Salmon Wars
Author: Catherine Collins; Douglas Frantz
Date: 2023-07-11 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Ecosystems & Habitats; box set; Health & Fitness; Business & Economics; Coastal Regions & Shorelines; Food Industry; Breeder; The Hour Before Dark; Nature; Industries; Healthy Living & Personal Hygien
Description: A Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent and a former private investigator dive deep into the murky waters of the international salmon farming industry, exposing the unappetizing truth about a fish that is not as good for you as you have been told. A decade ago, farmed Atlantic salmon replaced tuna as the most popular fish on North America’s dinner tables. We are told salmon is healthy and environmentally friendly. The reality is disturbingly different. In Salmon Wars , investigative journalists Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins bring readers to massive ocean feedlots where millions of salmon
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
Rights: Copyrights as per source stories

Table of Contents

- The Hour Before Dark
- Breeder
- Afterlife

Praise for Douglas Clegg’s Fiction

“Clegg’s stories can chill the spine so effectively that the reader should keep paramedics on standby.”

—Dean Koontz, New York Times bestselling author.

“Douglas Clegg has become the new star in horror fiction.”

—Peter Straub, New York Times bestselling author of Ghost Story and, with Stephen King, The Talisman

“Douglas Clegg is the best horror novelist of the post-Stephen King generation.”

— Bentley Little, USA Today bestselling author of The Haunted.

“Clegg gets high marks on the terror scale…”

—The Daily News (New York)

THE HOUR BEFORE DARK

Douglas Clegg

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"Here comes a candle to light you to bed, And here comes a chopper to chop off your head."

—traditional nursery rhyme

"There are only two ways to live your life.

One is that nothing is a miracle.

The other is as though everything is a miracle."

—Albert Einstein

PROLOGUE

1

A nightmare:

"Do you want to play the Dark Game?"

"No."

"What are you afraid of?"

"You."

2

The rules for the Dark Game are simple:

First, you need to close your eyes. Do not open them. If necessary, you can use a blindfold. In fact, because kids usually can't keep their eyes closed, blindfolds are recommended.

Second, you need to stay very still for a long time and block out all noise, except for the voice of the chosen master of the Dark Game. You must also block out all smell and all touch, except for the others whose hands you're holding. You have to join hands and form a circle. But block out everything you can.

Except the voice of the master of the Dark Game.

Third, someone has to be in control of where the Dark Game goes. To recite the litany that begins it. To direct your mind into the game.

And lastly, you must never play the Dark Game once it's dark outside.

At night, it becomes too real. You lose control of it. You can't stop it after dark.

You must start the game in the hour before dark, sometimes called the Magic Hour.

You must stop playing when night falls. Because that's when it changes.

Sometimes, you can't get out of the Dark Game once the dark comes.

It becomes real then.

It takes you over.

3

A nightmare:

On the other side of the door, the voice again: "Don't be afraid."

The door swings wide, and from outside, an eternal twilight, a shadow sweeps in.

"I am here."

"I won't play the Dark Game," I whisper.

"Too late. You can't stop playing it."

4

I've come to believe that absolute evil has a human face.

And absolute innocence is the brother of evil.

I was once innocent, but then I began playing that game.

5

When I was nine, I went wandering on a chilly early evening.

My father owned a vast property called Hawthorn, which included a house, some woods, and a smokehouse, as well as a stream and a duck pond. It seemed like an endless world to me then.

A man found me in the woods—a man whose face I have somehow erased from my memory as part of a feverish week that vanished for me as a child.

He told me that I had blood on my face. He washed it off in an ice-cold stream, splashing it all over my forehead and hands. I felt as if I'd been bitten by mosquitoes—even in the middle of winter.

He walked me through the night-smitten woods until we approached the back of my home.

It was a moment out of time that I could not place within my other memories—why I had wandered, or why I had what might've been blood on my face, or even the face of the man who had washed blood from me.

That was childhood; it ended; I closed its door; I grew up and moved away.

Many years later, when he was in his fifties and I was in my late twenties, my father wandered at twilight and opened the door to a mystery.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

1

It attacked with the ferocity of a wild animal.

2

At the point my father, Gordie Raglan, entered the smokehouse, his life was nearly over.

Even if you'd told him that, it probably wouldn't have stopped him.

Knowing my father, he probably had been thinking about the Boston Celtics and if they were going to kick any ass that winter. Or whether he was going to have shepherd's pie without peas for supper when he got back. Or how he was going to repair the half-rotted roof of the cabin down by the duck pond when he knew he should just let the cabin fall apart.

He was a guy who was fairly transparent in his thinking and, though smart, was a simple man. He liked his world to be orderly.

He always looked to me—in photographs and my childhood memories—like a solid structure. A man created for purpose, duty, and care. Even at his worst (he had his terrible days, as all fathers will), he seemed a moral compass within a world spun out of control.

He liked the people around him to be somewhat predictable, which is no doubt why he remained on Burnley Island most of his life. His main loves were, in fact, the Boston Celtics, what was for supper, home repairs, and his daughter's two dogs, which, by right of whose house they lived in, were his as well. They were rescued greyhounds named for Welsh legend (Mab and Madoc) and might've met terrible fates if he and my sister, Brooke, hadn't gone over to the racetrack in Rhode Island a few years previous to grab two pups that weren't quite right for racing.

Perhaps all he thought about was what was bringing him out in the storm in the first place. There were, at the time, a thousand guesses for this, but none of them got near the mark.

He hadn't called the dogs. This was unusual for him. He might go out to see who was in the driveway or what a certain noise had been, but he nearly always called the greyhounds out when he did that.

Not that he went out often at twilight or most evenings. Not that Mab and Madoc would've gone with him—those dogs dreaded foul weather as much as they did the local veterinarian's office.

But still, he would've called them. If he had, Brooke would've known he was leaving. She was at the other end of the house—down the boxcar hallways that led like a puzzle from one room to another without end, built that way by some ancient Raglan with a bizarre sense that every room should open on another room. Brooke was down in what was called the second Great Room, with the dogs at her feet. Reading a mystery novel, halfway falling asleep, having been up most of the previous night.

That afternoon, Gordie Raglan had drunk half a mug of hot cocoa before he left the house. He had a fondness in November for comfort foods—chicken soup, warm cocoa, and shepherd's pie. Cocoa was his favorite. He loved it more laced with a bit of bourbon, but this particular night there was nary a drop in the house.

He no doubt had chewed gum as he headed for the front door—Wrigley's Spearmint or Big Red, either one could be his favorite of the day. He wore his funny red cap that once belonged to one of his sons, but to which he had become attached over the past several years. He drew on a parka that he'd received as a present the previous Christmas. There were boots by the door, but he chose to wear his scuffed, ten-year-worn Oxfords. It was his storm outfit. No umbrella. Dad didn't believe in umbrellas.

The cap made him look youthful or silly, depending upon who was asked about it. His peppered gray hair no doubt stuck out of its sides. My father was generally late with haircuts once November had begun, unless his daughter had been after him about it.

He rarely left the house after three or four in the afternoon anymore, unless something needed immediate attention around the grounds of his home.

But something got him outside, during the storm.

3

Barely light out, the fury of the storm brought an early veil of darkness with it.

Something made him put down the mug, slip on his shoes, leaving them untied as he went out the front door of his home. He had a flashlight with him. Around the house, he always kept a flashlight by his side, as much as he kept the kerosene spot heater in whichever room he chose to occupy.

Only a man as stubborn as Gordie Raglan would've traipsed out in the worst storm of November to do some mysterious errand in what amounted to a rundown stone shelter that had been locked up for years.

It had been a tempest out at sea, but on the island it was a rough kind of magic—a Nor'easter blowing down across the bogs and ponds and the slips and beaches, through the woods with their sheltering pines, with all the beauty that a terrific storm brings—the overly dramatic light of creation itself swirling through that island.

(I had loved the winter storms when I was a boy. I had gone out into them sometimes and held out my arms—imagine a boy of ten doing that—as if it were my own magic power that brought the wind and rain.)

This particular night the rain was incessant.

Maddening.

The lightning, a constant flashbulb in the eyes. Thunder roared overhead like drunken Nordic gods.

He must've been swearing under his breath, given his limp and what he had always called the "old pain," doubly frustrated, for at one point his left shoe went into the mud, deep.

He left it there, a few feet from the entrance to the smokehouse.

The smokehouse itself was hardly much of a shelter. It was a small one-room stone house that had at one time been the place where meat was hung to smoke and dry. It had been kept locked for years.

He had the key with him.

4

He would not have been considered tall by any stretch of the imagination, but there was something in his broad shoulders and barrel chest that indicated a large, imposing figure.

Upon entering the small room, he no doubt smelled the old smoky odor and the pungent stink of earth in the air. Behind him—and I'm guessing—the door slid shut, creaking with the wind that howled outside.

He spun around, annoyed.

The rain had been coming down in sheets for nearly an hour. He directed the flashlight's beam to the small, thick square of glass that was the only window. The sky darkened with clouds and a somber grayness. The door banged back and forth briefly, then shut again. Branches scraped the low rooftop.

He glanced back into the darkness, perhaps.

Then up—the ceiling, highest at about six feet, was arched.

He looked back at the door and its window.

The square of light through its glass.

Twilight outside. Rain began hitting the window.

He shot the flashlight beam around the ceiling. He glanced down along the rough stone walk.

He might have heard what would be a clash of metal, like a knife being sharpened on stone.

He heard some noise—perhaps someone behind him?

The first slice came down on his shoulder.

He dropped the flashlight.

The next slice caught him on the back of the leg. Something stung the place between his shoulder blades. A cold blade thrust into his back.

After an hour, the flashlight's beam grew feeble.

He was not yet dead.

The door to the small stone structure swung back and forth, and then closed again.

It grew dark outside, from descending night and the storm. Branches of the old hawthorn trees scraped the roof as rain battered down. Lightning flashed across the gently sloping hills and rocky pastures, followed by a rolling boom of thunder.

The storm, which had begun off the coast farther south and had ridden up into New England on the jet stream, howled and screamed and groaned through the night.

The lights went out at the farmhouse that stood less than a mile away as the rain turned to sleet and then snow with the falling temperature.

The first snow of the year swept through on the heels of the storm. It frosted the fields and woods.

There was something about the New England woods, and in particular, this island off the Atlantic coast, off Massachusetts, that created a very real isolation within the beauty of a winter storm.

The first snow, a dusting across pine and oak, with the last stalks of balding pasture thrust up through glittering whiteness.

A pastoral moment: farmhouse in the distance, the stone smokehouse, the swirls of fine snow, the smell of wood-fire in the air from chimneys near and far, and the night, as it descended.

5

This is the story of my family.

Call me Nemo, for that was the name my sister saddled me with when I was a kid. It stuck. Other things stuck from childhood, as well—including the Brain Fart.

The Brain Fart was a week in the memories of my brother, sister, and me that had just disappeared without warning. We imagined it, after a while, as an enormous gassy cloud that had shot out of our ears and floated like mist somewhere above the island before drifting off to sea. By the time I'd turned twenty-eight, that Brain Fart seemed to hover in the air again. None of us knew what had caused the Brain Fart. It had seemed spontaneous, although a certain amount of fever had accompanied it. We had lost a week, which, for children like us, seemed like an entire season.

I suspected even then that the week of the Brain Fart was important. In the end, I guess it was.

But the beginning was my father, and how he had walked into the smokehouse and set in motion a mystery that drew me back to the island in the first place.

And how my sister, Brooke, had found him.

CHAPTER TWO

1

"What we do in life that determines who we are, we do alone," my father told me when I was much younger and had done something that was no doubt terrible. I can't recall what it was I'd done, but his words had been engraved in my brain since then.

He also was a great proponent of the phrase "Even one person can make a difference in the world. Even the smallest among us."

He was one of those fathers who had these kinds of chats with his children.

2

The current smokehouse was built sometime before 1850. It had once been used for smoking fish and meat for my great-great-greats. There had been another smokehouse on the same spot before 1845, but the story was that it had burned down, for it was made of wood. The stones were local, quarried at what was, for most of the twentieth century, a rocky area and a pit full of water, out among the pines just two miles to the north of the property. The newer stone smokehouse had remained intact for more than 150 years. In his lifetime, my father only once had to replace the roof, long before I was born, after a hurricane had hit the island. It had a dirt floor when we'd been children. At some point, my father had set down oak planks, then put another set of pine planks over these as a kind of floor. He'd used pegs and nails to connect the boards, but it had been a very rough, uncouth floor that had warped a bit over the years.

It was always cold in the smokehouse, no matter what the season.

When I was very little, my siblings and I used the smokehouse as something of a hideaway to play games in; then, when it became the place of all punishment for us (spankings, lessons-to-be-learned-from-our-misdeeds, and the Time-Out room), the place lost its enchantment. I mainly remembered it for being nasty and chilly, and for making me feel as if I were going to be trapped inside it forever and no one would ever come get me.

Years later, my father put a dead bolt on it because he said that he found two summer people making out in it (I suspect now that they were doing more than making out). The smokehouse became mainly just another object of quaintness on our property, of equal interest as the duck pond and the old pump out back.

3

A reconstruction of the crime scene:

The door battering, the flashlight on the wood slat floor, the way his body was positioned when he'd been found, and the approximate time of the electricity going out at the house.

His shoe, in the thick mud.

His hands, severed at the wrists.

The blood, which had made the first policeman on the scene think that the floor and walls had been painted a messy red.

Joe Grogan, the local police chief of the very small police force on the island, knew better.

The smokehouse door was locked, always. There were no windows but the one in the door, and that was too small for anyone to fit through. It had not been broken or removed.

My father had let himself into the smokehouse.

He had unlocked the door.

He may have even let the murderer in as well.

4

No one alive really knew what had happened in the smokehouse that night. All anyone knew, it turned out, was that something must have drawn him there.

Here, the theories seemed to scatter to the winds: He knew whom he was going to meet, or he guided them there, or they jumped him, or well, it was pretty wild, the variety of theories. It might've been a stranger, or a group of thugs. Getting on and off the island would have been difficult.

And the modus operandi of the killing? To imagine that one human being could inflict this on another seemed beyond the reach of all sanity. It had been a curved blade of some sort (none was found). Whoever had done this—in mid-November, when there was only one ferry a day out to the island—had somehow eluded authorities and gone off-island without anyone seeing them. How could that have happened?

But the basics were that my father had left the house a bit earlier, with a parka on and a flashlight in his hand.

Brooke had been reading in her bedroom, she told the police, and was rarely aware of her father's comings and goings at night. The house was large. The floor plan, which twisted like a snake along the grounds, allowed for various ways of leaving and entering. One room opened on the other. There were no hallways—just one boxy room after another, upstairs and down.

With the doors between the rooms closed, as they were, it was hard to hear one sound from the other end of the house. Even the dogs didn't hear beyond one or two rooms, at best.

Brooke had once gone a week without ever seeing her father, so completely independent was her life within the house where she'd been raised.

I got the details later, but by then it had already been called the worst murder in the history of eastern Massachusetts. I'm fairly sure that wasn't entirely true. There were other terrible murders—all the time, I suppose—but they'd been forgotten in the fickle memory of those who did the recording of recent history. The Brain Farts of the media.

Surely, there were murders daily on the mainland, in the crack houses and alleyways that existed there, but those deaths were seen as somehow less interesting than my father's—a war hero, a survivor of torture and deprivation, a family man who raised three children nearly by himself, cut down at the last by some psycho with a sharp blade on a resort island after the resorts had all closed for the winter. It was news, as they say. It would keep some young reporters in line for a promotion if they made enough of the murder.

Sure, Burnley was no Martha's Vineyard, no Nantucket—we had no celebrities to speak of, and the rich didn't flock to the island as much as the wannabe rich did. But it still sounded cool, no doubt, to turn in a story to a newspaper editor that had in it the words: resort, island, murder, and war hero.

It certainly was the worst murder that Burnley Island had ever known, and the worst to ever take place near Hawthorn, the house where I had grown up.

"Life is full of casualties," my father told me when I asked him why Granny had to die when I was young. He was one of those wonderful fathers who brought life's lessons out of any situation. "We look away until we have no choice. Then we examine them, remember them, and look away again, as if we're not meant to think too much about them, but to live. Just live and forget."

Brooke found my father dead in the smokehouse, but apparently could not look away.

He had been dead since seven or eight the previous night.

5

The storm's howling had kept her up most of the night.

She had argued with Dad the day before. She had avoided him, which was fairly easy to do at Hawthorn. She was very sad about something, but told me that none of it mattered once Dad died.

She said later: "I had the worst night of my life. Let's leave it at that. I had a big fire going in the back bedroom, and even with that, the place was freezing. I could not get it warm enough. I went to take a hot bath, but that didn't work. I just wanted to go to sleep. I couldn't. Hadn't eaten. It was the barometric pressure. It always does that to me when winter comes on. It plummets and my mood just goes. I feel like I want to bury myself alive or just lie in bed or walk through the rooms, back and forth all night, until the headache goes away. The dogs even stay away from me. They sense it. All I could think about was what was wrong with the world."

Brooke had slept late—'til two.

She hadn't even thought about where our father had gone. It was not unusual for him to be inspecting parts of the property or running his errands in town in the afternoon. She had made some eggs, toast, and coffee, but would not eat them because she said she had an upset stomach from the night before. She left a plate of eggs and toast out on the kitchen table, thinking that her father might be back at any moment from his errands and would want a snack.

She thought it unusual that he had not already made a pot of coffee earlier in the day.

Even so, he might've gone to have coffee at Croder-Sharp-Callahan, where he could talk women and weather with Percy Shaw and Reg Miller, both of whom spent their lives at that lunch counter having what Brooke called their Old Salt conversations. She had warned her father several times that if he hung out with them, he would grow old before his time and then no woman would have him.

Brooke took the dogs out for a walk down to the woods.

She guided them back up to the dirt road that ran from the back of the property up to the main road. She saw Paulette Doone and her husband, Ike, in their truck on the way to get groceries in the village. Paulette had mentioned that the lights were out in half the island because of the storm. "Won't be back on 'til six. Maybe eight," Paulette said.

"Maybe ten," Ike said.

Brooke had mentioned that her lights came back up sometime after midnight.

The Doones lived in the Cape Cod house set back from the road. Paulette asked if the Captain (although my father had been anything but a captain, he was known as the Captain or Cap by the villagers since he'd been a boy) needed his favorite kind of candy from the store, or a prescription from Hempstead Apothecary (because she knew he'd had a bad cold all week). Brooke had asked if they could pick up some Halls Mentholyptus and maybe some kind of over-the-counter inhaler, something to help his sinuses. Brooke mentioned the barometric pressure and was generally furious that the cabin by the pond had flooded. Paulette mentioned Jesus and God and being saved, which is something that she never seemed to tire of bringing up, no matter how rude Brooke got in return. Paulette felt that Brooke was agitated (as she informed the police chief when asked). Paulette even called her "heated" later to her husband, but Ike privately thought that Brooke had seemed radiant, as if she were in love, with a rosy complexion and bright eyes. Paulette had interpreted this as something bad, because she felt that Brooke was a dangerous woman to the married women on the island—and Paulette elbowed her husband whenever he glanced at their attractive neighbor for too long.

Brooke told Paulette that she thought her father might be in the village, at the lunch counter talking storms and boats and the upcoming winter festivities in the village.

"If we see the Captain, we'll drag him home," Paulette had told her.

"If you see him, tell him we're having chili tonight," Brooke had said. "Hormel's. And corn bread if I can find any corn flour. Can you pick me up some in town? I might be out. Chili's always better with corn bread. Or spoon bread. He wants shepherd's pie, but I won't make it three nights in a row. He can cook his own supper if he wants what he wants."

"Ike is like that, too," Paulette said. Her burly and often-sullen husband gave a grunt at that. Paulette mentioned to Joe Grogan later on that Brooke had seemed preoccupied, as if speaking to them had been a disturbance for her.

"I thought she was very sad. She looked like she hadn't slept in days," Paulette had mentioned, giving Joe Grogan something that was as close to the Evil Eye as he had ever in his life witnessed. "But you know, Joe, women like that. Well, they don't sleep much. Do they? I'd say more, but I'm a Christian woman, and I don't like to speak like that."

6

Because our father often hiked the mile to the village and got rides home with neighbors or anyone he could talk into giving him a lift, this was just another ordinary day.

Brooke had her own inner turmoil.

She told others that she had been anxious and somewhat depressed. She talked to Dr. Connelly in the village a week earlier about perhaps getting a change in prescription for her sleeping medicine. "Are you depressed?" he'd asked.

"Not depressed," she said. "Just not quite feeling like myself."

He had asked her if she might want to see a therapist on the mainland—he knew a good one in Falmouth. She told him she'd consider it, but she didn't think talking out her problems would be the answer.

She fought the urge to be impatient with Mab and Madoc. They'd run off to the woods chasing squirrels or rabbits, and returned a long while later, covered head to foot with mud. She went and checked on the cabin—the damage to the roof was extensive. She made a mental note to talk to her father about just tearing it down before it turned into some kind of eyesore.

The snow melted where the sun hit it. In the shade, the duck pond had a thin scum of ice on its surface that had not hardened.

At four, she noticed that lightning had split one of the trees near the smokehouse. She said she had been standing in the greenhouse, with the windows steamed over, and feeling the warmth of the place.

"I was looking at something—I thought it was mist coming in from the road. It was nearly beautiful. It was twilight—dark came early—and this romantic, soft mist just slowly poured along the road. Remember how Granny used to say you could see angels in the fog? I remembered her saying it, and I almost saw an angel in the mist," she said of it. "And then, I noticed the half-fallen tree."

One of the hawthorns in particular, but also the young oak that had not quite grown to adulthood yet.

Lightning, she assumed, had ripped across the trees. She was thankful there hadn't been a fire.

She went to see if there was any other damage.

Her feet crunched in the glaze of snow that hadn't quite melted in the shadow of the smokehouse.

She saw his shoe, his brown Oxford, stuck in mud—now frozen, she found, as she tried to pull it out. She ended up leaving it where it was, mired.

She glanced first up to the road, perhaps hoping that Paulette and Ike would still be there.

Then to the fields and the pasture—and beyond it, the woods. Mab and Madoc were running down into the duck pond, splashing around.

She glanced up at the sky with its overcast gloom.

Then she went to the low door of the smokehouse and touched it. Something told her not to—she told me later that it was an electric shock of memory—of never liking the smokehouse since before she could remember. Of remembering my screams as Dad spanked me there, or of remembering Bruno crying there for no reason at all when he was six or seven, sobbing and telling her that the smokehouse gave him nightmares.

When she touched the door, it moved a bit.

She grasped the latched handle, expecting the dead bolt that had been applied years ago to keep it shut, and surprise, surprise, it opened outward.

And that's when she found him.

(She told me later, "I wasn't sure whether it was him or not for a second. It was something I'd never seen before in my life. It was as if something had exploded, but had been reconstructed again. Something about it was like a dream—or a nightmare—something I'd visited before. As if I'd had some premonition of this. And my brain just short circuited. It just seemed to fade, and I couldn't think. I went somewhere else in my mind, I suppose. Somewhere safe.") She sat and stared at him for hours before contacting anyone. I don't want to even imagine how she could've sat there on the cold floor, blood everywhere.

My father.

And Brooke sat there in the icy stench of death.

She called someone just after ten that night. Her older brother.

Me.

CHAPTER THREE

1

I had a nightmare for all those years, and it repeated itself in a never-ending loop, now and again, at my most anxious times. In it, we played the Dark Game and could not stop.

It was as if the Dark Game had kept playing in some compartment of our minds even as we each grew up.

2

Brooke left no message for me other than to say "Nemo" on my answering machine.

My real name, Fergus, was redubbed Nemo in my early years when Brooke discovered Jules Verne—or at least the Disney version of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. She decided that because of my interest in sailing craft and my willingness to eat fried squid in a dare with Harry Withers, I must be kin to the infamous captain. Since I preferred Nemo to my real name, which just didn't fit for me, I had taken it on while on the island. After I left Burnley, once in college, I reverted to Gus, a diminutive of Fergus that didn't annoy me too much. But the islanders knew me as Nemo Raglan. As did my sister.

"Nemo, Nemo," she repeated.

After saying it, she hung up.

I listened to it twice, then erased it. I called her back. The phone rang several times. I heard the familiar clicks and that strange wind tunnel-like noise that I always heard whenever I called the island. Finally, the message machine picked up.

"Brooke? It's Nemo. Good to hear from you. What's up? Call me back."

Later, I got a nervous call from my younger brother, Bruno.

3

"Brooke said she called you," my brother said. "You've been out."

It was nearly one a.m. I was half-asleep. Beth, whom I'd been out with that night, lay beside me and turned over, clutching a pillow.

"Hey. Who's asleep. Bruno? That you?" I asked.

Beth made some small noise that was part-snore and part-groan. I reached over and stroked her back lightly. She made my bed smell of roses and something murkily sexual, a musk, an odor of femaleness that I enjoyed. I loved her scent. I pulled the sheet up around her shoulders to keep her warm. I wanted to kiss her again, just on the back of the neck. She turned over, annoyed even in sleep.

"Someone's with you," Bruno said, his voice not quite as Yankee as it had once been. It was gentler.

"What's up?" I repeated, annoyed that I could not cuddle up with Beth and drift to sleep. "I tried calling Brooke back, but there was no answer."

"You need to come home now. Tomorrow. A lot's going on."

"Like?"

"Dad's dead."

We both were silent for what seemed like minutes.

I gasped a word or two, meaningless. I felt as if someone had knocked the wind out of me. I leaned back on the pillows. I looked up at the shadows that the bedroom windows cast on the ceiling, with the curtains moving slowly back and forth from the slight draft. I closed my eyes and fought back a stupid anguished cry that wanted to come out of my body.

"Call me tomorrow," Bruno said. "We can talk then. Tonight's bad. There's more to it. Fly in tomorrow. I'll pick you up in Boston."

Then he hung up. No more details. Bruno was like that. Sometimes he spoke in telegrams, as if he were being charged by the word.

I called him back several times, but there was no answer.

4

I spent a sleepless night, made worse by not knowing how exactly my father had died.

When I did close my eyes—for what felt like a few minutes—a dream came abruptly with the ferocity of a nightmare. I watched outside myself (in the dream) as twilight descended on Hawthorn. The trees seemed to list to the side as my consciousness broke through them. I saw three children, standing in a circle, holding hands. It was me as a little boy, my sister, and my brother. Walking slowly to the left and then the right in the summer grass. Then, with the swiftness and brute force that can accompany shifts in a dream, I stood in the darkness, somewhere, and heard my little brother Bruno say the words, "Here comes a candle to light you to bed."

In the dream, the phone began ringing, and I cried out, "Someone get the phone! The phone's ringing! Get the phone!"

Someone asked, "What are you afraid of?"

I awoke. Covered in sweat. Breathing hard.

I gave up on sleep for the night.

It was maddening. I tried to call my brother back every few minutes until dawn. I left message after message. Finally his voice mail must have been full and stopped taking my messages. I could only stare at the walls. I went in the bathroom and curled up on the floor, just to feel its coldness and to be in a small space.

For some reason, small, dark spaces often made me feel protected. I felt like a child. I didn't want to think. I didn't want to imagine my father's face. I fought to pretend that somehow this wasn't the whole story, that perhaps my father had a stroke and Bruno had gotten it wrong. Or perhaps he was in a coma—as much as that doesn't sound better than death, it is. It would give me hope.

I wanted to hope badly. I hadn't seen my father in years, and I had loved him, but I had hoped that in a few months, I'd go back and see him and we'd have a good conversation and he'd tell me that I'd turned into a good man.

It was never going to happen. Nothing worse than lying on a cold bathroom floor at four in the morning and looking at the bottom of the white wooden door and wishing that the world could somehow change, magically, to suit your own needs.

I returned to bed, snuggling against Beth, as if I could just plow into her flesh and disappear, along with everything pounding in my head.

Beth left well before sunrise, annoyed by my pacing and turning in bed.

It was hard not to want her. She was one of those women who seemed to know that she was headed for great things in life. She had a great body and cute face to accompany her vision of the future, and even a first-rate mind. How could I not want her? She was a prize.

I knew why she wouldn't want me. I'd been laid off a few days earlier. I wasn't headed, apparently, for great things in life. I could predict the most ordinary life ahead of me, and somehow, I knew I'd muddle through it. I burned for more, but in my twenty-eight years my only extraordinary contribution to the world was that I'd written a novel that apparently no one had read. Younger, I'd wanted to change the world. But by that morning, I was just hoping that I could rise above the usual storms of life and get through it.

I suspect that I was looking for a woman to rescue me and make love the extra ingredient, and perhaps not even love, but some kind of great sex that passed for love in a city like Washington, DC.

I had lowered expectations for all that life had to offer.

When we kissed goodbye, it was brief and forgettable. Our lips barely touched. I got the sad feeling one gets at the end of a misbegotten affair, as if it reminds us that we're merely animals, enjoying mating for mysterious reasons in order to pass time until something else comes along.

"My dad died last night," I said.

"I'm sorry," she whispered. She kissed my cheek. "That's terrible." Silently, she telegraphed without moving her lips once: I need to get to the office.

"I need to go up there," I said. "To the island."

I didn't expect her to say too much else at that point.

It was over between us. I was the one feeling discarded. I was the revenge in life for all men who treated women badly—I was the lightning rod of the wrath of women whose loves had walked away from them. I didn't really give a damn. I just wanted to pretend for a minute with her. And for her to play along. I wanted her to embrace me and emanate human warmth. To experience the smallest spark of sexual fire between us so that I'd feel that there was something else in the world other than the ice that had crept into my blood during the night.

She looked at me as if worried for a minute that I might fall apart on her—and that she might have to deal with it, when all she wanted was to be out of my life.

"Look," she said. "You—"

"No, it's all right," I said.

"What I mean is, what you need isn't here. So don't feel bad about leaving."

"What do I need?" I asked, a somber puppy staring at her.

"Something you left behind somewhere," she said. "I don't know what it is. I just know it's not here. You'll find it." She kissed me on the forehead like I was a little boy. "You're the kind who finds what he's after."

She meant these as words of comfort, but something in her tone gave me a slight chill.

It created a slim dread within me—as if I knew that something was scratching at my window in the middle of some endless twilight.

As if her words echoed something I felt, but not something that was good within me. Something about the home I'd grown up in that had never felt right to me.

And I was after whatever that bad thing might be.

5

I watched her dress, knowing it would be the last time.

In my head, the words "Death and the Maiden." My father's voice. Sometimes his voice was in my head, in times of crisis. My imagining of his voice comforted me. His voice soothed the nicks and scars of life. In the years since I last saw him, last set foot in his house, I internalized him.

What we do in life that determines who we are, we do alone.

6

I had already drunk a pot of coffee by eight thirty.

I made reservations for a flight to Logan Airport, charging it on a credit card I should not have even had, let alone used. Somewhere in there, I called my father's house more than ten times without an answer. I had a minor-league migraine by nine. Black circles under my eyes, a feeling of dry mouth and that wound-up tightness in my gut of caffeine overflow. Showered in less than five minutes, and dressed carelessly in whatever was not lying on the floor of the closet. Packing involved throwing everything in three suitcases. When that was done, it seemed I had left nothing of value in my apartment. I looked at the suitcases. None was huge. My life, in three suitcases.

I finally got hold of my brother. "Hello?" I asked. "Bruno?"

"Nemo, Nemo," he said as if grasping the name for the first time. "So, can you get a flight?"

"Cost me a fortune. You tell the airlines it's an emergency, and they triple the charge. I get in at one."

"Okay. I'll be at Logan."

"What the hell happened?" I asked.

"Somebody killed him," he said. "It's terrible. Look, we can talk when I pick you up at the airport."

"Are you crazy? Someone killed him? What?"

But Bruno had already hung up the phone.

I imagined my dad's face.

Fury coursed through my blood.

I wanted to destroy my father's killer. A front-row seat to an execution. I wanted someone to hurt for what they'd done.

CHAPTER FOUR

1

On the plane, mid-flight, I closed my eyes.

I felt numb, tired, and far older than I was.

Soon, a mix of dream and memory came upon me. I was a boy, back on the island, again. It was dark, and I stood in dirt, my hands tied behind my back—some childhood game. Something pressed against my eyes, but in the dark I couldn't tell what it was. I heard someone tell me—was it my father?—that I needed to keep my hands to myself. I heard my sister, somewhere nearby, recite a nursery rhyme. I heard Bruno breathing—his four-year-old self with his slightly deviated septum breathing through his nostrils, like a light wind through creaky boards. I felt a strange comfort there, as if we were being held tight again by both our parents, snuggling against my mother's bosom, or pressed against my father's arms, falling down into sleep as if it were a cool, dark place.

I opened my eyes, to the airplane, to the gray clouds outside the window.

All I had ever wanted as a boy was to leave the island. I wasn't even sure what I wanted as an adult. I had nothing but confusion in my life.

Now this.

2

At Logan Airport, Bruno met me with anxiety on his brow in the form of lines I wouldn't have thought a twenty-three-year-old would've had, and dark circles beneath his eyes. Yet he had managed to pull himself together enough to brighten a bit when he saw me. He waved, and then came over to give me a shoulder squeeze. It passed for a hug between us.

"How was the flight?"

"Terrorist free," I said.

"That's bad luck," he said. "Saying things like that."

"How bad can it get?"

"Pretty damn bad, you ask me," he said. "You're always trying to be funny." Then he cracked a bit of a smile, shaking his head. " Terrorist free,' he says."

"You gonna tell me some more about all this?" I asked. "Who did it? Who killed him?"

"Nobody knows," Bruno said.

"What the hell does that mean?"

"It means nobody knows," he said.

3

My younger brother, at twenty-three, was strapping and muscular without seeming affected—he had a dollop of physical grace, which was in direct conflict with the generally messy way he had been screwing up his life. He was a natural athlete, had been since he was six or seven and staged swimming races at the beach or impromptu soccer games in the pasture. He had only just slipped into his prime—no longer the scrawny kid, he had taken on the look of an island tourist—tanned, even at the outset of winter, sandy-blond hair; and that peculiar Yankee quality of having thin lips; and a slender, sharp nose; smallish eyes made larger by round spectacles that softened his sharp features; and basic handsomeness. I possessed none of these qualities. He and Brooke got the handsome and beautiful genes—my mother's. They both had her coloring and her lankiness. People often looked at them as if detecting an attractive scent. I was more like my father, although tall. I was dark, and my only compelling features (since women had mentioned it) were my blue eyes. Black Irish had somehow snuck into the Welsh gene pool of the Raglans.

He was dressed as well as you could ask a recent college grad to be dressed—jeans, a scruffy old cotton shirt with a dominant coffee stain where his heart would be, and a brown leather jacket. And he still looked like the terse and generally quiet kid brother I used to regularly have to defend in elementary school from the bullies when he was still small and scrawny.

I nearly hugged him, but he drew back.

4

He slipped on a pair of ill-fitting sunglasses and shook my hand, formally. He picked up one of my bags. "I'd say it's great to see you, but under the circumstances " he said.

"I was trying to call all night. Drove me nuts. What the hell?"

"Brooke turned the phones off," he said. "It was constant. A barrage."

"Jesus," I said, stopping in the middle of the crowded ramp. "What exactly what happened?"

"Reporters. What a crappy job they got. Calling all tragedies and milking them," he said. Avoiding my question. He didn't want to veer to the topic of the murder. "It's funny none of them called you. I mean, not even Grogan?"

I shook my head slightly. Shrugged. "Nobody remembers I exist."

"Ha. Some remember."

"I'm sure they'll get hold of me soon enough."

"Your old friend's been asking about you."

"Which one?"

He looked at me funny. Like I was fishing for something. "You think I'm going to say Pola."

"No," I said.

"I saw her on Monday," Bruno said. He didn't add: She asked about you. Perhaps Pola Croder, who had been my high school sweetheart, hadn't thought about me in years. "She looks good. She's a remarkable woman, I think."

"So who's asking about me?"

"Withers."

I shrugged. "He's got my number."

"I know. He told me. He's waiting for you to get here. He's the only reporter we let in the house last night."

"He's still there?"

"No, he went home. I thought he was your old best friend."

"Yeah, I guess he is. Sorry," I said. "I feel like crap. You look like crap. Must be hell out there. Burnley must be buzzing with this one."

"None of it means shit," he said. His usual understatement. "Look, we've got a special boat—borrowed just for you. I brought an extra coat in the back. It's pretty damn cold out there right now."

"I hate winter," I said. "Dead trees. Dead everything. Dead dead dead." Then I added, "Sorry, that was a weak attempt at humor."

Bruno made some noise in the back of his throat that was both muffled cough and disapproval. "Breaking the tension is good, I guess," he said. "Me, I got Jumblies."

"Jumblies" was Raglan-speak for mixed-up feelings. Granny used the word, and after she died, I made up stories for my little sister and brother about creatures called Jumblies that hopped in people's mouths and made them confused.

I guess I had Jumblies in me at that moment, too.

Ten minutes later, in the car, we drove onto the highway.

5

"Who did it?" I asked, as a blur of wintry Boston sped around us.

"Like I know. They haven't quite figured it out. Who does that kind of thing? Psychos? Maniacs?"

"God," I said, covering my face with my hands. "I don't even want to think of Dad like that. I can't believe it. I just can't. Brooke okay?"

"Guess," Bruno said. Then he added, "No, I mean. No. How can she be? I'm not okay. It was awful."

"You saw the body?"

He glanced at me, sidelong. I felt some sort of repressed fury, as if he never wanted to think about seeing our father's corpse again for as long as he lived.

We didn't talk until we were nearly to the coastline.

I watched the speedometer, cringed when the back end of the little car slid on a patch of ice or rattled across a pothole, and just hoped we'd make it at all.

"You wouldn't believe last night," Bruno said, finally.

Then he told me.

6

Bruno had been with a buddy of his, having a beer at the local pub in the village, when Brooke called him on his cell phone.

He ran out of the pub and down to the police station—a few blocks away. When he got there, he saw Brooke shivering, covered with a blanket. Her hair wet. It was the blood. She'd lain down in the blood, next to our father. She'd gone catatonic or something. She was covered with blood, only it looked brownish and not red at all (as he had expected). She didn't recall the hours that had passed. Then she'd gotten up and left the smokehouse, dragging herself back inside, called me. Then she called Joe Grogan.

Brooke had been screaming in the house afterward, just standing in the living room screaming. The Doones called over because they heard the noise, and Brooke picked up the phone but had hung it up again before saying anything. Paulette Doone called the police. Paulette had told them she thought she'd seen someone over by the smokehouse earlier, and with the screaming she heard later, she was afraid something awful had happened.

By two or three in the morning, cops arrived, including an investigative detective and her team.

Helicopters came over from the Cape, bringing reporters, landing out at the Point at a helipad. Bruno had no idea that so many people would suddenly appear out of nowhere.

Bruno was up most of the night, answering questions, sitting with Brooke, who began talking incoherently until she had exhausted herself and fallen asleep by five.

Bruno managed two hours of sleep at that point, having been smart enough to unplug the phone and switch his cell phone off. The news vans were outside when he left to go to the mainland.

His biggest fear was that Brooke would feel scared when he left, but she had told him that she was going to bed and would wear earplugs and maybe even take a pill to calm her nerves.

7

"And now, that's what we're coming back to," he said. "I saw a report on the morning news about it. I was just waking up on the couch, and I flicked it on, and there we were. Well, there was the mention of it. It sounded almost interesting, the way they talked about it on the news. Seven in the morning, it already reached the Cape."

"What about the killer?" I asked.

"No word."

"Brooke must be so upset. I'm glad you've been here."

"Yeah, I know," Bruno said. "She's really freaked. She walked around all last night, room to room, with a candle, like some kind of gothic heroine. She thinks that the killer's waiting for her in the dark. We had men go through the house just to make sure no one was hiding. She's paranoid."

"Can't blame her."

"Maybe more than paranoid. She's been doing funny things."

"How funny?"

He breathed hard through his nose. It was a technique he'd had as a kid when he didn't want to talk about something. Then, "I found her out in the rain four nights ago. Nearly freezing rain. She was completely naked. She didn't recognize me. And she did some things." He blushed. "Well, she was sleepwalking, I think. But it really bothered me. She was Okay, look, she was sort of playing with herself."

I took a deep breath. "God." My mind went blank at the thought. I didn't want to imagine my sister like that.

"I know. But she wasn't herself. She was asleep the whole time. It shocked the hell out of me. I had a friend with me, and we got her into the house, wrapped her up, and she just slept on the sofa that night in front of the fire. I don't even think she remembers it. I didn't tell Dad, but by then Dad and I weren't exactly talking to each other."

"Hoo boy," I said. "Jesus."

"Yeah," Bruno said.

We let that subject cool a bit with some much-needed silence.

"They search the house?" I asked finally.

He nodded. "One of the off-island cops told me that he'd never seen such a wacky house—the way the rooms are laid out. The way you can't hear anything from the back of the house to the front. The front door doesn't even lock right. They scoured the woods in back. Who knows? Who would've thought this would've happened there? I mean, Boston or New York, sure. Or even the Cape. But way the hell out on the island?"

"I still can't believe this," I said.

"Me, neither. Grogan said he thinks the killer already left. Brooke was driving me nuts all night long. She kept talking about hearing things, and that made me freak out even more. It's a mess. She's a mess."

"As well she should be," I said. "You must be exhausted."

"Maybe it's adrenaline," Bruno said, "but I couldn't fall asleep right now if you paid me. My head keeps replaying what he must've gone through. His last moments. Nightmares. Brooke's not helping. She's convinced herself that she saw a ghost."

CHAPTER FIVE

1

"Blood. All over," Bruno said, accepting an offered cigarette. He reached into his pocket and drew out a lighter. Flicked it up, lit his cigarette, and then passed it back to me. "You don't want to hear it."

"Yeah. I do."

"No," he said. "You don't."

We arrived at the dock down at Buzzard's Bay sooner than I'd expected.

Across the water, our destination.

So distant it was invisible.

2

The sky turned a bit dark for noon, even for Massachusetts in November, and this heralded more snow. Deeper snow, perhaps. I didn't love snow. If I could've, I would've lived in Aruba or even hell rather than in the snowy climes.

The sky smelled of that peculiar freshness of a change of weather. From cold to frigid.

Bruno parked the car in the long-term area. "I'll pick my car up when I take you back to the airport."

"I may not go home for a bit," I said, unsure about any future that existed for me beyond the moment.

"That's okay," he said. "I sort of hope so, since I'm going to be here 'til at least well, 'til at least I figure out what's next."

"It looks like Pompeii out there," I said.

"You're crazy." My brother nearly grinned.

Snowflakes had just begun falling from a gray wash of sky. A handful, as if they were white petals of a flower falling at the end of summer. The grayness had overtaken the morning. It was a thick sea mist. You could not even distinguish the sea—it all looked like a wall of ash, and the horizon line barely divided water from sky.

Beyond it, my Pompeii.

My Burnley.

3

"Embrace what beats you down," my father told me after I'd had a terrible time in junior high with bullies and a particularly sadistic soccer coach. "If you fight it, it will fight back better than you ever could. You must learn to make friends with the enemy. You must learn from your enemy because there's something of the enemy already in you, and that's who you're really fighting against."

When I was growing up, I sometimes felt that the island was my enemy.

Sometimes my father, as wonderful as he could be, was my enemy as well.

He was the most wonderful person I knew.

He was the most irrational person I'd ever met.

He could beat me up with a look, or reward me with a wink and a smile.

Now that he was dead, I knew that I had never really known him. Not in the fundamental way you're supposed to know your father.

He used to say something that cracked me up every time.

"The sun shines on a dog's ass now and again." He'd say it to me when I was low and felt everyone else had the good life. Always made me laugh.

I missed him.

4

I froze my ass off on the boat ride over.

Our boatman, Cary Conklin, was a guy just out of college who had no idea what to do with his life, very much like my brother. He was a little goofy, and shot what I'd call "knowing looks" at my brother when I spoke to him. I hadn't known him from my years on the island, although I knew his oldest brother (of five), Chip. Cary looked a lot like his brother, particularly in the strong chin and lazy eyelids that seemed to run in the Conklin clan. I briefly asked about Chip. We made the kind of small talk you make on long, freezing boat rides when you don't want to talk about the vicious murder of your father, I guess.

Somewhere in there, Cary mumbled something meant to be comforting about my father.

We could've been crossing over from the world of the living to the world of the unknown. Cary was our Charon, taking us over the River Styx—or in this case, the Sound.

I didn't want to keep messing my mind into the death metaphors that came far too easily to me—but I had begun seeing mythological significance to this journey, to my father's death, and to God. I went from watching the last of the shore with its rows of Cape houses and rocky beach and the smoke from chimneys in towns and villages along the coastline, to looking into the haze of gray and white ahead. My mother, what I remembered of her, was depressed whenever the fog rolled in on the island. And roll it did, far too often. She hated it. She had no love for the place. I guess in that respect, I was like her. The fog, the cold, the isolation from the mainland all had gotten to me.

It all seemed like a shroud. The dullish clank of ships' bells and the intermittent cries of seagulls that had not yet gone inland. The storm fronts that were the norm for that time of year reminded me of my youth and days and nights spent out on the island. Burnley Island was beautiful and horrible, idyllic and monstrous, calm and turbulent. It was like the weather itself: unpredictable. You live on an island, you live the year from one extreme to another.

I looked out onto the unnaturally calm sea and watched the light snow come down, and for just a minute, just a hair of a minute, I saw some beauty in the world. I sipped from a mug of coffee. I closed my eyes and wished my father would be there, alive, to meet us at the harbor on the island.

It didn't seem fair that he should miss a beautiful snowy day and a cup of coffee, and I felt a little guilty that I was alive and he was not.

Something cut through my mind like a scalpel, trying to remove memories I wished I didn't have.

The good memories.

The memories of how loving my father could be, even at my worst times.

5

What seemed like hours later, my limbs frozen and my ears red, Bruno leaned into me. "Okay look, I'll tell you some stuff. You're going to find out anyway. Last night, when the storm hit, he went out to the smokehouse."

"Jesus," I said. "Why the hell would he go in there?"

"I don't know," Bruno said.

I closed my eyes. My father's face: his off-kilter jaw that was both square and mildly dimpled. Barking out orders for us boys to never play in the smokehouse. I felt nauseated. I hated the smokehouse. It was an awful place—always freezing cold, even in summer, with that lingering smoke practically plastered into the stone walls from years before I came into the world. I'd always felt dread whenever I went into it—often, it was because my dad was going to punish me for some familial misdemeanor.

I opened my eyes. My brother had been talking, but I'd managed to block most of it out. I heard the tail end of a sentence: " couldn't function. I got her dressed. But it was pulling teeth to get her to talk to the police."

"How bad was it?" I asked.

Then he told me how bad it was. How it was more than just "Dad died" or "someone killed Dad" or "a murder." It was one of those crimes that seemed impossible to have happened. As if another human being could not possibly physically do to a person what had been done to my father.

"There's something else," Bruno said. His voice dropped a bit, as if he were trying to gulp back the words. "I just I just don't know how to say it. Out loud."

"That's okay. If you can't, that's okay," I said.

"No, not about him. But it got me thinking last night. I tried talking to Brooke about it, but she wouldn't listen. But, Nemo, it was like when it's hard to even say the words."

Something within me seemed to clutch as he fumbled with his words.

"I mean, I'm not completely stupid," Bruno said. "But I keep thinking about it. You know how you get those things in your head and you can't stop thinking? They keep you up all night? It's like that. It's something that just keeps playing in my head over and over again. Know what I'm talking about?"

6

I didn't reply. Could not. My head felt as if the granddaddy of all headaches was coming on. I wanted to shut down.

Then I began to feel an uneasy dread. Not of returning to the island. Not of dealing with my father's death. Not of the monstrosity of the murder.

But a dread about whatever words were about to spill out of my little brother's mouth.

Bruno took a deep breath. "You know how when I was little, I had those nightmares? I mean, all of us did?"

The words formed in my mind, a whisper from the past: Here comes a candle to light you to bed.

When he said this, I had to catch my breath. My lungs felt frozen from the air. But now my heart froze, too. "Bruno, that was nothing no that was a long time ago."

"All around the Brain Fart," he said. The two words together sounded pretty funny: Brain and Fart. But they filled me with dread. We had been playing in the smokehouse, and suddenly, all three of us lost our memories for a week. We didn't tell our dad. We didn't tell anyone other than each other. We thought maybe we'd just woken up on Monday of the following week and perhaps nothing had happened the week before. But somehow, we doubted that. When we asked our father, he told us we'd had fevers that week that had scared him. High fevers that had him putting us in ice baths and pressing boxes of frozen Bird's Eye peas behind our necks to bring the fever down. Had it been scarlet fever? He wasn't sure. Equine encephalitis? That sometimes happened when the mosquitoes from the backwoods got too plentiful in early summer or early autumn and swarmed the low fields. But no, it was none of those things. He told us Dr. Connelly had come by briefly, and just told him to let us get rest and stay cool whenever the fever spiked. But it had been something more—the Brain Fart had affected us almost like a bodily injury, but we couldn't remember what had started it.

"It's some twisted, sick individual who did this to Dad, Bruno," I said. "Get that other stuff out of your head."

He looked at me with a half-cocked grin. I remembered how golden his hair was when he was a little boy. How he'd wake up singing. How he used to dance with Brooke out by the duck pond on summer nights while I chased dogs around in the mud. How I used to thank God every single day that I had a baby brother like Bruno, and that he looked up to me, and that I protected him in every way I could from the thorns and burrs of the little world we occupied. He had once been such a happy little boy.

Somehow I wanted to bring that back in him after this tragedy.

What I got from him—his twenty-three-year-old self—was anger.

"Don't sit there and pretend," he said. "I am so sick of people in this family pretending everything's all right when it's not. Never has been."

I cursed under my breath, closing my eyes again. I wanted to just block out everything in the world and have a moment of private oblivion. "Okay, let's not talk about it right now. This is going to be awful for all of us for a while, I guess."

"It's the Dark Game," he said.

"No, it's not. It is not."

7

I had grown to hate the Dark Game as a boy.

The more you played it, the more power you felt.

And then, one time a few weeks after the Brain Fart, Brooke had decided to be the master of the Dark Game, speaking with someone else's voice.

But we had been children then. And we'd broken one of the rules of the game: We let it go beyond twilight.

We'd spent hours in the smokehouse, playing the game, all of us with blindfolds on, rags torn from old clothes.

We had overactive imaginations. Perhaps this was the reason our father eventually locked it up.

We had imagined that the smokehouse had become a red room, and that someone lay at the center of the room, between the three of us. That someone lay there, and spoke to us—Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clemens.

In the Dark Game. Not in the real world.

You owe me five farthings, say the bells of St. Martins.

The real world changed when we played it. It had different rules.

When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey.

Dark had come too fast, and we'd kept playing, as if we couldn't stop it.

When I am rich, say the bells of Shoreditch.

The problem with the Dark Game: It had always seemed to have been waiting for us.

When we closed our eyes.

When will that be? say the bells of Stepney.

When we were together.

I do not know, says the great bell of Bowe.

In the hour before dark.

It had become an addiction when we were children.

Here comes a candle to light you to bed—

And here comes a chopper to chop off your head.

CHAPTER SIX

1

Bruno drew back from me in the boat.

He reached for the coffee thermos. "More?" he asked.

I shook my head. "Look, it was just a game."

"I know," he said. "But it was like that. It's going to be all over the papers—the details—pretty soon. One of the local news crews from the Cape came out, so it'll be on TV tonight. They talked to Minnie Wooten. She told 'em that we were all no good." We both laughed a little at the mention of the name, despite the gruesomeness of the crime. Minnie was nearly a hundred years old and as weathered as the gray, bowed planks on her front porch. She had been known as one of the Women That God Forgot—there were four of them on Burnley Island, each more ancient than the other. Somehow, despite the nasty winters and the isolation, some people seemed to grow old well on Burnley.

"I bet Minnie's famous all over now. She'll probably get her own talk show," I said, managing to laugh, even when something in my mind had begun to shut down. I tried not to imagine my father or what had happened the night before.

I didn't know that we would become famous on the island for all the wrong reasons from that moment on.

2

The Raglans had a spotty history of both the good and the bad.

I had been a bad kid in the way that kids who aren't quite demonic are bad, and if you were to ask me, I could not tell you what drove me to badness. I suspect that being born in New England, being Catholic, and being a Raglan, I was triply blessed with a sense of Sin with a capital S, GUILT with all capital letters, and atonement, expiation, and possibly redemption all following thereafter. I was bad in the only ways I knew how: I did the things I ought not have done. Harry and I snuck into the movie theater when we were broke at the age of ten. At eleven, we kidnapped the Croder's Maine Coon cat (at Pola Croder's request, I might add, although she denied this later). We took Monster (as we called him, for he attacked and scratched up many a kid—the demon cat's real name was Scooby) to St. Bartholomew's to baptize him in the name of the Holy Ghost because we were sure that animal would go to hell one day or another. We brought the cat back, but it was soaked and furious, and its talons were wrapped in bits of white sheet so it wouldn't scratch Harry or me when we dipped it into the baptismal font. Mrs. Croder called the local cop on us and we had a stern talking to and a half hour in the holding cell behind the police station.

Then my misdemeanors increased: borrowed my dad's truck to drive my friends out to Palmerton one night and go skinny dipping with the Evangelical Christian kids, all of whom taught us a thing or two, at fourteen, about human anatomy. Harry and I, altar boys, drank the wine reserved for communion at fifteen, and that was the worst of my church-related crimes. Luckily, the wine had not been blessed, and while my father took me home to be punished, the worst of it was throwing up in the back of the truck on the way home.

I didn't hurt anyone. At least, not directly. I wasn't a bully. I just tended to be in trouble with whatever trouble could be had. If there was a store to be broken into on a weekday night for no reason other than to have someplace to go, I was part of the crew. We never stole anything, nor did we break locks or windows (in the fall, winter, and spring, nobody on Burnley locked doors). If there was a car to be borrowed from Harry's uncle without him knowing about it, you can be sure Harry and I were probably doing the borrowing. If the horses from the stables in The Oaks had been let out to run wild on a soft, summer night, somehow my name was linked to the deed.

I was your basic screw-up, and not even cool enough to be a good one. Always, I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and for some reason I never had a good excuse for being there. I always got caught, and being the good Catholics we were, my father would drag me down to St. Bartholomew's and toss me at the confessional, before dragging me back home. I can guarantee you that being a six-foot-tall sixteen-year-old, it was shameful to have my five-foot-two bull of a father practically pulling me by the ear along the streets in the village. At home, he might use a belt, until I reached high school, and then he just used denial of privileges—no television, no phone, no dinner, and no books, the worst for me. He'd removed every single book from my bedroom once he discovered that I loved reading so much it was really no punishment to just go to my room. I'd sometimes yell those absurd things that teens do, how he didn't understand me, he didn't love me, he was no kind of father, that he wasn't even trying to be what Mom would be and if I were her, I'd have moved to Brazil, too—and the ugly heads of Sin and GUILT would rise up in me afterward, and I'd meekly apologize and tell him that he was right to punish me and I was rotten to the core.

(I wished I could go back and change those moments. I wish I could go back and tell him how much I loved him and how much he meant to me.) I respected my father enough to let him punish me. It seemed just. He was never harsher on me than I was on myself. The parish priest ended up being kind toward me in these transgressive periods of my childhood as time went on, and although it was rare for me to see the inside of a church once I went away to college, I had nothing but warm memories of Father Ronnie and St. Bart's church.

Despite what happened with my mother when I was nine, we were not mired in some sense of sorrow. All our Christmases were brightly lit confections; all our summers were adventures and dares.

Our early history as a family on the island was actually quite good. My great-great-great-everyone were stalwarts. Welshmen, Irishmen, Scots, and some English, a mix of Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Catholics that married out of the island over the years, until my father and his younger brother were the heirs. Then his brother died in the same war in which my father nearly died—but managed, through "the grace of God and a pack of Wrigley's," to survive. The story went that he had exactly one pack of Wrigley's gum with him when he was captured.

He used it as a psychological tool to resist the brainwashing that was done to him over the two years he was held prisoner.

"I chewed that gum over and over again, and each time imagined that the flavor was something I loved and missed from America. The taste of coffee. The sweetness of honey and lemon. Chocolate. Peppermint. It allowed me to get away in my mind to another place. To not listen to the brainwashing. To not be discouraged by the sensory deprivation they put me through. It was my own kind of brainwashing. I could chew the gum and close my eyes and just go somewhere else. Believe something else. And gum was easy to hide, virtually invisible."

It became such a famous story that for a while gum companies put it in their advertising. All of that was long before any of us were born, but the stories were legendary.

My mother's mystery and my father's heroism and the house itself—Hawthorn—all had stories attached to them.

Named for the thorny trees that grew wild near the house (although Minnie Wooten was quick to point out whenever she could that in fact they weren't "true hawthorns," whatever that meant), Hawthorn was a rambling old structure—a farmhouse that had grown with a few generation of Raglans, a poor Welsh family turned rich then poor again with my father's generation. Two stories high and simple in one way—for it was as plain as a New England farmhouse could be—it was also eccentric in many ways. It seemed of no particular age or time, for it had elements of various incarnations—from its humble early eighteenth-century beginnings as a stone house of one room right through the creation of its many rooms, and its serpentine curving along the rocky acreage where it grew. The last addition had been the greenhouse, which was under construction for most of my life and still remained unfinished to some extent. It had been intended for my mother.

Then Hawthorn had begun to fall apart, on bad pasture-land that had lain fallow for decades, edging deep New England woods, beyond which lay the village of Burnley, known more for what it didn't have than what it did, and beyond this, the sea.

My father's favorite things about the old house, he told us, were the lessons it taught him. "Never let your roof get too leaky, never let the gutters fill with leaves, and always check the gas before you light the pilot." He had once, accidentally, nearly blown up the house because he had not checked the gas first. "Life is like a house. You have to do routine maintenance constantly or else it all just goes down the tubes at once." My main memories of him at home generally were about repairing and fixing things. Or putting up drywall when the old wall near the front staircase had rotted out—I wasn't much help, even though I tried my best to pitch in. My dad had a temper when he worked on the old house. He'd cuss a blue streak if I so much as held a hammer the wrong way or wasn't sure how to change a drill bit. He worked on the plumbing himself, allowing no one to come in and "rob us blind just for changing a washer and unscrewing a bolt." He had an ongoing project of tearing down walls, putting in new insulation, putting the walls back up—as if it were his main occupation. About the only thing he allowed me to do was install locks (I could handle this by the time I was fourteen or so) and carry his toolkit for him. He loved that house, and had worked on the ceiling and floors and walls as if he treasured the place.

I had left Hawthorn and hoped to never spend more than a weekend there ever again. Not because of unhappy memories, or because of something stupid that I took part in just before I headed off for college, but because of something I did that had cut me off from knowing any peace on the island.

I fell in love with a girl who would not love me back. A pattern for me, as it turned out.

Between that event—when I was eighteen—and my mother's abandonment of us when I was a little boy, and yes, the arguments with my father, which never seemed to end, I just had no reason to return.

I always told anyone who asked—outside of the village—that my mother had died when I was nine.

3

I'd make up a story about her awful lingering illness, and how we gathered 'round her bedside, with my sister weeping to bring the angels and my father kissing my mother on the hand. I cribbed the emotion of the scene from the death of Little Nell in Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop, and part from the death of Little Eva from Uncle Tom's Cabin. These were deaths of absolute purity and saintliness, as befitted a beloved family member. There was an intensity to the innocence of those deaths. I wanted to believe it happened that way, too, with Mother beneath a snow-white comforter, her golden hair falling across the tear-stained pillow, the scent of wildflowers and bitter herbs in the air, a small red rose of color in her otherwise pale cheek, and a last clasp of her hand as she gave me motherly wisdom and departed to heaven with one final and wistful sigh.

But that was a lie.

Everyone in Burnley knew the truth. Anyone could tell you—in broad daylight on a Wednesday afternoon, you could walk into what might roughly approximate a village and ask any of the children who had just gotten off the school bus. I'm betting they'd know about the Raglans' mother. How she had abandoned her husband and family, and was very much alive and enjoying a different family somewhere in Sao Paulo, Brazil. My mother was, after all, the most exotic creature that Burnley Island had ever seen after the summer was over.

She ordered perfume from London, from a perfumery that her grandmother had once run, that her great-grandfather had founded in the South of France, and from which she had been disinherited when she purportedly stole several thousand dollars from my grandmother's bank account. (How many times had I been told by people as I grew up that she was a bad woman? That I might turn out just like she had, somehow tainted with her blood?) She had been raised in London, Switzerland, and Majorca, gone to college at Columbia. She had met my father in Burnleyside one summer when visiting a college friend's family there, dropped out of college, and went slumming with him until she ended up pregnant and in love. Her family never spoke to her again. And she never spoke to them. They never spoke to us, the grandchildren, either. They lived in other countries, and were mythological to me—real but not truly to be believed.

My father had his own share of fame, but without the wealth, so he was her equal in many ways, despite his rough-and-tumble upbringing, as opposed to her refined boarding school years. She had been, without question, the most beautiful woman on the island. I remember her looking like a fairy princess—slender, ethereal, with almond-shaped eyes, and a sloping but elegant nose. She had golden hair—not blond or yellow, but a rich autumn gold that might look sandy blond on her worst days, like creamy toffee on others, and spun gold at her best. She always smelled of vanilla and lime and lavender. I would sit with her while she bathed, and she would tell me tales from the Arabian nights or of how she had stowed away once with a friend on a tramp steamer and had gone to Brazil, her favorite country in the entire world. "I was sixteen and running away," she said, "but it was just for the summer. A wonderful summer of romantic suspense," she added, without explaining any details. My mother had many talents: She played music, sketched on long summer afternoons, read from books, and tried her hand at poetry briefly. I remember her mainly surrounded by candlelight—she was a romantic at heart, and I suppose it's what changed her, that romantic yearning.

She had mischief in her as well. I discovered this early and was charmed by it—by her misadventures in finding ways of getting to Boston faster than anyone could get there, the way she'd spend money cautiously one minute and then as if nothing were more important than something whimsical she'd just seen—and had to have at any cost. My father adored her, and adored the attention men gave her—he told me that he was proud that his wife was such a prize and yet had chosen him.

It all ended one night, years ago. December 19th. A red-letter day.

My mother walked out the door when I was nine years old and told my father that if he loved his kids so much, he could have them. The details: She wore her reddest dress (as small town minds like to recall), she had one of my father's guns for protection in case he tried to force her to stay, and it was very late at night or else very early in the morning. The story went that my father sobbed quietly, gave her his blessing, and told her he would be there with the kids when she got tired of this new man in her life.

My father was a good man, so said people in Burnley and everyone who had ever heard of him. He told us that our mother loved us very much and left us only because something inside her head had control of her—but he promised he would be there, to take care of us and keep us safe.

He kept that promise, in his own way.

He even told us he'd take her back, if she wished to return.

"But to stand in the way of someone's happiness," he told me once, "is the cruelest of impulses. It's as cruel as killing men, in my opinion. Real love sometimes means letting love fly."

I had a dream soon after my mother left us. When I spoke about it to my brother and sister, when we were young, they told me they had dreams like it, too. In the dream, our mother came home and took each of us up in her arms, embracing and kissing us all over. In the dream, our father hugged us as well. It's only natural for children to want to see their parents reunited, even if those same children know that it's like wishing there were an Easter Bunny, or that birthday candles release some magic when they're blown out. I sometimes wonder if we don't long for precisely what we know in truth we can never have.

I dreamed about a silver crescent, too, like the moon. Like a crown that our mother would wear when she returned to us from the man she'd run off with so many years ago. The shadow man we'd never known, but who had come into our mother's life and stolen her from us.

My father had been taken by a different kind of shadow man.

Viciously.

"A peculiar ferocity," wrote Harry Withers, who reported for the Burnley Gazette, but whom I knew primarily from the playground of my childhood. "One does not associate this sort of crime with the peaceful island of Burnley, Massachusetts, known primarily for its plover shelter in the wetlands and its role in the Revolutionary War. The bogs and woods and meadows no longer seem benign. The hunt is on for the person or persons who committed this heinous act upon a war hero, upon a father, upon a man who stood for everything that was good in Burnley."

The first I knew that my father had been tortured in a war was in second grade when that boy I had only just met named Harry Withers taunted me with, "Your daddy's got only one ball! The other got cut off and fed to snakes! Your daddy's a freak!"

4

It never occurred to me at that age that just because my father had always been missing two fingers on his right hand, he might have had something happen to him that caused it. Or that other parts of him might be missing as well. Since I was only dimly aware of what balls were at that age, I wasn't sure if it mattered how many my father possessed.

Harry Withers seemed to think it mattered a hell of a lot. There was something in the nature of both challenge and humiliation for him to say it out on the blacktop during recess. I ended up in a fistfight, which got me to the principal's office, then to the nurse's office, and then a note to my parents about how I'd nearly bitten Harry's ear off.

I had barely snipped at his ear with my teeth, but it did bleed a lot. I was afraid I'd mutilated Harry, that I'd be thrown in jail for having done it, and that poor one-eared Harry would haunt me forever. As it turned out, Harry's ear would heal within days. Not so my troubled heart. Why did my father have only one ball and eight fingers?

I went home nearly in tears and angry enough to cuss. I asked my mother what this was all about, after she'd given me the disappointed treatment from reading the principal's note.

Modest though she was, she had no problem setting me straight on my father's testicular health. This was followed by a bit of birds-and-bees, and how loving, legally wed people lay very close together and then nearly a year later, a baby would be born. Even with my father's condition, apparently he had no problem fathering three children.

My father, she told me, did indeed have one "testicle, and yes, some bad things happened to him over there," and she took me in the library of our home—a dusty room that had always seemed misshapen to me, packed with shelves and books—and brought down a photo album. She went through my father's childhood, his parents, the war, his capture, the news clippings, and finally said to me, "So two of his fingers are gone, and yes, his testicle was also taken, but it doesn't make him less of a man. You just remember that. There are a lot of men who walk around with no balls whatsoever."

I learned most of what I knew of my father's heroics by the time I was nine.

He had fought in a war before I was born. He'd been taken captive for twenty months, had tried to escape from his captors twice, had lost two fingers on his left hand for reasons of which he never spoke, had been decorated a hero, and had returned to the plow as it were—or in his case, returned to his own father's farm, married, and started a family.

My mother retrieved the articles for me. She substituted them for the comic books I loved to look at. She would show me the old home movies. Daddy getting a medal. Daddy standing beside a helicopter. Daddy meeting some news anchorman. Daddy standing in line with others to meet the president. Daddy and Mommy on their wedding day, with swords and guns and soldiers standing in a halo around them. The glow of heroism surrounded him in all these photographs. I felt better about my father. I loved him even more for being not just a hero to me, but to the world.

Sometimes, an old-timer from town would see me at the playground in the park and call me over and tell me that I looked just like my father did when he was my age. "Your grandfather wasn't much good, but he made himself a good man in your daddy," someone might say; once I heard the librarian, Mrs. Pollock, tell me that my father had been the most famous man to ever come out of Burnley, and that no one had expected he'd come back to run Hawthorn again or even try and get along when the money ran out.

"He could've been president or at least a senator, once upon a time," she told me. "That's how famous he was after the war. Not famous like movie stars or rock and roll people. Not that vulgar thing. And not rich. I mean to say famous in the ways that count. And just like you, he got in trouble as a boy sometimes. So don't think that it's the end of the world for you. You can be a hero, just like your father."

Or I'd hear the story of how my father had managed to save seven men from certain death, or how my father had piloted a helicopter "without knowing nothin' about helicopters but that they spin. And he bombed the hell out of them. He just dropped it all back down on them. And he got his men out."

My father would rarely speak of the past that existed before meeting my mother, other than to hide the medals of valor in places where my brother and I could not find them. He'd scoff at the idea that he had ever been a hero at all. After my mother ran off, he lived under a terrible burden. He expressed little that wasn't dour or dutiful after that. He gave lessons or lectured; he rarely spoke to me and even more rarely listened. I suppose my mother's abandonment affected all of us, and may have been part of the fog that kept me confused about life and my place in it as I grew into an adult.

I grew up under the burden of his heroism, and I became less than a model son because I knew I was no hero. My impulses were never heroic ones. I began smoking by the time I was twelve, and when I was seventeen, I'd done all the things teenagers do that they will regret in merely a few years, scarred by such foolishness and disregard for any rule in life. I was the embarrassment of the family when I left it.

Yet, I could look back on the love and affection of the household; on the way my father would tell me—even at my worst—that he'd done just such a thing when he'd been my age, and it was wrong, but it was not wicked, merely childish.

His words had the effect of arms around me—it was his way of embracing.

I took his wise words to heart and knew that despite my missteps in life, my father had gone through many more difficulties than I could dream up, and still, he had done good.

My mother had been a slightly different story.

5

After she left, my father told us that she sometimes called, late at night.

No matter how much he begged, she would not come back to us. He told us that she wanted to see us. He promised that one day she would come for us, would collect us, but that "now" wasn't the time.

She sent letters and postcards, as well, but none of them mentioned our names. Notes like: "I want to keep in touch, but the past is so difficult to mull over. Please don't let's keep in touch. I don't want to cause you more pain." She sent a few of these that I saw.

I assumed my father had been writing her late at night, posting his mail without our knowing, begging her to return. "She's got a new life," my father would say at times, and begin to brood. "I would love to tell the three of you that she doesn't love you, but I know she does. This is the hardest thing I've ever said. Even in war, nothing was this hard, but I will say it regardless. You must each overcome this. I can't force your mother to come home. I can't go chase her down if she is with this other man and she claims that this brings her happiness. You've been crying since she left, and you haven't eaten enough, and you all have to stop it now. She is not the woman I married. She's not the mother who brought each of you into this world. She changed. Perhaps she'll change back. But the best we can do is hang tough and get through this. And each of you needs to pitch in and do your share. Accept this, somehow. Accept it now. Life is its own kind of war. You've got to fight it and win it."

As he spoke, I saw his eyes become glassy and distant. I couldn't look at the sadness in his face, but glanced down at my shoes. Somehow, I felt all of us were to blame. I felt that if I had just been nicer to my mother, she would've stayed. If I hadn't gotten into any trouble, she would've stayed. If I'd said my prayers every morning and night, she probably would still have been with us. I have no doubt that Brooke and Bruno felt the same way.

"None of you deserves this," he said. "Not one of you."

And that was all he really spoke about it.

6

Now and then, one of us would ask about her. He'd tell us to write a letter and he'd send it. None of us ever wrote a letter, although I started a few, but put them aside. I suppose we accepted the finality on some deep level, regardless of our wants and needs on the surface of things.

Once she wrote to us all and mentioned a new child. She had a new child. A boy. His name was Steven. That's all she said about him. My father tore the letter up after reading it aloud, tears in his eyes, and held us close. At other times, he went into horrible rages and locked himself in his room for an entire day, screaming, as if at the walls of the house itself.

All this to begin to tell you: Our father was both loved and hated within his own family, he was a hero to the world and to each of us, even though he had his dark periods.

When my father died—was killed—none of it mattered.

CHAPTER SEVEN

1

I couldn't get the images out of my mind:

My father was butchered.

Sliced up.

In pieces.

2

"Man, I'm angry," Bruno said. "Sucker punched. Dazed. That's how I've felt since finding out. I was just talking to him the other day. And now " This was the most open I'd ever heard my brother be. He never talked about his inner life or feelings that I knew of. He was a mystery to my sister and me in that respect. "Brooke's had the worst of it. She's been depressed this fall. I don't know why. I know she hasn't been sleeping right since before this. Now, who knows?" He said this with an appealing meekness, as if he needed something from me. Some reassurance about the good in the world.

I did something I've never done before, but I suppose you don't do what you're not used to doing until a nasty tragedy has stomped you and your family. I reached over and hugged him to my side. Like the little brother he was to me. He put his head on my shoulder and cried for a little bit. I felt like we were little boys again, after having a bully at school say something mean to him about our mom running off, or about his glasses, or how he couldn't play softball as well as the others.

"They'll get whoever did it," I said, without much confidence. I meant it. If they didn't, I'd make it the quest of my life to hunt down the madman.

I would not stop until the guy was caught.

When we got to the docks, Bruno walked ahead of me, lugging one of my suitcases, while I had the other two. We loaded the back of Brooke's truck and headed out onto the road away from the sea.

The sky, slate gray; the woods, like broomsticks; the air, salt, snow, and that memory-scent of winters past.

3

Bruno turned down Goose Creek Road with its overhang of gloomy trees.

In the distance, I saw the beginning of the woods that would guide the narrowest of roads up to the house where I'd been born and raised, and where Raglans had lived ever since they'd been in America. We turned up Dunstable Road, and Hawthorn came into view just over the ridge. There were police cars along the road, and three news vans from the television studios, nearly blocking the driveway. We passed the smokehouse to the left, and I didn't want to look at it, but I couldn't help myself. It was surrounded by what looked like a makeshift wire fence, with orange police tape up around it.

"Christ," I said.

"Feeling some Jumblies?"

"Definitely," I said.

"Can I tell you something?"

"Of course."

"I've never really told anyone this, it makes me feel guilty. Right now. Promise not to hold it against me?"

"Okay."

"I hated him," Bruno said. "I hated Dad. He didn't like me much either. But I hated him. He drove our mother away. He drove you away. As far as I'm concerned " Then he stopped himself. A bit more evenly, he added, "It's terrible this happened. I feel this awful guilt. As if it's my fault."

I wasn't sure how to reply to this. "Bruno," I said, and thought, what the hell do I tell him? It's okay to hate the guy who was just butchered? It's okay to hate the guy who raised and clothed and fed you? That yes, he drove me away, when in fact I did a damn good job of just driving myself away? That he could not have driven our mother away any faster than she had run herself, out the door with her red dress and her suitcase and all the money she took, and the secret lover she had when she should've kept her love for her young children and her devoted husband? Bruno had, within him, a little of what we all felt—an undercurrent of anger, directed at our father, but really meant for our mother, who had left us when we were nearly too young to remember. Somehow, we had all blamed the one who had remained behind to some extent.

Now that he'd been murdered, guilt followed these feelings.

"Don't tell Brooke," he said. "Promise me. She idolized him. She'd hate me. Now, I guess, more than ever."

"All right," I said. It was our family sickness, I guess: Don't tell someone else in the family how you really feel. Hide it. Bury it. Make it go away. It had been ingrained in us from an early age. Its origins were as hard to pin down as the fog that surrounded Hawthorn for half the year: Who had made us feel that way? Was it something within ourselves? Some organic sense of burying, the way dogs bury bones?

Part of me felt like lashing out at him for being so cold-hearted as to talk like this within two days of our father's death. Part of me wanted to understand him as I never had before.

And I hated to admit it, but part of me agreed with Bruno. I couldn't understand it—why had I disliked my father so much? Had I blamed him for things? Had I made him too responsible for the confusion I so often felt?

He had been rough on us, that was the bottom line. And we had rebelled.

That big GUILT I generally felt was going into hyperdrive in me.

I was not looking forward to any aspect of this homecoming.

4

The old house, on the outside, was still haggard looking, as it had been ten years before. It was a grandfather of a house. It had even turned a bit gray in the intervening years.

Slowly maneuvering around the vans and cars, Bruno turned down the drive. The gate was closed, of course. I got out of the car, feeling the blast of icy air again, and ran to open it.

Bruno drove through, and I shut the gate to the driveway again. I glanced up at the road. There were people in jackets and trench coats up on the roadside, watching.

5

"Brooke," I said, when my sister met me at the front door. I did everything I could not to imagine her naked in a storm, her fingers reaching down below her flat belly. I regretted that Bruno had ever told me that story.

Too late to move out of the way, I was jumped by her two enormous greyhounds, Mab and Madoc, and I went backward onto the porch. A pain in my butt told me I'd landed on part of the flagstone walk. Dog licks covered my face. Despite the pain, I began laughing and shoving the dogs away.

Brooke stood over me, doing her best to pull the dogs back by their collars, but they were out of control.

Then she offered me her hand, helping me up.

6

My sister Brooke: an unkempt beauty.

Her hair, darker than I'd remembered it, hung down and around her shoulders, somehow framing her face so that her eyes seemed owl-like. She wore no makeup, looked as if she had just rolled out of bed. She wore a stretched-out gray wool sweater that came down to the ends of her fingers and fell nearly to her knees, baggy khakis. Barefoot on the porch. Oddly, there was the smell of turpentine about her—I noticed what might've been paint on her sleeve. Had she been painting something?

Somehow, she still managed to radiate beauty. Some women have organic beauty—their bodies are formed as if meant to be appreciated. This is simply nature, and no doubt many have had it who were undeserving. Some women have magical beauty—where their features aren't symmetrical, or their face looks slightly off-beat, but they have an aura about them that creates beauty around them. My sister had a bit of both. She had the same beauty our mother had possessed, when I could remember our mother's face. Brooke did whatever she could to hide her looks in sweaters and sweats and a general sloppiness. But it was still there: that touch of our mother.

7

First thing Brooke did was whisper so softly that I was afraid I wouldn't hear her. "Do I look scared, Nemo?"

She had an air of the bittersweet about her—pale and rosy and golden at the same time, her lips bitten and her eyes lost. Botticelli hair falling around her woolen shoulders—the perfect result of the blending of my mother's Northern European fairness and my father's Welsh darkness. "Do I? I feel scared. But I don't want them to see it. I don't want the world to see it." She pointed to the news van out on the road. "Goddamn buzzards," she said, her voice rising to its normal tone. "Come on in, Nemo. Good you made it. Carson greet you?" Her New Englandese turned the perv's name into "Cahsehn," and I had to admit I liked hearing it. Carson was known for seducing island sheep and for masturbating from the front seat of his small pickup truck at the harbor as a kind of welcome wagon.

"Nope," I said. "No miraculous vibrating truck."

"Dad called it the Burnley Hello,'" she said. "He said it just a week ago. Better than what most men do with those things, I suppose." Then the bravado left her face, a sudden retreat. She whispered, "I don't want them to see me upset. I feel like I'm being watched all the time."

She clapped her hands, and the dogs went running back into the house ahead of us. A loud crash—Brooke swore a blue streak—and when we got to the kitchen, the dogs had already knocked over a small chair by the glass table. Brooke shouted, "Kennels!"

The dogs, finally obedient, ran to their respective, enormous wire crates that edged the living room.

In personality, Brooke was solidly Yankee in a way that neither Bruno nor I had remained. She had the strongest accent, which was vaguely masculine despite her petite softness. She was a category of woman who lived on Yankee islands, just as there was a category of men who did as well, who had thick hair that always needed cutting, and ruddy complexions from constant movement in the cold, a nearly downcast expression as she spoke, as if gravity were her only makeup; she used profanity the way insecure chefs used spices, as if no sentence were complete without at least a "fuck" or a "goddamn." In this way, she was unlike any of us. She was as Yankee as the low stone walls that had surrounded Hawthorn for more than two centuries. She was like a weathervane on the roof, or the shingles themselves; part of the way things looked in New England, part of its charm, but also part of its expectation. Few on the island could out-island my sister. She had an old soul for the place, as if she were the reincarnation of my great-grandma Cery (pronounced Cherry) Raglan, a salty bitter woman of enormous bosom and the iron will of a mule.

As I held her for a moment, I smelled our mother's scent—particularly the essence of lime—and for a moment, I was truly happy. Happy to be with my sister. Happy to be home again. Happy that at least the three of us would be here for the time being.

Even if for all the wrong reasons.

8

When I entered Hawthorn again, I felt enveloped in its plain New England arms, its brick and wood and white walls and smell of earth and coffee and winter spice.

Its length seemed less like a serpentine pattern and more like a series of Christmas boxes waiting to be opened.

Why had I hated this place so much?

Why had I left it behind and done everything I could to let work and life get in the way of coming back?

Now it was late in the game. My father, gone. I'd thought I'd have some time later in life to sort out our problems. Maybe in my forties. After I'd somehow established my own territory in the world. Sometime in the future, when he was older and softer and I was wiser and more understanding of my own nature. I had made a huge mistake by running away from my problems.

Despite the length of the house, it wasn't that wide, nor were the ceilings high. It was built for Welshmen and women—my great-greats, none of whom were tall. It wasn't until my father married my mother and produced two sons who had some Norwegian and German in them, that the house seemed smaller and less grand to my dad. He told me that no one should really be taller than five-foot-six anyway.

I could practically feel my father still alive in the entryway—and yes, though my mother was long gone, I felt her there, too, and saw her in my sister's face. I looked for the penknife notching in the door frame—and there they were. The notch that was me at four, then at six, then at twelve; and Brooke and Bruno's notches, as well, all of us lined up against the door frame every few years to check our progress.

I went to hug my sister, and she whispered in my ear, "Good to see you again."

My sister and brother and I had seen each other in the years I'd been gone—but not more than once or twice. I hadn't seen her in nearly six years, though, and we'd been so close growing up, that I felt my eyes tearing up just to be there, in the house, with both her and Bruno. It was enough for the time being.

Brooke loved the island more than she loved life itself, and Hawthorn was the heart of her love. She had told me as a child that she wanted to grow up to either be a fisherman, or a fisherman's wife, and she had danced along the edge of the shoreline on many summer twilights, stretching her arms up to the pink sky, while her friends gathered around a bonfire that had just been set for the night—but she was separate from them, a nature spirit on the island.

Some heaviness had come into her—not in terms of weight, but an aura, as if remaining on the island had tugged away at her vitality, her ability to dance on the shore or love the smell of the fishing boats as they came into the harbor.

I suspected that, whether she ever married or not, she would always remain in that house, always caring for it and tinkering with its upkeep, and making sure that someone remained to remember the Raglan history. It was as if the doors were not open for her.

9

Brooke went to flick on the kitchen light, and when her back was turned, Bruno whispered to me, "Sedatives."

"Yes," Brooke said, turning to face him. She shot him a poisonous look. It nearly scared me, because it didn't seem like the soft gentleness I'd remembered her having. "You drink, and I get a pill now and then."

"I didn't mean it as—" Bruno began, but shut up. "Sorry."

Brooke's face smoothed out. Then to me: "Pola and her little boy came by. Just paying respects. It seems early for it. I didn't run her off, but I have a hard time with the idea of people just popping over the day after this. Harry came by this morning, too, and it's making me angry that everyone has to say something to me. As if it's required." The sorrow in her face nearly astonished me. She needed sleep badly. Sleep and peace. "Just make yourself at home. Your room should be okay. Mab and Madoc seem to like sleeping there some nights. If they bother you, just shut them out. Don't put up with any crap from them. There's a spot heater in the den you can have if it gets too cold. I'm not sleeping at night. Don't bother me 'til after seven tonight. I just want to sleep right now. As long as I can." She whistled for her dogs, and they leapt nearly across the living room and ran to her.

And then my sister went down through the living room, out the door that led to the dining room. I heard a series of doors open and shut as she went through twelve rooms, upstairs, to her own room, near the back of the house.

"She was on edge before this," Bruno said. "Either quiet or like a cyclone. She and Dad were fighting all week. Mainly about money."

10

Within an hour of being home, I got a call from the local police chief.

CHAPTER EIGHT

1

"Nemo?"

"Joe," I said. I had always known him as Joe rather than Officer Grogan. The island was like that. We had been tight-knit. Too tight. First thing I asked him, "You catch the killer yet?"

A pause on the line.

"First, I'm sorry for all this." He said it in a low, quiet voice. It reminded me of my father a little, when he was trying to tell me something bad.

"I just got in," I said. But I wanted to just sink into a soft sadness and not deal with anything.

"Well, I want you to know we've been scouring the island for this killer. Everyone is cooperating."

"Thank you," I said, unsure how to respond. I still wasn't certain how I was supposed to continue in life, thinking about this murder. I wonder if anyone who has been touched by a murder really knows how to react to it or to how people treat you afterward. It was as if you somehow came out of another dimension, as if you lost your pact with the rest of the human race, and then you were either a wounded victim or simply a foreigner in the land of normalcy.

"We'll need to ask you some questions, soon," he said.

"Of course," I said.

"Good. How's Brooke?"

"She seems to be well, holding up."

"Hang tough," he said, before hanging up.

I glanced at Bruno. Hung up the phone. "Grogan," I said.

"He's calling too much," Bruno said. "Means he doesn't have anything. He really wants to talk to Brooke. I think he's scared of her."

2

The first week was a blur of reporters, who didn't bother us as much as I thought they might, but generally were around if one of us left the house and actually ventured to the village. (I stayed home with Brooke unless a trip to town was absolutely necessary, and then I just went to buy eggs or coffee or milk at the QuickMart, where I knew no one.) The reporters from the mainland seemed a little scared of us—or were ashamed to have to circle around us. Brooke hated having her picture taken, so when she went outside, she always gave the photographers and cameramen the finger just to keep her picture out of the paper.

Harry Withers, running the Burnley Gazette, was not among them, despite my brother's promise that he had been camping out somewhere nearby. I guess I should add a word or two about Harry here. Harry Withers, my best friend when I was growing up, was a bit of a nutcase. As a lad, he'd been into being a complete geek, which was cool in its own way—he read books on improving brain power, and he knew what NASA was working on, and he was completely convinced that Earth would eventually be contacted by aliens. He used to even try to hypnotize my brother, sister, and me as kids after seeing a guy on television make a bunch of people quack like a duck. He was the son of the owner of the Burnley Gazette, an island rag that tended toward gossip and tourist promotions and the odd story about how pennies were getting scarce on the island. When we had been kids, he was like my brother—more so than Bruno in some respects, because Harry and I were the same age, and got into nearly the same trouble. He slept over at Hawthorn a lot as a kid, too, so my family knew him well—his parents had troubles that I won't get into here other than to say they were mismatched. His father died of emphysema when he was fourteen, and then he turned bad in a way that was destructive.

I was nearly thankful that Harry hadn't come by Hawthorn yet. I just didn't want to see him if I could help it. Not with all the other crap going on. Not with the shroud of gloom and confusion that hung over the house.

He did call once, though. He wouldn't say much other than that we needed to get together soon, and that he knew "something about the smokehouse."

"You calling as a reporter or a friend?" I asked.

"Both, I guess," he said, and added, "But I'm a friend first."

"It's hell here," I whispered into the phone.

"Yeah," he said.

A pause on the line.

"I guess I can't say anything pleasant in the face of this," he said.

"Nope."

"I'm just sorry it happened. The way I used to hang out over there with you, I always felt like one of the family."

"You were," I said. "I know Dad considered you an honorary Raglan."

"Sorry we've been out of touch."

"Feels like I just left the place yesterday," I told him. "Like I just saw you the day before yesterday."

But despite the warmth of this last part of our conversation, I felt distant from Harry and distant from everyone I'd grown up with.

I still wasn't sure why I'd created that distance.

3

I didn't see Harry that first week at all, but Joe Grogan came by Hawthorn more than once.

He was the only policeman of note on the island in the winter. During high tourist season, from Memorial Day to Labor Day, this increased to ten, most of whom were at The Oaks rather than in Burnleyside. Joe and his gang of three were eager to take part in this most interesting of local crimes, even though the police from the mainland flocked, briefly, to Burnley once the story got out. Like seagulls to a trash heap.

Joe Grogan had aged quite a bit—my guess was he was about forty-eight, but he looked a lot older with wrinkles and white hair and a general hangdog expression.

He had the look of a man whose life had worn him down to the nub.

"It goes like this," he said. "First, we secured the area around the crime scene. Not difficult for this time of year, but you never know who will decide to tromp through there. We're keeping the smokehouse locked up, though. Investigators have been going through, trying to examine everything they can."

Brooke turned cold, briefly. "How many men went through there?" she asked.

"Six or seven. At the most."

"He would've hated that," she said. "Tweezers out to pick up hair samples. Blotting blood trying to find evidence. I can't imagine all the gory details."

"It's procedure," Joe said, glancing at me with a slightly bewildered expression. "Unfortunately, the weather hasn't helped any of this. The police tape has blown away twice already, and between the snow falling and melting, I'm not sure we're going to have much luck. Finding anything in the perimeter beyond the building, is, well " He splayed his hands, a gesture of futility. "Pretty soon, we'll just have some additional informal interviews with neighbors, and each of you, of course."

"Interviews?" Bruno asked. "That's it?"

"There's a lead investigator, and she's got to find out if anyone saw anything. Anything at all."

"I don't feel very safe," Brooke said.

"The killer—or killers—may well have already left the island," Joe said. He took his time saying this—he was being careful with his words. He seemed to watch Brooke's face equally carefully. "This person is on the move."

"He could have easily killed me," Brooke said. "The doors weren't locked. If he wanted something, he would've come and taken it. He just wanted to murder someone. That's my guess. He's some insane sociopath."

Joe seemed about to say something, but then held back.

Bruno nodded gravely, looking at the tattered Persian rug on the floor instead of at our sister. "Brooke, it could even be someone here. Someone who lives here. Maybe someone who didn't like Dad."

"Do you think so, Joe?" Brooke asked, fixing what I'd term a sharp and terrible look on Joe Grogan, as if he had failed her just by being there. "You think Carson did it? Or Ike Doone?" Her voice rose a bit. "Or me? Do you think I killed him and sat in his blood for hours, thinking about my hideous act?"

When Bruno next spoke, his voice seemed small, like a child's who has been scolded. "I didn't mean that. I didn't." Joe glanced at me, then at Bruno, but averted his gaze from my sister. He was overpowered by her. I had an inkling of why. They'd had an affair. I could smell it at ten paces. They had some broken chemistry between them. It was as if they were talking about one thing, but meaning another. It felt like it. Like they had too much intimacy. Joe and Brooke. The way they both seemed uncomfortable in each other's presence. I didn't know this for sure, but something about the chief of police sitting there in the chair. He sat in that chair before. He has been in Hawthorn more than a few times. Holding the cup of coffee in the saucer. Nearly relaxed, but a strange underlying tension. It all seemed too familiar. Brooke seemed too hostile toward him.

"The investigators have gathered what evidence they could," he said. "But it's still too soon to not keep going over every detail."

"What about DNA?" I said, not really knowing what I asked.

"Samples already went down to some labs in Connecticut. It may take some time to determine anything. But we'll get whoever did this. Don't worry."

"I feel unsafe," Brooke said. Her eyes filled with glassy tears. She reached for a tissue in a dispenser near her elbow. Blew her nose.

"Do you have any ideas?" I asked. "It takes a while to go on-and off-island. There's the coast guard. How hard is it to—"

Joe's face turned grim as he cut me off. "Every cop from here to Boston is formulating theories. They'll keep scraping for evidence they might've missed. Your father didn't seem to have enemies. There haven't been reports of strangers on the island since before the end of October. Even the logs on the ferry for the past three weeks—all accounted for. This is a tough one. We'll crack it. Maybe if we're lucky, the killer had his own boat and drowned during the storm."

As bloodthirsty as it may have seemed, I hoped in my heart that was true.

Brooke wiped her eyes, then her nose, with the tissue. "You think it's me."

"Don't be ridiculous," Joe Grogan said. "No one thinks that. It's just just the damnedest thing." It must have been his favorite phrase.

"I sat there, in that blood," Brooke said. Then she covered her face with her hands. I went to her and sat on the edge of the large leather chair she was in. I stroked her back lightly.

"I don't want any of you tromping around by the smokehouse," Joe said to me when I walked him to the front door. "And watch out for Ike Doone. I've caught him twice trying to get close to it, and he and that wife of his are all caught up with America's Most Wanted, so I don't want him grabbing souvenirs. Chase him off if you see him out there."

4

The moment Joe's car had pulled out of the driveway, Brooke went to the front window and stared out at the road. "Fuck!" she shouted.

Bruno and I just sat and watched her.

"She's going through hell," I said.

I really meant it. You grow up Catholic, and there's some inkling that hell is always right around the corner. It's the place you accidentally step into when you least expect it. I asked my dad, when I was a kid, if he thought he was going to heaven, and he told me no. He wouldn't explain why, and it was the saddest thing he ever said about himself. I guessed, as I got older, that if you lived long enough, you spent time in hell as you went through life.

I figured we'd all just bought a little bit of real estate there, with this murder. We knew something about life that many people get to skim over in the papers or on the nightly news.

Brooke had sat in hell for hours, staring in its face.

She had the right to her obscenities.

5

We could not have a funeral yet because my father's body was needed for forensics evidence. It was unpleasant to contemplate. I had the idea of a funeral at St. Bart's, with Father Ronnie, now nearly seventy, giving mass. Bruno shook his head to shush me up, but Brooke told me, "We had a falling out with Father Ronnie. Dad didn't like him in the end. I didn't like him. For a priest, he had no sense of Christian forgiveness. To him, I'm Jezebel or something. He called me a harlot once. I called him a drunk. We parted ways." She said this last part with a bit of acid in her voice.

"What's that all about?" I asked. "He actually called you a harlot?"

"You'll hear about it soon enough," she said. "Joe Grogan and I had a fling. Well, more than that. For nearly a year. Do not give me that Nemo look."

" Nemo look'?" I nearly laughed. It felt good to feel a little light.

"That I knew you were up to something' look," she said without a trace of humor. "Don't judge me. I will not be judged by you or anyone. His wife has had affairs with men up at The Oaks every summer since they've been married. He needed a little happiness. I did, too. It ended badly. Dad was furious, but kept a lid on it. He felt I was I don't know devaluing myself, I guess. He told me I'd never find a husband, and I guess I pissed him off by spitting back at him that I could find any husband I wanted, so long as the wife was away. Father Ronnie scolded Dad for allowing a woman like me to live in his house. Dad told him to fuck off. So, no absolution for us. We're headed for limbo. Or worse."

"True," I said. "I'm not sure you can ever come back from telling a priest to fuck off."

"He didn't quite say it that way."

"It's a relief to know we all won't be excommunicated for your sins," I said cheerily.

"Always the funny one," she said in a way that was not funny at all. It was the Yankee in her. "I never liked church. Sunday should be a day to sleep in. Ronnie's mass went on too long. I could always smell whiskey on his breath in the confessional."

6

When I was out piling up firewood that Carson McKinley brought (yes, he had a good delivery business with his truck, despite his predilection for sheep), I saw Joe Grogan's police car up on the roadside.

Joe stood over by the smokehouse, just on the edge of the last of the police tape that hadn't quite blown away. He peered around it, as if he didn't want to step into some sacred circle.

I waved to him and called out. He glanced in my direction, then crouched down just outside the building. He picked at something with his fingers.

There was a kind of silent barrier to winter on the island; he may have called out to me, but I didn't hear it. The wind picked up.

When I got over to him, he stood, a grim expression on his face.

"I have to tell you, Nemo. And I hate doing it."

I remained stonily silent, my heart sinking a bit.

"We got nothin'."

We shared a smoke, because it was cold and he had a pack on him, and then he said, "It keeps me up nights. Thinking about this. About how someone could do it and get away. How they could do it and not leave some print. Hair. Footprint in the blood. Some small thing. The blade was some kind of small scythe, best I can figure. Hasn't been found. Nothing's been found. All those mainland people are beginning to leave it alone. They don't like this kind of thing. Where a suspect isn't apprehended fast. They like to either close the book or move on. They're gonna pin this on some guy who's been killing people down in Jersey, but I don't know how. There's nothing here. You and I know Brooke didn't do it. She's no Lizzie Borden." He took a long drag on his cigarette, and then looked at me as if I were not really there and he'd just been talking to himself all along.

We both stood there awhile in the cold, a stack of chopped wood at my feet. The wind picked up.

He said, "It's the damnedest thing."

That was it. He walked back up to the roadside, dusk coming on.

After he started his car, I took up the wood and went into the house to make a fire.

PART TWO

"Vision is the art of seeing things invisible."

—Jonathan Swift

CHAPTER NINE

1

The weather forecast storms. That's pretty much all we got out there in the Atlantic in winter. Freezing cold, storms, snow, sleet, gray or even blackened skies. It had depressed me as a boy, but now it didn't bother me much. I had a constant fire going in the living room fireplace, which made it all toasty when I wanted to sit and read or just dwell on things. I'd glance at the sky in the morning and try to predict when the snow would come, and by noon, if I'd been accurate, I would go outside just to feel the cleanness of it on my face.

