The Hideout

by Arthur Davis (January 2025)

 

Dicken Chambers rolled out of bed with an urgency for adventure.

His summer vacation was nearly over.

His father was at work at the lumber mill in Hillock, Tennessee which had managed to stay open in spite of the depression that gripped the country. His mother was dropping off Kenny, his kid brother, at a friend’s house.

He poked around the kitchen in his shorts. He considered taking them off and walking around the house in his birthday suit. He had been considering many seemingly outlandish things for a fifteen-year-old lately. He decided against “getting to the bone,” as Lanny Watkins referred to it, and poured himself a bowl of cold cereal.

They had argued the other day about a girl in school. It was stupid.

He heard Lanny’s voice and walked to the front door. “What’s up?” he asked, shrinking from the burst of daylight that greeted him.

“Let’s go down to the river.”

Dicken didn’t care much for the river this time of day. There would be no breeze and clots of hungry mosquitoes. But it was better than stumbling around a home that held few fond memories and less to look forward to.

“I found us a hideout,” Lanny said as they approached the Elkmont River, which snaked down from Kentucky only sixty miles to the north. The thirty-yard-wide strip of shallow, muddy brown water weakened by a year-long drought was a sickly image of its usual gurgling arrogance.

“Where?”

Lanny came up close. He was taller by an inch and instinctively used the difference to his advantage. “Behind the old Glumly mansion.”

Dicken stepped back. “No way.”

“It’s perfect. It’s what we’ve been looking for.”

“I don’t want any part of it.”

“My mom says nothing went on out there but rumors.”

Dicken had a crush on Lanny’s mother and couldn’t bring himself to say anything against her. “The cops found the twins’ bodies lying next to each other in a cheap Knoxville hotel room. Newspapers said they were wrapped in each other’s arms, each with a bullet in their head.”

“That was years ago.”

“As good as yesterday for me.”

***

It bothered Dicken that Lanny had found a place for them first and that he had the guts to go anywhere near the abandoned estate.

Dicken half-expected Lanny to bring up the issue of Leanora Bethune and the incident that ignited their dispute as they walked along the riverbank, kicking up broken bottles, dead brush, and old stories.

Dicken felt Lanny had read more into what happened in Gleason’s Pharmacy when Leanora spotted him before noticing Lanny, who was already sweet on her. Maybe Leanora really was more interested in him than in Lanny?

They reached the edge of the sprawling old estate before lunch. Their bellies growled for attention.

“Now what?”

Lanny moved along a tall stone wall until they came to a patch of honeysuckle and dry ivy. “Someone’s been here.”

Dicken’s father made a big deal of the legend of the death of the Glumly twins and what happened to the third sister, who disappeared after she was exonerated for the twins’ murder. The ghosts. The dead bodies. The fortune that was never recovered.

“How do you know?”

“I’ve been poking around here for the last few days and there is something different about this path. See, over there, the brush looks like it was pushed back to open up the path. Someone’s been here.”

“Who?”

“Ghosts.” Lanny turned sharply and growled in Dicken’s face.

Dicken shoved him to the ground. They both laughed.

“Idiot,” Lanny said.

They moved to high ground, past the mansion to a wooded expanse of pine and old stand birch and an irregular clearing about fifty feet in diameter. In the middle was a pile of cut wood.

“It’s common cut construction wood,” Dicken said, climbing over one of the stacks. “Southern pine. Some beech and maple over there.”

“I’ll bet it had something to do with the murder of the sisters.”

Hundreds of twelve-foot-long, four-by-eight-inch beams filled the clearing, many strewn about the forest floor like pick-up sticks that had been blown about in a storm, a perfect place to harbor rattlers or possum.

Dicken climbed higher on top of the stacks. “This what you had in mind?”

“You went right to it.”

Dicken bent down to scrutinize Lanny’s handiwork. Several dozen of the long planks had been draped between two of the stacks, leaving a shaded hollow between the piles.

