. “Half of them think they’re the next Kubrick, half of them think they’re Tarantino, and half want to be Carpenter. I swear this kid Jody made his film just as a highlight reel for his band to do the score.”

  “You know that’s three halves, right?”

  “You know I don’t know nothing bout no maths.”

  She grabbed his wrists and pulled his arms around her waist, then leaned into his chest.

  “What I wouldn’t give for one original voice in that class. I’m not saying I have to help coach the next big thing, but these kids aren’t even trying.”

  “You’ll get them there. What are we doing for dinner tonight?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Hadn’t thought about it. Are you hungry?”

  “Not really, just wondering.”

  “We’ll go out,” he said, kissing the rim of her ear. “When you get hungry, tell me what sounds good and we’ll go there.”

  “Then you better get back to grading so you’re not distracted the whole time, trying to get back here and finish.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I guess. Or we could just go up to the bedroom.”

  “Not happening,” she said. “You’ve got work to do.”

  “We could stay right here, this floor’s been good to us before.”

  “Good to you, maybe. My back still hates you.”

  “We’ll be quick.”

  “Oh,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Don’t I know it!” She laughed and turned back to her sketch pad. Sean kissed the top of her head and turned to go back upstairs to his office, stealing a glance at the picture. She had sketched their house as if it were a clock. The bay window in the living room was the clock face and, visible behind the numbers and clock hands, she had put the machinery, the gears and sprockets. The slope of the roof seemed steeper, almost menacing. At an angle, she had somehow drawn the left and right bay windows with a slant across the tops, barely noticeable at first, that made them look, along with the gutter, which she had drawn just slightly crooked, like angry eyes and a furrowed brow.

  The gears in the window were spaced evenly and could be seen as cheeks, while a smaller array running across the bottom of the windows, from left to right, could have been a grinning mouth, or a sneering one, now that he thought about it. The more he looked at it, the more he understood it wasn’t just a clock face, but could also be seen as a clock/face.

  It looked like she was drawing two different pictures at once, but both occupied the same piece of paper. He wanted to pick it up and study it more closely, but he never touched them until she handed them to him, that way he knew they were done. Or what she considered done at the moment, with the understanding that she reserved the right to go back and change whatever she felt needed changed.

  “That’s cool,” he said before moving away.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “What made you think of it?”

  She shrugged and said, “The universe is right on schedule.”

  He nodded, but she didn’t see because she was staring at her picture. He went upstairs and returned to his grading.

  Even though he considered himself a romantic at heart, Sean would never admit to believing in love at first sight. Lust, he would admit to, but he was a realist and true love, the kind that sustains a relationship over time, wasn’t something that just happened in a blink.

  That was before.

  He had met Amy when she worked in the North West Angel Hill college library two years earlier. She had commented on a Neil Gaiman graphic novel he was checking out, The Dream Hunters, remarking how much she’d loved it when she read it. He said he used to have a copy, but it had been lost, and he wanted to read it again, then left the building. He read the graphic novel over lunch the next day, but kept thinking of the dark-haired woman with the lips and the eyes who had handed it to him. He took the book back later that day, hoping she might be there. He didn’t see her anywhere, so he took it home and read it again.

  He finally ran into her, entirely on purpose, two days later when, once again, he tried to return the book. He saw her at the desk, dropped the book in the book return pile, and went back to the graphic novel section. He found another, Death: The High Cost of Living, and took it to the counter.

  “Excellent choice,” she said as she ran her scanner over the bar code. “I dressed up as Death for Halloween last year.”

  He tried to picture that and decided that was probably the sexiest image that had ever crossed his mind.

  “Really?” he said. “I bet that was interesting.”

  “It was fun,” she said. “Nobody at the party knew who I was, though, so I kept having to explain it all night.”

  “You need a new group of friends,” he said, then regretted it. Start off by insulting her crowd, he thought, that’s the ticket.

  “They weren’t my friends, I just went with some sorority sisters.”

  “You’re a student here?”

  “Not anymore. I graduated last year. But I still need a job, so here I am.”

  “Well,” he said, “college is good for some things, right?”

  And again, he thought. Bang up job. First her friends are no good, now her education is worthless and she’s stuck working here instead of following her dream. Unless of course her dream had been to become a librarian.

  “It’s got its moments,” she said. “You get to meet new people.”

  “That you do,” he said, then decided to make his exit before he said anything else insulting. “Um, when’s this due back?”

  She pointed to the reminder card she had tucked into the book.

  “Enjoy your comic,” she said as he walked away.

  This time it took four days before he found her there again. Over those four days, he decided he had to know her name if nothing else. He had spent enough time over the past week having imaginary conversations with her, just trying to enjoy her presence, even if only in his head, but he had no idea what to call her. Instead of the book return pile, he brought the book directly to her.

  “You’re a hard one to catch,” he said, trying on his best suave voice. />
  She looked up and smiled and said, “I wasn’t aware I was being chased.”

  If a black man could blush, he thought, I’d be red as a beet right now.

  “Um,” he said, “well, not chased, I wouldn’t say that. But I’m always interested in the opinions of people who’ve read the same books as me.”

  “So you wanted to strike up a dialogue over the pros and cons of decades old Neil Gaiman comics?”

  “Something like that,” he said, wishing he had just dropped the book and walked out. Sean had never been in quite a predicament like this. He was a teacher here, he wasn’t supposed to be riled by students, or even ex-students. He was The Man here, dammit, so why did he feel like a stuttering fool?

  Because there is something here, he thought. I know she has to feel it, too, so why are we bullshitting with this chit chat? Let me take you to dinner and show you the world, he thought.

  No, that was stupid, if he said that she’d laugh in his face, and if by some chance she said yes, what was his plan? A shrimp platter at Perkins and a movie? Not exactly showing her the world.

  Then again, in Angel Hill, there wasn’t much world to see. So she would understand if their first date was a little underwhelming, right?

  No, probably not. Or maybe. God, he didn’t know.

  “Have you read any of his novels?”

  She nodded and said, “I’ve read a couple, yeah.”

  “That wasn’t very enthusiastic.”

  “I like his stuff for younger readers better. Coraline, The Wolves in the Walls, that kind of stuff.”

  “I haven’t read those,” he said. “Do you have them here?”

  “Probably not,” she said.

  He was still picturing her dressed as Death and it made his heart pound.

  “This is going to sound stupid,” she said.

  Nothing you say could sound stupid, he thought.

  “I’m moving out of town in two weeks, but I’d really like to keep in touch with you. Can I give you my number?”