2

Paulette Doone, from across the way, stopped by that night with what she called a "care package." It consisted of a paperback Bible, a copy of a book called Give Your Troubles to the Lord and Watch Them Disappear, as well as raisin-oatmeal cookies, gingerbread men, and some apples she'd bought at one of the local markets. What she really wanted to do was snoop and pronounce some judgment on us.

Paulette looked grim when I brought her into the house. She glanced left to right as if she were taking inventory. ("That's a lovely vase," she said, pointing. "And the piano. Your mother used to play it all the time. Is it still in tune?") But when we got right down to it, she came over to tell me one thing and one thing only: that we needed to get to the Lord, and fast.

"I want you to know that no one ever blamed you kids for the trouble you got up to," she said. She patted my hand as we sat next to each other. She kept the grim expression—Bruno later called it a "death's head rictus"—as she recounted her memories of our father. And then she said, "I thought I saw someone that day. Earlier. Might've been seven or so in the morning. It was a woman. She was walking in the fog."

I began to feel as grim as Paulette looked. "Did you tell Joe?"

She nodded. "She scared me, that woman. She seemed out of place. She wasn't from around here." When she said this last part, I had a horrible feeling in my gut that I'd made a big mistake by returning home at all. She reminded me of what I truly had hated on the island: the bigotry and prejudice against anything "foreign," and by foreign, this meant anyone who was not from the island in the first place. Anyone who had not lived there for two generations or more. "Wasn't from around here" was a popular way of saying, "outsider." Outsiders were considered somehow tainted, somehow worth less than insiders. The provincialism of the place was appalling. Worse, with Paulette, was the fact that she was rabidly religious and believed the devil was everywhere and angels fought for our souls.

And it was embodied for me, for that moment, in Paulette Doone, with her grimness and her fears and her made-up world of demons and angels.

My contrary nature got the best of me.

"It must be terrifying," I said.

Her eyes lit up as if she loved terror as much as she did the hint of scandal.

"To live across from our home. To know that whoever did this this horrible thing might be somewhere nearby," I said. I felt petty and mean, but something in her story of "wasn't from around here" reminded me of why I'd set off stink bombs in her yard in the first place—she had shouted at me more than once that year that I was going to turn out just like my mother. My mother had been, after all, the ultimate island outsider. She quite literally was not from around there. She had the audacity to have married and carried children with the local hero, the prize, the man who had put Burnley Island on the map with his heroic deeds. And then she had run off like a scoundrel in the night, with a lover, no less, leaving the man broken and raising children alone.

Paulette nodded as I spoke of the lingering terrors of living near the murder site. I felt like a rat for doing it to her—for scaring her more. But she'd come over to just say something bad about someone, and I was sick of her within five minutes.

"I've stayed up the last two nights and wondered about it. I read mystery novels, and Ike says I'm always trying to solve crimes. I listen to the satellite radio—Ike has it in his garage—so I can hear what goes on off-island, what criminals are doing. And I don't think this was out of the blue. I think your father was murdered a certain way well, it was like a ritual, don't you think? Do you believe in God?"

That was it for me. She was going to try to save us. Using the opportunity of our father's murder.

"Get out of our house," I said.

3

Sometime after the Revelation of Brooke as a Scarlet Woman, Bruno brought up the possibility of a memorial service.

"Did Dad ever talk about how he'd want it?" I asked.

She squinted at me, as if she didn't quite believe I'd asked that. "He was only fifty-eight. He didn't talk much about dying. I don't think he anticipated this." Her sarcasm nearly bit me. I had never been able to read her moods.

"I guess he wanted to be buried down in the old cemetery," she said, as if I needed reminding. "Among all the Raglans. All of us should be buried there."

"Granny was buried in Falmouth," I reminded her.

"She was only a Raglan by marriage," my sister said. "That was her sister's doing. Dad wanted her here, but he didn't like to stand up to the aunts from that part of the family. They were harpies." Then she nearly brightened. "There must be a way to get in touch with Mom. I know there is. I wrote six months ago to the address I found in Dad's file cabinets, but I got it back unopened. Someone else lives there now. There's got to be a way to find her."

"Why?"

"Why not? How many years has it been?" Brooke asked. "She's our mother. She may be married and living on a coffee plantation or something, I don't care. I want to find her. Don't you?"

"I don't know," I said.

"I want her to know," Brooke said. "And I want that door to be open for her."

"If she won't find us," I said, "I'm not sure we can find her."

4

Brooke once turned on the TV, only to be faced with the six o'clock news out of Boston. It had a mention of the trial of some priest, and how some vandals had destroyed some of the trees on Boston Common, and a mention of Dad's murder and the suspicion that it might be a serial killer who had been responsible for the death of a New Jersey couple from the previous summer.

"Joe said they'd do that," I told Brooke. "That the detectives would link it to other murders. He doesn't think it's true."

When I looked over at her, she'd covered her face with her hands as if weeping, but she made no sound.

5

Bruno used music as anger therapy.

Even as a kid, he had played the piano like it was his angst expeller.

He tried to play our mother's piano in the living room, but all I heard was a flat tinkling of the keys, as if he could not remember a single composition from the three years of piano lessons he had taken.

He could not even muster "Moonlight Sonata," which was a tune he had banged out for a solid year, it had seemed, when he had been twelve and seemed to show signs of musical prodigy.

6

Me, I drowned the noise in my mind with Sam Adams Ale with Bruno down at the local pub.

Bruno had become far too familiar with brands of beer (he could distinguish between Alsatian and French and German with his eyes closed; he knew the brewing techniques of Rolling Rock and Coors and how they differed from an upstate New York beer of which he was fond called Genesee). During one of these bouts of beer, Bruno said to me, "I saw something spooky last night."

"It was Brooke. She's walking all night. Even the dogs won't get up for her."

"Oh yeah, I noticed. Those pills she takes don't seem to help her sleep much." He waited a beat and took a sip of beer.

"No, it was outside my window," he said. "It was someone outside my window."

I shrugged, grabbing the pitcher and pouring out a bit of Guinness into my glass mug. "Brooke."

"On the second floor," he said. "Jesus, do you ever listen? I saw someone outside, like they were in the oak tree."

7

Some hours of the day, I found myself glancing out at the smokehouse. Thinking of the cops. Of Joe Grogan. Of damnedest things. Of my father.

His last moments.

8

The smokehouse was surrounded with dead yellow stalks of weed and grass poking through the snow and what seemed like a never-ending mist, as if a translucent veil of white-gray covered the world.

It had been both a playhouse and the place of punishment for me as a child. My father had been stern when something truly bad had happened. I tended to be the troublemaker. I think he wept sometimes when he drew off his belt to spank me there. He had been punished horribly as a child (so horribly I did not even understand the stories he used to tell me about a whipping post and a riding crop or a cat o' nine tails that my grandfather hung over the inside of the front door when my father had been a boy).

My own punishments had never lasted long—usually one or two whacks on the butt, and then I had to sit on the dirty floor of that smelly place for an hour and think about what I had done.

My father was afraid I would become a delinquent, as his oldest brother had, and end badly. He worried, I'm guessing, that he was more lenient than his own father and that I might turn out to be a terrible human being.

He believed that there was bad blood in the family from the Irish and Scot sides, some kind of madness and bullheadedness, and that it had landed in his brother, and might have entered me at conception as well.

He may have been right, since I seemed to always get in trouble or have unexplainable mishaps happen around me that seemed to only point in my direction.

It had all been centered around the smokehouse, those punishments I got as a kid.

And the games we used to play as well.

I circled around the building and adjusted the strip of police tape, even though I knew it was futile.

The wind would blow the tape away again.

Didn't matter. The investigators had found nothing. There was nothing to find. Only Brooke's prints and her hair, and my father.

The smokehouse seemed consecrated now.

Consecrated by my father's blood.

9

One time, I was trying to clear out the gutters of the house, since they'd been neglected since the fall and were full of leaves and muck. I saw Ike Doone out by the smokehouse, and I could not get down the ladder fast enough to go chase him off.

Other curiosity seekers drove by, slowing on the road as they got near the crime scene.

10

At night, after I'd been drinking with Bruno, I'd lay in bed and look at the ceiling believing that the world was somehow an unfair and tragic proposition, and life was a joke.

One night, I dreamed my father and I were out in a boat together.

11

The dream: It was a dinghy, and the sea was calm as a mirror. In the sky, an enormous silver crescent moon, but it was barely dark yet.

My father was turned with his back to me. He had on the tan baseball cap that he'd often wear when he went fishing. He had no shirt on—his back was bare and pale white. He had a fishing line out in the water. When I looked in the bottom of the boat, near my bare feet, it seemed alive with wriggling fat eels and freshwater trout, their tails flipping as they tried to get out of the boat.

He turned to face me, and his eyes were no longer there, but blood poured from the empty holes.

Seagulls flew in the sky above, crying out, and somehow I knew they had taken his eyes.

Then his eyes were intact, and he got that jolly twinkle in them like he did whenever he was about to tell a funny story. "Don't be afraid," he said. "Just close your eyes. Don't touch anything."

I glanced down at the eels in the boat. "Them?"

"Just stay still here. Keep your eyes closed. Don't lean. No talking. Ignore the noise," he said. "Listen to what I'm about to say. Listen very carefully. Each word I say is important. Each word is like a key to a door. I want you to imagine a small red light, so small you can barely see it. Everything about it is completely pitch dark, but the light is red like a tiny, tiny fire. I want you to follow me with that fire, follow me as I take you somewhere else."

I watched an eel with a mouth like a python as it devoured one of the fish. I nodded, not wanting to say anything to him.

When I looked up again, the moon had grown larger, as if our boat had moved closer to it. My father hooked a long pike with a wood handle and a sharp barbed tip into one of the eels and was holding it over the boat. The eel wriggled in slow motion against the crescent moon. The moon seemed to have barbed tips, also, and for some reason looked like it was made out of metal.

One of the seagulls shrieked louder than the rest, and its cry seemed to grow with the echoes of it.

"She went away," my father said, returning his gaze to the ever-growing moon as the seagull's shriek became a scream. "But someday, she'll be back"

"Pola?" I asked.

CHAPTER TEN

1

I awoke and, strangely, felt calm from the dream.

As if my mind was somehow giving me permission to say goodbye to him. As if, despite the savagery of the crime, he was all right, somewhere, on some glassy sea, fishing.

The only part of the dream that disturbed me was somehow knowing my father knew I was still in love with Pola.

As I always did whenever I had a strange dream that seemed significant to me, I got up and got a spiral notebook I'd had for years and wrote down the details I could remember in it: Moon, fishing, eels and trout, fingernail crescent moon, seagulls, eyes missing, eyes returned to normal, tan baseball cap, calm water. Pola.

2

For the first time in daylight, I went to the village.

The village was only about a half-mile walk from the eastern edge of Hawthorn. The day was overcast and the woods to the south sent a piney scent up to me as I trudged through the crunchy bits of snow. It had snowed off and on since I arrived, but generally melted by late afternoon down to a manageable slush. I could've borrowed Brooke's truck, but she was sleeping and had the keys somewhere in her room. I didn't want to disturb her.

The road to town was slick and wet, and I enjoyed the freshness of the day as I went. Part of me wanted to jog the whole way in, to feel my lungs working, but instead, I opted for a lit cigarette out the side of my mouth. My self-destruction would be slow and take as long as cigarettes could take.

Everything about Burnleyside was unappealing in winter.

It seemed Main Street had no color after summer—the peeling paint of the white clapboard two-stories all ran together in a jumble of storefronts and thin slivers of small Cape houses. The locals called it the Shambles—the way the stores seemed to pile on top and over each other on Main Street. It always seemed overcrowded in summer, and like a mess of poor architectural planning in the winter. The Oaks, up island, was more picturesque owing to the money poured into the houses and few convenience stores at the end of the island. In the summer, there was a Baskin-Robbins there, and even a McDonald's, all of which closed down for the winter as of October 20th. On Main Street in Burnleyside, I saw MontiLee Stormer with her swanky new hairdo. "Just like a movie star," she said, and at first I wanted to smirk and chuckle at the provincialism of Burnleyside, but when I looked twice at her, it did give her a glamorous look. MontiLee was the woman who women kept their husbands away from because she seemed to be catnip for the men in the village, even if she had never strayed from her own husband. She had the look of a woman who might stray, and no matter how she protested, there were those who thought she'd spent her life in alliances. MontiLee quizzed me about what it had been like living in the South (as she thought of Washington, DC) and asked if the senators and congressmen were as corrupt as they seemed. She talked politics a bit—first national, wondering what the president was up to and why he didn't respond to the letters she'd sent him about what she considered were the growing concerns of the nation. Then she switched to local news.

"I know I shouldn't be mentioning this," she said. "But any news?"

"On?"

"The murder," she whispered, and glanced about the street as if others might hear her. As if it were a big secret. "We're absolutely terrified to go out at night."

"They think it's a killer from the mainland. Who's back on the mainland," I said, fairly sure that it was a lie. I had to admit it: "I really don't know. I don't even understand what the cops are doing about it."

"I watch all the Discovery Channel shows on forensics, and it's fascinating. How they can even see how blood sprays a certain way, and—" but she must've seen the look of revulsion in my face, because she stopped. "Our hearts go out to you, dear," she said, and placed a hand on my chest, right above where my heart would be. For just a second, I thought she might be flirting with me, which was less annoying than uncalled for. I will grant that it gave me a tingle, partly because MontiLee was so attractive; I was not immune to her charms. "And you know," she said, keeping her voice low, "you look like you're holding up."

"Thanks. Ah " I said, fumbling with words. The only thing I could think to say was Joe Grogan's "It's the damnedest thing."

"I keep meaning to come by and pay my respects," she said, next touching my wrist, lightly. "But with Christmas coming up, and the business—well, my time is never my own."

After we did the small talk of small towns, MontiLee turned away. She sashayed to the other side of the street, heading toward her realty office. The row of shop fronts seemed dead now. Christmas lights were strung up, blinking even in daylight. At the end of Main Street, the small memorial park, with the one great fir tree, lit up.

Christmas was around the corner.

The year was nearly over.

I stood there, watching her go, remembering all these things I ought not to have shoved from my brain: a woman's touch. It made me think of another woman. The woman I just could not forget. Pola Croder.

All women I found attractive had made me think of Pola. I was beginning to suspect that even Beth, back in Washington, knew that my interest in her might've had something to do with her vague resemblance to Pola. No wonder she had distanced herself from me so easily; I had not been much of a prospect.

I walked by Croder-Sharp-Callahan, and casually looked through the glass, but could not bring myself to go inside. I wanted to see Pola, but I did not know what I would say to her if I saw her. My pulse quickened a bit, thinking of her, and I knew I was doomed to replay the goodness and richness of a high school romance in my head until the end of my days.

Still, she had come by the house after my father's death.

She still cared, and I still cared, and I kept hoping that one of my father's famous quotes, stolen no doubt from others, would be true: that the universe rewards belief.

I still believed that love couldn't die. Down in my toes I believed it. Even with the bad things in life, even with murder and sorrow, I believed that love just couldn't die if it was real between two people.

And I knew I was a doomed fool to believe it.

After picking up some eggs and bread at the local grocer's, where, thankfully, no one talked to me, I went by the old store my father had run.

The storefront was smaller than I'd remembered. The closed for the holidays sign was in the window, and when I peered through the windows, it looked as if nothing had changed since I'd been eighteen.

3

Back home an hour or so later, I caught Bruno peeling back some old wallpaper in the dining room that was never used.

"Look at this," he said. "Three layers of wallpaper under here. This must've been Great-Grandma Raglan's pattern." He pointed out a dulled rose pattern. "About 1905," he said. "Or 1904. Boston. I'm willing to bet it cost a pretty penny then."

"Brooke's gonna shit when she sees you tearing at the wallpaper," I said.

"It's amazing how old this house is. Think of all the things. Our rooms have been painted over so much," he said. "I scratched at my bedroom door and—get this—it's really made of glass."

"Glass? It's wood."

"No," he chuckled. "People have been painting over it so much, the center of that door is a thick oval of glass. And it's etched. I bet there are little treasures around here like that. Last night I was going through the shelves at the back of my old closet, and I found a small pantry behind it."

"Full of treasures?"

"No," he said. "Nothing, really. A couple of little ceramic salt and pepper shakers and a naked doll with its head cracked. Probably Granny's."

Bruno apparently had taken to picking at parts of the house—looking through cabinets, finding the old secret staircase—a narrow child-sized staircase that led from the laundry room—through a cabinet door—down to one of the kitchen cabinets on the first floor. As kids, we used to play hide and seek in it, and our father would raise unholy hell when we leapt out of the kitchen cabinet while he was cooking supper. Bruno found several items that had been missing for years: his old teddy bear, a dust mop after a nineteen-year disappearance; he also discovered that there was a way to reach between the walls in his old bedroom, by way of removing a thin board in his closet.

He found his old sketchbook there, which he had forgotten that he'd hidden away at twelve and kept private from the rest of us. He showed some of them to me. They were scenes from the Ice Queen stories—and how the goblins ended up torturing the Queen eternally for her crimes. The Ice Queen was poorly drawn, but could be identified by the crescent moon in her hand and her hair, which was straw-yellow and flowing. It was pretty vivid stuff for a little kid, and I suspect that Bruno had been getting some of his frustrations out on paper.

"You made up the stories," he reminded me. "I was just using crayons to illustrate your books."

"Only you never showed me," I said.

"I'm showing you now. I'm not the artist that Brooke is. But I tried."

"It's pretty violent," I said, ever the observer.

"So were the stories. I wonder why we liked them so much," he said, flipping through the sketchbook. "Dad would've had a fit if he'd seen these. He'd think there was something wrong with me."

"There is something wrong with you," I said, grinning. "You're a Raglan."

"We were a pretty creative bunch."

"Not a lot to do in the winter."

"Remember the words we made up?"

I nodded. "Jumblies."

"Gran made that one up. I mean like the Greasels."

"The result of Weasel and Groundhog mating," I said with some authority. "And the Eyestopper."

"Oh, yeah," he said. "That was a bad one. The evil poison that turns children blind when they see the sun."

"And the goblinfire," he said. "Look." He showed me a page in the sketchbook of a boy who might've been me, but with pointed elf ears, and a blackness of night all around him. In the middle of the blackness was a smudge of fiery yellow and orange.

We looked through some more of the sketches, pointing out what we remembered. The little ogre-girl who gobbled up people who said no to her; the boy whose skin was made out of bubblegum and blew up in a big pink bubble when he wanted to fly.

The most unusual one had me, Bruno, and Brooke all standing in a row with our mouths open in screams, and the tops of our heads were exploding.

Underneath this, Bruno had written in purple crayon: BRAIN FARTS!!!

And then there was the picture that was of us playing the Dark Game.

I barely glanced at it.

In a circle, holding hands.

Three children.

Bruno, Brooke, Nemo.

Blindfolds over their eyes.

"I wasn't much of an artist," Bruno said, and quickly closed his sketchbook.

I awoke the next morning, with Bruno standing over my bed.

He had on what looked like long underwear. Something about the way he looked, his hair all scruffy in his face, and something of an excited expression on his face, reminded me of him as a kid. "Get up! Nemo, you gotta see this!"

CHAPTER ELEVEN

1

After I'd rolled onto the floor, sleepily trying to find my bathrobe, Bruno dragged me from room to room until we came to my father's bedroom. It was exactly as I remembered it: the king-sized bed with my grandmother's quilt thrown over it and one goose down pillow at the head.

A small black-and-white television on a metal stand by the window.

A lamp by the bed, with a small round table beneath it, on which my father kept the TV guide and his nail clippers. Above the bed, a photo of him and my mother on their wedding day.

"Look at this, look," Bruno said. He opened the doors to the wardrobe, the very one we had all squeezed into as children. It had wide doors, and when he drew them back, they revealed my father's clothes, hanging. Bruno parted these. There was no back to the wardrobe. It was open and went to the wall. The wallpaper had been scraped back around a hole about four feet tall.

"What the hell?"

"Yeah and it gets better," Bruno said. He crouched down, stepping into the wardrobe, and withdrew a stack of papers and magazines. "Haven't completely gone through these, but want to see what Dad was up to in here all by his lonesome?"

He passed me the magazine on the top.

Slaves of Lust was the title. On the cover, a not-so-beautiful model with large, sloppy breasts covered from head to foot in rubber, only her face showing through a zipper. Others in the pile included: Master and Harem, Love Torture, and Punish the Naughty Lady.

"He was an S&M porn hound," Bruno said.

2

I didn't expect my father not to have a private sex life that involved his hand (this somehow kept him purer for all of us, who had hoped he'd remain true to our mother, a fantasy in its own way for kids whose mothers have run off), but when Bruno dumped the magazines on the bed, they were plainly the kinds of pornography I'd never seen before. I mean, I'd watched porn in college when someone had videotapes, and I'd flipped through the odd Penthouse and the other assorted girlie magazines.

But they'd seemed tame in comparison to what my dad had been stashing away.

The kind that made me flinch a little and not think well of people who were pornographers. (Porn is a funny thing. When you see the mainstream pornography, what Granny used to call "marriage manuals," it all seems full of happy, willing participants. There's an element to human beauty and fantasy in it. But when you see this kind, it looks as ugly as anything that is human can look. Call me puritan. But watching people being whipped or tied up wasn't my idea of eroticism. Not to say it's not someone else's. To each his or her own. Obviously, it was my dad's idea of a turn on. Call me a prude, but the last thing I wanted to find was my dad's porn stash.) "You think it was 'cause Granddad used to beat him?" Bruno asked.

"What?"

He shrugged. "I don't know. If a guy is into this, doesn't that just mean he had a lot of punishment as a kid and it became eroticized? I've known a few guys who liked this kind of stuff, and they all seemed to have this whole discipline thing going on. Granddad had that bullwhip or whatever that he kept above the door. It must've had some effect on Dad."

"You're talking about Dad. Christ. Gives me the willies."

"Yeah. I guess it's freaky. Who knew?"

"Let's just throw it out," I said.

"It's not the porn that I care about," Bruno said. He got down on his hands and knees and crawled into the hole, groaning a bit where he scraped his back. He back-crawled out, and brought with him a stack of letters. "Lots of this stuff. I put some in my room, too. Look," he said. "All this stuff. And two thousand cash." He pointed to the dresser. I went over to it, and touched the top of what turned out to be three stacks of hundred-dollar bills, wrapped in plastic bags, and bound with rubber bands.

"His bank account?"

"Mad money," Bruno said. "And these, too."

He came over to me, and passed me the letters he'd found. At first, I thought they were letters from my mother to him. Love letters from when they were young.

I picked one of them up. Turned it over.

3

Dear Mia,

Please come back to us.

The children miss you more than you can imagine, and I am going crazy without you.

I didn't know loneliness until you left. Please fulfill my greatest wish, that you love me again, that you love your children again.

Nemo is nearly fourteen and is going to be a man soon. But he needs his mother. He doesn't always make correct judgments, and I'm just not good at understanding why he's different than I was as a boy. But you were so good with him.

Brooke is as beautiful as you, and as bright. You must see her. And Bruno still cries for you at night, even though he hardy remembers what you look like.

Please come home, Mia. Please.

I love you and I wish that night had never happened between us.

I love you and always keep a light on at Hawthorn for you.

If you ever think for a moment that I have lost all love for you, or that I hate you, know in your heart that you are mistaken.

You are the only one for me. You are the love of my life. You are my only light. I beg of you, on my knees, and to God, and to everything holy and sacred in the world: Come home and be a mother to your children, and if you feel even an ounce of kindness and pity for me, come home. Come home and take care of them, be their mother, hold them close. I am so sorry for what happened between us.

Love always, Gordie

4

The letters were dusty and written on various kinds of paper—parchment, typing paper, notepad paper, as well as elegant stationery. The envelopes, from which my father had torn the letters before stacking them all together, had a single address on them: a house in Sao Paulo, Brazil. My mother's name: Mia Raglan.

It gave me a lonely feeling to read through them, between the porn, like a parade of the sacred and the profane.

I went and sat on his bed, and then lay back and put my head on the pillow.

I read letter after letter.

5

We ended up tossing the porn in the garbage without telling Brooke, since she was a bit judgmental about anything to do with pictures of naked women.

But the letters I passed to Brooke.

We also gave her the money that was found, although Bruno really wanted to keep some of it (he had debts, he said, and I told him I had bigger debts, but it still should be for Brooke since there were bills to pay at home).

On the sofa in the living room, while Bruno played something on the piano that sounded vaguely like a classical lullaby, Brooke flipped through the letters the way she might look over legal documents—with a kind of spirited disinterest. "He wrote these all the time."

"He didn't send them," I said. "I don't know why."

"He may have. They might've been returned. He said that some came back undeliverable."

"Look at the dates," I said.

She glanced at the top right-hand comers of some of the letters. "Every week," she said, nodding. "That makes sense. He always went to the post office on Monday morning. Sometimes there was nothing to mail, and he still went. I saw him writing to her once. He told me he did it because he had to keep the faith."

"He really loved her."

"I suppose he did," she said. "I was never sure of it. I'd guess he was angry with her. For leaving. I always wondered if they really loved each other at any time. He told me she had mental breakdowns more than once. Sometimes I wonder if he wasn't just a caretaker for her. But I guess he still wanted her to come home. All these letters. Sent back. She must've hated all of us."

I didn't jump on her comment, which seemed cold. It had been a rough time for all of us.

Bruno, playing the piano, stopped. He said, "He never sent them. Check the envelopes again."

Brooke held up one of the envelopes. "Oh. We missed it." She passed it to me. "Bruno's right. No postmark. He must've just written these and held on to them."

"Poor guy," I said.

Bruno turned around on the piano bench. "He used to hit her," he said, that Brunoesque anger rising in his voice as if he could go from "calm" to "storm" in seconds flat.

"He did not," I said.

"Sure he did. I saw him. She came and got me. I was maybe three. I just remember he hit her. He was yelling at her, and he hit her, and I was there, and she picked me up and took me up to her room. She snuggled up to me in the bed, crying. He tore her dress, and he made her cry, and he hit her. It's a vivid memory. That's the first time I remember not liking him at all."

"You might be remembering wrong," Brooke said. "You always remember things a little twisted and negative."

"Not damn likely," Bruno said.

"From the age of three?" Brooke let out a mocking laugh. "Even if he hit her—and I still don't believe it—maybe it was just once. And a bad time."

"You believe that?" Bruno asked. "You think it's okay for a guy to hit his wife under any circumstances, Brooke? You think he took us out to that smokehouse and used the belt on us, and he didn't use it on her at some point?"

"We were kids," she said, her own piss-and-vinegar rising. "He was spanking us. It's not the same."

"I watched him spank Nemo one time," Bruno said. "I stood in the corner of that freezing cold place, and I saw blood on Nemo's rear end. He wasn't just spanking us."

"Shut up," Brooke said, "just shut up. He's dead now. Let it go. Jesus, you'd think he never did anything for you. You'd think because he spanked us a couple of times—"

"It wasn't just spanking," Bruno said, disgust rising in his voice. "Spanking a kid is different. What I saw him do to Nemo was whip him."

As he said the words, I tried to remember a time when I felt as if my father had whipped me, but I could not. It was a great blank spot for me. I remembered hating the place of punishment and Dad's anger, but I could not for the life of me ever remember feeling that he'd gone overboard.

Bruno turned back around and began banging something out on that upright piano that sounded like nothing but noise at first.

Brooke shot me a glance that seemed to be full of curiosity. Then we recognized the tune—it was "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring."

We had all heard it as little children, from our mother's music box.

6

The cloud that hung low, the mystery and depression and trauma we'd all sustained from this shocking murder of our father, remained, but as the days rolled out I began to realize that we were all that was left of us. We still could remake ourselves, grow back together a bit and somehow get along.

My heart felt a bit heavy with the knowledge that somewhere out there, my father's killer was wandering free.

I didn't trust the universe enough to think they'd get him anytime soon.

7

Bruno confided in me that there wasn't much money left, perhaps ten thousand dollars after some debts Dad had accrued, plus the two thousand Bruno had found upstairs. Twelve thousand sounded like a lot to the two of us, but we knew that it wasn't much of a savings. Brooke would need it for her own life as much as Bruno and I wanted to paw at it ourselves. Brooke had to run the business and Hawthorn. I didn't really want Hawthorn, and neither did Bruno. We saw our futures off-island.

"What kind of debts? He was cheap."

Bruno shrugged. "He spent money like anyone else. There's some company in New York he'd buy books or something from." He shook his head. "Maybe that was the porn. Who knows? I found receipts for other stuff."

"But the business," I said. "It was running okay?"

The business was the store my dad had in the village, the one that Brooke ran. A small sundries store, it was a direct competitor for the larger Croder-Sharp-Callahan Store, which always turned a profit. Apparently, my dad's store had been losing money. It ran itself, it paid Brooke's meager salary, which allowed Hawthorn to keep up appearances, but it didn't run into profit, even during the abundant summertime.

"I guess you didn't know some money was missing," Bruno said.

"Grogan told me something about money problems. But I didn't think it was anything other than Dad having no financial sense."

Bruno snorted. "Well, it was his life. And his money. I guess given that he always did things his way, it's fine, right?" He had challenge in his eyes, but I was not up for an argument over Dad's corpse.

"Maybe it's time we sold off some of Hawthorn," I suggested. "Not the house. I mean, maybe the woods, or over by the creek. There's a lot of unused acreage. It's worth something. We could keep five acres around the house and sell the rest."

"Brooke wouldn't let it happen," Bruno said.

I glanced at him with some curiosity. "You need money, don't you?"

"I don't give a damn about the money," he said. "I just give a damn about what Brooke's gonna need now. She's stuck here."

"Well, when things are better, we'll all sit down and figure this out," I said. "If Brooke needs money to stay here, we'll figure it out. She's closing the store for a couple of weeks. I like the idea of helping her out a little. I just wish I weren't the official fuck-up that I am."

"I'm officially the fuck-up," Bruno said. "I'm the one who hated Dad. I'm the one who thinks bad about everything. I drink too much. Just right now. I think I need to stop drinking."

"No, no," I said. "We both drink too much. Actually, I watched you. You had three beers last night. To some people, that's barely drinking."

"To others, it's alcoholism," he said.

"I wasn't fond of Dad either," I admitted. "I can't for the life of me figure out why. He wasn't mean to me. I insist: I am the family fuck-up."

"Nope," Bruno said. "I'm the family fuck-up. Nemo, you don't even want to know."

I shook my head, enjoying this. "You're in the minor leagues. I'm the major league fuck-up. Who else got run out of town at eighteen? Who else can't hold a job for a year at a time? Who else—"

"You wrote a book."

It was true. I'd written a fantasy novel a few years previous. It was published. No one bought or read it. It had been my dream to be a writer, but by twenty-eight that dream had eroded.

"Lots of fuck-ups write books," I said. "Libraries are full of the evidence. You're the athlete with the good grades and the charm who everyone loves. You can play the piano. I lose a girlfriend every time I say I like her. I lose a job when they discover how incompetent I am."

"Okay," Bruno sighed. "I've got a trump card. I'm gay."

I sat there in silence. The word hadn't quite registered. Bruno? Gay? My little brother? "Wow. Wow. Bruno. Wow. That's news to me."

"Yeah," he said. "To you. Dad knew. That's why he didn't love having me staying in the house. Dad was a homophobe. You know what? I think he hated me, too. Since I was born. He told me he thought I was doing it to get back at him for something. Don't tell Paulette Doone. She'll do an exorcism." Then he added, "You shocked?"

8

"You knew he was gay?" I asked Brooke as soon as we had a minute alone. She was pulling clothes out of the dryer, while trying to keep the two dogs from getting into the laundry room.

"Of course," she said. "Here, help fold."

"Not good at this," I said, as she passed me some warm towels.

"Folding? Or getting used to having a gay brother?"

"Folding. I don't care that he's gay."

"Yes, you do," she said. "I knew it when he was twelve. He told me when he was sixteen."

"Told you?"

"What, you were around for him to talk to?" she asked, and it stopped me cold. "He wanted to tell you, but apparently you didn't want to stay on the phone with him long enough to talk about it. Bruno has a lot of anger about Dad, and I think some of it is directed at you. He assumed, from some comment you made to him once, that you'd be like Dad about it."

"I would not ever—damn it," I said. "Damn it." She was right. I vaguely remembered a long phone call, very late at night, when Bruno had been sad over something that had happened—I assume he had broken up with a girl in college—and he never quite got to the point. But it had been mostly me, not wanting him to get to the point. Not really even listening the one time Bruno had seemed to open up to me as an adult, I had never been there for him at all, past the age of twelve. Even then, I was too preoccupied with my girlfriend and buddies and getting up to no good. Bruno must've felt a little lost not having someone to talk to about it. I felt terrible. GUILT rose up within me. I had been an awful older brother.

"Oh," Brooke said. She waited a beat before speaking again. "He has a boyfriend. Cary Conklin. Try not to be too shocked."

"This family will never cease to amaze me," I said. "Good for him."

She dropped the sheets she'd bunched up in a pile on the floor. She squeezed my arm. "I'm glad you're home, even under the circumstances. You should stay a little longer this time."

"Yeah," I said. And meant it. "It always amazes me what I don't know about stuff around here. Do you realize that none of us really knows each other?"

"You mean, you don't know us very well anymore," she said.

"Busted," I said, nodding.

"What drove you from this house?" she asked, as if it were the weightiest question in the universe.

I didn't even need to think about it. "I always felt something was rotten here," I said. "And I never knew why. But maybe I was just so messed up then. It's like it was a different life, not the one I have now."

"It's because Mom left," she said. "Dad always said that. He said you took off because you'd been abandoned more than any of us. He said you cried and cried the night she left and begged her to stay, and then you blamed him."

I tried to remember this, but none of it came. "I guess I buried it all."

"I did that, too," she said. "Bruno seems to be the only one who doesn't bury stuff. He just throws it all out there on the wall. Sometimes too much."

"I know so little about Bruno," I said. "Is there anything about you I need to know?"

She gave me a curious stare, as if she were about to surprise me with something. "Nothing you don't already know," she said. "I gave up on love this fall. That kind of love—the kind that's about two souls binding together. And so on. It seems a little empty to even think about it after what happened, the whole idea of dating. It seems trivial. Anything I want to do seems trivial. After that." That's what she'd called our father's murder. She swore she could not even remember sitting in the smokehouse with his body, or what it looked like, or how she felt. It had been that bad of a shock. All she could say was "after what happened," "after that," or simply, "after." I wondered how many years needed to go by before all of us would somehow get better from this. "I refuse to go out on any more dates with local men until I know that they're not just here because they have no place else to go."

"That's what I feel like. I have no place else to go," I said.

"You always have Hawthorn. By the rights of the firstborn, the house is probably yours." She said this seriously, as if she believed it.

"Spoken like someone who doesn't give a damn. Well, it's yours. It has been since we were kids."

"I'm not sure I love it anymore," she said. "Not like I did then. Sometimes it's like a prison. It's like a place with too many doors. And none of them lead outside. Even before. Sometimes it's like a splinter inside me that won't come out. Someone said something to me a while ago that's been bugging me. Someone said that he thought we were too incestuous."

"You and Dad?"

She shot me a look that was half-grimace and half-mocking. "God, no. All of us. He told me that I'd never find a mate because I was too caught up in this family. Which is ridiculous, isn't it? We're a half-assed family now. Mom's gone, Dad's dead. Bruno hated Dad. I think he doesn't like me too much anymore. You both have lives elsewhere. How can we be incestuous?"

"Who said it?"

"Joe Grogan," she said. "But do you think we are? This whole Raglan thing? How we keep too separate from everyone here? How Dad didn't like our friends, and how we had those games we all played and kept other kids away? Was it unhealthy?"

"We played with Harry when we were kids."

"I meant in general," she said, somewhat testily.

"What's bothering you?" I asked.

"Nothing," she said.

"Joe said that just to hurt you."

"You know what?" she said. "I think all three of us aren't meant to be happy. Maybe we were too close here. I always felt like I was betraying him to have a life outside Hawthorn. I felt like if I did, it would be like Mom leaving, or you or Bruno taking off. Can I ask you something? Something I don't want to be judged on?"

"Of course."

"Do you believe in ghosts?"

CHAPTER TWELVE

1

Before I could answer, Brooke jumped in with, "Not ghosts as in dead people. I mean, the idea of someone haunting someone. The idea that inside a person, there can be another person."

"You mean, psychologically?"

"Maybe. That might be it. It's Dad I'm thinking of. He always told me that someone haunted him. He didn't start talking about it 'til last year, when we were fighting. He started drinking again, and we well, we got into it. Yelling at each other. I'm not proud of it, but it happened. And he told me that he thought he was losing his mind because he felt like someone was haunting him. Do you think there are such things as hauntings?"

"No."

"I think I do," she said. "I think I believe there's one here. I think Dad was haunted. And I think I am, too."

2

That night, as I lay in bed, I had the disturbing feeling that there was a woman in the room.

Standing near my bed.

Please don't let it be Brooke naked, sleepwalking, her fingers running all over her body.

I opened my eyes in the dark, expecting to see Brooke, but no one was there.

Yet each time I closed my eyes, I had the distinct impression: a woman.

Not a figure, and not a man. If I opened my eyes, she would be gone. Once I closed them again, she'd still be there, a phantom.

And not only standing there, but angry.

I had this sense, it was crawling around in my brain and body, as if I could detect her aura. Anger and madness. It pissed me off that it took me so long to fall asleep. I could picture nothing about her, but it was like a negative image behind my eyes when I closed them. It was all that ghost and haunting talk that Brooke had been going on about. It influenced me too much in the late night. It frightened me a little, as well, because it reminded me of the madness our father had told us that our mother possessed. I wondered if we each would go mad someday—some biological imperative, some little signal sent out from an obscured part of the brain. That we'd somehow begin to show signs of mental breakdown. I wondered if Brooke had already been experiencing this. I wondered if it was the reason we had ever played that awful game as children, where our minds seemed to work differently afterward.

I felt my inner life was unquiet. Restless. Constant thought, constant debating over family and my father's death and what I sensed versus what I didn't—my brain didn't seem to stop at night at all. I tossed and turned, and wrapped myself in the comforter and blankets, and then threw them off the bed and rolled up in the top sheet.

I don't know when sleep finally came, but soon after, I awoke to hear Brooke screaming.

Three bloodcurdling shrieks, the like of which I'd never heard before. I stumbled out of bed and called to her.

All the doors were closed, so I had to open the five doors that separated my room from Brooke's—Bruno had come running as well.

As I went, I could see the first morning sunlight out the windows.

When we got to Brooke's room, she was sound asleep in her bed.

On her dresser, at her bedside table, even on the windowsill, small votive candles, all nursing small flames.

Bruno and I stared at each other for a second. Bruno whispered, "That's fucked."

He pointed to the big window over her bed, the shades up, the curtains drawn back.

3

It was as if just seconds before we'd gotten there, Brooke had taken her finger and rubbed words across the condensation on her bedroom window, then had breathed heavily on it so they'd show up.

The words were written largely enough to be read from across the room: HERE COMES A CANDLE TO LIGHT YOU TO BED

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

1

All right, let me put it all down here: When we were little kids, we'd played that damned game as if it were real, and we broke the main rule about not playing it after dark.

We played it when we weren't supposed to, and I suspected that it screwed with our heads, only I wasn't sure how to talk about it. It had an accompanying dose of shame with it, and a decent bit of fear. (And it was fun.) It turned bad when we couldn't stop playing it. When we'd sneak away, and put on the blindfolds and start going into the Dark Game.

Start going where it went.

Brooke had been most affected by the Dark Game, and by the Brain Fart.

She had been the one who had nearly died at the age of eight, afterward.

Her heart had nearly stopped, at least that's what it had seemed like to me. I practically got hysterical and kept telling our father that she needed to go to a hospital, but he told me it wasn't that bad.

"She's had a fright," he said. First he brought her temperature down with an ice bath. He made me his assistant, had me running all over the house for the thermometer, the ear drops, the nose drops, and the Vicks VapoRub to help her breathe better.

Dad kept her in warm blankets for two weeks after that, and spoon-fed her, and wouldn't let her so much as go to the bathroom by herself until he was sure she was better.

After that, he took me by the hand down to the duck pond, and he told me that if I ever played the Dark Game again, he would make sure that I lived to regret it.

I lied to him and told him I never would play it again.

But my fingers were crossed, so it didn't count. Or so I thought.

As I grew up, I lived to regret pretty much everything.

2

"Locks," Brooke said. "I want new locks on every door."

I stood in the doorway, having just come back from a hike with the dogs down through the woods. It was two in the afternoon—the earliest I had seen Brooke get up in a few days. "How many?"

"Seven," she said. "For the outside doors. I want at least two for the inside."

"All right," I said.

"Dead bolts. All of them," she said.

"Not for the inside," I said.

"Inside and out," she said. "I'm sorry. I just haven't felt safe. We can call a locksmith if you want."

"No, I can do it. Dad's tools still around?"

She nodded and went to show me where the tool kit was—under our father's desk in his den on the first floor. The desk was piled high with folders and papers. "He was doing some genealogical research," she said.

I flipped through some of the papers, but have to admit that I began feeling very numb doing it. I felt as if I were picking over his bones.

"It's the Raglans going back to before William the Conqueror," she said with some wistfulness in her voice. "He spent too much time on it. But sometimes it was the only thing he did at night."

I pulled the tool kit out—a large metal suitcase that my father had loved dearly. I crouched down and opened it.

"Seven dead bolts," Brooke repeated, as she stood over me. "Might as well be the same key for all of them. Can you do that?"

I glanced up at her. "Sure. It's just a key assembly."

"Good," she said.

"Why inside?"

"I don't feel safe," she said. "I want the doors to the upstairs hall to lock. Both ends of the hall."

"That's not practical. If there's a fire and it's locked and we can't get the key "

She thought a moment, and then lifted her hands as if weighing options. "Get enough keys so that they can be on the inside of each door."

I murmured something that might've had the words "fire code" in them.

"Mumblespeak?" she asked.

"What?"

"You're mumbling."

"I'm just not sure if the fire department would like that. If someone needed to get out, during a fire, they might not have their key." I thought of the candles she kept burning in her room at night. There must have been at least ten or twelve of them. The last thing I wanted to worry about in Hawthorn was a fire.

"I don't care," she said. "I wouldn't mind a dead bolt for my bedroom, but since it already locks from the inside, I'll be fine with it. There's a killer somewhere. I want to feel safe. I can't sleep at night. Every little noise frightens me." She said this as if it were obvious, even though I'd never really seen her be afraid of anything. "I wish we could get better locks for the windows. When I can, I want to replace them."

"We can get an alarm system."

"I already ordered one," she said. "But it won't be here for another week."

"I don't blame you," I said.

"I don't want anyone coming near us," she said.

"Are you all right?" I asked.

"I'm just being sensible. We need to keep this place locked up. It's not safe here anymore."

"This morning, early, you cried out. You were asleep."

"I was probably dreaming," she said. As she passed me on her way out the door, she added, "Would you mind doing the locks today?"

"Fine," I said. "Are you painting or cleaning something?"

She glanced back at me from the doorway. "What?"

"I keep smelling turpentine."

"Oh," she said. "I paint sometimes. At night."

3

"She paints?" I asked Bruno, stopping him during one of his great concertos at the piano that had been giving me a bit of a headache. I wasn't about to complain. I figured if he was getting creative like that, it probably was healthy. It's how he had released rage as a kid, and I knew he had built up a lot of it over the past several years. Just as it might be healthy that Brooke was painting again, as she had as a young child.

"Does anyone in this family ever ask a question directly to the person that it's about?" he responded, with a somewhat bemused expression.

"God, I can tell you've been shrunk. That sounds like therapy-speak. Brooke's too sensitive about her drawings," I said. "Since she was little."

"Well, yeah, she paints," he said. "She set up the back of the greenhouse like a studio. She's pretty good. Hey, you using the tub by Dad's room?"

"No," I said. "His stuff's still in there. I feel weird about it. I'm using the downstairs shower."

"Maybe Brooke's using it. Something's leaking downstairs. I thought it might be the caulking in the tub," he said. "Check the ceiling in the dining room. There's a water spot over toward the window. It grows by leaps and bounds. Daily."

"Shit," I said. "I bet the same pipes are in here that were there in 1895."

"At least," Bruno said. "I wish I knew a little about house maintenance. Other than from watching This Old House. I mainly just know how to tear walls down."

"Hawthorn is the original This Old House," I said. "Call a plumber."

He shook his head, laughing. " Call a plumber,' he says." Then he pressed his fingers to the piano keys and began playing again.

4

While Brooke was asleep, early in the day, I walked back through the rooms to get to the very end of the house. The greenhouse door was open, and I went through it.

Past the empty pots and stacks of gardening tools, stood an easel that was low to the floor. On it a half-finished canvas. Brooke had been painting the woods out back, and using some kind of gray wash for a background that seemed to heighten the color of fire—for she painted a fire in the woods. It was not half bad.

Behind this, several jars of water full of thin paintbrushes, a can of turpentine, and small gray cloths. Crushed tubes of oil paints—nine or ten of them—lay beside the easel as well. Four or five canvases leaned against the glass wall beyond all this.

I crouched down and lifted one up.

It was medium-sized, and at first I wasn't sure what it was of—three indistinct figures standing in what looked like a dimly lit room.

Then I realized the figures were us as children. Their faces were gray and unfinished, but there was no mistaking Bruno in his little red T-shirt, with his yellow hair, at the age of four. Brooke, with her hair straight and long; and me, scrawny and wearing my jeans that were torn at the knees. We held hands, standing in a circle.

It was the Dark Game. We were playing.

I was impressed with her memory—to have been able to paint these images, remembering the clothes we had worn at one time. Remembering how our bodies looked. Even if she couldn't quite remember our faces then.

I set this canvas back down and reached for the one behind it. In this painting, it was our father's face, but young. Younger than I could remember, so I assumed it might've been from an old photograph. He had a smile, and she had managed to capture a peculiar brightness in his eyes. Something was too flat about it, as if she hadn't quite mastered perspective or even the interplay of light and dark. But it looked so much like him in its details. I pressed my thumb against my forehead to ward off a headache. I can't believe he's gone. I can't believe it.

I set this one down, carefully, behind the first.

Then I pulled up the third canvas.

This one I found disturbing.

It was a painting of Brooke herself. At least, I believe it was Brooke.

She stood on the front porch of Hawthorn. She was naked. There was rain.

She had painted her breasts and stomach and thighs completely red, as if smeared with blood.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

1

I put the canvases back in place.

I managed to spend the rest of the day, from morning 'til night, putting dead bolts on each of the doors to the outside. The front door, back door, the door from the kitchen that went down to the brick walkway out to what had once been my mother's garden, the door to the fenced-in area at the east side of the house, where the dogs could be let out to wrestle and gambol all day. And the door that came off the greenhouse, to the side and back of the house.

The doors to the front and back hallways seemed problematic to me. I really worried about the possibility of a fire. One had broken out once, many years before my birth, but had been contained to the kitchen and front room. I really wondered what would happen if there were a fire on the stairs, and we had two locked doors. So, instead of dead bolts, I put on ordinary locks such that each door could be unlocked without a key from the inside.

2

Several days in, I got a call from Joe Grogan, asking me to come in for a few more questions. I borrowed Brooke's truck and went to the station at about three in the afternoon. Joe's office was very much as it had been when I was a boy. I'd been hauled in once or twice when it was suspected I'd broken in with a gang of my friends to one of the summer people's places. Not only had I never done this, but I had no gang of friends. Other than Harry Withers, and later Pola Croder, I hadn't really made many close friends—let alone a gang.

I felt like a boy again, walking in there.

Joe was not alone. A woman of at least thirty, short-cropped red hair, looking severe and somewhat like a pigeon (gray clothes and a sort of beak for a nose), stood, leaning a bit against his desk.

"Nemo Raglan, this is Homicide Detective Raleigh."

"From Hyannis," she said, clipping her words as if small talk were an annoyance for her. She stepped toward me to shake my hand.

"She just needs to ask a few questions," Joe said.

"Take a seat, Mr. Raglan," the detective said. She had a stony look on her face. "I don't want to waste your time. This will be brief."

"Sounds good," I said, feeling somewhat nervous.

"You arrived the day after the body was discovered," she said.

"Yes."

"Your sister called you the previous night. Do you recall precisely when?"

"No. It was sometime before midnight. I was out that night with a friend."

"Does your answering machine log the time?"

I shrugged. "Yes. But I erased the tape. I always do. Once I've heard the messages."

"But you can guess that at the earliest, she might've called when?"

"Well, she told me she called around nine."

"But she might've called earlier."

"I hadn't been home since morning. I went to work, then went out after work."

"You left Burnley when you were eighteen?"

I glanced at Joe. Then back at the investigator. "Yes."

I glanced at Joe again. "Is this something I need a lawyer for?"

Raleigh smiled. "Let me tell you, we're having a tough time with this one, Mr. Raglan. For various reasons. It would be helpful if we could at least learn more about your father's relationship within his own family."

"Well, it was a good one. I was a bad kid, basically. I don't know why. There was just something here that made me want to get away. I hated this village, and this island. I felt stuck. I was also stupid. I just wanted to get away, so I did. I haven't been that close to my sister or brother or father since then. Well, 'til now."

"Did you know about your sister's mental state?" she asked.

"What?"

"Detective," Grogan said.

She continued. "She'd been depressed. Neighbors mentioned to us that she sometimes wandered at night—since late November. She was seen once out on the road in front of the house, completely naked. Your brother mentioned finding her in such a state, sleepwalking. She's even contemplated suicide."

"Brooke? I don't believe that." I stood up, pushing the chair back. "I'm sorry, Joe, but it sounds like you're looking to scapegoat Brooke."

"She told us," Raleigh said. "She didn't hide it. She showed us scars on her arms. Have you seen them?"

3

"It wasn't exactly a suicide attempt," Bruno snapped when I told him. "She said that she'd been asleep. She'd been taking a bath, and she has the little plastic pillow that floats—in the tub—and she fell asleep. She almost drowned. But it wasn't an attempted suicide."

"I don't think it was about the bathtub," I told him.

We were at yet another of our favorite watering holes in the village that night, having one beer too many. "This investigator said there were scars. On her arms."

"It was the upstairs bathroom," Bruno said, testiness in his voice. "With the sliding glass door for the shower. Dad's. When she woke up, she panicked, coming up from the water, and smashed it. She cut her arms a bit, but nothing much. Nothing deep. It freaked her out. She was embarrassed. She said she tracked blood into her room and had to wash it all up that night."

"Were you there?"

"No. But I know Brooke. If she'd tried to kill herself, she'd have done the job right."

4

Out of curiosity, I went upstairs and down the long hallway of rooms to my sister's bathroom one morning when she was sound asleep. The glass doors to the bathtub were gone, although the frame around them remained.

It definitely broke. I left it at that.

For the time being.

I grew restless. I began to feel as if Hawthorn had become a prison. We certainly were too incestuous, too much in each other's business, too much on top of each other's lives. I felt like hopping the first ferry off the island, just to be away from both of them: Bruno and Brooke, brother and sister.

And that house.

And that smokehouse with its residue of murder.

At twilight, I took a walk into the village, wrapped in a big overcoat and gloves and hat—feeling as if I just wanted to freeze a little, just feel the cleanness of air and the freshness of the sea breeze.

5

As I walked along the road, snow fell so lightly that it was barely perceptible at first.

By the time I reached the village, it was pitch-black with very little moon shining through the overhang of clouds. The streetlamps of Main Street were well lit, but the block I strolled along was completely empty. Half the shops were boarded up for the winter; the other half, on the north side of the street, were open. A few had just closed for the night.

I stood for a few minutes and watched the faint beginning of snow spin downward, and I watched some of the shopkeepers lock up their stores.

Croder-Sharp-Callahan was still open.

It was a longish building with Victorian flourishes along its rooftop and a wraparound porch. It probably had begun its life in the village as a great spread of a house. When the store had taken over, it had worked hard to retain that charm of the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, as had many of the shops on Main Street. The lights were on inside, and I could see the rows of food and household supplies.

And then I saw her there. Through the slightly blurry window of the store.

Pola Croder.

It was as if I were not standing across the street, with a car or two passing between me and the store. It was as if I were right there, next to her, looking at her.

She stood behind the old lunch counter, an apron wrapped around her broad and lovely hips, her blond hair pulled back. She had gained a little weight since high school, but I had to admit, it looked damn good on her and gave curves to her formerly angular body.

Work up the nerve, you mouse, I told myself. I wished I could've downed a beer just to give myself that warm, false courage of hops and foam. You've spent your life running from her. You have to make it right. Somehow. You have to let her close the door on you. Again.

6

I went into Croder-Sharp-Callahan, its front door practically slapping me on the ass as I stepped over its threshold.

Inside, the lights were bright and flat. I saw a few faces I recognized. You can't grow up in a town that small and not know everyone. Even if you move away for several years, you come back and you still know everyone. Truth is, time truly does stop there and only begins again upon your return. "Neem," they said, and I said "Hey" to each of them and they said "Hey" back, and then we all got down to the business of ordering what might be the worst Chinese food on the planet, but the only kind available on the island.

"Pola," I said.

I wasn't sure if she would ever look my way.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

1

In her teens, her hair had been white-blond, and she had glossy red lipstick and let cigarettes hang out of her mouth as if she wanted a guy to flick them out and kiss her. She was the closest thing to glamorous we had in Burnleyside.

Pola. That name came from her Russian father, but it had been an unfortunate one in our childhood. We had called her Pola Bear on the playground, and because she had the usual amount of baby fat straight up until her teen years, this nickname no doubt hurt.

All right, I had never called her Pola Bear. I was an outcast even then, and I felt a great deal of sympathy for anyone who was bullied or called names. The fact that we all had funny names (with the exception of the few Bills, Daves, Annes, and Debbies among us) didn't seem to stop any of the kids from picking out someone to ridicule for name alone. As Nemo, I was often called "Feebo" (you figure out how it got from one to the other, and you will have discovered the secret of childhood cruelty).

But there was Pola, at Croder-Sharp-Callahan. She was no longer the pointy-chinned little weirdo from childhood, the girl with a dirty face and a dirty dress. By high school, I had found her completely irresistible, and we'd fallen in love fast and stayed that way until about the end of my senior year. I had adored every inch of her, the smell of her, the brain of her, the laugh of her.

She finally turned and said her "Hey," and took my order of chicken chow mein and egg drop soup. I wasn't sure if she recognized me at all. My heart seemed to beat too fast. I felt my throat dry up a bit, but soothed it with some warm tea.

Seeing her again, I will admit, I felt that lust hunger that wasn't as awful as I suspect women think it is.

I wanted to hold her, and kiss her, and somehow be with her again.

I figured it would never happen.

I felt five times the loser for even wanting it.

2

The chicken chow mein was as smooth as ever, and the soup, though tepid, satisfied. It was difficult to even notice the taste because Pola was nearby. I kept glancing at her, out of the corners of my eyes. Had she recognized me at all while I slurped at the cup? While I wiped at my chin? Pola didn't seem to have noticed me beyond the way she might notice any other local entering the place. Certainly others said their "heys" with more marked enthusiasm, and with questions about my travels to the outer edges of the universe. Here's what I can recall of Pola, standing behind the counter with her smudge-stained white apron, her breasts so noticeable as to be an entirely separate creature parasitically attached to her chest, her hair shiny in the fluorescent lights that hummed above us: She was a beauty, and not just on the small-town Burnley Island scale, but she would've been a beauty anywhere, and it was not her bra size, or the blondness, but it was her eyes and her rather direct use of them when happy, sad, annoyed, or disturbed.

She looked as if she had lived her life once with some recklessness, and now relived it with wisdom and understanding and a certain amount of unpleasant resignation.

And so, there was I; there was Pola; and between us, a metal counter, an apron, and my understanding that there would be no time to again make out beneath the school bleachers, or to dance beneath icy moonlight on the edge of a clear and frozen lake while my father's car idled at the roadside, nor would there be another second of stealing a kiss and feeling like a thief. Whether it came at thirty, or at forty, or at fifty, it didn't matter. I had already begun to long for what was past and what could not be grasped again.

And then the little miracle began.

She came over to me and drew a chair back across the table.

"It's terrible what happened," she said. "Your father was a good man."

"Yeah," I said. I wanted to say: I tried to call. But that sounded so lame. I wanted to say: I've thought about you for the past ten years. I just wasn't sure what that really meant.

Instead, we got to talking families and pasts and presents, but always with some kind of unanswered question about where love goes. How does it ever really change? You can tell me that when you were truly in love with someone, and it ended, that you no longer love that person, but I won't be the one to believe you. Anyone I had ever loved—in my heart, not just in my flesh or in my mind, I still loved. They had remained with me in some way that was maddeningly difficult to pinpoint.

Pola seemed to have set her expression in stone: neither smile nor flatline, her lips were slightly parted as if she were about to whistle. Then, "Well, it's good to see you here, anyway. You should come around and meet my son."

"Ah." That was all I said. Mention of her son reminded me of all the reasons I'd left Burnley Island behind. She and I were in love. I was in love with her. She was in love, but not with me. She had fooled me for a time into believing she adored me. But she had already moved on—she was pregnant at eighteen, and she told me, tears in her eyes, that it was another boy, a few years older. She was going to marry him. She wept on my sleeve, and I held her on a long summer's night. She had kept saying to me how right it was that we should break up, that she wanted to stay on the island, that she loved it there, and that I was going to get out in the world and would've hated her more for trying to keep me there. The whole time she'd told me this, when we were both eighteen, I had hated her. Hated her in the only way that a lover could. It seemed careless of her—to me—that I should give her the purity of my love and be willing to dedicate my life to her, and she had just trampled on that by deciding on a more suitable guy. And I felt myself turn cold. Even at eighteen. Bitter and cold, and I never wanted to see her again.

She had turned on me, and I had been too immature to handle it. I had run, and used any excuse I could to go.

But now, seeing her, it brought back everything. The pop songs and the cliches were all correct: Love is a stranger. Love is a battlefield. Love is a four-letter word. Love is a miracle.

But I added a new cliche to the mix when I was eighteen: Love is a prison, and the only way out is to open the door yourself, and walk away.

I glanced at her hand. I just stared at that sucker, and I wanted to touch it. I wanted to hold her hand. To listen to her for a while. I could not get the idea out of my mind that we should be in each other's arms, pressing together, melting against each other.

We talked old times, and laughed, and hesitated a little. She shut the store down, and I told her I'd walk her home.

Just as I had done as a teenager.

Outside, the snow continued.

3

The snow swirled and shivered as it fell beneath the streetlamps.

Pola would not look at me as we walked along Main Street with all its yellow and blue and red holiday lights strung along the stores. She still wore the large white apron, and it spread across her hips, tied tight around the back, accentuating her curves; her hair was pulled back severely, and an impish part of me wanted to pull at the bands holding it up and let it fall down around her shoulders.

She stopped. As if she could read my mind. The snow moved around her face as she stood beneath the lamplight at the end of the street. Her eyes seemed radiant to me. "Sometimes the past is stupid," she said. "Would you do things differently if you could go back?"

I nodded. "Pretty much everything."

She gave me a knowing look. "Well, me, too."

Her brief words, me, too, confused me.

I felt something I'd never quite experienced. It was like a small voice in my head that said: You can spend your whole life not telling the truth about who you are inside. Life is easier that way.

Or you can just fess up right now. Risk it. Throw it out there.

Live up to it.

"I never stopped caring about you," I said, and I felt my face go red, and for perhaps the first time in a long time I felt it down to my toes. I felt my being. I felt as if this was the first time I'd ever stood up for myself in anything.

I expected her to laugh in my face, and I was willing to take it.

The look of astonishment that crossed her face soon turned into a slowly building smile and a damp sparkle to her eyes—a light glaze of tears. She wiped at the tears. "Don't say that."

"I know it may not matter now," I said. "I don't care. You may not care for me in the same way. I don't care." Joe Grogan's phrase came to me again, seeming completely accurate: It's the damnedest thing.

"Do you know I had to fight myself just to let you go?" she asked.

"What?"

She offered up a sad half-smile. "You would've died if you'd stayed here. You were too in love with me. And I was too immature. And I'd cheated on you, with my body and heart, and I did it because I knew you needed to leave. I couldn't fight my parents then. I couldn't fight anyone. And I let you go. I just let the best thing in my life go. I let it go for some stupid sense of what my parents wanted. And what everyone wanted except for me. And I didn't want you stuck here, with me."

A chill went through me when she said it. Something seemed to smash against my innards, and for a minute I thought I would be sick. Jumblies, indeed. But that feeling quickly passed as I stood there in the barest moment that seemed to be an hour. I stood and looked into her face, and something within me fought against what I was feeling in the pit of my stomach. It was an awful feeling of fluttering and slight dizziness, as if she'd caught me off-guard and had tripped me up.

Then she said, "If you knew that someone intentionally lied to you so that you would have a better life, even if that lie was the worst thing in the world, how would you feel?"

I thought for a moment and said, "If I understood the reason, it wouldn't bother me. A lot of people lie for no good reason. If the reason's good, it's understandable."

She closed her eyes, opened them again, and looked at me as if she had just said a prayer.

"It's the stupid past," I said. "Just like you said. Don't let it hurt you now. I'm here. I don't care about any of it. I'm here right now."

I was about to say something more, but I decided not to talk at all. I wanted to kiss her tears away. I leaned forward and kissed her eyelids, and then her nose, and then without even realizing where this might lead, my lips were over hers, and she opened her mouth gently. Her breath was sweet and felt like home as I inhaled it. I wrapped my arms around her, and drew her to me. Part of me was afraid she might pull away, but she embraced me before I had locked my arms behind her back.

"This is crazy," she murmured. She pressed her face against mine, and then under my chin, and then against my cheek.

"I know, I know," I said. I resumed kissing her as much as a woman could be kissed beneath a streetlamp. I reached up and drew out the twist of cloth that held up her hair, and it cascaded around her shoulders, and she opened her coat so I could put my arms inside it for warmth as I held her.

"We can't do this here," she whispered.

"The store," I said, glancing back at the darkness of Croder-Sharp-Callahan. "The lunch counter."

She laughed, looking up at me to see if I were teasing her. "You're serious?"

"Like when we first made love," I said, and my throat caught on those words: made love. It was the first time in my adult life I had ever said them. I had said all the other words that seemed truer in the past; I had used the profanity and the blunt language and the clinical talk, but not those words that had seemed both precious and mysterious.

"This is mad," she whispered, but her body betrayed a passionate urgency, and we held each other's hands like kids again and ran through the fresh snow, back to Croder-Sharp-Callahan.

4

Once inside, she locked the door behind us.

She kept the lights off, and we stumbled into stools and chairs and around the cash register. Somehow, our clothes fell away, although there was a good deal of tugging and unsnapping and unbuttoning and unzipping and boots that took a while to come off. I felt just as I had at seventeen, the fumbling numbskullery of a boy in love without a brain in his head, the explosion of the senses as we rolled together, and tasted and felt and burned against each other.

Somehow, from there, we went up to the empty apartment above the store, through the back stairs, half-dressed, the snow still spinning gently downward, giggling and passionate and me in my boxers and socks, bounding up the steps after her as she wrapped herself in her coat, but with nothing else underneath.

The apartment was one room, with a bathroom and a small kitchenette by the window. The window had a tattered and yellowed shade drawn down. An overhead light flickered. A mattress lay back against one wall. "It's clean, don't worry," she said. "We use it for naps at work."

I didn't care if it was dirty or newly washed. I leapt onto the mattress, and she came tumbling down on top of me.

I felt an energy within me, a renewal of forces stronger than personality or sustainable life. Something more than what I had been before that night. I wanted to give her so much, everything I had, every ounce of love and care and physical pleasure; I wanted to mold myself against her and her against me until you couldn't tell one from the other.

Afterward, I didn't even crave a cigarette.

5

"I've been wasting my life," I said, my lips against her hair, holding the scent of her for just a moment longer.

"You have not," Pola said.

"I have," I insisted. "I've wasted these years. I let go of my family. Of you. We could've been building a life together."

"You'd have been bored here. With me. It wasn't right, not then."

"I guess we had separate paths for a while," I said. And I knew it. Sorrow had held its sway over me for too long. The sorrow was not just my father's murder. It was a sorrow that had somehow crept its way into my soul and had burrowed there. It all seemed ridiculous now, in the arms of the woman I loved, on the island I had abandoned for no good or genuine reason.

"Maybe this was the way it was meant to be," she whispered, lazily and sweetly.

I held her longer than I had ever before held a woman in my arms. I felt her heartbeat against my chest. That peculiar and unfamiliar feeling of being bound to another human being in a way that breaks down all barriers and intimate territories. We made love with the energy of first-timers, and the sloppiness, too. She laughed when I tried to hold her in a way that made her leg cramp; and I began laughing when she took me inside her, not from silliness, but from a joy I hadn't even known could exist between two people, between a man and a woman in a secret of love that had been protected over several years. It was as if I had unlocked doors within me. She smiled afterward and told me that when we were in the throes of it, she enjoyed my laughter. "You sounded like the old Nemo. The one I fell in love with when we were children. The one who had joy." She kissed my lips, then my cheek, and neck. "Are you back, Nemo?" She looked into my eyes as if someone might be hiding somewhere in them.

Without realizing it, I had held my breath as she spoke. I had held on to a breath as if I were holding on to the years. I let out a sigh, the likes of which had not passed through my lungs or throat in all my life.

"Yeah," I said, like some idiot, a gust of my breath escaping and taking with it a great burden. "Yes. I am back."

Outside the window, the wind howled, the beginnings of a storm, perhaps, but I didn't care. I felt safe, for once in my life. I felt safe with Pola.

I lay there with her, looking at the window, the snow, and for a brief second, I thought I saw a woman's face at the window.

I sat up, startled.

But it was gone.

It's in your mind.

"What is it?" Pola asked, looking from my face, back to the window. "Nemo?"

"Nothing," I said, settling back into the mattress with her, arms around her again.

6

"I want you to forgive me," I said a bit later.

"For what?"

"What I did to you back then."

"I didn't blame you," she said. "Like I don't need forgiveness myself."

"How I ever deserved even knowing someone like you "

She held a finger to my lips. "Don't make me out to be a saint."

"But I was the one—"

"Don't. Leave the past where it belongs. All the bad things are in the past. We were barely more than children then."

"I don't even wanna talk," I said. "My dad used to tell me that the sun shines on a dog's ass now and again. And I just want to bask in the sunshine a little."

We kissed again, and lay there until we both knew it was time for her to go pick up her son at her ex-husband's. I didn't want to leave her side at all, but we parted, regardless. I told her that we'd have lunch the next day.

The separation of old lovers who discover a new love between them has got to be the most agonizing. You know what it's like, you know how much you want the other person, but you also know that things can get in the way of love. How I wished that two people in love could always be together, every minute, every hour, and never grow bored or tired or distracted—or worse, out of love by the familiarity of love. These were the crazy abstractions I thought about on my walk back to Hawthorn, down the snowy road at sometime after ten p.m.

And that's when I saw Carson McKinley in his truck, parked alongside the darkened storefronts, but beneath the red and blue of Christmas lights, masturbating.

7

Truth was, I didn't know if he was choking the chicken, but the truck vibrated, and I saw his sweaty face in the truck, so I assumed he was performing his favorite public pastime.

I never begrudged Carson his compulsion. Many a man has dreamt of doing just what Carson did in broad daylight or beneath the streetlamps, but few have the balls to follow through. As long as he was in his truck, the island sheep and horses were safe.

As I walked by the truck, I averted my gaze. The last thing I wanted to see after being with Pola was a fifty-four-year-old with a beard and eyes like a crazed moron jacking off. But as I passed, he called out my name.

Now, with anyone else, I would've ordinarily turned to see who wanted to get my attention. But this was Carson McKinley.

"Hey, Nemo!" he called out again, his shout echoing slightly because of the cold and snow and emptiness of the street. I turned. He looked out at me with his trollish face, half in darkness.

"Storm's comin'," he said.

"What?"

"I saw her. Storm's comin'."

The truck continued to vibrate.

Perhaps Carson McKinley might've somehow spied on Pola and me as we had our marathon of sex. I felt a disgust for all mankind. The memory of seeing my dad's porn collection didn't help. Women were right, most of the time we were dogs and pigs, and perhaps not even as good as anything that walked on four legs. Sure, there were men who did great things in the world, but in the ordinary things, we were completely the lowest of lows. Even my father, I thought—even Gordie Raglan, war hero, survivor of prison camps, who led the other prisoners to safety at great odds; even his life came down to a stash of porn stuffed in the walls.

I didn't want life to be just this. Finding Pola again, not knowing if I could even feel that innocent love you get to feel as a kid, seemed like a miracle in need of protection. I stood there for a moment, judge and jury of Carson McKinley, who seemed the prototype of all that was dysfunctional of my gender. It was my puritan blood rising, I guess. Who was I to judge anyone else? I felt bad for Carson. I asked him if he was okay.

"She's a bad storm comin' down on us," he said. The truck began to bounce up and down. I turned away. He shouted after me, "SHE'S COMIN'! OH LORDY, SHE'S A-COMIN!" This was followed by what I can only assume were orgasmic moans of McKinley pleasure.

"Merry Christmas to you, too," I said.

8

As I approached Hawthorn, feeling weary and frozen and in need of sleep like a drunk in need of the last drop from a bottle, I saw a light on in Brooke's room toward the back of the house. You're up. You're always up. You need more life. You need more than Hawthorn, Brooke. You need to open some doors.

Bruno's light was off, but this didn't mean much. I wasn't even sure if Bruno was in his bedroom asleep or across town with his boyfriend. Well, good for him. At least he's got love. Hang on to it, Bruno, for as long as you can. It's a small miracle that needs protection. I didn't protect my miracle when I was a teenager, and I lost some years. Luckily, Pola protected it. Luckily, Pola loved me, too. So, Bruno, just make sure it's love and then hang on for dear life.

I dropped onto my bed, and only then realized that I had left my boxer shorts in the apartment above Croder-Sharp-Callahan.

That night, I awoke to Brooke walking through my room at some ungodly hour. Unfortunately, I had that now-expected impression that it wasn't Brooke. I sat up and flicked on the light.

No one was there at all.

Both doors to my bedroom were shut.

9

The next morning, I discovered that Carson's fertility rite had indeed brought a storm.

We were buried under snow, not the most unusual occurrence for the island in December. By the time I'd trudged downstairs to the kitchen to the smell of a rich dark roast of coffee, Bruno and his boyfriend had already dug out most of the driveway. Not that it mattered. The village plow, also known as Johnny Sullivan, had yet to reach Hawthorn. There'd be no driving that day.

Cary and Bruno started a snowball fight out front. As I watched them from the kitchen window, it reminded me of us all as kids. How we played all over the fields, how the winters were rich with ice skating on the pond or snow forts along the hill.

Afterward, the smell of coffee and a kind of rosy glow seemed to permeate the house. I think it was just the way I felt—I had this hope again, this sense that I'd come home for a reason that was good. Not just because of my father's murder, but because I still had to find out if there was love for me in the world—the only woman I had ever really loved. Bruno noticed and commented that I looked a bit more chipper than usual; he asked where I'd left Dad's tool kit, and then added, "You look the way I feel."

A bit later, I called up Pola. "You hanging in there?"

"Yep," she said. "Me and Zack are making hot cocoa. Want to come over?"

"If I can walk a mile or two in the snow."

"Johnny'll be out soon."

"Well, then I definitely want some cocoa. With marshmallows."

"We have a fire going. Zack and I are gonna go to Seabird Hill and sled down it in a bit."

"You sure we're okay?"

"Nemo?"

"I mean, last night was "

"I know," she said softly. "I wish we could've stayed together all night."

"Me, too."

"Why didn't we?"

"Don't want to spring it on Zack too quickly," I said. "How do you think he'll feel about about this?"

"I don't know," she said. "Well, he's begging to go out and play. Come by when you get out from under it."

She hung up.

Part of me felt the phantom of girlfriends past in the hang up. I felt the Jumblies in my stomach. Would this work out? Were we just trying to recapture a past that couldn't last? It was still all euphoria for me. All the goofy and no-good thoughts that run through you when you realize that love looms. I thought of every woman I had ever felt close with, how I had wanted to see if love was there within each relationship. But it hadn't been. Only Pola. It was crazy. Things like high school sweethearts weren't supposed to work out.

I spent the day either on the phone with Pola (the road didn't get plowed until nine o'clock that night), or going over my dad's papers. I found a notebook of his, and recognized his tiny scrawl that was so hard to read.

My dad had kept track of everything that happened in his life, particularly in terms of the house. Here's one bit of it:

Stairway, back of house. Need repair on banister. Call lumberyard. Call Bill. Make appointment with vet for Mab.

Bruno's baseball practice. 9 a.m. Saturday, take cooler. Brooke at 11, swim team.

Cheerios, milk, sugar, eggs, wheat bread, chicken breasts, case of Coke, case of Diet Coke, case of root beer. No Oreos for Bruno.

It made me laugh to flip through the spiral notebooks he kept, the closest thing to a diary he'd ever had. It reminded me more of him, of his way of organizing his life, than if he'd kept a more detailed record of his every whim and mood. I laughed, and then wept a little thinking about life's unfairness, that I'd never made things right with my father, that some insane person had murdered him and now there was nothing I could do to reach my father and tell him all the things you want to tell the dead.

As I sat there, I began to wonder about the past month's records. I flipped through the notebooks, but for the one marked that year, there were no strange entries at all.

I guess I wanted to believe that my father had noticed something. Had seen anything.

But again, my head ached, my stomach tightened, and I thought of him, lying in his own blood, sliced, someone standing over him with a curved blade in her hand.

Her.

I thought it: Her.

Why her? I closed my eyes. The sense of a woman.

Not Brooke.

Another woman.

As if the house itself had a woman hidden in it somewhere.

Hiding.

Sometime after two or three, I awoke in darkness and sensed a presence in the room.

My heart began beating too fast, and I could taste something sour and dry in my throat. I wanted to get up, drink some water or at least flick on a light. But a half-sleepy fear kept me on the bed, trying not to move. What was it? I glanced to the bookshelf and the small desk by the window.

Then I saw her.

For a moment, I had a terrible feeling I didn't know who it was. I felt my heart beating within my chest, and a strange shushing sound that was like a pulse within me. I held my breath, afraid she would know I was awake and watching her.

For that slice of a moment, a terrible dread overtook me.

I had the sure feeling—the absolute conviction—that if there were such things as ghosts, this was one of them.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

1

She stood near the white curtain of the window, the moon shining in her hair. I could not tell if she was looking out the window or looking from the window to me, for she was nearly all shadow.

It's Brooke, I thought. My heart still jackhammering. I felt clammy and cold, and didn't want to think this could be anything irrational. It has to be Brooke.

I was about to say something, but I didn't want to startle her. Brooke went from room to room at night, after all. Perhaps she had just stopped for a minute to look out across the woods, and think of our father.

The sensation of dread returned.

Somehow, I felt that this was not Brooke at all. This was someone else. I only thought it was Brooke because it was a woman in the house, and Brooke was the only candidate. I began to believe (as you only can in those terrible early morning hours when the dark has not yet vanished) that this truly was a ghost. I felt like a child again, with a belief in anything that came my way.

It took courage for me to reach over and flick on the bedside lamp.

When I did, and the light flashed up in the room, it was Brooke. That nighttime imagination always did its worst with me.

She faced the window, her back to me, the reflection of her face in the mirror.

She wore one of her stretched-out sweaters and gray sweatpants, her hair long and stringy as if she hadn't washed it for a few days.

"Brooke?"

She didn't respond.

"You okay?"

"I don't know what he wanted from me, not ever," she said, slowly, and in such a way that it gave me a chill. I realized a few seconds later that what scared me about her was that her voice didn't seem right. It seemed almost like Brooke's voice, but different.

"You probably should go to bed now," I said.

"He never loved me. Not the way he should have. Why couldn't he let me go? Why can't I leave? I don't understand any of this," she said. "That son of a bitch."

"Don't think about it now," I said.

"It's terrible what this island can do to you," she said, and she turned to look at me, but her eyes were nearly closed. For the barest second, she didn't look like herself at all. Was she sleepwalking? Her voice was calm and even, but something in her tone kept me on edge. "Not just him, but everyone. If you're an outsider, you're always one. Others knew, I think. They guessed. But no one stood up to him. Nobody protected me. Nobody wanted to know what was really happening. Not any of you. This place is a prison."

Then she went out through the doorway to the west, through the bathroom that adjoined my room with my father's old room. She closed the door behind her as she went on, presumably to the next room.

I left the lights on and could not sleep the rest of the night. I grabbed a book off the shelf called The House on the Strand, one of my favorites from my teen years, and sank back into a world of time travel and intrigue.

2

Nightmares grew within my head when I finally fell asleep at night, or in the early morning. Sometimes I got up in the middle of the night, just to avoid the bad dream. I'd go out and get a few logs from the pile just outside the front porch and make a fire in the living room and try to read, or flip TV channels in search of something to take my mind off the idea of sleep.

But I'd fall asleep eventually.

In my nightmares, I saw her. She wore blood as a gown. She had hair like a raven and skin as pale as snow.

It was the Snow Queen. The Banshee. The Queen of Hell.

And I'd created her when I was a kid.

3

Soon enough, the regional news shows stopped running anything about the story of the murder, nor was it showing up in the papers, outside of the Burnley Gazette. Other tragedies and terrors took over the news in the world. Other families suffered and found reporters at their door; other good men and women were cut down by vicious killers; and my world sank back into a low throbbing pain at the back of my head.

I was beginning to feel trapped, but I had nowhere else to go. Oddly enough, I never asked Brooke about the details of our father's death, nor did I read the papers or watch the news. And none of us answered the phone.

"Writing any more books?" Brooke asked one evening. "I read Igdarizilia."

"Igdrasil."

"Oh. Dad used to call it Godzilla.' I liked it. You needed more sex in it and maybe some battles. That whole elf subplot bogged it down, and the names? You picked all the wrong names. Too hard to pronounce. You know it's rough when you need a glossary just to pronounce the names. Maybe you should write about real things this time," she said. "And I didn't like how you just threw all the dirty laundry in there."

"Huh?"

"Well, I don't doubt that the little nymph was me. You could've at least made her a little less slutty." She laughed, but with a bit of an edge. "Dad was in there. And Bruno. I'm surprised you didn't include the dogs."

I ignored her comments. It seemed to be a universal truth that the family of the writer never really wanted to appreciate the writing. "Dad didn't read it, did he?"

"Don't feel bad. It's not like he ever read novels much. I told him what was in it. He was proud. He said he didn't like the father character, but I told him it had nothing to do with him. You might not have wanted to make the father the ogre who tortures elves and abducts the Queen of Hell."

"It's fiction, Brooke. Fantasy. There's no reality about it."

"People want to read about real things, even in fantasy," she said. She thought a moment and her eyes became slits, as if she'd just been seized with some vague moment of genius. "You really should think about writing for children. The stuff you wrote when we were kids was good. I can still remember some of it." She meant everything she said to be kind and generous. I wasn't ever going to take offense to anything Brooke said, or anything Bruno might say. I didn't want to lose this bond we were creating in the wake of tragedy over something petty like my silly book.

I decided I needed to write again.

4

In my old room, I found some of my early stories, when I had just begun to learn to write.

I had dreamed of being a writer since I was nine years old. My father had gotten me a typewriter back in the days when it was the most advanced writing tool beyond a pen and paper. It was a secondhand beast from the Croder-Sharp-Callahan general store, one that had sat on the shelf for nearly my entire life at that point. It was a thick, clunky Royal whose existence had begun sometime before even my father was born. But it served its purpose, and I learned to hunt and peck, for I'd had a bad year that year—it was the year my mother had left us, and this seemed to hit me hardest. My father asked me to write stories if it would help me, and I began writing them.

They were, at first, one-pagers, but soon I became adept at just writing and writing with no end in sight. I suspect I was obsessed with whatever story had gotten into my head. I wrote fantasies and stories of terror and happy stories of children who had wonderful mothers who hugged them and told them how important they were. In some respects, my ambition was never to be published, but to bring onto the page the nearly perfect, if dictatorial, world of my imagination: the three-headed monsters, the perfect mother, and magical island, the boy who could fly—all the ways I wanted the world to be. In my mind, as a kid, I imagined all kinds of fantastic ways of living—of brushing the tops of trees with my feet as I flew, not like Peter Pan, but like a starling. Or animals that would speak to me in the stories. Or the kids I wanted to have like me, who did indeed enjoy my company. There were faraway lands based far too much on Tolkien's Middle Earth, and creatures out of Edith Hamilton's books on mythology, which I began reading at eleven. Once I discovered Herman Hesse's Demian, I was done for; moving on to other covert reading (for none of these books were pressed upon me in school), I went to George Orwell and H.G. Wells and Mary Shelley—and I was writing stories that mirrored my reading the whole way through.

Writing stories—purely for myself, for I never showed these to anyone—was to not express myself, but to purge some of my imagination, get it out of my head, where it swirled and blocked me from living as a child. Brought it out into another dimension. There were times when I felt there were a thousand doors in my head, and I needed to open all of them to find the one important door. The one important key that would open it. And whatever was behind that door would somehow illuminate what I didn't understand about my life. In the meantime, I had to open those thousand doors and see what wonderful and dreadful beasts existed there, waiting for me.

I found the one story that probably meant the most to me from childhood. It was a complete rip-off of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen," mixed with the Greek myth of Persephone. In the Andersen story, the Snow Queen's magic mirror is broken, and a shard of glass gets in Kay's heart. He is Gerda's brother, and he becomes a very bad boy from this. The myth of Persephone is the story of the daughter of Demeter's abduction into the Underworld by the king of that realm. I even noticed shades of Narnia and Alice in Wonderland in there.

The story was called "The Ice Queen's Revenge." I suspect I called it this not because of the obvious derivation from Andersen's "Snow Queen," but because it was a little joke with Bruno.

At four, when he wanted ice cream, it sounded like "ice queen," so I just made up the stories. At first, when I read some of them to him, he got scared, and stopped asking for "ice queen" at all.

5

Here is a bit of it, with typos and misspellings intact. I was ten at the time:

CHAPTER FIVE: THE ICE QUEEN RISES!

I SHALL COME FOR THE CHILDREN! the Ice Queen, the Queen of FROZEN CREAMY HELL, said, and she wrapped herself in the furs of bears and lions, and she had her Oomos, those filthy goblins of the Underland whose breath is so foul that people think its farts from a dead cow and whose hands are so grimey that they spread disease wherever they go, carry her to her Slay, made entirely of diamonds cut from the fingers of new brides. The Slay glowed and shined like millions of stars, and the Ice Queen, called by some Imyrmia, sat in it with her trusty demon servant, Chamelea, the lizard-faced and hog-bellied. The Slay was pulled by twin dragons, tortured in the Castle Fragonard that lies above the Lake of Glass and Fire at the very heart of Underland. The dragons were once kind-hearted beasts, but Imyrmia, in anger over their father's not wanting them to be slaves of her Relm, took them to her basement and turned them into zombie dragons doing only her bidding. She used bobbed wire to beat them onward as they flew up up up from the deep diamond and ruby caves of Under land.

When the Slay came all the way up into Earth, lightning tore at the ground, opening it up for Imyrmia's Slay. Blasts of fire and BELCHES OF FOOL STENCH! blew up like a fart from an oger's butt. Even the twin dragons hated the smell and coughed fire as they rose into a blackened sky, their tails twisting and smashing trees down as they went and setting entire forests ablaze with their coughs.

All the land knew of the Ice Queen's arrival, for they had known her many years before. Once upon a time, she was the Maiden of Snow, and she brought the dancing elves and fairys of winter across the land. She had made everyone have fun, and children through the entire world could skate and ski and have snowball fights and make snow angels and snow people and never go to school when the Maiden of Snow was there. But then, she got picked up by the FEARFUL AND MIGHTY ruler of Underland, a monster so dirty his skin was crawling with germs. His hair was home to thousands of cities of lice. His skin seemed alive with red mites. When he walked, his feet never touched ground, for rats and centipedes lifted the souls of his feet up on their backs and did the walking for him like roller skates. He is known as Dogrun the Merciless. He wanted the Maiden of Snow in his kingdom because it was too hot and he needed better weather. Underland was on fire most of the time. People there breathed the foulest stenches and drank polluted water from the Twin Lakes of Rhea (which were called Dya and Gonna, sisters enchanted and turned into lakes of brown lava full of wastes and chemical spills and oil spills.) Dogrun the Merciless needed a bride. So he grabbed the Maiden of Snow, Imyrmia, and she screamed, but she had to go into Underland with him. He forced her to marry him, and the heat of Under land melted her heart for him. But she herself made Dogrun's heart turn cold, and he could not be married to her anymore. She had turned Evil, and she ended up imprisoning him on the Dark Isle of Lost Devils, a place where those demons went who no longer had Evil Believers in the world above them. Dogrun was chained and kept inside a prison that had a high fence, painted all over with magical cymbals that clanged and smashed at him when he tried to escape. He lived out the rest of his eternal life there, eating the rats beneath his feet, the red mites on his body, and the lice in his hair.

And the Ice Queen ruled all in Underland.

And now, she was after the elf-children who knew her secrets.

They lived on Earth, and their names were Fearling, Burnt, and River.

6

Of course this was somehow about putting my little brother and sister and me inside the story—they were the only ones I read them to. Since Bruno's real name was Byrne, Burnt was close enough; and Brooke might be a "river," and my much-hated real name, Fergus, was close to Fearling in some way.

We'd have read it in secret, finding a room in the house where Dad would not find us. There was a wardrobe in his bedroom, and it was just large enough for the three of us to fit in. I had a flashlight, and I'd read to them. We pretended that we were somehow entering C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe right there, and Bruno, until he was six, would not venture to the back of the wardrobe even when we dared him for fear that another world opened up there.

The legends of Imyrmia, the Ice Queen, grew over the years, and she somehow transformed in my story to an even more powerful monster called, simply, Banshee, as I had begun discovering the Celtic myths when I was twelve, and felt that the Ice Queen needed a transformation and a new name. Both Bruno and Brooke still looked forward to the stories, and although we were all a bit taller and could just fit in the wardrobe without touching each other—with the occasional gas leak from Bruno, who seemed to delight in this—we'd climb in when I had finished writing another three-or five-page opus, and I'd have the best audience a writer could ever have.

As Banshee, the Ice Queen had changed. She was no longer the frosty beauty with blue skin and white hair. She had become more monstrous, denied the beauty creams and ointments and sorcery of Underland, which kept her eternally young and insanely beautiful. Banshee came out at twilight, surrounded by flies and mosquitoes, her heralds. She was ghoulish, and her skin was torn and leathered and dried against her bones. She had razors for teeth and fingers that scraped flesh, and she took the form of anyone she chose, anyone trusted, but as dark approached, she could not hide her true form, and when night fell, all was revealed. Alone with her hapless victim, she showed her true form.

In the Banshee stories, she became trapped on Earth, unable to go to her Dark Kingdom, and she wanted more than anything the souls of the three elves who had exiled her from her world.

Scared the shit out of Bruno when he was about six. I told him that Banshee was coming for him if he stepped out of bed after the light went out. This accounted for his bedwetting, and yes, I feel ashamed that I put the thought in his mind. I tried to take it back, but once you've told a kid that kind of thing, it never completely erases from his memory.

7

I read through some of the stories, all of them bad, all of them somehow making me happy about my childhood again. My father had once had the ambition to be a writer, in his youth. He told me that he seemed to only be able to write the truth of things, and no one wanted to hear the truth. He'd hold up a novel from my bookshelf (Treasure Island, From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Danny Dunn and the Anti-Gravity Paint) and he'd say, "It's people who write lies like these who get published. Nobody wants the truth. They want lies spoon-fed to them." All right, he had a bit of the tyrant in him—perhaps all heroes do—and had never been able to read or enjoy fiction to save his life. I attributed this, again, to both a stern upbringing (his own father, the grandfather I never knew, disciplined with whips to the back, actual whips in the smokehouse, the place of punishment), and to his two years in prison camps during his war. He nearly seemed vulnerable at those moments, when he was at his worst. I forgave him anything when I was a kid because I was so grateful that he hadn't left us as our mother had.

But those books on my shelf! To me they were worlds to explore. These were the seeds of my desire to write fiction, but I didn't think I'd ever be able to do it as an adult. Still, when I was twenty-five my first novel, a fantasy called Igdrasil was published. (For those of you who don't know, Igdrasil is the Tree of All Existence in myth. My novel did it a disservice.) I could not make a living from writing, but I found that fantasy was what I could write best—high fantasy as it's called. And so this gave me the illusion that I could be a writer, but in fact, I had not been able to write another story or novel since selling that one.

It was a mental and physical constipation, my adult life to that point.

It was as if I genuinely was not meant to live outside of the island where I'd grown up—the world was too much. I needed the smallness of Burnley Island. The narrowness of the minds, the quietness of the winters, the serenity of the separation from the mainland.

Even Carson McKinley, spanking the monkey in his truck at the harbor.

But my dreams of happiness and writing fiction and loving life, all had been there, at home, waiting for me.

Sitting in my old bedroom, I pulled out that ancient typewriter—a Royal that had no business working, let alone with a ribbon of ink still in it that managed to smudge the odd "a" and "r."

THIS IS THE LAST STORY ABOUT BANSHEE

Now, before I tell you what I wrote, I have to tell you that whenever I write anything, I have to first write a page or two about things that are occupying my mind. It's a way of sweeping out the cobwebs, I guess, and is my version of therapy. I'm not sure if I believe in writer's block, but I do believe in general Brain Block, just as I believed in Brain Farts. Writing out the tangle from inside me seemed to get the creative juices going.

So I wrote:

My father is dead. Someone murdered him.

Who?

WHO?

Brooke is losing her mind. Bruno is picking apart the house. Brooke is painting. Bruno is playing the piano again. And here I am, writing.

It's as if we're just picking up where we left off years ago.

Brooke walks at night. Bruno has a boyfriend. I still love Pola. We have none of us figured out love right. Maybe Bruno has. Not me. Not Brooke. Our lives in shambles. Dad must have been the glue. Falling apart.

The Banshee is loose. The Banshee has taken us over.

At night, she watches us.

When I'd finished typing this sentence, I looked at it. I had no idea what it meant. Did I mean that Brooke watches us? The Banshee? Was this the beginning of a story, or was I still trying to clear my mind a bit? I wasn't even sure.

I typed:

At night she watches us, waiting.

Again, no idea what this meant, but it might be the beginning of a story I could write. It intrigued me.

Then:

Dad was murdered. At night. Not at night. Before night.

He wasn't killed at night. He was only found at night. Killed earlier. Body cut. Torn. Sadistic.

Who? Who? WHO?

It was the hour before dark.

The magic hour.

Why in God's name would someone want to kill my father? War. His men? The enemy? His enemies? A psycho?

The Banshee?

I stopped, scratching my head, annoyed with the futility of this exercise.

I set the typewriter down at the foot of my bed.

8

Sometime around midnight, I was back in my bedroom again, exhausted from helping clear some of the debris that had piled up in rooms—Bruno and I made a go of sorting Dad's papers and going through unopened boxes in the two rooms he had used for storage.

There was that old typewriter, just waiting for me to write a bit more.

I sat on the bed and plopped it on my lap.

Someone had used it.

Someone had typed beneath what I'd already pounded out:

Oranges and lemons say the bells of St. Clemens.

I am here.

I am here.

I am here.

I am here.

And I never left you.

Play it.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

1

The next morning, I told Bruno I knew he'd been the one to play with my typewriter, but he denied it.

But here's the thing: It's the kind of prank Bruno used to pull when he was a kid.

Sometimes I'd type part of a story out, and he'd type in two or three words after my last one (usually: stupid storie or Nemo loves Pola Bear).

I didn't really believe it was him.

But I didn't want to believe that it might be something else.

That it might be Brooke, her mind wandering too much.

Her breakdown on its way.

2

Sometimes I could hear Brooke crying through the walls.

I worried a bit about what seemed to be a logical and terrible depression descending on all of us in the house, but most especially her. This made me sadder because she had somehow been a partner for my father—not incestuously, but in terms of being there at Hawthorn, living in the house, handling the financial matters, making sure that the roofer arrived on time, or that the pond got drained in the spring, and that nothing rusted, or that everything that broke got fixed. I suspected some part of her had wanted to be free of this life, but she must have felt guilt for the way her freedom had come. He was more of her life than he was of mine or Bruno's. Her loss was greater to some extent, and the fact that she had discovered the body made it an even greater burden.

We didn't get together to talk about Dad and how wonderful he was—yet. We saved our moans and cries and gnashing of teeth for the privacy of our rooms.

There had always been a barrier between me and my sister and my brother, and I was never sure where it had come from. We had gotten along famously when young, and had managed to share fairly equally among us. Despite my mother's taking off so wildly, I looked back on a lot of childhood as joyous, and some of it as full of hard lessons learned, but never with a sense that it was anything but the right childhood for me. When one of us was sick, the others would gather 'round the bedside and read aloud from books or bring soup and tales of the outside world. Yet, a barrier grew up between us, as if there were some unspoken crime we'd witnessed; or as if each of us had a disturbance within that seemed to intensify the more we were all three together. So we kept our mourning to ourselves and didn't share grief much.

When I thought of my father, how he was wrenched from us, alone in my old room, in my too-small bed, I cried, also. I tried writing a few more pages on the Royal, but it was as pointless as the first page I'd attempted.

In my head, I begged God for understanding, as if He lived there or had access to my brain. Minutes later, I'd question the idea of God at all given this kind of murder. Then I'd wonder if the pagans were right—if it weren't just a pantheon of spirits and forces and gods and goddesses all within minidomains, ruling sections of this chaotic universe, with Nature itself the ultimate deity. Or if there was no God at all, God or gods, just the lives of animals on a rocky planet, all scrambling to survive, some of us built with an outrageous and unending hope that there was something more that existed between the words "live" and "die." Then I went back to God and the relationship between heaven and mankind. I even had the gods of some ancient religion arguing with the God of Abraham. It got pretty silly the way my mind went. Suddenly, I was talking to my father in silence. I imagined him in heaven, and then felt ridiculous for the fantasy. It was wishful thinking.

I had no idea what happened when life ended. All my Catholic upbringing had brought me was a sense that I wasn't sure what to believe, for it all seemed like the wishes of men and women who didn't want to face the unknowable without a comfortable ending in mind. The altar boy in me felt guilty for thinking that.

These were nights of headaches. I'd look out my window over the slope of the hills and imagine I'd see the smokehouse out to the east.

The pictures of my father's final hours replayed in my head as if I'd been there, watching.

The battering of the door, the terrific storm; the way my father had heard some sound nearby; the dropping of the flashlight; and then, the shadow figure there, bringing the stinging blade into him.

Sawing.

3

All right, let me just get it all out of the way right now.

My father's murder was a cosmic fornication—a murder beyond what most people ever have to bear. Or dream about.

Someone got him from behind with a sharp blade. A curved blade. Under the arm, over the shoulder, in the back. They may have severed his spinal cord so that he had to lay there and take it. Or that may have come moments later. He may have volunteered to let them do it—there were no marks of restraints on his wrists or ankles, nor were there signs of struggle. At best, the fallen flashlight might've indicated he'd been knocked down first and was unconscious for most of the procedure. One can only hope.

Then they went at him. Cutting parts of him. Slicing. Curved blade carefully going in, cutting tendons. Cutting muscle. You had to assume the killer did this to keep him from escaping—but, in fact, there was no sign that my father had tried to leave the smokehouse, or even fight back at his attacker.

The worst of it was that my father might have been conscious for most of it.

All right, the worst of it was that each of us, my brother, sister, and I, had to now live with this without denial and without illusion.

No Brain Fart was going to rescue us with a weeklong fever of forgetfulness.

I could not think of my father after that without imagining the bloody room and his eyes looking up at the curved blade about to come down on another part of his body, and wonder what that must have been like.

The unimaginable began to haunt me. With it, the nightmares came, during daily catnaps and whenever sleep found me.

I could not get one image out of my head.

His eyes, looking up, as a shiny crescent blade came down.

In the nightmare, I felt as if I could see the misty face he had seen before he died.

She had long golden hair, and thin lips, and warm almond eyes.

It was Brooke.