“We can stack others on the dirt and build up the floor and seal off both entrances and it’s ours,” Lanny said. “What do you think?”

“I think it’s damn perfect,” Dicken shot back.

Lanny beamed with delight. “Told you.”

***

Dicken wanted to tell Leanora about what they had found. More an excuse to call on Leanora with those flashing eyes and tender way she turned to him in Gleason’s and smiled as only a young girl can to capture a young boy’s fragile, hopeful heart.

“Well, look at that,” Dicken said, topping off their masterpiece with an American flag he had found in a junk yard several years back.

“Now what?” Lanny asked after the jubilation died down.

“Now we have a first-class hideout from which to carry out our nefarious activities.”

“Nefarious what?”

“To reach out into the soul of the populace and wreak havoc on the peaceful citizens of this small, unsuspecting town,” Dicken answered with ghoulish glee.

“What in the Lord’s name have you been reading?”

Dicken fell back laughing. “I have no idea. I just remembered a comic book character who once said that.”

“That’s what comic book characters do. They say stupid things.”

Dicken looked around at their handiwork. “Well, it sounded good.”

Lanny pulled out a handful of his mother’s fresh-backed peanut butter cookies from his pocket and divided the booty. “The mansion has been abandoned for years. I heard it was sealed by the court. Think what it would mean to get in there and find out what’s inside.”

“Think what it would mean to be dead.”

“Dicken, the place is ours for the taking. No one in town has the guts to come out here.”

Memories of his father’s exaggerated bedtime tales of the sisters’ death churned in a flush of fear. “Because no one is that insane.”

Dicken stared at Lanny, realizing that was his friend’s plan all along.

Lanny sat back and looked around the hideout. It wasn’t enough. “Okay, I’m going in alone.”

“Now you sound like one of those cartoon heroes yourself.”

Lanny jumped up. “Lanny Watkins, Captain Commando,” he said with a frown and gnashed teeth, then stretched his T-shirt up over the top of his head. “Today we find our hero, Captain Commando, planning his most dangerous adventure yet. A plan so daring, so dangerous, so incredibility bold, that if he pulls it off, it will make him more of a legend than he already is.”

Dicken finished off his cookie and looked up. “And if he doesn’t?”

“Then we will always remember him for the brave warrior he was.”

“More than likely we’ll remember him for being the town crazy.”

***

Lanny saluted the flag. “Here we go, folks, into the unknown,” he said jumping from the stack of wood to a patch of dirt below.

Dicken watched Lanny disappear beyond a thicket. Time passes slowly when you’re questioning the spine of your own character. But when you think your best friend might be venturing into trouble, your heart demands a decision.

Dicken crossed the distance to the edge of the clearing in the direction of the mansion in a blur of nervous strides. It was past three in the afternoon. The air was still and dry. The sun was cast in red and orange hues.

Dicken questioned why he hadn’t stood by Lanny and immediately launched himself into danger. Leanora may have been right to favor Lanny all along.

“Boo,” Lanny blurted out, jumping from the bushes behind Dicken.

“You screw-up. You scared the shit out of me,” Dicken said, clearly relieved. “This place doesn’t look so bad. Let’s go around to the front?”

The twenty-six-room Victorian mansion was built in 1878 by Oliver Hastings Glumly, a man who made his fortune building the eastern railroads on the backs of cheap European labor. It was said that neither of his three daughters possessed his probing intelligence, daring, or business acumen, eventually dissipating their inheritance on bad investments, soured marriages, and a decade of social extravagance.

Claims on the property from different members of the extended Glumly family and creditors had been contested in court for so many years no one knew who owned it anymore.

Dicken walked down the overgrown path directly toward the front of the home. It was a grand four-story mansion with a score of broken windows and shingles torn away from its many ornate gables. Rotted wood was everywhere. Dicken was saddened. What must it have been like to live in such a splendid home? No problems with money or status, with recognition, or defining who you were and having to live up to what was expected of you.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going in the front door.”