When I awoke from the nightmare, Brooke stood over my bed.

In one hand, she cupped a small glass saucer, within which was a white votive candle, its flame small and blue-yellow.

In her other hand, a knife.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

1

"Brooke," I whispered.

The room had early morning light filtering through the white curtains—a blue-purple haze on the walls.

I reached over to the bedside table to flick on the lamp, but my hand trembled. I found the switch and turned it on. The glare of the lamp seemed like a noon sun.

"Brooke," I repeated.

"Nemo?" she said, in that same whispered delicacy with which she'd greeted me when I first arrived home. "It's you?"

A breath or two exhaled, she glanced at the knife she held in her hand. It was just a steak knife from the kitchen. "I heard noises."

She set the candle and knife on the table. Then she crouched down to pick up the small lamp that had turned over onto the floor. "I get scared at night," she said. She sat down on the floor beside my bed. "Dad doesn't have his guns anymore. The police took them. I don't know why. Don't ask me. Don't ask me. I'm going crazy here. I thought I heard someone in the house. I thought " She glanced around the room. "I thought this was another room. I didn't think I was in your room."

"No one else is in the house. You, me, and Bruno. The doors are locked. Remember? I put all the locks in. If you want to see in the dark, just use a flashlight," I said, glancing at the candle. "You could trip on something and set it on fire. God, or stab yourself." It was an exaggeration, I guess, but I was tired of her nightly wanderings, which were freaking me out completely.

She ignored my comments. "The dogs are always the first to notice. They whimpered a little while ago. I had to close their kennels up."

"Probably they heard a possum outside."

"They were frightened. Nothing frightens them much."

"If you think someone might be here," I said, feeling as wide awake as I'd ever felt, my heart still beating like a jackhammer, "you might want to let the dogs roam."

"I thought it might be my imagination," she said, her voice still barely more than a whisper. Her face turned glum and a bit stony. "I've heard it since before well, before it happened. I kept thinking that someone was walking just ahead of me."

"It's the night," I said. I packed some pillows behind my back and sat up. The smell of the room came to me: It smelled like trash. I glanced at the small trash can by my old desk, wondering what I'd thrown in there. Banana peel? Half a sandwich? "I've stayed up 'til all hours sometimes, and I start imagining all kinds of things."

"I don't think it's that," she said. Then her voice rose. "Do you know that every night when I'm up—late—something in the house has moved?"

"Moved?"

"Small things. Things that no one would really notice. I notice them because I notice everything in this house."

"It could've been Bruno. Or me."

"No," she said. "Not things like that. Inconsequential things, things you wouldn't even touch."

"Like?"

"The thermostat. It goes up at night."

"That's Bruno," I said. "I'm sure it is."

"Even on the nights he's not here? It's up to ninety. But it's freezing anyway. Someone moves the dial on it up, but it still gets cold. I feel cold when I get up to check it. I feel something," she said. She leaned forward and brought her knees up just under her chin. As she put her arms around her knees, reminding me of a little girl, her sweater rolled back a bit. I tried to see marks from her bathtub mishap, but couldn't make anything out. "Some nights, there are windows open. In Dad's room, in the living room. I've checked to see if they're locked at four a.m. But then, by six, they're wide open."

"We've got storm windows," I said. "No one's getting in or out that way."

"That's the thing," she said. "The storm windows are still on the outside. No one broke in. No one left through a window. They just opened them. As if they wanted me to know they're here."

"It could be anything," I said. I grinned. "Dad's ghost." A joke. I felt grim for mentioning it. I just wanted someone to lighten up—her or me.

"No," she said, taking this suggestion far too seriously. "It happened before Dad was killed. It happened before Bruno came back. And the wardrobe, in Dad's room. It was moved."

"I can explain that," I said. "Bruno and I—"

"I don't mean recently," she said sharply, her mood changing. There was anger beneath her words, as if I were suggesting that she had somehow made something of nothing, "In October. Late October. Dad thought I did it. But I didn't. And then there were the noises."

"Brooke," I said. I reached out and tapped her knee lightly. "We're all suffering here. You probably more than anyone. You and Dad were so close."

"I think," she said, looking at my hand after it had briefly touched her knee. "I think that the killer is in the house. And has been. You know how Hawthorn was built. You know how it has those spaces."

"No one but a six-year-old could even get into those spaces," I said. "Look, you're stressed. It's normal. You were in the war zone. You sat with him. You saw what happened. It's normal that you're on edge. But for your own sake, you need to start working on ways to handle the stress."

I knew about the old, original structure of Hawthorn—how it had been one of those less-than-sturdy New England farmhouses that had little insulation and very little room at all. The present house, built in the nineteenth century, had engulfed it—the living room with its great fireplace and the two bedrooms beyond it were the only things left from it that showed. Otherwise, there was a hollow space behind the front stairs that had been part of the original "great room" and a one-foot-wide space between the old brick and the new insulation and the brick on the outside. It couldn't be reconciled with the later design, so it left this kind of thin wind tunnel that ran along the side front quarter of the house. When we'd been very little, Brooke and Bruno had been able to squeeze through it for as far as they could go—no more than a few feet in. By the time Bruno was seven, he could no longer fit, and Brooke couldn't fit by her ninth year.

"Someone could go through the walls," Brooke said, looking at me with an unflinching gaze. She had completely ignored everything I'd just said. "Someone could if they wanted it badly enough."

"Who?" I asked.

"The same someone I hear at night. I go from room to room, and I feel as if I can almost find him."

"Him?"

Her eyes widened. "I know it sounds ridiculous. But either it's a person or it's not. Who could it be, Nemo? If it's a ghost, what is it? Why is it here?"

"Want me to call Joe and have him bring some detectives through?"

"No," she said. Her eyes teared up. She raised her hands to her face and squished her flesh around as if it were clay. "God, I feel like I'm going crazy. Do you think I'm crazy?"

"Maybe we need to talk to someone," I said. "All of us. A shrink. Maybe we can go see Bruno's. He thinks she's God."

"Not bloody likely," she said, and then smiled through her sadness, for it was what our father had always said about psychiatrists. "It's my mind. It's unquiet. Do you know—" She stopped herself in midsentence. "No, nothing."

"What?"

"Nothing," she said. Then, "The night he died, I thought I heard someone downstairs."

I watched her. I had begun looking for signs of a breakdown. I really was worried that we had some kind of family insanity within us. Brooke, the contradiction: the sturdiest of us, also the most fragile.

"I didn't tell Joe. I don't think I should," she said.

"Did you see someone?"

She closed her eyes and rested the palm of her hand on her forehead, applying pressure there. "I can't seem to turn off my mind anymore, Nemo. I keep playing things back from that night again and again and again."

This time, her sweater slid farther down her arm, and I saw, along her forearm, gauze wrapped with white tape.

I leaned forward and touched the edge of her arm. "What's this?"

2

She looked up, then brought her arm down to her side.

Shrugged.

Tugged the arm of her sweater back down to her wrists.

"Accident. I fell asleep in the tub." She fumbled with words, as if trying to string together the right ones to make sense. "I broke some glass cut myself up a bit."

"That's it?"

She nodded.

"What really happened?"

She nearly smiled—a sad half grin. It was part of how we'd interacted as children. Brooke never liked telling the truth when she was little, so she'd make something up first to make you feel better about bad news. After she'd given some convoluted explanation for something, I'd ask her: What really happened?

"I don't know if I was dreaming or not," she said, her slight smile returning to a flat line. "Bruno convinced me that I was. That I fell asleep in the tub and was dreaming, but I'm not sure. It was the night the night of the storm. The night he died. There were voices that seemed to come from downstairs. I only really heard one of them. But it somehow made me sleepy to hear it, and in the dream I thought we were children again, playing the game."

Just hearing it made my brain go a little haywire—something within me rebelled at the idea of the game we'd played as children. I hated it, and was embarrassed by it. It was as if my mind squinted and cringed whenever the thought of the Dark Game arose.

"We were all playing it. You had the blindfold on, and Bruno was doing the counting, and I helped him with the reciting. And I was just there, somehow, not really in the Dark Game and not really outside it. I had glass in my hand. I was taking it and trying to cut at the rope around my wrists. But but I wasn't doing it right, and the ropes became bright red ribbons floating around in the air. Bruno started laughing. So did I, but you told me to stop it. Stop it! you shouted, the way you used to when I was doing something wrong."

"Oh, Brooke," I said, my heart sinking a bit as I took her hand in mine. "Did you do this to yourself?''

"I didn't think I did," she said, her voice pure confusion. She glanced over at the knife on the table, and then at me. "I didn't want to kill myself. I really didn't. I just I just wanted to sleep. I wanted to be in the game again. But I felt like someone else was there. Someone else was with me. Inside me. Trying to get out."

3

Her face became all screwed up, wrinkling as if she were years older. "I woke up, not in the bathtub at all. I stood on the front porch. I didn't have anything on. Not a stitch. It was freezing. The storm that night—terrible. I was just just just standing there, with the door open. Rain coming down. Howling wind. Horrible night. The last thing I remembered before this was I had been in the tub. Somehow, I had gotten out of the tub when I was asleep, and walked through the rooms, down the stairs, and outside. That night. My arms were all torn up from the glass. Blood. Not as much as you'd think. The piece of glass was in my hand. I went back inside. I went back upstairs to the bathroom. When I turned on the light, I saw the glass on the floor. The water in the tub was all pink with blood. Only, something else was there."

"In the bathroom?" I asked, sitting up, drawing back a bit, crossing my legs in front of me. I almost didn't want to know what was there in her dream.

"In the tub. In all that pink, foamy water."

"What was it?"

She closed her eyes, her eyebrows pressing downward as if trying to force the memory from her mind. "It was me," she said. "I watched myself. I was dying. Blood was coming out of my arms slowing in gentle red ribbons. And then "

I held my breath a moment. Denial was how I'd been raised. Deny anything even close to a bad mental state. Deny that life exerted any pressure on anyone. The voice of my father: "I was in the camps, and if I could survive that without cracking up, then anyone can survive anything if they just control their mind better."

But Brooke had been falling apart, even before our father's murder, even before sitting in his blood for hours.

And neither Bruno nor I had done anything to help her.

Bruno had found her wandering, naked, in the night.

I had seen her paintings.

Her mental state was a wreck, but we were ill-equipped to understand it.

4

"I was in the tub. All along I was in the tub," she said. "Looking up at what seemed like steam. But it wasn't steam. I thought for a second that it was the dream-me evaporating. In front of my eyes," she said. "I watched it for a minute as it went—it was just steam. The whole thing had been a dream. But remember in the Dark Game? How we could go inside and outside ourselves?"

"Do I," I whispered, wishing that she had not mentioned it, wishing that Bruno had not mentioned it recently, wishing that I could forget we ever had played it. The source of her disturbed state.

The source of all our disturbances.

"It was like that," she said. "Just like it. Only, Nemo, there was something else. Someone else was there. It was like I had released someone from inside me, when I cut myself. It was as if I had never been alone before, and now I was—something had gotten out of me. It was just like the Dark Game. It was as if by bleeding, wanting to die—I did want to die—someone else came out of me. Like they'd been waiting a long time. Ever since we used to play it. Like they were waiting for me to open myself up and let them out."

5

Our father had taught the Dark Game to us.

Then, when we had been screaming in the smokehouse, he'd ended it.

He told us that he never wanted to catch us playing it again. He told us that when the game got to be too much, we should hit a wall and that it could get dangerous. "The mind is fragile, and you shouldn't play it so easily. It comes too easily for you. I shouldn't have taught it to you. I thought you were strong enough."

But the game wasn't so easy to give up, either.

Sometimes, we still played it—in the wardrobe or in one of our bedrooms. We stopped at some point—I think when I was about thirteen or so, I had stopped playing it completely. Something changed—perhaps puberty had eliminated the need for the drug of the game.

Or perhaps we had hit the wall in the game.

He told us that he had fine-tuned the Dark Game when he was a prisoner of war. It helped him escape where they had imprisoned him when he was a young man during a war that I knew very little about. He told us that you could make your mind do things if you isolated it and if you directed it. He said that when he was in solitary confinement, the game allowed him to forget the pain in his legs and shoulders, and he could travel outside of the well they'd left him in for a week or two—that he could stand on the ground and travel among them—all in his mind. "The human imagination has never been fully tested. It never will be. But I could swear that during those times, particularly in the hole, I could hear their conversation and wander about freely among them."

He told us not to play after dark because the game could ruin your mind if you let it. "Play it during the hour before dark, no matter what hour it is, it works best then, when the world is settling and your mind is calm," he had said.

"What happens at night?" I asked him.

"When I did it at night, it got hold of me," he said. "I couldn't get out of it on my own. Only when I hit that wall would I get thrown back into my waking consciousness, and it might be days before that happened. I'd be nearly starved, and so thirsty even my captors wondered at it. And my men " He shook his head sadly. "They thought I was dead sometimes, in it sometimes it seemed as if I were dead."

We always thought he'd told us these stories to terrify us into not playing the Dark Game too much. After all, if it were such a deadly game, why even teach it to us? Why even train us to play it?

But the boredom of Hawthorn in the winter was too much. The cable might go out or the electricity, or our friends could not tromp from the village out to our place for a winter's day of games.

He used the Dark Game once for something that at the time made sense, but now seemed wrong: when Granny died. Brooke was inconsolable—she sobbed and screeched as if she would never be happy again. I was also bleating my tears out, for despite her harshness at times, I had loved the old woman who had read us stories and told us about Wales and Scotland as if she had been raised there herself.

So, our father, apparently at the end of his rope, had taken us into the smokehouse. We had thought it was to punish us for wailing so much, but he sat us down, and guided us through the Dark Game as a way to see Granny again. I barely remember it, other than feeling much better—closing my eyes on a summer afternoon in the cool smokehouse, feeling the bites of mosquitoes on my arms, and then moving in the dark of my self-imposed blindness into a different afternoon, and seeing Granny there, holding her hand out to Brooke and me, and the sweet, gentle voice of our father guiding us.

The Dark Game was simple: You closed your eyes, or you blindfolded yourself if you couldn't keep your eyes closed. One person, who put on his blindfold last, had to count to ten, and then began reciting a nursery rhyme.

It was a very particular nursery rhyme—our father's own Granny (my great-grandmother) had taught it to him, as she had been taught it as a child. He told me that the origins of the Dark Game went back further than even his two years in the prison camps. "It goes back before words were written down, and it's the rhythm of the rhyme that counts, not the words. The words just can be said. The rhythm gets inside you. My Granny told me that the Dark Game was used in dark times—when horrible things happened to people, and those who survived those things needed rest from it all. I took the Dark Game to the prison camps with me and modified it. I used what I learned there. It helps us escape in hard times. But it's not a toy. It is not to be abused."

The rhyme itself had to do with churches in England and a game that children once played while they recited it. It was a common enough nursery rhyme—I'd heard it since growing up. So it was not unique to the Dark Game. It simply was a way for the reciter to help the mind relax.

It began:

"Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clemens.

You owe me five farthings, say the bells of St. Martins.

When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey.

When I am rich, say the bells of Shoreditch.

When will that be? say the bells of Stepney.

I do not know, says the great bell at Bowe."

And it ended:

"Here comes a candle to light you to bed—

And here comes a chopper to chop off your head."

Then the reciter shut his eyes and began to guide the others—and we'd go in our minds where our guide took us, with no resistance. At some point, you'd be telling what you saw in your mind, over and over again, until you began really seeing the others there as well, with you. Where you went, what you were doing. You tried to rise outside of your body and just float there and watch yourself. Our father had told us it was a survival technique—and that it would help us understand how our minds worked. Looking back, I can understand now that we were probably too young to play the Game—because our imaginations were already strong as it was. But our father played it with us when we were all a little too rambunctious and bored at the same time, and the winter blizzards had come down on the island.

In the winter, we played the Dark Game a lot, and it was fairly innocent for a while. We could travel through time or to other countries or to places we made up. We could even see our mother—we would travel to where we thought we could find her. When she lived with us, we would travel to the store or to the kitchen and pretend we were near her. After she abandoned us, we pretended to travel to Brazil, to a beautiful home in the mountains.

But the last time we played it, something went wrong.

It was a flight of fantasy for us. It was our family secret—we didn't let other kids in on the Dark Game. I told Harry about it, but that was about it. Harry had been sad about his father's illness, and I wanted to help him escape. He was the only person who I believe knew about it outside of the three of us and our father.

At some point, something broke about the game, and we all just stopped playing it.

6

"You painted something about your dream," I told her.

She shook her head. "What do you mean?"

"In the greenhouse," I said. "I saw your painting. The one of the dream you just told me. You, standing at the front door in the rain."

"I didn't paint any dreams," she said. "And who gave you permission to snoop?"

"You left them out. In the open."

"I did not," Brooke said.

7

We got into the kind of argument over this (whether or not she'd left her painting out to be seen) that we'd had as kids. It almost felt good to spar a bit, and finally it ended as all our challenges had: We had to go downstairs to check it out for ourselves.

Brooke went ahead of me, key in hand.

Against my wishes, she had locked the upstairs hall door. She stood in front of me and turned the key in the lock, without apologizing for this lapse in judgment.

Then, down the backstairs in what we'd always called the sewing room (even though no one had ever sewn in it since Granny with her quilts and embroidery), through another set of doors until we came to the closest thing that could be called a hallway (five feet in length), and the door to the greenhouse.

Brooke went in, nearly as interested in the canvases as I had been. The one on the easel, and the one of our father she acknowledged.

But when she reached back to lift the third canvas, she nearly dropped it. "Shit!" she cried out. The dogs, upstairs in her bedroom, began barking at some noise. "Shit! Nemo! Is this a joke?" She turned to me, holding up the canvas.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

1

I saw the same painting I'd observed previously, a woman who looked very much like my sister, naked, her skin painted red, standing on the front porch of our house during a storm.

"It's your dream," I said, confused. "See? There you are on the porch."

"Did you do this?" she asked, and I heard tears and not a small amount of rage in her voice. "Did you bring this out?"

"No," I said.

"You did! You came back to do this kind of prank, the kinds of of things you used to do. God, I thought you grew up! I guess I was wrong!" she spat, her rage like a gathering storm. Then she took the painting and held it up to my face as if she were going to hit me with it.

"Look at it. Look at it," she said. "Did you do this?"

I tried to focus on the canvas, but I couldn't. It was too close to my face.

"Brooke," I said, my voice rising, "look, what are you so mad about? It's your dream. You painted it. You."

I grabbed it from her hands, and when I did, I saw a kind of uncalled-for fury on her face. I took the canvas and set it down at my side. "What the hell is going on?"

"I want to know who's been getting into my paints and painting this kind of obscene "

"Brooke, it's you," I said. "It's the same kind of figures you did here." I pointed to the one on the easel, of the faceless children.

"It's not me!" she screamed. "I am not the one who painted that!" She pointed to the painting at my side. "How could I have? Christ, Nemo. How could I have? I did not do it!" Her shouts grew, and I had the strange feeling that something was vibrating nearby—something was shaking—I looked at her hands, clenched at her sides, trembling as she cried out.

And then, a sound as if a bomb exploded nearby.

2

The glass of the greenhouse seemed to bend slightly—I was overly tired, so I couldn't tell if this was right—but it was as if the glass of the wall behind Brooke rippled like water with something moving through it—something that moved snakelike along the surface of glass.

"Calm down, Brooke," I said. "Calm down, it's all right. It's all right."

"I am not losing my mind! I did not imagine this! This is a trick—you're trying to make me think I'm losing it, but I'm not!" she shouted.

"Brooke," I reached out and took her trembling fist, and held it in my hands. "It's all right. It's all right. Try and relax." I kept my eyes on the glass, for it continued its S-shaped ripples, and Brooke seemed to notice it as well—she looked up to the ceiling, the curved glass of it moving like a canopy in the breeze—just floating up slightly, and then resting back down again.

"I am not losing " she said, and then went quiet.

She nearly fell, trembling into my arms. She was hot with fever as I held her, briefly. "Oh my God, did you see it, too?" she asked.

"I'm not sure," I said, but inside I knew this was a lie. "Yes. Yes. I saw it."

Her voice was a whisper. "Sometimes I see it at night. Something is in here. Something's in the house with us."

"We're stressed," I said. I let her go, and she wiped her hands across her face and smoothed out her hair.

"It's not just stress," she said. "Dear God, Nemo, I thought I was losing it. I've thought so since October. But you saw it?" Tears of what might have been relief—or even gratitude—flooded her eyes and streamed down her face.

3

I went to wake up Bruno. I got a bit of a shock going into his room—he lay there, the quilt pulled back, his naked back with a yin-yang tattoo near his lower spine. Next to him, slightly overlapping leg upon leg, snoring away, was Cary Conklin, the guy who had brought me over in the boat. Bruno's boyfriend.

I didn't really think to react—I had only just gotten used to Bruno being gay, so seeing his boyfriend in his old bed—far too small for the two of them, so they were draped over each other—made me feel a bit the way the three bears must've felt upon finding Goldilocks. I didn't want to wake Cary, so I tapped Bruno on his left foot. After a few taps, he snarfled awake and glanced back at me.

"Hey, Nemo."

"Bruno," I said. "Sorry to, um, wake you up so early. But something's up."

"Up as in important'?"

I nodded.

He sighed. "Okay," he whispered. "I'll be down in a few."

4

"You notice anything strange here?" I asked as soon as he bounded down the stairs, wearing a long T-shirt and red boxers. He had a harsh look in his eyes, as if he were furious for being dragged out of bed so early.

"Strange?" he asked.

"Things missing?"

Bruno shook his head.

"We were in the greenhouse a little while ago," I said, glancing at Brooke. "Something weird happened."

"Like?"

"Like the glass moved."

"Moved? Broke?"

"No," I said. "It was like "

"Like quicksilver," Brooke said.

"What's quicksilver?"

"Like liquid," I said.

Bruno squinted and looked at Brooke. "You've been up all night." Then at me. "You don't exactly look all there, either."

"We saw it, tired or not," I said.

"Did you ask her?" Bruno turned to me.

"Ask me what?" Brooke raised an eyebrow at me,

"No," I replied. Then to her, "You walk up and down the house all night long."

"I know," she said.

"Why?" Bruno chirped.

"Why do you think? Our father was murdered. I can't sleep."

"No," Bruno said. He pointed a finger at her. "You were doing it before Dad died."

"No I wasn't."

Bruno half-grinned. "Come on. I saw you. I'd wake up and see you in my room. Just walking."

"I'm telling you," she said. She shot a glance at me. "I wasn't."

"You sure?"

"I don't lie," she said.

Bruno let out what I can only describe as a repressed breath, through his nostrils.

"I don't," she repeated.

"So the bathtub story is accurate," he said. "You fell asleep. You weren't trying to—"

"God!" Brooke closed her eyes. "God, I'm going to have a headache."

"Doesn't matter," I said to him. "I was there, too. I saw it. It was this rippling thing."

"What time?"

I shrugged. "Six, maybe."

"Well," he said, spreading his hands out as if this solved everything. "No sleep, the light barely up outside. And you—" he nodded to Brooke. "Miss Xanax."

"I haven't taken one since the day after Dad was killed."

I closed my eyes, trying to figure out how this all could be. How could I have seen the same thing Brooke had seen: the glass of the greenhouse moving. "What about the painting?" I asked Brooke.

"I didn't paint it," she insisted.

"You did," I said. "It's the same as the others. And it's exactly what the dream was. The one you told me about."

"Let's not get into this again. Maybe we didn't see anything on the glass."

"Wait," I said. "You saw something on the glass?"

"You did, too," she said.

"No, I saw it move—like it was rippling or I don't know that's not what it was like it was like it was blurring or something."

"I saw a woman's face," she said.

5

"Bruno's right. I'm exhausted," she added. "I've been up all night. It was a hallucination. You didn't see it?"

"I saw movement on the glass,"

"Could've been clouds overhead," Bruno said. "It's foggy. In the greenhouse, it makes the walls look different."

"Who was it you saw in the glass?" I kept my gaze on my sister.

"Just a woman," Brooke said.

I watched her face—my beautiful, smart sister. The stress of what had happened had no doubt scrambled her mind a bit. Who wouldn't be a little shaken, a little traumatized, by finding her father dead, butchered? Bathed in blood. How could she not? How could she sleep? How could she function? That she could even speak to us about any of this was a bit of a miracle in and of itself.

"You need rest," I said. "We all do. And I think it's time we get some professional help."

"No shrinks," she said sharply.

"Then Dr. Connelly. Just a check up. We can all use one." I turned to Bruno for support.

"Sure," Bruno said.

"I guess I should talk to someone," Brooke said finally, a note of defeat in her voice. "And I can't exactly go to Father Ronnie anymore for counsel."

"Not since Dad told him to fuck off," Bruno said.

6

Bruno insisted on going to the greenhouse immediately after Brooke went back up to bed.

"I saw it, Bruno," I said. "The wall." I went over to the panes of glass and touched lightly against one of them. Tapped it. "It was as if it were made out of gel or something and just moved."

"How many hours of sleep did you get?"

"Five."

"You need to go back to bed, too," he said.

7

I went back to bed and woke up around one in the afternoon. The greenhouse seemed just as it had before. I sat in it, sipping my coffee, for a good half hour, wondering if I'd get that sensation again. The glass turning to rippling water. But it didn't. Wide awake, with the day well under way, I realized that perhaps I had, after all, been half asleep when Brooke and I had gone there at daybreak. Bruno, I figured, had been at least partially right. There had been a light fog that didn't burn off 'til three, and that might've accounted for at least some of what I'd seen—accompanied by my lack of sleep and my sister's rage. I went looking for the picture again, but it was gone. I assumed Brooke had taken it and put it somewhere else. I called Dr. Connelly's office and tried to schedule my sister in—even though it was a week or so 'til Christmas, his assistant knew, as the current local tragic celebrities, we might be able to cut in line. Called Pola, and wanted love to take me away from my fears about my sister.

8

And I thought about my father. He was never away from my mind. I thought about his face. His hands. His way of speaking that was a gentle twist of Yankee islander.

And I wondered why I had never really gotten along with him.

9

Got a strange phone call late one night. About two a.m.

When I picked it up, it was Paulette Doone. "You demons," she said. "You did it. You did it."

Then she hung up on me. I fell back to sleep, not really knowing what had possessed her.

In the morning I got a call from Joe, and he told me Ike Doone had shot himself in some cockamamie illegal hunting accident going after some wild turkeys he'd flushed out, and Paulette had begun telling everyone in the village, almost immediately, that the "Raglan curse" was upon them and that the devil was all around our house.

Ike was not dead, just had a helluva wound on his left thigh.

"Try and ignore this kind of stuff," Joe said.

10

Pola and I went to dinner, for long walks—but my mind was too much on a murder and on my family.

Then, just before the weekend, Harry Withers found me.

CHAPTER TWENTY

1

The day was sunny and bright, and even though another snow had fallen recently, it felt warmer outside with the yellow sun and clear blue sky. When the winter's gray as in New England, you've got to get outdoors on those days that the sun finally shines.

On a dog's ass.

Stepping out the door, I was greeted with the bounding leaps and nips at my elbows of Madoc, the greyhound that seemed more like a skinny horse than a dog. He followed me a ways, and then, after a quarter mile or so, ran back for the house and his companion, Mab, who was barking down by the duck pond.

I wanted to enjoy a good walk on a lone country road.

Just as I was setting off, Harry Withers showed up.

2

Harry was impossibly dressed in a broad-brimmed hat and a duster jacket, and his square glasses, and a flop of thick brown hair nearly over his eyes. I laughed when I saw him.

"You look like the sheriff of Sagebrush," I said.

"I know, I know," Harry said. "Ridiculous, isn't it? I thought I looked like an Italian prelate."

"You found me."

"I gave you a little time," he said, somewhat sheepishly. "I heard you were in the pubs with Bruno, but I didn't come looking. Out of respect."

"Thanks," I said.

"Want to walk a bit?"

3

He hadn't changed much in the years since I'd been gone. He looked as if he were eighteen still, but with a bit of a paunch. His eyes had the kind of brightness to them that only someone who loves his life seems to have. His crooked smile was disarming, but painful for me to remember. It was some kind of muscle problem that he'd had since an accident when he was a baby.

He smiled at the worst times—always had.

His smile was some kind of permanent scar on his face. Happy or sad, he smiled. He told me he couldn't help it. "They believe," he said, referring to the police, "that the killer must have escaped right after the murder." He paused and added, "Is this going to upset you, hearing about it?"

"Not as much as it should."

He went off the road and bent down in the snow, practically squatting. He drew up a longish thick branch that had come down in the storm, broke off the weak branches from it, and said, "Instant walking stick." He took it with him and used it as a pointer.

"Over there, from the woods. That's what they think. Then, from there, to the harbor. Their own boat."

"Could be," I said.

Harry's smile intensified. Then it dropped to a straight line on his face. "I don't think so. In fact, it's basically not possible, but try telling that to Joe Grogan. First, I doubt one man did this. I suspect there were a few. And second, getting off the island during a Nor'easter is suicide. If they got in a boat that night, particularly some little motorboat, they'd have been lucky if they made it to the Vineyard. They're still here."

"Interesting," I said.

Harry pointed at the smokehouse, which lay back toward the house itself. He seemed about to say something, but stopped himself. Then he held the stick parallel to the ground and pressed it down. "They probably didn't tell you about the footprints."

"The killer's?"

"They've kept things quiet. Joe Grogan's seen to that. All the mainlander investigators have combed and questioned and pretty much turned over every rock. They even hauled Carson's butt in for questioning, and the poor guy could only weep and tell them that he thought he saw a demon that night. They almost took him away. If Joe hadn't stepped in, Carson McKinley would probably be in some state hospital in Boston getting drugged up every time he thought of sheep. Everyone on the island is scared."

"All six hundred?"

He shrugged. "Fewer this year. The McWhorters and the Carrs moved. When the propane delivery changed, the entire McHenry clan had to move back to Providence, and then one of the Women Whom God Forgot died. Sarah Hatchet was ninety-six. So we now have, approximately, five hundred seventy-two. But then, you're back, and Bruno. Five hundred seventy-four."

I looked at him as if I had never known him. We'd had some bad stuff between us in the past. We'd had some good stuff as well. I had never been sure how much I really trusted Harry. "What do you want from me?"

He looked at me innocently enough. Like a puppy that just got slapped on the nose. " Want'?"

"Yep. Want. You and I don't speak for just about a decade, and now you want something. I can tell. I can sense it."

He chuckled. "Jesus, Nemo. You haven't changed much."

"Probably not." He was right. I really hadn't changed much in those intervening years. All my wounds were fairly fresh, at least now that I was back on the island; maybe worse because of the murder.

"Okay, let me cut to the chase," he said. "I want to be a big-time reporter. I want to be on CNN someday. Or network news. I'm nearly thirty and on an island nobody cares about, writing up local gossip. I want something more. It's not an industry that wants middle-aged men joining it. It's an industry where you work up when you're young. And I'm not gonna get there from Burnley Island and a winter circulation of under a thousand—most of whom use the six-page newspaper to line their birdcages and paper train their puppies and wipe their asses—writing the occasional odd story about the octogenarian great-great grandmother who still knits sweaters from yaks that gets picked up by the AP wire because suddenly yaks are a hot topic."

Had to laugh at that last string of images.

"So you want a big murder story."

"Listen, I got a big murder story," he said. "But it's not enough. I need to solve a big murder story. I need to solve it. And I need whatever information I can get."

"Oh," I said. "You want to go in. The smokehouse."

"You got it," he said.

4

Harry went over the particulars of the murder. "There were no prints at all. No footprints. No handprints. No weapon found. There was enough blood there—pardon me, Nemo, I know this is hard to have to hear," he said. "But prints would've been made. One person or three or four. Someone. But the strangest part of all was what your father did."

I waited for whatever this was.

"He let it happen. He was alive for at least an hour. He was cut in places on his body, strategically, as if to keep him alive for the longest time, but he seems to have just lain down and let them slice off parts of his body after that," Harry said. "It wasn't just a murder. It was a surgical procedure."

5

"You haven't been over to it since it happened, have you?" Harry asked. He pointed again to the smokehouse with the stick.

"It's still off-limits," I sad. "They might need to—"

He cut me off. "They went over that place for days. They didn't find a single fingerprint or footprint or anything other than your father's own prints. They came up with nothing. One of the top forensics experts in Boston came out for three days trying to collect something. It has them all baffled. You think you're going to get justice from anyone? Impossible. They can't come up with a case. The state attorney's gonna have to figure out where to point the finger, and each one of you has an alibi, except for Brooke, and no one thinks a woman of five-foot-four, even as sturdily built as Brooke, could do this and not leave a trace of herself behind. She took a direct route into that smokehouse and sat down on that bloody floor and went catatonic or something for a few hours before calling anyone. Only her prints show up, and they're known to have come long after the murder took place because of the way the blood had congealed. She is the only possible suspect, but they really don't think it's her, unless she went Lizzie Borden on his ass. And it would be nearly impossible for her to do it without some others helping, who again, would have left some trace of themselves in that room. It was a mess. No one who did that would've gotten out. Grogan told someone that your father might've even laid down and done it to himself. He drew a diagram of how it might've been done. But what I want to know is, how'd your dad chop his own head off?"

It was more than I was ready for. I nearly dropped into the wet ground and covered my face. I wanted to block out the images forming in my head.

To his credit, Harry crouched down beside me and wrapped an arm around my back. "I'm sorry, Nemo."

"Got a cigarette?"

"No. And you should quit," he said. "My dad died of emphysema. It's nasty. Smoked a pack a day and thought it wasn't much. Dead by fifty-three."

"My dad died by being chopped up, dead by fifty-eight," I said. The gallows humor was upon me. I really wanted a cigarette, but had left my pack in my other coat's pocket.

6

"Here's the thing," he said. "Brooke might've helped him do it. That's the only theory I've heard bandied about that might work. Brooke might've been in cahoots with your father on killing him."

"And you know how ridiculous that sounds?"

"Completely."

"If my sister were to help my father kill himself, there are easier ways. There's drowning in the pond. Smothering with a pillow. Gun at the back of the head," I said. More gallows humor. I couldn't help it. If you've ever gotten to such a point of confusion that it was almost as if you couldn't see out from your own eyes, then you know how I felt as I sat there on the ground.

"I know, and that's what Grogan told me, too, just about. But at some point—now, or a month from now, or a year from now—they may go after her. Unless someone figures this out. You know how the cops figured out the Manson murders?"

I shook my head.

"Right. They didn't. The reporters figured it out. Because investigators are looking at the small picture. But sometimes, it's the big obvious picture that spits in your face. I don't believe Brooke did it. I think a few people murdered your father. I have no idea what motive is involved. I have no idea who they are or where they went. But I think between the two of us, we can go in there and see if there's something the detectives missed. How many years has it been since Jon-Benet Ramsey was killed? Well, there's no actual suspect yet. No one can bring charges. This could be like that. But my fear is that Brooke is going to be the easy target, even if she's the wrong one. And yes, she'll be proven innocent, but that won't matter once she goes to court. It's a nasty system when it drags in a scapegoat. I don't want it to. I want it to drag in the killers. I want to be the guy to piece stuff together."

"You know what? I feel guilty for saying this, but I just want Dad to be buried and this to go away."

"Of course," he said. "But it won't go away. Not many murders out this way."

"I know." I sighed. "It's the worst in New England history. Or something."

"It's not that," he said. "There've been others that might be worse. A family was killed down on Outerbridge Island a couple of years back. They caught the boys involved, eventually. When Stonehaven, down in Connecticut, had that big mass murder back in the—what? Well, years ago, that was pretty damn bad. There've been murders all over the place. I think the Borden murders in Fall River still have the tide of the bloodiest unsolved murders. But this one well, it's ours. Burnley's. You know about your dad's business?"

I nodded. "If what you're asking is about his finances, yeah, I knew."

"He was a gambler. Not that he ever went down to Foxwoods or Atlantic City. I mean, he played the odds with his business instead of going the safe route. And money disappeared. Not a lot at any one time. Five hundred here, a thousand there. But if you look at the books, it comes to about 75,000 bucks over a twenty-year period. It wasn't in his bank account. Brooke doesn't have it," Harry said. "There's a lot of money unaccounted for. So maybe money was a motive. Maybe he had an old debt. Maybe it was a war buddy. Maybe it was your mom."

When he said this, I caught my breath. "As if she gave a damn. She'd have more money than God from my grandmother's will."

"She was disinherited," Harry said.

"Fuck," I said. "I feel like bones are being picked over."

"The estate never contacted her, she never contacted them. The detectives have been trying to locate her, too."

"Well, I'm pretty sure it wasn't my mother," I said, snorting. "Unless she came all the way up from Brazil to kill him and then take off again."

"When it comes to murder, you never know who it might be," Harry said. "Come on, let's go to the smokehouse."

7

Harry handed me the key. "I got it from Joe. He and his guys are so stymied, he gave me his blessing."

I looked at the key, which I had never seen in my childhood. My father had kept it around his neck. What in God's name for?

I looked up at Harry. "Okay."

I unlocked the door.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

1

To enter the smokehouse, we both had to lean forward, stooping a bit. The doorway was low, and the ceiling was not much higher. I felt a strange warmth, and half expected to remember all the hiding and the punishing and the secrecy that the smokehouse had been in my childhood, but not one bit of it came back to me. It seemed like an alien place. It would've seemed ordinary, but for the forensics work that had been done there.

2

In the smokehouse. Bloodstains. Chalk, fading. Fragrant, almost March-like smell of seedlings and freshly turned earth mixed with the coppery tang in the air and the smell of dead animal. Dead man. Dead father.

"Why do you think he came out here?" Harry asked.

"No idea. I really don't know."

"It's almost a ritual," Harry said. "He was laid out spread-eagle." He spread his arms and legs wide. "No ropes, no tethers. They suspect he was lifted up at one point, but then laid back down. Whoever did it let him go slowly. The major cuts didn't happen until near the end. Whoever did this wanted him alive for most of it. Whoever did this, he didn't fight them."

3

I caught my breath and held it. Then, exhaled. "I feel like a little kid scared of the dark."

"You used to play that game in here," Harry said.

"Yep."

"I never understood it. I always wondered what was going on because when I tried to play it, I just didn't see what you saw."

"It was just imagination," I said.

"Sure," he said. "Like any other kid's make-believe game. You close your eyes and you start making a journey in your mind."

"Is that what you're interested in?" I asked. "The Dark Game?"

"Not really. But it happened here. Your father's murder. You played the game here, and you all had some strange stories to tell back then."

"We did?"

"You don't remember?"

"Done everything I could to not remember. And then some. I just seem to remember creating a fantasy world."

"An escape hatch," Harry said, "That's what your dad called it. I heard him yelling at you one time because he found some rags we'd used as blindfolds. And he told you not to keep using an escape hatch, that it was only for truly bad times."

I looked up and around the walls. Harry shone his flashlight into the corners of the stone walls.

"Awful," I whispered through gritted teeth.

The blood had begun to turn brown on the stone. The ceiling of the smokehouse was too dark to see. Harry's flashlight spun around; he went to the walls and carefully looked at things that I had no desire to see, let alone know about. I just caught a glimpse of the markings on the floor where my father's body had been found, a jigsaw puzzle of a body, cut in several places. I got the feeling that someone else was there, in some dark recess of the place. I began to feel the small hairs on my arms stand up. I felt the way I would've waking up from a nightmare that had seemed all too real.

The temperature inside the smokehouse dropped several degrees, and I felt something on my earlobe, as if an insect were crawling along it, tickling.

I felt light-headed, and the room seemed to spin. I tried saying something to Harry—I think I'm fainting, I wanted to say—but words wouldn't come out of my mouth.

"Holy shit!" Harry gasped as he turned toward me, and I felt the beam of the flashlight on my face like an exploded sun—it blinded me for an instant, and when my vision returned, I felt as if I were looking out from someone else's eyes.

4

The world seemed to fall in on itself, into a black hole of darkness as a wave of nausea went through me and my knees buckled. I knew I would fall, or was in the process of falling, but suddenly, it all went dark.

5

When I woke up, I was outside, looking up into the empty sky, feeling a coldness at the back of my neck and the worst headache of my life pressing against my skull.

"Nemo?" Harry asked. He crouched beside me; I felt his arm under the back of my neck, supporting me.

I tried to speak, but my mouth felt dry and raw, and I could feel the beginnings of a sore throat.

Harry's face was white. He had scratches all along his cheeks. His lower lip was cut and bloody, and he had the purplish beginnings of a black left eye. "Jesus H. Christ, Nemo, what in God's name was that all about?"

I coughed out, "I don't know." Felt like razor blades in my throat.

"Is that you in there, or do I need to hit you again?" Harry asked.

I felt pressure from his arm across my neck.

He was afraid I was going to lunge at him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

1

"You nearly beat the crap out of me," Harry said. His face bore thin red marking around the eyes and nose. He sweated profusely. "I thought it was a seizure. At first. It was like trying to help a grizzly."

"Sorry," I said, feeling awkward apologizing for something that I wasn't even sure had come from me. "I can't believe it."

2

I felt as if something had been torn out of me against my will. I felt raped in some awful way.

Cold and torn and used by something that had pressed its way into my body.

It was a feeling of insanity.

Was I going crazy? Was this a sign? Was it stress?

I tried to remember the stories that my father had told of Granny and how she'd had her spells when she'd start talking to people who weren't there; or when my grandfather had tried to set a fire in the gas oven and nearly blown up Hawthorn altogether but for the quick thinking on my father's part.

But those were old-age diseases—those were dementias that came after seventy.

They weren't this.

Part of me genuinely could not believe it.

Part of me even harbored a damning hope that Harry had made it up and would tell me in a moment that it was a big joke. That he'd scraped up his own face, punched himself with the back of the flashlight, and was having a good one at my expense so soon after my father's murder.

"Let's get back to the house," he said, easing up on my neck and chest. He stood up and offered me his hand. "I don't know what the hell just happened, but you look like you should lie down on something other than mud."

3

Once I felt well enough to stand, I decided that I wasn't going to go back to the house.

Not just yet.

I had grown a bit worried about Brooke's nocturnal rambling through the rooms of the house, and I didn't want to add yet another disturbance to her life if I could help it.

Harry offered to drive me to his digs in the village—he'd inherited both the Burnley Gazette office and the house in which it existed. He had a big fat Jeep Grand Cherokee that was about seven years old and seemed like it had the crap kicked out of it in dents and nicks—the roof itself had a dent that made it seem as if an elephant had fallen on it. "I got it cheap. One of the rich guys got in a wreck up island two summers ago," he told me. Then he laughed. "Christ, I can't believe I'm talking about this car. All I'm thinking about is what just happened."

4

When we got to his office, the first thing he did was get a bottle of aged scotch from the middle file drawer by his desk.

"None for me," I said.

"You sure?"

"Okay. Okay. Maybe just a little."

"It's for me, Christ almighty," he said. He filled a tumbler with the brown liquid and drank half of it back before coming up for air. Then he filled a mug about half full and brought it over to me.

The warm fire of the scotch was a nice antidote to the ice I'd been feeling in my flesh.

"How bad was it?" I asked.

He pointed to the scratches on his face and around his throat. A dark bruise on his wrist where I'd apparently tried to tear his arm off. "And you tried to bite me," he said. "You practically knocked the wind out of me, Nemo. I'm not sure how, but you did."

"Shit."

"Any idea why?"

"No."

"You said you'd get all of us," he said. "And then you knocked the flashlight out of my hand." He made a motion with his arm as if he were physically trying to remember what I had done. He moved his arms slowly and cocked his head to the side. "Then you you reached up and tore my glasses off. Somewhere in there, your fingernails went into my face. Not sure when you hit my lip. And you socked me a good one right here." He tapped a finger just below his left eye. The skin around it had grown darker.

"Jesus. I'm sorry. Jesus."

"Ever have seizures?"

"None that I know of."

"Ever have a scan done? MRI?"

"No."

"When was the last time you had a physical?"

I shrugged. "College. Junior year."

"Any accidents?"

"Like what?"

"Anything that would cause trauma to your head?"

"Nothing. Accident free. I guess I fell on the sidewalk once down in Virginia. It was muddy. I slipped and hit my knee and elbow. Hard. That's the only thing I can think of."

"Didn't you get hurt on the ice once?"

"Oh, yeah. You mean when we were fourteen? Yeah, I fell and cracked my head open."

"But you were checked after that."

"Nothing beyond some stitches."

He took another swig of scotch. "You didn't even sound like you."

"Who'd I sound like?"

"No idea. Someone different." As, an afterthought, Harry Withers added, "A woman."

5

He went over it again:

"So, I'm looking around. I was crouching down, and I hear this noise. Well, maybe not much of a noise. It's like a high-pitched sound. I smell smoke, but I'm not sure why. Except it's an old smokehouse and it's winter. You know how sometimes those old stone houses can reek of smoke even if they haven't been used in forever? Only you say something right at that moment, and I'm ignoring you—you say something I don't quite understand. Now that I think of it, it was as if your tongue was heavy in your mouth, like you'd been shot up with Novocain. I turn my head back, Nemo, and you're standing over me. The freaky thing about it is that not a second before, you were across the room. I know it's a small room, but I would've heard you. But it was as if you suddenly were just standing over me.

"I'm not one to get started over nothing, but I have to admit, my mouth went dry when I saw you, and I felt something in the air, as if the weather had changed outside, or as if there were static electricity. Maybe the feeling you're supposed to get when lightning is about to hit where you're standing. That's what it felt like. And I look up at you. I can't quite see your face. It's not so dark with you right there that I can't see your face at all. But you seem funny, and I'm a little freaked, and I hold the flashlight up, and that's when you knock it out of my hand. But I see your face for a second, and Nemo, it ain't your face, buddy. It's someone else, it's like you took off a mask. I don't know what was so different, but you looked angry, and your lips seemed different.

"And then I stood up, and you were whispering something over and over again. I said, Nemo?' and you started in on all that stuff, and it's just not you, Nemo. I know you too well, and it's not you at all. You clawed at my face and my glasses went flying, and I had to shove you as hard as I could, which is why your head probably hurts a little, since you hit the wall and went down.

"It was like " he said, finishing with a last sip of scotch.

"Like?"

He smacked his lips. Shook his head. He nearly grinned when he said it. "It's gonna sound crazy. But it was like you were possessed."

I thought for half a second he had said "obsessed." Then I remembered that Harry had been the superstitious one. He had always believed there were ghosts on the island—at least as a boy. I had figured he had outgrown this, but based on mentioning possession, I assumed he still believed that there were ghosts. And that they got inside people.

As if reading my mind, he said, "It's probably just stress. Anxiety. All the crap you've been going through since you got back."

I nodded.

He leaned forward slightly, staring at me with an intensity that made him seem a bit maniacal. "We gotta go back there, bud. This time with a tape recorder."

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

1

I agreed to go back to the smokehouse with Harry.

I didn't want to go in there again.

I didn't want to feel it.

Not a terrible feeling, or a fear of being out of control.

I had been turned on in the smokehouse. I had felt an arousal the likes of which I can only call sexual, but which seemed more encompassing than that.

It bad been like some kind of high within my bloodstream, and when I finally tried to figure it out, I realized: I had felt like a kid again, on the cusp of pleasure and a rare, nearly erotic feeling that all my burdens in life had been lifted.

It was like taking a hit of a really powerful drug that made the user feel euphoria, excitement, and a liberation from gravity itself.

2

Harry and I trudged up one late afternoon, about three or so, with flashlights and a digital voice recorder that Harry usually used when interviewing some old salt or corporate CEO who vacationed up island. "Just talk normally. It'll pick up all kinds of sounds. It's a sensitive bit of machinery," he said.

Unlocking the door to the smokehouse, he made an "after you" gesture with his hands.

3

I stepped inside, and nothing happened. I stood in the smokehouse, closed my eyes for a second or two because I did feel anxious just being there.

I guess it was during those few seconds that something did indeed happen, because when I opened my eyes—it was little more than a blink—my watch—and Harry—told me that twenty minutes had gone by.

And it was all on tape.

4

"It's fantastic!" he said, with the glee of a boy. "Oh my God, is this ever amazing! It gave me goose bumps, standing there. It was absolutely chilling!"

"Harry?" I asked.

He pressed the play button on the small cylindrical machine.

"Who are you?" Harry's voice on the tape.

Silence. I glanced at Harry, but he kept his eyes on the recorder.

Five minutes or more passed. I tried to block out all other sounds in the room, and any from outside the window. I was sure I could hear the whirr of the tape itself. I leaned slightly forward as if I might miss whatever it was that he was so keen on. I imagined myself standing there, eyes closed, in some kind of trance.

And then something changed on the tape. Like a small mouse scurrying in a corner. Just a whisper of a noise.

I tried to focus all attention on that small sound.

And then it exploded.

"LET ME OUT!" The scream was so loud it was nearly distorted on the tape. "LET ME OUT! PLEASE! OH GOD! LET ME OUT! DON'T DO THIS TO ME! PLEASE! OH GOD! LET ME GO! PLEASE SOMEBODY LET ME OUT! GOD HELP ME! GOD HELP ME!"

PART THREE

"You owe me five farthings, say the bells of St. Martin's "

—traditional

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

1

The voice kept screaming until Harry shut off the machine. He held it in his hand, looked down at it, then up at me.

"Worst part is," Harry said, "I've heard this voice before."

2

Harry said, "I interviewed a psychic once—a medium. She and her husband rented the Houghs' place up on Grotto Road for the summer four years ago. My dad still ran the paper, and I was trying to do those pieces about local color and the tourists, and she had just gotten on some TV show about reaching the other side or something, so she was a near-celeb. She told me that she'd channel to show me what it was like. I may be wrong, but it was that voice. I've got the tape somewhere back in the files." He said this as if he were just thinking it aloud for the first time. "Either you're possessed," he added, "or you're insane. You choose your adventure."

"Insane," I said, and looked at the small tape machine and wished it didn't exist.

"Ever had any problems of this sort before?"

"This is ridiculous," I said.

"Ever had any problems of this sort before?" he repeated.

"No."

"That you know of," he said.

"Harry," I said. "Give me a break."

"Can I get your permission to do something in that smokehouse?" Harry asked.

"Depends," I said.

"You want to find out who murdered your father?"

"Of course."

"I think the police missed something." He wiped his face with his hands. "I hate to ask you this, but do you believe in ghosts?"

"No," I said.

"Good," Harry sighed, half grinning. "I was afraid this was fraud. Like you were trying to create some bizarre defense."

"Why the hell would I do that?"

"In case Brooke gets arrested."

"You think she will?"

His face became unreadable.

"Look," he said. "Let me find the other tape. Maybe it'll mean something to you."

3

That evening, we sat in Harry's uncomfortable living room, and he played the tape. It was on an old reel-to-reel that his father had used for interviews. The psychic, named Mary Manley, had written two books on the subjects of life after death. One had been called Where Angels Fear and the other, Talking to the Lost. Harry pointed to the books up high on his dusty bookshelf, next to the fireplace, in which he'd built a comfortable, cozy fire. We picked at our white cartons of noodles and chicken with the chopsticks, although I ended up going for a fork. Harry told me about her books.

"She mainly went where she said the spirits took her. She investigated the Gisslers' Bed and Breakfast up in Cullen Town, Vermont, after it was said that the disturbed spirit of a dead man kept yelling at the guests. She claimed it was a fake, something put on by the owner's oldest son, who out of sheer vindictiveness wanted his parents to sell the house and get out of the business. She's a great detector of fraud in the world of spiritualists and mediums. She also exorcised the spirit of a little girl who haunted a playground in Vancouver, and that's what got her on the television shows, because the mother of the dead girl claimed that there were reasons why it had to be her dead daughter. Her books are moderately level-headed, although she had theories that sound a little silly if you think about them. But one that makes sense is that if there are ghosts, they're not literally the person made invisible. They're the energy of that person, trapped for some reason. Unreleased energy. She used the metaphor of gas trapped in rock. Manley says it's like that. Or carbonation in a soda bottle—you shake it up over and over again, and pretty soon it explodes. It's not a human being per se, but a force. Well, let's listen," he said, and got up to turn on the enormous tape machine.

"What preparations do you make?" Harry's voice seemed a bit nervous on the tape.

"Well, it's not religion. It's basic practicality. Some spirits are bad energy, and I have to protect myself. So, first, I spend a day or two in purification. I meditate. I do some yoga. I try to put myself in some relaxing place. I don't fast—I eat quite a bit during that time because I'll need the strength. I take time to talk to whomever I need to in order to settle past disputes. That's part of purification, settling the past. It's not a simple fix, but if I can make the first step, whether it's an apology to a friend or business associate, or a long letter I write to my dead father and mother in order to show gratitude for what they gave me and how they cared for me. Basically, whatever is clouding my mind needs to be dealt with beforehand. Then I just go to the place of disturbance and open myself to it. You may think this is some pristine pure thing, but in fact, its feels sexual. That's not politically correct to say, but I get an erotic and sexual feeling from it. That's why my mind needs to be clear and my body strong. I am going to be invaded by another presence, and I have to open my arms and wrap myself around it. If not, it will be rape. The presence will rape me. That's the danger of this. If I have not given myself to it completely and willingly, I will not remember anything, and it will have power over me, and it will destroy me in some way. Psychically."

"So, you're here. It's midsummer's night on Burnley Island. We're sitting up on Lookout Rock at seven at night. It's fairly quiet. Do you sense anything?"

"Not yet. Perhaps there's nothing."

"You told me earlier—"

"Yes. I felt something here. Like a gravitational pull. Not just all who had died here. Every place on earth has had death and violence and bones buried. But when the spirits linger, it's because they're trapped. Most are not trapped. Here, something is trapped and is waiting. Not here, not on this boulder. But somewhere here."

Harry switched the tape recorder off.

"We went all over the island that night. It seemed like a colossal waste of time, Nemo. Til we got to your place." He switched on the machine again, fast forwarded, listened for a word or two, then fast forwarded the tape some more. Then: "Here."

"Here?"

"It's strong here," she said.

A cut in the tape, and then a strange sound like a strong wind.

"I edited the tape. Badly," Harry told me.

Then, "Here. Right here," the woman said. She whispered, "I can feel it. It wants to come into me. I'm inviting it, but it doesn't want to. Shhh It's all right. It's all right. No, no."

"What's happening?" Harry asked on the tape.

A silence.

Then a different woman's voice. "OPEN THE DOOR! LET ME OUT! LET ME OUT! PLEASE! GOD HELP ME! I WANT TO LEAVE! I WANT TO GET OUT!''

4

Then nothing.

Harry stopped the tape.

"Holy shit," I said.

"Oh yeah," Harry nodded. "I dropped the tape recorder after that. She grabbed me, and her eyes went white, rolling up into her head. I practically had to throw her down. Ever see documentary footage of voodoo ceremonies? It was like that. It was like something had taken her over. When it was through, she was exhausted. She slept for two days. After that, she refused to come back. Hell, she refused to talk to me again. She left the island a few weeks later and wouldn't take my calls. Her husband told me that if I bothered them again, he'd call the cops. I had been calling a lot. I wanted to know what had gone on. And then I got a letter from her. No return address. All she wrote to me was: Don't ever go in that place again. Something terrible happened there. Some ritual. Some awful, powerful ritual. And that was it."

"It was at Hawthorn," I said.

"We were outside the smokehouse," Harry said.

5

"Why the smokehouse?" I asked. Rephrased it: "Why did you take her to the smokehouse?"

Harry shrugged. "Someone died there, maybe. Maybe a hundred years ago. Or who knows. She didn't exactly stick around and tell me. I mean, if you buy this. Do you buy it?"

"Not really. It's fucked up. But it was because of the Brain Fart," I said, nearly impulsively.

He wagged a finger at me. "Don't make me go there."

6

But it was too late: The moving image of the past had already begun showing in my brain. Me and Brooke and Bruno, sitting on the big plush blue sofa in the living room, after we had our Brain Fart.

Harry Withers, all of nine years old, sitting beside me with a big gold watch and a chain—his father would've killed him if he had known Harry had taken it. Waving it back and forth, saying, "Look at the watch, how shiny it is." He had learned it on TV and in some books, when he saw some hypnotist put an entire studio audience to sleep. Harry had always been up for hypnotisms, seances with an old ratty Ouija board he had (which he called a Weejun board, not understanding the difference between Ouija and Bass Weejun shoes). None of us was up for being hypnotized, but eventually we did fall asleep—out of exhaustion and boredom.

7

"It was the Brain Fart. We had it, and it was at the smokehouse, and you tried to hypnotize us back then," I said, vaguely wishing for some of Harry's scotch to help dull my senses a bit.

"What's that smokehouse mean to you?"

"It's an old smokehouse."

"Tell me about it. Its history."

"Well, far as I know, the current one was built sometime around 1850. I'm not up on its history. They used to smoke meat out there."

"What else?"

"It hasn't been used since maybe, I don't know. My grandfather never used it. It's just been sitting."

"Funny. It's been my experience that somehow everything is used for something. Even if it's not apparent at first."

"Profound," I said.

"It's true. At least, I've found it to be true."

"I never knew about it if it were ever used when I lived here. Dad might've stored stuff there. At one time. But he usually used the cabin for his tools."

"That's not true," Harry said. "You told me yourself when we were kids. You called it the place of punishment.'"

"Oh. Yeah. It was. That's what we called it. Before I was nine or ten, that's where Dad would haul me or Brooke off to spank us."

"Just spank?"

"Well, with a belt a couple of times. Nothing too horrible. It stopped at a certain point." I remembered more: "And my grandfather used to take him out there, too, when he was a kid. And my uncle. There was a post in the middle of the floor—well, in the dirt. Dad put the wood-slats of the floor down long after that. There was a post and Grandpa would tie one or more sons to it. Dad said it was stuff that people get arrested for now, but in his childhood, that's how it was. Whippings. Birchings. I asked him why he didn't tell anybody, and he said back then, there were about a hundred people on the island, and most of them just looked the other way. Most of them thought whipping protected boys from growing up bad. Dad had horrible stories about it. My grandfather seemed really sweet, but my dad said he sometimes got whipped so hard that his back stuck to the sheets at night because of the blood. He hated that old man. He was practically happy when he died so that Dad could take care of Granny." I paused a moment. "Harry, there's no ghost. Unless it's my great-grandma."

"Forget the word ghost,'" Harry said. "It's a phenomenon. Belief in the afterlife doesn't need to come into this. A phenomenon. That's all it is. Right now. In the meantime, I want you to ask Brooke if she experienced anything there."

"Brooke?"

"Sure," he said. "She was in the smokehouse for a couple of hours."

"So were cops."

"But the cops didn't experience any phenomena. You did. Brooke might've," he said.

Grabbing my cup of hot tea from his newspaper-stacked coffee table, I asked, "Do you believe in ghosts, Harry?"

He smiled. "You and me were altar boys, Nemo. I believe that a man's body and blood can come from wine and a wafer. I believe that a woman who is a virgin can give birth. I believe that God decided to come to the world in human form a couple thousand years ago. Do I really believe in all that? Yes and no. Part of me wants it to be true. Part of me thinks it's a way of reimagining existence, and our relationship with whatever created the world. Maybe virginity means purity. Maybe wine and water mean acceptance of a transcendent idea—that water can be wine. Maybe there was this guy who aligned himself so well with the truth of all existence that it was as if he were the Son of God. But you know what? I don't know. It might literally be water into wine, and a man who was God. I want to know, but I don't. I'm not smart enough." He leaned back in his leather chair and swiveled it around. He pointed to the tape machine. "If people die and remain where they died, that seems a bit easier to swallow, doesn't it? Not that I do. I mean, ghosts? Not really. I've experienced this twice now. With you. With Mary Manley. If it had only happened once, I could forget about it. But twice?"

"Well, it's weird. I'll give you that." Then I let out a kind of hyena laugh of relief.

"What was that about?" he asked.

"You used to hold s ances."

"Oh, please. It was just a Ouija board."

"You do believe in ghosts, don't you?" I asked.

Harry didn't answer immediately.

Then he told me the story about seeing something once, when he was twelve years old. "One time, I was sleeping over at your place. And I sat in the love seat. You sat in some kind of spindly chair. We were up late. Everyone had gone to bed. And I brought my father's pocket watch out."

"And you tried to put me under," I said. "Like you tried to do with all three of us before. Only you didn't."

"I did put you under," he said.

8

"You were surprisingly easy. It was as if you'd been hypnotized before. I just never told you about it. I was well, I was too scared. At first, I did stuff I'd read in this book on hypnosis. I put some ammonia from the kitchen under your nose. You inhaled it as if it were nothing. Then I pinched your arm so hard it left a red mark. Not a squeak out of you. Then I had you say something silly, something humiliating to a twelve-year-old. I'm not sure what it was, but I can guarantee it made me laugh. And then, when I asked you to recite a nursery rhyme, you began this long one. This one with fruit in it and bells."

"Oranges and lemons," I said. "Christ."

"Whatever it was, it gave me chills the way you said it. You said it like it was a ritual. I even thought you might've been doing it on purpose and perhaps weren't hypnotized at all. But at the end of it, you said something to me that I will never forget, Nemo. Your eyes popped open, suddenly—quickly enough that I nearly jumped out of my skin—and you said, Your father's dying. He'll be dead soon enough.' I stared at you for ten minutes after that before I brought you out of it. I made sure you wouldn't remember even being hypnotized. But it scared me, what you said. And the thing is, we didn't know my father was already dying. He was. You had told me something in that trance that was absolutely true. So I did it again."

"Again?"

"Hypnotized you," he said. "A few months later, I had to see if you really had said that. If you could tell me things."

"I would've known if you'd hypnotized me."

"I don't think so," he said. "I did it a couple times. You didn't know. I had a control phrase. If you heard it, you'd go under. You were extremely suggestible, Nemo. It was as if you'd been hypnotized by someone for years."

"That's an awful thing you did," I said. "You really did it?"

"Sure. It was awful. It was like some kind of big secret I had. But I couldn't help myself. Not after you'd told me about my father's upcoming death. And you told me other things. I didn't want to find out much. I'd just ask you about things I wanted to know about. You knew things that a boy your age could not possibly have known. You had this wealth of knowledge. I could ask you nearly anything ."

"What are you getting at?"

"I asked you something, when we were eighteen, hanging out by the Triumph Theater, smoking."

"What?"

"I asked you if your mother was ever going to come back. And you know what you said? Under? You said that she had never left. You started wailing. It sounded like you were a two-year-old. I couldn't bring you out of it. Nemo, you don't have any memory of it, do you?"

I shook my head. "Jesus, Harry. Christ. You did that to me?"

"I'm sorry," he said. "But when you told me about my father and it turned out to be true I just couldn't I couldn't stop. You knew things Nemo—only it wasn't like it was you. How could you know the things I asked about?"

"You didn't tape record any of that, did you?" I asked.

He shook his head. "I wish I had. And don't look like that—I didn't do it all the time. Only a few times. But it scared me each time. I just wanted to figure you out."

"Figure me out? Why?"

He took a deep breath, "There was always something wrong with you. No—not just with you. Something at your house. It was like something I couldn't figure out. Like there was a cloud there. Or some unspoken thing. And I guess maybe I wanted to find out more. Maybe it was the reporter in me. That sounds goofy, but you were writing your stories back then, so that was no goofier than me wanting to investigate things. I found everything about you and your family fascinating. But I wanted to figure out what it was that kept me—I don't know—confused, about you."

I stared at him long and hard, thoughts spinning around in my head as if I was equally confused by Harry Withers. "Okay, how'd you do it? What was the control phrase?"

"If I say it, you might go under again."

I laughed. "After all these years?"

"Would you consider going under again?"

I didn't know what to say. But I was curious and annoyed at the same time. I had so many chunks of my childhood that felt as if they'd been removed without my knowing, like a perverse Operation.

I was determined to prove him wrong. "All right. Let's do it. See if you can put me under."

Then he said something to me, but I couldn't remember what it was ten seconds later, and the next thing I knew, I blinked.

9

He no longer sat behind his desk.

Instead, he stood over me.

"Nothing," he said. "I thought I put you under, and maybe I did for a minute. But nothing."

"Nothing on tape?"

He glanced at the digital recorder in his hand. He had begun sweating, but I didn't feel particularly warm in the room. "Nothing. You said nothing. You just seemed asleep."

"Well, so much for that," I said, somewhat pleased that I wasn't just some guinea pig waiting to be exploited.

He walked back behind his desk, glancing around his bookshelf, touching the spines of various volumes. "It's here somewhere. Oh, here," he said, drawing a tall, slim paperback from the shelf. He turned and held it out to me. "Take it."

I went over to his desk and took the book from him. Talking to the Lost by Mary Manley. I looked at him, shaking my head. "Harry "

"She's not like other kooks who do this. Just skim it a little, when you get the chance," he said. "There's a section about childhood rituals you might want to look at."

10

Even on the way out the door, he began ranting about mysteries and ghosts and strange, weird, wacko things. But everything in my being fought the idea of a ghost or any supernatural phenomena at all. It was all make believe. It's like the Dark Game, I told myself. It's like pretending so hard that it seems real. But that's all it is. Maybe it's the stress. Maybe the psychic's moment outside the smokehouse was like the Oracles at Delphi—there's some kind of underground gasses released at the spot, and it causes some sort of seizure.

Even that seemed stupid.

Admittedly, everything I thought of to counteract the idea that it was "a ghost," which is how Harry described it (gullible believer in all that he had always been), all my arguments both within my head and outside in the world that I could see around me—it all meant nothing. Something inside me felt as if this voice coming from me in the smokehouse did have some significance and meaning. I just could not decipher what any of it meant.

It reminded me of the Dark Game far too much.

In the Dark Game, we would pretend that we were talking to the dead sometimes. We would pretend that Granny was still there, and that she was with us. The Dark Game allowed us to open our eyes within our minds and draw back what our father had called "the illusion of reality."

As children, this had been powerful for us. It was as if we had a childhood imagination to the nth degree. It became a place for incredible creativity—after we'd played for long periods of time, I'd go in my room and knock out a story about the Underland, or Brooke would start drawing on pages and pages of paper, as if she couldn't stop—as if she had some inner vision and wanted to get it all down.

I suppose it's where Brooke got her talent in art—something she had tried to hide, but was now coming out in those paintings—and where Bruno got his wild musical talent that allowed him to compose some interesting melodies from out of nowhere. And in my own modest way, it was probably where my ability to make up stories had appeared, not that it had brought me anything other than anxiety.

But the Dark Game was a creativity firecracker that we each had within us, even as adults.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

1

I clung to the possibility that Harry's and my adventure in the smokehouse was somehow less than it seemed. Maybe the Dark Game that we'd played to pass the endless winter days had some detrimental effect on each of us, on our subconscious minds, the way a hypnotic suggestion might. Maybe we were all susceptible to hypnotic suggestion because the Dark Game was its own powerful form of self-hypnosis.

Well, of course it was, I reasoned as I trudged in the snow-swept street. Of course, the Dark Game was just hypnosis in the form of a game. That's why Harry could hypnotize me so easily. That's why I spouted silly things to him when I was a kid. Our father had taught it to us, but he had learned it from his granny and modified it in the war to survive. It was a bit abusive for him to teach it to us as a method of momentary escape, but what could you do? Childhood was like that—full of pulls and pushes from grown-ups who had no conception of what they were doing half the time to fuck up their kids.

I felt heavy from the weather and the burden of destiny that had already been loaded on my shoulders. My father's memory didn't need more irrationality.

I left Harry's place, book under my arm. I wondered if perhaps I was going insane—just the post-traumatic stress kind of thing. After all, my dad had been butchered. I had gone into the very place where it had happened. His blood was still on the walls. It might not be a stretch for a guy to break down and start babbling. Since Harry had been a kid who really believed in far too many things, and since Harry had been stuck on the island his entire life, I figured that maybe he'd gotten into island lore a little too much. He had spent part of the evening talking about the ghosts of the Native American dead who had been seen up on the white cliffs at The Oaks in a terrible fog; or the ghost of the infamous pirate Johann Redd, who supposedly still protected his buried treasure on the islands up and down the coastline, unable to remember where he'd buried it, so he went from island to island in search of the doubloons. I had known these stories since childhood, and even if they'd fascinated me as a kid, I'd never met anyone who had actually seen one of these ghosts.

2

Walking along the slippery sidewalk on Main Street, I drew out my cell phone and tried to call Pola, but the phone wasn't working. It's a Dead Area. The whole damn island's got to be a Dead Area for making calls most of the time. I ended up calling her from the pay phone at Hanley's Mobil station. She immediately picked up.

"I knew it was you," she said. "I thought you were mad for me. Then you drop off the face of the earth."

"Can I come over?" I asked, a plaintive whine in my voice that I could not knock out.

"Something's wrong?"

"Not really," I said. "I just want to see you."

"Ready to meet Zack?"

3

Pola's house had once belonged to a man I knew as a kid—his name was Fisher, and he paid me a lot of money to mow his lawn in the summer and keep his driveway clear in the winter. He'd sold it to Pola and her husband four years before, and then, when they'd gotten divorced, Pola had kept the house while, according to Pola, "he kept just about everything else."

It was a cozy Cape Cod, just two bedrooms with a small living room and kitchen. I adored it on sight—Pola was everywhere in it, in the pastel of the walls and the stencils near the ceiling of her son's room, to the old captain's trunk in the living room that served as both coffee table and footrest. The living room was decked out in full Christmas regalia—and it made me painfully aware of how, since our father's death, my own family had not bothered with cheer or decorations. Her tree was small but heavy with homemade touches, cranberry and popcorn string, what looked like eggs decorated with beads and ribbons, no doubt a school project for Zack; and along the edges of her windows, small, blinking, colorful lights. At the fireplace, a long red stocking with Zack's name on it. Presents nestled beneath the tree.

"Zack!" Pola said, calling her son down from the attic. She turned to check my expression. "You sure you're ready to meet him?"

"Of course," I said. "Why'd you lock him in the attic?"

"He's going to be an inventor," she said. I heard the clip-clop of his shoes as he came down the narrow stairs that went to the top of the house. "It's barely a crawlspace up there, but he has his inventions. It's his mad scientist laboratory. You know how kids are. It's where he and his friends can play games and have a little privacy."

A lanky boy of nine came running, his white sweatshirt covered with what might've been axle grease. He had a mischievous look on his face, and he had his mother's eyes and smile.

"Is it supper yet?" he asked.

He looked at me just as curiously as I looked at him. "He looks like you," I said.

"Some people think so," she said. "I can't really tell. He looks like himself." She said this exuberantly, and as he came down to the bottom step, she went and grabbed him around the neck and shoulders in a swinging hug. "Zack, this is an old friend of mine."

"Hello!" Zack shouted, as if I wouldn't be able to hear him. Then he shrugged off his mother's arms and walked rather formally toward me. He put his hand out, and I shook it. His grip was firm. "Good to meet you, sir."

"Zack, this is Nemo Raglan."

"That's a funny name," Zack said. "Nemo Ragman."

"Zack," his mother said. "Raglan."

"Oh," Zack said, as if he suddenly understood. He grew more serious. "You're the one whose dad got killed."

4

Zack explained to me that he was sad about his dad, too, because his dad had left and found another mom two years before, and Zack didn't really like the other mom that well because she wasn't the real thing.

Supper consisted of homemade chili that was the most delicious I'd ever had; Zack talked nonstop through supper, and wanted to know all about things that had nothing to do with the island. What was Washington like? Boston? Had I ever been to Chicago and seen the Sears Tower? Had I ever seen the World Trade Center before the bad guys knocked it down? What was my favorite hockey team? He liked Wayne Gretzky but only because he thought the name was funny. His favorite band was the Bare Naked Ladies, although I suspected that it was because of the group's name and not because of the music. Ditto for his second favorite: Alien Ant Farm. He asked if I had ever played lacrosse, or if I had ice skated like he did out at Hanley's Pond. He said his best friend, Mike, had taught him how to cross-country ski, but he'd only done it once. He told me that he wished he had met Albert Einstein, and he wondered if I had. When I told him no, I did tell him my favorite Albert Einstein quote. (It goes: "There are only two ways to live your life. One is that nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle." He thought this quote was cool.) He asked me if I'd ever read anything by J. K Rowling. Then he proceeded to regale me with why he thought the Harry Potter books were the best books ever written, why he believed there might really be a Hogwarts School, and why I should make sure to go read the books even if I'd seen the movie.

Pola got up at one point and came back to the table with a copy of my novel, Igdrasil. I felt my face flush. I wanted to rub dirt all over myself. It felt more than slightly embarrassing to know she'd read my only published novel.

As if to ward off any criticism, I immediately said, "I really wish it hadn't been published." It was a lie, but I just didn't want to face that book, the failure of my dream.

"I love this book," Pola said. She flipped the pages. "Look how dog-eared it is. I reread it all the time. It's just like having you here to talk to."

Zack looked at me with wonder after that and told me that I should think about writing books the way J. K. Rowling did, "the kind where every kid wants to read them."

After supper, it was nearly his bedtime. Pola went upstairs for a while to make sure he got into his pajamas, brushed his teeth, and was ready for a little late night reading. It was utterly charming. He did the reading (from a book called Great Inventors Through the Ages), and she sat in a chair by the bed, and listened. She invited me to read some, too.

I asked Zack what his favorite book was and told him that I'd read a few pages to him. He asked me to read some of my novel.

"You may not like it," I said.

"I will love it," he said. "I will think it's the best book if you read it to me."

Such was his enthusiasm that I read the passage from my novel about the hero when he was a boy, and how he had learned the language of the wind and rain. Zack smiled the whole time.

When he closed his eyes and yawned a bit too much, I flicked off his bedside lamp and joined Pola, who had been in the doorway while I read.

Pola and I stood outside his door, just watching him in the shadows.

"He likes you," she whispered.

"I'm guessing a kid that great likes everybody he meets," I said.

"Poor little guy," she said softy. "He's got his troubles like anyone else." She didn't elaborate, but I figured it had to do with the divorce. I remembered how abandoned I'd felt when my mother had run off. I doubted a wound like that ever would heal, but would always remain a bit of a scar no matter how many years passed.

Even for Zack.

It was the closest I had ever come to having my own family, that moment. Standing with Pola, leaning against the door frame, watching her son in bed, all covered up, drifting off to sleep.

I think it was nearly like being part of a normal family. A family that seemed at peace.

Sure, I knew it was fake. I wasn't Zack's dad; Pola and I still had the past to contend with, and would have to deal with it one day; the scene was all make believe.

But it was a moment taken out of time for me.

It was like lingering at the edge of a wonderful dream I had always wanted to have.

Loitering with intent.

5

I'd like to say that we did the mature thing and went downstairs, sat in the living room, and just held hands.

But the truth was, I couldn't keep my mitts off her. It was a sacred love turned remarkably profane. The feeling of being part of her life again was just a complete turn on. I felt horny the way I had at sixteen with her, and I had this urge to merge. I wanted to touch her and feel her warmth, just be as close to her as I possibly could get, our lips touching, our bodies wrapped around each other.

But that was in my head. We mainly kissed and cuddled, and the intensity of her warmth went right down to my toes.

After a bit of making out, she drew back.

"Something wrong?"

"Nothing," she said. "But you sounded bad on the phone. Want to talk about it?"

I didn't respond at first, still in a sort of passion-driven stare, the aroused, animal moment that needed to simmer down a bit.

"Is it meeting Zack?"

"No, of course not," I said. "No, it's not anything like that. I hate even bringing anything up."

"You don't have to," she said. "We don't have to talk." We began kissing again, and after a few minutes, she drew back from me again. This time she sat back up and moved to the end of the sofa. "Something's up. I can tell."

"It's crazy," I said, wondering at her powers of observation. Could she read me that easily?

"It's probably not crazy," she said.

And then I just let it out. I felt as if the largest burden of my entire life released in one fell swoop, and I began jabbering about it all—about feeling something in the greenhouse, about Brooke and her painting, about the money in the wardrobe, and finally, about what had happened with Harry Withers in the smokehouse.

The voice.

6

"Do you believe in supernatural crap?" I asked. It was the only way I could put it without laughing at myself. It sounded ridiculous.

"I'm not sure belief is an issue," she said thoughtfully. "Nemo, are you sure it wasn't your voice?"

"Positive."

"You don't think Harry did some kind of trick?"

I shook my head. "No. He believes it's a supernatural phenomenon. He thinks there's a ghost."

She grinned, and then said, "Really? A ghost?"

"I know. I don't believe in them, either."

She looked at me with an unsettling concern in her face.

She reached over and took my hand in hers. "You've been through hell since he died."

"True."

"I can't even imagine what it was like. I used to see your father every day, at his store. It's left all of us feeling unsafe and worried, but most of all, I can't imagine what it's like for you. And now, this other stuff. Do you really need it?"

She was a smart woman. Smarter than I had remembered. "Stress?" I asked.

"I don't know. But it sounds unhealthy. I don't want you to get hurt. Who knows what it is? Maybe there are such things as ghosts. Maybe there aren't. But there's something bad in that smokehouse, and there's something you need to avoid for now."

Strangely, her words had the opposite effect on me than they probably should have. I held her hand as she spoke, and I thought: What am I afraid of? There are no ghosts. This is something else. This is my mind cracking a bit, trying to make sense of everything. It's coming back here, it's reopening old wounds, it's feeling love and feeling abandoned all over again. It's living in Hawthorn. It's the house, it's everything that comes up from it. What am I afraid of? What is there to fear?

"You're not listening to me," Pola said.

"Yes, I am."

She smiled. "No you aren't. What are you thinking? Just tell me."

"I guess I'm thinking that maybe I've just been afraid of things. My whole life. Avoiding what's hard to look at or figure out. That maybe I left here because I was afraid of what I didn't understand. Something in me is resisting the idea that something's wrong at home, with Brooke. Something in me doesn't want to face it. But I think I have to. I think I have to stop leaving things behind and start looking into them," I said. It felt like a huge relief to say it. "I've been afraid of home. All my life. I've been afraid of it."

7

I spent the night with her. I woke up early, and not wanting to wake Pola, crept into her kitchen to make some coffee for myself with a minimum of banging around. Harry's book, Talking to the Lost by Mary Manley, was where I'd left it on the counter. I picked it up, sat down at the small table in the breakfast nook, and began flipping pages.

It looked ridiculous and dull—I read a sentence or two. " the prophecies at the Windward House were followed by rapping on the wall " and " I saw an aura that screamed, dark and terrible, around the woman, and I knew that she was possessed by the child " It all made me think that Harry's childhood obsessions with aliens and hypnotism had never quite matured.

As I skimmed parts of the book, mainly glancing at the pictures, I realized I should just look through the index. I flipped to the back, scanned down the page, and saw the words "games: children, p. 123"—and flipped to that page.

8

Mary Manley wrote:

I've found in my studies of gifted children that when they've been raised in what I'd term an extreme situation, they often create rituals to help them cope with the trauma. To some extent, all children do this, but the ones I've studied, who seem to possess a level of telepathy, have had heightened trauma in their lives. Witnessing the loss of parents in a car crash, as one subject in the California study had, drove the subject to develop a unique religion that had a Hierarchy of gods and goddesses and a language that could be perfectly translated, with nearly six hundred words in it. The child was only five years old. Similarly, the man I call Eric B also had developed a stylized ritual in order to escape an extremely abusive childhood, in which he was tormented endlessly by his mother, who kept him locked in the house until he was nearly fifteen, at which point she died. When he was discovered, he did not believe anyone could see him. He had so convinced himself he was invisible that it took nearly six years for him to learn the magical system he'd created in his head did not correspond to the real world.

Yet, he could prophesy disasters and predict, with some accuracy, the outcome of football games at his local school. His gift of prophecy seemed to be directly related to both the trauma he had suffered, as well as the ritual he had created to keep himself safe and sane during those years in the dark.

We've seen soldiers in prison camps do this as well. Who in the world can forget Micah Rollins, a private in World War II captured by the Nazis, who manifested burns on his face from believing—in his ritual—that he had flown so fast through the air he had begun to burst into flames upon entering the Earth's atmosphere? Correspondingly, Rollins's ritual had begun not in the prison camp, but as a child in his Kansas home. At the age of six, he'd been running with his mother through a summer thunderstorm, when both of them had been struck by lightning. His mother had died, but Rollins survived. I have no doubt that the rituals he created as a child were what allowed him to survive in the German camps as a POW.

The result of these games and rituals that children of extreme trauma have created seems to be a manifestation of some inner reality. With a woman named Willa Trent in Barstow, California, the depth of what she'd experienced as a child became the very thing that nearly drove her to suicide when she was forty-two years old. She had created such an inner world since childhood that she could no longer cope with the outer one. The attending psychiatrists and clinicians, who studied her as if she would show them about the inner workings of the human mind in a way that no one ever could, all came away with the notion that Willa was a fraud. Yet, in her forties, having tried to take her own life, it was found that she could levitate at will. She had done this since childhood, but had never really believed that it was real, only that it was part of a complicated game process she'd created that was part hopscotch, part prayer, and part witchcraft. (It will be noted that Willa did not believe she was a Wiccan or a Pagan at all. She firmly maintained that she based her witchcraft on cartoons and fairy tales.) I was able to witness one of Willa's levitations (before she went into seclusion, refusing to see either doctors or the press ever again), and while it was less remarkable than the word "levitation" might suggest, I saw that Willa had taken what was once called "mass hysteria" to a new level. She had not developed the power to fly. What she had done was develop a powerful telepathic power that was beyond language. She did not speak within people's minds. She created images in them. She had somehow made herself able to project images into many people's minds. Interestingly, it was primarily the medical profession that swore to having seen her rise off the ground. I did not. But I learned that, in fact, Willa Trent had developed a powerful will, and a creative form of telepathy I had never before witnessed.

9

I set the book down and closed it.

I sipped coffee and stared at the back of the book, at Mary Manley's photograph.

Then I went back to the pages I'd just been reading and skimmed a few:

what the psychologists and the psychiatrists seem to have missed in the cases of Willa Trent and Micah Rollins was that they had simply done what all children do. To the nth degree. Most children have difficulties in their lives. Most don't understand the world adults foist upon them. How many children are sexually abused each year? How many witness murder? How many are beaten? How many are outcasts? Those children may ritualize their differentness. They may create their own ways of dealing with the continual abuse or affront to their own nature. But if you multiply that abuse by ten, or one hundred, how much more powerful will those rituals be on the minds of the children? We know so little about the developing mind of a child—and when that mind has been crushed in some way, a strong child may create a ritual for compensating for the boot on his back. A strong child may create a sense of security with an imaginary friend, a game, a ritual, a religion. Because without it, perhaps, reality is too terrifying to face at a young age. But it is in adulthood that these children need to slough off the old skin of these rituals. No doubt, many do. But there are those who do not—like Willa Trent. Like Micah Rollins. Like Eric B.

Each of them faced a trauma in adulthood that forced them back into the childhood ritual for survival.

And the manifestations from their minds became more powerful as a result.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

1

I thought about the Dark Game, and how its ritual had somehow messed with our minds. I didn't see our childhood as particularly harrowing. Perhaps our mother leaving had been the extreme moment that Manley wrote about. Perhaps it even explained my having taken on a voice, a distinct personality, inside the smokehouse, but that wouldn't explain why Mary Manley herself had also been "possessed" (using her own terminology) there. Ghosts. Games. Rituals.

Murder.

I just wanted some ordinariness to creep back into my life.

As I sat in Pola's kitchen, I felt an urgency to get back home.

I was going to take off and write a brief note to Pola, but I waited.

Nothing's wrong there.

This is all just messing with your head.

You'll get Brooke to the doctor in a day or two.

And then maybe you'll get a check-up, too.

2

When Pola and Zack got up, I invited them to Hawthorn just to hang out a while.

The three of us drove through the village in the early morning just as the sun was coming up through a haze of cloud and mist. The road, finally plowed out to Hawthorn, had its requisite potholes and ice patches intact, and Zack laughed each time his mother's car hit one or the other.

I felt a little hope in my gut, which seemed to be a new kind of feeling.

3

Brooke was, of course, still asleep, and I didn't bother going off in search of Bruno. I set Zack to work in the kitchen with me to make eggs and bacon for breakfast, while Pola sat on a nearby stool and watched us try to coordinate the various pans and plates.

It was chilly in the house, and Zack decided that someone needed to make a fire in the fireplace in the living room.

After a relaxing morning, talking old times and letting Zack tell me the history of his life as a young inventor, I went out the front door again to get some wood from the pile by the front porch.

It was still misty out, as it sometimes was even on the coldest of days on the island. The smells of cleanness that snow and ice brought with them lifted my spirits as I went. As I trudged through the crusty snow by the porch, I lifted some of the wood—the top layer was wet, and so I dug down deeper in the pile. I thought I heard a noise—as if someone were nearby and had perhaps called my name, only indistinctly.

When I glanced up, I saw a woman standing at the open door of the smokehouse.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

1

I set the wood back down on the pile.

My heart began to beat rapidly. I don't know why. There was nothing frightening about the woman. She stood in front of the door to the smokehouse, with fog all around her, and I was nearly positive it was Brooke. But I didn't call out to her or wave. My mouth went dry, and I squinted to see her better, but each time I tried to focus on her, she seemed to blur more. I felt a strange prickly heat along my back and felt feverish at the back of my scalp and along my forehead.

Brooke just stood there, and then she went inside the building.

My breathing was rapid, as if I'd run a mile, but in fact I had remained perfectly still for a minute or two. My heart rate felt as if it were increasing, and I suddenly thought of the one or two news stories I'd seen of men my age or even younger who suddenly dropped dead of heart attacks. It was pure fear within me, and I could not for the life of me understand why the idea of Brooke being inside the smokehouse would have such an effect on me.

It's not Brooke, some voice within me intoned. It's her. It's the Banshee. It's the ghost that Harry Withers believes is there. It's whatever killed Dad. It's something evil. Some malevolence that exists. Some awful spirit of darkness that you conjured up.

Yes, you. Don't deny it You three, playing your games, playing your Dark Game after dark. Using the game to conjure devils.

Using the Dark Game to bring something into existence.

Some force.

I would never before have entertained such an irrational thought. I did not believe in these things. I did not believe in the spirit world, in evil entities, in conjuring ghosts.

But the child that still lived within me, the boy who had kept his eyes closed and been with Brooke and Bruno as we played that game, as we took it to heights that our father would never have dreamed we would, that we remained long after dark, sneaking out of the house to go into the smokehouse, that awful little icy building and conjure the Banshee.

Bring her forth.

It has to be your imagination. It can't be real You're under stress. It's anxiety. It's normal under current conditions. Your life is all Jumblies. Your world is upside down. You have love and hate confused in your family. Your father whipped you when you were a boy. Your mother left you and never contacted any of you. You grew your imagination with your brother and sister in a game that was too powerful for young minds.

Young minds that could create within themselves something hideously evil.

Something dark.

The Dark Game wasn't supposed to be played at night.

The Dark Game wasn't supposed to go on like it did.

And one night, it got out of hand.

One night, the night when the Brain Fart began, it went too long. You almost died. You came to in the woods with blood on you; Brooke was found out in the field, shivering from cold; Bruno was soaked with fever-sweat. You three had done something terrible with the Dark Game.

Or it had done something terrible with you.

Your father knew.

He knew that it had gotten the better of you.

He knew that you were no match for the Dark Game.

He knew that whatever was in the smokehouse was evil.

He knew about the Banshee.

2

With all that burning in my brain, you'd think I would've not walked across the road and down the slight hill, crunching through snow, to find out who was inside the smokehouse.

But I had to. I could no longer take the sense that something in the world was so skewed that I might just be losing my mind, even as I was beginning to feel the hope of a renewal with Pola. The hope that something wonderful could be salvaged from the waste of my life and the nastiness of my father's death.

When I reached the smokehouse, I saw that the lock had been torn off. Ripped away.

I glanced back at the main house. I imagined Pola and Zack pulling out the Scrabble board or flipping through the stack of magazines Brooke kept by the coffee table.

From within the smokehouse:

The smell that came at me was like the stench of a dead animal, its stomach ripped open.

I had a flash of an image in my head:

My father, lying on the floor.

I entered that place regardless of fear and inner turmoil.

The place of punishment.

3

Some part of me had been hoping she would have vanished, this phantom, this Brain Fart of some kind. Or even that Brooke would be standing there, in a somnambulistic trance.

But instead, I saw her clearly.

She stood at the center of the smokehouse as the morning light entered, and even the light touched her skin. She had a corporeal presence. It was not Brooke, nor was it some other woman of the village. I felt a terrible hunger from her—the look in her eyes, the tortured grimace of her lips pulled back across her teeth, the sense I had that she was somehow a smudge of darkness, as if I could see her aura. I felt immediately that this was the woman I had sensed when I closed my eyes at night. This was the woman I had feared when Brooke went from room to room in the house. I felt electric waves of fury emanating from her—the only way I can describe it, for it did feel like a power surge in the air.

Then the door to the smokehouse slammed shut behind me.

I felt a series of electrical shocks along my arms and up my spine. It was as if I had begun short-circuiting. I was barely aware of the blood that dripped from my nose, as it had when I'd been a boy and the air was too dry in winter.

I thought that I was dying right then.

Right there.

Darkness descended within the smokehouse, like a candle just snuffed, with only the diffuse glow from the door's window allowing me to see one square of light.

It fixed upon her face.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

I thought this was a vision that I'd see at the moment of death.

My bones seemed to pain me, as if they wished to break free from my flesh.

I could not take a breath as I watched her.

Her face, seething. Her visage cruel.

Her eyes staring as if she could not see me, as if I were the ghost.

My mother.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

1

I lost focus as soon as I saw her face.

It was as if my tear ducts had suddenly released a gusher, and it all went blurry. My mother? I stood there, motionless, frozen, numb on the outside, in the pinpricks along my arms and legs and deep down in my groin, my balls feeling as if they wanted to curl up inside my body never to descend again. In that moment, I felt as if my body were something alien, and my mind, what intelligence I possessed, was separate and hovering, still connected by nerves and the whoosh of blood (which I seemed to hear within my ear canals), but an entirely separate entity that had acknowledged that the flesh and bones surrounding it were of some other being, and that being was scared shitless. I didn't piss my Levis, but I had one of the few nosebleeds I'd had in my lifetime.

Did I mention the awful word: insane? Not the big version of the word, not INSANE as in irredeemable over the chasm I, but the lowercase insane, the insane that was just a wriggling little worm in my head. It could not be my mother. I could not see her clearly anymore, anyway. My vision was going bonkers, and my body seemed to be crapping out on me—and still, I felt it was her.

Do people do this? I wondered. Do people whose loved one has been slaughtered begin to break down and see things? Like the serpent shimmer of the greenhouse glass, and my sister's visions.

Was I succumbing to it? Temporary, mild hallucinatory visions? I felt the cold of the world. Not the winter and its snow and ice. The cold of the world—all that was ugly and fruitless and unloved and irredeemable. The shrugged. The sloughed.

And then the blurry image of the woman whom I knew to be my mother was gone. My vision returned, albeit with a generous hosing of tears—or so it seemed to be at the time—and I saw the wall again.

In my mind, the awful thought: She has come home. She has returned. From Brazil.

And another, awful part of me began chattering, a looking-glass world jabbering:

It's your mind. It's only you. You let it get to you. Let it all get inside you. You were insane as a little boy, and you're crazy now, all the Raglans are crazy, you're inbred Yankees, what killed your father was some evil people, some sadistic narcissistic killers who enjoyed the slaughter, and this vision is your mind melting down. It's your own personal China syndrome. It's your fucked-up nature finally imploding and fucking you up even more.

Yet, I experienced a split, even as these words ran through my head. I was not insane. I know I am not. I am perfectly sane in a normal everyday sanity, the kind that might crack at some future point, but not now. Not healthy and twenty-eight and knowing that there are no radio signals coming into my head from another planet or that the government has some conspiracy going that directly involves something I know, or that the devil is trying to find out what I'm thinking. I was not insane—to even think it, I knew that I could not be. To even question my sanity, I must be sane. I must be.

I was alone in the smokehouse with a bloody nose and a revulsion in my body, as if I had been carrying around in my vital organs, my whole life, some devouring parasite that had begun fighting against its host.

And then something touched my hand.

Something that sent a ripple of disgust and revulsion through me, beginning at the palm of my hand. A terrible, nearly sexual feeling, that touch, that invisible feeling of something warm and moist pressing itself into my hand, a woman clutching my fingers, squeezing them, an unseen woman who was there in that dreadful place with me. In the second it happened, I felt like a child again and opened my mouth to cry out, only my throat was too dry; I tasted the blood from my nose as it dribbled onto my tongue. It was not the metallic taste I'd expected, but a sweet, sugary spike; stop squeezing my hand, I thought, let go, you're hurting me.

The pressure on my fingers continued, and I stared at my hand and watched the skin ripple as if some magnet were pulling at nails beneath it, and the nails moved the flesh—and the tickling continued—and I felt the pressure of fingernails along my wrist, and saw the skin press in like a sponge—and then a sharp pain came, and a small droplet of blood appeared on the surface of my skin. I thought it was from the nosebleed, but it bubbled up from my wrist, and a cut in the skin grew slightly—cutting into me.

Stop it.

Stop it!

I brought my other hand down and tugged at the wrist that was held so tightly. It seemed ridiculous—I kept looking at the place where the blood and pressure were, but it was nothing; nothing.

I pulled at my arm with all the power I could muster and tripped, falling backward.

I realized that my head would hit the stone wall of the smokehouse, and sure enough, when I landed, I felt as if my brains had just been smashed against some enormous boulder.

I lay on the wood-slatted floor of the smokehouse, the back of my head throbbing and banging. I looked into the darkness, and again found the square of light that came through the window, the hazy light of morning.

And in that light, I saw a face from hell.

Not my mother at all.

Perhaps not even a woman.

Stringy, matted hair hung over the blood-soaked face.

The mouth, open, had small nubs of what must have been broken teeth.

The eyes were empty, their sockets drawn back, as if it had not been enough to tear the eyes out, but someone had gone further and dug the holes deep, scraping back the flesh.

I saw pinpoints of light—not from the square of the window, but from the pain in my head. I knew I was passing out, and I was somewhat relieved that whatever I was seeing would pass—or kill me.

I heard a metallic sound, as of a knife being sharpened against stone, only it seemed to be louder and nearly like a bell.

I blacked out.

2

The Dark Game came to me—I dreamed it or remembered it in whatever corridors my brain still had working. I knew I dreamed, and I knew I was the grown-up Nemo, but I was somehow hovering and watching myself at the age of nine, as I stood there with a blindfold on, holding hands with my sister, a sullen eight-year-old, and Bruno, an impossibly small four and a half.

"Here comes a candle to light you to bed," we all three recited, "and here comes a chopper to chop off your head." Three or four times we said it, and Bruno seemed to be crying beneath his ragged blindfold, which looked as if it had been made from one of my mother's old pantyhose.

Then young Nemo said, "We'll go there again. We'll find out why she went there, and we'll see if we can bring her back."

"Daddy said not to," Brooke said, her voice like the chirp of a sparrow.

"I'm the Master of the Dark Game tonight," Nemo said.

"It's nighttime," Bruno whined. "I'm scared."

"Don't be. It only works now. We'll stop by dark, I promise. It's still light out. But the power happens now. Let's go find her," Nemo said below me. "She'll come back. We can make her come back where she is, and then none of it happened."

"I'm scared, too," Brooke whispered. She nearly broke contact with Nemo's hand, but he held on to her fingers.

"Don't break the circle," he said. "Follow me."

"Where?" Brook asked.

And then, the Nemo-of-nine said, "We're going there, we're going back before that night. We're going back to the house, and we're going to do it different, and we're going to make sure that none of it ever happens again. We can find her, and we can bring her back."

But his face had begun to perspire, and I could feel his heat—and the heat of the other two—they were burning with fever, even in the freezing cold, they were frying themselves, they were pushing their minds too hard.

3

I opened my eyes.

I was still inside the smokehouse, on the floor, with a gargantuan ache at the back of my head, and an intense feeling of exhaustion. I sat up, my muscles sore as if I'd been running for miles, my body covered with sweat, a shivering throughout.

I could barely bring myself to look at the square of light.

Nothing.

No one.

4

It felt as if my mind were flashing on and off.

As if lightning played within my head.

I closed my eyes to remember the Dark Game.

5

Holding hands with Bruno and Brooke, in a circle, peeking beneath my blindfold to make sure they weren't peeking at me.

Reciting the nursery rhyme, and then feeling as if we were soaring—all three of us—into a darkness.

And there she was, waiting for us.

Our mother.

Not quite our mother.

Our mother somehow rebuilt inside our imaginations. Our mother crossed with the Ice Queen.

The Maiden of Snow.

The Banshee.

A hybrid of our idea of some monstrous woman and our beautiful mother, with her honey-gold hair turned white, and her eyes yellow-red and fixed with a cruel but cold, snakelike gaze.

Somehow, somehow we had created her.

CHAPTER THIRTY

1

I must have stumbled out of the smokehouse, but I barely remember it. When I came to, Pola and Zack were calling to me from the porch of the house.

When I glanced their way, I thought I felt a pull. A gravitational pull, trying to draw me back into the smokehouse—like invisible fingers, tugging at me.

The sky was heavy with the smoky clouds that generally meant more bad weather—the predictions had been for yet another storm, as we always got on the island in December.

I had the odd sensation that I was dead. Dead and crawling across the ground, but not feeling it. Trying to resist the pull, that force, that magnet, which wanted my body back in the smokehouse.

I heard Pola's cries, and then a sound like the giant wings of a bird flapping close to my ear—

My breath was labored.

I felt as if my lungs were frozen.

I felt hands upon me.

With some effort, I turned slightly to see who had their hands on my shoulders.

As if I saw her at the end of a long dark tunnel, Pola knelt there beside me.

Her lips moved, but I couldn't hear her.

Next to her, standing over the two of us was her son, Zack.

His eyes were wide, as if he saw something awful. I knew who he saw. I knew he must see her as well.

Not Pola, but the other one.

Then I heard Pola's voice. "Nemo? Nemo, are you all right? Nemo?"

I watched, unable to move or speak, feeling a chilling paralysis in my bones, and saw Zack move away.

As if someone were calling him, and he alone could hear the voice.

2

Sound returned, and then sharper vision; finally, after a minute or so, I felt the pinpricks along my legs and arms and the soles of my feet, I could sit up, and felt wet in the snow.

Pola was nearly in tears, but she fought to keep them back. "Oh, my God," she said. "You frightened me. Are you all right?"

I said the only thing that came to my mind. "Where's Zack?"

I wiped my eyes, for they stung. And then, with Pola's help, I got up.

"Zack?" Pola glanced around. "Zack?"

Her son stood at the entrance to the smokehouse.

Zack looked back at us.

"I thought I saw something," he said, but then bounded back over to us.

I still felt shaky, and somehow coated with shame, as if the haywire nature of my brain was its own kind of humiliation. I might be losing my mind, the way that Brooke felt she had been losing hers. I might be suffering some nasty post-traumatic bullshit that would require years of medical attention.

But I felt sane. If you can feel sane, and still feel the sputtering of the circuits of your brain, then I knew I was sane.

3

"Why would I see my mother?" I asked.

I sat on the living room sofa and watched as Zack swung a poker around the logs in the fireplace. Pola struck a match and lit the fire, then came back to sit with me.

"You've been through too much," she said.

"No," I said. "I want to get Harry out here again." I reached for the phone. "You might want to go home."

"Why?"

"I just feel weird about it. I don't want you to worry about anything, and Harry is " I held up the phone and began tapping out Harry's number.

"I'm staying here," Pola said. "If you and Harry want to go out there again, you're free to. You're crazy to want to, if it affects you this much. But Zack and I can just stay here by the fire."

"We can't go home now," Zack said, pointing to the window. "It's snowing again."

It was an understatement on Zack's part. Outside the window, the storm clouds were growing, and what came down was less snow than sleet.

Harry picked up the phone on his end, and I said, "Harry, can you come out here? Now?"

4

After I got off the phone with Harry, I went to go wake up Brooke. Pola offered to come with me, but I asked her to stay in the living room. I had a feeling, something I didn't like having to admit, and it was simply that I didn't want Pola and her son to know about the Dark Game or about what I feared might be all of us cracking up in the wake of our father's death.

I jogged up the front staircase. Unlocking the door to the first room upstairs (locked, just as I had warned Brooke away from doing), I opened it upon a mess. The room I entered, the room that we'd thought of as the sun room, looked like a whirlwind had gone through it. A chair and table had been turned upside down, and papers were scattered all over the floor. As I went from room to room, it was as if someone had been on a tirade, tossing pillows and papers and kicking over trash and pulling drawers completely out of the dressers.

Brooke was not in her bed, but the sheet was half torn off. All the votive candles were left sitting on their shelves, upright, still lit. There were some on the floor.

I called out to Brooke, to Bruno, but got no response.

Then I thought I heard a woman crying. Was it in my head? Was it in the house? It was the most pitiable sound.

I ran in its direction, regardless. Doors opened and closed, and I felt as if I were running through rooms in someone else's memory, for I saw flashes—moments of my father in a room as he had been when I was a child, or of Bruno as a little boy sitting in his red wagon in the rumpus room, or my mother, writing letters at her desk—it was as if my memories were jumping out at me. Close 'em off. Close 'em off.

I found Brooke in the greenhouse, sitting on the cold floor, surrounded by her paintings.

5

"The dogs are gone," she said, looking up at me. "They ran off. They haven't come back. Bruno's after them, but I think they're gone for good. I let them out, but they won't come back."

I stood over her, glancing out through the green glass to the snowy fields and woods. "They run sometimes. Don't worry."

"No," she said. "They've been gone all night."

As she told me of her efforts to find them, nearly freezing to death as she went through the woods with a flashlight, calling for them, I looked at the canvases that were spread out around her.

Each painting was of our father, dead, bleeding, looking up at someone.

6

I put Brooke to bed, wrapping her in quilts and comforters to still her chattering.

There was condensation on her window, but no words finger-painted there.

Outside, snow mixed with sleet continued falling.

Then I went to my own room.

My typewriter was on the floor by my bed, as if someone picked it up off my desk and dropped it there.

I retrieved it from the floor, and when I did, I noticed the papers just under the bed. I reached for them, drawing them out.

Someone had been typing.

YOU CAN'T KEEP ME TRAPPED HERE. I AM GOING TO DESTROY YOU.

PLAY THE GAME FOR ME.

PLAY IT.

PLAY IT OR SHE WILL DIE.

JUST LIKE HE DID.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

1

Bruno arrived, having chased the greyhounds all the way to the other side of the woods. "Something spooked them last night, I guess," he said, dragging them in, all of them soaked from the outdoors. We got towels, dried off the dogs, and put them in their kennels.

Then he told me what he'd discovered.

2

While I'd been at Pola's house, Bruno and his boyfriend had been tearing apart the ceiling of the dining room. It had begun to bow and bend a bit, heavy with drippy plumbing from a leak Bruno hadn't been able to identify, although he had assumed it was from our father's bathroom. He had already caulked the tub and tiles upstairs, but the water damage had increased in the ceiling below it.

He had a stepladder set up, and Cary passed him tools while he pulled at the ceiling. It burst all over him as he sat at the top of the ladder.

Mosquitoes and tiny gnat-like flies swarmed down from the damp open hole that was left behind. He was amazed that mosquitoes could be living in the gaps in the ceiling and walls in the dead of winter. "But the water was warm, so I guess they just kept breeding," he said.

3

He led the three of us into the dining room and pointed to a suitcase on the rug, by the table. "I already opened it, but maybe you should take a look."

I got down on the floor and turned the suitcase on its side. Popped it open.

As I did this, Bruno said, "He must've put it in there when he put in the new tub upstairs."

"A long time ago," I said.

Inside the suitcase, wrapped in plastic and old newspapers, was more money.

4

"Wow!" Zack said. "You're rich!"

Pola drew him back from bounding forward to pick up some of it. "What's all that from?"

"It's like there's another house underneath this one," Bruno said. "Dad's buried treasure."

"Look at all this," I said. I unwrapped the plastic off one pile of bills. "Did you count it?"

"Barely touched it. I crapped out and then had to go hunting those dogs down. For all I know " But he didn't finish the thought.

"Hell, Bruno, it looks like ten—maybe twelve thousand dollars here."

We spent an hour counting it. Some of it was in neat stacks, others had been thrown loosely into the plastic wrap and newsprint. Zack helped out by counting the stray bills that had fallen loose. "Fifteen thousand," I said when I'd finished the final count.

Bruno looked tense.

"Fifteen thousand," I repeated.

"Well, now we know where he stashed it," Bruno said.

5

Bruno began pacing after that. "He hid stuff in the house. He did it. He did the repair on the tub. Shit, he did a repair on the front stairs. What do you bet there's something behind there?"

"The crawlspace?" I asked.

6

I tried to talk him out of it, but Bruno got a crowbar and a drill. I followed behind him, trying to reason with him, then shouted at him to stop, but by the time I grabbed him by the shoulder, he had already smashed the crowbar into the wall behind the front staircase, leaving a huge hole in the thin wall.

He opened up the wall, and reached into the dark opening.

But there was nothing, just the empty space that ran along the front quarter of the house, behind the stairs.

"I bet I can squeeze back there," he said.

"I can do it!" Zack volunteered, leaping up, raising his hand as if he were in school.

"You're too big," Pola said.

"I can do it," Zack said.

"Nobody is going in there," I said.

"Remember how he kept repairing things?" Bruno asked. "How he'd always be working on something—the pipes, the walls. What if he put money back there? What if there's more?"

"That's crazy."

"No, it's not," Bruno said. "He never trusted the bank. He never liked anyone knowing what he made. He and Brooke used to fight about the store because he never kept up with the books."

In a moment of silence, Zack whispered in awe: "I bet there's pirate treasure back there."

I stared at the wall by the staircase, and the raw tear he'd just made in it. "Don't do it! This is crazy!"

"Let's find out," he said, without waiting for any approval from me. He smashed the crowbar into the drywall. It went through. "He had a hand-axe somewhere. He always kept it. Go find it."

"You're going to destroy the house," I said.

Bruno's face looked as if it burned with fever. "I think this house is sick. I think it needs some destroying."

7

When he'd opened the wall up with an axe, a crowbar, and some reckless hammering, we saw what we both wished we had never had to see.

It was our mother's suitcase.

Her red dress.

Her beige shoes. The ones she wore often. The ones that she left the house in.

Even her rosary and a small statue of the Virgin Mary that she had taken with her.

To Brazil.

Not to Brazil at all.

The only foreign country we knew was Hawthorn itself.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

1

By the time Harry showed up, I had asked Pola to take Zack home—it would not be the kind of day I'd anticipated. The only problem was, roads had worsened, Harry said even his SUV had been skidding on the road, and the only reasonable way to get back was to walk. I sat down with Pola in the den.

"Here's the thing," I told her. "There's something wrong with us. Maybe it's some kind of stress from the murder. Maybe it's something inside me. Inside Brooke, too. But I don't understand it. And my fear is that there might be well, some kind of danger here. I have to be sensitive to Brooke's feelings in this, but I think she may be cracking up under all the pressure. And I may be also."

"Let's all go," she said. She took my hand in hers. "Let's all of us just go. We can walk to town. We can walk in the snow. It might take half an hour at the most. You don't need to be here." She didn't say it with any serious gaze in her eyes; she sounded perfectly practical.

And it was true, we didn't need to be there; I didn't need to be at Hawthorn.

But I could not leave my sister there in that condition.

Nor could I ignore something that had been building since I'd arrived.

I had felt the pull of the Dark Game.

I had left the island to avoid its pull. To get away from what was bad inside me.

But the hallucination of my mother—she had seemed like flesh and blood—she had seemed there.

The words from the typewriter.

Brooke's paintings.

Pola looked at me as clear-eyed as I had ever seen anyone. "Do you know that you did this to me when we were young? That you shut me out of your life even then? That you closed ranks with your brother and sister and father as if I didn't matter?"

I didn't detect anger in her voice.

Just the truth.

The absolute truth.

"I know."

She offered a weak smile. "Do what you need to do. We're going to stay here. By the fire. But if I'm going to be part of your life again, I don't want to be shut out. Ever."

2

Pola and Zack remained in the house; we let Brooke sleep. Harry, Bruno, and I went to the smokehouse.

3

We skipped the blindfolds. Bruno and I faced each other. Closed our eyes. Harry, with his small recorder out, sat on the wood-slat floor.

I have to admit, I began laughing at first, and then Bruno did as well, as we took each other's hands.

"Want me to hypnotize you? Would that make it easier?" Harry asked.

I opened my eyes and looked at Bruno, who kept his eyes closed. "I think we need the blindfolds."

"All right, then," Harry said. He took his jacket off, then his shirt, and drew his undershirt over his head. He ripped it up into a few strips, passed them to each of us, and then put his shirt and jacket back on.

"I just feel silly," Bruno said, looking at the rag in his hand.

"Feel silly, then," Harry told him. "Did you feel silly when we were kids and you did this?"

"No," he said. "It was serious then."

"It's serious now," Harry said. "Do you want to know how serious? Let me play something for you." He held up the digital recorder. "Nemo, in my office. I put you under."

"And nothing happened," I said.

"I lied," he said. "You did say things. Only I didn't want to face them. But I need to know if what you told me when you were under is going to come to pass."

He pressed the play button of the recorder.

My voice.

"Harry Withers, you're going to die. Soon. You don't want to make it happen. Not again. You don't want to. You will die. Slowly. Painfully."

Clicked it off.

He shrugged. "Maybe it's bullshit. Maybe not. You used to predict things when you were under," Harry said. "You knew that my father would die of emphysema. You knew other things. This doesn't seem silly to me. I want to know everything that you know."

We began the ritual.

4

I didn't imagine anything, but recited the poem about the bells, and then chanted, "Here comes a candle to light you to bed, and here comes a chopper to chop off your head," repeating these lines again and again. I slipped back into them easily—as if I felt better about myself for saying them.

As if I'd wanted to say them, in the smokehouse, the way I wanted a cigarette or the way I might want a drink.

It felt like an hour went by. We stood there. We held our hands together.

Nothing.

And then it came.

In my mind's eye. Bruno was there with me, watching. Aloud, I described what we were both seeing: my mother.

She was naked, her womb ripped open, and her eyes ran with blood all around them. My father held her, his skin soaked with her blood as it pulsed from the thousand cuts he'd made in her.

And again, he raised the shiny crescent.

Crescent moon?

What was it?

It flashed and came down against my mother's skin.

A small, curved blade.

The blade of a scythe.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

1

One of us let go of the other's hands. I wasn't sure which.

I nearly fell backward, with the force of being let loose from the game.

I had forgotten its power.

"He killed her," Bruno said, tearing off the blindfold.

2

"He may not have," Harry said.

"Bruno, it's a game. It's some mindfuck. It may not be real," I said.

"Her clothes are still here. Her things. He used the Dark Game to survive the POW camps, Nemo. He used it with us to control our minds."

I felt as if a gun had gone off right next to my ear. It was as if the words exploded something, and for a few seconds, the world went silent.

"He used to hurt her," Bruno said. "You may not remember it, Nemo. But I do. He probably hurt her that night."

"Right here," Harry said. I'd nearly forgotten that he was in the smokehouse with us.

It only took us a few minutes to decide what to do next.

We really had no choice.

3

It was so cold outside that I felt as if my ears were going to burn off, and the snow was heavy, and the wind had begun blasting from the north. This time, I was covered from head to foot in a thick down jacket, a wool cap, with a thick wool scarf wrapped around my neck. Bruno was less concerned with the cold and wore his trademark brown leather jacket and jeans, with a baseball cap scrunched down on his head.

He carried the shovels, I carried the axe and crowbar. The flashlights were stuffed in the four pockets of my coat.

Harry had remained in the smokehouse and was speaking into his recorder. Ever the reporter.

4

Inside the smokehouse, we set up flashlights around the floor.

They lit the place decently.

The smell of blood was not quite as strong as I had experienced that morning.

I crouched down and touched the slats of the floor. "He put them in the year she left." My father's blood had dried and frozen the wood.

"Yep," Bruno said.

We began smashing the floor and pulling the wood up as it broke. I piled it in a corner.

We took turns with the shovels, for there were only two of them, a long- and a short-handled.

Bruno cracked the hard surface of the dirt below.

It took an hour to get to it, but we found it.

A canvas tarp, wrapped around the remains of a human body.

Harry crouched down and drew something from it.

"What's this?"

It was a crescent-shaped object. Rusted.

"It's what I always imagined her having. A crescent moon," I said, feeling blood draining from my face.

"He murdered her with it," Bruno said.

We stared at it, and then at each other, for a long time.

I said nothing. I could not comprehend what we'd found. I could not understand it logically.

Our mother had been murdered.

Our mother had been murdered by our father.

He had buried her there, in the place where we had played, when we weren't being punished in the same spot.

Then he had created the Dark Game so that he could stop up our memories.

He fucked each one of us up with that ritual. I wonder if he even knew the power it had for us. The way it had been an addiction for us, going to the smokehouse, or even in the wardrobe in his bedroom, or down by the duck pond.

How our lives had been empty without it.

I felt that now.

Playing it again.

I felt its pull.

It wanted to be played.

It had created a hunger, carved out a place for us.

Made a home within our minds.

5

"She was furious—telling him that she'd never cared for him and that she hadn't wanted children at all. I sat out on the stairs and listened and saw what I could from the banister. He was practically on his knees," I said, remembering the look on my poor father's face as my mother, seeming more wicked than she had ever been to any of us before, told him how he had destroyed anything he'd ever touched and how if he loved the children so much, he could take care of them, but she was going to South America, she was going for love, and she was not going to spend another minute in the hellhole known as Hawthorn or the awful place called Burnley Island.

Even as I said it, it sounded false. I hadn't drawn that memory up in years, and this time, it didn't sound right. It sounded too perfect.

"Like it's from a movie," Bruno said. "Or made up. Like he made it up. Like he made you think that had happened. Face it, he murdered her. He killed her. Here."

"The place of punishment," I said.

"I want more," Bruno said, a silly look coming over his face. He took deep breaths, and leaned over, resting his hands on his knees. "That wasn't enough."

"Bruno?" I said. "You okay?"

He looked at me wild-eyed, nodding. "We need Brooke. I want more of it. I want to go back to that night. In the Dark Game. Harry, don't you think she should be here? We just got a glimpse. Harry, you can be part of it. You played it once."

"Nothing happened. I didn't see anything."

Bruno glanced over at me. "All of us. Pola, too."

"No," I said. "Not Harry, either."

"Then Brooke," Bruno said, nearly panting as if he'd been running a few miles. "He fucked us over for life, Nemo. We need to go back there. We need to play it like we used to play it. Only not by his rules."

6

Brooke was in no condition for any of this.

She looked at him as if she could not quite focus. "I'm so tired, Bruno. Bruno, Nemo, let me sleep. I'm so tired."

"Get up," Bruno said. A roughness had come over him, and I also felt it. It was the hunger for the game. We wanted to be back in it. It gave us something, no matter how awful it seemed afterward, it gave us something. And when it was over, it took it away. "Come on. Let's go out there again. Let's play the Dark Game there. Now."

Brooke protested, and I told him it could wait, but he was enraged. "We are going to play it!" he shouted, and somehow, I knew that I had wanted to play the Dark Game again, ever since I'd returned.

The nightmares had been waiting for me.

The doors had been locked in my mind.

I let Bruno vent all the repressed fury he'd held inside, and I was afraid he was going to hit Brooke. I lunged at him, and drew him back from her bed. "Stop it!"

Then, I told her about what we'd found in the smokehouse.

7

In the smokehouse again, with Harry standing away from our circle, we began. Brooke had taken some tranquilizers and was fuzzy with the rhyme, but she accepted the blindfold. Her hands, and mine, trembled.

Harry glanced at his watch. "It's not quite dark yet," he said. "It will be soon."

"Perfect," I said. "The hour before dark you start. And if you keep going, it becomes real."

8

"Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clemens." We all said the rhyme. Bruno, the most enthusiastically. I felt the shivering of Brooke's hand in mine and kept a firm grip on her. It was cruel to do this. It was perhaps even evil, for her mind was fragile enough at this point. But the hunger was in me. Just as it had been as a boy. I was merely a conduit, a channel for the Dark Game.

"You owe me five farthings, say the bells of St. Martin's," we said, and it continued until the line "And here comes a chopper to chop off your head." As silly as it was, it gave me strength, and I felt more connected to my brother and sister than I had in years. It had been the missing piece to my existence. It had been the surge of power I'd regretted ever leaving behind.

We were one.

We were one in the Dark Game.

And then, with one voice, we began speaking, as if our minds had merged, and the words themselves took us into another darkness.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

1

It was the night our mother left.

2

"No, Daddy!" I cried out, but I could not stop him from beating at her with his fists.

"You goddamn whore! You have done this for the last time!" he shouted. He barely looked like my father at all. His face was contorted, and his eyes wild and angry. He grabbed my mother by her long golden hair and pulled so hard that, as she screamed, long strands of blood-tipped hair came out in his fist.

She tried to fight him, but he kept punching her. I jumped on him and beat my fists against his back, but he shook me off and kicked at my face.

"You goddamn whore!" he yelled at her again. Brooke and Bruno stood in the doorway crying.

"I'm going to punish you, you bitch! You kids, get out to the smokehouse. You're going to see how whores get treated!"

And then it was as if we were floating, all of us, and I could go in and out of my father's mind at will, and I heard the voices he had within him. I felt the tortures that had been inflicted upon him, the whippings his father had given him, and the muddy hole he'd been kept in for months at a time while he played the Dark Game himself—and something else was there in his mind; something else lurked within him.

Something created by the Dark Game itself.

A monster.

Not a human being turned monstrous.

But a creature that had knives for teeth, in circular, lamprey rows, going down its throat. Something was loose within him, something he could not control.

Banshee.

3

Next, we watched as he held our mother up in front of us—she was barely conscious—and he tore her dress from her, and then her bra, her pale white skin bruised.

We saw three children—they were us—tied with hands behind our backs.

"NONE OF YOU DESERVES TO LIVE!" my father screamed. "NONE OF YOU! YOU ARE ALL BASTARDS AND FOR ALL I KNOW I'M NOT EVEN YOUR FATHER! I AM THE FATHER AND WHAT I SAY GOES! NOT ONE OF YOU IS EVER GOING TO BREAK MY RULES, YOU UNDERSTAND ME?"

"Please," my mother said. "Please, God, please, oh God, please."

For a lightning-flash of a moment, I saw her not as a woman, but as a lamb about to be slaughtered beneath a farmer's axe.

My father's booming voice caused the children to tremble.

They had duct tape on their mouths.

He was going to hurt them, as well.

"You're all bad! You're all evil!" my father yelled, and then his voice softened, and he kissed the edge of my mother's lips. "You're making me do this. You have evil in you. It needs to be cleansed. It needs to be wiped free."

The broken handle of the scythe was in the comer.

The blade was in my father's hands.

The children's eyes went wide as the blade came down into my mother's throat.

4

And then we were all crying, digging in the dirt.

My father was digging also, burying my mother's body.

"None of you should be alive. None of you. She was a good woman, but she went bad. You each are going bad. I can see it coming," he said.

Bruno began moaning the loudest.

My father ripped the tape from his mouth and grabbed Bruno around the waist, hugging him.

My father wept.

"Don't kill me, Daddy," Bruno sobbed.

Again, I had that strange sensation. I could move into my father's mind, and I felt the monster there, and when I tried to picture it, the word banshee came up. Inside my father. Growing. Struggling against him. I felt the killings he'd done in the war, some justified by battle, others, darker, for he had been playing the game. The monster had grown within him like a tumor. A dark blotch of cancer in his mind, taking him over, but retreating, in remission.

"I love you, baby," he said to my brother, and began sobbing himself. He released Bruno, and pressed his hands to his forehead. "Get out of me!" he shouted. "Get out of me!"

In his mind, I felt it, some kind of change, some shift of his blood.

He replaced the duct tape over Bruno's lips.

Little Brooke was gone. Her eyes glazed over. It had been too much for her. I moved through her mind and heard: Daddy is not doing it. It didn't happen. She went away. She went away. Somewhere else. Another place called Brazil. She went away. Daddy did not do it. Daddy did not tie her up. Daddy did not punish her. Daddy did not punish her and make her hurt. DADDY WOULD NEVER HURT US! DADDY LOVES US! HE'S ONLY PUNISHING MOMMY! BUT IT'S NOT REAL! IT'S THE DARK GAME! SHE RAN AWAY FROM US BECAUSE SHE DOESN'T LOVE US!

I felt as if I were shot back out of Brooke's mind.

When I looked at my own nine-year-old self, I wasn't exactly all there either. My eyes had the same glassy look as did Brooke's, and it was the saddest thing I'd ever seen.

Who could blame these children?

Witnessing this.

Seeing it happen.

I went inside my own mind, to get a sense of what I could be thinking, and all I felt was darkness there—so much that it stung for me to stay inside my childhood self.

I drew back and watched.

My father filled in my mother's grave, and then sat with us all day.

All night.

Then, against my will, I was sucked into my childhood self.

I felt intense pain, as if my skull were about to explode, and something eel-like swam through my skin, making me feel uncomfortable in my own flesh.

In that little boy's mind he was in a small boat on the sea. In the sky, an enormous silver crescent moon, but it was barely dark yet.

My father was turned with his back to me. He had a fishing line out in the water. When I looked in the bottom of the boat, near my bare feet, it seemed alive with fat, wriggling eels and trout, their tails flipping as they tried to get out of the boat.

He turned to face me. His eyes were no longer there, but blood poured from the empty holes.

(Someone cried near me. Bruno?)

"Don't be afraid," my father said. "Just close your eyes. Don't touch anything."

I glanced down at the eels in the boat. The eels were in the child's imagination. He wasn't in a boat. He wasn't near the water. But he wanted to remake the world so that it made sense to him. "Them?" he asked, looking at the eels.

"Just stay still here. Keep your eyes closed. Don't lean. No talking. Ignore the noise," he said. "Listen to what I'm about to say. Listen very carefully. Each word I say is important. Each word is like a key to a door. I want you to imagine a small red light, so small you can barely see it, Everything about it is completely pitch dark, but the light is red like a tiny, tiny fire. I want you to follow me with that fire, follow me as I take you somewhere else."

Somewhere else.

I watched an eel with a mouth like a python as it devoured one of the fish. I nodded, not wanting to say anything to him.

"She went away," my father said, returning his gaze to the ever-growing moon as a seagull's shriek became a scream. "But someday, she'll be back. Nemo, you saw her on the stairs. In her red dress. You cried and you tried to grab her, but she was mean to you. She didn't love any of you. She didn't love me. A man waited for her outside. They were leaving you. Abandoning you. You three slept in my bed that night, you slept there and we all wept together that she didn't love any of us anymore "

I was expelled from my childhood mind and floated again, watching as my father used what can only be described as brainwashing techniques, combined with the Dark Game itself. Hours passed in seconds, and the children remained in that smokehouse for days, being fed, peeing and shitting in their clothes, while my father kept them prisoner.

And the Dark Game began to take them over.

5

Beneath the blindfold, aware again of being in the smokehouse with Bruno and Brooke.

Brooke seemed to be forming words as if she were first learning to speak.

Bruno whispered, "The Brain Fart."

6

I was a bird flying in the air, looking down as each of us left the smokehouse as children. My father carried Brooke in his arms, for she seemed sick and feverish. Bruno held my—the boy I was—hand. At the house, that Nemo began to panic—you could see it in his eyes, and his skin turned pale—he let go of his little brother's hand and ran out and away from the house and his father.

Ran down through the fields.

We felt the sucking hunger of his mind, as if it had been carved up in that Brain Fart, and something instinctive made him run away.

Down to the woods the little boy went, and when he got there, he began biting his own arms, just above the wrist.

Even drawing blood.

But a man came there and took him to the stream to wash the blood.

It was his father.

The monster within him, gone.

The father took his son in his arms and carried him home.

7

Aloud, back in the present, in the smokehouse, I said, "Bruno, Brooke, do you feel it?"

After a moment, Brooke whispered, "What is it?"

"I don't know," I said.

But whatever it was, it went through the three of us like a current.

I was convinced that there were four people holding hands in that circle.

We were not there without something else also being there. Holding our hands, holding them tightly, not wanting any of us to break the circle.

8

"It's Mom," Bruno said. "It's Mom, I can feel her. It's it's "

"Oh God, do you feel it, Nemo?" Brooke asked, her voice suddenly full of energy, where it had sounded drained and exhausted moments before.

And I did feel it.

An electrical current flowing through us.

We saw her.

Our mother.

But not as we wanted her to be.

9

We watched as our father, just two weeks before, stepped into the smokehouse.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

1

Gordie Raglan sniffed at the air, and we smelled it as well: a powerful odor.

Dead animal.

He crouched down and touched the floor.

What was he thinking? I couldn't sense anything from his mind. I didn't seem to possess the power to move through him any longer.

And then something grabbed him.

I expected to see a ghost.

To see our mother there, with blade in hand.

But instead, it was Brooke.

She attacked with the ferocity of a wild animal.

The first slice came down on his shoulder.

The blade went in and out, and my sister engulfed him.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

1

Suddenly, I felt my mind explode, and for minutes I began to see a strobe-like white light flashing in darkness.

We'd let go of each other's hands.

2

"It wasn't me!" Brooke cried out.

I tore the blindfold from my face.

The flashlights on the ground cast eerie shadows around us.

"I didn't do that," she said. "I didn't. It couldn't have been me."

"I know," I said, "It was something else. It was the Banshee in the game."

"The monster we made up," Bruno said. "We gave it life."

"In the Dark Game," I said.

There was a terrible smell in the smokehouse as we three stood there.

"I want to keep playing," Bruno said, and his voice was curiously like that of a child.

The odor grew stronger, and I began to feel sick.

"Harry," I said, turning around, nearly having forgotten he was there with us, observing.

What greeted me then was something I could not have imagined. Not have wished upon my worst enemy.

Or my best friend.

3

First, I have to tell you that the Dark Game was within each of us now—and all of us at once. It had been waiting there, waiting to open those doors, and close others, within our minds, just as the doors in Hawthorn had opened and closed on us, just as life had opened and closed on us.

I felt different. I remembered the high that I'd felt as a boy, as if I had no problems whatsoever, as if I could do or be anything, and how we'd play the Dark Game and soar like birds, or swim beneath the sea like eels wriggling into the fathomless depths. I breathed more clearly. I felt stronger. Sweeter.

And when I saw what had become of Harry, it terrified me, but that switch had been flicked inside me and I wasn't sure if it was the Dark Game scaring me, or the sight of him.

He lay crumpled on the ground.

There was a look in his eyes as if he'd seen something too terrifying to live through. A kind of awe and astonishment, and he nearly seemed alive to me. As Joe Grogan might say, it was the damnedest thing.

I knelt down and held him. He was gone. Tears came to my eyes. I didn't understand this. I wanted to know what he'd seen, why he had to die.

Why I even let him be there with us.

Why the Dark Game had to feed off him like that.

4

Bruno was the first to notice. "Look, it's dark out. We played past twilight. It's real now. That's what happens. It's real." He spoke as if drunk, with both a lazy slurring of words and a nearly hyperactive physicality.

Brooke began shuddering. "I didn't do it. I just could not. I didn't."

It was as if neither of them saw Harry, lying dead. I, too, was disconnected from that death.

We were too much in the game now.

"What happened that night?" Bruno asks. "Why did you sit there for hours?"

"I don't know!" Brooke shouted.

"You do know! You know, you're just not saying!"

Something within Brooke seemed to break. "I was playing it. By myself. I closed my eyes. I went into the darkness. I couldn't help it. I couldn't."

I went to her and put my hands around her, but felt cold inside toward her.

Toward myself.

The Dark Game had won.

It had been lurking and biding its time.

The Banshee, the only thing I can call the creature I felt stirring in my brain now, the name we stole from among several names of spirits and monsters, our made-up creature with the face of our mother crossed with the Ice Queen, crossed with the lamprey-monster of nightmares it remained a small parasite in our brains, but the Dark Game had brought it out. Fed it. Let it grow.

"The night he was killed," I whispered in Brooke's ear. "You tried to kill yourself. You played the Dark Game. By yourself. Your blood spilled. And it came back to you."

She drew back, her eyes wide with horror.

Then she pushed me; I nearly fell over, her strength had increased so much from the game. Her eyes seemed wild, but not with fear. Something else. Something that reminded me too much of the Banshee.

She crouched down by our mother's remains and plucked something from them.

The scythe. She glanced back at me like a wild animal, as if she didn't recognize me at all.

Then she ran for the door, flung it open, and ran out into the snow.

Bruno grabbed me by my shoulders and snarled, "Let her go! You brought this back! You and your friend!" Then he let go of me and grabbed the sides of his head. "Get it out of me! I don't want it in me! It's burning me!"

I felt it too, a slight rise in my body temperature, and we both saw the other one, standing there between us.

The Banshee, with her eyes harsh and unforgiving.

Our mother.

Our monster.

The ultimate Mistress of the Dark Game.

And then the howling of the wind, as the creature before us became a shadow and swept out the door, across the dark night.

I ran out, and shielding my eyes, followed the shadow as it moved toward Hawthorn itself.

5

The front door to Hawthorn was open wide.

Inside, silence.

"Pola?" I called. "Zack?"

Behind me, Bruno, and what had become a blizzard.

6

Inside the house, the living room was silent.

The fire continued to burn in the hearth.

"Pola?"

From upstairs, a single, muffled scream.

7

I ran up the stairs as quickly as I could; the first door was locked.

Smoke came out from beneath it. Inside my head the words: Here comes a candle to light you to bed.

8

I turned to Bruno, behind me. The game was in him too much—his eyes—his heavy breathing as if he were consuming oxygen like beer.

"Your keys," I said.

"Let's play it again," he said, licking his lips.

"Give me your keys," I said.

9

By the time I'd opened the door, I could already smell smoke. My heart raced. I bounded from room to room, As I opened each door into the next room, more smoke began to come my way.

"Brooke! Pola!" I shouted as I went, and when I finally got to Brooke's bedroom, it was locked.

"Brooke!" I pounded on the door.

"It's all right!" Brooke shouted from the other side of the door. "It's all right, Nemo! I'm in the Dark Game! The fire won't hurt me!"

"Unlock the door! Brooke!" I rammed the door with my shoulder, and it gave slightly. "Brooke! It wasn't you! It was that thing. It's inside all of us. It was in the smokehouse. It was in the game. You don't have to do this. You didn't kill him!"

"It's all right," she said, and her voice became singsong as she recited the Dark Game rhyme. "Here comes a candle to light you to bed, and here comes a chopper to chop off your head!"

I busted the door down, my shoulder feeling as if it were nearly dislocated from the effort.

The candles were overturned, and the curtains had caught fire.

I saw something that I will never forget.

Bruno beside me started shouting, but I didn't hear him. The chill I felt inside brought a deafening silence.

Brooke stood near the bedroom window as the flames rose on either side of her, and even seemed to be under her feet.

She began to rise, just imperceptibly, so little that I thought I imagined it.

And then she levitated higher.

The whites of her eyes showed. Her face became contorted in the same rage I'd seen in the phantom of my mother at the smokehouse that morning.

All sound came back to me as her lips parted.

"HERE COMES A CANDLE TO LIGHT YOU TO BED! She screeched, waving the crescent blade in her hand and slashing at the fire itself. "AND HERE COMES A CHOPPER! HERE IT COMES, NEMO! A CHOPPER TO CHOP OFF YOUR HEAD! TO CHOP YOU INTO PIECES WHILE YOU WATCH! WHILE YOU LIVE UNTIL THE LAST SLICE HAS GONE IN!"

Behind her, the window burst open—the storm windows as well exploded around her. The blast sent her body forward.

She began to glide on a current of air toward me.

My mind began to scramble, but I stood my ground.

It's the Dark Game. It's nothing more. It twists what you see. It fucks with you.

I gasped as I felt a whoosh of air being sucked out of my lungs.

Things seemed to move slowly; time had changed subtly; the fire itself moved in slow motion.

It's the Dark Game. Play it. Play it as the Master of it.

I grabbed Bruno by the wrists. "We have to go there now. Right now!"

Bruno looked at me as if I had just told him we were going on a roller coaster. He grinned, nodding, and closed his eyes.

The game—a drug—a door to a better place.

I closed my eyes, terrified that I'd open them again to find the scythe coming down on my neck.

Let's go there, let's go. We'll find you, Brooke. We'll find you there, and we'll bring you out. Come on.

I felt Bruno's mind slip into mine, easily, like a hand in a glove.

Calm, as well.

In the darkness, I saw Brooke, her blindfold on.

In the darkness, I pulled the blindfold back. Tore it from her face.

I saw her eyes look up at mine.

My little sister.

I opened my eyes again and let go of Bruno's hands.

Brooke was nearly next to me, both feet on the floor.

"You watched him torture me! You let him kill me!" she shouted with the voice of our mother. She swung the scythe up and seemed to bring it down to Bruno's arm, but he moved at just the last second, and it sliced, instead, into his leg. I grabbed her by the wrist and shook her. I felt a jolt of electricity go through her, and that awful sweet feeling of the game.

She dropped the blade. It slid across the floor. She twisted her arm out from my hand and lunged at me, her teeth nearly going to my throat. It was like fending off a mad dog.

I threw her back with all my strength; she landed on the bed, its sheets catching fire as if she were the fire herself.

The howling wind outside the broken window—

I heard the explosive slamming of doors in the house, one after the other.

Brooke began biting her arms, reopening the cuts on them, blood on her lips. The flesh curling back as the wounds spread wide.

"Yes! Yes! Hold my hands," she said. "Hold my hands. We don't have to be here. We can go there. Into the dark. We can be with her. With Mother."

I rushed to her and yanked her up from the burning bed; the skin along her neck had begun bubbling from the burn, and her hair had caught fire. I wrapped her in the quilt, snuffing out the flames along her scalp, and lifted her up.

She pressed her lips to my neck as I carried her, licking. It was the nastiest thing I'd ever felt.

It's not her. It's not. It's not a ghost. It's something we created in that game. It's something that exists in it.

We don't play it.

It plays us.

I carried her out of her bedroom, opening one door after another to get out of the house; she clawed at me the whole way, scraping my neck and tearing at my coat like it was made of paper.

"Bruno, come on!" I shouted.

10

The fire had its own power—that same surge we'd felt—and it spread too fast on the upper floor. Flames shot out of the windows.

I lay Brooke down in the snow on the quilt.

"Watch her!" I said.

I went back in for Pola and Zack, but as I raced through the rooms on the ground floor, I saw shapes of things—of children—of us, the three of us, children in the house, as if I were seeing quick flashes of moments from my childhood. Part of me wondered whether I was still in the smokehouse.

Still in the Dark Game.

My brain was flashing on and off, as if it had a struggle to make sense of everything that had gone on that night.

At the other end of the house, in the greenhouse, the door leading outside was wide open.

I saw light down by the woods. A flashlight's beam.

I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted Pola's name.

I heard a call back up from the woods.

Pola's voice.

They were safe.

11

I stood outside and watched Hawthorn burn, as it probably should've burned years before. The greyhounds were on leashes—when we'd been in the smokehouse, Pola and her son had taken the dogs out through the back of the house, and they'd run off again. Pola and Zack went out in the storm, leashes in hand, to get them back. And come back they did; perhaps, those dogs even saved the lives of the woman and boy who chased them down.

Bruno took Brooke up to Harry's SUV, and we sent Zack running across the road to go ask Paulette and Ike Doone to call the fire department if they hadn't already.

I was hoping that the place would just burn.

None of us could ever live there again.

None of us would want to sleep in that house, or even in its general vicinity. It would be days before we could even mourn Harry's death; we were in shock.

Shock would be our operating mode for weeks to come.

But that night, our home burning, in the snow, I felt hope from the woman who stood beside me.

12

"I don't think life has meaning," I said to Pola. "I just don't. Not after this."

Pola took my hand, squeezing it lightly. It was like some Morse code between us, and I felt some meaning in her touch. No Dark Game there. "Don't die twice," she said.

I glanced at her. Her face, beautiful and undisturbed. She was a survivor of things. She was someone I wanted to understand better.

"There's plenty of time for what will come. You and I will grow old. We'll be haunted by the past. But it's just the past," she said. "I'm not sure there are answers here. In this world. It's just mystery here. I think all we're supposed to do is ask the questions. The answers are for later."

I had nothing to say to this. I had no defense. I felt an enormous burning within myself, even as the last of the house went, and with it, some screams in my head that I suppose had not stopped since I'd been a little boy and had watched my mother die at the hands of my father.

There we were: Pola, her scarf tied around her hair, her beige jacket wrapped around her body; and me, standing on the gravel of the roadside, watching the fire consume the night.

In the darkening sky, the ashes floated gray and white; upward, like snowflakes turning from the earth back to the heavens.

I had no words left. I reached for her, clung to her, held her, and I wanted life more than anything else in the world.

EPILOGUE

1

The murder of my father was never officially solved. There were no fingerprints. There was no evidence beyond pictures in our minds. Bruno and I knew it hadn't really been Brooke. We knew it had been something else. An energy there, brought from darkness.

A power, fueled by a children's game.

Fueled by fear and anger and terror.

And by something we would probably never be able to fully understand.

Perhaps, a psychic spark against a flint of human madness.

Not our mother.

But an imaginary monster called Banshee that three children had conjured once upon a time.

2

I suppose if Harry hadn't been diagnosed as having a heart attack, Joe Grogan would've believed our stories about apparitions and possession and a game that drove you mad and turned you into some kind of psychic generator. (We didn't mention Brooke. We protected her. We knew the truth.) "He had a heart murmur," Joe told me. "It could've happened at any time."

I knew better. Even Joe had seen the way Harry's face looked. It had contorted not in pain, but in fear.

But I let it go. No good would be served by protesting about what no one—least of all a policeman with an orderly and skeptical mind—would believe unless he had been there to experience it.

Still, I knew I'd spend my life regretting ever allowing Harry into that smokehouse. It was the birthplace of all fear, for every one of us.

My mother's remains were positively identified from dental records, and we buried her in the Raglan cemetery down beyond the woods, but not 'til spring. I insisted that she not be buried near where my father was finally laid to rest, but at the opposite end, near Granny Pree, whom my mother had loved so much.

Brooke left the island, perhaps too quickly; we worried about her but her occasional notes and phone calls sounded as if she were healing. Bruno and I remained; Pola and I took in the greyhounds, both of whom wreaked havoc on Pola's small house, but Zack adored them.

I adored them as well, for they had saved two people I loved very much, just by being out of control.

3

We three Raglans decided to sell off parcels of land, once summer came around. We all could use the money, and Bruno expressed an ambition to build a small place on the other side of the woods, far away from where Hawthorn had stood. So, we'd keep a few acres, and sell the rest as buyers became interested. Bruno and I wanted Brooke to have the lion's share of any sale, but she insisted that whatever sale MontiLee Stormer could get, the proceeds would be divided three ways.

I still had to overcome my fear of the place.

I went there in March and wandered the ruins of the house. I couldn't bring myself to go near the smokehouse, and frankly, congratulated myself on that wisdom. No use opening that door, ever again.

As I walked around the property, with the winter chill and that whistling wind still biting at my neck, I felt a peace I'd never experienced there before.

It was gone.

Whatever had been there that was bad.

It had left.

Burnt itself out.

4

We had a reunion of sorts in June at Hawthorn—Midsummer's Eve, to be exact. The longest day of the year, which also meant the longest twilight.

The weather was delightful, the mosquitoes were a bit heavy, and Pola and I spent an afternoon cooking and preparing, with Zack running errands to make sure there were enough potatoes for the German potato salad, and for last-minute runs to Croder-Sharp-Callahan for paper plates.

Zack invited his friends, Mike and Mike's sister, Jenny, whose parents were going off on a sailboat with another couple that evening. It was nearly like having a big family in tow, but I loved every minute.

Bruno and Cary met us in the village. We drove from there out to the property.

5

All that was left of the house was its foundation and what I'd best call "scraps"—broken glass, burnt out frames of windows, some brick rubble—the ruins. Wildflowers, brightly colored in lavender and yellow, had sprung up around the foundation, and we settled on the southern edge of the foundation for our picnic. Cary had a huge quilt, which he spread out; it fit nearly all of us, with our feet hanging over the edge in the fresh green grass. The kids went off to play games down by the duck pond.

"How's the book?" Cary asked.

"Crap," I said. "But what the hell. I'm putting everything I have in me into it. It'll probably never get published."

"It'll get published," he said. "And I'll even read it. What's it called?"

I didn't want to tell the title at first, but I couldn't very well keep it a secret too long. "The Dark Game," I said.

"Ah." Bruno nodded. "And it's about?"

"Innocence and evil," I said. I didn't want to talk much about it. The story for the book was pretty much writing itself, and I'd discovered that the less said about a writing project, the more urgent it seemed to me to write it. "How's the business?"

"Same as yesterday," he said, grinning. "Same as tomorrow."

"MontiLee sell this place yet?"

"Three offers, but she said we should turn 'em down. She said give it another three weeks of summer, and we'll get the real offers."

"Regular entrepreneurs we are," I said. "Brooke probably wishes we'd just take an offer soon."

"Brooke never responded," he said.

"She'll show."

"I'm not sure if she's coming," Bruno said.

"She'll be here," I said.

I knew my sister well enough to know that she'd somehow find a way back here for this one evening. She had, after all, been the center of the family in ways that neither Bruno nor I ever could be. Yet, he and I chose to remain on Burnley, despite the past. Brooke had moved on, going first to the Cape, and then up to Maine, getting work in an art shop there.

I suppose she also had reason to never come back.

But the three of us had found some peace together; some middle ground of friendship that seemed to surpass the bad memories.

Since Bruno and I saw each other fairly regularly in the village, we just talked about the weather and the onslaught of summer tourists.

I followed Zack and his friends down to the duck pond to show them how to skip rocks.

"You choose a good flat one," I said. "Like this." I angled it and threw it in the pond, but it plopped down without a skip. "Been too many years," I said.

Zack laughed, picked up any old rock he found, and tossed it—the damn thing skipped three times before sinking.

"You've been practicing," I told him.

Pretty soon, Jenny and Mike were just throwing pebbles into the duck pond. The ducks, wisely, either flew away or skedaddled to the other side of the pond.

Jenny discovered—among the house debris—what looked like the torn remnants of an old sheet, with light green flowers on it. She held it up. "Somebody lost their bed," she said.

"Must be a squatter's," I said.

"What's that?" Zack asked.

Jenny made pouty sounds as her brother tugged the sheet away from her.

"Someone who camps out someplace where nobody notices. They squat," I said.

Zack gave me a funny look.

"It's not a precise definition," I added. I glanced over at the other kids, who'd begun fighting.

"Give it back!" Jenny protested.

"It's dirty!" Mike said, flinging the sheet back to his sister. "Take your ol' dirty sheet."

"It's pretty," little Jenny said, wrapping it up in her arms. "I'm gonna make a dress."

Mike and Zack rolled their eyes, and Jenny ignored them, rolling the sheet up as if it were some great treasure.

Zack grabbed my hand and wanted me to lean down so he could whisper something to me.

"What?" I asked.

"She's here."

When he said it, I felt that terrible bone chill again, and I looked at him as if he were some kind of evil child—for just a second, in my head: the memory of the Banshee, her fury, her absolute cold hatred for us, for any who were at Hawthorn.

But then I looked in the direction he pointed, and it was Brooke, up on the road. She had gotten a lift from Joe Grogan, who waved to us as he drove away.

I left the kids to play and trudged up the hillside.

6

"You made it!" I shouted as I reached her. Brooke had a smile so wide that it seemed to want to break away from her face.

She looked healthier than I'd ever seen her, too. Her face, no longer pale, had a rosy glow to it. She wore silver bracelets on each wrist, no doubt her method of hiding the thin white marks left by cuts. "Guess what?" she said, and before I could say another word, "I'm pregnant."

"Holy crap," I said. I grabbed her and hugged her. Bruno huddling nearby with Pola and Cary, shouted, "And you look it! You must've put on ten pounds!"

"At least," she said. "I predict a thirty-pound baby at the birth."

We sat around, chewing on fried chicken and drinking Coke from the can, and at about six o'clock Bruno began telling the kids the history of the Raglan family.

I drew Brooke aside and we took a walk down a slender path in the field.

"Who is he?" I asked. "This guy."

"A total wastrel," she said. "He's a poet who also works on boats in Camden. He does a good business. And he's a really good poet."

"Marriage in the picture?"

"Does it matter?"

"It's up to the two of you, I guess," I said.

"He wants to. He's proposed. I don't know. It happened so fast. I need more time, I think."

"Sure," I said.

"I wanted to run to well, the ends of the earth, I guess. I couldn't get out of New England. It's a Raglan curse. I met him in March. He told me it was love at first sight for him. I guess I love him. I mean, I feel like I do. But I don't trust it."

"The feeling?"

"I just don't. I don't know how many years it'll take to undo all this well, damage. Is that the word for it?"

"Sounds right to me."

"He told me he'd wait."

"He know about the baby?"

"Not yet. He will soon. Nemo, I'd never talk about this with anyone else, but I feel comfortable asking you. Do you think I could ever be a mother?"

"What do you mean? Of course you could. You will be."

"I'm not sure," she said. "What if it's some kind of mental illness? What if what happened to us is "

"In our blood?"

She heaved a sigh, an enormous weight from within.

"Come on, Brooke."

"I'm more worried about the game," she said. "I'm still not sure what it was."

"The game is over. He taught it to us to control us."

"No," she said. "I've thought about it a lot. It controlled us. It may have controlled him, too."

"Maybe. But what happened has nothing to do with you now."

She let out a mocking laugh. "Of course it does. Of course it does, Nemo. It has a lot to do with me—and you and Bruno—now."

I realized how dumb I'd been sounding. How we'd always talked around each other. How all three of us had to stop it if we were going to reach out into our own lives into new families and protect them and ourselves. "You're right. It had a profound effect on us. You look like Mom. I look like Dad. You paint like Mom. Bruno plays music like Mom. I'm as stubborn as Dad was. But what happened at this house was not about that. It was about human evil. And maybe about what that leaves behind. But it's gone. It got burned out. None of us gets a fucked-up-free life, Brooke. Nobody. Even Pola and Cary—maybe nobody went nuts like Dad did, but everybody gets slammed into the ground by life in one way or another. And I guess the choice is what we do with it. You can wallow in that past. You can let it break you. Or it can be like like rain, washing off you. You can let this wonderful guy go, this guy who adores you and writes poetry and fixes boats and puts you and your child first and who believes in love at first sight. You can even lose the baby. You can get it removed, and tell yourself that it's for the best, that someone like you shouldn't bring a child into the world. Or you can make the choice that you will overcome this. That it was a storm, but the storm is passed. Just like we overcame it in childhood. I was thinking about the Brain Fart, Brooke. I was thinking about it, and why it was there, and the only thing I can come up with is: We are meant to forget. We are meant to put aside childhood. We are meant to say goodbye to the families we came from, if they're bad for us. We are meant to move on and create our own families. That's what none of us had done. We are meant to have a Brain Fart so that all the bad things don't keep us from what life offers. And for you, life is offering what you wanted: a family. Dad couldn't provide it, not the way it's supposed to be. He was a murderer, plain and simple. He butchered our mother. Maybe we can blame the prison camp he was in. Maybe we can blame the way his father whipped him. Maybe it was just madness. Something happened here that was terrible. Something continued to remain here afterward. But it's gone now. It doesn't have to be in here," I said, and I placed my hand near her heart. "It doesn't have to live here. Don't make room for it."

She glanced at me a bit archly. "You've been to a shrink?"

"What, and you haven't?" I laughed. "Oh yeah. Big time. After all this, probably for the rest of my natural born days. You want to know what helped?" I twisted around and pointed back to Pola and Zack. "Those two. And even the good things we had as kids."

"There were good things?"

"We three had each other. No matter what storm was out there, we had each other," I said. "And we still do. Now, tell me, you want this baby?"

Her eyes glazed over with tears. "Yes. I want this baby. I've wanted a baby for years. And I want him, too. I love him. I'm afraid to love him. But I do."

"You need to tell him," I said.

"Nemo?"

"Yeah?"

"I don't know if I'm out of the woods yet," she said, a slight tremble to her voice.

"I suspect it's all woods," I said. "And nobody's out of 'em."

7

I walked with my beautiful sister back to my beautiful wife (yes, we had the small ceremony in the early spring, just the two of us with Zack as both ring bearer and best man, and a justice of the peace), my brilliant stepson and his friends, and my fabulous brother and his handsome lover, and for a moment, at twilight, I thought, this is pretty damn good. This is great. The world is good. The universe has some benevolence to it. We live our lives in the hour before dark. The dark itself will come—but there's no need to rush. When that hour passes, perhaps the real game begins.

We broke up the picnic after nine. The sun was on its way down at last. The woods were a haze of green, the smell of night sea in the air. I watched Bruno dance with Pola and Jenny as Zack and Mike fought over the job of deejay with the boom box; in another few minutes, Jenny ran along the fields, with her newly found sheet trailing behind her like she was a princess in a make-believe world, while Zack and Mike used sticks as swords for knightly duels, while Pola shouted at them that they'd poke an eye out; Cary went around looking in the rubble of the foundation, now and then calling out that he'd found some widget or other that was still useful; and Brooke and I sat and talked about what kind of name her baby should have, what name would be a good Raglan name even if the kid wasn't going to be a Raglan.

Albert Einstein once said, "There are only two ways to live your life. One is that nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."

I tried to convey this to my sister as we sat there, half on the grass, bitten by mosquitoes, half on the quilt, with the last of the longest day of the year passing over us like a warm presence.

The door was hers to open.

8

As it grew dark, Zack and crew had gone off to play with their sticks and sheets, but when Pola called after him, there was no answer.

"He's probably running around the woods," I said.

"He'd answer," she said. She glanced at me with a brief look of panic.

"Don't worry," I said. "He's around."

Pola and Bruno and Cary went off to the woods to round up the kids, and I started walking up to the roadside, carrying the trash-filled cooler with me.

The way the darkness comes in summer on the island is like a tinge of blackness shimmering at the edge of the tree-lined sky.

The smells of summer were at their height: honeysuckle and lavender and lilac.

"Zack!" I called, and heard the name echo down below in the woods, as others called to him. "Mike! Jenny!"

And then I saw that the door to the smokehouse was open slightly.

I felt as if my heart were about to stop.

I went over to it, opening the door wide.

Stepped inside.

They stood in a ring at its center.

Around their eyes, blindfolds—torn from the sheet that Jenny had picked up at the duck pond.

Zack had just finished reciting the nursery rhyme—I heard the last line of it.

Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.

I stared at them in silence. I looked around at the stone walls and out into the night as darkness swung low around the slopes and trees beyond the property.

Then back at these children.

I watched Zack. This little boy whose world had been disrupted: his mother and father divorced, a new man in the house, the memories of that awful night in December still no doubt immense in his mind.

A world that he didn't choose himself.

Who had taught him?

The Dark Game was an addiction. It wasn't something that could be stopped just by wanting it to be stopped.

Knowing it was there, it got in your blood.

Children were going to play it.

They had begun playing it before dark, and now, with full night around us, it would take them over. They must have heard about it. Zack would know about it, just from listening in on conversations. Children did that sometimes, and adults never really thought they were listening so carefully.

Zack looked the way I must've looked at his age. Blindfold on, saying what seemed like unintelligible words.

For the barest second, I thought that perhaps this was wholly innocent. That it was my own experience, and my own perception that colored my intense negative reaction to watching children play the Dark Game. That we three—Bruno, Brooke, and I—and perhaps even our father—had twisted it with the terrible trauma we'd gone through together. With watching our mother be brutally tortured and murdered. With whatever my father had experienced in those POW camps when he'd been in his twenties.

It was us. No one else. Not other children. Surely.

"Zack?" I finally said, still reeling inside from the initial shock. "Zack?" I took a step forward, and then another.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. My throat went dry.

I felt a crackle of static electricity in the air.

When I reached him, I crouched down and put my hand on his shoulder. The other children's breathing seemed labored and heavy.

As gently as I could, I tried to wake him.

To bring him out of the game.

But in his mind, he'd already gone elsewhere.

*    *    *

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BOOKS BY DOUGLAS CLEGG

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STAND-ALONE NOVELS

Afterlife

Breeder

The Children’s Hour

Dark of the Eye

Goat Dance

The Halloween Man

The Hour Before Dark

Mordred, Bastard Son

Naomi

Neverland

You Come When I Call You

SHORT NOVELS & NOVELLAS

The Attraction

Dinner with the Cannibal Sisters

Isis

Purity

The Chateau of Devils

The Words

SERIES

THE HARROW SERIES

Nightmare House, Book 1

Mischief, Book 2

The Infinite, Book 3

The Abandoned, Book 4

The Necromancer (Prequel Novella)

Isis (Prequel Novella)

THE CRIMINALLY INSANE SERIES

Bad Karma, Book 1

Red Angel, Book 2

Night Cage, Book 3

THE VAMPYRICON TRILOGY

The Priest of Blood, Book 1

The Lady of Serpents, Book 2

The Queen of Wolves, Book 3

COLLECTIONS

Lights Out: Collected Stories

Night Asylum

The Nightmare Chronicles

Wild Things

BUNDLES & BOX SETS

Coming of Age

Criminally Insane: The Series

Halloween Chillers

Harrow: Three Novels (Books 1-3)

The Vampyricon Trilogy

With more new novels, novellas and stories to come.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Douglas Clegg is the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of Neverland, The Priest of Blood, Afterlife, and The Hour Before Dark, among many other novels, novellas and stories. His short story collection, The Machinery of Night, won a Shocker Award, and his first collection, The Nightmare Chronicles, won both the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award. His work has been published by Simon & Schuster, Penguin/Berkley, Signet, Dorchester, Bantam Dell Doubleday, Cemetery Dance Publications, Subterranean Press, Alkemara Press and others.

A pioneer in the ebook world, his novel Naomi made international news when it was launched as the world’s first ebook serial in early 1999 and was called “the first major work of fiction to originate in cyberspace” by Publisher’s Weekly, covered in Time magazine, Business Week, Business 2.0, BBC Radio, NPR, USA Today and more; his book Purity was the first to go onto a mobile phone in the U.S. in early 2001.

He is married, and lives and writes in New England in a house called Villa Diodati.

DISCLAIMER

The Hour Before Dark is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual locales, events, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

PUBLICATION CREDITS

Copyright 2002, 2014 Douglas Clegg

Published by Alkemara Press in the United States.

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Breeder

By Douglas Clegg

Copyright © 1990, 2012 Douglas Clegg

Published by Alkemara Press, at Smashwords

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PROLOGUE

THE SCREAMING HOUSE

1.

April 1968

The girl could still taste the kerosene on her lips.

Her name was Nadine and she had been feverish for the past four nights.

The decision had not been made by her, but by her lover. She hadn’t wanted to go through with it; she had no energy to resist.

Just the throbbing pain, the leaking blood.

If she’d been coherent, this seventeen-year-old girl would’ve told them that her baby was going to be all right, that she knew the baby would be all right, even if she herself died.

She was not afraid of death if it meant her baby would breathe and grow.

She lay down in something cool and hard like stone, a large basin. The room smelled of rubbing alcohol and soap; the odor of kerosene and vinegar still lingered.

Above her were the most beautiful dark eyes she’d ever seen, so warm and cool at the same time; eyes that looked into her to find the root of this pain, this illness.

Her own vision wavered, and the world around her became transparent, empty, as she tried to look beyond this shadowy room, through these beautiful eyes into another existence, into a dream where there was no pain.

She saw no faces in the room, only eyes, only hands, only lips curling in smiles and anger.

Someone above her, a white hand, wiped her brow with a cold, wet hand towel. Nadine shivered; it was like ice on her forehead.

These people surrounding her in this small room were no more substantial than the dreams she had at night: she thought she could pass her hand through them like ghosts.

Who was here with her? Who would help with the birth of her child?

A man, her lover she thought, said, “The whole damn block’s going up. What the hell’s this going to do to property values?”

But the man to whom the beautiful eyes belonged, the man who watched over her as the spasms hit, grasped her hand as she tried to pass her fingers through him. “Have faith, your child shall be born.”

His large hand seemed to swallow hers alive like a hawk devouring a fish. She felt his pulse—a pounding drum. It beat steadily, hopefully against the ever-weakening sound of her own heart.

Where was her mother?

Her mother had promised to stay with her. To hold her hand the way this man held her hand. Her mother’s hand was warmer than this man’s, warmer and softer, open, unfolding.

Her mother was there among the smoky shadows, but why wasn’t she beside Nadine now? Why would a mother hide from her daughter?

Her lover, out in that misty darkness of the room, muttered, “Jesus, do you think this could go a little faster?”

“Baron Samedi,” Nadine gasped. It was a plea; the pain was clutching the baby inside her, the room was dislodging itself from the earth and running away, her womb would burst with overripe, fermented fruit. “Baron Samedi, I pray…”

Her lover whispered, “I’m not going to wait around here for some lunatic to shoot out the window!”

“Please,” Nadine gasped to the woman she could not see who stood above her. Her ribs were chafing against her skin as if they longed to break free of her.

She knew then that she was going to die.

She wasn’t scared, not with the man with the dark eyes holding her, leaning toward her.

They called him Baron Samedi, guardian of the graveyards and the dead. She did not believe, not like her mother believed, but if it saved her baby, Nadine would believe in anything.

The man above her grinned. His teeth seemed huge, but that was her fever. His teeth seemed to be coming down for her, down for her baby, down to find the place inside her where her baby’s heart beat.

Her lover screamed.

Then her mother (She’s here! She’s with me! She will protect me!) cried out, “My baby, what you doin’ to my baby girl?”

Then Nadine felt and heard nothing.

Her breathing stopped and what little life there was in her empty body ran out in a warm, red pool from between her legs.

2.

April 1989

“Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise,” Hugh whispered. “Maybe it’s just as well. Scout.”

Rachel knew that he wasn’t about to do his Let’s Pretend line:

Let’s Pretend, Scout, that you’re the mommy and I’m the daddy and we have a whole mess of kiddos, an acre of kiddos, and I’m coming home from work at the end of a hard day and you’re exhausted and we sit up and read them bedtime stories ‘til they fall asleep… Nope, Let’s Pretend went out the window when you got a miscarriage in the family. A blessing in disguise.

She’d cried for three weeks over this particular blessing, soon followed by a therapist, two group sessions a day for three weeks, a psychiatrist, a brief (and less than heavenly) flirtation with antidepressants. She still kept the leftover pills in a shoebox beneath the bathroom sink on the off chance that she might get the urge to jump out a window again. It had been great fun, if useless, getting all the medical attention over what she basically felt was a fact of Normal Life ( lots of nice folks have miscarriages, although Rachel herself didn’t seem to know any of them). And even if she did start crying every time she saw babies, or when she accidentally wandered into the baby supply area of Dart Drug and caught herself buying Pampers, or in Safeway picking up Gerber’s baby chicken. Only her work seemed to keep her from forgetting what Hugh had called “a minor glitch.”

“It’s just as well,” Hugh said (had said, would continue to say).

Rachel hated him for that and also loved him for that; he even promised he would make it up to her, that he would kiss it and make it better, that this was a blow, certainly, no one would deny how tragic it was, but couldn’t they turn it around? Couldn’t they try to see it as a momentary setback, but in the long run an advantage? Wouldn’t there be things to compensate?

She didn’t really hear him say all this.

She heard the words the way she would listen to the radio while ironing or eating breakfast. Instead she wondered if she really wanted to be married at all, except to have children; how she could’ve just lived with Hugh and that would’ve been enough, except she’d been pregnant, except she’d wanted a child, and now for some reason that child had chosen not to be born of her.

“Nature took care of it, Scout, it must be for the better. You have to try and see it that way,” Hugh droned on, and no doubt her doctor had prepped him on the sorts of lines to feed her, and she loved him for it, and she despised him for these spineless rationalizations, but she loved him, too.

She loved him because when she didn’t love him she hated herself and remembered the other woman, the one who was dead. Hugh’s first wife.

Hugh always emphasized that they weren’t financially ready for a baby, not yet, his feet weren’t on the ground, he still had to try the bar for one more go ‘round, his job as a consultant in a tax lawyer’s office was only for six months and would be over soon, and how could she really afford to leave her firm so soon, anyway? Just a year or so at the outside and then, yes, a whole litter of babies if you want, so you see it’s just as well. Although Hugh wouldn’t say babies, because it was a word they both avoided.

He would blanket her with hugs and kisses while she turned her face into the pillow. It’s not a baby, it’s just a little sphere, a little subdividing sphere, a glitch in the system.

Rachel loved her husband then and hated him more than she’d ever hated anyone; and she hated her body for betraying her like that.

Later, when she was feeling less tired and Hugh brought in a large bowl of ice cream, he told her about the house his father was giving them as a late wedding present.

Rachel sniffed at the ice cream as if smelling it might make her feel better. What I really want is a cigarette, but I guess I’ll just get healthy and fat.

She was purposefully trying not to act too excited about getting the house. That would kill it if she acted too excited; perhaps her excitement had killed her little sphere, too. Hugh didn’t like it when she was enthusiastic; he didn’t trust liking anything too much. She said, “See, your dad’s coming around, I knew he would.”

Hugh didn’t respond. He pretended to read the paper; chocolate ice cream on his upper lip. She knew that he had only accepted the gift as a means of compensating for the miscarriage. This was part of Hugh Adair’s sense of fair play, and which Rachel knew was the underlying reason he had trouble with the concept of being a lawyer: fair play was rarely involved. He thrived on frustrating himself. He wanted very little to do with his father, but he would accept the house for Rachel’s sake, and then get numerous headaches concerning how miserable he was knowing he’d let the Old Man, as he called his father, buy them this way.

For a split second Rachel considered that she could avoid a lot of trouble about this wonderful if tardy wedding gift by simply saying, “Oh, Hugh, let’s wait until we can really afford a house on our own terms. Let’s not have the Old Man lording it over us, let’s not compromise our integrity.

But it was only a split second, and then Rachel came to her senses.

She put the bowl of ice cream aside. “Our very first house. Is it in a good neighborhood?”

CHAPTER ONE

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

1.

She walked ahead of Hugh, through the alley, stepping over broken glass, around a trash heap. This side of the house was in constant shadow, this wall looked more like old plaster than stone, and the only window onto the alley was small and bricked over. Well, who wants to look out their window and see an alley full of trash and the wall of the next building over, anyway? When she reached the Hammer Street side of the house, facing the park, she waited for Hugh. In the park she saw a little boy and girl playing what seemed to be a game of freeze tag: Where was their mother? How could a woman let her children run through a city park like that all by themselves? This wasn’t the worst or the best neighborhood in Washington, D.C., but it was getting better; even so, how could anyone take a chance like that?

The oaks had burst with heavy green branches, and there was a breeze; the heat hadn’t exploded yet as it would in just a week or two. It was a quiet street. That was good. Just after rush hour and the sound of traffic from two streets over was just white noise. A jogger went by and waved, and Hugh came up behind her and said, “I saw a rat in the alley.”

“Good. If he stays outside the house we’ll all get along fine.”

She hadn’t looked at the house yet.

Our house.

She wanted Hugh to be with her, she wanted to see it clearly, she wanted it to be as if she had closed her eyes and then opened them to see our house. They’d driven by it three times before, she’d jogged by it once, but more to gauge the neighborhood, get a feel for the potholes and what parking was like along Hammer Street. When she’d glanced at the house before she’d just thought of it as a house, not as our house.

Rachel Adair turned with her husband and faced the house that was now theirs.

2.

Rachel’s first sight of the front of the house in Northwest Washington was not a pleasant one: a middle-aged woman, a bag lady from the park with her grocery cart full of trash, was squatting down near the stone steps urinating on the sidewalk. The woman was fat and moved like a Jell-O mold, wiggling down on her haunches—she pissed a stream that would apparently flow right to Rachel’s Reeboks. Rachel and Hugh both looked away—up to the turret, across to the park, to the taxi pulled over on the other side of the street. When Rachel glanced back to the house, the bag lady was gone, vanished, and all that remained of her was the drying urine on the sidewalk.

City living. Rachel forgot about the bag lady and looked at her new home.

It was a simple nineteenth-century stone house—resembling every other townhouse on that side of Hammer Street, just off Winthrop Park with Kalorama and its embassies on the opposite side of Connecticut Avenue; on the other side, a shady avenue of shabby redbrick buildings that seemed to have been bombed out all the way back to Eighteenth Street. This block was the border between a good neighborhood and a bad one, the shade from the park marking the line between them. The house was gray, tall and thin, with a beard of ivy along its edge; three stories high; with a separate apartment below. It looked like it had once been a longer house but was sliced at the side just along the turret; the house attached to one side of it was a plain, white box-shaped house, obviously new—someone had torn down part of Rachel’s house ( our house) on one side, someone had been dissatisfied with their half of the old stone house and decided to build that ugly white thing instead with the chain-link fence in front and that threatening face of a Doberman just behind the side glass of the front door.

“I always dreamed I’d live in a house like this,” Rachel said, turning her attention back to her new home. Hugh led the way up the stone steps. Rachel touched the thick carved stone post beside the door: it was cold, and felt good.

Beside the front door, the brass plaque:

HISTORIC HOUSES COMMISSION. DAPER HOUSE WAS BUILT BY THE ARCHITECT JULIAN MARLOWE IN 1822. EDGAR ALLAN POE WROTE HIS FAMOUS STORY, “PREMATURE BURIAL” IN THE TURRET ROOM WHILE RESIDING AS A GUEST.

“One of the Old Man’s vanities,” Hugh pointed out. “Poe did stay here when it was a hotel or something, for a weekend, but it’s doubtful he wrote any stories while he was here. He probably played some all-night poker games and recovered from hangovers the rest of the time. But the Old Man has always been an ace at perpetrating lies.”

“A house with a name.”

“A full name, too. The Rose Truthful Draper House, the architect’s mistress. I’ve heard old Rosie was a wild one.”

“In what way?” Rachel asked, but at that point Hugh lifted the heavy doorknocker and let it fall. It sounded like a hammer coming down on a bullet—Rachel winced at the noise, covering her ears. “Jesus.”

“Sorry, Scout, just testing.” Hugh reached in the pockets of his khakis for the front-door key. “How many keys can this place have, you may well ask.” He held up a large key ring with several keys dangling from it. He pointed them out: “This one’s for the front door, the downstairs hall door, this is for… I think the patio, and this one—I don’t know, maybe the back gate. I guess we’ll find that out. And this little piggy,” he jangled a small key, “goes wee-wee-wee all the way home.”

Rachel wasn’t listening to him. “Did you hear that?”

“Huh?”

“Nothing.”

“Was it a cat? The woman who rents the downstairs apartment has cats, I think. She’s either a psych-o or a psych-ic, I get those two confused.”

Yes, Rachel thought, cats mewling for milk, kittens searching for their mother. I’m not going crazy after all. It’s not babies. Just because I lost a baby—a sphere—doesn’t mean I’m going to hallucinate about it. Cats, yep, sounds good to me.

Then she heard it again, the sound, and for just a second she thought she saw Hugh blink twice having heard the baby crying. But she’d been thinking of babies since the humidity had risen, babies at her breasts, babies at her ankles, babies floating among the clouds. Babies were everywhere she looked. Why does it surprise me that I think I hear them? This is what the doctor said: “You’ll notice that everyone has babies except you, you’ll think that somehow you’re built differently from other women, that you’re unnatural, but don’t believe it. Miscarriages are as natural as deliveries. Rachel, you lose this one, well, somewhere down the road you’ll have another.” Yep. Doctor, you play the Let’s Pretend game just like my husband does.

Hugh opened the door to the inner hall. “To the dark tower, Scout.”

But the baby crying: it sounded like it came from beneath the stones of the porch, right beneath her feet.

CHAPTER TWO

INTERIOR

1.

They met the downstairs tenant, Mrs. Deerfield, briefly—Rachel barely got a glimpse of her when the older woman opened her door, leaving the chain on. All Rachel caught of her were blue eyes, pale wrinkled skin, and a shock of blond hair the color and texture of dry hay. And a strong whiff of either cleaning fluid or alcohol. Paint was peeling on the apartment door. We’ve got our work cut out for us.

“Just got out of the bath, dears,” Mrs. Deerfield said. “Come round to the patio.” Rachel shook the damp hand before it slipped back behind the closing door.

“Veddy British,” Rachel said low enough so as not to be overheard.

Hugh raised his eyebrows. “Like Mary Poppins gone to seed.” He unlocked the inner door that led to the upstairs. “Voilà,” he said, flinging the door open.

Rachel went quickly through the house assessing the damage; the dark blue wallpaper in the bathroom which should come down, the track lighting that didn’t complement the wonderful nineteenth-century flavor of the house, the layer of grease on the stove and oven. Two bedrooms on the top floor, one bath on each floor, the banister was a little rickety—would need repair but not right away—the living room was long and with a high ceiling, and that wonderfully large manor house fireplace set like a cave into the wall, the kitchen was small, not much room to turn around in, but the dining room was large, and there was the patio for summer entertaining. She ran up and down the stairs, shouting out to Hugh to come up and see this small room that would be perfect for a den. At the living room, the house twisted in an L, and Rachel clutched Hugh’s hand as they went down the narrow hallway.

“Secret passages,” Hugh said.

“Don’t you think this is a weird layout? From the alley it didn’t look like it went this way at all.”

“I’m not sure, but I think when the block was divided into separate residences the divisions made their own geometric messes of things.”

“So dark,” she said, “when you can just see this place was made for light—they’ve practically boarded it up.” She went and pulled a heavy curtain back from one of the second-floor hall windows. She wrote her initials in the dust on the pane.

“It’s so stuffy—Hugh, come see if you can open this one.”

Leaving Hugh to struggle with the windowpane, Rachel walked towards the room at the end of the hall. The door was shut; Rachel played with the doorknob until it came off in her hand. She set it on the floor. “This must be…” She pressed her shoulder up against the door and shoved.

“Yes!” The door swung open, slamming against the wall. “My favorite: the turret room.”

The room was a semicircle, dark and cold even in the hot summer. It reminded her of a dungeon, its airless darkness conjuring up images of torture chamber paraphernalia: thumbscrews, iron maidens, bone-stretching devices, steel fetters. On the other hand, it also reminded her of the basement apartment she and Hugh lived in but without the tacky gold wallpaper. Instead, the room was plastered with tacky dark wallpaper—a design that was supposed to be peacock tail feathers in a paisley swirl, but which looked more like a thousand eyes staring out of a coal mine. The curtains blocking the sunlight were a dusky shade of purple, ragged and moth-eaten, dragging across the dirty floor. She shivered just looking at the room, but her mind was already working: with some white drapes, strip the wallpaper, a paint job, some good old-fashioned scrubbing, it would be the friendliest room in the house. But who the hell wants to do all that work?

The window was convex and enormous, like a curved screen around the turret; with the curtains drawn back it must take in a panoramic view of the park. Rachel pictured a window seat with cushions—a place to read books and sip tea on Sunday afternoons. Yes, this would be her favorite room.

“This will be the nursery,” Rachel said mostly to herself, thinking Hugh was out of earshot; she said it like a prayer, like she knew it would never come true. She swept stale dusty air back with her left hand; she felt a sneeze coming on. Her wedding ring, loosening with the summer humidity, slid off her finger and clanked to the floor, reminding her again of thumbscrews and chains. She squatted down, balancing herself with one hand on the floor, the other reaching for the ring. She picked it up, but felt a stinging in her thumb: not from an imaginary thumbscrew, however, but from a splinter fresh from the floorboards. She nursed her thumb before plucking the offending bit of wood out from between her thumbnail and skin. A small period of red appeared there, just under the nail. She pressed her thumb against her lips to stop the flow of blood.

“Oh, Scout,” Hugh sighed, sounding defeated; he must’ve heard her little prayer, her mention of the word nursery, which was innocent enough as words went. Hugh would go and think she was making herself sad again, thinking about the child she hadn’t been able to carry. He didn’t seem to understand about hope. She wanted to tell him then that she wasn’t going to start crying just because she’d thought of a baby-related term. You don’t mourn the death of something that’s barely eight weeks conceived do you? It’s not even a baby, it’s just a little sphere.

Hugh gave up the struggle to open the hall window and came down into the turret room to her.

Since her miscarriage in the spring, he’d kept emphasizing how right and natural it had been to lose the baby, and how we’re not prepared for parenthood, and when it’s right we’ll know. There were subjects they didn’t talk about anymore, jokes they didn’t make. Life was becoming a serious business in which spheres did not subdivide into babies.

Hugh came up to her and drew her to him, enveloped her. She liked that feeling of being inside his arms. It made her think he desired her, and she could momentarily forget that he had ever been in love with anyone else, had begun to raise a family with that other woman—that other woman who was able to give him more than Rachel had been able to. That other woman, four months pregnant, who was dead and buried.

The other woman ( wife, damn it, his first wife—why can’t you even admit it? ) to whom Rachel was constantly comparing herself. There was Joanna, beautiful, pure, and obviously fertile. And then there’s me: making plans to steal her husband away even as Joanna’s Volvo was being demolished by a drunken driver. Always, always we pay for our sins—even the not-so-nice Catholic girls who don’t really believe in sin, only in stupid decisions.

Hugh went over to the turret window, his loafers clicking like angry beetles against the echoing floor. He pulled the drapes apart; Rachel heard some of the material rip. Light flooded the room through the snowstorm of dust that blew off the curtains. The sunlight was almost too bright. Rachel squinted for an instant—she’d gotten used to the heavy darkness of the house as they’d been going through it, room to room. “These windows haven’t been washed in years. You know how much work we’re going to have to put into this house? It’s not going to be like the apartment.”

“Good thing. It’ll be nice to have something that’s ours.”

“Famous last words.” Hugh twisted his head around and arched his eyebrows. Hugh Adair could do things like that and it would mean something to her—it was the one thing they’d developed over the past two years, that sort of ESP that came from living with someone. Rachel often wondered if Hugh and his first wife ever had that.

“Well, it is ours. A gift is a gift.” She didn’t want her chin to look so set and determined. She didn’t mean it as the challenge that Hugh might understand it to be: but there it was, in her chin, in the steady gaze of her brown eyes. Her chestnut brown bangs needed a trim, but she was happy she hadn’t gotten one yet. Rachel felt her hair suitably hid her eyebrows, which were forming this statement into a question: It is ours, isn’t it? You’re a lawyer, you know how to be assertive; if you can do it in court you can do it at home.

Rachel was hoping he wouldn’t go off into one of his despairing moods about accepting the wedding gift from his father again. She was glad her father-in-law was going out of his way to prove to them that he did finally approve of the marriage. Rachel kept trying to drum it into her husband’s skull that someday he would reconcile himself with his father, and the less he had to regret about his behavior to the Old Man, the better.

There was a momentary silence in the house as they stood there; silence filtered through dust. Behind the silence and the dust, Rachel wondered what other people thought, what other couples meant when they weren’t speaking. “I want to scream.” That must be what other couples thought when they had nothing to say, Rachel thought as she watched Hugh’s face: the lines that hadn’t been there two minutes ago. He’s thinking about the sphere, too, but he’s not thinking about it the way I am. He’s thinking about it with relief. I want to scream but I won’t scream because you won’t love me if I scream. Someone was honking their car horn in the alley, breaking through the brief silence. She smiled because she didn’t want this to be a depressing repeat of the past year. “Do you think that Mrs. Deerfield will still rent downstairs when we move in?”

“We can’t really ask her to move, can we? We’d be doing the kind of thing the Old Man does when he thinks a neighborhood, like this one I might add, is ripe for gentrification. Kick the poor people out and bring on the yuppies.” He tended to snap whenever he talked about anyone in his family. The front of Hugh’s red T-shirt was blotched with sweat; his sandy blond hair was swept back in a shiny wave across his forehead, softening his aquiline features.

“You are a yuppie, previously a preppie. The enemy is us. But I think it’ll be nice to have someone living beneath us.”

Hugh went back to tugging at the window. “How. Comfortable. Will. You,” Hugh grunted in between his attempts, “feel… having a woman living in the basement who in her last life was a princess in the lost city of Atlantis?” Again, he gave up his fight with the window.

“Just great—if she likes the vibes here, and she pays the rent on the first of the month. It won’t hurt the budget, will it? And I won’t mind the company, either.”

“But,” Hugh said jokingly, “I thought you were going to be too busy fixing this place up, and then let’s not even mention your conventional seventy-hour workweek.”

“Oh, I know, I know, but there are those coffee breaks. Mom told me that her first few years of marriage she just had lunch with the girls and went shopping,” Rachel sighed.

“Recherché du temps perdu,” Hugh chuckled. “This is what law school did for you, it made you want things you can’t have.”

For a second, Rachel thought: you asshole.

2.

She’d thought that when she first met him— you asshole, back when she was still Rachel Brennan and trying not to flunk out of law school. Although they had not exactly met, formally. She was working on the law review and Hugh edited it. Her father was dying of lung cancer, so she was taking most weekends and going home. This left little time for her law review duties, which included re-filing material she used, and the editor, Hugh Adair, sent her a memo:

Ms. Brennan,

It seems that some of the staff have not been attending to their more clerical duties with regards to the review. Among the neglected dead are filing, returning office supplies to the supply room, and a veritable graveyard of notes which have not been trashed. (Are they valuable? Should we start an archives for your research?) Perhaps if your office skills need sharpening, we can provide a refresher course in orderliness.

I hope this memo is sufficient.

Thank you,

Hugh Adair, Editor-in-Chief

The words that had formed in her mind were not just you asshole, but prick as well.

Rachel had seen Hugh in a few of her classes, but did not know the handsome man with the winning smile was the same geek who wrote the officious memo. She wrote back to him:

Dear Mr. Editor,

Thank you for the delightful reading. It really made my life, honest. How kind of you to fire such knowing bullets my way. How compassionate of you to take into account the extenuating circumstances of my having to return home on the weekends and some weekdays for my father’s last hours on this earth, to say nothing of the fact that a few of us have to work our way through law school while others sit on their asses while daddy pays off all those nasty credit card bills. If you want a secretary, I would be happy to apply for the position assuming, unlike the work many of us do on the review, secretarial work is PAID.

Again, thank you for such a COMPASSIONATE and MOTIVATING memo. I promise to be a good Girl Scout from here on in.

Warmly,

Ms. Brennan

The next day, Rachel received this brief note:

Scout,

Well, I guess this means lunch is out.

The Big Bad Editor

This struck her as funny—Rachel had a horrible time bearing a grudge, particularly when in the back of her mind she knew he was right. She had sloppy work habits. She was sure that her only salvation would come in a job where she had her own secretary to handle filing and neatness, because she was a mess. And then a good healthy dose of Catholic guilt had gotten the better of her. She’d been calling Hugh an asshole to everyone within earshot, and she felt bad about it.

So one Sunday, she returned early from seeing her father, walked right up to Hugh and said: “Lunch would be great.”

“And you are?…”

“A good Girl Scout.”

She immediately saw his wedding ring. That was one of the first things she looked for in a man, that or a tan line where he’d removed the ring. For some reason married men had always been attracted to her, and single men were not interested. Rachel rarely dated. “You’re married,” she said.

“It’s just lunch,” he told her. “I’m not only married, I’m, wonder of wonders, happily married. Can’t an editor ask one of his staffers to lunch? I promise not to seduce you.”

Too bad, she’d thought.

3.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Hugh said. He stood in silhouette against the blinding sunlight that filtered through the dust-streaked window.

Rachel kissed him. I want to scream, she was thinking, but she knew this was not exactly the thought he wanted to hear.

He held her tightly, and she looked out the dirty window, down on the park where a woman played catch with her three children while their father opened a picnic basket.

“It’s so damn humid.” Hugh sounded as annoyed as Rachel now felt.

Rachel tugged herself free from him. She went over to the other window in the hall. She pulled upwards on the sill, and managed to open the window. “There,” she said, looking out over the patio and the alley behind the house, “get some fresh air in here. Hello down there!” she shouted in a singsong friendly voice, and then turning to Hugh, said, “Mrs. Deerfield looks so lonely, let’s go down to the patio and be neighborly.”

CHAPTER THREE

“You believe in omens?” Mrs. Deerfield asked. Her British accent was like thick clotted cream. Rachel noticed she had trouble pronouncing her l’s; it sounded like she’d said “beweev.”

“Good or bad?” Rachel produced a grin, which made her feel uncomfortably phony. She had succeeded in dragging Hugh downstairs and outside to examine the split-level patio. Half of the patio was for the benefit of the lower apartment, and was defined by a neat brick rectangle under the wrought-iron staircase. Mrs. Deerfield was sitting at a small table beneath the shade of the stairs, drinking what Rachel thought was tea, but which Mrs. Deerfield assured her was a mug of Kahlua and milk. She offered a mug to Rachel as she came down the stairs ahead of Hugh. Rachel checked her watch: yes, it was only ten a.m. She shook her head to the offer of the liqueur.

“Well,” Mrs. Deerfield said, “this omen is particularly good. My Ramona vomited a hairball.”

The real estate woman had warned them that Penelope Deerfield was an odd bird who had been living in the basement apartment since before First Properties had begun handling it. Mrs. Deerfield must’ve been in her early sixties, and her hair was dyed a golden yellow, worn long to her shoulders as if she were still a young girl. Hugh said later, rather cruelly Rachel thought, “She looks like a drag queen waiting to happen.” Her heavily mascaraed eyes were of that clear translucent blue that always seemed to be looking over your shoulder, or through you. She wore a silk dressing gown with a red gold Oriental print, its darted edges revealing a pink calf-length slip beneath.

Mrs. Deerfield was so short that she appeared to be clinging to the table to keep from shrinking any further, and her hands were small like a child’s.

Rachel pretended to be examining the perimeter of the patio, testing the gray wooden gate for sturdiness. She was afraid if she stared too long at Mrs. Deerfield it would be rude, and yet she was fascinated by the diminutive woman.

At the mention of the name Ramona, Hugh called down from the iron landing at the top of the stairs, “You have a daughter, then, Mrs. Deerfield?”

Mrs. Deerfield, ignoring his comment, continued. “Ramona is a Himalayan of distinct breeding, and she rarely has hairballs, but it is a good sign I think that this should happen on the day you will be moving in. I have a talent for the interpretation of such events. Omens, dreams, portents, new landlords. We have a ghost, you know. That’s right, one of the early occupants of the house. She’s harmless, of course, makes some noise now and again. Rose Draper, it seems, is still waiting for her lover to return home. But ghosts are attention getters, aren’t they? Like little children, they just want someone to watch them, to know they exist.”

Rachel nodded pleasantly not understanding what in God’s name she was talking about; but just the idleness of the monologue was a delight, nothing about torts, briefs, or depositions. Just pure talk for talk’s sake.

“May I inquire as to my… status, in this present situation, Mrs. Adair?” Mrs. Deerfield’s voice acquired a curious drop as she spoke, as if she were embarrassed to even be asking such a common question.

“Call me Rachel, I still have trouble with the ‘Mrs. Adair.’” Rachel, feeling odd standing by the back gate, walked over to the small white table that Mrs. Deerfield draped herself across as she poured out more Kahlua in her mug. Rachel sat down uncertainly in a wobbly wire chair.

“You sure you won’t have a cup? It’s just like a milkshake. A grown-up milkshake.” Mrs. Deerfield lifted her mug.

“No thanks.” Rachel heard Hugh ahem from above.

“Well, Rachel, then, the apartment -”

“Well, I think it would be great if you were able to stay on in your place.”

“About the rent increase…” Again that embarrassed dive to the voice, like a child confessing to having wet herself.

Rachel looked up; she could not see Hugh standing above them, although she saw a bit of his hand clutching the dark, thin banister. His knuckles were white. “Hugh? There’s no increase, is there?”

Another throat clearing, and Rachel was worried that he might spit. Finally: “No, no. Scout, there’s no rent increase. We’re all status quo here.”

Mrs. Deerfield reached across the table, patting Rachel on the wrist, “Thank -” but both of them felt it: a shock. Rachel brought her hand away; Mrs. Deerfield kept her arm outstretched. “You’re a sensitive.”

“Sometimes too sensitive.”

“No, dear, I mean a sensitive. You’re open, to the influence. A small percentage of the world’s population is and always has been. Have you ever had any kind of psychic experience?”

Rachel heard Hugh whisper under his breath, “Sounds like a job interview.” She hoped that their tenant didn’t hear him. Sitting down on the steps, not bothering to be polite and come join them, he said, “Tell that story your mom always tells.”

“Oh, that’s just silly, and anyway I don’t think it ever really happened.”

Hugh began speaking for her. “When she was six, in church, she told her mother that the—Scout, you can tell this better than I can.”

Rachel sighed, grinning as if she were embarrassed. “Well, I—oh, this is stupid.” But Mrs. Deerfield gazed at her attentively, fascinated. “Well, I wasn’t raised really Catholic, but we went to mass at Christmas and Easter, and during one of these Christmas services, I apparently went up to the altar. There was this figure of Mary and the baby Jesus, and I started petting the baby’s head and told it not to cry. ‘Don’t cry, baby Jesus, don’t cry.’ Something like that. I wouldn’t classify that as anything occult.”

Mrs. Deerfield’s face became pinched; she nodded her head as if thinking of something else. “When we’re in the right place at the right time, and when we are the right person, sensitive to these things, it can happen. I’m of the opinion that these things are perfectly normal phenomena that simply haven’t yet been explained.”

Rachel was barely listening to her—she was thinking of that other time. “And then with daddy.”

“Oh, Scout,” she heard Hugh’s voice as if from a great distance.

“After he died—two years ago—I was still in law school. I didn’t know he was dead; mom didn’t even know. I went back to our apartment between classes and this sounds really dumb, but the lazy susan in the pantry started spinning, just a little. And then I saw him—just for a second. Like an afterimage. Like the second before someone leaves a room, and you blink, and they’re gone and you’re not sure if you saw them or not. I heard him say something, in my head—you know how you know someone so well that your mind can even reproduce their voice? All he said was, ‘It’s done, sweetie, but mom’ll need your help.’ I knew he was dead. And then ten minutes later, mom called in tears.” Rachel was thinking how much she wouldn’t mind lighting a cigarette up right then. What little breeze there had been wafting between the alleyways had died, and she smelled something bad, something decomposing. It must’ve come from the dumpster out back by the car. The odor of rotting meat. I am not going to start crying. If I start crying, Hugh’s going to think I am losing it again the way I lost it over the miscarriage, and I am not losing it. If I keep talking, I will lose it, but if I just shut up like a good Girl Scout…

Mrs. Deerfield perked up suddenly, as if injected with vitality. “You are special, dear, I’m sure of it.”

“I’ve always thought so,” Hugh said from the stairs. Rachel looked back to Mrs. Deerfield and felt such compassion emanating from the woman that she felt okay. The moment had passed. Just don’t start talking about hearing babies crying anywhere close by or you will be certifiable.

Mrs. Deerfield smiled, revealing an impossibly crooked overbite and an enormous gap between her front teeth. Her blue eyes became devilish slits as she said, “You are a nice young couple, aren’t you?”

“What were the former tenants like?”

“Ooh!” She shivered as if recalling the taste of a particularly sour medicine. “Horrible, unnatural persons, sexual perversions night and day, loud music, parties. It tested me, it certainly did, their friends tramping across my little garden, their foul language, the orgies, and worst of all, Rachel,” and at this, she leaned over the table almost knocking the mug and bottle over, clutching Rachel’s hand in her own tiny Deerfield fingers, “worst of all, most obscene,” Mrs. Deerfield’s eyes widened like a television tube warming up from a pinpoint to a nineteen inch screen, “they hated cats.”

CHAPTER FOUR

THE OLD MAN

If you glanced over at the sleek cherry-red Jaguar stuck like every other car in the middle of a traffic jam on the Fourteenth Street Bridge—and everyone caught in the tar pit of rush-hour traffic heading across the Potomac was rubbernecking to catch a glimpse of the Jaguar and what was going on inside the car—you would see a fiery flash of red hair whisking up and down like a dust mop just behind the steering wheel while the man who was driving kept a grimace of pain, or embarrassment, or pleasure spread across his fat face like Nero fiddling.

Gradually, the motions of the red hair slowed, and once, it rose up completely from the steering wheel. It was attached at the scalp to a pale girl with dark circles under her eyes, high cheekbones, sparklingly wet ruby-red lips and spidery false eyelashes. She looked less like a whore from the streets of Washington than a very tired girl of thirty-six who did not appreciate the car’s air conditioner blowing cold air directly on her face as she went about her work.

“I’m not paying you to stop,” the man said. The skin on his face seemed to have been pulled back tight, as if he’d once had a botched face lift. His hair—white, sparse, and blue in parts—began in a neat ridge at the very peak of his head, combed greasily back. Buttressing jowls supported the gothic arches of his various chins, and you might wonder if you could guess his age by counting those chins, like the rings of a tree. His cheeks and upper lip were spotted with sweat, which he wiped at with his fingers. His small, dark eyes were pushed by the puffy bags beneath them into eternal squints. He’d apparently been sewn right into the dark suit he wore—it looked like it could never come off without undoing the sleeves, the pants legs, and then piece by piece, the rest of the material. It was his exoskeletal armor.

The girl coughed, clutching her throat. “Something’s caught in my throat, I think it’s a hair.”

Her voice hit notes that most baritones would be proud of—it was far huskier than her small, fine-boned china doll face, powdered dead white, would suggest. She shook her wispy mane of red hair, with curls as large as malt liquor cans, and pursed her lips as if tasting something sour.

Between coughs, the girl gasped, “These days you got to be careful.”

“I’m not paying you to be careful.”

The redheaded girl began rubbing up and down on her throat—the man noted that it was similar to her hand-job technique. Her voice became garbled with hawking phlegm and intermittent coughs.

“Sorry,” she said. Tears were coming to her eyes. She began chanting the word ahem, over and over as if it were some mantra to cure throat problems.

The old man cursed.

Someone honked their horn from the car in back. Traffic was again moving across the bridge; the old man pressed his foot gently down on the accelerator. The girl had risen completely up in her seat, and was now leaning against her door, the side of her face pressed against the window as she continued to hack away. Her dress was sheer, lollipop red, covered with tiny fairy sparkles. The man would later find sparkles in his underwear and worry if this was a sign of some venereal disease.

His name was Winston Adair, and he worried constantly about the state of his penis—it was the center of his being, and it was one of the few parts of his body that had not become elephantine and bloated over the years. While procreation had never been his goal (although he had sired two sons and countless bastards that may or may not have survived birth), he enjoyed putting his member in whatever female orifice was for hire and available. Winston Adair had gone to fat in the past twenty years, but it only added to his imposing presence: he looked like a man who carried the excess luggage on his body like an arsenal. People who saw him wondered if he was as wide as he was tall. The streetwalkers who saw what he liked to call his Washington Monument tended to view it more as the part of the balloon where you blow.

And the redheaded streetwalker coughing next to him in his Jaguar was not inflating the balloon at all. As they crossed the Fourteenth Street Bridge to the George Washington Parkway, he reached across the seat and grabbed her by the wrist, keeping his left hand on the steering wheel.

She looked like she wanted to say something along the lines of “you’re hurting me,” but the coughing stopped her. She was trying to hold the coughs in, trying to swallow them, but they burst through her nose when she kept her mouth shut.

“Goddamn you, cocksucker, I paid you twenty-five bucks for those lips, and you’re not getting out of it.” Winston was always surprised by his voice in situations like this—in court he could sound like Clarence Darrow, but with a hooker he always sounded like a young naive boy. He turned the car in the direction of the Iwo Jima Memorial.

When he was twenty-one, he’d been with a whore who seemed as tall as the bridge they were standing under, and she had a face that could stop a truck. Doing her had been like sticking his dick in a muddy hole. He imagined he was doing that when he humped the whore, his penis sliding in and out of a dark hole, loose pebbles tumbling against his sensitive skin—they screwed on the muddy bank, and he felt the ooze sliding like exploring fingers beneath his testicles, her yellow brown rump slapping noisily into the suction cup of earth and water.

And then, it had happened.

Just as he was coming, trying to yank himself out of that whore, he felt something other than her fingers, something other than the cool mud of spring beneath his scrotum.