“Just like that?” Lanny said.

“And if it’s locked, I’ll find another way in, but I’m not skulking about like some common criminal.”

“But we are criminals.”

“It all depends on how you look at it,” Dicken said.

“So how do you look at it?”

“There is a truth inside, and I’m going to find it.”

Dicken bolted up the wide stone steps leading up to the porch and rapped three times on the door and stepped away. There was no answer. He struck his fist against the massive oak doors again.

Standing at the foot of the stairs, Lanny shook his head. “Maybe they’re not home?”

The sides of the house were bordered by brush and mats of knee-high weeds. Thick vines coiled up from nowhere and clung to the rotting wood siding.

Dicken cleared a passage through the bushes to the back of the wide pantry door and pressed his nose to the glass. The inside was cast in ancient shadows. The space was empty. No copper pots and pans and cooking utensils hanging from the cabinets and over a massive butcher block. There were two sinks. He couldn’t imagine what kind of family needed two oversized sinks.

“What do you see?”

Dicken cleaned off the rest of the single pane. The pantry was larger than his living room. Cobwebs were laced from corner to floor and over every surface from chopping blocks to cabinets. “I think I can make out movement.”

“What?”

“Someone is in there,” Dicken said, pressing his nose to the glass.

“We should get out of here.”

“I see a man and, wait, there’s a woman too.”

“Let’s go,” Lanny said, tugging on Dicken’s shirt.

“The man, I can’t make him out, but he’s big, and I think he’s got something in his right hand. He’s coming up behind the woman. I don’t know why she doesn’t hear him.”

Lanny looked around the outside of the home. “We have to get out the hell of here.”

“No. Wait. Oh my God.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a knife. I couldn’t make it out at first. The guy’s got a butcher knife in his hand.”

“What about the woman?”

“She doesn’t hear him. He’s only a few feet in back of her.”

“What’s he doing now?”

“There’s a strange look on his face. I can only make out a slice of it from here. God, he’s a monster. Six and a half feet if he’s an inch. He’s got a hat on. What the hell is he doing with a hat in the house? He’s raising the knife overhead.”

“How close is he?”

“He’s right behind her.”

“Let’s get the police.”

“There’s no time for that,” Dicken said, locking both hands onto the doorknob and twisting it with all his strength. The door was frozen tight in its weathered frame. He banged his shoulder against the door once, twice, but it wouldn’t budge. He looked back into the smeared window. “He heard me. He’s coming.”

“Oh my God, Dicken, he’s going to kill us,” Lanny said, falling back into the bushes.

“Better us than the woman.”

“What?”

“She’s beautiful.” Dicken turned. “Wouldn’t you sacrifice yourself in order to save a beautiful woman in distress?”

Lanny gasped for words. “And let him kill me?”

“To save her.”

“I … I don’t know.”

“Wouldn’t you sacrifice yourself for Leanora Bethune?” Dicken asked and instantly regretted the question.

He threw his body into the pantry door, trying to drown out the sound of his question and the insecurity that fed it. With the third try the door popped open and he fell through the opening.

The pantry was roasting hot and filled with foul air. A thick, stale smell tightened his nostrils. He walked back outside. “Lying down on the job again?” he said to Lanny, who was still working his way out of a clump of dead vines.

“What about the man with the knife?”

Maybe Lanny hadn’t heard his question about Leanora? “Guess I must have been wrong about him and the beautiful woman he was about to murder.”

“What!” Lanny screamed.

“Things like that ever happen to Captain Commando?”

“Dickhead. You got me on that one.”

Dicken came up to his friend. “We’re in this together, Captain Commando. Right?”

“Some captain,” he said brushing the caked soil off his pants.

“Let’s go in and see what all the fuss is about.”

“But no more butchers’ knives.”

“What about the beautiful woman?”

“That’s different,” Lanny said shoving Dicken back into the pantry.

***

Dicken could feel a surge of eagerness. This was the opportunity, the experience of a lifetime. How often did you get to explore a haunted mansion with your best friend?