Something small and hairy and ticklish. Tiny. Crawling. Up his balls. And then several of them. Perhaps a dozen

Before he saw them and screamed, he saw the look on the whore’s face, the thick-lipped smile, the eyes turned inward on themselves exposing the whites to him.

The whore knew.

She’d met him under the bridge because she knew this would happen. Winston, aged twenty-one, glanced down at his shriveling penis.

They covered his penis, his testicles, his thighs.

Mud dauber wasps.

“Bitch!” he screamed, slapping the redheaded girl with all his energy. The back of her head hit the window with a sharp crack. The girl’s eyes, bogged with tears, didn’t even seem to register pain from this. She was still coughing.

They were parked along the drive up the Iwo Jima Memorial. The girl’s hands were scraping skin off her throat; she began inhaling deeply, but Winston didn’t hear any air coming out.

Winston Adair grabbed the girl by her hair, twisting his fingers into the ringlets.

He pulled her face over his penis.

“Maybe if you get to work it’ll help.” He pressed her lips against the tip of the wagging condom, and miraculously, her lips parted, and the redheaded whore from Fourteenth Street began sucking.

They looked like small jewels at first, parts of a necklace come loose. They were a sapphire blue in the twilight shade beneath the bridge, and he’d really thought that maybe they were the whore’s, that they’d fallen off when they were rocking back and forth in the cool mud.

But then he saw their small legs, and their long slender wings.

And the pincers extending from their diamond-shaped heads.

Mandibles opening and closing, opening and closing.

Antennae touching his shriveling penis.

And then the pain had begun, somewhere in the back of his head at first, which he thought was awfully funny considering where the wasps were hanging out—a pain like a long sharp needle being thrust in his ear, poking around, twisting.

It took a few seconds before the pain localized to his crotch.

His fist was tight in the girl’s hair as he remembered, but he felt a sharp pain, and looked down. The girl kept her head in his lap, her eyes wide with terror, gasping, sucking in air, breathing in, breathing in, breathing in.

But not breathing out.

She gazed up at him as if she had never seen a human being before. She looked like a Polaroid of a whore, not the living, breathing thing.

Winston noticed that his penis was a pinkish red color from her strenuous sucking. It felt sore. But not as bad as when he was in his twenties.

Winston noticed that the condom was no longer covering his penis.

When the girl stopped breathing in, she stopped breathing altogether.

Panic hit him in the gut like a tank of bad chili—he felt imprisoned in his tight suit—a spoonful of urine leapt out of his penis before he could bring it under conscious control. “You bitch, don’t you die!” He pulled her jaw back—it wanted to bite down on his fingers—he reached back into her mouth. It felt like dripping jelly, it felt like the inside of a rat’s belly, it felt like a mud dauber’s nest. He could feel the slippery edge of the condom that she’d sucked down her throat. Lady, if you could figure out a way to live and keep this thing implanted down there permanently, you could revolutionize safe sex.

Twice, the condom slipped through his fingers.

And then, praying for a miracle— who the hell are you praying to? —the third try, he managed to catch the rubber on the edge of his ragged middle fingernail. He hoisted it up. When it came as far as her tongue, he yanked the condom out and tossed it onto the dashboard.

He shook her, holding her indelicately by the shoulders.

But it wasn’t so bad, those wasps biting him, really chewing down on his gonads—it hurt like an atom bomb, but that wasn’t the worst of it. You forget pain as you get older, you forget the feeling that you’ve just stuck your Washington Monument into a garbage disposal when you screw enough women. You forget it in the face of other things. Worse things.

But at twenty-one, the worst of it was the whore’s laughing.

The worst of it was looking down between her legs, and seeing where those wasps came from.

The worst of it was seeing that the mud dauber wasps were coming out of the woman’s vagina.

The redheaded girl coughed, opening her eyes. Her eyelashes dripped with tears. Mucus flowed in a thick stream out of her nostrils. She wiped at her face. She sniffed. When she breathed in, she breathed out.

She was alive.

And she spoke.

She spoke with a man’s voice, a man with a thick French accent.

A man with whom he’d done business once upon a time.

Before Winston Adair could get out of his cherry red Jaguar, away from the whore with the man’s voice, she whispered to him: “Breeder.”

CHAPTER FIVE

CAUSE FOR CELEBRATION

1.

“I would’ve given anything to see the look on her face.” Hugh was laughing so hard he had to put his fork down.

They decided to celebrate off their usual budget, and so they went into Georgetown for an Italian dinner. Hugh wore the blue seersucker jacket he always felt uncomfortable in; this was for Rachel’s benefit—she loved the way he looked in that jacket with his faded khakis, blue shirt and bow tie. “You just might be the only man in America who doesn’t look goofy in a bow tie,” she told him as she adjusted it against his neck earlier in the evening. Hugh felt he looked too conspicuously “yup.” Rachel thought he looked disarmingly handsome.

“You’re so attractive with linguini on your chin, here -” Rachel reached across the red-checkered tablecloth with her napkin and wiped away the bit of food beneath her husband’s lower lip. She’d already spilled tomato sauce raindrops down the front of her blouse, and in trying to daub them away had turned the droplets into a crimson smudge. (“You can dress me up,” she’d said, half joking, half despairing, “but you can’t take me out.”)

Hugh shook his head from side to side. “Most obscene,” he bit down on the words in his imitation of Mrs. Deerfield. “They hated cats.”

“Everyone’s watching, now will you stop it?” But Rachel could not help laughing herself. “Imagine, Kahlua and milk at ten in the morning.” She glanced towards the waiter for a minute because she realized what she had just said and could not bring herself to meet Hugh’s brief glare. Hadn’t she seen Hugh downing Bloody Marys that last year he was in law school, always before his eight o’clock class? But she mustn’t think about that: it had been her one condition that before they got married he would stop drinking. And he had stopped, or at least cut down considerably which was the next best thing. The same way I’ve cut out smoking, Rachel thought, guiltily remembering the single cigarette she kept in her purse for life’s little emotional emergencies. She’d given up her pack-a-day habit with her pregnancy and had stayed off them even after the miscarriage. “She really is something, though. In this world but not of it, as daddy would say.”

“I’m willing to bet the former tenants really did give her a good scare.”

“Who were they?” Rachel’s eyes returned to him. She looked like a child ready for a particularly good bedtime story. Sometimes, not always, but sometimes she felt as comfortable and safe with Hugh as she had as a girl with her father.

“Oh, a nice gay couple—it was really they who were responsible for cleaning that place out, getting rid of the garbage. The place was practically empty for nearly twenty years—every vagrant in Washington must’ve slept there at one time or another. So when the Old Man decides that folks are returning to the city, he kicks out whoever’s squatting there, has a team go in and do some superficial cleaning, but it was really those two young men who deserve all the credit. They’re the ones who did the bookshelves. And the ornate banister—as shaky as it is. And the fireplace. Did you notice how well the ceiling was restored? Them, too. I’m a little surprised by the grimy kitchen and the filth in the turret room, but you can’t have everything.”

“And they just left? They buy their own place or something?”

“Who knows? I think they moved out to the suburbs themselves. Too many breeders moving in to D.C.”

“You know, Hugh, that’s one of your less attractive qualities, saying that word breeders like people are cattle.” Rachel wanted to add, and I wouldn’t mind breeding a little in the next year or two, either, but decided that wouldn’t be subtle enough for Hugh. “Or when you call your father ‘the Old Man’ like he’s not even worth considering.”

“I’m not about to call him ‘daddy’ like some debutante from Potomac.” Hugh raised his palms as if to ward off a curse. “Just joking. Scout, you’re not even from Potomac. Jeez, Scout, is the honeymoon really over?”

She felt his shoe scuffing against her ankle beneath the table. “I’m sorry, I guess I’m not in the best of humors. Daddy’s sort of my sacred cow, and I know if he were alive, the two of you would get along really well. I guess when I hear you, you know, talk about your father like that… well, I’m just tired right now.”

“All right, I’ll lay off the lousy jokes for a few minutes anyway. So how did you like the stuff about the ghost?” Hugh asked.

“I think it’s romantic,” Rachel said. “I think it’s neat that old Rose Draper still walks the halls waiting for Julian Marlowe to return.”

“Ah, yeah,” Hugh wrinkled his nose, “except for one little detail. Scout.”

Rachel raised her eyebrows inquiringly.

Hugh grinned that perfect orthodontic grin of his.

“Really romantic, if it weren’t for the fact that Rosie Draper was a notorious whore. They say she was the Typhoid Mary of syphilis cases this side of the Potomac. They called her The Clapper as a term of endearment.”

2.

As she got ready for bed that night, Rachel looked not so fondly at their tiny one-bedroom basement for what she hoped was one of the last times. “Sassy and I can move the stuff that fits into the car on Thursday—I’m not going in to the office—and you’ve got an interview in the morning, right? But if you could be home by, say, two,” she called out from the bathroom to Hugh who didn’t respond. “Hugh?” Rachel glanced out the door to the square bedroom. Hugh had fallen asleep on top of the covers in his khakis and pale blue button-down shirt. He looked adorable with his hair all mussed, the way his chest expanded and deflated while he snored lightly.

It all comes out in the wash, right? Between you and me, Hugh, I don’t think we were fit to be parents yet. It was a silly thing, and maybe you were right, maybe it was a blessing in disguise. You’ll get a job, and then in a few years when we have put away a little nest egg, we’ll have some kiddos and I’ll just be a mommy for a while. But first, first over everything else, we’ll make a home together.

“Thank you for letting us take the house,” she whispered quietly.

Her husband snarled a reply as he sleepily turned over on his stomach. Rachel went over to the edge of the bed and sat down. She reached out and stroked Hugh’s back. She felt the breaths he was taking, anticipated the snores, wondered what he was dreaming. They’d had their problems in the past year, but things seemed to be working out. Rachel was positive that the new home would help. In a larger place they would at least avoid the arguments that cramped quarters seemed to encourage.

And maybe on Thursday he would come back from the job interview, into their new home, with good news.

CHAPTER SIX

AFTER THE INTERVIEW

1.

Hugh walked up Connecticut Avenue in the rain. The streets steamed. Noontime traffic was awash with honking and skidding and brake slamming. Hugh was not crossing at the crosswalk, he was not waiting for the light, and he was not looking both ways.

“Fucking asshole!” a cabbie shouted as Hugh passed in front of the taxi on his way to DuPont Circle.

Exactly, Hugh considered: fucking asshole.

It was the phrase in his mouth when he’d gone up to the tenth floor of the building at McPherson Square, waited at the receptionist’s desk for fifteen minutes, and then was given an audience of another quarter hour with his old fraternity brother, Raymond “Bufu” Thompson.

“Hey, Bufu,” Hugh had said, extending his hand.

Thompson caught his hand but didn’t shake it; he just took it and dropped it. “I’m afraid my associates call me Raymond these days, Hugh.” Thompson looked like every young Washington lawyer: well-groomed, eager, shallow and possessing that pathological trait of always seeing the world as a movie in which he is the star. The power tie and blue pin-stripe suit didn’t tarnish that image one bit. Bufu Thompson, his old roomie, his frat-rat brother, the only guy who could turn in a term paper two weeks late and still act stunned when he flunked the course—this man looked like every other man in every other office in downtown Washington.

Hugh walked across DuPont Circle, and then up to KramerBooks. It was a bookstore with a cafe called Afterwords, and Hugh found during his recent days of unemployment that he could sift through the stacks of books and then sit and have some coffee and a sandwich, and watch all of Washington go by before the end of the day.

“I’m looking for a book,” he told the clerk. “I know you guys don’t have it because I’ve been looking all week. It’s called Diaries of An Innocent Age, by Verena Standish. Can I maybe get you all to order it?” At least Hugh could accomplish this: ordering the book. When Rachel heard that Verena Standish, wife to the diplomat, had written about Draper House in her published diary, she seemed interested in reading it.

After Hugh ordered the book, he grabbed a copy of City Paper at the entrance, and then went back to the tables that lined the long window in the back. A pretty blond girl who looked like she was about ten years younger than him—maybe twenty, twenty-one—was sitting, waiting for someone. She glanced over at him and smiled.

He smiled back.

She raised her cup of coffee in a silent toast. He kept smiling; he couldn’t help it. When was the last time a pretty young girl had smiled at him? Was she a student at GW? At American U.? At Catholic?

But it had gone too far—she stood up and came over to his table. “Hi,” she said.

Hugh was startled; he could feel his heartbeat under his tongue. He was soaked from the rain; his tan suit felt like a moist towelette wrapped around him. He combed his fingers through his hair, squeezing water out. He bit his lower lip but he couldn’t bring himself to look at her face. He was trying to look down into his own coffee. He nodded his head and said a slight “hello.” He made sure she noticed his wedding band by tapping on the table nervously with his left hand.

“My name’s Isabel.”

Hugh and Isabel exchanged a few pleasantries. The whole time Hugh was wondering how to get rid of her: the wedding ring hadn’t done the trick. Then he remembered the one thing that most women seemed to find absolutely resistible.

“Yeah, well, I’ve been looking for work. Haven’t had a job in a while.”

Within seconds, Isabel excused herself; the rain seemed to be letting up, she had places to go, friends to meet, oh, and her boyfriend, who by the way has a job, was picking her up across the street at the Metro.

How had Bufu Thompson put it? Oh, yeah. “I guess of all people in this town, you don’t need me telling you what it’s like. Your dad’s got the biggest firm around, and you’re coming to me for work? We’re part of this machine, you and me, Hugh. We all get stamped out like gingerbread men—and we’re all after the same jobs. I can maybe throw some paralegal garbage your way, but you don’t want that, do you? Now, if you’d take the bar again, maybe pass it this time—and I know you’ve got it in you—hey, if a guy with your background is coming to me, a junior shit-kicker with your connections—I even think Rachel could probably bail you out of this more than someone like—oh, man, don’t look at me like that, Adair. I’m giving you some sincere advice here...”

Without realizing what he was doing, Hugh ordered a glass of wine. The rain had not let up as the blond Isabel claimed when she abandoned him; it seemed to be coming down harder. Wine was suddenly there before him.

Just a glass of wine. He had never been an alcoholic—that was something Rachel had dreamed up. She was from a family of teetotalers, never saw a bottle of anything in the house when she was growing up. So to her, one or two (or three or four) drinks meant a disease. Wine wasn’t all that bad, and anyway—he missed the taste of it. That was the worst thing about giving up alcohol for Rachel: the taste of wine. It was such a hassle to put people out at parties and have to drink soda, especially since wine, one glass anyway, didn’t have all that much alcohol. Now, if he had ordered a carafe, that might be considered excessive at midday, but not a glass. Especially with the headache he was getting, just thinking about Bufu Thompson and the whole damn legal profession. Sometimes Hugh wondered how Rachel could live with all that bullshit. He wondered how he could have been so goddamn starry-eyed in law school.

He also wondered why in hell he had allowed himself to fall in love with Rachel. Why had he done that to a nice girl like Rachel Brennan? He rarely thought about his late wife, Joanna—it was as if that marriage was a picture from someone else’s scrapbook.

His father’s scrapbook.

Unlike Rachel, Joanna had been the perfect debutante, someone his father absolutely approved of, a woman who, as the Old Man had put it, “has what it takes.”

What it takes.

The waitress came by with another glass of wine.

“Did I order this?” he asked.

She nodded. “But if you don’t want it -” She made a motion to take the glass away.

Hugh shook his head. “No, it’s all right, I guess I did order it—rainy days always make me thirsty.”

He thought about his father, in the Volvo with his pregnant wife Joanna, and he wondered why in hell the Old Man had been allowed to escape that accident alive.

2.

Let’s Pretend, Scout. Hugh raised his glass to the people passing on the street. Good Christ, Scout, Let’s Pretend I haven’t failed you in your search for the perfect daddy. Well, slap my face for thinking that! Hugh reached up with his free hand and slapped his own face. It didn’t even sting. “I love my wife, you know.”

He didn’t realize he was talking to anyone until the bartender replied, “Sure, buddy, I love mine, too. Tied one or two on this afternoon?”

One? Two? Hugh Adair had lost count of the number, seven, maybe? How many glasses had he drunk? If only he’d ordered by the bottle, he could look at it and say: All right, I’ve had two bottles. But ordering by the glass was so deceptive. He wasn’t even sitting at a table at the bookstore cafe; he was leaning against the bar at Childe Harold’s—at some point, he had crossed the street.

“You okay?” the bartender asked.

“At times,” Hugh replied. He ordered coffee. “Hell, just bring the whole pot.”

Hugh Adair had an epiphany right there at Childe Harold’s, sipping black coffee. It came to him, probably because of the ratio of stimulant to depressant—just enough caffeine to get his neurons shooting around those dendrites, but not enough to override the deeply philosophical effects of the alcohol. He was thinking about his career which was no career. The work in the tax law firm had been little more than glorified paralegal work, all the more humiliating because his wife had a terrific job with one of the better firms in town and had passed the bar exam her first try. Hugh had yet to pass it, and he dreaded the next go around with it. He was sick of tests. Sick of job hunting. Sure, he’d begun the job search with enough confidence to launch a rocket, but within the space of a few months all the glitches in the system became apparent: he really disliked the company of lawyers, with the single exception of Rachel.

Rachel, who seemed so ill suited to the legal world, and yet there she was: successful, damn her, and she didn’t even want to be successful, she just wanted to work for a few years and then get out and turn Let’s Pretend into reality. How the hell had she gotten through law school if she didn’t really want to be a lawyer, anyway? But he knew the answer to that, and stupidly enough it was the same answer he might’ve given, but in less complimentary terms: Daddy. “He just wanted to make sure I could take care of myself, and I wanted to do that one thing for him, get a law degree, before he passed away,” she’d told Hugh, and she’d fulfilled that obligation imagining that somehow it would keep her father alive a year or two longer. Not like me, I was, ahem, kinda hoping my Old Man would bite the big one before I turned thirty. Again, Hugh slapped his own face, or at least thought he did. Well, hush my mouth, more wishful thinking.

And there it was, the ultimate Let’s Pretend.

Let’s Pretend that if I clean my room up every day and put the toilet seat down and wash behind my ears and go to law school, Let’s Pretend the Old Man will die before I’m thirty.

But Let’s Pretend will always get you in the end, Scout, because they’re just more words from a bullshit artist. You do things based on Let’s Pretend and your whole damn life goes down the toilet with the lid left up. “It’s not even a choice,” he told the bartender.

“What’s that?”

“This whole lawyer thing. Life. The pursuit of happiness.” The barroom was spinning. Hugh tasted something sour at the back of his throat. He began hiccupping.

“Maybe I better call you a cab.”

“Call me whatever you want…” Hugh shrugged.

CHAPTER SEVEN

MOVING

“Well, it always rains when you move,” Sassy Parker said, and Rachel could practically hear Sassy’s smoker’s lungs vacuuming up the air in one terrific whoosh as they lifted the long cardboard box around the corner through the front door. Sassy’s short afro-styled hair glistened with the rain as if it barely concealed diamonds among the black curls. Both women were soaked to the skin; when they were safely inside the downstairs hall, Rachel set down the large cardboard box and ran upstairs and into the townhouse.

She returned a few seconds later with towels.

“You didn’t tell me you have a tenant.” Sassy nodded towards 1201-B’s mailbox.

“Penelope Deerfield, she’s a nice lady,” Rachel said, flopping a pink towel over Sassy’s head. Rachel squeezed the water out of her hair and shook it out like a wet dog coming inside. “These summer storms.” She had changed out of her business clothes after she’d left the office at ten, just stopping in there to drop off some papers. She had scrounged through their packed suitcases and come up with these painter’s pants, and one of Hugh’s smelly old basketball T-shirts; the rain seemed to coax the odor of the gymnasium right out from the armpits. Rachel combed her wet, squeaky hair back into a ponytail, tying it up with a rubber band. She felt more like a twenty-eight-year-old bobby soxer than a junior associate with the firm of Newton, Bancroft & Hamer.

“Remember Barbie’s best friend Midge? That’s who you remind me of, Retch,” Sassy said, laughing. Sassy was taller than Rachel by about five inches; Rachel had always figured her friend was pushing six feet. They’d been roommates as undergraduates, and Sassy seemed to be the only girlfriend of Rachel’s who truly understood her. As well as her craving for nicotine. Sassy had been working at the Washington Herald Tribune, the third-rated newspaper in the city, but had moved up quickly and now ran the “Home” section, which sponsored an annual house tour through the old neighborhoods of Washington. Rachel hoped that one day Draper House would be on that tour. Once we get it fixed up.

Normally, Sassy looked pretty glamorous, “as every big-city assistant editor of trash newspapers should,” Sassy would herself have said, but right now, dressed in baggy chinos and a white cotton blouse (“Looks like something out of the Victoria’s Secret catalog,” she said, glancing down at the damp material which seemed to have molded to the shape of her breasts), Sassy looked simple and unassuming. She drew a damp cigarette out of her breast pocket. She snipped off the end between her long red fingernails and slid it into her mouth. The cigarette drooped. “I suppose this is as good a time as any to go cold turkey.” Rachel envied Sassy’s ability to ignore things like the surgeon general’s warnings and continue to smoke; Rachel desired a cigarette even now when she knew she shouldn’t have one. The image came up: Daddy coughing, knowing his lungs were pockmarked with cancer.

“So you have a nice setup, Mrs. Adair,” Sassy laughed. “You have a patio, a house, a renter, what more could a girl want?”

“A ghost.”

“A what?”

“We have a ghost—really. It’s supposed to be the original owner of the house, Rose Draper, a courtesan to the political world of the nineteenth century. Mrs. Deerfield says that she’s heard her walking the halls.”

“Maybe we can get your ghost to help us with all this junk.” Sassy squatted down to try and lift her end of the box up. “I never thought records could be so bleeping heavy.”

Rachel nodded. “Not just ordinary records, Hugh’s collection of Big Band. He finally gave up trying to teach me the jitterbug in law school, so now he listens to them when I’m not around.”

“You were always more of a disco kind of girl, weren’t you?”

“Please,” Rachel groaned with the suggestion and the weight of the box.

When they’d gone up the flight of stairs, Rachel leaned her end of the box on the new sofa that had been delivered on Tuesday. “Here, let’s set this down for a minute.”

“Amen to that.”

“Gently, gently, these are his babies, remember, the only thing his mother left him that he treasures—Now why are you looking at me like that?”

“I was just wondering what a nice girl like you is doing in this neighborhood. Used to be, six, seven years ago, all the winos on the block hung out on this front stoop and tossed their cookies in the hallway.”

“A sobering thought.”

“When I was fourteen, my mom would bring me down here because there was some old doctor who lived down the end of the block, and he was real cheap, and then I’d sit in the park and wait for her. I was scared to death of this street—old men used to try to get me to go with them, winking at me and then spitting like it was going to make them irresistible. How times do change, Retch, how they change. The alley behind your place was called Dealer’s Alley, and there was a string of red lights up in one of these row houses.” Sassy looked out the French doors onto the alley—it was now a parking lot for the various occupants of Hammer Street. “Still looks like you could buy your drugs back there, I guess.”

“I still have my supply of antidepressants,” Rachel said. “I wonder how much any of those pills are worth on the street?”

Sassy glanced around the room. “You know, Retch, I’ll bet we’ve even got something in research on this neighborhood—I’ve got so much junk in my files I wouldn’t be surprised if Draper House is in there. God, my mind is a banquet of trivial facts from that job! And to think, I used to love reading newspapers.”

“This alley is pretty depressing,” Rachel said, grabbing her friend by the arm. “The best room is down the hall—it may be one of the best views in the city.”

They went down the long hall to the turret room. Hugh had washed the windows to the point where Rachel noticed the paper towel streaks on the glass; the walls still needed painting, and there was Hugh’s collection of Sherwin-Williams paints all ready for the job.

The floor creaked as they walked, and Sassy went out of her way to find the locations of all the creaking boards.

When they entered the turret room, Rachel was suddenly aware again of that dungeon look—it seemed dark, cold, and damp.

The wallpaper was drab and full of swirling paisley designs, reminding her of an awful wide tie her father used to wear.

Even with the convex window being so large, the light that came in from outside was like a fog. She switched on the overhead light.

“We still haven’t gotten around to putting up drapes yet.”

“You could have affairs up here and see Hugh coming a mile off,” Sassy joked. “There’s that park. I used to sit in there when I was little—scared to death that some druggie or psycho was going to grab me. Or a pervert -”

“Back then, I don’t think I even saw D.C., my folks kept us safely in the ‘burbs.”

“Yeah, back then even people used to roll up the window and lock the door when we drove through here. They call this park Winthrop Park—sounds pretty white bread doesn’t it—but when I was in school it was still known as Needle Park, like every other park in the city. When I was a teenager, I’m telling you, I thought that as soon as I was old enough I was going to hightail it to the suburbs. Now, look at this whole neighborhood: people pay as much for a parking space as I do for rent! If only I’d known back then, I’d have become a real estate mogul.”

“But this block has been owned by Hugh’s family for years. I’m sure after all that time of losing money on it, it’s a welcome change…”

“You’re telling me Hugh’s daddy has owned this street since when?”

Rachel shrugged. “Maybe the fifties or forties. Sometime after World War II.”

“I’d rather have had a corner of Hell than this place.” Sassy raised her eyebrows as she scanned the rain-swept park, and then nodded at the window. “Look at her.”

Rachel came closer to the turret window; she felt an icy shiver run through her and she didn’t know why—it had felt for a second like someone had stroked his fingers down the back of her neck. She put her hand to her shoulders, rubbing the nape of her neck; it was nothing—she’d been thinking it was going to be one of the gross cockroaches she’d seen in the kitchen.

Sassy said, “That’s so sad; she doesn’t even know to come in out of the rain.”

Rachel followed Sassy’s gaze down through the dripping trees and puddles of the park until she saw what Sassy was talking about.

An old bag woman was muttering to herself, glancing occasionally up at them and shaking her fist, shouting something that could not be heard through the rain and the window.

“Jesus,” Rachel gasped.

“You know her?”

“It looks like the same woman who peed on the sidewalk the first day I saw the house. I didn’t think she’d be a regular. ”

Sassy turned away from the window. “It’s the mental hospitals; they’re full, and so they release these people. Old men and politicians deciding that these poor people no longer need care. It’s positively criminal. You know it’s like they’re invisible people, that they’re somehow not real. Like she was born like that, full grown, with her shopping cart and trash bags. But she’s probably just like this neighborhood, you know, she’s got a history. Everybody’s got a history.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE INVISIBLE WOMAN

1.

Few people passing her by, stopping to give a quarter or a dollar bill, would guess that Mattie Peru -- as she called herself -- had any history at all.

Her face was broad, a flat, round plate, with small, steady dark eyes that seemed constantly vigilant. When she wasn’t shouting, she kept her lips puckered like she was tasting something sour. Her hair grew wild and greasy; because she hadn’t looked at herself in years, she didn’t know that there was any gray in it. She hadn’t taken off her dress in years either. It seemed to be as much a part of her skin as anything. And her bags: dark green and black plastic bags molded to suit the occasion—hats and coats and galoshes.

Mattie was a bag woman, that was enough. To the people passing her on their way to their meetings, their warm homes, their subway trains, their bars and hair salons, she might have been every bag woman they’d ever seen, black or white, middle-aged or ancient.

Once, two other street people, men she’d seen around the park at Farragut Square, molested her, held her up against a sea-green lamppost a in the early evening as rush hour was just beginning. They called themselves Willy and Pete, and Pete said, “We been watchin’ you, sugar, and we been waitin’, and now the watchin’ and waitin’s over.” His breath smelled like dog shit as he kissed her; she kept her teeth clenched together, she tried to push him away, but the other one, Willy, held her arms back against the lamppost.

Pete punched her in the stomach when he’d done slobbering all over her, and then it was Willy’s turn.

Willy was less kind.

Willy raked his fingers through her trash bags, beneath her dress, across her breasts.

She tried calling up the wasps to protect her, but that magic was gone.

She looked up to the sky as he tormented her. It was an empty sky that seemed to go on up into forever and she thought of the world as a great jar without a lid, and everything inside spilling out.

It hurt, what Willy was doing to her, but she sent her mind flying, one thing she could do, like her Magic Touch and her trash bags, she could send her mind flying somewhere else. To a cool spot beneath a bridge where she went sometimes to talk to her babygirl.

She left her body there, let ‘em have it! No need for a body -- and her mind flew away.

The people, the Mr. Big Men and Women passing through the park on their ways to the Metro, hailing cabs, strolling, messengers on bikes, none of them stopped. No one came to her aid. No one seemed to notice what the men were doing. No one noticed that she was really there and not just part of the scenery, like the pigeons, the bushes, and the benches. If someone asked her, Mattie would probably tell them that her Hefty trash bags were a cloak of invisibility, and when she enshrouded herself, people just could not see her at all. When she’d discovered this secret to remaining invisible to the naked eye, she decided it was safe to return again to Winthrop Park. To sit in her favorite bench, or stretch out beneath the scanty shade of the gingko tree, and do what she did best: watch for signs of life.

She didn’t know for sure why she went there; her memory of the past was jumbled like the junk in her grocery cart. She knew they’d done something bad to her babygirl there, she knew it was the baron, she remembered her love and her fear of him.

And she remembered the one who watched and waited in the Screaming House. Like the two vagrants who’d attacked her, the spirit in the house was done with watching and waiting.

And once again, there were signs of life in the house on Hammer Street.

Two women, one black, one white, stared out of the turret room window as if they were looking straight at Mattie.

Mattie covered her head with her trash bag of invisibility.

She glanced out from beneath it.

She knew they could no longer see her.

Then, from the lowest window of the house, the one with the bars on the outside, she thought she saw the other gazing out at her.

Mattie shook her fist at the house and screamed at it.

2.

The summer in Washington had been a living hell for Mattie Peru. People were moving back into the Screaming House, and she had done everything she could with her magic to keep them away. She had blessed the house three times the way she’d been taught by an old mambo when she was a young girl—she tried to appease the restless spirits who broke through the cracks in the earth. But none of them seemed to listen, and Mattie doubted that the old magic would work. There didn’t seem to be any rules anymore—and the spirits of the dead ignored the old rituals the same way that young people no longer performed them.

And she could feel the breath of the baron, the guardian of the graveyards, warm against her face.

His rotting inspiration found her wherever she went. He crawled behind the skin of night.

Mattie Peru had slept a few nights in the Farragut West Metro station—of course, nobody saw her the night before when she’d stayed down low by the ticket machines—she’d wrapped herself in her trash bags of invisibility just before midnight as she saw the men in uniform closing the subway entrance off with a chain-link gate. Her scalp was itching something awful beneath the dark plastic, but with a little self-control she managed to resist scratching her hair out. She needed some sleep—she’d been watching for him, and for them ever since the Screaming House had come back to itself.

That night, after the rainstorm which she had raised in an effort to keep them out, after she had recited her curses, she felt she was safest in the down, in the subway.

The subway was not the best place to spend the night in the summer: it was only slightly cooler than the air outside, in the up. The down, where the Metro was, choked itself sometimes with its stale, dusty air. She would’ve preferred a nice cool alleyway, or even a bench in the park, but when the baron was on the loose, she didn’t feel safe in the up.

An old wino crouched in the alcove behind the ticket machines. He was dressed in stained trousers and ragged shirt. A coating of filth ran across his face down to his burst shoes.

He smiled at her, and Mattie was a little worried that he might try to rape her like Willy and Pete in the park. But his eyes seemed kind, the way her lover’s eyes had once looked at her as if she was the most beautiful woman in the world. He offered her a drink from his bottle, so she went over and sat next to him. If there was evil in his eyes, she couldn’t read it, and her need for a drink was overpowering. His name was Ken, he told her, and the people out there had fucked him something royal. Mattie asked him if he’d ever met the baron, and he snorted. “Don’t know no dang baron,” his voice like a rusty nail scraping on a chalkboard.

“Baron find you no matter where.” She sucked at the bottle like a hungry baby. “He smell you like a hound, he go where he please. And when he get a hold of your collar, he yank on it, and he take-take-take.”

The man grinned a four-tooth half-moon. His teeth and gums hung over the chasm of his mouth like stalactites in a cavern. “Crazy bitch.”

“You laugh, but he laugh louder.”

“Those son-bitches stole my damn money.” He reached over for his bottle. His hand hung like a dangling spider in midair, waiting for her to let loose of it. It was a good bottle of Thunderbird.

“You see him ‘round the eyes, he hides in the eyes like a speck of hell dust, but he comes out from the teeth.”

“Shut up, you crazy old bitch!” He grabbed the bottle and tore it loose from her clutching fingers. Raising it to his lips, he thrust it against his mouth and then howled in pain. Ken pulled the bottle away from his face—blood sluiced from his upper lip. He spat out a chip from one of his few remaining teeth, tonguing his uppers to make sure all four of them were still there and in place. Wiping his bloodied mouth with the back of his hand, he raised the bottle of Thunderbird once again to his lips—this time, gently.

“He got my baby, and he got my baby’s baby. He come out through the teeth and get my babygirl and her child. Baron's been ‘round a long time.” Mattie could not help herself—she began weeping, grasping her Hefty trash bags around her shoulders and poking small holes in them with her fingers. She felt her thick flesh beneath the plastic, and winced as she pinched herself. “I let him do it! I let him do it!”

“Get your ass away.” Ken was looking at her from the corners of his eyes as he guzzled the wine. He shoved at her with his elbow.

“Gimme a drink.” She motioned to the bottle.

“You gonna shut up?”

She nodded, her fingers still kneading and pinching her soft, flabby skin beneath the bags.

He passed her the bottle.

She chugged it long and deep.

“Save some for me, willya?”

“He got no place to come into, ya see? He's gonna look for a place, and she's gonna give him a place to come into. But she ain't no mambo— she just skin and spirit—she think she know it, but she don’t—she got no power but what he give her.”

“You shut up!”

“You got to believe, ‘cause if you don’t believe, you let him in.”

The air brushed through the subway tunnel, up to where they lay huddled together; she sniffed and smelled something rotten from down there in the dark tunnel. A three-day, lying in the heat, dead-animal rottenness.

“Oh, I believe you, whore,” the man’s voice changed, reminding her of another man, someone she’d once been in love with. His fingers clutched hers. “I believe you well enough, my little scum bucket, my love.” The man screamed, cupping his hands over his mouth convulsively, pitching forward and backwards; foam bubbled from his lips across his gnarled fingers. He began pulling his last remaining teeth out of his mouth, digging into his diseased gums with his dirt-rimmed fingernails as if he were extracting splinters from his skin. His screams echoed throughout the subway.

“Samedi! Samedi!” Mattie screamed, pushing herself away from the man, crawling out into the light, trying to maneuver onto her haunches.

It was him, it was the baron. He was in that wino lying next to her and he was gone from him, swept like a summer wind down the long tunnel of the subway. Gone, leaving the man dead on the cold, red floor, frothy blood simmering on his chin, four teeth, torn out at the roots, in his right hand.

CHAPTER NINE

THE NEW OWNER

1.

Rachel could only stare at the newly painted walls for so long; but this activity took up some time between the seemingly endless phone calls that had been plaguing her since Sassy had left at three.

First, the two teenagers that Hugh had hired to help move the bedroom furniture and the dining room table called at quarter to four wondering where Hugh was.

They wondered if they would get paid even though they obviously weren’t moving anything.

Then her secretary called; messages were piling up for her at the office, and one of her clients was angry because he’d been arrested after his case had already been dismissed when the man bringing the charge had failed to show up for the preliminary hearing. Rachel then had to call him, then call the municipal court and act angry.

Then, Sassy called to see if she was all right. She lied and said that Hugh had gotten home about five minutes after Sassy had left.

With some pathetic semblance of organization, Rachel Adair wandered around the house with the yellow Post-it Notes she’d pilfered from her office. At each door, each corner, along the refrigerator, above the stove, on the French doors, she stuck the paper with phrases like: WINDEX or GARBAGE DSPSL? or ROACH!! or PAINT PEELING. She stuck yellow papers all over the house with ROACH ALERT written across them. Then she saw what looked like mouse droppings in a faded rectangle of linoleum—every kind of vermin in the world seemed to use the kitchen as its dumping ground. The Post-it Note she left on the wall above it read simply, MOUSEDOODY, with an arrow pointing to the floor. The Post-it Note mania was on the advice of her mother who was perhaps the most organized person in the cosmos. “If you write notes to yourself, you don’t have to overload your brain with minor details,” mom had said. “You’ve never been good at getting your facts straight or your details right, Rachel, not when you were a little girl and not now, but if you just keep reminding yourself of these things…”

And if I don’t remind myself, I know you will, mom. Would Rachel really say that to her mother? If she did say something snippy her mother would pause whether on the phone or sitting across the table from her or next to her in the car, and look away. Or Rachel imagined her mother would look away because it seemed like the Right Thing To Do, which mom was really, really good at.

Normally, I’d rebel against you on this, mom, but I want it to be right, I want it to be normal in this house. I don’t want to start off on the wrong foot in my own house—our house—I want this to be a place we can start our family. Maybe only one baby, maybe six, maybe this year, maybe in three years. But Dear God! before I turn thirty-five, please, please, please!

She was again staring at the walls when the phone rang.

A woman’s voice, “You hooked up your phone?”

“Mom.” Rachel wanted to add: Funny, I was just thinking about you. Rachel always recognized her mother’s voice by that sedimentary layer of Southernness that remained in the woman’s voice all these years she’d been living outside of North Carolina: every sentence seemed to end in a question mark, so it was not just, You hooked up your phone, but, You hooked up your phone? If her mother were to mention the weather, Rachel knew she’d say in a slow, deliberate voice, It’s gonna be a sun-shiny day? When Rachel had been younger, her mother constantly scolded her for talking back, while Rachel had always felt she was just answering her mother’s questions.

“You don’t sound thrilled.” You don’t sound thrilled?

“I was expecting Hugh.”

“He’s working?”

“He had an interview.”

“You don’t sound too hopeful. You went and had your blood sugar checked like I asked you, because when you sound like this -”

“When I sound like what? ”

“You know, drained and edgy? I used to have bad periods, you know, it’s not that unusual. But there’s hypoglycemia and your brothers have it. Kelly has PMS. It’s like having walking time bombs for children.”

Rachel waited a beat, catching her breath. She was not going to argue with her mother over the phone; that would be playing into her hands. “Hugh was supposed to be home at two.”

“Good lord, it’s nearly seven. You don’t think something happened?”

Sometimes I wish something would happen. “No. But I guess if he’d gotten the job he’d be home.”

“Sometimes it takes a while. Your father had nearly a year when he left the Navy before he got on with the beltway bandits.”

“Let’s drop it. Is something up?”

“I was just bored. I was playing grandma to Kelly’s brood last week, and now the place seems empty. Are you all moved in?”

“There’s a shitload of work to do.”

“Since when do you use language like that with your mother?”

“When I get off the phone I’ll wash my mouth out. Goodbye.”

“Give me a call when you’re feeling better, okay?”

“Right. Goodbye.”

When she got off the phone from that call, Rachel felt like breaking something. Not because of her mother, although there was that little aside about “playing grandma” to Kelly’s kids (she had four and she wasn’t even thirty yet)—it was Hugh who was the object of her frustration. The thought Hugh where are you? was soon replaced with, I could scream, I will just scream. But she remembered the downstairs tenant. So I can break something and it will be like screaming. The plates and glasses were still packed away in boxes, so it would be difficult to break them. By the time she’d opened the boxes the anger would’ve dissipated. Rachel saw Hugh’s record collection there by the fireplace. She went over.

This will really hurt him. She picked up his “Ella Fitzgerald Sings Duke Ellington” record, removing the disc from the sleeve. But instead, she looked at the shiny record kept in mint condition—“Take the A Train.” She spent the next twenty minutes unpacking the stereo and connecting the speakers up. She put the record on. She sat on the sofa and gazed out at the patio and alley. The rain had stopped and in the sunless summer light, steam and mist glowed like morning dew.

Through the French doors she saw a man standing in the alley on the other side of the gate. For a second she thought it was Hugh finally home, but realized not only would he not be coming in the back way (it would make no sense) but also Hugh had lighter hair. Even from this distance she could tell that the skinny stranger was much better looking than Hugh (and she thought Hugh was pretty damn cute).

Rather than panic, as she was well aware any normal person would, Rachel thought: This is one of the oddest neighborhoods, bag ladies in front of the house and thieves in back. The tall, gangly man was attempting to climb over the back gate. He was the kind of skinny that reminded her of a skeleton, although his darkly tanned face seemed to have enough meat on it. His eyes looked like small coffee beans sunk above high cheekbones. Beneath the heavy eyebrows and the short-cropped light brown hair he was wearing a navy blazer and a yellow tie, hardly the uniform of the neighborhood thief. Perhaps one of Mrs. Deerfield’s friends.

It was only when the stranger saw her and waved frantically that she realized who it was.

Ted Adair.

Hugh’s brother.

Rachel rose from the couch, smiling.

2.

Rachel hadn’t seen Ted since the wedding last fall, and then only briefly because naturally there was some argument between the two brothers. She was sure that if you put Hugh in a room with any member of his family, he would find something to argue about with them, whether it was the state of the world or a jar of peanut butter. Perhaps that’s why they were a family of lawyers. At the reception, she’d pulled Hugh aside and said, “Can’t you two get along for just five minutes?” But she’d felt it was Hugh’s fault that Ted had not shown up for the reception. “What did you say to him?” she’d asked her husband.

Hugh had looked her square in the face and said: “I told him he wasn’t welcome, Scout. He’s just a messenger boy for the Old Man. He’s only here to lay the family curse.”

Because it was her wedding day and she had her own friends and family to contend with (particularly her drunken Uncle Paul who had begun flirting heavily with her bridesmaids), Rachel had decided not to reprimand Hugh for this kind of boorish behavior, although she would’ve liked to tell him, “Hugh Adair, you’re becoming more like your father every day.”

And now, as she went through the French doors and down the rain-puddled iron stairs in back, she was glad that Hugh wasn’t home to drive Ted off.

“Rachel! Let me in or I’ll blow your house down!” Ted banged hard on the gate; it creaked and shuddered as if it would fall apart at any moment. “I feel like a wet dog out here!” His voice rose and fell like a swing, and hearing it reminded her of Hugh before life had begun to bog him down.

She went to the gate and unlatched it from the inside. It swung open with an obnoxious squeal, threatening to slam against its side, but Ted caught the edge of it with his right hand. With his left hand, he reached over and clutched her shoulder as if he were off balance and about to fall forward.

“You should post a sign: Slippery When Wet.” His dark eyes drank in the whole scene: the patio, the house, Rachel with damp hair—and no Hugh. “I’ve caught you at a bad time.”

“Of course not. Come inside and see the place.”

“I hope I don’t muddy my boots on the way from the carriage house. Quite a little manor you got here. Where’s my baby brother?” He picked up his attaché case from the concrete and swung it from side to side. “Got something the two of you might be interested in.”

“Oh, Ted, he’s on an interview. But he’s supposed to be back fairly soon.”

“Who needs Hugh?” Ted patted the case. “You can handle this stuff yourself, I mean, it is in your name.”

“What is?” She led the way up the staircase.

“Rachel,” and when she turned around to face Ted on the stairs for just an instant she had a sense of something, something there on his face that was like Hugh but not like Hugh, and he grinned a broad uninhibited grin as if he had a terrific joke but if he told her it wouldn’t seem so funny. But he could no longer keep it inside. Ted Adair said: “Didn’t he tell you? The whole goddamn house is in your name.”

3.

“My name?”

“I’m surprised Hugh didn’t mention it, although, hey, maybe dad didn’t even go over the details with Hughie—dad’s not real good with his kids, but I guess you don’t need me telling you that -” Ted spoke in gusts of conversation, still managing to take sips from the can of Diet Coke she’d brought him when they went inside. He slouched on the sofa in the living room, one leg looping through the other, his feet tap-tapping nervously against the hardwood floor. “Dad, in his own inimitable way, has his charming side, and he thinks the wife and kiddies—if any exist I don’t know about, you tell me—should have some property. It’s dad’s soft side coming through. I think the way dad put it was: ‘I don’t want my grandchildren going homeless.’”

Rachel glanced through the papers. It all looked like just another batch of legalese to dump in her already overstuffed file cabinet, but there was her name on every page, and places for her signature. “I’m flattered he thought to -”

Ted interrupted: “Include you in the little grudge match he’s got going with Hughie? It’s an unenviable position. He treated Joanna—it’s okay to say her name now, isn’t it?—that way, too. He made sure everything was put in her name, what there was, anyway.”

When Ted mentioned Hugh’s first wife, Joanna, Rachel felt a jolt go through her that had nothing to do with all the caffeine she’d been drinking. She wasn’t sure if Ted was joking or not; Hugh called his brother The Joker, and a tense moment arrived when she didn’t know how to take this last comment. With Hugh, this would be a serious conversation because it concerned the Old Man and his late wife—and there was nothing to joke about there. Hugh always had that dead earnestness which she had admired in law school, a true-blue quality. His integrity. The same integrity that kept him from going to the Old Man’s law firm for a job.

Rachel watched Ted, trying to read his eyes.

They were dark brown, like hers, and unfathomable.

But Ted broke out laughing—it was a joke after all. “It gives one pause, as inappropriate as it is to bring such sacred cows as the dead, and the near dead—I mean pop, about being near dead. He believes that he’s not going to be around much longer.” But he was still chuckling as he spoke, and so, Rachel thought, It’s all a joke, he’s not serious.

His laughter was contagious; she, too, began laughing in spite of herself, in spite of her anger with Hugh for taking so long to get home, in spite of his dead first wife, and in spite of the Old Man and his deeds. “Oh, Ted, this is awful, making jokes about dead people.”

“Don’t forget the near dead, too,” Ted giggled almost like a little boy. “I’m sorry, Rachel, I just couldn’t resist. None of us in the family ever really liked Joanna—not that she ever let us near enough to know if she was likable. She was the most talented block of ice I’ve ever met.” His words were punctuated with sniffling giggles.

Rachel crinkled the legal papers in her lap. Maybe it was Hugh who never let you get near enough to her, the way he keeps his family away from his second wife, too. She wondered how Hugh would react if he knew that his older brother had dropped by the house unannounced. But she felt giggly, silly, slightly dizzy— probably just hungry—her stomach was gurgling and she’d completely forgotten to buy any food. Ted continued talking, joking, saying hilarious things, and she felt like she’d been given a quick breath of pure oxygen. She was drunk from Diet Coke. “Ted, you’re so funny.”

“What do you think Hughie would say if I was to tell him he’s got the most beautiful and intelligent wife on the planet?”

“He’d say you were after something.” Rachel heard her voice as if down a long hallway. Watch what you say, Scout, this is a Greek bearing gifts, not your best old friend in college.

But she’d said it: He’d say you were after something. She covered her mouth to keep other foolish things from pouring out.

Ted stared at her. His jaw seemed to drop to the floor, his eyes widening incredulously.

Then he was laughing even harder than before, gales of laughter. He slapped the sofa and his knees and his attaché case he was laughing so hard, clutching his stomach, kicking the floor with the heels of his loafers. Tears leapt from his eyes.

“No, no,” she was laughing again, pointing to his shoes. “You’ll scuff the floors,” which caused both of them to laugh again because the wood floors were already mercilessly scratched like an ice rink after a hockey game.

But the laughing died inside both of them, Ted wiping his eyes and Rachel catching her breath, feeling like she’d just sprinted a mile.

“Families,” Ted said, shaking his head wearily. It was as if he were coming down from a drug-induced high. The laughing moment was over and normal, steady life had caught up with them again. Ted stood up, stretching his long frame. Rachel felt embarrassed as if they’d just shared something intimate. The camaraderie she’d just felt with Ted also felt like some kind of betrayal of Hugh. She sat there on the box that held Hugh’s collection of novels, smiling up at Ted, wondering if she was betraying Hugh, and if Hugh knew she was betraying him. A small betrayal, not a big one, just a normal betrayal. But what do you want me to do, Hugh? Tell him he’s not allowed in the house? My house as it turns out. Well, Hugh, you may have been raised to be rude to people, but I wasn’t. No grudge is worth nursing forever. Rachel got up off the box. “I should show you around the place.”

Ted reached over, touching her left shoulder, bearing down slightly. “No, you sit down and wait for Hughie. The grand tour can wait for a housewarming party—you’re giving one, right?”

Rachel shrugged, sitting back down. “We’ve got so much to do to get this place up to a livable standard.”

“Don’t be stupid—that’s what a housewarming party’s for—everyone can bring a gift to keep your decorating overhead low.”

“Look, Ted, Hugh should be back soon. Why don’t you wait and join us for dinner?”

“Now, do you think Hughie would really want to have me sitting across the table from him?” Ted grinned. He went to the open door, about to leave, and then turned to face her again. “You’re a mender, Rachel, that’s nice. But no, I better skedaddle. And with those papers, no rush, just sign where you’re supposed to, call if there’s anything too weird in them, and then those at the end, well, it’s all that household crap about how the furnace is set up and insurance bullshit about your tenant—also a blueprint—well, more of a sketch of the floor plan. It’s a read-it-and-weep job, because I think a heck of a lot of work has been done in alterations on this place. I heard it was just a skeleton and a bunch of crumbling walls until about 1977. And Rachel, Rachel, Rachel, think housewarming party—I love a good blow-out and I always bring the best gifts, anyway.”

He gave her a quick wink before descending the stairs to the patio.

Rachel went to shut the French doors behind him; the muggy, steamy day was almost over, Hugh wasn’t home, damn him, and she watched Ted shut the back gate gently. He strode down the alley, looking back every few feet just to see if she was still standing there.

And what would Hugh think of this visit? Oh, Hugh—your brother dropped by today with some papers.

If the interview went well it might slide right off him. He might grin and say, “Oh?” and then tell her about this new job he might get.

But if the interview went badly, or if he hadn’t made it to the interview (and that had happened twice in the past two months), what would he say? Would he give her his mad smile? The one that meant he was trying to maintain a pleasant exterior, but inside he was seething? He never mentioned his brother except to recall a particularly vicious moment from what Hugh termed “childhood’s greatest hits.”

Let’s Pretend, Scout. Let’s Pretend that you’re me and you’re standing at the top of the stairs and your big brother Ted pushes you down them and you’re black and blue. But you don’t want to upset your mom because she has problems of her own, big ones like the Old Man. And so you say that you fell down the stairs all by yourself. And Let’s Pretend that this goes on, say, ten or twelve times one summer and you’re black and blue to the point where mom, out of concern, takes you to several doctors, one being a kiddo psychiatrist, because she doesn’t think an eight year old would normally be so clumsy. And Let’s Pretend that your brother puts a rubber band around your pet cat’s neck and he tells you, because you’re younger and you want to believe your big brother, that it’s a special, secret collar and not to tell mom or the housekeeper about it. And then you wake up one morning and the cat is dead on the balcony because this thing, this rubber band, has eaten into its neck and cut off its circulation. Let’s Pretend that you take the blame for it because your older brother lies and calls you a killer.

It wouldn’t matter that Rachel would argue that they were both kiddos themselves and that maybe it wasn’t as black and white between the two brothers as Hugh made it out to be. “You make it sound like the evil twins on those stupid TV shows,” she would say if she had the nerve.

But as Rachel watched her brother-in-law Ted walk out of sight beyond the apartments next to theirs in the alley, she thought: Okay, for marital harmony, Let’s Pretend you never came by, Ted, and these papers arrived through the mail slot:

She went over to the stereo to turn the Ella Fitzgerald record over. Then she lay down on the couch, wondering when Hugh—the bastard—would make it home, wondering when the sun would go down, wondering if it was a headache she was feeling coming on or if this was just normal life taking its toll. She closed her eyes for a few moments, then opened them again, then closed them. Just for a few moments.

Rachel Adair dreamed of babies, beautiful healthy babies coming out of her, all on schedule at nine months to the day, all little Adairs. And she was the mommy and Hugh was the daddy, and somewhere in the dream her healthy, beautiful father was saying, “I am so proud of you, sweetheart.”

CHAPTER TEN

THE CLAMORING PLACE

1.

Rachel awoke on the couch feeling sticky and hungry. The summer light had not yet faded outside; it was almost nine p.m. When is this day going to be over? She turned off the stereo and went into the kitchen. The only things in the fridge were some Diet Cokes; she plucked an ice cube from the freezer and wiped it across her forehead. Rubbing the dwindling ice cube into her face, she walked down the hall towards the first-floor bathroom.

When she flicked on the light she saw something dart across the floor—even though the cockroach could not have been more than a half-inch long it seemed to her to be a six-footer. She gasped when she saw it, then broke out laughing. Join the club. Pulling a Post-it Note from her pocket, she scrawled across it in magic marker: ROACH 17—CALL EXTERMINATOR/BUY RAID. She stuck this just under the light switch.

She turned on the shower, and the water came out in staccato bursts, rusty brown until she’d let it run for a few minutes. It smelled of rotten eggs. The pipes squealed and coughed, but finally ran clear water. Her clothes seemed to have attached themselves to her skin; peeling off the painter’s pants was like skinning herself. The water was spraying out of the white tub—there was no shower curtain, another essential she had forgotten along with toilet paper. She hoped that she still had the small package of Kleenex in her purse.

Rachel stepped into the shower, and as she did this she noticed the small window. It was above the toilet and across the room from the tub and shower, but it had no shade and she wondered if anyone could see in from the outside. The cloud-filtered sunlight was flat and made the empty red buildings across the alley look like cardboard cutouts. She glanced down at her feet—the drain was clogged, and water was backing up. She bent over and scraped her fingers across the drain wondering if it was hair, but it was plaster dust, and it seemed that no matter how much she scraped away, there was more and the tub was filling up to her ankles. The water was coughing out rust colored again, and her hands went to the spigots. She turned off the water feeling dirtier than when she’d stepped under the shower.

Of course, no towel. She shook herself off; it was warm enough and she didn’t mind the feeling of water on her skin.

She had the sense of someone in the doorway, someone staring at her. When she turned, expecting Hugh, she saw the cat.

It was a puffy Himalayan with a dark face but with a streak of peach and orange across its nose. It looked up at her with no curiosity, just empty blue orbs. Something dark and shiny wriggled against the cat’s whiskers just as it registered on Rachel’s brain what this thing was that the cat was playing with. A roach, gross! The cat swallowed the insect with a moist crackle, the kind of noise that Hugh made when he ate bean sprouts.

Rachel gasped, and the cat darted off down the hall. But, on the practical side, as mom would say, just think of what this animal could save on exterminator bills.

Rachel knew this must be the infamous Ramona from downstairs who vomited hairballs as omens. How did she get up here? The first thought in her mind: Hugh. Hugh was home, finally, waiting in the living room with his bad news and depressing apologies. He had accidentally left the downstairs door open, or the French doors to the patio. The cat got past him.

Stamping a wet foot pattern across the bleached wood floor, Rachel went out to the living room. She realized at the last second she was naked and would be crossing by those French doors, but tried streaking through in case anyone was watching. No one was.

There was also no Hugh in evidence, and Ramona was lying in front of the fireplace cleaning herself carefully. She rolled over onto her back, paws splayed in the air, gazing up at Rachel with patient eyes. Her belly was enormous.

“Even you can get pregnant.” She reached over, petting the cat. “Now, if you’ll excuse me a minute.” Rachel sneezed, wiping her eyes—her allergy to cats always seemed to explode in her face like gunpowder in spite of the fact that she loved animals. “I’ve got to go put some clothes on.”

Upstairs, Rachel rummaged through one of the boxes in the bedroom and found a summer dress her mother had given her years ago. She never liked what her mother gave her to wear, it was never anything she would’ve chosen for herself, but for some reason those gift clothes were always on hand in an emergency. They were dresses and skirts and blouses to be worn on moving days and when her other skirt was at the cleaners, or when she spilled ketchup on a blouse and needed another in a hurry. She felt like a little girl in them, and for some reason the clothes her mother bought her (like this dress she bunched up and pulled over her head getting lost in a sea of wildflower print) were always two sizes too large. Her mother no doubt expected her to gain twenty or thirty pounds, and perhaps one day she would. Yes, and then she’d have a complete wardrobe provided by mom. But right now she felt about twelve years old, which was probably right where her mother would’ve liked to keep her.

She came back downstairs expecting the cat to have run off somewhere, however the hell it had gotten in, but Ramona still lay in the same place, stretching lazily. Rachel bunched up the Mumu around her waist and kneeled by the cat. Her sinuses were driving her crazy, but the cat was so adorable and furry. “You know you’re cute, don’t you? But don’t expect a kiss after wolfing that roach down.” She rubbed Ramona just beneath the chin and the cat let out an almost birdlike mew accompanied by a thrumming purr of satisfaction. A speck of dirt seemed to leap from the cat’s fur onto Rachel’s hand.

Not a speck, a flea.

“Shit.” She pinched the flea between her thumbnails until it popped. “Let’s get you back home before you contaminate the house. Roaches, fleas, mice, what other crawling things do we have around here?”

Gently, she lifted Ramona up, careful not to let the cat’s belly sag. “Lots of little lumpkins in there.”

2.

“You’ve found the beast!” Penelope Deerfield shouted as she opened her door. She seemed even shorter than she had when they’d first met. Her eyes were just about level with Rachel’s chest. Perhaps it’s true that you shrink as you get older. Her yellow hair was done up with gold plastic combs, reminding Rachel of haystacks in a damp field. She wore a more conservative outfit than the last time they’d met: almost a suit, although mismatched, probably from a thrift shop. The overall effect of the dress and light jacket was of someone who didn’t care what anyone thought of her. Again, a “mom-ism,” because Rachel found this aspect of Mrs. Deerfield’s personality utterly charming.

Mrs. Deerfield’s eyebrows curled around her blue eyes as she grabbed the cat up beneath its front shoulders. “Naughty little Ramona running off from Nanny Deerfield!”

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Rachel said, peering around the open doorway without meaning to—there were two other women sitting at the day bed and the loveseat. They’d been speaking in whispers, and as soon as they saw Rachel their faces suddenly blossomed pleasant smiles as if Rachel were the last person on earth they expected to walk through that door and wasn’t this a nicer surprise than whomever they expected.

“Not interrupting at all, dear, come in, come in, this must be moving day.” Mrs. Deerfield flung the door open; it hit the back of the wall with a thunking shudder. Mrs. Deerfield was mildly drunk, Rachel guessed. “We’ve been gossiping and pickling.”

Yes, Rachel thought, and getting pickled. The room was redolent of vinegar and spices and the purest whiff of alcohol she’d smelled since she’d been in the hospital after the miscarriage. “Today seems to be lasting forever.”

“As well it should, it’s the summer solstice—this is the longest day of the year. Somewhere Druids are dancing.” As she pulled Rachel in, tugging like an eager child at her arm, Mrs. Deerfield murmured an aside. “We won’t even go into the fertility rites involved, at least not with this group.” Her breath was laced with sherry. Then back to her stage voice: “My friends, this is my landlady, Rachel Adair, and Rachel, this is Betty Kellogg, and Annie Ralph—she runs the Ralph-Westford Gallery in Mount Pleasant.”

Betty Kellogg and Annie Ralph were both in their mid-fifties to early sixties, and looked more uptown than Mrs. Deerfield. Betty looked as if she could be fascinated by the smallest mind, her eyes wide as if the lids were held back with tiny hooks, their pupils jiggling rapidly as if she were deep in REM sleep and wide awake. Her mouth was frozen in an apparently constant O of surprise and interest; her hair was dyed platinum and permed—it seemed an effervescent fizz above her slightly wrinkled, china-doll face. She was chubby—everything about her was round and getting rounder as she balanced her weight first on one hip and then on the other, creasing the royal blue fabric of her cocktail dress. “So young to own a house. Len and I were in our mid-thirties before we were owners.”

“Your Len would’ve lived in a tent if you hadn’t forced him to get that place in Chevy Chase.” Annie Ralph cast the words out of her mouth like they tasted bad, and she snapped her fingers at Mrs. Deerfield (making Rachel feel suddenly protective of her tenant). “Honey, get Rachel a sherry, and honey,” she added, the second honey intended for Rachel, “you sit down and make yourself comfy-cozy, ‘cause moving day’s always a bitch.” Annie Ralph looked vaguely bohemian in a peach peasant blouse and wide gray skirt, although Rachel thought she’d seen this outfit in one of the more chic boutiques in Georgetown. It was what Hugh referred to as the artsy-fartsy look. Rachel had been in the Ralph-Westford Gallery once and its owner was a perfect enough match: the gallery was full of the kind of art that only interior decorators got excited about, lots of bright squiggly colors on plain white canvases. Annie Ralph herself looked like a squiggly smudge of a woman, stretched and framed and bearing an expensive price tag. She looked like she would go with any room, any sofa-loveseat combination, any color scheme. Although the ages were all roughly equivalent among the ladies, Rachel could not imagine what they were doing with poor Mrs. Deerfield—they looked like rich Georgetown women. And if first impressions mean anything, I don’t like them one bit.

“No thanks on the sherry,” Rachel said, stepping backwards to the doorway again. But Mrs. Deerfield’s grasp was firm and she tugged her into the small living room.

“Penelope’s told us such nice things about you,” Betty cooed, sipping daintily from the sherry glass, not realizing she was dripping the liquid down the front of her dress.

“Don’t believe a word of it, dear.” Penelope went over to the kitchenette. “I grouse about everything in creation. I don’t have a kind bone in my body. Are you hungry? Annie’s brought a delightful cheesecake, only we’re all complaining from diets.”

“That’s right,” Annie said archly. “This is even diet sherry we’re guzzling.”

“No, I’ve got to get back, my husband might call.”

Bringing a slice of cheesecake out to the living area, Mrs. Deerfield said, “She’s got such a lovely ‘usband, ladies, when these two have children we will have a clan of beauties above us.”

“We can ask my Len if he knows.” But as soon as Betty Kellogg said this, she acted as if she’d just wet her pants—she squirmed uncomfortably, tugging at the edges of her dress, her face turning red.

“She’ll think we’ve all gone to the moon,” Annie Ralph said, shooting Betty a nasty look. “And she may be right on that count.” Then to Rachel: “Honey, Len is her husband.”

“Was my husband.”

Mrs. Deerfield studied Rachel’s face for a reaction, but there was none. “He died in ‘78, dear. Heart attack—Betty had been dreaming for ten years that he would go that way.”

“But,” Annie added, “of course, Betty never told Len about her dreams, probably because she was afraid he would take steps to prevent it. I believe she fed him a steady diet of butter, fatty red meat, and grease -”

“She’s joking,” Betty said, shaking her head from side to side.

Annie giggled almost charmingly and said, “Of course, Rachel, you don’t know me, but I am joking.”

“But not about communicating with his spirit through -”

“She’ll think we’re batty, Betty.” Annie seemed to like this turn of phrase. She repeated it: “Batty-Betty, Batty-Betty, that’s a good one.”

“We are batty,” Mrs. Deerfield said, and the steadiness of her voice momentarily silenced the other two women. She looked Rachel directly in the eyes, and her gaze was so pure and unclouded that Rachel had to resist flinching. But then the kind, overly made-up face of a retired nanny returned, softening her glance. Mrs. Deerfield said, “Rachel, we talk to dead people.”

3.

Rachel helped Mrs. Deerfield with the card table. They unfolded its legs above a trap door. “This is the center of the house, you see.”

“A cold spot,” Betty Kellogg said as if she were translating a foreign phrase for Rachel. “The clamoring place.”

Mrs. Deerfield tapped the trap door with the heel of her shoe. “In the old days, they called it a crib—I guess it kept the babies cool. I’m joking, dear, I imagine it was for perishables of various and sundry sorts. It’s quite chilly down there, the house holds in the night. It’s where I keep my jams and pickles, dear.”

“And honey, you must try her pickles.”

“Bread and butter.”

“She’s got jars this big full of jellies.” Annie Ralph held her hands out as wide as her hips.

“Ladies, pull your chairs up.”

“You called it the clamoring place?” Rachel felt like Alice in Wonderland; she wondered if they were all making fun of her, or if they really took this seriously. Right at that moment she was wishing that Sassy was there with her to witness this. She sat down with the ladies, setting the china plate with cheesecake in front of her on the table.

“It’s a Carrefour, dear, a crossroads of sorts. This is where the spirits cross on their journeys. You find it hard to swallow, I see.” Mrs. Deerfield smiled pleasantly. “But Annie’s cheesecake, on the other hand, is a bit easier to swallow. How is it?”

Rachel nodded as she took a bite, her mouth full.

“It’s an old ladies’ game, honey.”

“Yes. When you see death up ahead, in the next ten, twenty years -” Betty let her voice die mid-sentence. “Len was taken when he was only fifty-one. They clamor here, can’t you hear them?”

“We’re giving her the creeps, really. They are just passing through, honey, like wind through an old house.”

“Where are they going?” Rachel wished she hadn’t asked; she wished she’d just gotten up from the table and gone back upstairs or gone out for a walk down to DuPont Circle for some ice cream or to see if Hugh was in one of the bars down there. Where are you, Hugh? Don’t you know that I love you even if you don’t have a job right at the moment, don’t you know that? Don’t you know things like this make me mad, but I still love you anyway? She felt slightly dizzy, but was getting a heady sugar rush from the cheesecake, which was not half bad.

“It’s really only an old ladies’ game, dear.” Mrs. Deerfield seemed to sense her discomfort.

“We can’t have all the answers. Even they don’t have the answers. How is my cheesecake, honey?”

“It’s delicious.”

“I only use Philadelphia brand cream cheese. It’s very simple to make.”

“Don’t give her the ‘recipe,’” Betty said with a hint of sarcasm. “It’s so hard to follow, and then it never comes out the way she does it because she always leaves something out.”

“Betty Kellogg, you make it sound intentional. What I do is I forget to put something in.”

“Recipe?” Mrs. Deerfield huffed. “My dear, she got it off the package of cream cheese.”

“Bitch. Menopausal bitch.”

They were all momentarily silent. Rachel felt itchily uncomfortable, just as if she were surrounded by mosquitoes. Or those fleas of Ramona’s. She made a slight move back in her fold-out chair; it scraped the floor and her knee hit the underside of the card table.

“I should be -”

“We’re a rough pack of cards,” Penelope Deerfield said, reaching over to squeeze Rachel’s hand. “We’re being rude—my goodness, dear, your hand is so warm. You’re not running a fever are you?”

Rachel did feel warm suddenly, as if something had just been let into the room, some wild animal with its fur burning. She felt dizzy. She was sitting there with three versions of her own mother, at different ages: when her mother was thirty, when she was forty-five, and then in her sixties. Her mother in her sixties pressed down on her hand and said, “Get her a cup of tea, “and then it was no longer her mother, but a black man holding her hand. His skull seemed to be pressing outward against his coffee-colored skin, his large dark eyes sinking back into holes, becoming cracks, and then his eyes were sealed up completely—his lips dried like a riverbed. And emerging were ridged yellow teeth covered with a dripping scum, growing in size as they came towards her, his nose swimming in the dark flesh that gradually filled up her vision. The teeth parted, flying up, and she was looking down into his throat, his enormous purple tongue slapping just in front of her face, his pulpy uvula flapping like torn skin—and a blast of heat from his gut rising up through his throat—heat and something else, something sweet and sour, vinegary, reminding her of a biology class, of dissecting a frog when she was fifteen, and then she felt freezing cold and it was over.

“How long does it take you to pour tea, Annie?” Mrs. Deerfield’s face was turned away from Rachel’s, but her hand was still clutching Rachel’s wrist.

“She’s coming down,” Betty said.

Rachel coughed, wrenching her hand from Mrs. Deerfield’s. “I’m sorry.”

“Those who clamor,” Annie Ralph said, balancing the tea cup as she came back from the kitchenette, “they’ve spoken through you, honey.”

“It was the sugar shock,” Penelope said. “That damn cheesecake of yours. You must be exhausted, dear. You’ll run a fever if we don’t get you upstairs for a rest.”

4.

“Did they speak through me?” Rachel lay down on the sofa in her own living room. She felt drained and weak and wasn’t sure if she was dreaming.

Mrs. Deerfield stood above her, gazing down at her with concern. “What?”

“Annie said it was those spirits. She said they spoke through me. You told me I was sensitive. Is that what it means?”

“Annie Ralph would believe anything. I say just because it happens doesn’t make it real. You started saying some jumbled words, it was gibberish.” Mrs. Deerfield felt Rachel’s forehead. “You don’t seem too feverish, but it’s probably the humidity, too. Can I turn up the air conditioner?”

Rachel nodded dreamily. Mrs. Deerfield went over to the thermostat and switched it on, adjusting the temperature.

“Did I say something bad? They looked scared.”

“Those old birds are frightened of their shadows. But Rachel, you see I knew it, you’re open to spiritual influence.”

“It doesn’t frighten you? Jesus, I was terrified and I don’t even believe in it.”

“One never knows what to believe in this world. Nothing’s really out there telling us what to believe, is it? But we all muddle through and sometimes the patterns reveal themselves to us. You obviously have a talent that way, dear, perhaps untapped, but still there. But who knows what to make of it all?”

“But you believe in ghosts.”

“The child in me believes, dear, the child in me believes. And the grown-up in me believes in letting that child out now and then, sometimes just to run amok in the garden and track mud across my quiet life. But one mustn’t confuse things: a ghost is a remnant of a life, while a spirit is simply a life without flesh. I believe in spirits and their influence. But it is just a pastime for a little old lady like myself, nothing for a pretty young girl to worry about.”

“You’ve been very sweet, Mrs. Deerfield—I’m sorry for wilting like that with your friends.”

“It was the sugar, Rachel, the way your face went from peach to white and then red when you came to—it was only a second. What have you eaten today?” Mrs. Deerfield returned to the couch; Rachel scooted over a bit to allow her to sit on the edge.

“Oh. A Diet Coke and I guess that was it until the cheesecake.”

“Sugar can do nasty things to you if you’re not careful. I try not to use much in my jams and jellies—as we all get older we must watch what we put in our tummies. When I worked as a nanny I saw what sugar can do to children.”

“You must’ve been a very good nanny.”

“Not so good.” She rose from beside the couch. “You sure you’ll be all right? I can sit here awhile longer.”

“No, thank you, though. I’m just sleepy.”

“When Mr. Adair gets home have him make you a good dinner.”

“When Mr. Adair gets home he’ll be lucky if I’m still asleep.”

Mrs. Deerfield wagged a finger at her. “Naughty girl.”

5.

It was dark out when she felt a kiss on her forehead, waking her, and smelled a brewery pressed against her. She remembered the man’s mouth in Mrs. Deerfield’s Clamoring Place, and tried to scream, but the mouth sucked greedily at her lips. When Rachel opened her eyes, pushing the man away from her, screaming, he switched a light on and it was Hugh, his tan suit stained and filthy, his hair brushed in opposing directions, his eyes half lidded, his shirt opened almost to his navel.

“I didn’t think you’d scream,” he said.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

PLAYING HOUSE

1.

“Washington is hell in summer,” Penelope Deerfield said as she dug into her mulch pile with a small rusty trowel. The patio was hot as a broiler, and Rachel (standing over her, observing) kept switching from one foot to the other. She was barefoot and had only come downstairs to put the trash bags in the alley dumpster when Mrs. Deerfield called her over to the small mulch pile near her thin strip of garden.

Mrs. Deerfield explained to Rachel, “You see, even the rodentia go off on suicide missions.” She tapped the dead rat that lay next to her. It was the size of her own fist; Mrs. Deerfield had discreetly turned the rat over on its stomach so that Rachel wouldn’t lose her breakfast looking at the deep gash that the cat had made down the rat’s stomach. Mrs. Deerfield wore a wide-brimmed straw sun hat, a stretched-to-the-limit pair of blue jeans, and a grass-stained blue chamois work shirt that made her look a little too “down on the farm” considering what she was doing—burying a dead rat into the mulch pile. “It’s morbid, I suppose, to use the rat’s carcass as part of the mulch, but of such things is fertilizer made, dear. I’ve often thought it a pity that we don’t bury human beings in mulch piles—it would make them ever so much more useful, don’t you agree?”

“I hope the mice in our house don’t get as big as that thing,” Rachel said. The soles of her feet felt like they were burning, and the cement of the patio was like a bed of hot coals. She’d awakened feeling fat and unattractive, found a pimple in the middle of her forehead, her car would probably not start (or if it did, it would make those funny noises), and now she had to look at a dead rat and be polite about it after having eaten runny fried eggs. And it’s my day off. She clutched the sides of her bathrobe together. “You’re sure it didn’t come from inside somewhere?”

“Oh, no, dear, this is most certainly an alley rat who had the misfortune of crossing Ramona’s path. Ramona is a warrior at heart, and although a pregnant lady, still a wanderer—I saw her bring it in from near the dumpster. She was quite proud, I assure you, and expected extra cream this morning.”

“Makes me happy there’s a cat around—even if she does make me sneeze.”

“It’s the easy season for felines.” Mrs. Deerfield poked a hole in the mulch pile with her trowel, stabbing into the mound to make a wide berth for the dead rat. “When the humidity and heat explode like this—it’s not even eleven and already we’ve got a drippy oven day on our hands—all a cat has to do is put her paws out to trip the rats.” She pushed the rat into the hole with the back of her trowel and then began covering it up. “The rats get fat and stupid in this kind of weather and then start fighting with each other. Usually, they’re at each other’s throats before a mischievous cat like my Ramona even happens upon them.”

2.

Rachel wondered if she and Hugh were as bad as the rats.

They had managed to survive the first few weeks in the house without being at each other’s throats—this was Rachel’s feeling, anyway. Unemployment, Rachel knew from only brief experience, was depressing enough without having someone hanging over you like a vulture reminding you of it. She’d wake up for work in the morning and see him lying there, still dreaming, snoring, for all the world like an innocent, while she bitched and moaned about her malfunctioning car, about the soaring humidity, about the slight weight gain she’d noticed from eating all those on-the-way-to-the-office bagels from the Chesapeake Bagel Factory. She’d take her shower, still wary of the roaches darting beneath the tile where the grouting had come out CALL EXTERMINATOR, her yellow Post-it Notes scattered across the tiles, down the hallway, on the refrigerator), and look in the steamed bathroom mirror wondering who was the fairest of them all, knowing it was not her. She was tired even before the day began. One morning, she wrote across the steamed mirror BREADWINNER.

She hoped that Hugh would see it. She could never commit these nasty messages to her Post-it Note mania—too permanent, not lighthearted enough. A Post-it Note he could slip in his pocket and confront her with; writing on a steamed mirror was somewhat whimsical, a joke to be rubbed away with a towel or two fingers. Who wrote this? Oh, you and your little jokes!

Then it became a habit, leaving messages on the mirror in steam: WORK, or CASHFLOW, or the worst one, THE BIG 3-0. All in hopes that he would see it, would laugh, think she was being cute. And still get the message. She imagined him pulling back the shower curtain, all set to shave, looking up in the mirror and seeing the magic mirror message appear. Shaking his head, That Rachel, he would think, what will that little dickens think up next?

But he never mentioned the messages which meant one of two things: either he was taking them too seriously or he didn’t notice them at all.

Rachel couldn’t complain about Hugh having nothing to do around the house. He managed to strip off most of the dingy old wallpaper in the halls. He’d re-grouted the tiles in both the upstairs and downstairs bathrooms, completely replaced the downstairs bathroom sink. He acted like a kid at Christmas every time he got his tool kit out, his hammers, screwdrivers, planes, crowbar, and sledgehammer (“for when I need to take out my aggressions on the walls…”), and a series of wrenches of all sizes. If he was busy he seemed happy. Everything seemed to be costing an arm and a leg—some days Rachel would look at her paycheck and know that it was going to pay for refinishing the floors or repairing something or other. Paints and wallpapers ate up most of the money, with new drapes running a close third. But no matter how much work Hugh put into the house, it always looked half-finished, and Rachel was a little afraid that it would always be that way. She made enough money to cover all the household expenses, but she was saving practically nothing and it had never been their plan to only live on one income. Her car alone was eating up a lot of spare change—it made strange noises which were to her a mystery, and there were mornings when she had to take a cab to work because the car refused to start.

But Hugh seemed to be happy, just keeping busy—summer was a horrible time to look for a job, the fall would be better, and Hugh was going on at least three interviews a week as it was. She couldn’t even begrudge him a few beers here and there.

Sometimes she thought about inviting people over—Sassy or Hugh’s brother Ted, or her mother, but the house smelled of paint and nothing was quite the way she wanted it to be yet. She wanted the house to be perfect, or as close as it could get, before she undertook anything like a house-warming party.

3.

“Mouse shit!” Hugh cried out. “We’ve got mouse shit in our sink!” He stared intently at it as if it would move. “They’re taking over.”

Rachel turned away from the refrigerator. “I’m glad you can find some humor in it—are you going to scoop it up or what?”

“It’s probably good fertilizer. Maybe Penny Dreadful would like it for her mulch pile.” He had taken to calling their downstairs tenant Penny Dreadful, and her cat Baby Dreadful.

“Hugh, think about it: some mouse is climbing around our sink and stove and cutting board. Oh, gross, and I just made a sandwich over there. We’ve got to call the exterminator or something before we die of bubonic plague.”

“You ate a mouse-shit sandwich?”

“Disgusting. Hold the mayo. I feel like we should call the health department to close us down. You’re supposed to get some poison and traps. That’s your job, right?”

“You don’t really want to kill Mickey or Minnie, do you?”

“Even Gus-Gus and Mighty Mouse. The three blind mice, too. I don’t care. This is getting sickening.”

Hugh began squeaking. He wrinkled his nose and wiggled his ears. He stepped over to her, his chin pressed down against his neck making him look remarkably chinless, his eyes wide. Squeak!

“Oh, Hugh, really.” Rachel clucked her tongue but could not help smiling.

“How’s about a mouse fuck?” His voice was a high-pitched falsetto.

“Hugh.”

“Well, we haven’t really, you know, had our inaugural…fuck.”

“It’s Tuesday afternoon and I have to be back in the office in twenty minutes.”

“Squeak!”

“That is the least erotic sound I have ever heard a man or mouse make.”

“You be Minnie and I’ll be Mickey.”

“And we’ll both end up looking Goofy. Blasphemy.”

“How do you think mice do it, anyway?”

“Something I can go my whole life without ever finding out. And I hope our mice don’t do much of it around here. Now Hugh, stop that—I am not about to…right here.”

“So don’t.”

She felt his hand climbing up the side of her thigh, tickling the light hair that she’d missed shaving, and then pulling aside her hose. “You’ll run them, Hugh.” But she let him continue and he did run them, tucking his fingers up between the elastic. Her breathing was getting heavy. Whenever they made love she always felt as if they were suddenly in some dark closet, two children naked together playing doctor. It made her feel happy and strong, to say nothing of the intense pleasure she felt and the thought that this was something so right and natural, a man making love to a woman, the two bodies becoming one monstrous but natural body, normal life… his lips, rough and heavy, never half as hungry as hers seemed—she was embarrassed by these sudden explosions of sexual heat. Her body would go out of control and she would do things with him that she would later feel were not things that Rachel Adair, lawyer and daughter of Mike and Dorothy Brennan, would normally be responsible for. Sometimes when they made love, in the dark closet of her mind, she imagined there were five of him, five Hughs stroking her, licking her, holding her, kissing her, pulling her against their moist, rutting bodies.

Rachel clutched the edge of her skirt up around her waist, as Hugh, kissing her, licking her neck, pressing his mouth up behind her ear lobe, inched her pantyhose down towards her knees. She reached with her hand towards his crotch and just as she touched the rough denim of his 501 Levi’s, pressing her fingernails in between the buttons, about to pop them open, Hugh drew back. Away from her.

“God,” he said.

Her eyes came back into focus. The heat brushed past both of them, dissipating into the atmosphere. “Mmm?”

“I just saw our mouse run behind the stove—it kind of unnerved me.”

Rachel let the edges of her skirt fall back into place, and Hugh withdrew his hand from between her legs. He reached down and pulled her hose back up. He seemed very workmanlike about it. He reached up and kissed her nose, biting slightly. “Nose shark.”

She looked at him, disoriented. “We’ve got to have our inaugural, um, you know…”

“Right now I think I should try to get that mouse out of here—do you know where the broom is, Scout?”

But she knew enough not to insist on returning to a potential fifteen minutes of animal lust—she didn’t really want to work up a sweat, anyway, the humidity would take care of that.

Rachel also knew that Hugh had lost his erection.

And not when he’d seen the mouse.

He’d lost it when she’d touched him there.

You don’t go around mentioning to the man you love that he can’t get it up. Let’s Pretend you saw the invader mouse, too, and make a thing of it, but don’t make a big deal out of temporary impotence. She could count on her fingers the number of times they’d made love since Hugh had been unemployed. Maybe five times in five months. Only once in the past six weeks. Either she was too tired or he fell asleep early, or he was reading a really good book in bed, or she said something to make him angry, or there was a mouse running loose behind the stove. It had gotten to a point in the evenings when Rachel, coming home from a mountain of work and a full day in court, didn’t even consider sex an option worth pursuing.

Hugh was bending over, trying to look behind the stove, when Rachel said, “When you find our mouse, be sure and ask him how mice do it. And take notes, okay?”

This is as bitchy as I get.

4.

People passed in and out of her office all day, but they might as well have been pigeons fluttering through one of the city’s parks: Rachel felt isolated at work, isolated at home, and she found that she was losing her ability to concentrate on the things that had to get done. She’d been through something like this with the miscarriage. She’d gone to a therapist, who told her this inability to concentrate on the work at hand was a sign of depression, perhaps a very severe depression. The therapist suggested she see a doctor for a complete examination, and suddenly, when she was twenty-seven, Rachel Adair felt like she’d turned into Frances Farmer. She imagined that once she went to a psychiatrist, she’d be put in a hospital, they’d find out awful things about her mind, shave her head, force her into hot baths—followed, perhaps, by shock treatment and a tidy lobotomy. Just stick that old ice pick up under the eyelids and everything will be hunky-dory. If only it were that easy. Then one day, just as suddenly, this sort of anxiety was gone. The world seemed different to her. You lose a baby—but not a baby, just a small subdividing sphere, a microscopic amoeba like thing, no heartbeat, something the size of a pea that was formed when one of those tadpole sperm collided with an ovum—you lose a baby and you get slightly depressed. Normal life, Scout, a blessing in disguise. You don’t concentrate too well at work, so, hell, you take a few weeks off work (unstructured time, the therapist called it) and you maybe fall in love with the man you married—you try to concentrate on a little nurturing of him because he really needs it—you help with his unemployment anxiety, with his “I didn’t pass the D.C. bar” anxiety. You listen to your mom’s advice on How To Make A Man Happy. ‘Cause weren’t mom and dad happy? Even when they fought like tigers, weren’t they happy? And wouldn’t it make daddy proud, if he were alive, to know she was working on her marriage?

How come when Hugh and I fight I always feel like I’m the bitch goddess of Northwest Washington, propelled on by one of those delightful mood swings that the therapist had mentioned way back in the spring?

But now, in summer, the humidity, the monoxide-filtered air of the Washington streets, the rush, the push, the phone calls—zillions of phone calls to and from bitching clients— Rachel felt herself slipping again. At least she was conscious of slipping, and she couldn’t blame it on a miscarriage, nothing as understandable as that. According to her calendar, she would be eight months pregnant if she hadn’t lost her little sphere.

Could she blame her bad feelings on Hugh?

Could she say Let’s Pretend that it was Hugh’s fault that she was slipping into a lethargy, a depression, a deep depression, a deep-shit depression?

Let’s Pretend.

There is no Hugh Adair.

I can’t, I can’t. I love Hugh. We’ve got our share of problems and right now it seems awful. We’ve gotten up to our necks in it—I hate my job, Hugh has no job, he’s probably ordering a drink right now, and I’m a witch to think that, maybe he’s in an interview right now, or dropping an application off, or worrying about the next bar exam. But it’s a hot summer, and we have more than most couples our age—we’re healthy, we own our own home. I’ve got a well-paying job.

As mom would say. Normal Life.

As daddy would say, it all comes out in the wash.

She remembered—no, she concentrated on what she loved about Hugh, and none of it had to do with his ability to find work. She loved his smile, she loved the way she felt when they cuddled together in bed at night, she even loved him when he was down and sad, looking so much like a little boy, the heavy shock of blond hair falling down across his forehead, his blue eyes becoming large and round.

Mom pushed daddy too hard. Rachel had seen it all the time she was growing up. Why couldn’t mom just have been satisfied with daddy the way he was? He provided well enough, and he made sure we all got good educations, and he was always there on weekends to do family things—he didn’t have to be the most ambitious or wealthiest man in the world.

Rachel was determined not to do the same thing with Hugh. He’d come around in his own time. Not all men had to have burning ambition. Not all men had to be ridiculously goal oriented. Hugh had a law degree and one day soon she might even be jealous of his success. And proud of him. She hadn’t understood why she had passed the bar and he had not; he was bright, top of his class, she had faith in him most of the time, but he’d tied himself in knots over the exam—it was all a foreign language to him. One of the qualities that had attracted her to him during their courtship had been the fact that he seemed to take none of it seriously: Let’s Pretend, Scout, he’d say, cradling her in his arms, Let’s Pretend, I’m the daddy and you’re the mommy and I’m hammering loose nails back into the floor, I’m greasing the hinges on the doors, and you’re telling the kiddos a bedtime story and we’re all drinking hot cocoa

But it’s time, Hugh, to take a few things seriously.

5.

At night, in bed, the heat rose in the house and seemed to linger in a cloud above her head; no matter how she adjusted the thermostat, it was warm in the bedroom. Hugh set up a small fan in the doorway, which seemed to do nothing more than make an annoying whirring noise. He’d set mousetraps up in the corners of the rooms, and every now and then, she’d hear the traps clacking and she’d imagine the dead gray mouse, its head smushed beneath the wire jaw of the trap. She could never recall the moment when sleep would come to her—she felt as if she lay awake half the night, listening to the clacking of the mousetraps, Hugh’s breezy snores, and the whirring of the fan. Hugh would press up against her back in his sleep, and she would feel the damp fever of sweat along her back, tickling. The clacking mousetraps reminding her of the supposed ghost of the house, the whore Rose Draper, The Clapper, who was supposed to wander the house clapping her hands together.

Somewhere, off where the sirens screamed down one street or another, out where the cats cried in sexual longing, she would hear a baby crying, too, and it would comfort her like nothing else and before she realized it, she would be asleep, dreaming.

6.

Rachel didn’t even have to wake Hugh up—he was staring up at the ceiling. “I was dreaming of bombs exploding,” he murmured.

Clack! A mousetrap from out in the hall.

She closed her eyes and thought about sleep again. He’ll take care of the mousetraps.

“How many do you think we’re catching?” His breath was like steam against her shoulders; she felt him move his head against the small of her back, his hair greasy against her skin.

She didn’t answer.

“I’d guess in the hundreds. I better go downstairs and change the traps now that I’m up.”

She sighed, realizing that she would not quickly get back to sleep. “I kind of feel bad for the mice.”

“Yeah, they’ve probably been coming in here for generations.” Hugh chuckled and she felt his arm snake under her shoulder blades and curve around to stroke the skin covering her ribs; she automatically pulled her stomach in. Then his arms slithered back away from her; the bed creaked, she felt his weight shift, he was standing up.

Clack!

She kept her eyes closed and tried to think about sleep, although every time she was falling (she imagined sleep as a downward drifting on a feather bed, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, the house spinning through a cyclone while she slept) another trap would spring somewhere downstairs or in the hall.

She heard Hugh say, “I was sure the fan would make enough white noise to cover the sound of the traps.”

She lay there, eyes pressed shut, a tension headache coming on, wondering what “white noise” meant—the phrase sounded foreign even though she knew in her heart of hearts what it meant, or at least she’d used that phrase before.

And then she was at her mother’s house in Arlington, helping to can peaches—something her mother had never done in her life. If anything they’d be uncanning peaches. Her mother said, “All summer long they ripen.”

Then her mother opened her mouth to speak and a clack! came out instead; Rachel grasped her heart, which was easy to do because she was standing there naked in her mother’s kitchen. Naked and her mother didn’t seem to care in the least.

But it wasn’t her mother, it was Hugh, wearing her mother’s housedress, and as he turned away from the jars of peaches, he said, “I think we just got Cubby, Karen, Bobby, and Annette.”

But she was mistaken, her vision was going in and out of focus and it wasn’t Hugh at all, but daddy, who smiled sweetly to her. His smile grew wider, a piano keyboard smile, until his teeth started bursting through his cheeks and stretching out, opening wide as he said, “Rachel, Let’s Pretend I’m the daddy and you’re the mommy and we have a whole mess of kiddos…”

Rachel heard a gurgling noise from inside her, and she looked down at her stomach: it was growing large as if she were being pumped up with water. Her breasts were rising like twin helium balloons to compete in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade; her stomach was churning like a washing machine on a full cycle; she felt tiny feet kicking her from inside. She was getting fat and heavy, swollen. Beneath her enormous breasts, another pair of breasts sprouted, and below them, another, all the way to her navel which itself stretched from side to side of her puffing belly like a mouth opening and closing with each breath. She heard a clack! from somewhere. She had the feeling that a kettle was about to boil over, and she remembered that she’d left eggs boiling in a saucepan and she had to go turn down the heat. Now the eggs were probably cracking from the soaring temperature. She realized that the boiling was going on in her stomach as her six breasts began leaking milk. Beneath the clacking and the bubbling, she heard her babies, inside her, crying—she was boiling her mess of kiddos before they even had a chance, her spheres were screaming beneath her flapping navel. Then her ears were ringing like an alarm going off, a kitchen timer, and she knew a clock! was coming, the biggest clack! she was ever going to hear, a clack! to end all clacks, like a time bomb, her biological clock was going off, a clack! that would mean—

When Rachel’s belly exploded into a shower of streaming spheres with tiny feet, and rivers of milk spurted from her breasts, and the scream was caught way down deep in her larynx which was now exposed because the skin had ripped all the way up to her throat, she opened her eyes.

Hugh stood, a silhouette in the hall light.

Her own body was whole and naked and she lay atop the sweat-soaked sheet of their bed.

“Nine are dead—nine mice,” he said groggily. “I think Mouseketeer roll call is over for the night.”

Rachel closed her eyes and pretended she was asleep because she knew if she could pretend she was asleep, maybe she would be asleep.

But she was awake most of the night, waiting for the next clack! to occur.

CHAPTER TWELVE

FEEDING THE DEAD

1.

Mattie Peru, her trash bags of invisibility wrapped around her face like a scarf, walked down the aisle of the grocery store—people were staring at her, someone’s little girl was even pointing at her as she passed the frozen food section, but she didn’t care. Her trash bags rustled like dead leaves underfoot, and as she lumbered down towards the L’il Ol’ Baker’s Pantry, she clutched them about her neck. She could not be invisible for this—that magic would have to be saved up now, saved for the big fight with Baron Samedi. Her thoughts were jumbled—language didn’t come easy to her anymore, not since her baby died, and words came in strings like spit into her mouth—sometimes she couldn’t control the way they leapt out, sometimes she managed to imprison them beneath her tongue.

He’s gettin’ through, he’s crawling up and out, and this ain’t his domain. The words wanted to fly from her mouth, but she reined them in. You buy your yogurt and your frozen pizzas and your Sugar Free Gum, but you don’t keep him away, you don’t got the magic inside you, you don’t know what he comes for, you don’t know the way he turn life and death inside out and upside down and take the baby before he cries and the mama before she gives milk, and he makes the house scream with the lost and the ones that don’t know no better! But some of the words spat out from between the gaps in her teeth without her being aware of it, and the nice middle-aged lady picking out the raspberry jelly doughnuts and the crullers for her breakfast was treated to: “Getting! Crawlin’! Domain! Frozen pizzas don’t keep him away! Inside out ‘n upside down, take the baby! The house scream, no better!”

The teenage boy behind the counter, dressed in the L’il Ol’ Baker’s Pantry uniform of puny chef’s cap and large white apron, murmured, “You get all kinds in this neighborhood,” but the nice middle-aged lady pretended that Mattie was invisible. Joke’s on you, lady! I know I ain’t invisible without the trash bags over my face! You just trying to fool old Mattie, and you just don’t go around foolin’ no mambos!

“Hey!” The boy behind the counter yelped like a dog whose tail has been stepped on. He reached across and slapped Mattie’s hand—she was helping herself to the free sampling of pastries on the white paper doilies.

“Ain’t these free?” Mattie growled; she hadn’t even bothered to look up at him.

“Not for you,” he said.

This didn’t seem unfair to Mattie. She was accustomed to this kind of treatment. She refrained from laying a curse on the boy. She stared at the sliced bear claw and the neat square cuts of a cherry Danish that remained on the doily. “Ain’t for me, for my little girl.”

The nice middle-aged woman pretended to be having trouble deciding if the raspberry-filled doughnuts were right, or if those coconut-covered ones were more suitable for the breakfast she had in mind. Her nose wrinkled slightly like a ripple across a pond.

She smells me. Mattie grinned.

Mattie knew how to make the boy give her the pastry samples.

She reached across the counter, her fingers grazing every crumb on the doily.

It was the Magic Touch that she possessed.

And the Magic Touch worked.

The teenager said, “Take all of them and get out of here—no one’s going to want them now that your fat old hands got all over them.”

Out on the street again, Mattie wrapped the pastries carefully in a newspaper and tucked it into her grocery cart; she found a safe space for it down beneath the empty cans she’d found behind the store, and her usual collection of blankets, newspapers, and bottles. The weather suited Mattie: the skies hung low like a sagging cushion—she felt she could reach up and touch them (she tried to, to push the stuffing of the clouds back up into the lining of sky)—and the humidity was itchy. The temperature matched the soaring fever in her soul, the sun was approaching midday, and the time was right to feed the dead.

I brung this for you, my baby. Mattie’s words spun through the gallery of her head, although all that jumped out from between her lips was a bleating “My baby.” I done promised to keep him outta this world, and he ain’t gonna come back. He ain’t gonna use your little baby to come back, my baby.

She pushed her cart down along Connecticut Avenue; the streets were desolate of pedestrians—a few people late for work, or an occasional bum hanging out on the stoop of Steve’s Ice Cream, but the heat had sent lingerers inside buildings and shops. Mattie felt the plastic from the trash bags tickle her cheek. The wheels of the cart squealed as she pushed it over the cracks in the sidewalk, negotiating the turn to the right around the DuPont Circle Metro entrance. The wind from the trains came up from the long downward fall of escalators, and she waited, tasting the wind for Baron Samedi—but he was not that strong. He had no power in this world. He ruled the dead. He could only breathe himself into those who were close to death. He had no life. I don’t fear no dead man. She passed over the entrance, feeling that innocent train wind pass by her. Then at P Street, she turned right again.

I feed you, my baby, because I need your spirit strong to help your mama, I need your spirit strong. He’s coming back again—they tried those girls, but none worked, but this one work because this one repayment, this one give for services due. He’s tired, he’s weary, but he sees his chance to come through, and he’s going to turn it inside out.

The sidewalks were hard on her: the grocery cart felt heavy, and she had to pivot and lift up on the wheels each time she went from the sidewalk to the street to the sidewalk crossing Twentieth, Twenty-first, Twenty-second Street, until she came to a wide green park. There were even sunbathers down along the grass near the picnic tables—just a few people in bathing suits, looking silly with the traffic speeding along Rock Creek Parkway just across the thin creek. When Mattie saw them she pointed and laughed.

But the laugh turned into a bleating cry as she remembered her duty. She set the cart parallel to the dirt path that led through the sparse bushes and trees to the right of the park, almost beneath the stone bridge of P Street as it ran over the Parkway into Georgetown. Mattie reached down beneath the can for the pastries. She walked down the path, into the woods.

She searched the area, trying to remember the spot—the summer with its hungry branches and thick green tresses of grass covering up the spot—everything was overgrown. Mattie slipped on a ridge along the path and came thudding down hard on her ass, pebbles scurrying towards the creek. The pastries wrapped in the paper bag leapt out from where she had been cradling them in the crook of her elbow, and scattered beside her. Methodically, she picked up the crumbs and the bits of bear claw one by one—placing them in the bag again. She looked down towards the cold running stream with the ragged grass growing along its banks, and beyond it, the deep purple of the road, the cars whizzing by.

Mattie prayed that she would find direction. She prayed for the place to be revealed.

The place where she’d buried her daughter.

She hunted with her fingers, crawling through the dry rough grass that scratched her like sandpaper—her fingers never let her down, not the way her eyes and her mind did. Mattie’s Magic Touch still worked, and if she wiggled her fingers through the grass, it would begin talking to her, whisper the secret as to where the grave was. She sliced her finger across a shard of glass thrust upward in the dirt and cried out—but she was close, the glass seemed to sing to her, oh, she was close!

And then she found it.

Marked by a broken pitcher she had buried there in the earth. As she sat back to look at the grave she realized how obvious it would be if someone looked at the pattern of the grass: it had grown in a wavy pattern around the body of her daughter.

Nadine, she prayed, for your strength. Help me, my baby, help me. Stop him, stop him. He can’t be comin’ through. Help, my baby. But the words that leapt from her mouth were: “Help her. ”

As if to answer her prayer, a tremendous droning hum seemed to swoop up from under the P Street Bridge, a noise that grew like cicadas on a summer’s evening—only it wasn’t yet evening and these weren’t cicadas.

Wasps. The gray, tattered nest was thrust into the crotch of the bridge’s underside; it shook as if by a breeze.

It was alive with hundreds of them.

Mattie knew what she must do, she must send a warning, the wasps must carry her warning.

Mattie Peru pressed her face close to the earth, gently scraping her lips against the singing grass above her daughter’s grave.

2.

The sign on Roxanne Hastings’ desk read: Receptionist, but everyone knew she had run the law offices of Adair, Long, Wilmot and Sanford almost single-handedly for the past thirty years. She prided herself on being a tough customer, a hard woman, someone who didn’t put up with any guff, nonsense, or shenanigans. She could tell a wisenheimer as soon as he stepped off the elevator, and she could fix the company Xerox machine faster than anybody with just a kick of her heel. Roxanne had spent most of her adult life remaining unruffled by the scum bags who trekked to the sixth-floor suites—they were rich and sometimes famous, but scum bags nonetheless. The lawyers themselves—rude, overgrown babies who were quickly becoming old men—self-indulgent and so darn wealthy (Roxanne disliked strong language the way she disliked strong perfume) that they seemed to think they could buy anyone and everyone in their paths. And for thirty years she had been as sweet and hard as candy to them, had taken their messages, arranged their conferences and board meetings, their Christmas parties, even their trysts.

But in her thirty years with the law firm, she’d never witnessed what came off the elevator on a lazy Friday afternoon in July.

Roxanne Hastings screamed, “Holy shit!”

She had never used that sort of language before in her life.

It might as well have been a giant sewer rat that had come up through the vents.

Make that a giant sewer rat with its guts dangling out.

But Roxanne could deal with rats.

But what got off the elevator Friday afternoon and stepped across the pale blue plush carpet— looked like the contents of a dumpster had come to life.

A large bag woman whose smell preceded her stood in the hall between the four elevator doors.

The smell was one with which Roxanne Hastings was well familiar: the smell of executive washroom stall number three which was always backing up. Roxanne knew about stall number three because one of the summer clerks had bet her that she wouldn’t go into the men’s room and check it out, and Roxanne was a sucker for a sure thing. And this thing, in her dark, rippling plastic bags and oversized, open-toed hiking boots, her partially covered face huge , round pop-eyes, crying out, “Holy shit!” also as if the sight of Roxanne Hastings was enough to scare her, too.

“You—you can’t be here,” Roxanne gasped, pushing herself back from her desk, standing.

Vail Foster, a junior partner, was coming out of the Xerox room, a stack of papers under his arms. He shot a glance towards the creature (smelled her first, his nose wrinkling, he was wondering who farted); then he winked at Roxanne as he passed her desk. “One of Sanford’s pro bono’s no doubt.”

“You’re on the wrong floor, lady,” Roxanne said. She was regaining some authority. This was her office after all, and anyone who stepped off those elevators was trespassing on her territory.

The homeless woman’s mouth opened wider.

“I’m gonna have to call somebody if you don’t get out of here.” Roxanne was now in full blossom— no crazy bag lady was gonna stink up her life.

The bag woman’s mouth clamped shut. Her eyes crinkled into small silverfish, almost paper cuts of eyes, all white, and then they popped open again. “Here to see Mr. Big Man,” she snarled, her upper lip curling back to her flaring nostrils, causing a ripple of tension across her round face that continued uninterrupted along the Hefty trash bags.

Before Roxanne Hastings could tell her again to leave—simultaneously reaching for the phone to dial the number for security—the woman brought her arms into view. They’d been hidden beneath the folds of the torn, flapping bags. They were thick, flabby arms, and in her twisting, swollen fingers she brought out something. Something which Roxanne thought at first was a bomb and that thought -- after all the bomb scares the office building had sustained over the past twenty year -- now, today, this Friday in July, it was for real.

But then Roxanne heard the noise, saw the tiny particles floating out from the gray papery object.

Wasps.

This crazy woman was holding a wasp’s nest in her hands.

The woman held the nest up and shook it madly, the way you’d shake a snow globe to watch the tiny specks of plastic white snow fall down across a winter scene. But this snow, angry, buzzing, murmuring, flew in all directions, several towards Roxanne Hastings’ desk, which is the reason she ran screaming back to the private offices of the senior partners of the law firm of Adair, Long, Wilmot and Sanford.

3.

Mr. Big Man! You come outta your office, you come out from behind your fat desk, and you see your children flying and singing, looking for you, they want to claim you, Mr. Big Man, they’re gonna find you, too, and then you’ll know you got to do something, something to stop the house from screaming, got to stop the babies from crying! You got to stop the Baron from raising the knife! You got to stop the monsters from breeding!

4.

Winston Adair felt like he was sinking into the back of the plush leather chair. His office was dark, the only light stealing in like a coward from beneath the door and between the slats of the Venetian blinds.

“I am a monster,” he said to no one.

Beyond his door there was the clacking of his secretary’s typewriter and a low murmur as if of whispering just on the other side of the door.

The headache he was having made his vision blur, and sometimes when they came on suddenly like this he hallucinated voices. When he heard the woman scream down the hall, when he heard a woman yelling some indecipherable word, when he heard the commotion of office doors opening and closing, he knew there was something.

He had stood at the window of his office, the blinds up, the afternoon light flooding in, not ten minutes before. He had no headache then. He was thinking about a case the firm was handling, thinking about a prostitute he was afraid he may have killed, thinking about what he would have for dinner, where he would go, who he would invite out with him.

Then he saw her.

Madeleine Perreau.

Crossing K Street, narrowly avoiding being hit as she crossed against the light. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t seen her in over twenty years, and it didn’t matter that he could barely see her through all the trash bags she wore.

It was her.

Not the Madeleine Perreau he’d remembered, not the woman with the smooth young skin and broad accommodating hips, the tantalizing walk, but the Madeleine he’d created: a grotesque sculpture, the Madeleine he thought he had buried in his memory of that night.

Thought they had buried that night.

All these years I thought she was dead. I thought… after what she’d done I thought she would’ve died.

I thought the housekeeper would’ve killed her.

The woman below on the street had walked up to the entrance to his building. Had gone inside.

Winston Adair felt a sudden throbbing in his temple; his stomach lurched and he tasted his lunch (pastrami on rye and two dill pickles) in the back of his throat; his knees trembled, and a muscle just to the right of his right eye began twitching.

The throbbing under the skin of his face seemed to explode, and he turned off the light in his office, closed the blinds.

He didn’t notice the wasp that had crawled beneath the door of his office until it stung him on the back of the hand and he screamed just as Roxanne Hastings had done.

5.

Mattie Peru’s fingers were numb, but fingers were nothing special. You had ten of them, anyway. Mattie licked each finger as she rode the elevator back down to the lobby of the building. She pressed her back against the coolness of the full-length mirror—the elevator was full of mirrors—and looked at her reflection for the first time in twenty years.

She saw nothing reflected there, because her trash bags of invisibility covered her.

He’ll know it. he’ll know it was me. He thinks he sits in his office all safe and sound. He don’t have to see Mattie, he don’t have to think nothing about Nadine, he don’t have to think about my baby and my baby’s baby, but he’ll know it when he sees them bugs.

She took inventory on herself, glancing beneath her trash bags: ten fingers, ten toes, two tits and all of ‘em numb and scratchy from where the bugs took a bite or two or three or four. “Ain’t gonna breed no monsters!” she shouted uncontrollably as the elevator doors parted in the lobby.

A bewildered group of men in dark suits, coming back from late lunches, stood back as Mattie Peru invisibly stepped out of the elevator.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

PLAYING HOUSE, II

1.

When Rachel Adair was not in her office, she came up with ways of staying away from the house when Hugh was around working on it—she and Hugh still had the occasional laugh, still began speaking at the same time saying the same thing, still had tender embraces when the day had been long and frustrating, but these were all becoming few and far between. There are times to be close and times to be distant, and this was one of those times to be a little distant, to let Hugh work out his troubles on his own. Rachel was afraid that if she were to sit down with Hugh and plan out his future, he would blame all his troubles on her. She did not intend to be used for an emotional punching bag, and didn’t want to begin disliking Hugh.

“Well, I almost broke my sacred vow.” Rachel was jogging with Sassy Parker on the bike path that ran alongside the Potomac River, with the Kennedy Center just across the parkway. The river smelled of dead fish, and the carbon monoxide from the traffic on the road to their right was equally as nauseating. Rachel sometimes wondered if jogging near heavy morning traffic was as bad for her lungs as her old cigarette habit.

“You running around on Hugh?” Sassy was her usual knock-out self in just an old T-shirt and baggy shorts. She wasn’t even sweating half as much as Rachel. They jogged to Rachel’s pace, which was very slow, almost a walk.

“Really, I don’t have time to run around on Hugh.”

“But you’ve got time to run around.”

“No—I meant the vow about smoking. Hugh fell apart on me last Sunday and I ended up having the cigarette dream.” Rachel’s breathing was ragged and she had to slow down even further, until finally she was walking. “You know, the one where the cigarette is just begging you to suck it?”

Sassy gave her a nasty glance, but also began walking.

“Like a teenager horny for sex—you are a wicked girl, Retch. I never deny myself—in fact, I want to light up right now.” Sassy withdrew something small, slender, and white from the pocket of her shorts. A cigarette. “I have another one in my pocket if you break down.” Sassy brought a book of matches out. She paused, leaning against the railing of the walkway, and lit the cigarette. Sassy took a long fat drag, blowing the smoke over the Potomac River.

“No—believe me, if I could resist last Sunday I can easily turn down a cigarette— not that Hugh’s been turning down his cherished booze.”

“Enough!” Sassy covered her ears with her hands. “I am so tired of married women telling me their problems. Single people have more troubles, but we don’t whine to everybody. Go see a therapist.”

“I don’t have time to see a therapist.”

“Mmm—this cig sure is good.”

“Blow a little smoke my way.”

“That would be cheating. How many miles you think we ran?”

“Ten—twelve… maybe two.”

“I’m sweating like I ran twelve. This river really stinks in the summer.”

Rachel nodded, but fell silent for a while as they walked along the running path.

“All right, so tell me—what’s going on with Hugh?”

“No, you’re right, I shouldn’t dump it on you. I should figure this out on my own. Or dump it right back on Hugh. And it’s nothing really bad. In a way—a very sick way—it’s kind of good. Hugh and I were bickering about something, I forget, and then he went racing out of the house, and then I didn’t see him until midnight when he was throwing up on the stairs and crying.”

“Whoa, now, slow down. He was crying?”

“It was about his first wife, something about her, but he kept pushing me away, and there was that vomit on the third step up. Not a pretty sight. Between that and the mice and roaches… His first wife, Joanna, is not one of my favorite topics, either.”

“Chalk it up to life’s ups and downs.”

“I wish. Hugh is kind of—I know this sounds wimpy—sensitive and he’s not a coward or anything, but he has that kind of poetic slouch to him. I always feel like I should protect him. But he’s been sort of out of it lately, at least since we moved in. Maybe taking on a house this soon was a mistake—maybe we should’ve waited until he had some steady work, or at least passed the bar. I actually thought the house would help things. But I think he’s…”

“Losing it?”

Rachel nodded. “One of us is, anyway.”

“Maybe you two should start living a normal life—he doesn’t get out much, does he?”

“Supposedly on job interviews, but I think mainly to grab a few drinks.” Rachel almost laughed: her life with Hugh was beginning to sound funny to her, as if they were two sad sacks who had found each other.

Sassy’s face was screwed up in the kind of intensity of thought that Rachel’s mother was so good at when advice was forthcoming. “While I’m admittedly no expert on relationships, Retch, I think maybe you should cut back on your workload a little and try to do a few things together—maybe go off for a sexy weekend or start entertaining more.”

“That sounds vaguely 1950s housewifey to me."

“I guess it is. But you're kind of talking vaguely 1950s housewifey-ish, too.” She blew a smoke ring into Rachel’s face. “You said you might give a housewarming party?”

Rachel inhaled the smoke, smiling. “With all the vermin we’ve got running through there, we should call it a mousewarming party. I had to set one of those awful traps—you know, where the cute little mouse gets his feet caught in glue—really gross. But it’s better than the racket these mousetraps make.” She paused, breathing in, sighing. She glanced across the river to Virginia and thoughts of home and daddy seemed to be there, just over the water. The thought of dealing with Hugh at all made her want to crawl into bed and stay there for a week or more. I want to scream, but not too loud.

“Get out of yourself a little: give a party, go sky diving, join the Junior League.” Sassy smirked.

“You realize you’re the only friend I have in this town?”

Sassy puffed on the cigarette. “No good—you’re going to have to have at least twelve friends to have a housewarming party.”

Getting back up to M Street on their way home, the two women passed a storefront on the edge of Georgetown. Rachel was not aware that she had begun crying until she felt the squeeze of Sassy’s hand on her elbow.

“Oh, Retch,” Sassy said.

“I guess my body just hasn’t caught up with reality—it still thinks it’s pregnant.”

The store window display was of baby clothes. They were frilly and light and draped across a long blue rocking horse with painted eyelashes and a lipsticked smile.

I want to scream, she thought.

2.

On Saturday, Rachel could not get her car started. She sat in the damn car in the alley after a frustrating few minutes of turning the key in the ignition, pumping the gas, jiggling the wheel, and praying to whatever gods were listening. The seat of the car was hot, the wheel burned her fingers, she had gotten dressed up to go to the store, and already she was fried and sweating. “You goddamn car!” she shouted, pounding the dashboard with her fist. She sat there feeling as if she were nothing but frazzled nerves covered with skin. She felt like yelling her head off, spewing out every obscenity she’d ever heard or seen written on bathroom walls in college.

She waited a few minutes longer; a slight breeze wafting through the open window. Her hands were shaking. She wanted to cry but was so mad at the car she didn’t give it that little victory of seeing her fall apart.

Rachel looked up at her house, over the back gate, to the second floor. Hugh had come out onto the outside stairs, standing there in his paint-spattered khakis and filthy white T-shirt. When he waved to her, paint flew out from the brush he was holding. Hugh was apparently in a good mood this afternoon—when he was consumed with working on the house, planing the floor, scraping old paint off wails and spreading on a new coat, he was content. He had a way of standing there that reminded her of her other father, just a certain inner calmness regardless of the turmoil going on about him.

Hugh’s smile sank into a straight line, and a look of concern came across his features; his brow wrinkled. He looked like a lifeguard who had just spotted a shark fin circling a swimmer. He pointed to the left of the car. His mouth opened and he shouted something like, “Look out!”

Just as Rachel turned to her left to see what he was pointing at, something moved so swiftly it was a blur as it pushed itself into her open car window.

"Get out!" the thing shouted (and Rachel in the half second of absolute terror knew it was the bag woman from Winthrop Park and at the same time thought it was a monster). Her spit sprayed across Rachel’s face as she howled at the top of her lungs, “Get outta the screamin’ house, lady!”

Rachel tried to scream but found she had no voice. It felt like her vocal cords had turned to solid ice. As if in a dream, she was moving in slow motion and everything around her went on in real time. She wanted to reach over and roll the window up, but her whole body seemed to have gone to sleep, and her skin crawled with a pins-and-needles sensation. All she could do was stare at the crazy woman in horror.

But normal life flooded back in an instant as if it had never been gone: the crazy woman moved away from the car. The back gate was opening to the alley; Hugh was running down the iron stairs to the patio.

Mrs. Deerfield came through the gate holding the garden hose, spraying it at the bag lady who ran limping down the alley. “You get out of here, you old witch, or I’ll have them put you away for good this time!”

The bag woman began cussing as she turned the corner, her trash bags flying behind her like a cape in the wind.

3.

“It seems heartless, I know, but perhaps if I called the authorities she might have a better home at one of the mental hospitals.” Mrs. Deerfield sat on Hugh’s college chair.

Rachel leaned back on the couch, and Hugh was in the kitchen brewing tea. Hugh’s framed photographs hung along the wall above the fireplace; Mrs. Deerfield studied them with some interest while she spoke. The pictures were of interesting and unusual houses, bridges, landscapes, whatever had caught his eye. One of them was of a twenty-six-year-old girl named Rachel Brennan wearing a heavy sweater on a beach in Cape Cod one autumn, trying to smile and keep her hair out of her eyes while he took the picture. Her dark hair was longer then, down over her shoulders, and what Rachel remembered about the picture the most was the way that Hugh kept laughing every time he was about to take the picture and how much love she felt for him then. In just two years, how things had changed.

“You’re ever so much prettier now, with your hair cut the way you’ve got it, dear,” Mrs. Deerfield commented. “Change is always for the better.”

“Oh.” Rachel felt as if Mrs. Deerfield had just read her thoughts.

It startled her a bit, but then Mrs. Deerfield returned to the subject of the crazy bag lady. “She calls herself Marty or Mattie or something, and she used to be in one the state asylums, I think, until someone let her out. I know her well—at least I feel as if I do—she used to fling large chunks of dog feces at my window, and once she broke into this house when the two young men had just moved in. I imagine they scared her as much as she did them—they said she came into their bedroom at two in the morning waving a knife around, but evidently she didn’t expect to see two naked men sharing the same bed. I suppose I would’ve been as shocked as she was, and she dropped the knife and ran out screaming.” Mrs. Deerfield paused when Hugh brought her a cup of tea. “Mightn’t you have a drop of whiskey for flavor?”

Rachel glanced at Hugh and smiled.

“I could run get some down in my flat,” Mrs. Deerfield volunteered. “Oh, perhaps not, then.” She sounded defeated; she glanced about the room again, at the photographs, at the stereo, up at the hanging plants.

“If she has a knife she must be dangerous,” Hugh said. He went and sat down next to his wife.

“Oh, hardly, she’s all show, that one, mad as a hatter but fairly harmless, I think. She seems to imagine that her baby or something is being held hostage in this house. Perhaps she has a half dozen or more houses she does this to—I suppose it seemed cruel to hose her down like that, but you see, words and logic don’t seem to get through to her. She’s like a poor, dumb child, really. Oh, dear, but you shouldn’t have done it.” Mrs. Deerfield sipped her tea, glancing about the living room.

“What’s that?” Rachel asked.

“You went and blocked that lovely fireplace. You put your telly there, and it’s really a wonderfully beautiful fireplace, and I can tell you that no one could build them like that anymore, dear.”

“I thought you meant I’d done something to that woman.”

Ignoring her, Mrs. Deerfield went on while Hugh winked at Rachel, “I do like the paint job—ever so much more light in the room, don’t you think? And the photographs are lovely, who took them?”

“Hugh did—he was big on photography in law school.”

“Ever do any nude studies? When I was younger I always wished someone would’ve done a nude study of me before the world revolved a hundred times, and here I am today old and useless and drinking weak tea. You ought to put a drop of whiskey in your tea, dears, it adds a little sunshine to the afternoon, especially after our run-in with that creature.” Mrs. Deerfield barely caught her breath when she spoke, and Hugh, sitting close to Rachel, began nudging her knee playfully with his, shooting a smile her way which she tried to ignore because she was afraid she’d laugh and hurt Mrs. Deerfield’s feelings. Mrs. Deerfield seemed oblivious to this, however. She didn’t look at the couple on the couch while she spoke, but scanned the room, taking in the little changes they’d made. “I’ve called the police on her, once or twice, but it doesn’t matter, does it? The authorities around here seem to expect this sort of behavior. I suppose it would be easy to go crazy in this neighborhood—and this Mattie woman has been around a long time, I think. Most of this block burned out in the late '60s, you know. I looked out from the window and saw several men running down the alley spraying gasoline on the cars, and then an explosion as one car after another went up, and then it spread to the building behind us, and it almost came over here, too, I suppose, before the night was over, but the wind kept the fire back—thankfully. It was as if for a brief moment Hell had spilled across the park. Hippies and agitators and of course the downtrodden. Mustn't forget the downtrodden." She paused and looked away. “My Ramona is due any time now and I’m afraid she’s been quite the naughty puss and run away from Nanny Deerfield—if you should find kittens in your bathtub, you have my permission to scold her on my behalf. Sometimes,” now Mrs. Deerfield was wistful, and Rachel got halfway to a smile, “sometimes, when I think of it all, kittens, this house, that insane creature,” Mrs. Deerfield shook her head slowly, “it almost makes me want to scream.”

It almost makes me want to scream.

Rachel looked from Mrs. Deerfield to Hugh and back again. Had she said that, had she really said that? It almost makes me want to scream?

“In our little sanctuary by the park,” Mrs. Deerfield continued, “to be, well, assaulted by that pathetic woman, and where are the police to keep people like her out of our alley? Why is there no one to keep this area free of such people? But screaming would do no good, no good at all. For who would one scream to?”

4.

“What a sad little woman, in her small apartment, nothing to keep her going,” Rachel said after Mrs. Deerfield had left.

“Nothing but booze.” But as soon as Hugh said this, the two of them fell silent. Rachel rested her head in the crook of Hugh’s elbow; she tried to match her breaths with his. The air conditioner seemed to be working better than usual, and the house with its new paint jobs and greased hinges and hanging plants seemed to be theirs at last.

After a few moments, Rachel said, “You know, your photos are good. I think that picture is my favorite one of me: I look so insecure and inexperienced and confused, and so happy. You really caught the true Rachel.”

“Nose shark,” he said, pinching her nose lightly between his fingers. “I love you. Scout.”

“She’s a good influence.”

“Penny Dreadful?”

“She came up and saw our living room and she made me look at it differently. She saw it as ours. We’ve screwed up the fireplace, but hey, we did it our way.”

Then Rachel and Hugh said, simultaneously: “Our home sweet home.” They laughed, and Hugh cradled Rachel against him. Her body felt heavy, and his was like a soft cushion and she wished she could just sink into him and not ever rise up again.

“I must be getting old,” he said. “I feel the need for a midafternoon nap.”

“You are a wizened man of thirty.”

“Let’s just fall asleep here the way we used to in school and we’d just laze around all afternoon.” He kissed her forehead, and she closed her eyes. “Let’s Pretend we’re in our own home, Scout, and Let’s Pretend everything will be all right.”

“I love you, You-Are-There-Hugh-Adair.”

5.

Later they went for a walk—the evening was cool and breezy, which was unusual for the final days of July. The trees that lined the sidewalks were a pale luminescent green, offering dappled shade from the western sun. They hiked up through Kalorama Triangle, looking at the embassies and large houses. Other couples passed by, one family of four obviously sightseeing, young people walking their dogs, which Hugh would stop and pet. The gingko trees stank to high heaven (Hugh called them “vomit trees”), the blocks seemed to go on for miles—Rachel’s calves ached—but she felt so happy inside she wanted to walk forever. It was as if the scare she’d had from that bag woman, following close on the heels of her car breaking down, had awakened something in her that had been sleeping. And Mrs. Deerfield, too, had unlocked something for her, some cabinet in the house, just by saying that one phrase: it almost makes me want to scream. So, Rachel wasn’t the only human being who felt like screaming sometimes, others did, too, others like Mrs. Deerfield could admit it. Things could get to be too much for her just like they could for Rachel. Normal life.

Hugh grabbed her hand and swung it playfully; he twisted around her in a pretzel dance move. “Sugar pie honey-bunch.”

“Oh, Hugh, you’re so weird,” Rachel said. She grinned goofily. “Wanna play, Hugh?”

“A dangerous question.”

“No, I mean like, ‘come out and play.’ Remember when you could call up a friend and just say, ‘Do you want to come out and play?’”

“‘Play’ takes on a whole new meaning later on. Why don’t we go to the movies?”

“Oh, barf, let’s not go to some movie theater when we finally have bearable weather. Let’s go to the zoo—it’s not even seven, I think we can still get in.”

“And watch the chimps masturbate? Well, it’s your day off.”

“And we do what I want.” They took a path beside the parkway, walking through a wooded area just beneath the northern edge of Winthrop Park. Joggers were out in droves with blank, almost fatalistic looks on their faces as they pounded the asphalt, avoiding the couple.

“Walk on the grass!” one of them shouted as he ran by.

“Nice attitude.” Hugh smirked.

“I was thinking maybe we could get away for a few days—maybe a week.”

“It’s a great time. We’ve just spent half our savings fixing up a house, I haven’t worked since May…”

“Oh, you are getting to be an old man, you stick-in-the mud. I don’t mean anywhere exotic, I mean to the beach or something.”

“Like I said, it’s a great time.”

“Well, maybe while you’re unemployed we should do something, go somewhere. I mean, once you get a job you won’t have a vacation coming for at least six months, probably longer. This might be the best time. I think my paycheck’ll cover a cheap motel at Rehoboth or Dewey. And while we’re gone, we can have the place de-moused and de-roached.”

“Only if we take Penny Dreadful and Baby Dreadful with us.”

“With the kind of work I’m doing this fall and your getting a job I really don’t see how we’ll get another break until sometime at the turn of the century. Except for today, the humidity sucks, the pollution is getting to me, and the last vacation we took was our honeymoon.”

They entered the zoo from the bike path; hundreds of tourists were milling around the exhibits and cages. They took a path along the seal exhibit, up to the otters. Rachel tried to find the otters, but couldn’t see them anywhere.

“Look, if going to the beach is what you really want -” Hugh said as they continued walking. The squawks and cries of wild animals filled their ears.

“I want, I want.”

“I just don’t want to spend all your money—I’m beginning to feel like a kept man.”

“Our money.”

“The car payments and repair, your college loans, your law school loans, et cetera et cetera.”

“Hey, if you’re going to be in debt, do it big time.”

“Okay, all right, I just feel so damned guilty. And don’t think I don’t see your little notes around the bathroom—it doesn’t help my highly developed sense of guilt any to see the word paycheck etched across the bathroom mirror.”

“I know, I’ve been tough on you. Look, you’ll get a job soon enough—I know it.”

“We haven’t talked about it much,” Hugh whispered.

She knew what he meant. He meant: the drinking. Rachel was beginning to wish the conversation had not gotten so serious; she’d been enjoying herself, and forgetting about the clutter of her life.

“I know.”

“You’ve been good about it. I know I’m slipping up some.”

“Yeah, well, we all do it sometimes.”

“The interviews I’ve been on!” He laughed, clapping his hands together. “Bufu Thompson said he’d try to ‘work me in.’ Work me in? I was practically responsible for his getting in to law school in the first place.”

“The world is full of assholes.”

“It’s been kind of tense. I’ll try to stay away from it.” The dreaded it. Beer, wine, selected refined liquors. Somehow Hugh’s not naming it specifically made her shiver. It must have some power over him if he could not give it a single descriptive word.

Rachel had no response to this: the past few months had been tense, to the point where when she was not working she’d been drifting through things, nodding her head when Hugh would say something, but trying not to turn every situation into a confrontation.

But today. Today had been so good. All of her anxiety seemed to have melted away, changed with the weather.

She felt happy and even secure with Hugh.

Hugh said, “We’ll go to the beach, what, maybe Labor Day weekend?”

“Well, to be honest, the end of next week is good. I think I can get Thursday and Friday off, and the following week if I want it.”

“Talk about presumptuous—how long have you been planning this little getaway, Scout?”

“I was just inspired, that’s all. We could drive up Thursday morning. A couple of T-shirts, some shorts, flip-flops… we can get a couple of those big goofy beach towels up there, and order club sandwiches from room service.”

“A cheap motel with room service?”

“Okay, we’ll pick up Ding-Dongs and Ho-Ho’s at the drugstore.”

“Of course we have to think about your clunker car. I guess I could get it to a garage Monday morning.”

“If it works by Wednesday, we’re set. I’ll ask Mrs. Deerfield to take in the paper, you know, water the plants, turn lights on and off and stuff, and maybe we can get the roach man to come by while we’re gone.”

“You’re just my one-woman problem solver, Scout,” he said without a trace of sarcasm. His eyes were shining blue as he looked into hers; she reached up and with her fingers twirled the hair that hung across his forehead.

“Daddy always said: it all comes out in the wash.”

He grinned and shook his head, his eyes never leaving her face. “If I kissed you right here -” and before she could say anything in protest, Hugh hugged her to him, and brought his lips against hers, softly, softer than she could ever remember a kiss being, cool and moist and unhurried. I love you so much, You- Are-There-Hugh-Adair.

Behind them, the monkeys shrieked and jangled at the bars of their cages.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

FATHER-SON CHAT

1.

Ted Adair dreaded visiting his father, but the Old Man was losing it fast and Ted figured he owed him that much. For the past month and a half, Winston had been calling his oldest boy every night after midnight with bizarre stories. One about things that were after him, then something about an old bad debt. (“What, pop, can’t you pay it?” Ted had asked over the phone and the Old Man replied, chillingly, “Of course, I can pay it, Ted, I’ve always paid off my debts!”)

Then several weeks ago, his father had taken Ted out to lunch—to an outdoor cafe in Georgetown.

Now, if you knew the Old Man, you’d know he wasn’t one for dining al fresco. But Ted got the feeling that his father wanted to be out in the open, in the daylight, as if something waited for him, something or someone who lurked in darkness.

Winston Adair took Ted out to lunch to tell him about the dead body in the Jaguar.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Ted almost spilled his beer.

The Old Man glanced around the cafe—the tables were filled with people, talking, eating and drinking, making such a racket he could be fairly assured of secrecy. He reached across the table to Ted, leaning forward, tugging at Ted’s arm.

“There’s this whore,” Winston whispered, and his breath was so foul that Ted wondered if the Old Man had brushed his teeth since Christmas. “She died in my car.”

Then the Old Man began giggling.

Ted, who prided himself on being able to catch most of life’s curveballs, played it cool. You watch your pop crack like an egg and you want to pretend it’s business as usual. He took a mean swig of his beer, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, “I think we better clarify what we’re talking about here.”

The Old Man was acting spooky, his head nodding as if this were some under-the-table deal, as if this were a plea bargain or something and he just wanted it to go smoothly. Here he was in a three-piece pin-stripe suit from Brooks Brothers, a little mustard on his red tie from his pastrami sandwich, just a hint of drool at the left-hand comer of his mouth: Pop, dad, the Old Man, Winston Adair, legal counsel to the stars and minor constellations.

And he was losing it.

“What are we talking here, pop? Is this some kind of necrophiliac’s dream? You got a dead girl in the trunk of your Jag?” Ted looked around at the other tables.

“Well,” Winston Adair said, slurping up some of the spit that was running down his chin—he lapped up the slick wet trail beneath his lip with his tongue, “not anymore. You, you know, you can’t keep a good corpse down. Nosiree. She up and walked away.”

2.

Ted hadn’t been back to the old family home in McLean since Christmas. Something had been building in the past year, and it had begun with Hugh’s marrying Rachel Brennan. Ted didn’t know what it was exactly, but a change had come over the Old Man, something that Ted didn’t really like about his father, something that had lain hidden for years and was now emerging, coming to the surface.

Of course, there was a shitload that Ted had never liked about his father—his father was a real asshole most of the time, had spent years building a reputation as someone who would as soon screw you over as look at you, but Ted took this for granted.

Sometimes Ted felt he screwed people over, too, but it was tax law so who gave a flyer, anyway? Ted counted it a good night when he could drop off to sleep knowing he had, perhaps, screwed over one less person than he had the day before. But it was the nature of the business, and you go with the flow if you want to keep your head above water. Now, Hughie never understood this, but that wife of his is a real catch, she knows about how things work, how the universe is put together. No flies on her. Marrying her is just about the smartest thing Hughie’s ever done.

Ted pulled his silver Mercedes SL up to the entrance of Renfield, which was the name of the Adair estate; the large Tudor-style mansion was hidden from the road, dogwood trees clustered about the drive, wisteria entangled like greedy fingers through the front gate.

The burning sunlight didn’t penetrate the driveway, blocked by the old giant oaks that stood guard for the half-mile drive to the house. The shade was oppressive—Ted, who was boiling from the humidity of the early afternoon, wondered if it was not possible to crack up when you lived down such a dark and lonely road.

At the front gate, a video camera pointed down at him.

Something Pop must’ve installed since December.

Ted rolled down his window and smiled at the camera. He raised his sunglasses up. Finally, the gate began making a humming sound, followed by a series of clicks and squeaks. The tall black gate slid open.

“Thanks, Pop,” Ted said, flipping the bird at the camera. He pushed his foot down hard on the accelerator and sped up the drive towards the house.

3.

Winston Adair sat behind the console and watched his television monitors. His face rippled with uncontrollable ticks, above his eyes, along the edge of his mouth.

Up near his hairline, a purple vein throbbed with blood. If you could crawl inside his brain (he felt like he had done that and more, that he had crawled inside a small dark cave in his brain) you might find that it had been carved out like a pumpkin. Yes sir, a big fat balloon filled with breath, but at least I’ve got that—a little breath goes a long way these days. There were times when he did not know where he was. Right now he knew. He was safe at home, at Renfield, and his son Ted was coming up the drive. But other times he was buried alive beneath a bone-crushing fear. He was afraid that he would forget how to breathe, the way the redheaded whore in his car had forgotten.

And then something else had begun breathing for her.

His white button-down shirt was open to his chest and blotted with sweat; he kept rubbing his thick legs with the palms of his hands. He sat there in his shirttails and his white boxer shorts. He mumbled to himself every once in a while, that was okay, because if you’re talking you’re walking, you know it, Winston. If you can wag your fat tongue then you can wag your fat ass and that means you’re breathing.

After switching the electric gate closed behind Ted, he glanced quickly from one monitor to another. Every time he looked away from one screen, he thought he just missed seeing something on it. Out of the comer of his eye he thought he saw someone, or something, move.

But it’s just you, Winston. They haven’t caught up with you. You’ve caught up with you.

“Just take what you want and leave me alone,” he said to the monitors.

He rubbed the palms of his hands across his hairy, fat, white legs.

His hands still burned from the wasps.

He held his hands up to his face and kissed the center of each palm. He kissed each finger. Kiss it and make it better. His hands were swollen and looked as if he’d blown them up like balloons, but lead balloons because they were heavy and he dropped them to his lap again.

And it felt, sometimes, hell, most of the time, like the wasps had gotten inside him and he was the wasp’s nest.

4.

“Uh, Pop, do you always open the door in such… ah, sartorial splendor?” Ted stood on the front porch of the house. His father, in the shadow of the door, looked like hell—his boxer shorts clung to his thighs, his shirt was yellowed under the arms with sweat stains. Ted thought he smelled something too awful to even wonder what it was. The Old Man’s eyes were dark and sunken into brown circles, and his hands and arms were puffed up an oozing, blistering pink. “Jesus, Pop, you stick your hands in a barbecue?”

The Old Man grinned. “You’re just a laugh a minute, Ted. The class clown hasn’t grown up any, has he?”

“Hell with you.” Ted pushed his way past his father. As he went he smelled something that was dead, or Near Dead. One of the Near Dead, Pop, that must be you. You got the look of the grave in your eye, your skin is stretched across your fat and bones to the limit, and you’ve got the stench, Pop, you’ve got the stench like nobody’s business.

Ted went into the living room. The drapes on the back picture window were drawn, the furniture was covered with blankets and sheets. In a corner of the room were some pillows and a few blankets rumpled up. Next to them were jars filled with some yellowish water which Ted wanted to believe was apple juice or lemonade, but which he knew, because of the odor in the room, was piss.

The Old Man’s been sleeping and pissing in the living room. Maybe I should call it the Near Dead Room.

Ted turned back to face his father, who had followed behind him. “Jesus.”

“I can’t offer you anything to drink, boy,” Winston said. “I’ve drunk most of it.”

“Where’s your housekeeper?”

“She left about a month ago. Just packed her things and moved out of the guest house. I wanted to pay her, you know, she had some wages coming…”

“What the hell is happening to you, Pop?”

“Oh, the shit has hit the fan, boy, a big wad of the stuff, and that fan just spins and spins and where it stops nobody, not even me, knows. You see these?” He raised his hands up. “I wish I had barbecued them, Ted, I wish I could burn off these bumps. I tried skinning my arms. I just got a razor, boy, and started slicing through them. Just one layer of skin peeling off at a time. I was bleeding like a sonofabitch, and it hurt, but it did no good. They’re still here. A man can’t get rid of his insides just by peeling back the skin—that’s just going to show what’s really under there. Nosiree, it just didn’t work. Because these are bug bites, but not just ordinary bug bites. These are industrial-strength wasp stings and they get buried way down deep and don’t come out. They’re a part of me.”

Ted backed away from his father.

“What’s wrong, boy? Where are you headed?”

“Look, pop, I’m just going to call your doctor. I think maybe you should see somebody about those…”

“Don't call a doctor. They're useless. I need a miracle," his father whispered.

Minutes later, Ted drew the drapes back.

Sunlight sprayed across the living room. Ted opened the sliding glass door to get some fresh air in. “Here, Pop, let’s sit on the back porch.”

“Make sure nothing’s out there.”

“You think someone’s on the property?”

“You’ve got shit for gray matter, boy. It’s wasps I’m concerned about. They might be out there waiting for me.”

Ted went out and looked beneath the eaves of the house. “All’s clear on deck, pop.”

They sat around the glass coffee table. A cool breeze spun through and dissipated all too soon—once again the smell of the Near Dead thrust up Ted’s nostrils like two fingers with sharp nails.

“Pop, look, I think you need some help.”

“You know I haven’t been to the office for a week?” Ted had been thinking, from the condition of the house, it had been more like six weeks. “You talk to your brother?”

“Hughie’s never been the most communicative brother, pop. I doubt you’ll hear from him unless he needs a loan.”

“I hope I’m that lucky—God, I hope you’re right.”

“He’s a dickhead. He’s got a list of grudges against you and me that you could wrap around Capitol Hill.”

“He’s your brother, Ted.”

“And he’s your son.”

Winston shook his head sadly. “Would a father let his son inherit what I am leaving to Hugh?”

“Is this what it’s all about? Are you making yourself crazy because of Hughie’s questionable lineage? I knew it—I knew it when I was four. I knew about mom and her little indiscretion. Hughie probably knows it, too. He’s not completely dense. Your conscience go into overload this week? Or are you still worried about that whore who got fifty bucks from you without finishing her job?”

“She was dead. I know she was dead. I saw her die. I’ve seen people die before.” Winston broke into a grin. “They even found her in the river later on. It was in the paper, 'Prostitute Commits Suicide.' She was floating, Ted, just floating. Deader than dead. But she died in my car at the Iwo Jima Memorial and she walked down Route 50 and jumped into the Potomac. She was dead, boy, but she went and drowned herself anyway.”

Ted was trying to think of ways of getting the hell out of his father’s house and then calling some men in white coats with nets to come catch the Old Man. “Onward and upward, pop. I assume there’s a reason you wanted me to come. We both know this isn’t my favorite hangout.”

“I’ve raised a generation of vipers.”

“Good ol’ pop. Maybe a martini would help. Maybe a jug of martinis would help. You sure you don’t have a little booze in one of the cabinets?”

“I have been drunk all week, boy. I have been drunk and scared to death. I’ve been drunk until the hangovers started to taste good.”

And you sure look it.

“It’s been pursuing me since I was a young man, Ted. And it’s finally caught up with me.”

I ain’t sayin’ yes and I ain’t sayin’ no. “You don’t have something like testicular cancer do you, pop? ‘Cause if you’ve got something like that, man, you’ve got a strange way of leading up to it although—heh heh—you do have balls.”

“Keep the jokes coming, boy, but it won’t keep what I’ve got away. What I have, Ted, is an accounts payable credit—that’s pretty good, isn’t it? I know my figures, don’t I? I owe someone, Ted, someone more powerful than a shitheel IRS—and what I owe, I owe in blood. And this something, this something is here, now, to collect.”

“You owe the Mafia or something? Are we talking horse heads under the sheets?”

Winston laughed. “That wit, oh, that Adair wit.”

“Who do you owe?”

“It’s going to sound funny, Ted. It’s going to sound really funny.”

“Try me.”

“You promise not to put me away? You swear you won’t shoot me up with tranquilizers and lay me down in a padded cell?”

I ain’t sayin’ yes and I ain’t sayin’ no, I’m just sayin’ maybe.

“A bokor,” the Old Man mumbled.

“A what—a ‘broker’?”

“A bokor. A voodoo man—a witch doctor—a black-magic priest -”

“Bullshit.”

“I didn’t believe it either, until I saw what he could do. And still I didn’t fully believe it. But now I do. Ted, I saw him eat a woman alive—I saw him bury his teeth in -”

Yep, pop done cracked real good this time. You can see the fault lines erupting down the side of his face. He went and stuck his arms up to his elbows into a wasps’ nest and the venom went all the way to his brain. Just hope his will is in order and you find a nursing home comfortable enough for the old guy. He’s a bastard but even bastards deserve some comfort when they crack.

“Sure, Pop, calm down, let’s talk, it’s okay. Where does this guy live?”

Winston licked the pink swollen flesh between his puffy fingers. “Your guess is as good as mine.” Then laughing, tears coming to his eyes: “He’s dead, and where do dead men live, boy? Maybe all around us. Maybe they stick to one place. Maybe they haunt one place. Maybe a house. Maybe they never left the house. Maybe they’re in the house waiting for a crack, waiting for something to let them through, something oh so perfect, something that fits the scheme of things, boy, something or someone who would be the perfect way out.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

REVELATIONS

1.

While Hugh went to the garage Wednesday afternoon to pick up the VW, Rachel sat in the turret room reading the papers Ted had given her, she had put them away three weeks ago barely glancing at them. She’d thought it better not to mention to Hugh about Ted’s visit, and she was hoping that the legal ownership of the house wouldn’t come up until Hugh was in a steadier frame of mind.

The turret room was still in the midst of a major overhaul: Hugh had scraped and steamed the old wallpaper off, and beneath that another layer of wallpaper that was only half removed. It was a cheap, shiny, yellowish paper that reminded Rachel of contact paper and was unpleasant to look at for any length of time. But if she sat at the cushion on the window seat she could look out over the park and read and not deal with the half-finished room.

Below in the park, a group of old men sat talking on the benches, six school-children played a game of hopscotch on the sidewalk, the trees drooped heavily with the afternoon’s rainfall—it had only begun to clear at five, when Rachel got out of the subway at DuPont Circle and walked up Connecticut Avenue to Winthrop Park.

It had been cool and she’d felt good, good about the beach trip they’d be making in the morning, good about Hugh, good about life. She hadn’t seen the crazy bag woman from the park—another good omen.

She riffled through the white legal-sized sheets before her: boring, boring, boring, as Hugh would say. She skimmed through the domestic instructions: Your User-Friendly Trash Compactor, Frost-Free Refrigeration At Its Finest, Making The Most Of Your Three-Cycle Dishwasher. Finally, towards the back of the pile she came across a diagram of the house. Page one showed the floor plan of Mrs. Deerfield’s apartment: the sitting room near the front facing Hammer Street, then a brief, practically nonexistent hallway leading to the bedroom, the bathroom, back to the kitchenette, the walk-in closet, the breakfast nook—Rachel remembered that particular place, the Clamoring Place of Mrs. Deerfield and her weird girlfriends, the place where Rachel had all but passed out. It seemed silly to her now, and she knew that her hormones and her blood sugar were the culprits, but it had made her less anxious to go see the downstairs apartment again. There was something else, running alongside the breakfast nook—it looked to Rachel like a sketch of train tracks, and she thought it must be the back glass doors to the patio, or maybe it was something about the sewage pipes. Or who knows? Maybe there used to be a train running through here? I am a lawyer, not an architect.

On page two, the diagram was of the second floor of the building, or the first floor of their house. She scanned it, the living room, the kitchen, the den, the turret room, the bathroom. There was a blur of letters in a small crawl space between the BTHRM and TRRT RM. Rachel tried to make them out: VNTY. What is VNTY? It was a space perhaps the size of a closet, and maybe again this had to do with pipes, because there was a brief doodle of train tracks in a ray out of the VNTY. So maybe pipes behind the walls.

But there’s that bricked-up window.

In the alley, between the brownstone and Draper House.

Rachel had only gone through the alley on that side once—the first day she saw the house. It was narrow and dark and smelled of wino piss; broken bottles and tin cans sprawled across the concrete. But she had glanced up and seen the small bricked up window, like a closed eye, and wondered when and why it had been bricked up.

And then she’d just forgotten about it, buried it in the back of her mind, probably because I dreaded dealing with the cleanup job on that alley.

So perhaps there was a room there, between the bathroom and the turret room.

Rachel looked over at the wall near the door.

Behind that wall is a VNTY. With a window. And train tracks:

She stood up. The yellow wallpaper-beneath-the-wallpaper was so hideous she wondered who would even spend the money on that kind of stuff. She walked over to the wall, pushing the door closed so she could imagine the whole space, the entire room behind the wall. She rapped on it, and the rap was hollow— doesn’t that mean there’s a room back there?

Oh, but this wallpaper is so ghastly to look at, and she reached up, digging with her fingernails beneath one of the greasy yellow folds, tearing off a corner of the paper. The wall was a grayish white beneath. Okay, now we’re getting somewhere.

She scratched at some more of the paper. More wall beneath, but wall with a red Magic Marker scrawl.

This must’ve been some kind of nursery and some brat drew on the walls, so the mommy and daddy decided to put up cheap wallpaper in case junior went crazy with his Crayolas again.

She scraped more away, peeling back a long strip of the ugly paper.

Beneath it, a word was forming out of the red marker doodling.

Rachel pulled more of it, and the letters HOU were visible.

The kiddos have been writing dirty words on the walls.

She thrust her nails beneath the paper and tugged.

Rachel screamed when the nail of her index finger cracked, splitting all the way to the tender flesh. Blood rose up beneath the translucent nail. Shit, it feels like I stuck an ice pick under there. She sucked on her finger and then pressed down on the nail.

But the fingernail had at least done the job.

The strip of paper covering the red-markered word was hanging down below.

But the word made no sense.

Written in red marker was the word: HOUNFOUR.

2.

“Next month’s rent,” Mrs. Deerfield said, “August. You won’t be back you said until just before the first, and I thought you might like the spare change jingling in your pocket. I hope I’m not disturbing you—I know it’s late, but I heard the telly, so I knew you were still up and since you’re off in the morning I didn’t want to miss you, dear.” She stood there at the French doors; she’d come up the patio stairs, clumping loudly and rattling the railing as if to warn them of her arrival.

It was after ten on Wednesday night, and Rachel and Hugh were playing Scrabble in front of the television.

Mrs. Deerfield was wearing her turquoise oriental robe, her hair turbaned with a pink towel: she had come right from the bath to pay her rent. She smelled like a walking ad for Yardley’s English Lavender, a pleasant change from the vinegary, boozy odor.

Hugh said, “Hi,” but seemed more interested in “The Honeymooners” rerun. He glanced back and forth between his wife, his tenant, and his TV show. On the TV show, Jackie Gleason and Art Carney were handcuffed together on a train.

Rachel held the door open—not quite an invitation, but she didn’t want to seem rude (and yet she didn’t want to invite Mrs. Deerfield in, either). “I hope the TV isn’t too loud?”

Mrs. Deerfield shook her head. “No, I was actually afraid I might be making too much noise myself—I’ve been pickling and preserving like a madwoman, it’s really my passion, don’t ask me why because I couldn’t tell you, and it leaves the fingers a bit sticky—I broke one of my jars and then said to myself, Penelope, slow down, you needn’t do it all tonight, there’s plenty of time, it can wait, now, Penelope, go take a bath and get that awful sticky-smelly-gummy stuff off your skin.” Mrs. Deerfield looked in the living room. “I love a good game of Scrabble—who wins in this family?”

Hugh said, “Usually Rachel. She’s got the brains.”

“He’s joking, he always gets the most points.” Rachel took the check from Mrs. Deerfield’s small, pudgy fingers. “Thanks—that’s very thoughtful, but only if you’re sure you don’t mind parting with the cash this early.”

“Not at all, not at all.” But Mrs. Deerfield was more interested in the Scrabble board; she stepped into the living room, Rachel moving back. “Oh, goodness, there’s that word.”

The word HOUNFOUR was spelled out on the board.

“You know what it means? Hugh thinks it might be French, although he can’t come up with it.”

“After three years of high school French and a summer at the Sorbonne,” Hugh said. “But that’s assuming it’s a real word, too.”

“It was on the wall in the turret room—somebody wrote it—it was under all that horrible wallpaper.”

“You’re right, it does sound French, dear. I’d have to consult my books of mysticism, but I believe it’s got religious connotations, it means an altar or a place of worship. But I’d have to look it up to be sure.”

“I say Rachel can’t use it in this game unless she can tell me what it is. I think it’s a made-up word.”

“Like I made up the secret room.”

“You’ve got a secret room, dear? How lovely—that’s one of the more enchanting things about old houses, there’s always a secret room, locks with no keys, hidden staircases, old dusty tomes in dark closets.”

“Well, maybe no more than a secret closet. I saw some drawings of the floor plan of the house, and there’s something in between the turret room and the bathroom, just down the hall. It said V-N-T-Y on the sketch.”

“Well, dear, that must’ve been the vanity, coming off the bathroom like that. Perhaps just room enough for a small dressing table. In the olden days, ladies of such wealth as the original owners of this house had to have their own powder rooms I suppose.’”

“That makes sense: Vanity,” Hugh said, “thy name is -”

“Say it and you die, Hugh, and it doesn’t make any sense at all. There’s a bricked-up window in the alley. Why would somebody close that area off?”

Mrs. Deerfield nodded her head slowly. “Yes, why would someone? But this house is just a mess when it comes to rational thought. I’ve got that wind tunnel beneath my breakfast nook—it’s always cool down there and there’s no explanation for it as far as I’ve ever known. Although it’s excellent for storing wines and canned foods. I know you two don’t believe in the spirit world but I do, at times, and so I allow the irrational to connect the dots, as it were. Perhaps, after all, your vanity isn’t covered up to keep anyone out, least of all you two, perhaps it’s to keep something in.”

“Oh, please, Mrs. Deerfield, between that crazy woman last weekend, the mice, and the roaches, that’s the last thing I need to help me sleep tonight.”

“Sorry, dear. Ramona’s still on the lam. Any sign of her about?”

“I think I’d start sneezing if she were in the vicinity.”

“Well, I have a sneaking suspicion that she’s found some little nook to have her babies in already. I just hope she doesn’t cause too much trouble: there’s nothing prouder or more demanding than a new mother.”

3.

Rachel was brushing her teeth in the upstairs bathroom, mentally reviewing the list of things she had to remember in the morning: leave the keys with Mrs. Deerfield so she could let the exterminator in, the straw beach mats, the flip-flops, the sunglasses, the suntan oil, her make-up kit, Hugh’s shaving kit, a sweater, always take a sweater to the beach, mom would say, you never know when it might get cold, her skirts (the wraparound skirt was always the easiest to deal with at the beach), the sunblock…

Hugh stood behind her, she saw him in the mirror, and at first it didn’t look like Hugh. His face was not really a scowl, but it was quickly becoming one, lines dropping right and left. “Our house,” he said.

He was holding up the papers that Ted had dropped off.

“Your house.” His voice was not a snarl, but she wished it was. She could deal with him if he were angry, but he didn’t sound angry.

He sounded defeated.

4.

She lay in bed and massaged his neck. “Don’t let it bother you—it is our house. This is just something cheap your father did, but he can’t touch us here.”

“Can’t he? Christ, Scout, can’t he? Do you know what he does to people? He chews them up. Any chink he can find in our armor, he’s going to do his damnedest to explode. He’s done it before to me, and he’ll do it again.”

“Put it out of your mind, throw it away. I love you and he can’t touch our marriage.”

“Really?” Hugh turned to look at her; a tense smile streaked like lightning across his face. “Really, Scout? Because he sure as hell touched my last marriage.”

5.

She closed her eyes after he told her, she closed her eyes and he fell asleep next to her, she closed her eyes and listened to him tell the story again and she felt guilty and happy and guilty because she was happy, because she felt freed from a larger guilt that had been gnawing at her since she’d first fallen in love with Hugh.

And it was over now, they were home.

Home safe.

His words spun through her head:

"I never told you this—and I guess you won’t blame me, Scout. When I met you I know you thought I was an asshole. One of the other guys on the Law Review told me as much. But when I met you, I thought: God, here is a woman with whom I could really be in love.

Not like Joanna. Never like Joanna.

Joanna was perfect. Bright, beautiful—she really wasn’t beautiful, not the way I’ve come to think about beauty. But she knew how to make men think she was beautiful, the way some actresses can. She was a debutante who had never gotten over that fact, and I was her escort. You know she and I met while we were in college, but do you know how?

The Old Man arranged it.

He hired this girl in the summer to work as a gofer at the firm, and I was spending my summers doing research for them. The Old Man had set it all up: here was a girl from a good family, she had style, she had panache, she knew when to keep secrets and when not to.

I wonder if they had begun their affair before I’d even laid eyes on her? Sometimes at night I lie awake wondering, trying to imagine what kinds of conferences they must’ve held together, what kinds of strategies they must’ve worked out. How he bought her off—if she really thought she was in love with the Old Man, or if the thought of the Adair money was enough to keep her going back to him.

And I was so naive.

They must’ve been laughing about me. All along. But every now and then I caught her off guard. She’d be looking at me, absent-mindedly, her clear blue eyes filled with some kind of joke. Joanna had the clear blue eyes of a born liar. Scout—per- haps I’ve got them, too, for not telling you about this. I just haven’t wanted to admit what a moron I was in that marriage, how far my head was up my ass.

At times. Joanna would look at me and I thought she was adoring me. Can you imagine? Adoring me.

She was laughing at me, of course. She knew what she was putting over on me, and I suppose the plan was in another few years to divorce me, or who knows? Maybe she was content to be his mistress and sleep in my bed. God, when I think of lying in bed with her and touching her skin—my skin crawls. the way hers probably crawled whenever I touched her.

But I was a classic fool. I thought the kind of coldness I was feeling was normal to marriage—I thought that’s sort of what marriage was all about, you know, and everybody played along with it. You can’t blame me on that point: here’s a guy whose Old Man chased everything in skirts except his wife. So my marriage to Joanna seemed like paradise. My brother Ted tried to tell me once—he’s a snake, but he’s got that one ounce of decency in him—maybe it was a momentary lapse on his part—shit, I don’t know why I never picked up on it until it slapped me in the face. Ted told me, “Watch out for her, Hughie, she means different things to different people.” Something like that, and I didn’t get it. I didn’t know what to think, and Ted’s never been much of a caring brother…

But, Scout, when I met you, I already knew the lie, the Let’s Pretend lie, and it went like this: Let’s Pretend you didn’t see what you saw and the woman that you thought you saw was not your wife and the man you thought you saw was not your father. It was a big Let’s Pretend, the kind that eats away at your gut until you are certifiably gutless.

I pretended for a while longer that I was happily married.

A happily married man.

A man who would soon be a father.

Hey, I’d grown up watching the Old Man lie so skillfully to my own mother and everyone knew he was lying and everyone played along with him.

So lying about my marriage was no biggie. I am my father’s son, after all.

You see, five months before I even heard your name, Scout, I caught them together in his office. He had his gray slacks down around his fat ankles, his underwear stretched across his pink knees, the rolls of fat jiggling as he pushed into her, his face contorted in what looked like a grimace of pain, red as a beet, his eyes shut tight—he wasn’t even looking at her while he did it to her.

And Joanna—I wasn’t sure it was her, because the dress she wore was drawn over her waist, shoulders, hiding most of her face.

But I did recognize the dress. It was her Valentino, and we were due at an embassy party with friends of hers—I was wearing black tie, good for embassy parties, weddings, and funerals—and here they were all rolled up into one. Joanna had never wanted for anything, and that damn dress cost over a thousand bucks and now I knew where the money had been coming from.

Good ol’ dad.

The obscenity of that moment hit me in the gut and I tried vomiting, but nothing came out.

Because I was hollow. I had been chowing down on the Let’s Pretend for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and I knew all along, maybe not the specifics, maybe not Who Did Who, but I knew the way you know things down inside. Only I’d been hollowed out like a log—and I could float, Jesus, I could float along and be okay.

They saw me that day in his office. The Old Man and my wife saw me watching them and we all pretended I wasn’t there. I stepped out quietly, not wanting to disturb them. The Old Man’s secretary knew, too, and she says to me, “I always pre- tend it’s nothing.” My wife, my Old Man, and this woman, and me, too. I was thinking: Yeah, it’s nothing, business as usual. You’re going to float right out of here, down the hall, down the elevator, out in the street. You’re hollow, you’ve been upchucking air, it’s nothing, there’s nothing inside you and there’s nothing outside you.

I went out and got myself the biggest martini you’ve ever seen and I floated away that night and every night in law school when I wasn’t studying—and this may account for my good grades.

And then I met you, Scout.

And you brought me back to earth.

But Let’s Pretend wasn’t through with me yet, because then I found out Joanna was pregnant. And I was still playing the game, I pretended I was the father.

I knew the chances were about fifty-fifty that the kid was mine, although in any event there’d be that Adair family resemblance.

But the Old Man, he didn’t want to take that chance.

The Old Man always cleans up his messes.

Joanna told me where she was going that night, the night she died.

She was going to get an abortion.

She and her lover were going to some clinic.

But I was still floating, Scout, I was still accepting the lie, and I’d just found you. I wanted to break it off with you before the lie ate its way into you. But I was weak and I wanted you, wanted the kind of life I could have with you. I didn’t want to float anymore.

And when I heard about the car wreck, the accident, I wanted to celebrate, as ghoulish as that sounds.

I had been wishing Joanna were dead for the entire year.

Twelve months—fifty-two weeks, three hundred and sixty- five days and nights. It was as if Hell had finally frozen over. I guess that was evil of me.

I guess only a monster would be happy that someone was dead.

A few days later I crashed and I wept and I mourned because as much as I hated Joanna, I knew she’d probably been manipulated by my father.

And I knew it should’ve been him who died in that accident."

6.

In the middle of the night, in the violet light that meant the sun was threatening to emerge somewhere beyond the city, Rachel awoke feeling her husband’s face next to her cheek. He pecked her lightly; she turned to kiss him. His breath was sour and pasty with sleep; she kissed him anyway. Felt his hands crawling across her stomach (which she didn’t bother sucking in).

For the first time in several weeks they made love, and fell back to sleep easily as if it had been a dream.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

TED LOSES SLEEP

1.

The same night that found Hugh Adair confessing to his second wife the fraudulence of his first marriage, his older brother Ted lay in his king-sized bed at his condo in Georgetown recalling a confession he, too, had heard earlier in the week.

It was all some kind of bullshit that his Old Man had come up with when the nervous breakdown came crashing down around him, but still Ted had been losing sleep over what his father had said to him.

Outside his bedroom window a street lamp shone through dark mottled trees, and a cat yowled below, occasionally a car drove by (he counted seven by two a.m.). His ceiling was the kind made of plaster waves and raised dots, a white and frozen sea, and his mind created designs among the crests and curves until he thought he could stare at the ceiling no longer without going mad.

But it’s just because Pop went pop! And too much caffeine—that’s right, buddy, you’ve been hitting the Nescafé hard, and mainlining Coke and the Pepsis until your piss is brown and fizzy. You’ve got the jitters and your Old Man just leaked his brains like a pigeon crapping on a park bench. You put the two together and you lose a few nights’ sleep and you go to work with circles under your eyes and you keep those colas coming!

Ted had had a date earlier in the evening, a woman named Holly of all things, and Holly had had just about enough of his trembling and his guzzling beers at the American Cafe. Oh, yeah, mix some beers with the Coke, and the fear—the god-damned fear that your pop was losing it all over the place, that you could practically SEE right under his skin the lunatic blood pumping around that fat old head—the fear made you want to slap little old Hollyhocks senseless, but I will refrain, m’dear, refrain from any act of violence because I have been brought up a gentleman, and even though you needed a good stiff one, sweetheart, I will not lay a hand on you tonight. Oh, no, tonight I could not get it up even if there were three of you sucking so hard my head caved in—maybe pop went through such a transcendent experience, maybe that’s what turned his brain to slush.

Ted had dropped her off at her place on Capitol Hill. On his way back home, he took a detour. He drove his Mercedes up Connecticut Avenue, around DuPont Circle, up Columbia Road, then a left, then a right, then a left and was sitting in his car, the headlights off, alongside Winthrop Park.

The street was quiet, and he looked up at the house his brother lived in.

The upper story’s lights were off; there was some dim light from the lower apartment. Ted shivered in his car (as hot as it was) when he remembered what his father had told him.

And when he saw the homeless woman sitting on the park bench not more than ten feet from where he was parked, he started the engine again and drove away, quickly.

She was old and clothed in trash bags that glittered under the street-lamp light. She swayed back and forth on the bench, apparently reciting something.

She fit the Old Man’s description of Madeleine Perreau.

2.

Ted, lying awake in bed that night, could not get the Old Man’s words out of his mind:

I met her when I first bought the houses down there, down in Winthrop Park.

I was twenty-one, I’d just come into my inheritance, and I had money to burn, boy, money to bum. The war was still raging in Europe and I had no desire like so many of my foolhardy companions to go over and fight the Germans. War, boy, is the finest time to run domestic businesses, and property was dirt cheap. I knew if I bought that block on Hammer Street something would come of it. And something did come of it, too, something bigger than I expected.

Back then, this neighborhood was a cesspool, shit, it was a cesspool clear until 1979. I held on to it even when it was losing money because there was always something here I didn’t want someone else to find. She was there, Madeleine Perreau living in a rented room in a tenement near Draper House, and you wouldn’t know it to look at her, but she had something inside her, something more than looks, something sexual, something that approached the place where sex met death—I know that now, God, I know that now.

And if I had just looked before I leaped, but I believed in nothing in those days, Ted, nothing at all, nothing but myself. I screwed her whenever I had the chance. But I didn’t know a few things about her: one, that she was in love with me, Ted, this whore from the tenements was telling people we were going to be married, and I thought when she said it was a joke. I saw her maybe ten times in four years, and each time we fucked, boy, just fucked, that’s all it was as far as I was concerned.

One day she got pregnant and she said it was mine and I told her to get rid of it, and she threatened a lot of things, and that’s when I found him, boy. the man with the magic coat hanger, the man who was making a name for himself with his seven-minute kerosene and coat-hanger jobbies.

You give the girl a drink, she starts to convulse, the fetus drops a little and you twist an old wire hanger up inside her and jab that little life out.

And he lived right in my own building! He lived in Draper House. He ran his little outfit out of that house. He had a room all outfitted as if he were a real doctor, not just some back-alley abortionist. He was a French, from Haiti, boy, a man who had some kind of power over the women on that block, and he and his housekeeper took care of the pregnant whores who needed to get back on the streets. It was too good to be true.

And the beauty of it, Ted, my boy, was sometimes the girls died.

But there was another side, and that was: sometimes the babies lived, sometimes the abortion didn’t work. So this Perreau woman has her little baby girl and names her Nadine Adair, after the father who is at this point shelling out cold cash to keep the old bitch away from his legitimate family.

And one day I get so mad, so angry at that bitch when she asks for more money, more money for her little girl, that when we go for a walk down by Rock Creek, I decide I am going to kill the mother. I am going to kill her, but I get a hard-on, boy, a man’s downfall is always his dick, the stiff prick with no conscience, so I decide I’m going to fuck her to death, boy, skewer her shish-kabob style. And so we get worked up down on the muddy bank of the creek. And while I am screwing her, she calls up the demons of Hell to bite me, wasps just like the ones she sent to me last week, but back then she called them out of her cooze!

Ted rolled onto his stomach on the bed, clutching the pillow against his face, trying to fall asleep.

She’s what they call a mambo, boy, only like I said, I didn’t believe in anything, and when you believe in nothing, that’s when the piano drops out of the sky on you, that’s when something makes a grab for you in the dark from under your bed! But the man, he tells me he can keep that bitch out of my life for good. He’s something of a voodoo expert, a priest who calls himself a bokor, and he tells me that he can make sure she never bothers me again. Man, I promise that guy, my favorite abortionist, ANYTHING just to get that whore out of my life, and he does just that, and in a way that’s so ingenious that I still haven’t figured it out!

He makes her forget who I am, boy.

He makes her go mad.

I even saw her after that, and she didn’t recognize me, and I’d just laugh at her, laugh at her and her raggedy little girl, now a teenager, and beautiful. That’s when the man, the abortionist, quotes me his price.

You know the story about the Pied Piper, boy? How he gets, the rats out of this town, and then the town won’t pay him what he’s asked for, so you know what he does? He takes their children, Ted, he takes their children.

But the Pied Piper at least waited until the children were born.

But this guy, my favorite abortionist, his name was Gil DuRaz, but I’ve done some looking into that, too, and the name was about as legitimate as the way he went about his work. Gil DuRaz was a joke name, something I guess this man knew would be found out, and let me tell you what the joke is: Gilles DuRais was a famous guy in his own way. He was also French, but we’re talking France, and we’re talking Joan of Arc’s right-hand man who went crazy when the war was over and started poking little boys and slicing their entrails out and filling huge caldrons full of their blood before he was caught and brought to trial. And one more thing about the guy he stole his name from: he used the kids for his black-magic rituals, and he bought most of the kids from their parents.

That’s part of the joke, see, because he bought an unborn child from me, actually, he bought a baby before I’d even screwed the girl.

And the girl was named Nadine Adair.

My own flesh and blood.

I did it because I owed him one.

And I enjoyed it, boy, I enjoyed every minute of it.

Gil DuRaz had a ritual, and he needed that teenaged girl, my daughter by that crazy whore, he needed her and her baby, and I stood by in a room in that house, while the riots were going on, boy, while people were shooting out windows and setting fire to entire blocks, and I stood next to Nadine’s mother and she didn’t recognize me. I stood there and I watched Gil DuRaz, abortionist of gutter rats, bring his face down to where that baby’s heart beat inside a teenager and I saw him devour her like a hungry animal.

But, boy, that’s not the best part, no-siree-bob, the best part is yet to come. The fat lady was about to warble her chunky heart out, because they all sat down there, all except her mother Madeleine who was going into hysterics, but nothing to interfere with Gil’s feeding frenzy—and he saved the baby, yes, he did. He didn’t swallow that half-formed child, he held it up like it was the savior, and then they sat there and they drank that little girl’s blood. They drank her blood, boy, and I thought I was going to be killed if I didn’t, so I took a great big sip myself, boy.

And son, she tasted good.

3.

Ted Adair lay in bed awake all night wondering what you do when your father has finally lost it with no hope of getting it back.

When he went to sleep, with the morning light flooding through the window, he had a dream in which be sat at the head of a great table. Before him on the tablecloth were a napkin, a knife and fork, and a plate. He was alone at the table and someone was about to come through a doorway from the kitchen, someone with a platter, someone who was going to offer him a feast.

Ted awoke before noon, screaming.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

GETTING THE HELL OUT OF DODGE

1.

Thursday morning, Rachel awoke with a smile on her face, and Hugh was already taking a shower down the hall from the bedroom. Their lovemaking had been intense, exhausting, and she felt exhilarated. She rose lazily, wondering what the weather at the beach would be like, and glanced out the window. Cloudy. She gathered up a towel and her make-up kit and padded barefoot downstairs, through the living room, down to the first-floor bathroom. She stood before the space separating the turret room from the bathroom, figuring the small vanity room to be about three feet across, about half the size of the bathroom. She wondered if one day Hugh would be able to tear down the wall so they could use the space.

After her shower, spotting a roach running down the pipe beneath the sink, she combed her dark hair—it squeaked as she stroked her fingers through it. In the mirror she felt she looked like Dracula’s daughter, she was so pale, but perhaps a little sun would take care of that. Bring on the crow’s feet! Bring on the burn! Give me sand between my toes, between my lips, up the wazoo! The bathing suit dilemma once again confronted her as she sucked in her gut, examining the flab that had been accumulating around her waist. She’d gained ten pounds, in spite of jogging (and she knew it was from giving up cigarettes). Her old bikini would highlight the creeping ivy of cellulite on the backs of her thighs and would gross her out even though Hugh didn’t seem to notice it. Then she had a one-piece suit, naturally a gift from her mother, with a frilly edge that made her feel like she was wearing a tutu. Hugh had once given her a sexy black bathing suit, but she was almost afraid to wear it because she never felt very attractive in anything that was too sexy. She’d seen enough women on the beach wearing sexy outfits who looked like they should be the last people on earth to wear them. Perhaps she would wear the bikini, but cover herself with a towel most of the time. Or wear a T-shirt over the top.

Thank God we’re getting away for a while, just the two of us, no house, no job, no roaches, and no mice. It was already muggy at nine in the morning, but that was okay, too. It could be cloudy and humid and drippy and stagnant, just so long as they could get away.

2.

“Yes, dear, I know, the exterminator comes by at one, which is good timing because my ladies are arriving at three, and surely this man will be done spraying or whatever he’s going to do by then?” Mrs. Deerfield asked. She would not open her door more than a crack—Rachel had gotten her out of bed (“But that’s all right, dear, I’ve overslept for the third day in a row, I must get to bed earlier…”).

Rachel passed the set of house keys through the space in the open door. Mrs. Deerfield was evidently naked—there was a flash of her thigh for a second. “Have you found Ramona yet?”

“No dear, and I am becoming slightly worried, although she’s ever so self-sufficient for such a lazy feline.”

“Well, you have my permission to check around upstairs while we’re gone. I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen.”

Mrs. Deerfield pursed her lips. “if only something bad could happen to that wicked Ramona, as much as I adore her she’s been the bane of my existence these past few days—she broke three of my best mason jars full of jelly trying to get up through that dumbwaiter. Now you have a good trip and don’t lie out in the sun too long, and don’t go swimming much past your knees, you know, drowning can occur so easily, so swiftly, in just a few feet of water.”

And with that, Mrs. Deerfield shut the door.

3.

“I don’t think we’ll get caught in a rainstorm,” Rachel said as she rolled open the sunroof of the car; the clouds above them seemed less threatening than they had in the early morning. Hugh rummaged in the back seat. “You packed my blue sweatshirt, right?” He was wearing a gray T-shirt with the letters W and L across the front; his dark blue shorts hung loose around his pale hairy legs.

She glanced back at him in the rearview mirror. He’d made a mess of the cooler and picnic basket, pushing them aside as he dug through the suitcase— Am I forgetting anything? Is there still aspirin in the glove compartment? Do we have the maps we need? She reached into her purse for her small bottle of lotion. Down at the bottom of her purse was the one cigarette she always kept with her. I am immune to you, she silently told the cigarette. She rubbed the lotion across her hands. She sneezed. “Oh, great, I’m probably getting a cold, too, and it’ll rain and we’ll get caught in awful beach traffic.”

“Scout, we’ll be fine, and there’s no rush anyway. You remember your allergy stuff?” Hugh got out of the back of the car, adjusted the driver’s seat, and sat down, fiddling with her cassette tapes.

Rachel nodded, opening the side pocket of her purse just in case; if her allergies flared up at the beach she’d be prepared—when she and Hugh used to go up to Cape Cod or down to Virginia Beach, sometimes she would get a bad case of hives after going in the water, particularly if it was a cool day. “Me and my allergies.” She waved to a neighbor who was getting into his Honda Prelude two parking places down. “I won’t mind if it rains once we get there, but I hate it when it rains on the road and then all the accidents.”

“There are no accidents.” Hugh laughed. He drew a tape out of its plastic case. “You mind if we listen to the Beatles?”

Rachel shrugged. “Only if it’s Revolver, not The White Album, if I have to hear your rendition of ‘Rocky Raccoon’ again…”

He put the key in the ignition and pressed down on the accelerator. “I like my ‘Rocky Raccoon,’ and you told me you liked it, too, and to think I trusted your scout’s honor. Humph.”

“Don’t flood the motor,” she said.

Hugh paused, and glanced over at her. "Everything okay?”

“You probably think I’m crazy, but I feel strange leaving our home. I’ve never cared about any place we’ve lived, but I feel like it won’t be the same when we get back.”

“You mean it’s like an old friend,” Hugh said.

“See, you do think I’m nuts.” She was anxious to get on the road because she was going to miss their home, things had been peaceful and homey this week, and now what if we go and mess it all up at the beach?

Hugh was talking but Rachel was only half listening—his foot pumped the gas pedal, his wrist turned, the key turned, the lights blinked on and off behind the steering wheel as Rachel thought she heard babies crying again, their voices small and apparently all around her, while Hugh twisted the key and pumped the gas. He slapped the steering wheel with the palm of his left hand; the crying sounds seemed to be coming from inside the car, inside her, and Rachel wondered if this wasn’t a little like the ringing in her ears she occasionally experienced. The car made sputtering noises, backfired once, and Hugh said, “What the hell?”

She glanced over at him, trying to pretend she wasn’t hearing babies. It must be from somewhere in the alley, some woman is pushing her stroller near the back of one of the buildings, either that or I have lost my marbles. And I’m pretty sure I woke up today with everything in working order. She briefly remembered a dream she’d had several nights before, puffing up and exploding with babies, but Hugh had said what the hell? and now he’d stopped turning the key in the ignition and was reaching for the car door handle to get out of the car.

She looked over the hood of the car, and coming out of the slatted vents on the top of the hood were what looked like grayish white feathers, and then she thought they might be tufts of fur, but why were tufts of fur coming out from between the openings of the hood of her car?

She got out from her side as Hugh went around and lifted the hood of the car.

“Oh, Jesus,” Hugh said, and seeing her coming, “no, Scout, don’t look, not now,” but she looked and saw tiny masses of wet red and white fur. Then the body of a long-haired cat pushing its kittens away from the fan belt of the car, and then she saw the long-haired cat’s head which had been neatly separated from its body. Its eyes gazed up at the instruments of its destruction, the fan belt, the motor. Ramona.

The kittens, four of them, rested on top of the battery. They mewled and cried and looked up at Rachel and Hugh with closed eyes.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

KEEPING HOUSE

1.

“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Deerfield said as she went about her work in the kitchen. “Such a good mother to sacrifice herself for her babies.”

Penelope Deerfield watched their car rumble through the alley—it had been another hour before the nice couple had driven off, after Penelope had taken in the kittens, her eyes full of tears. “No, you two go on, go on, I shall be fine, I will call the vet and see if we can’t save Ramona’s babies, I shall be fine, I insist, go on, go on, it was an accident, I shall be fine.” And they’d laid dear Ramona down in a blue towel beneath the shade of the iron stairs, and now they were indeed leaving on their beach trip, and Ramona was indeed dead. Penelope Deerfield watched them go, standing over the sink in the kitchen. The sink filled to the brim with soapy dishwater, the just cleaned and shiny china cups and saucers lay glistening on a flowered hand towel that she’d stretched across her cutting board.

Penelope Deerfield kept her hands down in the water, but every few seconds one of the small white kittens floated to the top, trying to escape. “Mustn’t scratch,” she told each kitten as she pressed its bobbing head deeper into the dishwater.

2.

Later, after she dusting off the old chair she’d recently finished upholstering, Penelope drained the sink and took the waterlogged kittens out and buried them with Ramona in the mulch pile. It was hot, and she kept swatting at her bangs which fell across her forehead every few seconds in an annoying tickle. She told Ramona’s head, “I shall have to cut my hair off if I am to survive the summer.”

3.

She was down in the crib when someone began ringing the doorbell like a madman. “It’s too early for my friends,” she said aloud, “so it must be the exterminator for upstairs.” Her back was aching from lifting the trapdoor and then setting it to one side. She’d had to crouch down a bit, watch her head as she descended the four steps into the cool hold. She’d taken a deep breath of the air as she sat at the bottom step, licking her lips. “You’ve been a good one, today, hardly a sound,” she’d told the darkness.

The only light in the crib came from Mrs. Deerfield’s apartment, but even with the trapdoor completely off, there was barely enough light to see: twenty-five large mason jars filled with the memories of summers past, the preserves, the pickles, the jellies (strawberry, mint, apricot, peach, raspberry, pepper), and even a few bottles of homemade wine. It smelled of mold and dust, pickling brine and pure alcohol—the floor was made up of sandy earth. Brownish mushrooms sprouted along the corners, among the jars, and from between the clefts in the stone wall.

Another ten jars stood in a circle in the darkest corner, the part of the crib nearest the hidden steps up to the house above.

Something in the dark scraped its way between the jars, rattling them as it went.

“Be careful, dear, it won’t be much longer now I think.”

But then the doorbell had rung, and Penelope thought of how much her back ached and how weary a body could get, how flesh just didn’t hold up in the long run. The doorbell sounded again and again until she could no longer ignore it. “Stay here, dear, it’s that exterminator for sure, come to take away all your little playmates from upstairs.”

Keeping her head low so as not to strike it against the roof of the crib, Penelope Deerfield went back up the steps to her apartment.

In the dark, something behind the ten jars not filled with jams, jellies, pickles, and preserves let out a low moan.

Floating in the milky waters of those ten jars: human fetuses.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

HEALING WATERS

1.

Night, steamy night, a smothering pillow with the odors of rotting vegetation and carbon monoxide; the fishy swampy stink of summer curling in the dead-breeze air; the sounds of the creek running; the bright headlights, on the road nearby blinding the woman who stood over the grave, beneath the bridge. The sour taste of three-week-old milk spread across her lips. Mattie Peru flicked at a crane fly with her tongue—it had crawled along the edge of her chin. Her trash bags rattled as she raised her arms up, then whipped them down through the air as if she were trying to fly away.

Who did this to you, my baby? Is he out of Hell now? Did he send his messenger to take even your bones away from me? “Baby!” she shouted. Sounds of footsteps on P Street Bridge above her, her voice echoed across the parkway, booming and crashing like ocean waves, but stirred up in the evening noises, the honkings, the screechings, the yowlings, the gigglings, the shooshing of Rock Creek, the cry diminished.

The gigglings. Somewhere in the sparse dark woods around her, somewhere in the bushes.

Mattie looked at the grave.

The grave was empty, had been dug up, a perfect oval. She had planted her only daughter here, right here where the grass sang, where the water whispered, planted her bones all those years ago, planted them in red dry earth in the spring of 1968. The grave was filled up with water—the recent rainfall had taken over the space, had buried itself there.

Mattie flapped her arms, yipping like a pained dog.

She fell to her knees before the open grave. She bent over the water, dropping her face down to the muddy surface, cup ping her hands to the water, splashing it up into her face, taking long slurping drinks of it. Open my eyes, my baby! Open my mouth and my ears, open my heart, my little babygirl, give me your power, water of my child! Give me some power from the land of the dead, wash me in your bone water!

And when she stopped drinking and washing her face in the water, she peeled her trash bags of invisibility from her. She stripped her raggedy clothes from her back, the old, stained men’s boxer shorts she wore, the open-toed hiking boots. Naked and shining with grease, her gray hair white by moonlight, white and sparkling with the jewels of the bone water, she slipped into her daughter’s grave and began washing away the clogged pores of her memory.

From under the bridge, down by the creek, among the bushes: giggling.

2.

“We found ya,” the man snarled, but before Mattie saw him standing under the bridge she smelled him, and the smell was one from her memory, her memory which was shining and clean washed in the bone water of her baby.

He was one of the men who had raped her in the springtime, up against a lamppost with his buddy, raped her and taken her bottle of Mad Dog 20/20. She could not make him out in the dark shade from beneath the bridge, but she saw what he was holding in his hands extended out from beneath the bridge: a skull, reflecting light from the moon.

The one called Pete wagged the skull in midair, and spoke for it in a falsetto whine, “Mama, mama, they done fucked my brains out, and then they et ‘em, mama!”

The other man was there, too, Willy, and he emerged from beneath P Street Bridge carrying part of a rib cage.

“You lookin’ for these?” He held the ribs between his hands like an accordion, and then snapped them apart. His friend giggled, and he made Nadine’s skull giggle, too. “Oh, mama, you must be shittin’ your britches, you must be pissin’ your panties!”

Mattie cried out at the noise. She remained in the grave, up to her waist in water. It dripped down her neck, in rivulets down her shoulders to her breasts, lingering across her nipples. Her body tingled with the water, with the smell of her daughter’s muddy grave, with the clean feeling, the baptism she was undergoing. Down in the pit of her stomach she felt the water sloshing, her bladder filling with its warmth, her tongue moistened and smooth from drinking.

“We liked the way you went and stripped, piglet, and now you went and even took a bath!”

The skull giggled and gibbered in midair. Pete had stuck his fingers into the empty eye sockets—he shook it like it was a rattle.

“We want a little of what you got.” Willy snarled.

“Piglet, we been watchin’ you for weeks, and we been seein’ you come down here, we been watchin’ you but we been waitin’, and now no more watchin’ and waitin’.”

Mattie felt the bone water inside and outside her skin, and her blood boiled with the cleansing that was going through it.

The power that was shooting through her.

The spirit of her daughter, rinsing her with the old power, the mind and the power and the knowledge and the memory of the old days, the days when she was a mambo. When she was a priestess. When she could call wasps from her womb, when she could protect the soul of the dead from the gods of evil.

“Just a little nooky,” Pete said, rubbing the skull between his palms. “Seems you got plenty, and we fellers just want a slide or two.”

“Sure, bitch, we done it before to ya, and you liked it, you liked it.”

“You liked it, mama!” the skull screamed.

“Dug up my baby’s grave,” Mattie said, her voice a low growl. “You done stole my baby’s bones.”

“Shit, we just wanted to see what you got in here. You went ‘n killed somebody—we gonna keep it a secret. Just the three of us if you gon’ be a good girl. For such an ugly old hag you sure ain't got much gratitude.”

Mattie shook her head violently. Water sprayed out from her hair. “No, it’s him. Baron Samedi made you do it.”

“Crazy bitch.”

“You don't even know,” she whispered.

“Shut up,” Pete said, waggling the skull back and forth.

“Baron gets inside ya, means your gonna die soon, means ya might already be dead.”

Willy dropped the busted rib cage and came to the edge of the grave. He dropped to his knees, reaching down to his crotch and unzipped himself.

Mattie cupped her hands. She brought up a palmful of bone water. Holding her hands up to the moon, she prayed. The old prayers of her mambo days were forgotten, shut away inside her. She prayed to Nadine’s spirit and the bones. Forgive me, my babygirl, forgive your mama what she done to you, protect me from the baron, protect these old bones.

She felt something like an eel slithering in the grave pool of water, and for a moment she was scared, afraid it was the Baron here, come to drown her in her daughter’s own grave.

But the water had a voice, charged with electricity, and she recognized the voice, briefly, a faint sound, the words were whispered and unintelligible, but they were her daughter’s. The water around her began to roil and splash, feeling alternately hot and cold, and Mattie held her cupped hands high for the blessing.

The skull giggled.

Magic Touch, Nadine, bring me the Magic Touch.

Then she splattered the man who knelt in front of her, spraying the water across the flat small penis that flopped from his pants.

When the water hit him there, he screamed.

He screamed as if he’d been scorched with fire.

The skin of his penis bubbled and blistered in his fingers.

When she splashed water across his face, popping eruptions hissed where the water landed, his nose melting in the middle, one eye shut by its lid which had become waxen and dripped down and over to his cheekbone, his lips drooling down his chin. The screams became choked gurgles as he inadvertently swallowed some of the bone water.

The man with the skull ran to his friend’s side. “What ya do to my buddy?”

Mattie ducked her head down and drank in some bone water, gargling it in the back of her throat. Then she spat it out at him, and it peeled off the top layer of skin across his right arm. He dropped the skull, holding onto his buddy as they ran away through the woods.

The skull slipped into the bone water. Mattie reached down to catch it. She clutched it to her breasts. “My baby, my baby,” she moaned.

3.

The dreams of the past beat their rhythms in Mattie Peru’s mind as she lay across the park bench at mid-afternoon the next day, her trash bags thrown back away from her, her rags half falling off. A couple passed by, glancing down at the woman, upset because they could not use the bench for their lunch hour. Mattie’s smell steamed from her skin and when a breeze came up, strollers in the park wrinkled their noses without quite knowing why.

She lay still as if dead, but beneath her skin, her heartbeat was rapid and fluttering, her pulse beat fast, and if a doctor were to examine her at the height of this memory dream, he might diagnose a mild coronary—and when that moment came, Mattie would move. Chop-choppity-chop, the ax of her blood swung into her heart. Her right arm arched and her fist tightened. Drool sluiced from between her lips.

Her eyes flickered open, then closed.

Her dreams unfolded like a closed fist, gradually opening, the palm spreading, fingers splayed. And in the center of that hand, a small rose made of fire, a small rose opening its heart, and in its heart, the flame, and in the heart of the flame a man who called himself Gil DuRaz.

4.

Mattie Peru was on fire in her mind, but the fires raged with lust, lust for the dark man from the islands, lust for her half brother, Gil DuRaz. Gil had stood six foot five, a giant of a man, and so thin his ribs stuck out and rippled through the black cotton shirts he favored. His face was the face of a man who had seen beyond what life had to offer, who had done things that only dead men knew. It was ridged with dark knowledge, with a wild gleam in his deep-set eyes, a supreme love for the dead. He looked like a god to her—he was handsome, and strong, with the sharp look of a fighter who has never lost but is always on the lookout for a worthy opponent. And his smile! Wide and thick with a forest of beautiful teeth—a gold one on the upper left side that shone when he smiled.

And she loved him because he made her love him.

But the man was inspired with the spirit of the dead, he knew the rotting secrets of the graveyard.

In those days, when Mattie was called Madeleine Perreau, she was the most beautiful young girl in Winthrop Park. She was tall and sturdy, but she had the smooth curves of a cello, and long, shiny hair, inherited from her mother. Madeleine had been born watching her mother scrub the floors in the Bram Apartments, but the young girl soon discovered her mother’s true power over the people who lived in the enclave of Winthrop Park.

And she discovered the secret of the Screaming House, the Carrefour that bordered the park—the place where the petro, the spirits of evil, passed through.

But then, when Mattie was a teenager, her half brother had taken her mind off such fears: he was a bokor, a high priest, a powerful man who could capture a soul in a clay jar and shatter it just as easily; he could bury a man alive and make him a zombi to do his bidding, and he could make his half sister fall in love with him, because inside him, inside his tall, lean dark body, there dwelled the mind and the spirit of the Lord of the Dead, of Baron Samedi.

Mattie’s brother Gil had undergone a thousand possessions by spirits, but only at the Screaming House had the spirits stayed within him, as if now he were the jar, holding them.

And she learned some of the secrets of the rada and petro, of the spirits and their rhythms, but Gil turned to the darkest of spirits. She watched as he cut the babies from the wombs of young girls, and she became possessed with the clamoring spirits of the house and made love with her brother, with her brother and with any man he wanted her to make love with, and she became a mambo, a priestess with him.

But the gods who possessed her were beyond any she had ever heard of -- they were a kind of madness itself.

She intended to spend her whole lifetime by his side, until he betrayed her, and betrayed her with a woman that he emptied out and filled with another spirit, the spirit of evil that dwelt in the house.

She loved him until she saw him devouring a corpse.

She believed it had been a corpse.

Until the corpse had moved.

And Mattie knew then it was no corpse at all.

That her half brother Gil had become a cannibal, that he had developed a taste for flesh and blood, that he had perverted the Voudun religion that their mother had taught them, and had let something vile and evil into his worship. And the woman, the Housekeeper, was ensuring his corruption. When her brother finally had become Baron Samedi, the foul breathed flesh and blood of the grave, he turned against her.

And he devoured the body of her only child, a child by a man that Gil had wanted her to love in the first place, an evil white man who had been Gil’s tool for bringing the child into the world. Because the night Gil came to her like a lover, possessed by the spirits, and every night after, she did not conceive with him, no child was born.

So he wanted her child, even if it was hers by another man.

And he wanted her child’s child.

And he ate her baby, and he took her baby’s baby, and Mattie made him pay.

She made him pay.

And as Mattie remembered how she’d made Gil DuRaz pay, she heard her little girl calling something to her, something that sounded like…

5.

Mattie awoke, screaming. Pigeons scattered away from the bench she’d been sleeping upon. Nadine , honey, you callin’ to me, but I don’t understand nothin’ you sayin’. Her breasts were heavy and she felt sharp pains along her ribs, down to her thighs. It was still hot and sunny. Late in the day, and sundown may have been five hours away, but Mattie could feel the night in her bones, eating away at the daylight.

Her heartbeat was like an ax chopping away at an old thick tree, pausing to swing back, and the chop! chop! choppity-chop! Her right hand dug beneath the trash bags, pushing aside her left breast, trying to hold her heart steady, trying to slow down its chopping. A memory of love came back to her, through a smell—it was an annoying odor, one which she could not identify, not sweat, not cologne, not food cooking, but somehow, all of these. And she saw the face of the man who was Nadine’s father.

Mattie thought it was a dream as she lay there on the bench, clutching her heart, watching the two men in the car going by. One was young and handsome and she did not know him. The other was Mr. Big Man, and how he had changed on the outside, and how she could tell at a glance that on the inside he had not changed at all.

CHAPTER TWENTY

HE SAID, IT’S NOT EVEN HUMAN

1.

“Get me the hell out of here!” Winston Adair shrieked. He kept his head down, his fists pounding the dashboard of his son’s Mercedes.

He didn’t even have to look up to see the house, he knew where they were, he knew by the tone of Ted’s voice:

“We could say hello while we’re here.”

While they’d been driving, Winston had felt calm, almost relaxed, for the first time in three weeks—he had stayed inside and watched for those bugs, those crawling things, those wasps, but Ted had convinced him to come out for a drive, just for some fresh air.

“It’s such a goddamned beautiful day and you’ve been pissing in mayonnaise jars long enough, it’s either a drive or a loony bin, your choice.” And so Winston had agreed to go, but only if the windows were kept tightly rolled up, only if the doors were locked.

But he hadn’t agreed to this.

“Jesus, Pop,” Ted whisper-shouted, “the whole damn world can hear you.”

“Drive, or so help me God, Ted, so help me God!”

Ted Adair, cursing under his breath, continued driving to the end of Hammer Street, taking a left on Kalorama, heading away from Winthrop Park.

2.

They went to Ted’s condo, because there was booze there. Ted needed a good stiff drink. He was trying to remember the name of the shrink his ex-wife Paula used to go to.

Although maybe what Pop needs is a whole institute -- maybe he needs a megashot of morphine, maybe a lobotomy.

Winston Adair glanced suspiciously around the living room, but then decided it was safe.

He walked like he was already blind drunk—weaving across the parquet floor, stubbing his toes on the coffee table, then navigating uncertainly around the beige sofa, around the lamp table, along the wall, to the window that overlooked Q Street. He stayed to the left of the window. Then, spotting the dining room table and chairs, he went over, wobbling and klutzy the whole way, grabbed a chair, and dragged it back across the floor to the window. The chair made a fingernails-on-blackboard sound as it went.

Ted shook his head sadly as he watched his father. He stood in the front doorway, unsure as to whether he should stay or leave. Why am I letting myself in for this? “Hey, listen, let’s say you’re not crazy, let’s say you were involved in all this voodoo bullshit, but so what? That was what, over twenty years ago? So you ate a couple of mushrooms or something, or you drank too much vino and a girl died on the operating table. You can afford therapy, and if you want my advice, I think you just might get the top psychiatrist in town and stay with him for another ten years -”

Winston sat at the window, to the side, so he could see out of it without being seen. He did not turn to face Ted. The back of his head was a large pink mound, with tufts of blue white hair spraying out. Ted watched the back of his head as if he could drill into it and find out what chemical was causing this malfunction in the Old Man’s brain. “It’s not just that day in 1968, son. It’s the rest of it, the rest of the deal. When the devil makes a deal, there’s always a string, there’s always something within the deal, another deal, and within that deal, another deal.”

“Jesus, you are talking in circles. Want a martini?” Without waiting for an answer, Ted went over to the bar and poked around in the freezer. “You know, you keep the gin in the freezer and it’s just the right temperature. No ice, nothing. Just gets that chill. You want vodka or gin? Vodka, right?”

“Just give me the bottle.”

“Will you make more sense if I do? I mean, this little outing wasn’t planned out of the goodness of my heart. I wanted to make sure you were certifiable before I turned you over to the nice men in the white suits.”

Winston sighed heavily. “You are some son. You are some fucking son.”

“Yeah, and you’re some fucking father, but let’s not get into it or I might just conk you over the head with this bottle.” Ted took a highball glass filled to the brim with vodka over to where his father sat. He lifted the Old Man’s right hand and cupped it around the glass. “Now don’t spill. That would definitely make me want to throw you out the window.”

Winston Adair turned towards him, looking up at his oldest son with eyes that could’ve been empty sockets: there was nothing there, no color, no spark, no life. He had withdrawn somewhere inside himself the way a turtle withdraws into its shell.

Ted wanted to cry, just break down and start crying, because as much as he despised the Old Man, as much as he loathed him, it was as if his father were already dead and this were the funeral, because it seemed like there was no turning back. No cure for a man this far gone.

“It would be a relief if you did, just break my neck or knife me while I’m sitting here.” Winston lifted his glass in a toast. “Good drink, good meat, good God, let’s eat, boy, now there’s a grace a man can sink his teeth into. I saw him do it, too, Ted, sink his teeth into that little girl, good God, let’s eat. And we all shared in the blood. My face was streaked with it—it tasted like liquid metal. That is insane, isn’t it? Well, I was insane, and maybe I still am. But that doesn’t stop it, craziness doesn’t stop it. I don’t know what does. ” He was already finished with his drink; he held the glass out to be refilled. He wiped his free hand across his lips as if they were parched.

Vodka makes it easier, Ted thought as he poured out another glass. Some good old Absolut makes the medicine go down a little smoother. Don’t mind if I do. He lifted the bottle to his lips and gulped back a shot.

“I wish I had died then.” Winston fingered the rim of his glass—it made a high-pitched squealing sound. “I wish when it happened, the girl’s mother had killed me the way she killed him. But I thought then, that by killing him, Gil DuRaz, it would put an end to it. I thought they were a bunch of crazies. I didn’t really believe. When he wanted the unborn baby, not even a baby, a fetus, just a mushy wriggling pudding of flesh, I thought it was just part of his sickness, and shit, boy, I was glad to let him take it, he said, he said to me, ‘It’s not even human,’ and that’s what I thought, too, it’s not even breathing. But then I saw it, I saw the fetus. And I knew he meant something else by that. He said, ‘It’s not even human,’ boy, and he meant it. He was right, Ted, my boy, the thing wasn’t human, it was inhuman, it had claws like razors, it had eyes like a frog, it had a mouth, Jesus, its mouth was filled with warts and bumps, and it was barely formed, its spinal cord was just a knotted rope running beneath the flesh—you could practically see its heart beating, all its veins on the outside of its skin—and I said, ‘Fucking Jesus!’ and that man, Gil, said, ‘Hardly Jesus, Mr. Big Man. This is your son, this is your true son, the son you are meant to have, and he will be the vessel for my spirit, Mr. Big Man, he will be the possessor of my soul.’ I wondered what in God’s name that man had done to that girl to make her body form a baby like that, and he told me, son, he told me, get this—are you getting this? ‘Cause this is important—‘ Don’t you think it resembles you? Don’t you think this is what you are inside? ’ And hell, Ted, if that gob of flesh didn’t open its disgusting perverted mouth wide and moan and twist in his hands just like it was alive.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

NORMAL LIFE

1.

“What book?” Hugh asked, cradling the phone between his chin and scrunched-up shoulder—he propped the refrigerator door open with his right leg bent at the knee, and with his hands managed to move around all the jars of pickles and jams that Mrs. Deerfield had given them.

On the other end of the line, the clerk at the bookstore said, “Diaries of an Innocent Age by Standish, Mr. Adair. You ordered it in June, but it was hard to locate—the company who published it has been out of business for ten years. We finally got it, though. It just took a little longer than usual.”