Then he wondered what he would do if Lanny was injured during their quest. Dicken could see himself running back to Ms. Watkins’ home, hammering on the front door, and having this angel, this heavenly creature, learn that her only boy was seriously hurt because of Dicken Chambers’ lack of restraint. How would he look in her eyes then?

“Let’s get on with this.”

Lanny disappeared into a tall cupboard and came out with an old, single bit hickory axe handle caked gray in cobwebs. He cleaned it off, hefted the headless three-foot staff from hand to hand until he was comfortable. “Let’s go.”

Dicken walked into a grand entrance hall lined with the most detailed panels and wood carvings he had ever seen. At the far end were the twin, large, oak front doors he had tried to breach.

“Look at this place,” Dicken said wide-eyed. He stroked the carvings with loving devotion. He was so taken by the details along the paneled wall he felt an immediate kinship to the master woodcarver who had created such wonder.

Lanny walked into an empty, large hall closet, and another, which was also empty. The main study on the first floor was laced with intricate cobwebs cloaked over every window and wood panel. The boys stood at the entrance to this high, majestic room lined with empty bookshelves from floor to ceiling.

“People lived here?”

The main parlor had been stripped of all furniture.

Dicken made his way to the wide stairs leading up from the main parlor. The stairs creaked underfoot, but it was the scent that stirred the soul of Dicken Chambers.

Dicken threw his arm across Lanny’s path. “Smell it?”

“Yeah.”

Dicken swiveled about halfway up the staircase, trying to get a fix on the direction of the scent. He tightened his grip on the butcher knife, took a few more steps, which brought him up to the second-floor landing. “This place would make some hideout.”

“That’s not funny.”

Dicken stood on the second-floor landing like the captain of a ship, surveying the possibilities before him. “It’s indoors so we can come here all year round. No one ever comes here.”

“I wonder why.”

“Because they’re cowards.”

“Maybe they knew better,” Lanny said, taking the last few stairs up to Dicken’s side.

Dicken moved about the landing. A dozen open and closed doors led off into God knows where. “It’s now or never, Captain Commando. Either we rout the nest of thieves and murderers and take over this hideout or we’ll never forgive ourselves.”

“More comic book nonsense?”

“No, pure Dicken Chambers,” he said, already on his way to the largest pair of doors on the landing when he turned around and saw Lanny’s expression of terror. He looked down at his feet in the direction the axe staff was pointed.

In the dust film that had coated the entire mansion was a series of footprints that appeared at the top of the carpet-covered stairs, leading to the large doors and beyond.

“A woman?” Dicken said, making out the signature of a woman’s heel print.

He knelt down and stroked a line with his finger through the imprint that severed the front from the back of the shoe. “Someone was here, but not recently.”

“Now you’re an Indian scout?” Lanny said, the staff now secure in both hands like a baseball bat.

“Whoever it was could have made those prints weeks or months ago, considering the dust that has already settled on them.”

“Now what?”

Dicken pushed open the twin doors and moved cautiously into the room. There was only one piece of furniture: a bed that had to be ten feet long and just as wide. “God almighty.”

It was big, grand, and imposing, with an overly thick mattress. And the four carved mahogany bedposts that stretched nearly up to the ceiling were as thick as his thigh. Four pairs of dust-covered windows bathed the bedroom in an eerie, clouded yellow stillness.

“Can you imagine living here?”

“I can’t imagine standing here,” Lanny said, his staff tracing out the direction of the woman’s faint footprints to a point at the base of an oak-paneled wall behind the bed.

Dicken traced his fingers around the footprints. They were dull. Faded, as though they had been made long ago.

“Like she was never here,” Dicken said, moving to the point in the heavily detailed wall where the woman’s footprints ended.

Dicken knew, from all the mysteries he had read, that a secret door was close and could only be opened by a secret button or latch.

“Are you okay?”

“Did you ever see anything so beautiful?” Dicken said.