“Oh, right,” Hugh said absent-mindedly—he found what he was looking for, a half-empty Miller Lite behind the orange juice carton. “I pretty much forgot about it—I’ll be down sometime today.”

When he hung up the phone, he sniffed at the bottle of beer—it had gone flat. He’d opened it and put it in there the day before the trip to the beach. They’d been back a few days, so what did he expect? But he’d gone eight days without a drink of any kind, on his best behavior at the beach, for Rachel’s benefit. And the beach had been trying, particularly after the accident with the car and the cat. With Rachel crying, Penny Dreadful crying, and Hugh feeling miserable and then the rain and the late start in the noontime traffic congestion; with Rachel, her eyes red, saying that they should just turn the car around and go home, wondering how Mrs. Deerfield would ever forgive them… Hugh had craved a drink like a pregnant woman craves pickles. Then the beach was overcast most of the time (and still he managed to get a painful sunburn which no amount of lotion seemed to help—his nose continued to peel, and they’d been back three days), and Rachel was too listless, almost withdrawn over the cat’s death, to want to go out to a restaurant. So at night they sat in the motel room and ate junk food and watched bad TV. Hugh had a terrific case of constipation the whole time, and was a Metamucil junkie by the last day—he favored the orange-flavored kind in the small easy-to-toss-away packets; it reminded him of Fizzies from his childhood, dropping the Metamucil in the glass of water and having it hiss and sputter into this utilitarian punch.

But this punch was even better than Fizzies or Metamucil. He held the bottle up and took a long, lingering drink of beer. Flat Miller Lite ain’t so bad. He chugged down the rest and set the bottle on the counter. No, better trash it. Don’t need to get her upset over an old beer. He opened the cabinet beneath the sink and tossed it out.

No sign of roaches beneath the sink. No mousedoody behind the plastic trash can.

“Scout!” he called up the stairs.

She didn’t answer.

“Honey, I’m going to run down to KramerBooks for a sec. Can I pick up anything?”

2.

After Hugh left for the store, Rachel lay back on their bed. She was still exhausted from the trip, and then had plunged right back to work and it felt like jumping in the cold Atlantic that first day of the trip. The week back had passed slowly even with all the work she had to catch up on, and the weekend had taken forever to arrive. But then even Saturday was not perfect: one of her famous migraines had come on suddenly in the afternoon, so she lay on top of the covers, the shades drawn, the lights out. Her skin burned; every time she scratched her arm, more skin flaked off on the bed. The pain and nausea were unrelenting.

But even with the pain, she smiled.

She knew it was too soon to tell, and it’s just my overactive imagination, that and this migraine, but I am never ever late like this, it’s always like clockwork, always, the only time this has ever happened before was when it happened.

How many times had they made love in the past ten days? Twelve? Thirteen times? What are the chances? Oh, God, but I’m imagining things. You can’t know you’re pregnant until a month or two afterwards, this is just wishful thinking… but Scout, you knew before, you knew that somewhere inside you there was a little sphere just hopping with new life. You knew then, and you thought so immediately, and you were right. It wasn’t Let’s Pretend, it was real, it was Normal Life.

“You’re just being silly,” she said aloud, to the walls, to the ceiling, to the drapes. Her head was throbbing, but she didn’t really mind.

3.

From Diaries of an Innocent Age, by Verena Standish:

…Winthrop Park was, in those days, quite a fashionable residence, although there were still lingering traces of its bohemian beginnings: they said a woman at the Bram estate ran a house of ill-repute down at the corner, mainly for sailors and coloreds, although this was all rumor and I never saw a sailor or a colored, unless that colored was a member of one of my or my neighbor’s staffs…

Hugh sipped his beer. Verena, you old white supremacist racist, I’m willing to bet you were not well liked by many people. I’m willing to bet if it weren’t for your daddy’s money… Hell, just like me, Verena, you and I are part of the same class, ain’t we? But I’m willing to bet that, just like me, if someone scratched your surface, you’d be as common as a whore. Hugh skimmed the pages. Verena, in her tedious eighties while writing her life story, went on ad nauseam about the lost, refined qualities of fin de siècle society. Hugh thought: You dumbass debutante, Verena, you had everything served to you on a silver platter, you lived in one of the most fascinating times of history. You and me, Verena, you and me. For me, the best prep schools, the best college the Old Man could buy my way into. a pretty damn good law school (although not as good as the one Ted got into, and certainly not as good as the Old Man’s), summers in Europe and winters in the Caribbean. Hugh lifted the beer in a silent toast. Here’s to the girls who do, Verena, although I guess you’re one of the girls who never did.

He finished the bottle; there were three left in the six-pack he’d picked up at the liquor store on Nineteenth Street. He flipped through more pages in the thick diary.

Get to our house, lady, I don’t want this shit about the glorious days before these times of Sodom and Gomorrah. I want specifics: the wallpaper, the size of the rooms.

He read:

…Draper House was small by the standards of my upbringing. Its narrow passages were no match for the stately halls of my father’s Hudson River estate, a home which I grew to miss terribly. But my husband, Addison, was no doubt relieved to be out from under the wing of a rather demanding father-in-law, and the children seemed to enjoy the carriage rides around the park and the contact with so many other children being a daily occurrence rather than something reserved for planned weekends. Emmie and James were just reaching the point in childhood where everything seems an adventure, and if I had only had some inkling of the tragedy to come, I suppose I would have been more strict with them, I would have observed the goings-on in the house more carefully. But as I write this, for the first time, nearly fifty years later, I realize what a vain and foolish young woman I was, a woman barely thirty who believed that children should be seen and not heard, and that all matters of education and social carriage should be left in the hands of a competent governess. I have no one to blame but myself for the tragedies that befell my children, for not seeing when I should have seen and not hearing when I should have heard. But the house itself. Draper House, was as much to blame, I think, as anything.

For it was the house itself that brought about the deaths of my young children.

What gives a bad place its intention?

4.

For Rachel, the migraine came and went in a few hours. She became restless, wandering down to the living room and then to the turret room. The wallpaper was in the same shambles they’d left it in before the trip, and the room seemed washed out in the bright sunlight. That word HOUNFOUR was still up on the wall. Hugh sat over in the window seat, reading; he didn’t notice her as she came in. She saw the beer beside him, and it didn’t really bother her as much as it normally would have. He could have a drink now and then if he wanted to. It was no big deal. She just didn’t want him drunk, because daddies shouldn’t be drunk. Rachel wanted to tell him what she was thinking ( Let’s Pretend, Hugh, that you’re the daddy and I’m the mommy) but Hugh seemed so involved with the book he’d bought.

“Is it any good?”

He glanced up. “Scout,” he said as if waking from a nap; he made a motion to hide the bottle.

Rachel shrugged her shoulders. “Is that the Verna Standish book?”

“Verena, Scout. Yeah. It’s kind of interesting. I’m just into the part about this house. Headache gone?”

“I just needed to close my eyes for a little while. See if she has anything about our walled-up vanity.”

“Will do.”

“I’m thinking of going out. You just going to read?”

Hugh nodded.

“Maybe I’ll give Sassy a call. You think something like a housewarming party would be out of line—maybe next week or something?”

“I don’t know. We’ve lived here what, a couple of months? Is it too late for that kind of thing? I mean, what would Miss Manners have to say?”

“Any excuse for a party. We could plan it for Labor Day weekend, unless everybody we know is going away—but I doubt it. The weather will be miserable still so people will be up for a party and it’s not like we’ve had anybody in. Maybe we can finish this room next weekend if we work together. I have an idea for a Laura Ashley pattern I saw, but see if there’s anything about the patterns in the book. Would she have something like that in there? Maybe about that vanity, too, and then my big strong husband can knock it down with his sledgehammer of the gods.”

Rachel went over to his tool box, stepping over scattered wrenches, to his sledgehammer. She lifted it up.

“Watch your toes, Scout. Old Verena lists everything else about her life—most of this diary’s just her laundry list. If she weren’t the daughter of such a famous man I doubt this would ever have been published. You see Penny Dreadful yet?”

Carefully laying the hammer flat on its side, she gave him a clownishly sad look. “Oh, Hugh, I feel so bad about her cat, I wish you’d use her real name.”

“All right, all right, sorry. Penelope Deerfield.”

“I’m afraid to run into her—she must hate us, and I don’t know what I’d say to her at this point. The trip was fun, just what I needed, but that was like a black cloud hanging over us. I hope the kittens are okay.”

5.

It was after six when Rachel met with Sassy Parker for coffee at La Fourchette in Adams-Morgan. They sat outside in front of the restaurant, and Sassy ordered appetizers.

“I am so damned starved, and I have a ton of things to tell you. My news first,” Sassy said, “and then when the food comes I’ll chow down and you can talk.”

“I don’t know, I haven’t even told Hugh mine yet and I’m about to burst with keeping it in.”

“All right, you go,” Sassy huffed, “but this means I’ll have to talk with my mouth full.”

Rachel lowered her chin and raised her eyebrows. She grinned goofily, even though she was trying to be dramatic.

She took a deep breath.

“I’m,” and then blurted in rapid-fire succession, “pregnant—I think I’m pregnant—Shit, I don’t know, but I feel like I think I’m pregnant.”

“How long?”

“A week?” Rachel winced.

Now it was Sassy’s turn to raise her eyebrows. She laughed, but then saw that Rachel didn’t think this was funny. Sassy reached across the table and patted Rachel’s left hand which was tearing at her napkin. “Retch, give it a couple of weeks before you feel like you think you’re pregnant.”

“I really think I am. I haven’t had my period, and I never miss, it’s always on time.”

“What, were you and Hugh doing it like bunnies at the beach?”

“Well, before the beach, at the beach, on the way home from the beach. Not that the horror stories don’t abound, too, the whole time I was thinking about that poor cat. But the sex was terrific.”

“And you think the rabbit bit the big one?” Something about Sassy’s tone made Rachel feel like she was being mocked.

“I shouldn’t have told you, it’s too early, I’ll jinx it, and you’re probably right, I’m probably just being dumb, and maybe I’m off about my period, and I’ll start gushing tonight.” You are so stupid, Rachel Brennan, to ever tell a secret before it’s definite, how many times do you have to learn this in life? Rachel stared at her coffee and watched little swirls of milk dissipate like clouds. This reminded her of a song, but she couldn’t remember exactly which song, and she felt depressed that she’d ever gone and opened her big fat mouth.

“I’m not saying you’re not pregnant. It’s just a little early to start knitting booties.”

“No, this is dumb and it is so typical for me to go off the deep end as soon as I get laid. And we weren’t using, you know, condoms or anything, and I don’t know… I just feel so… fertile.”

“Oh, please, what, were your eggs bubbling around or something?” Sassy laughed.

Rachel managed to smile. “Okay, let’s drop it. No, really, let’s drop it. I am hoping I am pregnant and I’m being silly and you’re being normal, but I don’t care. We’ll just drop it and then in a month you’ll see I was right.”

“Fair enough.”

“So what’s your news, now that you’ve stuck the pin in my balloon?”

“Well, it’s your news, too. Have I got shit for you,” Sassy said, “and I’ve been waiting for you to get your ass back from the beach.”

“What’s up?”

“I had to scour the archives for stuff on the DuPont Circle and Capitol Hill houses because of the upcoming house tours, and guess what I came across? No, don’t even guess, let me tell you, I found reams of shit on your house.”

“You’re kidding.”

“It has quite a spotted history. Retch. And it’s just like me to forget to make copies for you. The file on your house is fat—I can get it to you Monday. You’ve got to read what’s in it.”

“A lot’s been written about Draper House. I’m surprised it isn’t on some house tour. Hugh just bought a book on the house, well, it has some chapters about the house, anyway. You know who Verena Standish was?”

“I do work for the ‘Home’ section of the Her-Ex—and she’s mentioned a bit in these articles I dug up.”

“What do they say?”

“Stuff like you wouldn’t believe. You’re living in some kind of haunted house.”

“Oh, right, there’s something about the ghost of a hooker.”

“I don’t know about a whore. Retch, but I do know about the weirdo drugged-out things that went on there in the sixties and seventies. Some kinky murders, and devil worshipers.”

“You’re making this up.”

“No, it’s for real.”

“No, you’re making this up because you know how easily I get scared by stupid things like this, just like when we were in college and you used to tell me the story about the claw, where the girl heard it scraping at the back of the car, and you had that bunny man story every time we drove over the hills and I kept thinking bunny man would jump out of the woods with his ax and smash the car up. This is going to be like the bunny man story, isn’t it?”

“No, Retch, we’re talking Charlie Manson meets the girl next door. You know what the papers used to call that place?”

“I give up.”

“The Screaming House. Ain’t it grand?”

6.

At work on Monday, Rachel glared at her desk as if she could melt it with her glance—unfortunately she could not. It was piled high with every memo known to mankind. She had three court dates in the next two weeks, and the briefs weren’t even prepared. Her secretary, Carl, had come down with the flu and would be out until Friday. Gretchen, the blue-faced Slavic blonde with the sweaty palms (leaving damp fingerprints on anything she touched—including the files), was acting as both receptionist and secretary. By 10:30, Gretchen had played fifty-two-card pick-up with the summer clerk’s mag cards, and Rachel would’ve screamed bloody murder except she didn’t really care.

Rachel turned on the radio to listen to the local disc jockey tell crude, racist jokes; she switched it off again, and began sucking on a Rolaids. She craved a cigarette, could picture a Virginia Slims, could almost feel it between her lips. But then she remembered what Hugh had told her when they were in law school ( “It’s like licking out an ashtray” ). She remembered the X-rays of her father’s lungs, and Hugh holding her, entering her which she always enjoyed but which always frightened her just a little because she couldn’t control his movement, are-you- there-Hugh-Adair? —all this curiously reminding her of the pain she’d felt in her stomach the morning of her miscarriage. Just when she was beginning to re-experience that sense of loss she’d felt (and the loss of not knowing what she was losing— just a tiny sphere mixed with blood), one of her lower front teeth began aching. She felt around the tooth and gum with her tongue and then decided she must be picking up radio waves because the pain vanished.

Rachel settled back down to work—or at least to thinking about work—when five junior associates trooped into her office to bitch about an upcoming meeting. When the other lawyers finally left ten minutes later, Rachel began separating the papers on her desk into three piles, with no rhyme or reason to their divisions. She figured that if one of the partners walked into her office just then he would think she was organized when she was not. And she had no intention of becoming organized. She hadn’t gone to law school for organizational skills, after all.

Sassy called at noon. “Retch?”

“Hi, Sassy,” Rachel sighed into the phone, whisper-singing: “What a day this has been. I hate lawyers.”

“It’s just a job. Weren’t those your exact words? ‘When Hugh gets on at a firm I’m going to quit, have babies, and never diet again. It’s just a job.’”

“You cold, calculating hardened woman, to turn my own words against me. Have a little sympathy: my secretary’s sick.”

“Some of us don’t have secretaries. You want an ulcer or what? And here I’ve gone and copied all these articles for you—I stole the file from research without signing out, so I am going to be shot come sunup. And I’m going to send them over right this instant. Retch, will this ever take your mind off your work.”

“Okay, send it, but I won’t promise to read it, especially if it’s scary.”

“Chicken!” Sassy cried, hanging up on her.

7.

The messenger dropped the manila folder off at two, but Rachel didn’t get to it for a week. Sassy called every other day asking if she’d read any of the articles (“You mean, Retch, I pay through the nose to messenger them to you and you haven’t touched them?” ), but Rachel allowed herself to be swamped with work and office gossip in order to make it through the week—on average, she stayed at work until seven at night. She thought about the sphere possibly growing inside her, and one evening she decided: screw it, screw work, time to relax, get the hell away from legalese.

It was a Wednesday evening, towards the end of August. Rachel was not sure what the weather was like outside because she was spending so much time inside her house or office, putting herself into her work more completely than she had all year while Hugh re-wallpapered the turret room. She was feeling, in spite of the work, in love with life again, the way she’d been in school: the sphere inside her subdividing, Hugh being relatively productive, Hugh seeming to be happy, and work taking over whenever she began to feel the slightest twinges of melancholy. The firm was still holding an organizational meeting down the hall in the conference room, but Rachel was beginning to feel physically sick over the proceedings and went back to her office and her messy desk feeling like she would collapse across it. She looked out her window, across at the Madison Hotel; usually, if she was lucky, someone would be undressing in front of their window without noticing the offices across the street. It was a cheap form of entertainment, but she felt pretty cheap this evening.

She leaned back in her chair and turned her attentions to the news clippings from The Washington Post, the old Washington Star-News, The Washingtonian Magazine, as well as the rag Sassy worked for, The Herald-Examiner.

CHAMBER OF HORRORS IN NORTHWEST

Oct. 12, 1969—The bodies of seven women were found buried beneath a house in the Winthrop Park area of Northwest Washington, following an investigation into the bizarre group of individuals who had occupied the block. None of the women have yet been identified, although it is thought that they may have worked as prostitutes in the surrounding neighborhoods. Three of the women appear to have been bled to death using some kind of medical apparatus, and there are indications that the other four were buried alive in concrete…

SEX SLAYINGS CONNECTED TO DEVIL WORSHIP

Oct. 23, 1969—A group calling itself the Disciples of the Last Circle have claimed responsibility for the torture and killing of seven women in the Winthrop Park area. The Herald-Examiner received this letter from the self-proclaimed spokesman of the group, a Mr. Swampgrass Rainbow.

Dear Pigs,

Our Lord Lucifer has arisen from his chains. We take the sacred mushroom and glorify his name. Kiss my a—, you suckers. Life is dream and dream is life, and we see the stained glass bleeding down the walls. We did not slice the entrails from the piggies, we set them free and their blood which is sacred to our Guru, the Horny One. The girls were to be His brides and the mothers of His children. The Devil is America in Nam. We drank napalm and saw it was good. You are just puppets of the pigs who run the fascist world. Imperialist running dogs crapped on the lawn of the world.

Sincerely in the Name of the Tortured,

Swampgrass Rainbow, Unholy Light Priest of the Disciples of the Last Circle

p.s. pigs

We sliced them open because they begged us to, because they wanted Him inside them, they wanted to bring it into the world.

Mr. Rainbow was taken in to custody early this morning, although at press time, no charges had been formally brought against him. Mr. Rainbow was charged in 1968 with possession of drugs, and resisting arrest. One district police officer, who wishes to remain anonymous, told this reporter, “This sounds like something out of Rosemary’s Baby, doesn’t it? Except we got a half-dozen Rosemarys cut up like the Black Dahlia, and a bunch of drug-crazed hippies walking around like zombies, and you know something? This used to be a ritzy neighborhood—all changed. It isn’t just the LSD, and it isn’t just all this sex going around, you know, those are just symptoms. It’s the bomb, I think. The kids know the world can end and they just figure, ‘If it feels good, do it.’”

EXORCIST VISITS WINTHROP PARK “HAUNTED” HOUSE

Oct. 31, 1970—Just over a year ago, the name of a certain house in Northwest Washington became a place of nightmares. Draper House. Built by the architect Julian Marlowe in the 1800s, a man known for his bizarre architectural style known as “marlowisms,” which involved numerous entries to rooms so that someone in the dining room could get to the bedroom, for example, without ever going through the kitchen or living room. Marlowe is of course most famous for the Edith Glasscock House in Newport News, Virginia, which the reclusive Miss Glasscock had him develop over a period of twenty-five years. Draper House’s most famous residents were Addison and Verena Standish, from the 1880s to the turn of the century. According to Fay Randolph, the noted “exorcist” of Manhattan whose recent book of essays, By Demons Possessed, was published to international acclaim. Draper House’s murky reputation began long before the recent tragedies of the young women’s deaths.

“The house was built on swampy ground; a well, in fact, runs beneath it. Its first occupant was a lady of the evening named Rose Draper, and it is said that in her brothel -- for politicians primarily -- blackmail and knavery were the rule. She died violently, as do all original residents of such houses, and her death was similar to the famous Fatty Arbuckle case early in this century, although I believe the instrument of death in that case was a broken champagne bottle. In the case of Rose Draper, it was a rather simple kitchen utensil: an apple-coring knife. They say her ghost claps at night, the clap being her alarm that the place is about to be raided, and the clap also being a reference to the disease which she carried to her death.

“The illustrious Verena Standish, daughter of Horace Ashton the famous robber baron, and her husband, the less distinguished Addison Standish, bought the house in the late 1800s when Addison was set his sites in the political world. With them, they brought their two children, and a governess, and here is where the evil qualities of the house came into play. The story goes that the governess went mad and murdered the children in a most grisly fashion. Mrs. Standish herself felt much to blame, apparently because, as a popular diversion of the time, she became intrigued with spiritualism, thinking it a lark. Upon the deaths of her only children, she took an entirely different view, and believed that her playing at table-rappings and ghosts had brought something out of the house, something that was there waiting for such a moment.

“Then, for a stretch of perhaps seventy years, the house lay fallow. Families moved in and out, at one point it became three or four apartments. Then the neighborhood of Winthrop Park began to tarnish, and the less desirable elements began to occupy the neighborhood and, in time, the house. Who knows what evil has been there in the past decade? We know of these hippies who tortured and murdered girls, but who knows what may have drawn them in? Were they, after all, as their defense attorneys argued unsuccessfully just this summer, pawns of their drug habits? And if so, what showed them the way? What brought them here?”

Mrs. Randolph possesses the cherubic face of the eternal child. It is hard to believe that this soft-spoken woman wearing her fair isle sweater and kilt is the same exorcist who cast demons out of the Isaacson twins in Brooklyn two years ago. Sitting with her in her suite at the John Quincy Adams Hotel, one wonders if she enjoys spooking reporters on Halloween.

“Tonight,” she says, “I will enter the house and call upon the spirits. I don’t believe in the devil, not at least in person. But I do believe that evil exists, I do believe that there are places on this earth where spirits are caught outside the flesh, the same way they are caught, more often, within the flesh. And tonight at Draper House, I will find out their meaning, and if they are, as I believe, evil, I will vanquish them from the house.”

FAMED EXORCIST DIES IN FIRE

Nov. 1, 1970—Fay Randolph, forty-three, author of the recent New York Times bestseller, By Demons Possessed, died last night in a fire in her hotel room in Washington, D.C.… believed to be started by the cigarette she was smoking when she fell asleep…

Rachel scanned the rest of the headlines:

THE “SCREAMING HOUSE

-- with the subhead: Neighbors Heard Girls’ Cries Of Terror, But Did Not Find It Unusual For Winthrop Park

MAN ARRESTED IN SEX CULT SLAYINGS

WITNESS COMES FORWARD—ESCAPED CLUTCHES OF ALLEGED “KNIFE RAPIST”

SUSPECT SETS SELF AFIRE

CIRCUS OF DEATH: MORE BODIES UNCOVERED IN WINTHROP PARK

8.

Rachel groaned as she folded the photocopies in half and hurriedly stuffed them into her purse; she’d read them later when her stomach wasn’t feeling so upset—much later. She wrote into her date book (without which she would never accomplish a thing):

1. Make list for housewarming party.

2. Get Hugh to look at VW.

3. Groceries: nothing that can’t be microwaved.

4. BANK! BANK! TAKE OUT LIFE SAVINGS! (at least 200 bucks)

5. Call to invite people: re: housewarming party: Labor Day weekend.

6. Set up appt. with dctr? Or wait? Re: sphere.

9.

Waiting for her train home in the Farragut West station, Rachel felt spooked. The subway platform was deserted, although she heard footsteps from above the escalators, and the lone wind that seemed to herald the next blue line train. It’s those articles about the house. She boarded the train, thankful that there were a handful of people on it, tired workers, some tourists probably heading back to their motels from the Smithsonian. She closed her eyes and tried to think calm thoughts, but her mind kept coming back to those headlines, Screaming House, Devil Worship, Chamber of Horrors.

Shit, I’ll have to thank Sassy personally for giving me a few more nightmares.

Keeping her eyes shut, she reached up with her fingers and kneaded her temples. Stay away migraine, stay away migraine, migraine you do not exist, you do not have power over me. Headache, I rebuke you!

She heard the conductor call out on the intercom, “DuPont Circle Station, this is a blue line train to Friendship Heights.”

Rachel saw, sitting in front of her, staring at her, a man she thought she knew. He was tall and slender, wearing a black shirt that stuck to his ribs. He leaned forward in his seat, his hands clutching the bar above the seat in front of him. His skin was shiny and dark, and his face seemed almost reassuring as if he recognized her, also. On his head he wore a black top hat. His eyes crinkled up into small slits, and he grinned, broadly, and she knew that grin, and she felt hot and cold, chilled, when she remembered where she knew him from: the day she sat at the card table at Mrs. Deerfield’s crib, when the face with the teeth came down for her, this was the face of the man from the clamoring place. He spoke without opening his mouth, and he said, “Let’s pretend, Rachel, that you are the mommy.”

Rachel gasped; she felt like she’d just flicked her tongue across a live wire.

But another voice came over the wire, the train’s intercom, the conductor’s voice again, “This is Woodley Park Station, Woodley Park,” and Rachel realized that she had not opened her eyes yet, not actually, because the man in the black tank top was becoming a static of squiggly lines on a purplish background, and Rachel opened her eyes to normal life and a normal world in which a little boy, standing in the aisle with his mother and sister, leaned over and tugged at her sleeve, saying,

“Hey lady, lady, is this the stop for the zoo?”

10.

So she had a nightmare that night.

But the nightmare wasn’t about a Screaming House; wasn’t concerned with a man who had materialized in her mind’s eye on the Metro; she did not dream of spheres bursting from her belly.

The nightmare was about her father.

He was lying in the hospital bed—she’d never even seen him in that bed, he hadn’t wanted her to see him, he hadn’t allowed his favorite girl to see him once the end was just two months away. His eyes were sunken as if the fluid had been sucked out of them, his skin was pasty, his lips moved slowly with great effort. Thrust between his lips: a lit cigarette. “Old habits die hard,” he said, coughing. “Took out my lungs, sweetie.”

His chest was burst open as if he’d swallowed a grenade. Gray tendrils of smoke curled between his dripping ribs.

I know this is a dream flashed through her mind.

And I want this dream to end.

Now.

Her father lay in the hospital bed.

To avoid looking at the smoldering cavity beneath his neck, Rachel concentrated on his face. Skin brittle as dead leaves. Cracked at the mouth. Cigarette burning orange at the tip. Smoke exhaled through flared nostrils. Voice like gravel underfoot. “Can’t have everything in this life, Rachel. You have your work, and I’m proud of what you’ve done, but you can’t deny your body, you can’t deny the destiny of every woman to bring life into this world, sweetie, it’s only natural.”

As he spoke, the light in the room dimmed, and she watched the smoke rise through the shadowy air, rise and curl and dissipate.

“No,” Rachel said. She was surrounded by darkness.

“What?”

“This isn’t you. You never said that.”

“Rachel?” he asked.

“You always wanted what was best for me.”

“Scout?”

Rachel awoke suddenly—she’d been sitting up in bed, leaning on her elbows.

The fan whirred in the doorway to the bedroom. Perspiration tickled the back of her neck.

“Scout?” Hugh asked again.

“Dreaming,” she murmured sleepily.

“Woke up just now. With you staring at me. Like you were scared of me.”

“Bad dream. About daddy. Really bad. But I don’t know why.”

Hugh hummed the theme from Jaws. “Nose shark will come and eat up all the bad dreams.” He reached over to her, hugging her, kissing her nose, falling off to sleep himself. He smelled like Ivory Soap; sweat; shampoo; an old T-shirt; baby powder.

Rachel lay there in bed holding herself to her husband, shaking as if from cold.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

BLOODMEMORY

1.

Hide me! Oh, hide me! Mattie pulled her trash bags of invisibility tight around her face. The heat was unbearable, the sound of her own breathing was like a lion’s roar in her ears, the plastic of the bags was smothering.

She had drunk her last bottle of wine—she’d panhandled her ass off up in Adams-Morgan for just a couple of bucks, and then went and blew it on Thunderbird. But she needed it, and bad; the cheap wine slowed down the images fluttering in her head, the loop of film replaying the scene over and over, the scene that she’d kept so carefully hidden, even from herself, the real reason why she was afraid to go into the Screaming House. Ever again.

It was all coming back to her, all the memories, all the terrors, but most clearly: that night, that night in the spring, the night of the riots in Washington, the night her babygirl lay in a bathtub burning with fever, the night he tore into her. The cheap wine wasn’t blurring the memory enough. The more she drank, the clearer that night became.

“My baby! Four! Death! Room! Fire!” she brayed as she set the empty bottle down by her side, but in her mind she cried out: I remember! Hounfour! Hounfour! Oh, my baby, death in room, fire out window, stink, death, you…

2.

I remember!

The room smelled of death; and of new life.

The only light came from beyond the window, out where the fires of riots tore up the night. A wall of flame shot up in the projects in the back alley, the building that had housed Madeleine Perreau and her daughter, Nadine. Gunfire down the block; sirens shrieking; shouts of a city gone wild.

The window was closed to that, and what little seeped through from beneath the pane was ignored by the people in this room. A sink dripped rusty water; roaches scuttled across the cracked yellow tiles; a sound like moist chewing coming from the man who bent over the bathtub. He was naked, his legs and buttocks thrusting forward over the tub as he leaned further into it. His shoulders were skin and bone, with sinewy muscles tying them together. He kept his head ducked down into the tub, his hands moving frantically. As he fed, Mattie could see his back muscles contract, his breaths coming short and swift with each swallow. The silk top hat he had worn earlier lay crushed beside the tub, its rim splattered with blood.

Mattie watched as her half brother, Gil, performed his operation. In his possessed state he became Baron Samedi. The muddy stink of the grave surrounded him. He was tearing into her daughter’s flesh. In memory it happened slowly, excruciating seconds that stretched into hours. But that April of 1968, it had been over in a matter of minutes.

Mr. Big Man sat on his haunches next to the toilet, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his tie askew, his gray pants ripped at the knees from when he’d fallen down, when he’d seen Gil begin to feed. He didn’t look over at Mattie, and he didn’t look at the spirit-in-flesh woman either. He stared transfixed at the blood-streaked bathtub. Mr. Big Man, face white with fear, screamed.

But then even his face changed, became full of beatific wonder: something had come over him, too, something bigger than even the spirits of rada and petro.

Something in the house that screamed in madness, like a starved wild animal escaped from its cage.

Something that had nothing to do with the Voudun Mattie’d been taught by her mother, something darker, something that once loose would never be caged again.

The nameless evil that passed through the house, that drew smaller evil to it—smaller evil like her half brother—and consumed it like a fire devouring the kindling that gave it life. A battery recharging.

Mattie howled in pain as blood splashed up from the tub—Gil DuRaz turned, grinning, his wide toothy grin smeared with red, his tongue slipping out from his mouth, mopping up the string of blood that drooled beneath his chin. His eyes like twin obsidian marbles.

From those eyes, hooks flew out to catch Mattie’s soul, to pull her forward, towards him. “Drink, my love, my sister, the milk of the mother.” He smeared his bloodstained hands across his face.

“Baron Samedi,” Mattie gasped. Her brother had crossed the line, given himself over, alive, to the spirits of death, to the guardian of graveyards. She felt a tremendous pressure push in on all sides, squeezing her brains, thumping against her eardrums; the ax in her heart going choppity-chop! She reeled backwards, slamming into the wall. Her breath came in quick pants, and she fouled her underwear. The stench of her own body became overwhelming—it was as if she’d opened an old grave and inhaled the fumes of an exploded corpse, and the corpse had her own face. She became aware of her flesh and its decay until the room was spinning with the smell.

She called on the old gods, the spirits, the loa, who would help her. At your altar, I pray, you bring your vengeance down on these -

But her thoughts were cut off, hacked at until her mind ripped in jagged cliffs and valleys within her skull. Her blood broke the dam of their blood vessels and her nose began bleeding.

Baby girl—screaming!—Mambomambomambo—guh-guhguh—

The Old One, the Spirit-In-Flesh, the one called Housekeeper, half in shadows, stood above her. “You never had power, you wasp nest, you jar for jelly.”

Mattie knew she had lost her magic, lost her power as a mambo priestess. Somehow it had been taken away from her, and now she was weak and spent. Mattie slid to the floor, pounding her fists against her stomach, trying to drive the evil spirits from her. She began gnashing her teeth, foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog, clawing her breasts.

Gil was done feeding. He cupped his hands into the mess of flesh and blood and brought the baby out.

It made sucking noises, and Gil held it in one hand. With the other, he poured dark blood into its grasping mouth.

Gil laughed. “This is the one, this is the vessel that shall hold my spirit.”

He handed the wriggling fetus to the Housekeeper. The thing mewled like a kitten.

Mattie had no energy to move. Her mind was trickling out of her skull, her thoughts were jumbling as if she were falling down a long staircase with nothing to stop her descent.

Gil extended his hand towards Mr. Big Man. A hand that dripped with Nadine’s steaming blood. “Drink.”

And Mr. Big Man crawled like a supplicant on his knees before Gil. His face just beneath the offering hand. His mouth turned upwards. He lapped at the underside of Gil’s hand, greedily.

When Gil pulled his hand away from the man’s lips, Mr. Big Man grabbed for Gil’s hands with both of his, tried to wrench them back to his face, sucking at the fingers to get the last traces of the girl’s blood. Gil slapped Mr. Big Man, and Mr. Big Man let go. He sat back, sliding like a naughty child to the corner, behind the toilet, licking his lips.

“Life’s milk, sister, drink and be with me, here, forever,” Gil whispered. He leaned into the tub again. She heard his slurping. He turned towards her, his cheeks puffed out, his mouth full of blood.

Gil crawled on all fours across the cold wet tiles. To Mattie.

She felt as if she’d been boned like a chicken. Could not move. Had no will. No will. Mind draining down through the plumbing, into the earth. No mind, no will, no energy.

When his face was inches away from her, a dribble of blood sluiced from between his teeth.

He pressed his face to hers, kissing her, his juicy tongue shooting into her mouth, past what little resistance her lips gave. Metallic liquid burned ulcers in her mouth. Her mouth filled with blood, Mattie saw: her daughter’s spirit standing before her, screaming in pain, screaming for release, screaming to give birth, screaming at her mother for giving her body up to this evil.

Gil pulled back. His lips smacked.

Mattie spat the blood he’d injected into her, spat it across his already stained face. He was momentarily blinded with blood. Dropped the knife, the coring knife, the one he’d used to help open her daughter up—his teeth alone had done most of the work, but he’d used the knife to rend her small body completely. He reached up to wipe his eyes.

Knife clattering to floor. The Housekeeper cooing to the baby from the shadows. Mr. Big Man licking his fingers near the toilet. The tub with blood like a rose blooming from its basin. Gil wiping his eyes free from blood, his hands in tight fists. The fire consuming empty buildings in the alley. Knife still on floor. Dull from cutting through flesh and bone, dripping red.

Slow. The memory was slow. But it was over in seconds. Over in seconds. What she’d done. What she’d done to her half brother.

With the shred of thought she had left in her, Mattie grasped the knife in her left hand and with her right held her half brother back. Drove it into him just below his stomach. Sliced. Twisted. Gutted. Churned.

Cored.

She screamed as the Housekeeper tore her away. The dying man choking on his own blood.

And then, nothing.

Her mind gone.

Her memory gone, except for knowing the Screaming House, except for love and fear of Nadine, her child, except for dread of Baron Samedi and the stink of the grave.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

THE NEW LEAF

1.

Hugh got his résumé over to a headhunter’s office the week before the housewarming party. He’d been in particularly good spirits, and found the day-to-day work around the house occupied most of his time. But the résumé, it had to be done— just get me some job to fill in the time, some little white-collar pigeonhole where I can at least feel like I’m less of a house-husband. As much as he was enjoying working on the house, there were times when he thought if he didn’t get out of there he would go bonkers. He began coming up with any excuse just to go down the block, and when he did he felt clumsy—as if he’d been in the damn house so long, in leaving it he was entering an alien landscape, sometimes hostile, sometimes friendly, but always different.

He’d notice people more on these brief excursions to the drugstore or to the hardware store, or more often than not to the liquor store ( but just beer, Scout, and only one a day sometimes, so I think I’ve got it under control); he’d notice how they were dressed, the anxiety in their faces, their small daily joys, their suppressed rage. That crazy bag lady who had given Rachel such a scare a while back, he saw her in the park and she screamed at him, something unintelligible—even she seemed to be a part of the fabric of daily life. It gave Hugh a sense that somehow just being alive was good. That perhaps this house, this home, would work out, after all. Whenever the small voice whispered in his head, Hugh Adair, you should be actively pursuing lawyerdom, instead of putting off the inevitable with carpentry and beer. Why did you go through those damn years of law school, anyway? he always had an answer: I think I went to law school to meet Rachel, I think it was some kind of destiny, I had to go through law school in order to find her.

The week before Labor Day, he vowed to Rachel that he would turn over a new leaf.

“And not just the leaf. Scout, the whole dang tree.” His spirits seemed so high that Rachel held back from mentioning what she thought ( I’m pregnant, Hugh, but maybe I’m not, but it would be okay if I were pregnant, right?)—again she would wait until she saw a doctor. She managed to postpone this in her mind—it was superstitious, but after all, the last time she was pregnant, she’d seen a doctor and then lost the baby. Why screw it up again?

“So you don’t mind about this housewarming party idea.”

“Nah. I just wish I had some friends to invite. I assume you’ll have your usual ‘This Is Your Life’ contingent. Miss Former Pep Squad Leader?”

“Call Bufu up. He may be an asshole, but they’re good at parties, too. And you can call up all those other Lambda Chis. You were good enough friends with them in college.”

“Yeah, so I can hear how successful my frat brothers are—no thank you. I wish I knew more losers like me.”

When she’d left for work, Hugh made a few calls, the headhunting agency, the city bar association, even Bufu Thompson. “Yeah, a little party this weekend, just bring a friend or something, maybe a roll of toilet paper, hey, we can always use toilet paper…” He waded through his small black address book, and realized that most of the people in it were either potential business contacts or Rachel’s friends. He decided he’d better not use the phone much, hoping the employment agency would call back—it was times like these he wished he’d gone ahead and gotten call waiting on the phone, as obnoxious as he thought that service was.

Bored, he strolled room to room, checking lights, checking the paint jobs he’d done, checking the scuff marks on the floors, checking for upended carpet tacks. He gobbled down a stale Hostess Donut that lay hidden in the breadbox, took out the garbage, checked for mail. Too hot to lounge out on the patio, and he didn’t need to get another sunburn this soon—that could wait for Labor Day. Ring you goddamn phone! Get me a job! Get me an interview! He straightened the cushions on the couch, and the photographs he’d taken in law school—mainly of Rachel on campus, or at the beach, or walking through the woods. He remembered where he’d left the Verena Standish book: in the turret room, and as he went into it that nonsensical word HOUNFOUR in streaked red on the cheap yellow paper. Should get someone in here and figure out how to tear down the wall so we can open up that small room there. Maybe just take the old sledge to it—if I could be sure there are no pipes or intricate wiring systems back there.

Then he heard voices, coming from the area where he’d covered over the dumbwaiter.

Penny Dreadful and her dreadful guests.

A woman, not Mrs. Deerfield: “Well, I didn’t notice anything different about her. She seems common.”

“Keep your voice down, dear, and she is quite special.”

Another woman: “He opened her up to him, you saw her face that day. You know.”

“As if that means anything, and that was weeks ago. I remember a time when he chose you, too, and see what’s come of it. And you weren’t terribly special.”

“Don’t remind me.”

“Now don’t put those down the sink, I told you—“

“You told me, you told me.”

“Yes, well, I think you might listen for once. None of that for me, thank you, no.”

“I know I’m impatient but I just wish it would happen sooner. Then we can all rest easier.”

“It’s that divine justice thing he’s got going, he wants her because she’s a link to the past. It’s that debt. Sometimes we must move slowly to realize the dream of, well, so much more than just a lifetime.” She said this last word with obvious disgust,

“No, too many calories for me, right now—ah, but the flesh is weak, so pass another one over, dear. Now, didn’t I just tell you not to put those down there. I’ll be forever cleaning them out…” A loud humming, a blender or some machine, cut off the voices; Hugh was almost disappointed.

Hoping he’d hear something again from his downstairs radio show, he plopped down in the window seat, gave a cursory nod to the park—its trees were becoming a drained anemic green as the summer heat continued. He picked up Diaries of an Innocent Age, found the dog-eared page he’d left off on—the part where Verena started to sound a little loony tunes about Draper House.

The good part.

2.

From Diaries of an Innocent Age by Verena Standish:

I had not looked into the background of the children’s governess as thoroughly as I might have, but she’d come with good recommendations from the Preston-Finches. So good, in fact, that Walter Preston-Finch called up to tell me that he attributed his son Aaron’s admission to Exeter directly to this woman’s instruction, and everyone in New York society knew Katherine Preston-Finch (later to become the wife of author-adventurer Francis Earhart) to be the very model of genteel comportment at the tender age of sixteen—our governess had everything to recommend her to the post. Only after the tragedy did I learn of Miss Fields’ relationship with Walter Preston-Finch and her subsequent nervous breakdown and suicide attempt. I would not have expected it in such a well-educated woman.

I have felt, at times, betrayed by the Preston-Finch family, whose exaltation of this extremely unbalanced young woman contributed greatly to the destruction of my happiness in life. But I really blame myself, and not merely for hiring her without proper investigation of her past, but for casting a cold eye upon my own children, and, I daresay, for letting things within the house itself go unnoticed.

Emmie was just four when we moved in, and James two and a half. Miss Fields was brought in immediately, and I suppose her preoccupation with the tarot cards should have alerted me to a susceptible mind. But I thought it all a lark, then, a gay pastime, similar to my own modest interest in table-rappings. And I was so very involved in being the Washington hostess, the dinners and the parties among the political cognoscenti, trying to help my dear Addison find his way through the diplomatic maze. When I remember those times I ache with regret—how it all means nothing to me now, how it was the folly of the times, how little I truly care for the eyes and ears of the world when I now think of all I lost in the bargain.

But Miss Fields seemed such a serene presence. She was less than beautiful, always an advantage for a woman of no means and great intelligence, for she offended no employer’s wife (or so it seemed to me at the time). She did not seem to care a whit for men or their opinions, except inasmuch as they applied to Latin and Greek and the questions of classical philosophy. In dress and manner she was modest, shy and deferential when in the presence of her employers; yet on more than one occasion in those first few years, I can recall her chastising Addison for his attempts to sabotage the children’s early education with his outlandish stories. And I thought, at the time, well and good for her, to stand up to my husband’s periodic foolishness. There was something very Quakerish about her, a tendency to plainness in speech, dress, and habit. I thought her, those four years she was with us, a sober and stabilizing presence, one that would brook no nonsense, a woman who would build character in my blessed angels. I do not remember her face, except in those last moments, and then it was much changed. But she had an emptiness of expression and a rather remarkable way of reassuring whomever she encountered with that emptiness. These were purely social reassurances—I suppose deference is the better term. One always had the feeling that Miss Fields was more clever than her station, but she had a way of nodding and looking down to the floor that allowed one some superiority. She struck me, upon our first meeting, as someone who had no sense of herself. With the recent popularity of Dr. Freud, we might call this a crisis of personality or identity. But Draper House solved that for her, in an unspeakable way.

She found, in the house, an identity, and perhaps even a husband, a lover—without that base connotation the word conjures in these pornographic times. A companion is perhaps a more suitable word—she found companionship in the house. But the house was, I believe, evil from its foundations to its roof, evil the way a guillotine is inherently evil, the way a hangman’s noose is evil, the way a snake is evil.

What remained in Draper House, at any rate, was the irrational residue of evil—left perhaps by the original owner, a woman of murky reputation, or perhaps the evil grew like a fungus, from beneath the house, in the damp-encrusted walls, until finally, the entire structure was in the clutches of something beyond knowing. My religious beliefs are (and have always been) such that I allow there can be no flesh without spirit, however, there may exist spirit without flesh. And the natural law of spirit is to always seek out and invade flesh in order to carry out its benevolent, or in Miss Fields’ case, malevolent plan.

When I finally was told the whole story of Miss Fields, how she had attempted to take her own life at the Preston-Finch home, suddenly I understood what this woman was looking for. Yes, on the surface, love, in particular a man to love her. How vile Walter Preston-Finch seems to me now! How he must have seduced this poor love-struck woman and then abandoned her to the fates. And how cruel the fates had been to her! What must it take to climb a staircase and tie a length of rope to the edge of a balcony and leap off to swing by your neck until dead! And how much more cruel it must have seemed to be rescued, to still live, when all hope for the future was gone.

For, without knowing this story when Miss Fields first came to live with us, I couldn’t see it in her modest demeanor. How was I to know the heart that lurked beneath the skin? She came to us without a god, without a faith, with no hope, no sense of the judgment to come, no promise of heaven when the weary toil had ended.

And in Draper House she found her god. Her savage god, a god of blood and torture and cannibalism. I do not mean to say a god exists beyond that which we call God; for this would be heresy. But as I have mentioned, there can be spirit, spirit without flesh, spirit seeking flesh, spirit hungry for flesh, hungry to corrupt and destroy flesh.

And she found it in the crib, not James’ crib, but the crib beneath the house, the entrance to the back servant stairs leading to my dressing table. The hungry spirits touched her there, and through them she understood her mission.

Was she insane? This is what we have been taught to believe. But who teaches us this? Yet more Godless people. We live in a Godless age, and so we look to our empty books and we see yet more emptiness. No answers, just words. We think as a race we possess genius simply because we affirm the unknowable: we say, there is nothing, nothing but ourselves in this world. And when we die, we become part of that nothing. How easy it is to believe in nothing, to believe in empty words, and empty worlds. So what does insanity mean to us? It is just another empty word for something we can’t understand, because we believe in nothing.

Miss Fields was not insane.

She was possessed.

Miss Fields murdered my children in cold blood.

But even cold-blooded murderers have their reasons.

And I pray to God, every night I pray to God, that my children were dead before that woman began devouring them.

We were gone, Addison and I, on our annual month in New York. It was cool at the Hudson River estate, and I would usually take the children and governess with us. Although it seems monstrous now that I left them while they were ill, I had, of late, become overwhelmed by other, more pressing matters.

Addison and I were having our difficulties. We decided between the two of us to go up to the country without the children, at least for the first week, and try to decide what we would do. Contrary to the popular rumor of the time, divorce was never even considered. I had become a foolish and vain woman, I am afraid to admit, and had begun hearing voices in the house with my coterie of spiritualist advisers. We believed it haunted, although I now think that Draper House went beyond being merely haunted. It was a hunting ground, I think, a place of such hungry evil spirit that all forms of life were its prey. If my friend the Reverend Elijah Calhoun had told me that Hell itself bordered that house, it would not surprise me.

And if you, dear reader, witnessed the scene I beheld in August of that year, you, too, would know the insatiable hunger of that place.

We had been gone three weeks with neither a word from my children nor their governess. I grew worried. Addison contacted the authorities in Washington, but the delay was too much. My husband and I exchanged words. In the heat of that argument, I left him, and journeyed alone to Washington. Indeed, I discovered that Miss Fields had spoken to the city police. She told them the children were taken to bed with a fever and that she had already sent word to me. In the carriage from the train station, I experienced a presentiment of what was to come: we passed an alley, stopping at a street corner, and I watched helplessly as a pack of hounds ran down a defenseless cat. Their jaws glistened with the feline’s blood as they tossed its flesh and yellow fur about. And there was something inside me that warned me from this, something that made me resist entering my own house at first.

Draper House.

I rushed upstairs, expecting the worst: that my children were deathly ill, and that Miss Fields was unaware of the danger their lives were in.

But what I beheld was beyond imagining.

I will not even write here the vile, unspeakable words she wrote across the walls with their blood, and I dare not remember too clearly my angels’ ravaged bodies. Skinned, and dressed the way a brutal hunter might two felled deer, hanging as if in a meatpacking house. She had tied them up on a crossbar of bamboo, and strung them along the shuttered window in my vanity.

But Miss Fields herself, inspired with the spirit of the house, had even begun disemboweling herself. Later, although Addison tried to keep things from me, I learned that Miss Fields had choked to death on the fingers of her own left hand, which, at the moment they were thrust in the back of her throat, were no longer attached to her body.

I dare not commit to paper the shock I felt. But I did not faint, I did not give in to frailty immediately. Instead, my mind took over, shutting itself down like a machine that has become too hot. This is the way in which the medical community has explained it to me.

It was not until ten years later that I was able to live in the normal world again, ten years of Foxmeadow, a spa for genteel ladies like myself, women of culture and character who had fallen off the edge of the flat world of sanity.

I would never, of course, return to that house, or even to that city. I could not bear it. Yet the house still will not let me go. I carry it within this weak-vesseled form, and all that is that house is here with me even as I write this.

I have moments of wondering if, at every corner, I will not behold that sight once again.

3.

The telephone was ringing. Not really a ring: these new phones seemed to produce an inhuman trilling that Hugh found painful to hear. Hugh had just begun getting into the book, sinking into the rhythm of the prose. Finally, Verena Standish was getting interesting, if a bit ghoulish. He almost resented this new intrusive noise. But maybe it’ll be about a job.

He sprinted to the kitchen and caught the receiver by the fourth ring, juggling it to within an inch of dropping the whole contraption on the linoleum. Hugh cleared his throat; he wanted to sound professional. His voice came out an unnaturally deep baritone. “Hello?”

But it was Penny Dreadful from downstairs. “Sorry to bother you, dear, but I’m having a bit of trouble with me garbage disposal and I was wondering what I should do—I have a plumber I can call, but I thought I should check with you first…”

Hugh sighed. This was the problem with being a landlord. “Oh, what’s the trouble with it?”

“Ghastly noises, like someone choking on eggshells—it just spits whatever I place down its gullet back up in me face.”

The cockney affectation in Mrs. Deerfield’s voice was a dead giveaway as to her state of being: sauced to the gills. He was about to tell her to go ahead and call the plumber and then stick the bill in his mailbox. But curiosity about the downstairs apartment got the better of him. “I’ll be down in a sec.”

Mrs. Deerfield greeted him at the door in a pink silk pajamas-type outfit, smudges of sky-blue eye shadow beneath her brows, fuchsia lipstick smeared across her mouth; all framed by a sort of pink tint to her cotton-candy-white puff of hair—she’d had it curled since he last saw her. She fanned her hands in front of his face, and he caught the strong odor of beer ( makes me thirsty). Her fingernails were long and painted green, with what looked like small gold astrological symbols glued to them. She introduced her two lady friends quickly, slurring her syllables together. “Annie, Betty, Hugh. We’re all a bit legless at the moment.” Mrs. Deerfield giggled mischievously. “I was missing my Ramona, and we held a little séance and she meowed through dear old Annie. The logical thing to do was have a pint or two.”

“It was embarrassing, hon,” one of the women said. “I just started making these noises and I suddenly wanted to catch a mouse or something. Spirits are like that.”

The third woman remained silent; she glanced down at the floor.

These must be the weird sisters Rachel had gone on about that first night in the house. “They’re really queer, Hugh,” she’d said, “and they kind of scared me, and you know how easily I can spook myself without outside help. They say they contact spirits.” Hugh sniffed the heavy air in the apartment. The only spirits he noticed as he headed back to the kitchen were the empty bottles of John Courage ale sitting on top of a card table. The third woman, the blonde named Betty, was tapping the toe of her right foot rather nervously, and he looked beneath the table, to the area where she cast her glance: the outline of a trapdoor.

The crib. “I just read about that.” He pointed to the trapdoor. It fit the exact dimensions of the card table above it. What had Verena said about it? It’s a quirk of the architect, or something? Now, Hugh, try to sound knowledgeable in front of the weird sisters—and this might not be the right group to tell about the governess who ate kiddos for dinner. “It’s an architectural oddity.”

“Dear?” Mrs. Deerfield was over at the sink, turning the garbage disposal on and off rapidly.

“Oh, it’s this book I’ve got about the house—apparently, there’s some kind of passage—stairs I guess, though there’s not much room for them—underneath there that continues up to the second floor—next to the dumbwaiter. Although it’s kind of nutty, isn’t it? I mean, why build it like that, when you could just make it like a normal staircase? But evidently, the guy who planned this house was into weirdness.”

“Julian Marlowe was a madman,” Mrs. Deerfield stated unequivocally. “But everything in its place and a place for everything, isn’t that right, dear? Perhaps it was a wine cellar of sorts, dear. It’s rather cool there, even in this weather, and it keeps me jams and pickles from boiling. But about the disposal…”

“Oh, right, well, there’s a trick to that—anybody got a broom handle?”

“As a matter-a-fact—“ Mrs. Deerfield went to get the broom from behind the back door. She handed it to him as he approached the kitchen sink.

“You just poke it around like this, sort of spinning the doohickeys down there.” As Hugh spoke, the women laughed, and Hugh, when he had gotten the garbage disposal going, accepted a bottle of dark ale from them. He sipped it slowly. It was ice cold and froze the back of his throat. “I better get back upstairs.”

“If you must, but it is nice to have a man around the house—don’t you agree, ladies?” They giggled their agreement, although the one called Annie seemed to be laughing at some other joke entirely. Mrs. Deerfield said, “But you both’ve been avoiding me, and I want you to tell your sweet wife that it was just an accident, after all, I know you didn’t mean to kill Ramona, accidents do happen. The world isn’t a perfect place.”

As Hugh left her apartment, he invited her to the housewarming party, and her friends, also. But there was something going through his mind as he thought about how the cat had died: there are no accidents. He was getting drunk. Off one damn beer, too, but it was strong. He almost tripped up the stairs, but there are no accidents. Scout, take a lesson. Not an accident from birth to death. There’s a meaning and a reason for everything. Just like my good friend Verena Standish says, that cold-blooded murderers have their reasons, too. Like the Old Man and my first wife—now that car wreck was no accident, it may have been a drunk driver, but the Old Man probably made good and sure they were straddling the white line, I’m willing to put some money where my mouth is, and his mouth felt dry and scratchy. He knew that he would go out somewhere and maybe have another beer or two. Like that cat in the car, sure, it looked like an accident, but nope, it must’ve been a sign—like that omen Penny Dreadful had when we moved in, the way her cat barfed hairballs—just like I’m a lawyer, it was no accident, it was real life. I had been raised to go to lawyer college, he chuckled, so I did as I was told until the lie got to be too much, which is right now, which is, he looked at his watch, which is 2:30, which is Miller time.

Hugh Adair felt in his pocket for his wallet, and then turned back down the stairs to go out into the sultry day and find himself a bar stool and knock back a couple of brewskies.

There was something, something he’d told Rachel that morning, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it, something about a leaf, and as he stepped outside to the sweltering afternoon, the front sidewalk was littered with dead leaves from a gingko tree that did not have long to live itself. Yeah, that’s it, a new leaf. Something about a new leaf. But he continued on through the park to the shortcut to Nineteenth Street, trying to forget his unbearable thirst.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHILDREN IN THE PARK

When Rachel finally got Sassy on the line, she said, “I want to thank you personally for scaring the bejesus out of me. I have a couple of your photocopies here in my purse and I can’t tell you how entertaining it is to know I live in a chamber of horrors.”

Sassy snorted a laugh on the other end of the line. “I’ve even found another article or two. That place is some kind of magnet for lunatics. You and Hugh are just two of the recent ones. Makes much more interesting reading than most of this home shit I’ve got to research.”

“Yeah, well, do me a favor, Sass, and don’t spread that stuff around at the party.”

“My lips are sealed. You all prepared?”

“Hardly, and I’ve got a shitload of work, I got yelled at by a client who I know for a fact is guilty and—yikes! It’s four, I want to get out of here so I can get some shopping done before Larimers is swamped with yuppies.”

“Can I bring anything tomorrow?”

“Your ass, now gotta-go. Bye.”

Rachel had to run to the bank, which she’d forgotten to do earlier in the week. She’d barely done any shopping for the housewarming party—time seemed to be rushing by this week, between the briefs she had to prepare, and her mother calling at work to see how she was doing. (“It’s just that it’s been a week since you called, and that always means you’re keeping something from me,” mom had said, and Rachel wondered if her mother were clairvoyant: Rachel’s mind, when not in gear, went to the thought of the baby she might be carrying. But I’m not going to jinx this and blab it until we’re both a ways along in gestation.) Rachel broke down on the phone and invited her mother to the housewarming party when her mother kept needling her about seeing the house.

But the sphere ( Don’t call it a baby yet, if you call it a baby, Scout, you’ll lose it, it’ll drop out of you and once it’s out you can’t put it back) was on her mind through all of it: work, play, rushing as she was to the bank, waiting in line at the automatic teller machine. Her blouse was soaked with sweat; the back of her neck was itchy; her pantyhose was like heavy fur— why the hell are you wearing hose in the middle of summer anyway? Do you think any of your colleagues are going to care if your legs are once again pale and knobby? The line at the bank was long—everyone ahead of her seemed to move in slow motion, making deposits and withdrawals, not writing their checks out until they were right up to the machine, inserting their bank cards the wrong way. She dropped the cash into her purse, wrapping it with a few of the articles Sassy had messengered over earlier in the week. I haven’t thrown these out yet? Larimers Market was already packed with shoppers. Rachel did her best to squeeze between people to get to the produce, and then there was another line at the deli counter. She glanced at her watch: 6:15.

She was just crossing Winthrop Park with her arms full of groceries when the street lamps flickered on. Children, like playful lost shadows, ran across the thin grass after one another, ducking behind the bushes, leaping over each other’s backs, playing tag and hide-and-go-seek near the playground. A little girl in a pink party frock sat crying on the swing set—a street lamp spotlighted her. Rachel had seen her before, playing with a boy out in the alley one weekend day. Rachel thought she was both the most beautiful child she’d ever seen, and the saddest. Rachel’s arms ached from carrying the groceries, the headache seemed to be kicking in again, and she was getting a mild, distant pain in her stomach. You be okay, sphere, we don’t want anything happening to you, we’re going to do this pregnancy right. She went over to the little girl, setting the grocery bags down in the dirt, her purse propped between them.

“Hello. What’s your name?” Rachel asked, sitting down into the curve of the swing next to the girl.

The girl, who was probably no more than eight years old, eyed her suspiciously. Her eyes were red from crying. She had wispy brown hair tied back with a red velvet ribbon; her face was empty as if she were all cried out. Her eyes were pale green like lima beans. “Pudd’n’tame, ask me again and I’ll tell you the same.”

Rachel felt pressure on her back, and then she was swinging upwards, down again, skidding her shoes into the dirt to stop. A small boy ran out from behind her. “Ha?” he shouted. “I pushed you!”

“He’s Jamie and he’s my brother,” the girl said. “And he’s a wicked little boy, too. He made me cry.”

“And he’s a strong little boy, too. Jamie, is your mommy here?”

The boy, Jamie, smiled. “I stepped on a crack and broke her back.” He started rummaging through her groceries.

“No you don’t.” Rachel caught him by the arm and pulled him backwards, lifting him up on her knee. So light, like lifting a pillow.

“Naughty, naughty boy,” the girl said.

“Where’s your home?” Rachel asked.

The boy giggled, made a snarling noise, then giggled again. The little girl pointed across the darkening park. “The one in between.”

Draper House. Mrs. Deerfield’s lights were off. Their floor, the second, was brightly lit up. Hugh’s home. I hope he’s got a job, oh please, just any old job. “But that’s my home. Are you friends of Mrs. Deerfield’s?”

The girl shrugged. “We haven’t been out to play in forever.”

Jamie, now sitting sturdily against Rachel’s knees, kicked his feet up. “I have this secret,” he said.

“Is it a secret secret, or a telling secret?”

He giggled. “It’s something you know. It’s about babies.”

The girl reached across with her right hand and gave him a resounding slap on the cheek. “You wicked boy! If you tell I will tell. On you. ”

The boy rubbed the side of his face. “I know how babies are made.” He leapt from Rachel’s lap, crouching down in front of her, writing with his fingers in the dirt.

“God makes them. Is your mommy somewhere here?”

The girl shrugged her shoulders. She began swinging back and forth. The chain clanked against the swing-set bar. “He knows he’s not supposed to say these things.”

Jamie kept his head down, his fingers scratching in the dust. “He sticks it in and then goes to the bathroom inside her and that makes the baby.”

Pain along ribs, down to stomach, side stitches. Be safe, sphere, be safe.

The little girl scowled. “Wicked boy.”

“It’s true! And then the baby crawls out of her cunny. Only if it’s all done. If it’s not all done, it has to crawl back in. What do you suppose would happen if the half-done baby couldn’t find his mother’s cunny again? I suppose it would find one eventually. Teacher says one is very much like another.”

The pain was subsiding, like summer thunder, becoming more distant every few seconds. “That’s very bad language for such a nice young boy to be using.”

“You’re not supposed to tell.” The little girl stood up, pushing the swing away from her. “You’re a bad wicked boy and bad wicked boys get cooked and eaten like in Hansel and Gretel if they don’t watch out!”

“Cunny, cunny, cunny!” Jamie screamed at the top of his lungs, leaping up like a frog from the dirt and running off, out from under the street lamp, through the darkness, hooting like an owl as he went. His sister took off after him, crying, “Wicked, wicked bad boy! She’ll get you, she’ll get you and turn you into gingerbread!”

Rachel leaned forward in the swing, wondering if she really wanted to have children after all. But mine will be different because they’ll be mine. She bent down, lifting the bags, sliding her purse up under her arm, expecting a hernia at any moment.

She saw what the boy had been drawing in the dirt: a stick figure wearing a top hat.

Beneath this, a word:

HOUNFOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

THE THING IN THE WALLS

Hugh only caught the barest glimpse of the thing. Like watching a train heading into a tunnel, like the echo of a flashbulb, or a firefly glowing for a fraction of a second at twilight and then vanishing. Just a pure whiteness in that dark hole—then gone. He’d made a hole in the wall, at first just by tugging at the cheap wallpaper, and then at the paper beneath that. There was a small dent there, as if someone had poked at the wall, and he found that if he pressed there with his fingers, the plaster came off. Bad workmanship. He pushed a little harder. A chunk of plaster came off in his hand. The wall had been cheaply constructed. He took a screwdriver and pried some more away and peered into the dark room and saw something white.

It’s ‘cause I’m drunk. I am rip-roaring drunk. These were Hugh’s first thoughts on seeing the thing, the white motion, the blur of movement. But he was not that drunk, he knew it. It had only been two beers; well, three. Or maybe I drank more without realizing it? Maybe I knocked back a few six-packs, and now I just don’t remember any of them beyond the first two, that would explain seeing this thing. This something in the crack in the wall of the vanity, something that could not be a small animal shaved of its hair, could not just be a rat covered with white dust.

Hugh knew that in dark caves there lived creatures of transparent white jelly, blind and glowing; he knew that underground streams throbbed with life that was so different from the daylight world as to be alien, but this...

What had lived in the shadows of this dark room and fed upon roaches and mice, what was it that had just crawled back into its small cave within this vanity within this house?

I must be blind drunk.

A hallucination like this was what drinking was all about. Now, if I’d dropped acid I could label it a bad flashback and be done with it. What should I call it?

He shuddered. His shirt caught under his armpits, down his back, at his chest: he was sweating. He could smell the sourness of his own breath. His right hand held a chunk of plaster from the vanity wall; it crumbled as his hand became a fist. The hand even seemed alien, it seemed too white to be his, the hair on his knuckles and the back of his hand seemed too blond, he saw scales crossing each other like lizard highways across his fingers. Plaster dust settled across his fingernails. He opened and closed his fist slowly, turning his palm upward. Drunk, drunk, drunk.

The house smelled differently, a subtle change, like an odor from childhood remembered years later. Where it had smelled like nothing to him, empty, it now smelled inhabited.

He would probably find dead rodents behind the wall, he would no doubt discover a nest of mice, all white, and that would be the smell, and the mother mouse would be that thing he’d seen.

No mouse.

God, why had its face seemed so human?

Hugh had seen its eyes before. There were eyes. It had eyes. The white thing that drew back into the darkness had eyes.

Hugh opened and closed his fist. It was a technique for relaxation he’d learned to develop from a very early age. He would pretend ( Let’s Pretend, Let’s Pretend, it’s all pretend) that with each fist he was throwing away his anger, his frustration, the way a magician makes a coin disappear, but not up his sleeve, but out, out into the vanishing world.

The thing I saw had eyes.

He was drunk, that was enough, he could deal well with being drunk because it meant he was under the influence. Like Draper House itself, influenced, beyond the control of natural forces, like being drunk. His fist opened and closed and opened and closed.

Pale blue eyes.

As if milky cataracts had grown over them.

Just a drunken flashback. No eyes, the white thing had no eyes, I was flashing back.

Flashback to Hugh, a child, standing before his father.

“Look me in the eyes, boy.”

Hugh could barely remember a moment in his life when he had not felt this way: a child, not sure of what he’d done, waiting for punishment that could come in any form. But the worst being what his father had done to him then.

“Look me in the eyes, boy,” the Old Man said, and all Hugh could see of his father were his eyes, like pools of blue-curdled milk, red lines circling the outer whiteness. “You want to play games when I have guests, perhaps you should play hide-and-seek.”

Those eyes.

“But it was Ted who—“ Hugh began. He stood there, barely four feet tall, his fist clenching and unclenching, making his anger vanish into thin air.

“Hide-and-seek, boy.” The Old Man opened the doors to the coat closet. Why did its depths seem so scary? Nothing in it but old coats and umbrellas, scarves fluttering across Hugh’s face as his father pressed him into it.

“But I didn’t do anything.”

The Old Man’s eyes burned in his memory, in the darkness at the back of his head where Hugh shut the wild nightmare things out of his mind, where his anger went when it vanished, where it waited there, lurking. Those eyes.

“You saw something, boy.”

The closet doors closed on him.

A lock clicked in place.

His fist hurt because he couldn’t undo it, he couldn’t flatten his hand out, he couldn’t make his anger disappear.

“I only saw a lady.”

His father laughed from the other side of the door. “You saw nothing, boy, nothing. And when you’re ready to tell the truth, about seeing nothing, I’ll let you out. Until then, you just sit there and think about making things up. Pretending is bad, boy. it hurts people.”

Hugh could not open his fist; the harder he tried, the more his fingernails cut into the palm of his hand.

His father’s blue eyes burning holes like twin blue-hot pokers pushing through his brain.

“Nothing, I saw nothing.”

He said it for three hours in the musty darkness of the front hall closet before his father finally let him out. And when he came out his fist was unclenched and he had made his anger vanish into thin air.

“Nothing,” the grown-up Hugh said to the opening to the vanity.

But the thing he’d seen there, the thing that vanished into the murk and dust, had looked like a white clenched fist with the Old Man’s blue eyes buried deep in its rippling knuckles.

The vanity was itself a closed fist, and as Hugh went to get his other tools, he knew if he opened it up, whatever was inside there would no longer exist.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

OPENING THE VANITY

1.

Rachel heard the crashing down the hall before she saw him. “My God! What’s all the racket?” She plopped the grocery bags on the sideboard and rushed to the turret room.

The walled-in vanity was partially torn into—its ragged wall only came up as high as Hugh’s chest.

He was covered with dust, his back to her. Wearing only his boxers, his shoulders and back muscles flexing as he tore a piece of the drywall out with a crowbar. Then he hooked the bar back into the space he’d already brought down; he pulled against the wall. Motes of dust floated along the hallway. He tossed the crowbar to the floor, picked up his sledgehammer and hefted it from his right hand to his left.

“What is all this?”

He turned, acknowledged her presence with a nod, and then returned his attention to the vanity, put his back into his work, slamming the hammer against the lower half of the wall that remained. It took the blow hard, crumbling and flying wildly inward. He set the hammer down, again lifting the crowbar. He began gnawing at the rubble with the bar. The floor around him was strewn with his shirt and slacks and dust and hammers and screwdrivers, bits of the wall, chips of wood. “I’m -” he grunted, “-just—opening—this..."

“I know what you’re doing, but...what the hell are you doing, Hugh? We’re entertaining tomorrow night and you’re making a mess of everything?”

He dropped the crowbar, narrowly missing his toes. Its metallic crash echoed down the hall. Sinking to the floor, he covered his head with his hands. “Thought I heard something back there, like a rat.” When he glanced up from between his fingers, she could see that he’d been crying. “I was just trying to help, Jesus, Scout, every time I try to help I -”

He’s drunk.

Beer bottles on the floor, lined up neatly just inside the turret room.

2.

“God, I need a cigarette!” She turned her purse upside down, dumping its contents out on the dining room table—combs, keys, date book, address book, a half eaten roll of Rolaids, Kleenex (both new and used), coins rolled along the table, bouncing over the edge. Finally, her wallet fell out like a brick, while tobacco bits spun around in the air—and one lone, crumbling cigarette finally dropped on top of the pile. It was the sorriest excuse for a cigarette she had ever seen. But for that moment, when she felt like her lungs were no longer responding to oxygen, when she thought of the lousy day she’d had, and the equally crappy evening she was letting herself in for, it looked like the largest cigarette in the history of the tobacco industry. Like a hungry animal, she grabbed for it and put it between her lips.

Hugh followed her out, pulling up a chair at the table. He sat down carefully. “I decided I’d had enough. Not just the room—the vanity. I was out walking around—and okay, drinking— but it was all boiling inside me, Scout, all this garbage inside me, always pretending that I have to do the right thing, but the right thing, well, sometimes it’s not the right thing. So I come back, and I remember something that my old friend Verena wrote, something about this room, something that happened in here, long time ago, and I think I hear something in there, maybe a rat or something, and I start hammering at it, just hammering at the wall, and it feels good, you know, to just finally be picking something up with my own two hands and just doing it, not talking about doing it or studying how to do it or asking permission to do it or having the Old Man tell me I’ve got to do it, but just doing it. I make a crack in the wall, and then I can’t stop and I take the back of the hammer and pry away, and it’s a pretty weak wall, Scout, and then I get some other tools and start going at it. I can’t stop. I’d had enough, you know, enough of everything, and that wall just needed to come down.” Hugh’s voice was barely a whisper, and she’d expected him to look away, his eyes downcast (the way she knew she would look if she were in his shoes), but no such luck: he looked at her steadily. He was drunk—she could smell that part of him, and he knew she knew he was drunk. He didn’t seem to care about hiding that. “I’d just had… enough.”

“You’ve had enough? You’ve had enough? You’re so full of shit, Hugh, your eyes are turning-brown.” She knew him inside and out, she knew his smell, his skin, she knew his moles, for God sakes, she knew his scars, he had no mystery. That was a problem after all—she knew him too well. His eyes weren’t turning brown, they remained so true blue she wanted to raise her hands up like claws and scratch them out for turning her into such a witch. He was right out front like the marble blue of his eyes, they were clear lakes through which you could see right to the bottom.

“What the hell is happening here?” She almost laughed when she said that, but was afraid to because she knew she would sound like a witch and she was not going to let him turn her into one.

“I don’t know,” Hugh said, and seemed to mean it. He reached into the shambles of her purse and brought out a book of matches. He struck a match and lifted it up to her disintegrated cigarette. She’d forgotten about the cigarette between her lips. She plucked it out of her mouth and dropped it on the table. Hugh blew the match out. “I’ve been thinking about what I want to be when I grow up. Or I guess I should say when I sober up.”

Later, Rachel would remember what she was thinking at the point when he lowered the boom, when the shit hit the fan, when the fat lady sang: she was thinking about the fact that there was cash missing from her purse, to the tune of about a hundred dollars. It was like a flash of lightning illuminating an entire landscape. She glanced away from Hugh, looking distractedly down at the junk that had fallen from her purse. Idly, she took inventory while Hugh began talking about growing up, finally taking responsibility for his actions. Her wallet, matches, loose change…

But where were Sassy’s newspaper articles she’d folded up? She was sure she’d stuck them in her usual sloppy manner into the underworld of her purse.

And the money.

She’d stuck the money inside the articles, too lazy to reach down and dig up her wallet at the very bottom of her purse. It was obvious. That horrible little boy rifling through the groceries while she turned to speak to his sister.

He had gotten into her purse and taken the money.

The money and the newspaper articles—probably just grabbed whatever paper there was and ran. How had she missed seeing it?

Rachel, feeling pale and stupid, was just about to mention getting mugged by a pre-teen when Hugh dropped the bomb.

“…And I realized, Scout, that I never wanted to be a lawyer. And I don’t intend to become one.”

3.

She had to get out for some fresh air, get out for a walk, get away from him. Not be a lawyer? But he’s supposed to want to be a lawyer, it’s what they’d planned for, it’s what they had decided he would do! It was dark out, but she followed the street lights down Hammer Street to Connecticut Avenue, and then turned left, towards DuPont Circle. It was crowded with young people out walking, busy, happy, productive.

Let’s Pretend, Scout, that you’re the mommy and I’m the daddy and we have a whole mess of kiddos, a goddamn acre of kiddos, and I’m coming home from work and you’re fixing dinner, and the kiddos are fighting, and some of them are crying and one’s learned to walk, and the TV’s blasting reruns, so I say, kiddos, it’s time we got us a baby sitter so your mommy and daddy can have an evening out, and you throw your coat on—it’s winter—and I call the girl down the block who’s free to sit for a few hours… Rachel tried to block the voices from her head, all the words he’d said to her when they would lie in his bed, before they went and got married and screwed it all up. Let’s Pretend, Scout, that you’re the mommy and I’m the daddy and we have a whole mess of kiddos, and we’re tucking them into bed and you’re reading them the story about Daniel in the lions’ den, and I tickle their toes and the youngest begins crying from the nursery…

She passed couples walking arm in arm up Connecticut Avenue on their ways to dinner, the movies, normal life. Teenaged boys skateboarding downhill, their T-shirts wrapped around their waists, trying to impress the young girls who sat at the bus stop. The girls giggled and pointed and whispered one to the other; the boys like young roosters strutting circles around them, pretending not to be interested. Pretending.

Let’s Pretend, Hugh, that we’re both in love, because we both want to be in love really badly, we both need a little stability in our lives, we both need family—daddy’s gone off and died on me, Hugh, and so did your first wife and your mother and your dad’s never really been there, and we can make some kiddos between the two of us, we can have an acre of kiddos, and we can have love, because it makes the world go ‘round, right? Not money, not work, not housing, not surviving, but love.

A light rain of dust swept across her face as she crossed Connecticut Avenue at R Street. The walk signal became a red pulsing hand, palm turned towards her, as she almost missed the light. The drugstore was still open—it was after 8:30, but she wasn’t sure of the exact time.

“Marlboro Lights,” she told the man behind the counter. Feeling just as she had when she’d smoked in the girls’ room in high school, Rachel guiltily lit the cigarette. She watched its burning orange tip as she walked halfway down the block at R Street and sat on some cold concrete steps. She remembered the cigarette smell of her father, how she would sit on his lap and smell his Camels, the bay rum cologne, the starch of his shirts. And then, when he was dying, that smell of tobacco clinging to his sallow skin.

But my baby, my sphere, I can’t do this to you, I can’t…

Rachel clutched her stomach—a sudden sharp pain shot through her, the muscles felt sore as if she’d been coughing. Then no pain, other than a pounding headache raging behind her eyes. The baby-sphere inside her had become such a secret that she was afraid to tell too many people about it because they might convince her it wasn’t there. Even Hugh would try to convince her of that.

A man said, “You all right, miss?” She looked up to see a young man walking with his boyfriend, their hands interlocked.

She nodded. “Yes… thank you.”

The couple walked on.

Let’s Pretend, Hugh, let’s fucking pretend that love is something real that lasts, that doesn’t miscarry before the term is up.

Rachel stubbed the cigarette out onto the steps. She said aloud: “Thank God for you, sphere, thank God I’ve got you.” She patted her stomach, wondering if she would be gaining as much weight as she’d begun to the last time she was pregnant.

After a few moments, she got up and walked back towards the drugstore, to the phones outside it. She scavenged through her purse for loose change.

Over the phone, she told Sassy, “So I just walked out. I was livid. And I’m still livid. I feel like everything he’s told me has been a lie, and on top of that some damn kid picked my pocket. I’d almost be happy if he was having an affair or something normal, but no, he’s got to go have a fucking identity crisis the same day he tells me he’s going to get his act in gear. Hell of a day, Sassy, hell of a day. It’s my house and I left it, but Jesus, that man’s driving me crazy. And I was even going to tell him, too, about the, you know, the baby.”

“Retch—you’ve seen your doctor?”

“No, but I know.” Rachel was on the verge of sobbing; she hiccupped her tears back. She was not going to break down at the corner of R and Connecticut with all these happy goddamn couples roaming the streets with their adolescent displays of affection. “I don’t know why I love him, I really don’t.”

Silence on the line. Come on, Sassy, say something to make me feel better.

“Kick him out.”

“Huh?”

“Kick him out. It is your house and you don’t want him there. So go ahead and throw the bum out.”

“That’s cold. I didn’t say I didn’t want him—I couldn’t do that. He needs me. He wouldn’t know what to do—“

“He doesn’t need you. Retch. Have you ever considered that maybe he would land on his own two feet if you weren’t there to catch him every time he fell?”

Rachel covered the receiver with the palm of her hand. She glared incredulously at the phone. She let her gaze wander, to the etched graffiti on the wall (For a good time call…), to the people lining up for the 9:30 movie at the KB-Janus, to the Red Top cab which had pulled over and parked beside the drugstore. The cab driver was reading a magazine. Rachel heard the static and squeal of voices from his radio.

Sassy said nothing.

Rachel uncovered the receiver. “Well, listen, I better go.”

“Retch, come on. I’m just playing devil’s advocate here. I’ve known Hugh just about as long as you have, maybe not as well, but I know one thing about him. He can be a good team player, but not when he has to outperform someone else. He shrivels. And you ever notice that when you talk about the two of you, you always say ‘I’m doing this’ or ‘he’s doing this,’ but never‘ we’re doing this”? You’re like separate entities. Not a team. Don’t get mad at me for saying this, Retch, because if you weren’t my best friend I wouldn’t risk telling you. But you asked, and I’ve got to be honest.”

“Thank you, Dr. Headshrink,” Rachel said, sniffing. “Yeah, well, you’re just plain wrong. Hugh and I— we—don’t compete. Jesus, I’ve been a fucking earth mother for him and—“

“You’re supposed to be lawyers, but you’re the one who passes the bar, you’re the one with the big job, you’re the one with the direction and the drive -”

“-And we don’t even compete, either, not really, as it turns out, because he’s not even interested in law, so there, and God I need a cigarette! And what kind of supportive friend are you, anyway? If this were reversed, believe you me, the last thing I’d do is tell you what I really think, no way. What I’d tell you is that everything’s going to be okay, it all comes out in the wash. I don’t need friends who kick me when I’m down.”

“Okay, Retch, you win. Everything’s going to be okay. It all comes out in the wash.”

“Fuck you. Everything I’m hearing today is such complete bullshit.”

But Sassy had hung up before Rachel had the “fuck you” out of her mouth. God, Mrs. Adair, you’ve got the maturity of a two year old—what kind of mother are you going to make?

She redialed Sassy’s number. It rang nine times. “Pick up the phone, pick up the phone, pick up the phone,” Rachel chanted under her breath. She sighed with frustration, hanging up.

She recycled the quarter into the phone slot, trying to remember Ted’s number ( last digits 46 or 48, well, here goes nothing), then dialed it.

“‘Lo?” The voice was so much like Hugh’s that Rachel almost thought she’d misdialed and gotten her own home.

“Ted? This is Rachel.”

“Rach—where are you? I hear strange noises.”

“Traffic. I’m out and about. Is this a bad time to call?”

“As good as any. What’s up?”

“Well, we’re finally throwing that housewarming party this weekend. I was wondering—I know it’s just tomorrow night—but if you—I’d like you to come.”

“Why do I get the feeling that my better half isn’t in on this?”

“Oh, Ted, please come.” She didn’t mean to, but somehow the sadness she was feeling inside slipped out in her voice. Sadness and desperation.

“I don’t know if I should, but not for the reason you’re probably thinking. The Old Man’s told me some weird stuff about your house.”

Was he joking? She couldn’t tell. His voice was slightly jittery.

“Oh, not you, too, Ted. I’ve gotten a dose of that—ghosts and goblins and bumps in the night.”

“Something along those lines. You all right? You sound…”

“Just a little winded. Been jogging.” God , you’re a terrific liar. Scout. “The party’s seven-thirtyish. Saturday. You’ll come? Please?”

“I shouldn’t.”

“Because of Hugh.”

“One reason among many.”

“Tell you what: don’t make up your mind this instant. I’m inviting you last minute, so, well, you can decide to come last minute, too.”

“Oh. Well. Listen, I better go. I’ve been sort of caring for the Old Man, and I think I hear him breaking things in the bathroom.”

“He’s there? Is something wr—Is he all right?”

“Well as can be expected. But we’ll talk.”

“Saturday night?”

“I ain’t sayin’ yes, and I ain’t sayin’ no, I’m just sayin’ maybe. Take care,” he said, hanging up the phone.

Walking back home, drained of emotion, wondering what she would say to Hugh when she went to bed (hoping he was asleep), Rachel made a mental list:

People I have alienated from my life by age 28:

1) My husband

2) My best friend

3) Probably the lady downstairs for killing her cat

Oh, daddy, you’d know what to tell me, you always had good advice, you could put things right.

Something twisted in her gut, like a case of diarrhea coming on. She hurried up Connecticut Avenue; as she went she told the sphere that must be growing inside her that everything was going to come out in the wash.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

THE OLD MAN TAKES A SHOWER

When he hung up the phone, Ted hurried down the hall to the bathroom where he’d heard the smashing of glass. The bathroom door was locked; he pounded on it. “Open the door—pop? Open the damn door!”

“Give me five minutes, son.”

“What’s all that noise?”

“Accident. Just a little accident.”

The sound of glass crunching underfoot.

Ted could hear his own heartbeat.

Through the door, his father said, “Just a few minutes, son, it’s all I need.”

“Open this door before I break it down.”

“Do what you will, boy, do what you will.”

Then a moan of pain.

Ted shook his head. “Jeez, pop.” He brought a dime out of his pocket and fit it into the keyhole and twisted—the doors were cheap in this condo. When he heard the click of the lock, Ted turned the knob, swinging the door wide.

The first thing he saw was the broken mirror. It looked like it had been punched in the center, sending rays of broken glass outward. Four shards were missing. On the floor were three of them, slightly chipped. Bloody footsteps led Ted to the shower, its curtain drawn.

Ted held his breath as he went over. No, pop, don’t have done this, don’t have gone and sliced yourself open.

He pulled the shower curtain over all the way back, tearing it from the rod.

His father was hunkered down in the shower. His hands were cut and bleeding. He held a fat slice of broken mirror between the fingers of both hands. It was triangular, he was pressing one end of it against his throat.

Winston Adair looked up at his son and said, “Just a few minutes and I’ll be done. Then you’ll believe me, boy, then you’ll see it’s true.”

But he was not slicing into his throat. He sat there immobile, the sharp mirror fragment beneath his chin. Ted squatted down beside him, reaching over. This kind of thing was becoming a normal occurrence—although the Old Man was getting more creative with the instruments. He’d gone from a kitchen knife to a screwdriver to a pair of scissors, and now mirrors. “Jesus, pop.” Ted grasped his father’s hand between his. “Drop it! Drop it!”

The Old Man’s hand opened, silver glass clattering against tile. He looked up at Ted, his eyes staring dully, his face devoid of expression. “I wouldn’t have done it, boy, I wouldn’t have done it. I’m as scared of what comes after life right now as I am of life itself. I wouldn’t have done it.”

“I know, pop.”

Sometimes I just wish you would go ahead and do it. Like a cat cleaning itself, Winston Adair began licking the blood from his fingers, rubbing his damp hands across his face.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

BEFORE THE PARTY

Rachel felt like she’d never even gone to sleep. But the party, good Lord the party’s tonight—it came to her like that when she awoke in the morning. Just lying there on the sofa staring at the ceiling, a ceiling she had memorized through the night. When Hugh had made his grand announcement she’d had nothing to say: what do you say to a man in whom you’ve believed, whom you’ve looked up to, whom you would’ve dented the corners and edges of your life to accommodate, when he tells you such a thing? Rachel had never felt completely tongue-tied before—she’d always been his pleasing machine, somebody who could smooth out the rough spots, fill in the potholes, but now how could she possibly say or do anything that would make him comfortable with his new decision?

At least she’d resisted that cigarette, for her baby’s sake, for her sphere’s sake—although the sphere may just have been Let’s Pretend, Let’s Pretend I’m going to have a baby, Hugh, but she hadn’t even made an appointment to see her doctor, because what if she were wrong? And Hugh, looking so different last night, looking like a stranger, like a stranger who almost looked like her husband, but not quite.

Was he the same man she’d married at all? Had she really known him as well as she thought she had? Was it all Let’s Pretend? She’d come in last night to a dark house; Hugh had already gone to bed. She thought of calling her mother about this new development—she imagined the conversation they’d have: “Rachel, if you just don’t take this phase too seriously—and that’s all it is, a phase, your father went through something similar—if you just don’t make too big an issue of it, this too shall pass. He’s probably depressed from being unemployed, and men are notorious for making sweeping and regrettable statements like that…”

And there, she’d been all prepared to tell him her little secret, about the sphere inside her, what she thought was a sphere inside her, but don’t call it a baby just yet because then you’ll lose it, just like you lost your last little sphere by thinking of it as a baby when it was still just a tiny subdivision. She wanted to tell him, and he’d gone and topped it, he’d gone and told her something that made her think this was the worst possible time for a sphere, unless there was some magical way of keeping the sphere from subdividing all the way to babyhood.

So when Rachel awoke in the morning, remembering the party, remembering Normal Life, she tried to put it out of her mind. Put him out of her mind. She was lying there, staring at the ceiling, and the light through the French doors was still purple and hazy—it must be just dawn, and it had been years since she’d been up this early. Usually, she woke up about half an hour before she was due at work, and then on weekends, slept till nine or ten.

But it was the baby crying that awoke her, and she had not even been aware of it—she’d opened her eyes with the sound, but she’d been dreaming of her sphere, and the transition to wakefulness had been so smooth it hadn’t seemed unusual to hear the baby— her baby crying. Dreams were like that.

But now consciousness seeped through her like a transfusion, and she sat up on the couch, wondering where the crying was coming from.

She went to the French doors, unlocked and opened them—it was actually chilly, and she hugged herself as she stepped out onto the narrow balcony. But the crying was not outside—dogs barked, the sound of trucks going across Connecticut Avenue, a helicopter going overhead, and silence slicing through these early morning noises. But no babies, no bawling.

The doctors all said you’d be hearing babies every time you ran amok emotionally, but Jesus, could it please end?

Rachel went back inside, shivering from the startling coolness of the August morning.

And she heard the crying baby, and followed the sound down the corridor, to the torn walls of the vanity—and heard a scuttling sound like…

Rats.

There better not be rats coming up from down below.

But there were no rats, at least she didn’t see anything—just the rubble that had been there last night, the bricks half built up into a wall as if the person building it was interrupted before finishing the project. A small metal washtub still lay overturned, and she wondered if maybe there were rats beneath it. She tapped on the edge.

It thumped like a hollow drum. The only rat here is lying upstairs, snoring.

The baby—wherever he was—was whimpering, and the sound seemed to be coming from down the stairs. Rachel gingerly stepped around the shards of broken glass, over the fallen bricks, leaving footprints in the white dust. The floor was cold, the room itself was cold, colder than it had been outside.

The baby seemed to be crying down those dark stone steps—where did they lead? To Mrs. Deerfield’s crib? Rachel shivered, remembering her experience over that spot in the lower apartment. The man with the teeth that seemed to be coming for her.

Something was scratching on the stairs, like an animal raking its claws across the stones.

Rachel felt fear trickle down her spine. She was suddenly overcome with dread. She remembered what Mrs. Deerfield had told her, about the crib being a place where spirits cross on their journeys, and the articles Sassy had given her that she had barely scanned—the house now did seem evil, and Rachel knew that if it were anything other than just before sunrise she would not be so terrified, more rational thoughts would take over, she would be part of Normal Life, but this was becoming too much like Let’s Pretend, and her imagination was running wild.

She backed away from the steps leading down into darkness, knocking into and almost tripping over the wash-tub. She kicked it away and it went clanging against the entry to the bathroom. She didn’t realize until she was out of the vanity that the baby had stopped crying, that she herself was sobbing, that her feet were finely cut with bits of glass. That her breasts had begun leaking milk.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

THE OFFERING

1.

“Retch?” Sassy called up the stairs, pushing the door open wide. It squealed conspicuously, slamming against the wall. She sensed (without knowing for sure) that the downstairs tenant was spying on her from the fisheye peephole of her door. Sassy repressed the urge to turn and stare at it.

She stood in the downstairs hallway of Draper House. She’d been so upset the night before, after she’d gotten off the phone with Rachel, that she’d actually gone back into work at ten o’clock at night and worked on next week’s “Home” section articles— and Sassy Parker never works a week ahead of time, particularly over a holiday weekend. She’d done some work, but she mainly stayed up writing nasty things about Rachel Adair on her computer screen, getting upset, erasing the bad things and typing in: You’re my best friend, I was only trying to help. But Rachel had been the one who’d asked for her advice, had been the one who said, “Fuck you,” had been in the wrong. But it doesn’t matter, you don’t let your best friend down when she’s that upset, you don’t tell her off. So Sassy had felt guilty when she’d finally hit the sack at two a.m., got up at noon, went out and bought a peace offering—the flowers she picked up at her neighborhood florist in Mount Pleasant, wrapped up in tissue paper—and thought she’d surprise Retch.

This’ll teach you to always call first. A note on the door: Scout, Ran out to pick up dry cleaning—also, cleaning stuff at drugstore— Swept up most of vanity mess—Hugh.

But he must have run out in a hurry, because both the outside and the inside doors to their house were unlocked and slightly ajar.

Sassy called out again from the bottom step (she’d moved up one giant step without asking mother-may-I). “This is your good friend Sassy Parker! Halloo! Retch?”

She heard floorboards creak from behind the downstairs tenant’s door.

Water from the flower stems soaked through the tissue and into her yellow cotton blouse—it felt gross, and she held the flowers away from her body. “Shit.”

A noise. Upstairs.

One more giant step up the stairs. “Mother-may-I,” she said.

Why do I feel like I’m breaking and entering when this is my closest friend’s home and nobody’s going to get mad if I am caught sneaking up these stairs?

A loud smashing sound, and then scraping. Thumping across the floor. Scraping. A sound like a sponge being squeezed out. Slurping. More heavy objects falling.

“Retch?”

Up more stairs, to the first floor.

A baby began bawling its head off after the last crash, and Sassy, worried, ran down the hallway towards the sound, wondering what in hell was going on at the end of the hall.

2.

When it was over, when the woman had stopped struggling, Penelope Deerfield saw the crumpled piece of paper in the dirt. She disentangled her small pudgy fingers from the woman’s scalp—a handful of blood-matted hair was caught like a cat’s cradle between her hands. She shook it out. Penelope knelt down and picked up the piece of paper. Too dark to see what it had written on it, although she could almost make out a photograph. “Slipping notes behind teacher’s back, are we?” She stuffed the paper in her apron pocket. The palms of her hands were spotty with calluses and blisters—the gardening had taken its toll this year, between that and her ward. “My little fleshling,” she called it.

The dead woman lay among the broken jars, her hands streaked red from razor cuts. Her heart was no longer beating. The fleshling was sated and had crawled back behind its brothers—they floated lifelessly, eternally staring out of their watery graves, their bodies barely formed. And none of them chosen, none of them like the baby, the fleshling. None of them inspired with the breath of death, with the spirit of Gil DuRaz, with the spirits of the house. None of them special

Penelope had to coax him into his jar. He crawled like a slug across the corpse, his tiny bumpy fingers clawing into the earth to propel himself along, then scraping through the tangle of skin and bloodied cloth of the dead woman. The jar was tall and wide, the smell of alcohol stung the air like a tragic memory. Bits of translucent tissue hung suspended in the fluid. “Must stay moist, dear, or we shall never be born.” She was exhausted, but this intrigued her—this piece of paper. She knelt down, jostling mason jars—they clinked together like bells with their clappers muted. A rat ran across the dead woman’s right foot, which with its shoe, lay alongside an irregular growth of luminescent white mushroom just beneath the stairs to the main house, far above the woman’s head.

The shoe, and the foot, remained where the woman had stepped down the last step.

When the fleshling had descended upon her.

Hungry.

She would have to make sure that no one came down there snooping again.

“But children are always hungry,” Penelope Deerfield said to the thing that treaded water in the jar. Large blue eyes staring out at her; wart-filled mouth opening and closing, breathing in the solution; crisscrossed string of veins gorged and throbbing; small raisin heart pumping furiously; the tiny body red with exertion and fresh blood.

Penelope pressed her cheek to the side of the jar and felt its coldness before setting it down among the others. She turned and went back up through her trapdoor.

Sitting on the patio at her small table, Mrs. Deerfield brought the crumpled paper out from her apron pocket. “So many years ago, so many lives gone by,” she said, shaking her head with memories. “And the children, oh dear, all the children I have loved, all the life I delivered then.” She scanned the paper: a photocopy of a newspaper article, the contents of which she knew well.

From The Washington Herald-Examiner, January 17, 1967:

MISSING WOMAN FOUND DEAD IN NW

Identified as “Deadly Baby Sitter” of Baltimore

A woman’s body was found early this morning in the Winthrop Park section of Northwest Washington. Cause of death is as yet unknown. She has been identified as Nora Garrett, aged sixty-one, A.K.A. Winifred Stanhope, Sarah Masterson, and Mary Devine. Under this last name, she made headlines in Baltimore in late 1966 as the Deadly Baby Sitter. Working in the household of the Marrow family of Baltimore, she was held responsible in the deaths of the two Marrow children, Laura and Philip, and with the discovery of the children’s deaths came a string of other similar murders, seven in all, of former employers’ children. But by then the so-called Deadly Baby Sitter had disappeared without a trace. Authorities know very little about this woman, other than she was an illegal alien born in London, England, and that she had managed to elude them for the four years she conducted her murderous activities.

Below this article, two photographs of the woman:

One, in death. She lay sprawled across fragments of brick and concrete, her face upward, a raincoat laid over her body, and yet the face was clear, her mouth slightly open, eyes closed.

The other photo, taken some years earlier, with a fifties look to the make-up and hairstyle. A small round face. Dull mousy hair, small eyes, nose almost indistinguishable from the rest of the face. Plain. Thin lips. Eyes slightly downcast, a tightness to the face as if she didn’t enjoy having her picture taken.

And there was no doubt who the woman was, through the maze of aliases and the nondescript quality of her features.

“So long ago,” Penelope Deerfield said to herself, “as if in another life.” It was nice to relax on a summer afternoon in the shade, nice to lean back and have a martini, a martini because her body needed it, a martini because alcohol kept her going these days—nice to just rest her bones and have a drink and reminisce about the good old days.

When she’d had choices.

When she’d been alive.

CHAPTER THIRTY

HOUSEWARMING PARTY

1.

Two hours before the party, while Hugh was running around on last-minute errands for cocktail napkins and fresh pineapple for the piña coladas, Rachel answered the door in her bathrobe, her hair greased up and back with conditioner. “Mom,” was all she could say—she’d been expecting Hugh, or perhaps Sassy, and when the doorbell rang, she looked out the kitchen window to try and see who it was, but the view was blocked with the heavy wisteria vine that was strangling the lantern just above the porch. She’d seen the bag lady in the park again—the crazy one, although Rachel was herself beginning to think that she was the crazy one in this neighborhood. Whenever she noticed the bag lady, Rachel wondered if it really was a person or just a collection of trash bags, like an urban scarecrow. But I’d hate to think what she’s scaring away from Winthrop Park.

“I thought it might be Sassy—we were supposed to go jogging, and I’ve tried calling her to cancel…” Rachel Adair, you are getting really good at the Let’s Pretend lies.

Her mother asked almost sweetly, “Don’t you think that girls who have miscarriages shouldn’t jog?”

Afraid my uterus is going to drop on the sidewalk? But Rachel merely smiled pleasantly. “You’re early.”