“Beautiful?”

“I wonder who carved it and hid the switch to open the secret panel.”

“A switch?”

“To open this panel so you could get into the secret stairwell or room behind this wall,” Dicken said.

Lanny searched the ornate molding for a break in the surface, a niche that could be hiding the secrets of Glumly Manor.

Dicken stepped back and retraced the woman’s footsteps to the side of the bed and bent down to the wood frame and ran his hand under the side frame that supported the bed. A small protrusion, like a wooden dowel the size of an eraser head of a pencil, erupted through the wood surface. The head of the dowel was rounded and worn smooth.

“I feel something.”

“What is it?”

“Here goes,” Dicken said and pressed it until he could feel a click as it effortlessly receded up into the base of the frame.

Lanny jumped away from the wall as the panel directly in front of him parted along a faint seam. Beyond the darkness of the opening there was a thick, black, murky haze.

Lanny’s grip on the axe shaft tightened. “We need to get the hell out of here.”

“No.”

“Dicken, the place is haunted. If we don’t leave now, we’ll never get out.”

“I’m staying.”

“I’m not going to die in this old dump,” Lanny insisted.

“Someday when we are old, either we will look back at this moment and regret not having gone forward, or be proud of ourselves for taking a step into the unknown. There are no ghosts. No witches and goblins. There is no mystery here except the one created by legend.”

“Or God.”

“A light, Lanny. We need a light.”

“I have no matches. Nothing,” he said, peeling open both pockets of his pants.

“Then I’m going in.”

“No. Don’t,” Lanny implored.

Dicken raised the knife in his fist and pressed himself sideways into the coal darkness that lay beyond the narrow opening.

***

Lanny hesitated, then propelled himself headlong into the black void. He took a step beyond the panel and fell forward as the floor disappeared beneath him. He fell on his hip, let out a short yelp, and tumbled down through the narrow, choking darkness. His back struck a cool, smooth surface as he slid down the winding shaft.

A faint light quickly became an opening through which he passed in a torrent of arms and legs and frenzied terror.

He fell out of the shaft and tumbled onto a dirt floor into a pile of filthy rags at the end of the small, dim chamber. There was no sign of Dicken.

Light from two small windows near the ceiling of the laundry room that were partially covered by grass and weeds penetrated the room for him to see the three-foot-diameter hole in the wall through which he had fallen. A stairwell in the corner led back up to a doorway.

“Dicken?” he cried.

He forced himself up, tripping over his staff. His fingernails were broken and bleeding from trying to stop his descent.

“Dicken?”

He began to cough in the airless room. He tried to reenter the narrow opening, but the upward angle was too steep and smooth. He couldn’t get a grip on the narrow, polished wood surface.

Lanny followed the light coming from the narrow stairwell at the end of the laundry room. At the top of the stone stairwell was a door leading into the back of the pantry. He ran out into the main hall, back up the stairs into the master bedroom, but the face of the wall that had once exposed the blackened heart of Glumly Manor had closed.

He scratched at the opening, “Dicken?”

He ran back to the bed and searched for the button Dicken had described until his hand was raw with splinters. Finally, he found it, frozen in place.

Lanny clasped his head in his hands and started to breathe quick and deep. Soon, tears were pouring down his cheeks.

“Dicken,” he yelled. His body was wracked with fear and the guilt of having been responsible for the death of his best friend. He tried the button beneath the bed again.

He grabbed the axe staff and began to hammer it against the thick oak panel until he was spent and heaving against the side of the bed. “Dicken,” he said again, with what little air remained in his lungs.

Now the tears came slower as guilt poisoned their flow. Lanny pictured going home to tell his mother what had happened. She would call Dicken’s parents, who would phone the police, who would definitely blame him for the disappearance and death of Dicken Chambers.

Then it struck him that with Dicken’s death he would lose whatever hold he had on Leanora Bethune. If there was any doubt of her affection, now it would soon resolve itself in a torrent of tears and regret.

How could he let his friend die? How could he let that happen unless he was so jealous he wanted it to happen?

That’s what Leanora would think.

That’s what everybody in Hillock and the surrounding towns would think once they found out the friends had been feuding over the same girl. Dicken Chambers, who tried to steal the heart of his best friend’s girlfriend, had succeeded in death with what he was unable to

accomplish in life.

“Dicken,” Lanny called out a few more times.

He wanted to stay and find Dicken. Another part of him wanted to run before he too was consumed by the death grip of Glumly Manor.

He pictured being interrogated by the police, and his mother’s disbelief, Dicken’s anguished parents. He had failed a friend, and he was going to lose the love of his life.

There was going to be a terrible price to pay for what he had done.

Lanny wiped the sorrow from his cheeks and stumbled to his feet.

He walked over to the wall and set his hand over the wood panel. Dicken had been taken by the force of evil that lay on the other side of the wall. Hopefully, the police would be able to recover the body before it was consumed by malevolent forces.

He picked up the axe staff again and charged the wall, slamming the headless staff into the hardened panel.

Lanny wanted the clash to be heard clear back to Hillock. He wanted its inhabitants, someone, to believe in his innocence.

In a rush of exhaustion and consuming guilt, he bent over, trying to regain his breath. When he looked up again, the panel had separated, exposing Dicken Chambers with a smirk on his face that cleaved the heart of his best friend.

Lanny picked up the staff and charged.

***

By the time Dicken tried to fend off the assault by raising his arms overhead, the edge of the wooden axe staff came down with such force it cleaved his right forearm and split open his skull.

Dicken dropped to his knees in front of a stunned Lanny Watkins. Dicken tried to raise his other arm, but it wouldn’t work. Nothing would. Blood pulsed from the open crack in his skull.

Dicken felt something tugging at his back then in his legs, then fell backward forever.

***

Lanny Watkins was cloaked in a fevered sweat. This time there was no mistake about what had killed Dicken Chambers.

Lanny took a half a step into the opening’s darkness and with his foot felt a wide ledge on one side of the entrance where Dicken had entered. It was large enough and deep enough to stand on and not fall into the long winding tunnel that dropped three floors into the basement. That must have been where Dicken was hiding.

He walked back and fell against one of the large windows. The axe handle was splattered with blood.

Lanny Watkins washed himself clean in a nearby creek and made his way back to town in time for dinner. He told his mother he had been out hiking with Dicken earlier in the day. When Bonnie Watkins came over that evening and asked where Dicken was, he replied, “He seemed moody, I think. He wanted to go off, so I let him. I think he was upset about something.”

The police questioned him after Dicken’s parents reported that he had not come home that night. Lanny pretended distress, as much as one might expect from someone whose friend had taken the cruelest advantage of their friendship.

The boy’s body was never found. The police considered their options. Had the boy run away from home, or was abducted, or was murdered? These were difficult and unpredictable times. Anything was possible.

Dicken’s mother believed her child had been murdered. Lanny’s mother tearfully agreed and did what she could to console her grieving son.

Lanny was confident, as anyone could be, that the footprints were years older than they had imagined, and that the axe and remains of Dicken’s lifeless body were safely buried deep under their hideout.

By the time school was open, Lanny was infatuated with a young girl new to Hillock. As he went through his final years in high school, he became more distant and moody.

As time passed, the Chambers family’s excruciating pain from the loss of their son turned into sorrow, then anguished regret, then pride in the memories of what a wonderful son he had been.

Years after the Depression was over, and before Roosevelt’s tragic death, the rightful ownership of the Glumly estate was established in court.

That was quite a few years after Dicken Chambers’ once best friend was institutionalized after suffering increasingly violent episodes of paranoid schizophrenia.

In the end, the boys remained the very best of friends, never far from the sound of the other’s voice, the other’s jest, or boast, or tease.

At least that’s the way it remained frozen in time in Lanny Watkins’ tormented soul.

 

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