“Invite your mother in to see this townhouse of yours,” her mother said. She was dressed in a beige skirt and lavender blouse, her light brown hair, fresh from the hairdresser, only slightly frazzled with the humidity. She looked mildly beautiful, as mom always did.

They went upstairs, and Rachel gave her a brief tour of the first floor.

“Lovely, lovely,” her mother said as she followed Rachel room to room, but there were obviously other things on her mother’s mind.

Finally, Rachel said, “I’m glad you came by, but you’re here for a reason, I guess.”

“No reason. It was a pretty afternoon, I had my hair appointment, I was dressed, I knew your soiree would be starting up soon, so I thought I’d give you a little warning about tonight. Rachel, I am bringing a date tonight and I am scared—shit, I’m terrified.”

The shock of hearing her mother use bad language was not as great as the shock from that word date. Moms don’t date, even if moms have been widows for two years. Moms stay moms eternally.

“Fantastic,” was all Rachel could muster. “Who?”

As if waiting days for someone to ask her, her mother blurted, “Well, he’s a very nice man, and I hope you don’t mind my bringing him tonight.”

“And?…”

“He’s just a nice man. He seems like a nice man. I didn’t want to come alone, and Kelly and her husband can’t make it.”

“Give me more scenario. How do you know this guy?”

“If I asked you all these questions when you were dating, you would’ve claimed the Fifth.”

“Mom.”

“All right, you know him already, anyway. Mr. Martin. David Martin.”

“As in Mr. Martin the man who lives in the cul-de-sac who dad couldn’t stand because he said he was a lout?”

“You asked. It’s just a date. He’s a nice man.”

“He asked you out?”

“Well… we went out last Sunday, just to the movies. Don’t look so judgmental, Rachel, that’s a very unattractive quality in a young woman, and it’s my life anyway.”

“Mr. Martin who used to yell at us for cutting through his yard?”

“Well, I see you’ve grown up some in the past twenty years. You were trespassing, you tomboys all ruined his garden, and Rachel, it’s just a date. Everyone else at this party will have a date. It’s not one of these modern dates like your generation, where the word date is just a euphemism for sexual relations, it’s a date. And I am glad I dropped by after all, because I don’t want you insulting him or being rude just out of some misguided effort to preserve your father’s memory and keep me a lonely old widow in the suburbs. No one ever asks me out places, not you kids, and not my old girlfriends. David Martin asked me out, and now I am asking him out for tonight. He’s a nice man and it’s either go out with him tonight to your party or stay at home and try to outguess the people on ‘Wheel of Fortune.’ So be good.”

After her mother left, Rachel tried Sassy’s number again, but there was no answer.

2.

The guests began arriving at quarter to eight, but the pains in Rachel’s sides continued unabated as the evening wore on—and her craving for a cigarette—especially since Connie and Dan Stewart, from her office, were smoking up a storm on the patio and every time she went out there both the pains in her back and stomach grew worse and her need of a cigarette became unbearable. All the smokers stayed on the patio, in fact, so Rachel did what she could to avoid going outside. Her mother arrived the earliest, with Mr. David Martin, and on the outside, Rachel said, “I’m so happy you could come. Hugh, sweetheart, see if you can’t get mom a 7-Up, and I think Mr. Martin—David—mentioned a gin and tonic.” But on the inside she was screaming: Daddy’s rolling in his grave! How could you, mom, how could you bring a man who daddy disliked so much!

In fact, she felt as if on the outside she was being witty and cordial and polite, and on the inside she was a volcano waiting to erupt. Hugh, don’t you think you’ve had enough martinis for one night? Why doesn’t Sassy show up and rescue me from all this? Damn it, my stomach hurts—damn I need a cigarette, damn this dress is tight. But she managed to smile—she was sure it was a pained smile right now as she led her mother and Mr. Martin over to the bar with Hugh there mixing drinks, actually telling jokes with that asshole Bufu Thompson who should’ve been convincing Hugh to get ready for the legal bar rather than the cocktail bar.

Nina McLeod, one of Rachel’s girlfriends from college, was arguing with the man she’d brought and introduced as her “lover,” a term which Rachel felt not only told too much about their relationship but also was particularly ironic at this moment. The harsh words were spoken softly, and Rachel admired their nerve but not their timing—she was almost jealous of this display of hostile communication, in which they were both equal partners. Whenever Rachel argued with Hugh, he always caved in, leaving her feeling like the Wicked Witch. Both Nina and her lover seemed equal in their nasty comments to each other. “I saw that look you gave the waitress tonight,” Nina whispered, and her lover replied, “I don’t know how you could see anything with your head so far up your ass.”

Rachel even smiled genuinely, and she felt suddenly like a hostess— I’m not the only one in the world with problems, and at least Hugh and I can be discreet.

Dave and Jan Fletcher complimented Hugh on his photographs, but Hugh shrugged his shoulders and started telling jokes. It had been at Rachel’s insistence that he invite them, and Chris Shreeve, his roommate from college. Noticeably missing were most of their law school friends, but that was where Rachel had been a bit sensitive to Hugh—she knew he would feel humiliated if they all came. They would all have good jobs, and here he was, a failure in their eyes.

Ted Adair arrived just after nine, just after Hugh was beginning to slur his speech, just after Rachel’s mother and Mr. Martin left because they hadn’t yet had dinner and he knew a place nearby. It was a relief to see Ted.

“Thank God, someone normal,” Rachel said, grabbing his hand and leading him upstairs to the party.

“I wasn’t sure if I should come,” he said.

“Well, I’m glad you did. I wish your father had come, too.”

“I’m afraid he’s not doing too well.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

“Yeah, well, you know, you get to be that age…”

She took him to the buffet. “Ham and turkey, but stay away from the goat’s cheese, my cousin Larry brought it and it tastes worse than it smells. But try the ranch dip, and the lady downstairs made this apple pie—she’s here somewhere, too.”

Mrs. Deerfield was, in fact, on the back porch among the smokers, coughing and drinking, and reading palms.

“Oh, my big brother!” Hugh yelled from the bar.

“Hughie,” Ted said, “you’re sailing three sheets to the wind.”

“You an emissary of his majesty the Old Man?”

“Not tonight.”

“Good, good. You know Bufu, don’t you? Boof, this is my big bro, Tedward Adair.”

“Rachel,” Ted said, “could you and I talk?”

Rachel nodded, but Hugh grabbed her arm. “Let go,” she said softly.

“Scout,” Hugh warned.

But Rachel pulled herself away from him. “Don’t you think you’ve had enough?”

Hugh lifted his glass up. “Never enough, Scout.”

“Bartender,” Bufu said, whistling, “what’s the name of the game?”

“Thumper!” Hugh said, slamming his glass down on the bar. Gin splattered across his shirt. He chugged down what was left in the glass.

“Why are you doing this?” Rachel asked quietly. He would not meet her gaze.

Instead he glanced over at Ted. “Listen, you sonofabitch, I want you and the Old Man to keep your claws out of my wife.”

Ted, pretending that nothing had been said, nodded, smiling. An aside, to Rachel: “Look, we can talk tomorrow, but we should talk soon.”

“You’re not leaving?”

“I think maybe I better. No point causing a scene, and Hughie and I are famous for causing scenes.”

“I don’t blame you. But I’m sorry, Ted.”

“It’s okay, there’s some business I need to attend to anyway.” As she walked him down the stairs to the front door, he turned and kissed her on her forehead. “A girl like you shouldn’t get such a raw deal.”

She stood there in the open doorway. Ted walked out onto the sidewalk without looking back.

Damn you, Hugh, damn you and your goddamn drinking! I knew I should’ve gotten you into AA last year. I knew I shouldn’t have just pretended it was going to go away. And now you’re going to drive anyone decent, even your own family, out of your life. She leaned against the door frame. Ted turned once, at his car which was parked at the end of the block. He stood still. His hands holding the keys to his car. Looking back at her.

He’s waiting for me.

Why? Does he feel sorry for me? Or is he the joker that Hugh says he is?

Somewhere in the distance, the sound of faint thunder.

You’re not going to do it, Hugh, you’re not going to do it to me, and you’re not going to do it to your brother.

Slamming the front door behind her, leaving her own party, Rachel stepped out onto the street.

Ted came to her.

3.

“What’ll you do?” Bufu asked drowsily.

“Don’t know, no idea,” Hugh said. “Always been good with my hands, maybe I’ll do some carpentry. Ha.”

“You fucked this house up,” Bufu said.

The two men laughed.

“Boof, she’s gone.”

“No, not Rachel.”

“Yeah, my Scout is gone. Without her, I don’t know where I’m going.”

“What’s the name of the game, Hughbert?”

“Damn it to hell, Boof, it’s no game.”

“You got to stop calling me Bufu, my associates wouldn’t think it was all that funny.”

“No game at all.”

4.

They walked without talking, almost touching, almost arm in arm. Rachel was glad to be out of the smoke and noise and liquor smell. As they passed the small restaurants on the way down Connecticut Avenue towards DuPont Circle, she glanced through the glass windows and watched the young couples enjoying their evening out. “My God,” she said pausing at a Greek restaurant.

“What is it?”

“That’s my mother.”

“So it is. Should we say hi?”

“No, God, no. She’s on a date with a despicable man, someone daddy hated.”

“And you’re out with your husband’s brother, who your husband loathes.”

“Not the same. Hugh is not a sacred cow. Now daddy is a sacred cow.”

“Moo.”

“Silly.”

“Now you’ve got me thinking about dairy products, how does an ice cream cone sound? Haagen Daz’s still looks open.”

“So does Steve’s, and I like Steve’s Ice Cream better.”

“That’s the trouble with life, too many choices and nobody agrees on any one of them.”

“So this is where Hugh got his dime store philosophy from.”

“I can see why he fell in love with you.” Ted put his arm around her waist.

“No, um…” Rachel stepped away, pretending to watch for a break in traffic so they could jaywalk. “I better not have ice cream anyway—I’m getting too fat.”

“Women always think they’re too fat.”

“Look, let’s go back—now I feel bad for leaving. Hugh’s probably passed out and our friends are probably already gossiping.”

“I’ve got to tell you something.”

“Oh, right, we’re supposed to be talking.”

“I don’t know how you’re going to take this.”

“Shoot.”

“Our father—Hugh’s and mine—has gone crazy. Whew! I haven’t told anyone, you’re the first, and it’s that easy.”

Rachel continued walking.

“I mean really nutso, off the deep end with no hope of coming back. And he wants me to deliver this message. And it’s crazy, but he said if I tell you this, he will agree to see whatever doctor I bring on. So, even though this sounds nutty, I’ve got to tell you, and then you can call him or write the Old Man a letter and tell him that I told you.”

“Sounds weird but fair.”

“Perfect analysis. He wants me to tell you to get out of the house, both you and Hugh, but if Hugh won’t go, then you, especially.”

“What—I don’t get it, do you mean he wants the house back or something? Can he do that?”

“He doesn’t want the house back. In fact, he’d like to burn it down but I think he’s too scared to go near it. He thinks you’re in some kind of danger. Look, here’s what he wrote.” Ted handed Rachel a letter.

She opened it up.

Rachel,

In name of everything holy get tout of the house. Its baby needs a mother, don’t you hear it crying? It’s real, it’s real and nobody can stop it, but if you get out maybe you can be safe—the Housekeeper has to do it, and you’re the one. Deal I made only I didn’t know what deal when I made it. Ted will explain rest. Not blessing on marriage, Rachel, but curse. Please forgive me.

Winston Adair

Ted said, “He’s really lost it.”

“Is he all right, Ted? I mean, shouldn’t you tell Hugh about this?”

Ted grinned, avoiding her. “Look, let’s get you back, you can call the Old Man up in the morning, and then I can bring in a psychiatrist. He’s hurt himself a bit, got stung by some wasps, but he’s physically okay—he’s living like Howard Hughes in his last days—even growing his fingernails long.”

“It says you’ll explain the rest.”

“He’s cracked, Rachel, my pop has cracked.” Ted said this matter-of-factly, but she could see sadness in his eyes.

“Oh, Ted, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well, I promised him I’d tell you, I can do that. All the bullshit he’s been going on about the house, about it being haunted or something, he called it ‘the screaming house,’ he’s really off—“

“But I just read about that, the screaming house. In some old news clippings, Ted, there were some murders in the house. It spooked me at first, but I figured they happened so long ago, maybe twenty years. There were some cultists and hippies in the house.”

“You’re kidding—maybe pop dropped a little acid back then—“

“The way you and Hugh go on about that poor man—oh, I’m sorry. I know he’s done some horrible things, at least to Hugh, in the past…”

“Poor dear Joanna, right, well, Hugh was a fool not to see that, everyone else who knew her knew she was after the Old Man’s money and not Hugh. I tried telling him, but he can be pretty stubborn sometimes.”

“I’ve noticed.”

“But pop’s put his boys through the wringer all right. And I guess he’s paying for it now.”

“Ted, now I know it’s crazy for me to ask, but did your father tell you why the house screams?”

“You’re right—it does sound crazy, but not half as crazy as the answer. He says the house screams because it’s in labor, Rachel; you know, giving birth.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

AFTER THE PARTY

1.

The party was over when Rachel returned home, having to drag herself through the front door, up the stairs. Her stomach pains were returning and she thought again about the possibility of being pregnant, and wondered if the pains were bad or good. She laid her hand across her lower stomach and the pain went away momentarily. On Monday, I’ll call Dr. Longford. Shit, on Monday I’ll probably be filing for divorce.

Hugh was sitting on his college chair, his head in his hands. The room smelled of cigarettes, perfume, and beer.

“Oh, Hugh,” she sighed.

“Scout,” he said, looking up. “I thought you were gone for good.”

“I guess you were wrong.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I just don’t think ‘sorry’ cuts it.”

She stepped out of her heels. Her feet were sore, and it almost tickled her toes to step down on the soft oriental rug. She walked across it and stood in front of him. He leaned over, embracing her hips, resting his head against her stomach. She felt warm inside when he touched her. She reached down and combed her fingers through his hair. She could smell his sweat, and it was like river water and she wanted to dive in.

She disentangled herself from him, holding his hands. Crouched down in front of him, she kissed him just beneath his left ear. Kissed him on his lightly bearded neck—it had grown out like microscopic blades of grass since he’d shaved that morning. Her lips found his—they were rough and dry and stank of gin. But they were warm, and she needed warmth, and as if in a dream she saw herself kissing him, drinking him. Felt his arms go around her back as they both fell to the oriental rug, losing themselves in the swirling patterns, undoing the back of her dress and slipping out of it. Her back ached and the sharp pain pinched her just along her ribs, but he was kissing her, he was rubbing his fingers across her just-freed nipples, and she wrapped her legs around his waist, ripping her dress, but who cared. He was warm and she needed warmth, she’d been cold for too long, cold and in the heat but never warm, never this. Her skin tingled with his warmth.

His tongue was like a scaly lizard in her mouth. Her own breath went bad with his. Under ordinary circumstances this would’ve been all wrong and she would’ve been turned off, but as she closed her eyes she thought it was Ted even when she knew it was Hugh, and not just Hugh, but Hugh and Ted and Ted and Hugh and all of them licking her and stroking her and entering her. And whatever pain she’d been feeling was gone with the rhythm they were creating, all her senses were concentrated in that one area, and her mind was a dark closet of sensation and movement. She had no control, and could tell by his raspy breathing that he had no control, that together they were out of control. She heard her baby inside her crying, and he was licking her breasts as he shuddered inside her, licking her breasts which dripped with liquid warmth.

And when it was over, and she lay there in his arms, and the baby inside her had stopped crying, and the unpleasantness of post-coitus had come back (the body smell, the muscle soreness, the wet spots, the need to urinate, the vulnerable nakedness), she realized what the pain in her sides and back had been.

There, faintly shiny between her legs, and partly on him, too, and even on the rug, was a dark brownish smudge, a red carnelian stain.

Menstrual blood.

Rachel did not know when she began crying, was not sure when she pushed Hugh away from her, but sunlight burned its way through the French door glass, creeping across the living room, eclipsing the dark emptiness of night, when her sobbing finally ended.

2.

Penelope Deerfield held the thing to her breast. “Soon, very soon, my love, you will be born again. We who have waited will wait no more.”

It cried for its mother.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

RISE AND SHINE

1.

If you were to pass by the alcove in the wall at the DuPont Circle Metro stop, you would think someone had left their trash bags piled up, perhaps waiting for the city sanitation trucks to come by and take them. But if you were to watch the bags for several minutes, you’d notice that they’d rise and fall in barely perceptible ripples.

And sometimes they’d gasp.

All night Mattie prayed, and in the morning none of her prayers were answered. She lay on the cold, dusty floor of the subway station, in the shadows. The filthy wind brushed the tunnels, fluttering across her dark, shiny form. Trash bags of invisibility cloaked her, but she knew they would not protect her from what was to come, what was in the daylight world above her.

What waited in the house.

Come and get me, Baron Samedi! Take these old bones and tear them apart!

Mattie Peru slept uneasily in the subway, afraid that at any moment the baron would find her through the darkness. He could go anywhere as spirit, he could travel any distance. She prayed he would come for her, come for her while she slept so it would be over and done with. Her power was coming back along with her memory, but slowly, and it made her sleepy, sluggish. She wished she could throw the power away: it was of no use against the greater power that remained in the Screaming House. She was afraid of him, the baron, but not as terrified as she was of the other one.

The spirit of Nadine.

Forgive me, daughter! Forgive me for letting him get to you, you and your baby!

When the subway gates slid open in the morning, Mattie rode the escalator up. Mr. Big Men and Mrs. Big Women in their suits, lugging their briefcases, dodging her as if she were a hole in the fabric of the world; if they touched her they might fall out of their comfortable hammocks of existence and land butt first on the ground. But the down, the subway, was the land of the dead: these people were dead, their eyes were dead, no life in them despite the fact that they continued to move, to glance at their watches, to whistle for taxis. They had no spirit. The whole world seemed dead to her. She didn’t have the urge to panhandle for breakfast; she had no appetite, no thirst. Mattie had abandoned her shopping cart days ago—left it in an alley on Newport Place. All her possessions were in it, all that she had in the world. She felt the power surging through her, the power of Voudun, the religion of her mother, the power that came from the spirits, and she knew the house was stronger than even the gods of her youth. The Screaming House was like a furnace that consumed spirits to fuel its evil. And even with her power returning after so many years, she felt weak and useless. How could she even think about trying to stop what was going to happen in that house? Why should she even care? A Mr. and Mrs. Big Man lived there now, and when had a Mr. Big Man ever tried to help old Mattie Peru?

Screamin’ House gonna make ‘em scream, but so? My baby-girl scream loud and nobody heard, I scream louder, nobody come runnin’! Mr. Big Man, he drink her blood like it was whiskey, so let ‘em scream, let ‘em scream. She beat her fists into her stomach. From her mouth came the words, “Let ‘em scream!”

She began walking faster, her fists beating her hips like she was trying to fly; and she flew, her trash bags floating in the breeze behind her, her open-toed hiking boots barely touching down on the pavement; she felt light as she ran. Let ‘em scream! Let ‘em scream! The ax in her heart going chop-pity-chop-chop! She brushed people at the bus stop. They laughed and gasped and swore at her. Let ‘em scream all they want, it’s out of my hands, can’t go back into the Screaming House! The chopping of her heart slowed her. She heaved, gasping for breath, leaning against a brick wall. There, on the other side of a gas station, was the bridge, and beneath it, the place where Nadine’s grave had been.

When Mattie caught her breath, she trudged towards the bridge.

And my baby, forgive me. Forgive me for letting ‘em do it to you. I didn’t know, my baby, I didn’t know. He said he was just going to make you better. I didn’t know.

2.

Ted watched: Rachel spread-eagled on the bed, ripping her dress off with her bare hands. Pocketbooks and sports coats lay between her skin and the bedspread. Beneath this bedroom, down in the living room, the housewarming party continued, the laughing, the stereo blaring “Tuxedo Junction.” Ted could even make out the sound of Hugh’s voice booming over the rest, “What’s the name of the game?”

Ted dove into Rachel, sliding across her tummy, catching her by her breasts, folding into her like a scrambled egg, into her skin, into her moist warm body. And she cried out, but he slapped a hand over her mouth, and she bit down, drawing blood. And for Ted it was ecstasy like he’d never felt, like he was shooting himself into a mystery -

Other voices invaded his erotic dream.

One, the clock radio. The alarm was set for nine and had apparently gone off. A DJ said, “... And it’s ten o’clock on an oldies fave Labor Day weekend with yours truly, the slime ball of the airwaves, Sludgeman, and I’m gonna lick out your inner ear with this blast from the past, the Monkees, and ‘Daydream Believer’...”

The other sound, his father’s voice.

“You’re not taking me to any hospital,” Winston Adair said.

Ted awoke slowly. First thoughts: What time is it? What was I dreaming? Who’s standing over me? The dream left a sticky residue in his underwear; it was the first wet dream he’d had in years. The apartment smelled like crap, thanks to the Old Man’s messiness coupled with his unwillingness to open any of the windows. When Ted had come in the previous night the Old Man had gone so far as to try and nail the windows shut. Ted, too tired to argue, told him, “After this weekend, pop, we go in for an exam, okay?” Then it had been off to erotic dreamland with his brother’s wife.

While the Monkees sang on the radio, his father stood beside the bed looking down at him. Ted rubbed his eyes, coughing. “Pop? What’s -”

His father stood beside the bed, holding something in his hand.

The object in his father’s left hand was a hammer. Ted was not used to seeing it—he never used it himself. Ted avoided manual labor as often as possible. He usually kept the hammer in a drawer in the kitchen, along with a plastic case full of nails and some screwdrivers. For a moment he wondered if his father was still nailing down windows to keep the wasps out.

Winston Adair was naked. His bloated pink flesh gave him the appearance of a skinned animal—he had been losing so much weight that folds of skin, deprived of their usual fat, hung like pancakes down his sides, under his arms, along his neck. He looked like a walking cadaver whose innards had been sucked out. With his right hand he was playing with his balls; with his left he took swipes at the air with the hammer. “Buzzing, buzzing, all around us,” his father said, grinning. “You heard of the lord of the flies? Well the old whore, she’s queen of the wasps, she is, and you know what they’re telling me, those wasps? All the buzzing in this old brain? Son, they’re telling me I got no choice but to high-tail it over to the Screaming House and set that house on fire, send them all back to Hell where they come from!”

His bloodshot eyes fixed on the hammer. As if every bit of energy the Old Man possessed was concentrated on holding it steady as it hit the air.

And still his hands trembled; the hammer wobbled; folds of skin shivered.

“Put it down, pop,” Ted commanded, trying to sound in control. He sat farther up in bed, kicking the sheets off his legs.

“You hear them buzzing?” His father was sweating. “No doctor, no hospital, boy, they’re gonna buzz right in between the sheets. But I can’t go back there, Ted, and no hospital’s gonna keep them from getting to me.”

“Give me the hammer, pop.” Ted sat up, kneeling. He extended the palm of his hand.

On the radio: “Wasn’t that a sweet tune, all you virgins of the world? But the world isn’t really like that, is it? It’s a nasty, naughty place, and Sludge had himself a tough night last night. Sludgeman knows what goes on out there while you’re listening, I know about your kind, yeah, Sludgeman likes it when you talk dirty to him, so give me a call right now, kick your boyfriends and girlfriends out of bed, and ring me up at...”

His father’s voice steamed. “You don’t believe me, Ted, but all I’ve told you is true. They’re trying to buzz me right over to that place. I have given up Hugh and Rachel to that house, to what is in that house. But I’m not dumb enough to go there. Do you have any idea what the housekeeper is going to do?”

“It’s okay, pop, it’s cool, just give me the hammer.”

“She was drawn to Draper House, you know, and she died there, but something evil, another waiting spirit, invaded her flesh, and she now belongs to the house. She’s the Housekeeper, boy, and she’s the wet nurse to that ... abomination.”

“The hammer.”

“She’s the one renting that apartment, Ted, calls herself Deerfield. But she is as old as the house, her spirit is as old as the house and what it contains. And do you know what she’s going to do, Ted? Any idea?”

“Pop.”

“She’s got the aborted fetus from my daughter Nadine, my daughter and one of my long line of girlfriends. And the housekeeper’s going to bring him back, bring Gil DuRaz back in the flesh, but not just him, boy, but every breath of evil in that house, in the flesh, brought into our world. As some kind of Messiah of the damned. I saw its face, son. It was part me and part that little girl, but mostly something else, something scrawled across its bloody chewing flesh that looked like the inside of somebody’s festering wound. You think I’m insane, but what? If it happens, if that monster is born, insanity’s going to be nothing compared with what happens. Insanity will be a goddamn blessing! But what do I care? I’ll be dead soon enough. I’m old, I’m dying, I can hear the buzzing in the walls. Let the world go to hell, let it burn, let it buzz. I’ll be dead, boy. Let the bomb drop right on top of my grave, let it mushroom over this sky like a rainbow, spray the wasps with Raid, let it all die when I die! But son, a baby needs a mother, even a monster fetus, and they got one, I’ve given them one. And the Housekeeper is going to stuff the new mother with that creature from Hell, is going to use her as an incubator, and when it’s ready, when it’s ready to be fully born, Ted my boy, it will use her body like a host and eat its way out of her.”

From the radio, “And Sludge is now gonna spin three in a row from the BeeGees, so disco down, babies ...”

“Pop, please, the hammer.”

“You don’t believe me, but screw belief! Nobody believes in nothing, but I tell you, son, if you’d been there, the night of the riots, the night we all drank that girl’s blood, if you’d seen what I saw, you’d believe.”

3.

The grave had filled with mud. Mattie bent over it, imprinting her face against it. The mud was cool, like a reassuring touch on her cheek, on her forehead. She began digging with her bare hands through the soft dirt, water squeezing against her fingers, digging, tossing mud back over her shoulders, burrowing beneath the mud until she found it.

Nadine’s skull.

It was covered with slick wet strands of grass and dirt. Mattie carried it down to the creek, dipping it into the water as if in baptism. Gradually the skull came clean. The lower jaw was gone. It was a small skull, and she closed her eyes, feeling along the top, the sides, the ridges of bone that rose up and fell, and she imagined that she was bathing her daughter, washing her hair, wiping her face with cool water. She kept her eyes closed, imagining that Nadine was there, with her, and not off in the world of the dead. Mattie kissed her forehead, cradling her daughter’s upturned face, rocking back and forth on her knees, singing a lullaby.

Then her daughter spoke to her.

Through the skull.

It was faint, as if from some great distance, and then it was in her ear, buzzing.

And as Mattie listened, she knew what she would have to do.

She knew it was time.

4.

The music on the radio continued.

Ted said, “The hammer, come on, now.”

“None of it should matter, boy, we all have to die sometime, it’s the way of all flesh, we’re born to die, so what the hell? Let the monster be born, let it disembowel her when it’s delivered, let the demons of Hell rejoice!”

Winston Adair swung the hammer down. Ted slid to the far side of the bed quickly. The hammer thudded against his pillow.

“Shit, pop!” Ted leapt out of bed.

“We’re all gonna die anyway, boy,” Winston giggled, foam dribbling from his mouth, “it don’t make no never-mind! It’s getting closer, gonna buzz around and around and around until it stings you. Between you and me, I’d rather get ripped to shreds by the talons of the demon than stung to death by the wasps out of that whore’s cooze. And when you got wasps after you, you better sure as shit have a fly swatter. What’s it gonna take to make you believe, boy?” Winston twirled the hammer around, swinging it down between his own legs, smashing his testicles. He dropped to his knees. “This?” he coughed, “this?”

“Pop!” Ted rushed over to him.

Winston held the hammer up to warn Ted away. He swung it through the air in front of him.

Ted stumbled back. The hammer just missed his knees.

Winston pounded the hammer right above his own eyes, whispering, “This?” as it smushed into his forehead.

Ted heard the crack of bone, but it might as well have been a crack in the universe, a rip down the side of reality.

He had no voice to scream.

Winston continued smashing his own head in until it caved in, a bloody pulp, a swirling nest made of gray paper and pomegranate juice.

Ted thought he heard it, the buzzing sound.

His father’s mouth went slack, sagging open.

Blood obscured his teeth, his tongue.

And then the wasps flew out from the red, gaping chasm of the Old Man’s mouth, and Ted tried hard to get his vocal cords to flex in just the right sequence, just the perfect arrangement for a scream. But Ted had never had to scream before, and to scream the right way you’ve got to practice just like with anything else. Maybe if Ted had screamed then a neighbor would come running. He had neighbors. He knew he had neighbors and if he screamed loud enough they’d be pounding at the door. But Ted had no screams in him. He rasped instead, he hissed, he moaned.

On the radio, “Staying Alive” was playing.

The Old Man grinned a river of blood. “Now you believe, boy, now?”

5.

“Mr. Big Man’s gone, Baron Samedi got him now,” Mattie said to her daughter’s skull. She twisted some of her plastic cloak through the empty eye sockets, wrapping the skull up into it. “You send wasp to take his spirit home, take him away from the baron. But you and me, Nadine, you and me’ll stop that house from screamin’.”

And then Mattie stopped in her tracks.

She was speaking aloud; she knew she was speaking aloud, the vibrations were humming up her throat, her teeth were clicking together, the sounds were coming out clearly, completely.

But the voice was her daughter’s.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

DREAMLAND TEA

1.

I’m not pregnant.

It was Rachel’s first thought upon waking. She was aware of a smell in the room, heat, and stale air. Sweat on her back, on her neck. Sheets twisting about her legs.

Hugh?

Her eyes were sore from crying, her head ached from wringing out the tears. She’d cried all day Sunday—but was Sunday already gone? Was it really Monday morning? Or was this Sunday morning, still? Sunday night? She had the vaguest memory of swallowing at least one of the antidepressants she had kept in a shoe box beneath the bathroom sink. Just one pill. Or had it been two? No more than two. She had to consider her sphere— wait, there is no sphere. Never was a little subdividing ovum. I was just late. I was just imagining it.

She stretched her arm lazily across the bed; Hugh’s pillow was hard and flat, no indentation where his head would’ve sunk down into it.

“Hugh?”

Rachel somehow expected him not to be there.

But why?

“Hugh?” She heard her own voice as if she’d thrown it, and now it came back to her. How could she expect him to be there—down the hall, in the bathroom shaving, whistling, putting the tea kettle on the stove. But, God, did I really throw him out of the house?

Had she done that or merely dreamed it? If this really was Monday morning, where was he? Why wouldn’t he have come back home? Didn’t he know how much she needed him?

A sharp pain like an icicle thrust between the hemispheres of her brain momentarily blotted out the thought of Hugh. Like a hangover, but with a sweet edge. Her father, as he lay dying and coughing in his hospital bed, told her, “Pain’s never bad, sweetheart, it’s just part of the transformation. It’s resisting the pain that hurts, but if you just give it its due, well, it’s just another way of feeling is all.” Smoke rose up above her father’s head, from his flared nostrils, up to the ceiling, circling around itself, and the smoke became bubbles drifting out the hospital window, popping as it met the heat and the stale air. Rachel was losing consciousness again, she was drifting downward into her pillow. Back to sleep, oh, thank you Nanny Deerfield for sleep and for that wonderful dreamland tea you make special for boys and girls, thank you. Antidepressants and dreamland tea from dear Nanny Dreadful. She was sleeping and dreaming of an entire field full of running deer, all of them leaping over the yellow grass, the young bucks butting their heads, and the fawn nursing from the young doe.

And Rachel dreamed that she awoke sometime later and Mrs. Deerfield stood at the foot of the bed, beyond the grasp of the writhing sheets. But it was daddy standing there, not Mrs. Deerfield, and daddy said, “Nothing wrong after all, she’s sleeping, and sleep will take care of it.” And Rachel felt good in her dream, and then the haze descended again and she met blackness with her sweet dreams.

2.

Mrs. Deerfield had heard Rachel breaking the china and had come up the back way, from the crib up through the vanity, through the rubble that was the vanity. Rachel had been frightened when she’d heard the footsteps coming from that end of the house, but it was only Mrs. Deerfield after all.

“I was afraid you might hurl yourself, dear,” Mrs. Deerfield said. She wore a green kimono and looked like she hadn’t slept a wink the way Rachel also had not slept a wink.

“I’m just breaking dishes,” Rachel said, not even pretending to make sense.

“I’ve made some tea, dear, to help you sleep.” Mrs. Deerfield offered her a cup and it tasted like raspberries and cream. Rachel was beginning to feel calm again. “It’s full of vitamins,” she said as Rachel drank up, “and those sorts of horrendous ingredients that go into healthful solutions. A touch of brandy, too. I call it dreamland tea.”

“I don’t drink, “Rachel told her as she finished the last drop in her cup. “I don’t really drink, but I want to scream.”

Mrs. Deerfield said nothing. Rachel caught something in the older woman’s face: a smile? Not a smile. A grimace. For a second she thought Mrs. Deerfield was in pain. Pain is our friend. It’s resisting the pain that hurts. If you just give it its due…

“You’ve been so sweet, thank you so much,” Rachel said as Mrs. Deerfield walked her upstairs to her bed.

“It’s me should thank you, dear.”

“I thought I was going to be a mommy. An acre of kiddos. All screaming.”

“You’ll make a wonderful mommy.”

“I don’t know about that, I just don’t know about that.” Rachel felt goofy as she lay across the sheets while Mrs. Deerfield closed the curtains. White noise of the fan—Hugh would like that, but Rachel didn’t give a damn what Hugh would like. Hugh would not like the way she’d destroyed the Havilland china, their wedding present from her mother.

“Two birds with one stone,” Rachel murmured, still tasting dreamland tea in the back of her throat.

Mrs. Deerfield smiled that beautiful gap-toothed grimace. “Yes, dear, two birds with one stone.”

Rachel awoke tasting something sour. A small red stain on the pillow next to her head. Did I cough that up?

She felt queasy standing up, getting off the bed. The sunlight through the bedroom curtains was too bright for such an early hour. She didn’t want to look outside to see that the world was going on all around her in a pale imitation of normal life.

There was no note from Hugh on the dressing table. All husbands should leave notes for their wives on the dressing table even when the wives kick them out of the house. Hugh always left notes for her whenever he went out. Rachel left notes, too, but hers were Post-it Notes and messages scrawled on steamed bathroom mirrors.

“Let’s Pretend!” she had shouted at him, covering her face, kicking her legs out to push him away. They had just made love on the rug in the living room after the housewarming party. “Let’s not pretend anymore, let’s just get down to the real thing.”

Rachel sat back down on the bed. The mattress was hard. Her back was achy; she’d been sleeping on her back and stomach all wrong-She leaned back into the pillow. Falling through the pillow. She coiled around Hugh’s pillow, sank into her pillow, rubbed his pillow between her knees and kept it there. Comfortable. Sleepy.

3.

“Did I just do something?” he asked. Hugh had that face—he looked like a little boy who didn’t know when he’d been naughty.

She didn’t mention the blood, or the fact that the blood meant there was no sphere. Maybe there had been one, maybe she’d had a mini-miscarriage. Nature, at any rate, had once again taken care of it. Nature in all her brutal perfection had cut her womb open and had let it bleed.

She didn’t say anything to him, but wouldn’t let him come near her while she cried.

The world was quiet on Sunday morning after the party.

She began smoking cigarettes—there was that pack of Marlboro Lights in her purse, and she chain-smoked them one after another until they were all gone.

“I know I’ve -” he began. Hugh was always beginning things he couldn’t finish: law, the vanity, fatherhood. So very Hugh.

“Let’s Pretend!” she shouted.

After he was gone she realized she was having a migraine headache and hadn’t even noticed. Rachel felt then that she would never again let a migraine headache bother her because things like this could block it out. Things like wanting to scream but not being able to, not loud enough, not the way she could dream of screaming.

Then she began breaking the china, one dish at a time, against the walls. She thought of her mother on her date with Mr. Martin—David, and Hugh, and the lost spheres of the free world, and daddy puffing on his cigarettes dying like that just because she hadn’t been as good a girl as he would’ve liked her to be. But just give pain its due. Pain is our friend.

Of all the things that could’ve been on her mind, she did not think of the baby she heard bawling from downstairs because it had become a constant for her, like her migraine, and she was beyond all that, beyond pain, beyond caring.

4.

“Get-out-get-out-get-out.” But Rachel didn’t scream. She was holding that scream in. The scream she had in her was special. She had one good scream to give and she was saving it.

Rachel felt as if she were watching herself sleep. She floated above her own body, looking down at herself: greasy hair, makeup wiped clean with drained emotion, cracked lips. Her arms were curled around her knees; her legs were pale white. Hugh’s pillow was tucked up between her knees.

“Enough,” Hugh said and went out the French doors to the patio, through the back gate.

The phone was ringing. It tickled her ear, and Rachel watched herself roll farther into the sheets, away from the sound

She watched Hugh walk down the alley, and for a moment she thought he looked back. But then she realized it was just Let’s Pretend because she knew that he would never look back to see her again. She was beyond that. She would hurl her wedding-gift china at the walls and she would put it all in the broken past.

Hugh?

Scraping in the room. Her eyes were sealed shut with crusty sleep. The feeling of being watched. In the back of her throat she tasted the bitterness of dreamland tea. Things moving in the room. She could barely lift her eyelids wide enough to see through them. Hugh must be back, Hugh must be back and maybe he would be begging her forgiveness, or maybe he wouldn’t but she would overlook what he’d done to her. What had he done to her? Something, she knew he’d done something. No. it was what he hasn’t done.

She tried to focus on whatever was there on the bed next to her. A shoe? A glove? A children’s toy? A small baby shaking a rattle? Her sphere, with its tiny hands clutching a noisy rattle, shaking, shaking, shaking.

She was too tired to even lift her head, too tired to move. Her arms and legs felt like stones.

The taste of raspberries and cream and cigarettes on her lips.

A rat the size of her fist sat up next to her face in bed and in its jaws it carried a small dead mouse. The rat shook the mouse violently, and the mouse let out a high-pitched squeak that could only have been a scream.

But Rachel watched all this from above her bed, and could not awaken her body which lay awake and asleep and staring and listening to the sound of the mouse screaming.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

IF I HAD A HAMMER

1.

On the clock radio in Ted Adair’s condo, the Sludgeman said, “Looks like another hellacious day, my little Sludgettes, truly hellacious…”

The bedroom smelled like overflow from a sewer, like a butcher’s shop on a hot afternoon. Ted’s chest was covered with some of his father’s blood and Ted’s own dribbling spit as he rocked back and forth on his knees as if praying to the Old Man, crouched before him.

“Shit, boy, that bastard won’t let me die, that goddamn voodoo abortionist won’t let me rest.” Winston Adair’s voice whistled through the ridge of broken front teeth as he continued hammering away at his face.

Ted didn’t want to look at the Old Man. He wanted to crawl inside himself. He wanted to wake up from what he hoped was a nightmare. A spray of blood shot out of the Old Man’s nose, speckling his throat. Blood spurted from the open wound of red pulp just above his father’s eyes. The nose was completely gone. The Old Man’s jaws sagged into his jowls—a few good hits with the hammer had separated the lower jaw from the rest of his skull. His pale skin was dripping like an ice cream cone in the sun. Here comes the blood. Ted had watched while his father hammered off each of his toes, all ten of them, and then slammed the hammer into his ankles.

From the clock radio, the DJ droned on. “It looks like it’s gonna be a hellacious ninety-five degrees today and even hotter come Labor Day, yes, boys and girls, another lovely Washington day of smelling your favorite armpits, and for those of you who love to sweat and sweat to love, I’ve got a tune coming up from…”

The wasps that had flown from the Old Man’s mouth spun around his head, alighting across the matted red scalp before floating off like scraps of burnt paper towards the window. Their tiny blood-encrusted bodies smudged red prints on the glass until the lower half of the window seemed to be stained dark crimson.

Ted knelt in front of his father, his mouth open, staring. He had no scream in him, and, anyway, if I did my neighbors would be pissed at me for ruining their Labor Day weekend. “Oh, pop, pop, pop, God, pop, juh-juh-juh-just puh-puh-put -” Ted felt his mind was sluicing out from his skull just like the Old Man’s brains were: Make it stop, make him die, make him die. He’s supposed to die. Can’t live with your skull half off and your testicles shot like twin golf balls splat against the goddamn walk-in closet doors, can’t keep talking when your teeth are somewhere down your esophagus and your tongue looks like you been chewing on razor blades. Cheese Whiz, Daddio, didn’t anyone ever tell you the rules? Don’t you know you’re supposed to die when your body’s doing the Mashed Potato from the inside out?

Ted tried catching the hammer in his fingers as the Old Man swung it down to shatter his own left kneecap. The hammer swung wide and missed.

The Old Man grinned toothlessly, jabbing the hammer’s claw into his right ear, its thick tines scraping away most of the lobe; still he pried further into his brain like he was opening up a boiled lobster. “You believe now, boy? I told you that voodoo priest had a hold over me, and I guess he won’t let go. He’s gonna use Rachel to get into the flesh again, and he’s bringing with him every perversion that house has to offer, boy, and he’ll be born like a monster.”

Ted leapt up, knocking his father backwards. As the Old Man fell, Ted heard a sickening crack like the crack of a crisp breadstick. But, Ted reasoned, it’s only one more cracking bone among the multitude of those already smashed up. The hammer flew from his father’s hand and thudded against the wall, just beneath the window. Wasps murmured angrily as they tapped their way around the window ledge, searching for a way out.

“Oh, son, Gil DuRaz will not let me die, I partook, boy, I partook of the girl, I et her and she tasted so damn sweet and now they want me for leftovers. They’ve got their mother now, they’ve got the fetus, how much more do I owe that bokor?” The Old Man leaned against his son. Ted clasped the broken, torn body to his. Dampness seeped from his father’s flesh to his. The Old Man stopped babbling. Stopped moving.

I am crazy, I am insane, and I am imagining this. I am hallucinating. The Old Man is alive, shit, maybe I hallucinated this whole damn morning, maybe I’m still curled up in bed dreaming about Rachel, and this is just some subconscious guilt drama playing out in my head and I’m going to wake up in another hour or two. Maybe another ten minutes and it will be Sunday morning and even the damn clock radio alarm won’t have sounded.

On the radio, the Sludgeman said, “I’m gonna be calling your house sometime in the next hour and if you can tell me who your fave-o-rave of the airwaves is, you win a dinner for two at…”

Ted hefted his father’s body up into his arms. The Old Man was ridiculously light, like a toy with the stuffing coming out. Ted’s arms had never felt so weak, so shaky, and yet the Old Man was no burden at all. He laid his father down on his bed, but could not bring himself to look down at the ravaged face.

The hammer lay where it had fallen on the carpet. Stray wisps of Mood-dyed hair were caught in the claw.

Did I do it? Am I as far gone as I thought the Old Man was? Was it me who just bludgeoned him? Shit. Ted rubbed his eyes, tears stinging behind the lids. Got to get clean, clean it off, all that blood. Who’d think a man has that much blood to go around? Get clean, a shower, a shower and a shave and maybe a cup of coffee and then maybe I’ll be sane again, yeah, that ought to do the job.

The DJ said, “You’re worthless, you cud-chewing scuzzhound, we play only the best on -”

On his way out of his bedroom, Ted picked up the hammer and smashed it down on his clock radio.

2.

He was in the shower so long his skin began to wrinkle. The water went from boiling hot to ice cold. But the steam had felt good on his skin, and he had that smell of deodorant soap on him and the blood was gone and he had stopped shivering. Ted took his time shaving; combed his hair, sliding some gel into it to keep it neat; brushed each of his thirty-two teeth and flossed. He only looked directly in the bathroom mirror when he drew blood from flossing.

His face was worn and gray and almost as tired as the Old Man’s had been.

And then he knew.

Something had knifed right through the skin of the world.

My God. It really happened. He killed himself. The Old Man killed himself, and he still couldn’t die.

That voodoo abortionist he was babbling about, yeah, that’s who got him. Came for him and wouldn’t let him die. Always keep an open mind, you never know what’s going to want to crawl in there and start gnawing away. An open mind and closed eyes. The Old Man wants me to believe? Well, I ain’t sayin’ yes and I ain’t sayin’ no, I’m just sayin’ maybe.

He stepped out of the bathroom counting the number of parquet tiles on the floor until he came to the hall carpet (thirty-six squares of tile).

In the bedroom would be a corpse who was not yet allowed to give up the spirit. Feel it in my bones, in my blood, way down in my gut with last night’s supper just about to go up or down or sideways.

“He won’t let me die.”

His father’s words echoed in his mind.

When Ted entered his bedroom he avoided looking at the bed and the body on the bed. He looked above the bed, to the white wall above the headboard.

In blood, the Old Man had written: HELPRACHEL.

Wasps danced frantically around the windowpane.

Ted, calmly, went over to the window, brushing the wasps away. They stung his hands, but he paid them no mind. With his numb fingers, he cracked the window open. “Ain’t sayin’ no.”

The wasps darted out into the shimmering air. Down below the building, a middle-aged woman was out walking her dog. The dog urinated on Ted’s Mercedes. The woman wore curlers and congratulated her pet for doing his business; she swatted at wasps that flew around her.

Ted shut the window.

The words were burned into his mind.

HELPRACHEL.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

HELPRACHEL

1.

Ted lifted the phone receiver. His hands trembled so much he tossed it out of his hand. The high-pitched pips started up a few seconds later. Ted gazed down at the fallen phone and said, “Hi, Rachel? Just thought you ought to know the Old Man’s duh-duh-dead.” He laughed, slapping his chest. Get real, Ted, my boy, let’s have a trifle more coordination between mind and tongue. “Get Hughie and get out of the house, Rachel. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know, but it’s something that the Old Man set in motion years ago and if I sound crazy, well, then I guess I am, but just get out for a while, get as far away from Draper House as you possibly can.”

Sounds sensible enough, Ted, my boy, now all’s you got to do is pick up the phone and call her and then maybe it’ll be copacetic. “I ain’t sayin’ no.” He barely recognized the whispery voice that came from his throat.

He left the phone where it was.

Nope, can’t really call her up with this kind of news. Call the cops? Not a great idea with a dead body in my bedroom. Particularly one this far hammered away. Cops might not be too sympathetic to my plight.

He wandered back out to the living room feeling as if a grenade had rolled right into his condo and blown up in his face— yeah, that’s right, I got shards of the Old Man’s insanity in my skull.

In the freezer, he found a half-full gallon of vodka.

When Ted decided what he would do, where he would go, he took the bottle with him.

Driving was easiest for Ted when he was drunk. With a little medicine in him he didn’t have to worry too much about where he was headed. He’d dressed quickly, almost forgetting his shoes in his eagerness to get out of his place ( don’t go back in that bedroom again, Ted, m’boy, you don’t need to double-check to see what’s dripping all over the white carpet).

In blood: HELPRACHEL.

Uncharacteristic of the Old Man even in death, even after death.

Hell, Ted thought as he dropped his car keys on the sidewalk for the sixth time, who’d the Old Man ever help in his life?

The hard part about being drunk so early in the day was getting the keys in the door of the car. Damn it, they make these things too small and slippery.

The vodka had made it all go down easier, just like it had when the Old Man had cracked. Cracked, but not yet hammered. It was all crazy, but vodka helped Ted over the rough spots of credibility: I ain’t sayin’ yes and I ain’t sayin’ no, I’m just sayin’ maybe. Finally he managed to unlock the car door without dropping the keys; he opened the door wide and checked under the seats for wasps before sliding in behind the wheel.

His eyes blurred with tears. He tried turning on the windshield wipers to slash his tears away. You are drunk, son, you sure you didn’t hammer your own head in?

He started the car, swerving to avoid a boy riding by on his bike. HELPRACHEL. Hallucination—that’s what this whole damn thing is. You didn’t see the Old Man dent himself silly and then keep yapping away like a manic schnauzer, you been walking in your sleep, Tedward. you been drinking too much of the Russian poison and dry humping your pillow, lusting after your brother’s wife. You just want Rachel to need your help, you want her the way you want every toy you’ve ever had and now you feel guilty ‘cause it’s your asshole brother’s wife and you’re a sinner and now guilt’s going into overdrive on the fuel of Absolut—ain’t sayin’ yes. He pressed his foot down on the accelerator as the light at the comer of Q Street and Connecticut turned yellow; his silver car swerved, screeching as he turned up Connecticut Avenue, pedestrians scattering, shouting curses. Ted barely noticed them. The wasps? Well, bugs always get in places in the summer. That’s it. They just squeezed through a crack last flight and the Old Man swallowed them while he was snoring. I ain’t sayin’ no. He waited at the light on Columbia Road, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. He glanced over at a girl in a VW Bug that had pulled up next to him.

He could still smile, that was good. See? I haven’t cracked, I can be a regular guy.

The girl, a pretty redhead, wrinkled her nose and quickly looked the other way. Like he was the most repulsive thing on the face of the earth.

Ted brought his gaze up to the rearview mirror. All he saw were his eyes: bloodshot.

And in those eyes a certain wildness. The girl must’ve seen that insanity there in the baby blues.

The eyes of someone out of control.

A madman.

The light turned green.

At Hammer Street, on the edge of the park, Ted spun the wheel into the curb, going up onto it and then down to the road again. He parked his Mercedes with a ridiculous amount of care for someone who had stopped giving a damn.

I won’t pretend to know what’s going on. Maybe they’ll put me away like I should’ve put the Old Man away weeks ago, before his madness started rubbing off on me.

But I’ll get Rachel out of there and then show her what’s in my apartment. And if the Old Man is back there laughing his head off at the clever trick he played on me, then they can give me some more booze and I’ll go off and be a bona fide alcoholic for the rest of my natural-born days.

But if I take her home and there’s a corpse and blood on the walls, then she can have me put away and she will be safe.

2.

Rachel, in bed, dreaming. In her dream someone was at the door. Knocking. Calling her name. Was it Hugh? She went to the door in her dream and opened it. It was not Hugh standing behind the dream door but a black man in a dark shirt and pants, a top hat on his head. When he opened his mouth to speak to her she felt as if she were being sucked into the mouth, and the mouth became a dark cave whose monstrous teeth became rows and rows of babies, their clicking talons raised to her, their mouths like balloon lips, opening and closing to drink her milk.

3.

Ted smashed his vodka bottle against the front door of Draper House. “Rachel! It’s Ted! Open up!” The stone balustrades on either side of the steps seemed to have grown around him, fattening each time he shouted for her. He was standing in a cold, shadowed spot, there at the entrance, and the sunlight reached everywhere on the street and in the park, everywhere except this front porch and these steps and this door.

When the door finally drew open, its wood squeaking against the floor of the lower hallway, it was not Rachel Adair standing behind it, but someone who invited him in nonetheless.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

THE MAGIC TOUCH

1.

Hugh passed out drunk on a bench in DuPont Circle; he covered his face with the front section of the Sunday Post. He had spent the morning and early part of the day wandering, just ambling drunkenly from sidewalk to sidewalk. It was a holiday weekend and not many people were out early. The city seemed dead. He liked it that way because he felt dead on the inside like an eggshell with the yolk sucked out. He had clutched his stomach in pain when he felt the need to throw up— don’t want to be sick, just want to die. At around ten in the morning he passed a shop window and saw a man staring back at him. The man’s sandy blond hair stuck out from his head like he’d slept on it wrong. His face was gray and pasty; his shoulders slumped forward. He was shaking, shivering. His eyes were smudged with sleeplessness, his lips cracked dry like water starved earth. Hugh couldn’t look directly into the man’s eyes because he knew the man is me.

Let’s Pretend, Hugh, that you’re not a loser, that she’ll forgive you and take you back, that it’s going to work out.

Then a conflicting thought shuttled its thread through his mind: To hell with her! She wants you to be something you’re not, screw it, maybe you’re better off a single man living as you please.

He felt in his drunkenness that there might as well have been a cartoon angel on his right shoulder and a devil on his left.

He tried calling Rachel from a pay phone, letting it ring ten times, but there was no answer. A family walking by him, all dressed up for church, eyed him suspiciously. A man standing with him at a crosswalk handed him a dollar.

“Don’t spend it on liquor,” the man said. “My advice to you is get a job, buddy, it don’t get no better.”

Hugh watched the pudgy hand fold the dollar and put it into Hugh’s hand. He couldn’t bring himself to look the man in the face.

Oh, well, at least I’m a dollar richer.

But most of all he just wanted to die, to lay down and give up the ghost.

He stretched out across the bench in the park at DuPont Circle hoping that death would come to him. Before he lay the newspaper across his face, he saw the clouds gathering in the sky and thought: Even God’s going to piss on me.

2.

He awoke suddenly. “Rachel?” Something had touched him. Something or someone. It had grown dark—clouds hanging low in the sky coupled with the sun pressing westward. Someone had grabbed his ankle, and before he sat up he instinctively felt for his wallet. It was there, in his hip pocket. The newspapers had dropped from his face and now lay crumpled beneath his head forming a makeshift pillow. He had drooled on them—newsprint ran together in a black smudge. His tongue felt like salted meat. What he tasted in his mouth—the product of not having brushed his teeth as well as the unique mixture of drinks from the housewarming party—well, his mouth tasted like he’d kissed the wrong end of a dead cat.

“I’m talkin’ to you,” a woman said as he sat up. “You the man that lives in the Screamin’ House. I seen you there.”

He didn’t recognize her at first: just another bag lady. She was fat and dark and dirty. He heard thunder and thought it might be the rumbling in her throat, but it was just thunder. Rain was on its way.

“You been sleepin’ too long,” she said.

The crazy woman. He remembered her—when Rachel had tried to start her car, this woman shouting in their back alley.

“You been sleepin’, mister, but the house don’t sleep, it just screams ‘n’ screams, and now, mister, now your woman gonna scream, too.”

From in between one of the folds of her rippling trash bags he saw what looked like a human skull.

And from the empty eye socket of that skull: a wasp. It crawled along the orbital ridge, a finely-cut blue sapphire. And then it flew towards him.

Jesus , you meet all kinds of creeps when you sleep in the park.

Then he felt the bite on the back of his neck.

He slapped at the wasp. Gotcha, you sonofabitch.

Feeling that needle-prick pain shoot into him, he saw in blood: HELPRACHEL, written on a white wall.

He heard voices whispering, indistinct.

He thought he was passing out again, everything faded to black as if the light bulb of the universe had finally died. But still, he felt consciousness. He was in a dark cold place, and he knew where he was: the crib, below Draper House, the place he’d thought he’d seen that thing with my father’s eyes, that delirium tremens hallucination, that inhuman jellyfish pulling itself further down into darkness, almost human, the bluest of eyes, almost the way a baby might look if it had been born about five months too early. A baby not born of a human mother.

Hugh saw before him a fetus floating in ajar. It opened its eyes, screaming with the Old Man’s voice, “You saw it, Hugh, you weren’t just drunk, you were enlightened, the house is unclean, it’s the asshole of the universe, son. Verena Standish lost her children to it. and now you’ll lose Rachel. They’re gonna make her the mother of it, of that monster child, it’s gonna eat its way into her, that abomination from Hell!”

3.

“Rachel,” Hugh gasped. It’s the hangover, the Queen Mother of hangovers, the place where hangovers are conceived, born and die right here in my head—must’ve slaughtered a few million brain cells this time out. He was looking at the dead wasp in his hand. He had smushed it after all. But the insect began wriggling again, getting up on its small legs. It stretched its wings out and took off from the palm of his hand. The insect flew up into the darkening sky.

It seemed to him that all the sounds of the earth had stopped, that someone had thrust the tip of a pencil in both his ears, because he was no longer aware of the crunch of the grass underfoot or the chatter of teenagers crossing the Circle or the traffic or the cries of birds or the growling thunder.

I’m really drunk and so hung over it’s like someone’s hammering my brains to oatmeal.

Let’s Pretend I’m a drunken sot whose wife has finally given him the boot, who finally is going to get what he wants…

What do I want?

Sleep. Just sleep.

HELPRACHEL.

Do I want to die?

He was afraid to look back at the bag lady. His hands were shaking, and to try and calm them he pretended that none of it was real, all of it was Let’s Pretend: the park, the crazy woman, Rachel, too, all of it. He tried to turn his hands to fists and then unfold them again, but they just shook. He could not keep his hands from shaking. I want…

“What you want ain’t important, mister,” the bag lady said, “just like what I want ain’t no big deal. What we gotta do, what we gotta do is stop that house from screamin’.” She put her hand to her breast as if in pain. “And I can’t do it alone.”

4.

Mattie kept one hand on her daughter’s skull, hiding it beneath her trash bags of invisibility, and her right hand under her heart. The ax was in her heart again, chopping at it. Help me, Nadine, just keep me goin’ long enough to do this one thing, this one righteous thing. Gotta stop it, gotta stop the house. The beating of her heart calmed, the chopping grew more faint.

You with me, Nadine?

Mattie thought she heard an answer.

The Mr. Big Man who sat there on the bench was staring at his fingers. You gotta give him the Magic Touch, Mattie, you gotta make him see.

She reached over with her right hand and touched his left, the one that held the wasp.

The man flinched, his hand shivering.

Magic Touch, Magic Touch, you gotta work, you gotta make him believe, ‘cause Mattie’s only got enough fight in her left for the Housekeeper, so I’m gonna need help, gonna need to make him understand.

Mattie felt a tickling in her finger; she was afraid the man would pull away from her—she could smell fear in him, fear and doubt and even a touch of belief. Just a slice of believing would be enough, just a rusty kind of believing. She knew he had seen Nadine’s unborn child, and that was where the believing in his soul had come from. With her Magic Touch she could tell that he wasn’t like the other Mr. Big Men. He was more, but he’d buried it all down, buried himself alive in disbelief. As she held his hand, she heard the words Let’s Pretend in her mind. He had it in him, but way down where you gotta get a shovel and just start diggin’ away.

Through her fingers, she spoke to him: “You got a lot of problems, mister, but you got life and that’s better than what the Housekeeper’s got—crawlin’ with death in that place—you got life and a body to get you places. You gonna run and hide or you gonna fight? You got to get her outta the Screamin’ House, mister. Things gotta be done, spirit laid to rest. I got the bugs in me. I got to help with the Housekeeper, but you got to get that girl before Baron Samedi gets inside her.”

5.

The words hit Hugh in the gut, and he felt the sour vomit of day-old-drunk gin threatening to come up; he wanted the crazy woman not to touch him like that, not on his hand because she seemed to be connected to an electric current. The current stung him and hit nerves in his arm, racing up to his head, to his brain, and then in his brain it felt like doors sliding open, lights flicking on, and behind the doors in the rooms:

bloodstained sheets, the Old Man’s battered spirit fighting to remain inside a fragmented, flesh-torn body, using the tips of his blood-spurting fingers like they were fountain pens, scratching letters across the white wall: HELPRACHEL.

Hugh recoiled from touching Mattie’s hand as if he’d stuck his fingers into a light socket.

Suddenly, the evening was normal again, all sounds returned, cars honking around the Circle, screeching brakes, men shouting to each other, women scolding children, and children running around the fountain, radios blaring. Hugh felt like he’d been diving down for miles and then was swiftly pulled up, his eyes popping, bursting, and then breaking the surface: Normal Life.

“Look, whoever the hell you are, get away from me,” he said. God. I feel sick, like I’m dead. Oh, Scout, forgive me, please, I love you. Balancing himself against the peeling green back of the bench, Hugh managed to stand without keeling over.

6.

Mattie Peru watched the man walk off. “I’m gonna make you see, mister.”

Holding her daughter’s skull with both hands beneath the folds of her trash bags, she felt a wave wash through her:

a walking dead man building a wall of bricks at the crib. and in her apartment, the Housekeeper holding a sucking half- formed baby, the one that had been taken from Nadine’s mutilated womb. The Housekeeper held it up to another woman’s wrist. Ragged vertical slices up and down the wrist. The baby was sucking blood from the woman’s wrist like milk.

Too late, am I too late?

But the woman nursing the child on her blood wasn’t the woman they had chosen as the mother, this woman was older and the Housekeeper said to her, “Betty Kellogg, you’ll spoil him.”

A vision of the woman upstairs, the one called Rachel, sleeping the sleep of one who has been given the baron’s sleeping juice, her bloodstream already turning to ice.

They were preparing her.

Am I too late?

As Mattie came out of her trance, she heard the choppity-chop-chop in her heart and felt stabbing pains between her ribs. She held her breath until the ache went away. Gotta keep goin’, Mattie, gotta keep the spirit in this old bag of skin and bones. No more girls gonna die in the house for no Baron Samedi. If I gotta do it alone, I’m gonna. If her man don’t care enough for her—it gotta be done.

She felt warm drops of rain spattering down on her scalp, tapping along the edges of her trash bags. She raised the bags around her neck up over her head like a hood.

Mattie Peru began shivering, but not from cold. Her bags rattled, and she felt her bones chafe against her tired flesh. The taste in the back of her throat was warm and sour, like her daughter’s blood.

Mattie knew what waited for her in the house-She knew if she stepped over its threshold, it would mean death. She could stand in the rain and scream at the house and let it do its worst. She would be safe on the outside.

You could just get Mr. Big Man to go in and stop it and you could live, but as this voice tunneled through her brain, she swatted at it. “Nadine,” she said aloud, “how am I to do this thing? I am weak, I am nothin’ against that. ”

Nadine, I will die in there.

Mattie wiped rain across her face with fear and memory.

But I will die nowhere else. And I will take the screaming with me. And Mr. Big Man would help her.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

SLEEPWALKING

1.

“Okay, okay,” Rachel slurred her words slightly as she tumbled out of bed, grabbing Hugh’s terry cloth bathrobe, “I’m coming, I’m coming.” She squinted at the clock on the dresser: 7:00 p.m.

Have I been asleep all day long? Her arms were sore; she thought she must’ve been sleeping on them all wrong; her back ached, and a muscle spasmed along her lower ribs. Her legs were still asleep—she steadied herself against a bedpost as she slipped her other arm into the sleeve of the bathrobe. An aftertaste from dreamland tea on her tongue: raspberries? More like drippy licorice and almonds, not cream, not anything sweet. She combed her fingers through her clotted hair, untangling the greasy strands. She avoided looking in the full-length mirror as she passed, wobbling and stiff legged, the bedroom door. She could barely keep her eyes open and someone was still banging at the front door. Should never have taken the antidepressant, it must’ve been that and the brandy that Nanny Dreadful gave me. Whoever was knocking at the door had been doing it for at least the past hour; she’d been dreaming of things banging.

The hallway was dark; she felt for the light switch when she got to the stairs. She flicked the switch up, and then brought her hand back to her waist. Rachel pressed her fingers against her stomach to stop the dull ache that throbbed there. Her skin was ice cold. She tied the bathrobe together. “Hugh?” Her voice was still groggy from sleep. The brilliance of the hall light hurt her eyes. She covered them as she switched off the light. Not dark enough to worry about tripping down the stairs. But her feet weren’t working quite right, she had to think carefully with each step, feeling around the edge of the stair to make sure she didn’t slip. Her legs now seemed rubbery, reminding her of an experiment they used to teach in elementary school where she’d soak a chicken bone overnight in vinegar and it would bend like a plastic straw. She clutched the banister. Scout, you are a klutz. “Hugh?” Am I still dreaming?

As she came down into the living room the floor seemed warm, like the heat was on. Where she’d been cold a few minutes before, now she was sweating from heat. She wiped at her forehead. Fever.

Whoever had been banging at the front door was now banging on the wall, or a door, or a window, down by the turret room. Was Hugh back and in one of his rages, tearing down more wall, mad at himself because he wasn’t a better husband?

Only in my dreams.

As she drew closer to the room, she realized the noise wasn’t banging at all but scraping and a kind of soft patting. Remembering the morning when she thought she heard a rat ( or babies? Am I off my rocker enough to believe there are babies down that tiny staircase? ), Rachel approached the end of the hall with caution.

Something was coming up, just a shape emerging from the narrow staircase half hidden in the torn vanity.

Rachel knew that sometimes, when she blinked, she saw things for a fraction of a second—things that weren’t there. Something was hanging from the ceiling in the vanity. Had Hugh hung his shirts up along the molding? But not shirts—no, they looked more like— sacks?

But as she drew closer, the objects hanging in the vanity became clear to her:

The little boy and girl she’d seen in the park, naked and dressed the way she knew a hunter would dress his kill. They hung upside down, a long wooden pole running through their ankles. The boy. Jamie, opened his mouth and said, “I know how babies are made.”

Rachel stood still and waited for this image to disappear. Fever, antidepressants, brandy, dreamland tea.

The girl swung around on her pole and reached over and thrust her small hand into her brother’s mouth to shut him up, and told him, “You’re not supposed to tell her, you little fool, she’ll find out soon enough.” Her small white arm was ragged with festering sores. Her hand disappeared up to the wrist into Jamie’s mouth. He began making choking noises. his eyes bugging out, as his sister kept pushing her hand further down his throat.

But then Rachel saw nothing hanging from the molding in the vanity. Fever dream. She rubbed her eyes.

She was almost relieved, too tired to worry about her sanity, reassured that it was just a hallucination. And now, here’s another one. A man, naked from the waist up, sweat glistening across his chest, his hands and arms dusted with gray plaster. Coming up from below. Is he really here?

“Oh, Ted,” Rachel said, her knees about to give out, a headache thumping gently in her temples, the bitter licorice aftertaste of dreamland tea in her mouth.

Ted smiled. She was sure it was a smile, but her fever twisted his smile into something carnivorous. He was slightly hunched over, too tall for the miniature passage. His hands were soaked with gray mud; he wiped them on his khakis.

“Ted, what are you—I mean, thank God you’re here, I’m not feeling too…” Rachel stammered.

“Some things have been happening.” He was smiling, it was a smile, she was sure it was a smile. He came towards her, his palms outward to show how well he’d wiped them clean, as if that mattered, and she could tell by the way he kept looking everywhere but at her that there was something dreadfully wrong, something he was afraid to admit to her. “It’s in this house, Rachel, something happening here, something to do with the Old Man, and Hugh, and with you.”

Am I dreaming? Rachel leaned back against the door-jamb. No children hanging from rods. She felt hungry and weak and sleepy. Mrs. Deerfield’s words of admonishment came back to hen “Must watch what we put in our tummies, dear.”

Ted came up beside her, still unable to look her in the eye. His arms snaked around her, catching her as she fell. Am I falling? “Here,” he whispered, “let’s get you to the window seat.” She closed her eyes as the room spun around her.

Opening her eyes again, she was sitting up by the window. In the park, no one played, the swing sets were empty. “Hugh and I had a fight,” she said. She pressed her fingers against her robe, down by her stomach. “My tummy’s upset.”

“I gathered, about the fight.” Ted was sitting beside her, his left hand on her right knee.

His right hand on the place where her stomach hurt. Is he putting his arm around me?

But it felt good, she needed someone’s arm around her, she needed a good strong hug.

“Rachel, I think you should know what happened.”

“Mmm?” She was so dizzy; she would get him to help her get back into bed. The thought of bed made her feel good. The thought of drifting down into sleep. The back of her head rested against the windowpane. The glass was warm, molten, curving around her ice-cold head.

“Something’s happened, Rachel, and it’s this house. Hugh was raving.”

“Hugh? When did you talk to—did he say—about house?”

“Raving. What it was doing to the two of you, what the Old Man had done by giving it to you, how it was evil.”

“Hugh?”

“Rachel, he went crazy, Rachel, he went off the deep end, Rachel.”

“Hugh? Crazy.” She let the word sink in, and she nodded dreamily.

“The Old Man died.”

She let Ted talk because she was feeling a little nauseated, just in the pit of her stomach.

“He was drunk, Rachel. Hugh was stone dead drunk and he had this hammer.”

The bones in her legs began aching, and she would’ve liked to massage her thighs to get the circulation going again but Ted’s snaking arm was in her way. The bones in her legs felt like they were trying to break free from her skin. Like they were ripping through her skin right then. But her bones stayed put. Bones didn’t rip through skin. They always stayed put. But they ached so much, they seemed so sore pressed up against her skin.

“Rachel, he broke the door down at my place, he was roaring—”

“Hammer?”

“He killed my father, Rachel. I tried to stop him but he swung out at me with the hammer and I went and called the cops. But by that time the Old Man was dead, and Hugh was screaming at me to leave you alone because he said I was as bad as the Old Man, Rachel. Then he said he was going to come get you, get his wife if he had to take you kicking and screaming out of this house forever. He said it was his responsibility.”

“Not Hugh.” Rachel shook the thought out of her head; Ted was being so silly. “I know Hugh.”

The annoying chirp of the telephone came from down the hall.

“The police,” Ted said. “I gave them your number. I should get it.”

Rachel sucked air into her lungs. Shock was awakening her; her legs were so sore, but she managed to get up on her feet, leaning on Ted for support. “No,” she said, “I’ll get it.”

She felt as if she were walking on air; her feet making the motions, but not quite touching the ground; Ted’s arms holding her up-But she made it to the phone. Not Hugh, I know Hugh inside and out, I know what he laughs about. I know what can make him cry, I know what his goddamn socks smell like, he’s all there in the blue of his eyes, he’s all up front, on the surface.

But the booze. The depression. The fight. Kicking him out. Telling him to go to hell. That night, before the party, seeing the frustration and rage in his face as he took the sledgehammer and crowbar to the vanity wall.

“I know Hugh,” she said, lifting the receiver. “Hello?”

No sound. Rachel was about to hang up.

Then, Hugh’s voice came on the line. “Scout?”

Rachel covered the receiver with the palm of her hand.

Ted said, “It’s him?”

She nodded.

“Dangerous,” he whispered in her ear and his breath was cool.

I know Hugh backwards and forwards.

“Scout?”

“I’m here.”

“I want to come home, Scout, I want to come get you.”

Ted’s whisper was like a fly crawling in her ear. “He did it, Rachel, and he wants you next. I saw him.”

“Hugh? Where are you?”

“P Street—Rachel, listen, I don’t know what, but there’s something there, in the house, and I don’t want you there alone.”

Ted whispered, “Tell him you’re going out.”

Again she covered the receiver. “I can’t lie to him. He sounds like he’s been through hell.”

“He wants to drag you there, too. I saw him hammer the Old Man just like he was a fucking nail. Say you’re going out.”

She gasped into the phone, “Hugh? I’m going…out.”

“Say it’s going to all come out in the wash.”

“It’s going to all come out in the wash, Hugh, I’ll be fine.”

Hugh hesitated before speaking again. “Is someone with you?”

“No.”

“Look, I’ll come get you. I love you, Scout. I’m so damn sorry about the way I’ve been all summer. Jesus, this whole year. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

Rachel shivered, remembering the wild look in his eyes when he’d torn the vanity wall down. It had stung more than if he’d actually hit her. Just that look in his eyes. Madness.

“Tell him you’ll meet him someplace.”

“I’ll meet you. Hugh, I’ll meet you down at -” Oh, Christ, what’s the name of the bookstore he likes so much?

“Scout? I’m just ten minutes’ walk. I’ll come get you.”

“No—Hugh—KramerBooks, I’ll be at KramerBooks, I’m practically out the door now.”

“You sure?”

“Yes. Hugh…”

“Scout?”

“Nothing.” She hung up the phone.

Ted squeezed his arm around her waist.

She drew away from him instinctively. There was something about Ted as he stood there, something about his smell. He’d been drinking, she’d noticed before when he’d brought her into the turret room. But after what he’d apparently been through, anybody might knock back a shot or two. But there was something besides liquor on his breath.

“You’re a terrific little liar, Rachel,” Ted said, winking at her as she tried to push him away. But his arms kept snaking around her, inside the robe, cold and damp on her skin. She had no energy, her limbs felt like jelly. His hands sliding up along her ribs, his thumbs twisting beneath her breasts as he poked and probed them, pinching her armpits, squeezing her. She felt the scream rise in her throat, but all that came out finally was a moan of fear. Ted reached up with one hand, still scraping her side, holding her to him, covering her mouth with the palm of his slimy hand. It tasted like mortar? Is this a dream?

“Those who clamor,” he told her, “we’ve been listening to you for a while, Rachel.” Then in a high-pitched voice he said, “Howsaboutamonsefuck?”

She struggled against his arms, her robe falling open. Just as she was about to kick him in the groin, her rubbery legs moving in too slow a motion, she saw a large rat poke its head through the zipper in his khakis. It leapt from between his legs and scampered off across the floor. Rachel reached up to Ted’s face as he brought his lips down to meet hers; she brought her fingers up to his eyes. Already her vision was going out of focus and sleep seemed to be drawing her back into its dark embrace.

She felt her fingers slide into the soft pudding of his eyes, and when she looked again at his face, working hard to keep her own eyes open, she saw his eyes hanging like gummy strands of runny eggs from the tips of her fingers.

2.

Am I dreaming? She lay in the darkness of sleep.

Can’t be happening, can’t be happening. Are-you-there-Hugh Adair?

A woman’s voice drawing her up through sleep almost to consciousness. “I knew the dose should’ve been stronger.”

Mrs. Deerfield’s voice. “You silly cow, if it had been any stronger she’d be dead now and where would that leave us?”

Dark purples swirled in Rachel’s mind, dancing with dots like mosquitoes, and she wondered where the dream had begun— down the hallway to the vanity, she was walking, it was a dream after all. A dream because babies surrounded her, dozens of babies, spheres with arms and legs. Their mouths opening upwards to her. At the end of the hall, at the vanity, hanging up to dry: the children from the park. Skin ripped open from their stomachs to their chins, torn and hollow. Jamie kept talking even with his sister’s fist in his mouth. “It’s where babies come from. But if it’s not all done it has to crawl back in. What do you suppose would happen if the half-done baby couldn’t find its mother’s cunny again?”

Purple haze of sleep again, as if she were rising out of the dream, about to open her eyes.

Mrs. Deerfield said, “And you, you stupid fool, you’re here for one purpose and one purpose only, to guard the wall, your sleazy hands all over her, she can’t be damaged, twit, if she’s to carry the child.”

That’s right, Rachel nodded in her dream, keeping her eyes closed, tasting the licorice and almonds in her mouth, can’t be damaged if I’m going to carry the little sphere.

Falling downward into sleep.

3.

Rachel’s lips were parched, her throat dry. Pins and needles poked at her toes, along the soles of her feet, around her calves. A hand tenderly pressed against the back of her head, raising it slightly. She opened her eyes.

To see.

Mrs. Deerfield’s face. Dim and flickering like candlelight. The old woman’s face was flat and empty, a pie crust of a face, but kind and colorless, with her translucent eyes looking right into Rachel, right through Rachel. “Don’t talk now, dear, just take another sip and you’ll be fine.” Mrs. Deerfield held a cup to Rachel’s lips.

“Bone china,” someone giggled from a corner.

Rachel murmured, “More dreamland tea?”

“It’s full of vitamins,” Mrs. Deerfield said, “some herbs and even a lizard’s gland or two. An old recipe passed down through generations.”

“You’re… so… funny… and… I’m sleepy.”

“Well, you’ve been having some bad dreams, dear. You’re here in my flat.”

“Oh? Oh. Is Hugh here?”

“Honey,” a woman said from somewhere nearby, “we are so proud of you.” It sounded to Rachel like one of the weird sisters—was it Annie Ralph? But then, it must be daddy, that’s what daddy would say, “We are so proud of you.”

“Daddy?”

Laughter, women’s laughter like pattering rain on a rooftop.

Rachel tried lifting her head on her own to look around, but her skull seemed heavy beneath her skin, her neck was pure liquid. She was lying flat somewhere. On the cold tile floor. The opening to the crib nearby, and flickering candlelight from down there, down below. Rachel’s whole body was jelly and jam. “Jellies in those jars,” Mrs. Deerfield had once said. “Jams and preserves. Whatever’ll keep. Most things do keep.”

“Daddy?”

Someone said, “You’d think she’d say ‘mommy’—it’s not fair, I don’t see anything so special about her.”

Mrs. Deerfield turned her face away from Rachel. The woman’s yellow hair fell across her cheek as she turned. Mrs. Deerfield said, “She’s open to the influence, which is more than I can say for some people, Elizabeth Kellogg. Now, one of you get over here and loosen these scarves—you’d think you were tying the Gordian knot here and not just a simple Boy Scout slipknot—yes, right now, do you think she’s going to jump up and bite you?”

Scout? Hugh? Rachel’s thoughts blended in half sleep. “Did something bite me?” She had no energy, and when she looked at the bone china cup that Mrs. Deerfield held near her chin it didn’t look like a cup at all. It was a shallow saucer, a yellowed bone saucer with jagged edges around the rim as if it had been sawed from something. Bone. “Am I sick, Nanny Deerfield?” Rising into consciousness and nausea.

Mrs. Deerfield returned her gaze down to Rachel. “Bit of fever, dearest, but Nanny Deerfield will make it all better.”

“Dream,” Rachel murmured, her lips moistened by dreamland tea. Something twisting at her wrists—like copper wire wound around them—and then just a distant throbbing pain. She turned her head to her left and saw Annie Ralph standing there.

“Hi, honey.” Annie nodded; she was doing something with Rachel’s hand. “Sorry if they were too tight.” Annie’s face blinked on and off with flickering yellow light. Every inch of the floor was covered with votive candles.

“Dreamland,” Rachel sighed.

“Yes, dear.”

“Ted—and the children, Jamie, I saw them, I saw them, hanging in -” But even these words made no sense to Rachel, even she didn’t know what she was trying to say. More flickering candlelight poured up from the open crib. The clamoring place. The dark hole full of jams and jellies and pickles and preserves and whatever will keep.

Mrs. Deerfield was stroking her forehead with a damp cloth. It felt like ice across her face. “I knew you were sensitive. Would Baron Samedi bring us the right flesh without the right spirit?”

Rachel’s throat felt like it was burning, but pleasantly, warm. She wanted to wake up now, but she felt so damn good and pleasant and the weird sisters were being so lovely and sweet she just let this dream continue. A while longer and then I’ll wake up. Hugh? Are-you-there?

“She’s closed her eyes again,” Betty Kellogg said.

Annie whispered, “She seems heavier now.”

Rising up and then falling back, falling into sleep, falling through the floor, falling down into the earth to sleep.

“Be careful putting her in,” Mrs. Deerfield said. “Watch your toes there, and be mindful of the candles.”

Put me in? Where? “Nanny?” Rachel asked dreamily.

“Yes, dear.”

They were carrying her but she didn’t have the energy to open her eyes. They’re putting me to bed, that’s what she meant. “Where are we going?”

“I don’t like lying, dear, so you should know. I’ve given you a drug, dear, powerful medicine from an extremely deadly plant, but in a small dose. We’re going to put you down in the crib.”

“Nice,” Rachel replied, “you’ll take care of me.”

Falling down into sleep, down where the babies play in their nurseries, crying for their mommies.

“Yes, dear, I care about you more than life itself. You and him. He’s our god, dear, not yet born, once a man, a man of spirit, named Gil DuRaz. He inhabits my sweet fleshling and when he’s allowed to grow in your womb, he will be fully born with greater power than, well, either you or I can imagine. He shall be a devourer of human flesh and the spirits of this house shall be released from their cage.”

Nice, nice and sleepy, nice and cool and soft down here, darkness like an arm around my waist, like Hugh against my back at night, and candlelight between the eyes of darkness.

Words sinking from Mrs. Deerfield, bobbing and floating like a balloon half filled with helium. “Do not be afraid, my dear, your friend Miss Parker is here to keep you company. Motherhood is a natural part of life, and a part that has been denied you much too long.”

A sound like the clack! of a mousetrap snapping shut.

4.

In the darkness of sleep she heard voices around her:

Mrs. Deerfield said, “Volunteers?”

“Me first, honey.” It was Annie Ralph.

Then Betty. “Well, I’ve never really disemboweled anyone before.”

“Honey, it’s like carving a turkey. And if you don’t do it now. I’ll do it myself.”

In her dream of absolute darkness, Rachel heard a sound like wet rubber splitting, tearing, and heard a series of thumps, a groan.

“Dear old Annie, such a trouper. Now dear, by your own hand. Rules are rules, Betty, after all, can’t have any living witnesses. Time to join the house with the others.”

Betty Kellogg said, “I can’t.”

“The flesh is weak, yes?”

“No, don’t—I can do it.”

“He wants you to go over, dear. Now.”

“I can do it. It’s just that it looks awful. All over my hands—Annie’s—all over me. The knife.”

“It’s an apple-coring knife, but it’s served other purposes in the past. A little pressure might help, dear.”

“Please, don’t—it—it hurts, it hurts so much—not like—when you push, don’t push it against my skin—it hurts—I can—please, it hurts so damn much, my stomach please, no, it’s not -”

“Pain is brief, dear, but if you think of what the pain is for, well, then. We’re born, we live, we die. That’s it. Mustn’t get sentimental.”

“Please, let me do it myself—it’s the blade, feels so cold, so damned cold on my stomach, no, don’t, I’m not ready, not yet—not yet—God—not -”

In the dream of candle-lit darkness that Rachel was having, the sound of wet rubber tearing, the sound of boots treading in the mud, the suction of pulling a boot out of the mud, and a whine, almost a scream, coming from beside her and then she thought she heard her little sphere, the one she’d lost last year, weeping in the corner because it was still trying to be born.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

BELIEF

Hugh waited in the bookstore for Rachel for over an hour. Rain splattered across the sidewalks outside, sheets of rain hammering down the darkness beyond the wide windows of the bookstore. He stared out into the rain. The store was packed with people milling around the stacks of trade paperbacks, customers flirting with each other, couples sitting over in the cafe section. Hugh stood alone, staring out through the blurred glass.

Watching.

Hugh knew that Rachel would not be coming. It had been in her voice on the phone. She sounded as if his calling her had repulsed her.

The world is a crazy place.

The bag lady standing in the rain, watching him, only seemed to confirm this opinion.

My God, that crazy woman is patient.

But what if Rachel is in some kind of trouble?

The thought seemed to buzz around his ear, and for a second he thought it was another damn wasp.

Let’s Pretend, Hugh, that there’s something going on here. You saw the words in blood: HELPRACHEL. Is it some subconscious thing? Do you really think she needs your help? Shit, she’s the most self-sufficient person in the world, right? She needs you about as much as she needs a hole in the head.

The bag lady stared through the window at him, unblinking. Hugh felt he’d spent the past hour trying to erase her from the street landscape, trying to see through her, trying to turn her invisible. His head throbbed from a hangover.

But she communicated with me, somehow, don’t know how, but it was as if she refocused my eyes. HELPRACHEL. Scout? You in trouble?

The bag lady began to look urgent; she stomped her feet in the puddles, sending water splashing up against the storefront.

I’ll wait her out. If I have to wait here another hour, I’ll do it.

But the woman turned away and began hurrying up Connecticut Avenue in the rain.

Go ahead, wherever the hell you’re headed.

But she’s headed to my home.

What if there’s—Let’s Pretend. Rachel is in some kind of danger. You asshole, Hugh, just standing here, you should be home, you should be there with her. She did sound funny on the phone. Funny and scared the way she was when she lost her baby, why haven’t you gone home yet?

Hugh made his way through the crowd of people at the entrance of KramerBooks; he felt like he was drowning. When he was on the street in the blinding rain, he ran after the bag woman, towards home.

Halfway up the hill he caught up with her. “Wait!”

She turned and glared at him. “You seen the signs! You know you seen the signs! They gonna do it tonight. Ain’t no more girls gonna die, and if I gotta do it myself I will, Mr. Big Man, but I can’t help your woman if I’m fighting the other one. I ain’t God, just old Mattie Peru, flesh and blood and I can only fight one battle at a time!” Her anger seemed to dissolve with the rain, and Hugh realized the woman was crying. “I know what waits for me up to the Screamin’ House, and I ain’t afraid for me. I know the hell I’m headin’ for. I know my crime.” She drew the skull from between the folds of her bags. “This here’s my babygirl that those in the house killed, mister, and it was a Mr. Big Man just like you that gave me the seed for my girl and gave my girl the seed for her baby, and now they gonna bring something into the world that don’t belong here.”

She tossed the skull to him and he instinctively caught it the way he would catch basketballs in college. When he looked back at Mattie, as he held the skull, he saw:

The Old Man, battered, rain washing blood from the jungle of cuts and open wounds. His upper jaw opened and closed mechanically, the lower jaw just hung slack in a pocket of skin. “Hugh! Get up to that house now! It’s too late for me, and they got Ted, they killed him and they filled his body with one of their own, but Rachel! For all the love you have for her, get the up there!”

Hugh glanced down at the skull: it glowed in the slashing rain like a lantern.

And he believed.

He believed the way a man believes when it is four in the morning and the rational world doesn’t tell him otherwise. He believed the way a man wakes up when he remembers a smell, wakes up and realizes he has been sleeping, and the smell is fire, and his house is burning. He believed the way a man believes in something when there is nothing else to believe in.

“Rachel,” he said.

And he knew it was true. It cut through every ounce of intellect in him, but he knew these visions were real, oh, but God, what if he’d waited too long?

But when have I ever been right before? It’s all been delusions, this could be just another one.

And then he thought: Screw that.

Knifing through all his thoughts: Scout, you be safe, I’ll come get you.

“We gotta go now.” Mattie grabbed his arm. The touch of her hand was like an electric shock, a current ran between them. He heard her voice in his head: “I am Mattie Peru, and the spirits of this house are evil, and of them, the most powerful and malevolent is called Gil DuRaz, Baron Samedi, the guardian of the dead. He has been both man and demon, and he murdered my daughter. ”

Interwoven with the sound of her voice, Hugh saw a fetus with the translucent blue eyes of his own father, the creature he’d seen in the shadows of the vanity.

“God,” Hugh gasped.

Mattie let go of him, and the vision evaporated. “They been waitin’ for a long time, and now they got their chance, mister, but we gotta get up there, we just gotta.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

HOUSECLEANING

1.

Rachel awoke because she was having difficulty breathing. The air was thick with incense: the candles, all around her like tiny eyes. Mrs. Deerfield was at her legs, massaging them, but Rachel couldn’t feel anyone touching her. Some kind of shiny grease in Mrs. Deerfield’s hands, pressing down on her legs. Rachel’s robe was open. Rachel came in and out of consciousness, feeling like a tired swimmer, drowning, going down for the first time, second, third. Her shoulders were sore, her neck ached. She was in a dark cave surrounded by candles, a dark cave with Mrs. Deerfield massaging her legs. Rachel felt her own bones chafing beneath her breasts, down to her womb. Above her, mushrooms grew from the stone ceiling. The crib. The candlelight cast animated yellow shadows across the etched stone. Things seemed to move inside there with them. There were others, faces Rachel could barely make out. Two women watched Mrs. Deerfield grease Rachel’s legs. Annie Ralph and Betty Kellogg, their faces unmoving, their eyes open wide. They sat up in the dirt behind Mrs. Deerfield. Rachel clutched the earth under her fingers; it was moist. Her fingers clawed at the earth. Hurt, every muscle hurt. Annie and Betty watched her, unblinking. Shadows danced across their faces, giving them a semblance of movement, but they were still.

“Am I dreaming?” Rachel asked Mrs. Deerfield. She didn’t want to look over Mrs. Deerfield’s shoulder at Annie, because just beneath Annie’s chin there was an opening into her throat, a jagged but precise cut as if someone had taken a knife… “It’s an apple-coring knife…” and the slit began beneath Annie’s chin and ran down farther, but Rachel couldn’t look, she just couldn’t and anyway it would be a dream.

Mrs. Deerfield glanced up from her work. She was wearing her work apron over her jeans and a blue work shirt. She had various gardening tools stuck in the pockets of her apron. “Well, you’re up and about, how unexpected of you, dear, and yet not something to fight.”

“Is this a dream?”

“Life is but a dream, dear, you just go back to sleep and think of England if you must.”

“I’ve had the worst nightmares.” Rachel’s fingers in the damp earth floor of the crib, fingers curling into tight claws. She tried to move her legs, to pull back from Mrs. Deerfield, but her legs did not budge. Sleep tugged at her; her mind hurt from being so weary and wanting to fight the tiredness, too.

“About children, dear?”

“Oh, God, about everything, what are you doing?”

“Preparing you, it’s a simple procedure, age-old.”

Her mind fighting the sleep, re-tasting dreamland tea in the back of her throat, her throat which felt scarred and numb as if healing from an operation. She wanted to scream, but she had lost her voice, all she could do was whisper. “You poisoned me.”

Mrs. Deerfield shook her head. “No, no dear, it’s just what I called it, dreamland tea, and it’ll make it so you won’t hurt. Pain is nothing to be afraid of, really, but you’re a weak vessel and the trauma it might cause…”

Rachel’s head ached from having lifted it. “Are you going to kill me?”

Rachel was standing over her father’s hospital bed. Smoke puffed rhythmically from his burst chest, yellow and gray smoke, tickling around Rachel’s face. Her father was smoking a Camel, his eyes milky white with cataracts. “We all die, dear, we all must go, but the thing of it is, sweetheart, what’s it all for? Is it just to go to dust like all the rest, or did we do it for something? Something bigger than us? Something that we can’t even fathom, but we know, dear heart, we know it’s for the best? Now that’s what I call a sacrifice.”

He reached up to her, through the smoke, touched her breasts, and his fingers were wet.

Rachel opened her mouth to scream, but when the smoke cleared, she saw a slender plain woman in a floor-length dress at the end of a long hallway brushing the long golden hair of the little girl from the park, and the girl screamed so that Rachel would not have to, screamed because the woman was brushing her hair too hard, screamed because the woman had a small jagged knife in her other hand and brought it beneath the girl’s throat. The boy ran past where Rachel lay, and Rachel tried to call out to him, to tell him it was too late, to not help his sister. “Emmie!” the boy cried, and the woman at the end of the hall turned smiling to him as he ran to her.

“Rachel? Retch?” It was Sassy, leaning over, her hand coming down softly onto Rachel’s forehead. “Man, you have got a temperature to beat all. Why didn’t you call your old best friend up?”

Rachel said weakly, “Sassy?”

“I got something in my purse for that, you know me, Retch, I always have got something in my purse for these things.” And as Sassy turned around to reach into her purse, Rachel began crying because she was so happy that she’d just been sick, that it had all been a dream, and then Sassy turned towards her again and Rachel was more afraid than she’d ever been in her life, because the light was flickering candles, and she held damp earth in her hands, and above her mushrooms grew like stalactites from the cold stone roof of the crib. And when Sassy turned around again, it wasn’t the same face, even though it was still Sassy. But Sassy’s face was streaked with dried blood, her hair matted down with an enormous gash across her scalp, her eye sockets small and empty.

“This’ll do the trick,” Sassy said. Her teeth cracked as she smiled, and in her hands was something that looked like a small, small baby.

A small mutilated baby, a baby that was barely more than a sphere.

And it gripped Sassy’s fingers and ripped into them.

“Hush, dear.” Mrs. Deerfield wiped her forehead.

Rachel felt like someone was punching her in her eyes with their fists. “Please, please,” she whimpered.

“It’s what you want,” Mrs. Deerfield said. “Nanny Deerfield will take care of it, she’ll make it all better.” Mrs. Deerfield helped her sit up. “It’s a simple procedure, dear, and it’s not as unnatural as it may seem, why, doctors do this all the time. We’re just vessels for spirit, dear heart, like clay. You are blessed to be the strong vessel that you are. We are all just jars, all jars waiting to be filled, waiting for inspiration.” She held Rachel’s head up, letting her rest in the crook of her arm. “Just like these little ones, in their jars.”

And Rachel saw what appeared to be a dozen or more gallon jars in a circle around her, and in each jar some small fish swimming. But not fish, not anything as simple as fish, but what in God’s name?

“The legion of unborn, our lord Baron Samedi took them from the fruitful womb and saved them from human decay. And of these he chose one, one child yet to be born, a child taken from a ripe womb. A child conceived in such perversion and corruption, conceived upstairs at the altar of the dark gods. Conceived and torn from its mother -”

Rachel lay in an enormous steel tub, and all around her was screaming, and out the bathroom window was a yellow and red night, burning. Hugh’s father gibbered madly in a corner. “You fucking animals, get this over with now!” His pale blue eyes wild and angry. “Right now, you hear me? I am an important man, I have more important things to worry about than this piece of trash.”

Mrs. Deerfield held up a small curved blade.

An apple-coring knife.

The man with the teeth leaned into the tub towards her, rubbing her stomach. “Flesh always dies, we die so that others will be born. You die for your child.”

And his teeth came down for her, and Mrs. Deerfield handed him the blade—coring knife

And when his face came back from her stomach, it dripped with blood and slivers of skin. He handed the coring knife back to Mrs. Deerfield, and then with both hands brought up the small wriggling creature, so much like a rat whose skin had been ripped off, its veins pulsing on the outside of its body, its small catlike claws snapping at the air, its nose and mouth wart-studded indentations, and its eyes.

Blue eyes.

Blue human eyes.

Something in them so sad, so pitiful, and so hungry.

It opened its eyes and mewled, “Mama.”

2.

Hugh put his shoulder against the front door of Draper House. The key turned in the lock, but the door still didn’t budge. It was as if some force were on the other side, and the more he pressed against it, the more it held its ground. Finally it gave, and he pushed it open, crying out, “Rachel!”

Mattie came in behind him; he rushed up the stairs to their living quarters. Mattie went to the downstairs apartment. The door was ajar. Her trash bags of invisibility rustled as she went quickly over to the crib, but her heart was going choppity-chop, and she had to stop and hold herself just beneath her left breast, the pain was so fierce. The apartment was filled with candles, and she tripped over them as she made her way, but the crib was sealed shut with dry plaster. Mattie nestled Nadine’s skull in the folds of her trash bags. She got down on her hands and knees and scratched at the solid lid. Magic Touch is sure to open this, open all things.

She was about to call upon her powers to open this place, when she heard the man, Hugh, screaming from upstairs. Help him, and through him, enter the clamoring place. Make the house stop its screamin’. She pushed herself up from the stone floor and headed back in the direction of the scream.

3.

Hugh cried out when he saw his brother, and although he never enjoyed seeing Ted, it was the fact that his brother did not seem to have any eyes in his sockets that made Hugh scream.

“Hughie!” Ted waved. He stood in front of the back stairs at the vanity. “How’s it hanging, baby brother?”

Ted hefted a sledgehammer from one hand to the other. “You really got into this carpentry kick, Hughie, all these tools and junk—the happy homeowner. I just wish you’d been here this morning. Jesus, the Housekeeper is a stern taskmaster. She made me build a wall down there with your stash of bricks and mortar from out back. And then the bitch killed me when I was done. Ain’t it just like a woman?” Besides the fact that Ted Adair had no eyes, there were other things wrong with the way he looked. His scalp was half torn off so that his hair looked like a toupee hanging down over his right ear, a toupee with a fleshy underside. And all the dried blood running from his chin down across his chest, which had been flayed so that the skin was peeled back above his stomach. As he spoke he bashed the sledgehammer into the remaining drywall of the vanity, on the bathroom side, knocking a hole the size of a man’s fist through it. “Stay away, Hughie, or I’ll come take care of you the way a big brother should. Like father like son, you know, the Old Man went and hammered himself just like he was a fucking nail, a fucking nail, bro.”

“Oh, God, what have you done with Rachel? Where is she?”

“I ain’t sayin’ yes and I ain’t sayin’ no, I’m just sayin’ maybe.”

“What the hell are -”

“I ain’t sayin’ yes.”

“She’s down there, let me -”

“And I ain’t sayin’ no.”

“What are you?”

“You know how blood coagulates? Well, I just sort of coagulated here in this house, baby brother Hughie, it just all came together for me here.” The sledgehammer whistled through the air. “What do you think a skull looks like when you knock it back with one of these babies?” Ted stood above Hugh, bringing the sledgehammer above his head. Both hands gripping the handle.

Hugh grabbed one of the loose bricks and pitched it up at Ted. He shut his eyes for a second, terrified to look. He rolled over to avoid the hammer coming down. A sound like rotten fruit smushing. He glanced up. The brick caught Ted across the teeth—they were broken, Ted’s mouth now a ripped, open sore. The hammer slammed into the floor, splintering boards. Getting to his feet, Hugh grabbed the crowbar from amongst the rubble. He brandished it like a sword as he retreated into the turret room, drawing Ted with him.

“I guess you need some taking care of,” Ted said, picking the sledgehammer back up, swinging it back as he stepped forward. “This is a sacred place, Hughie. Can’t have you desecrating it like you want to -”

“What have you done to Rachel you bastard?” Hugh sliced the crowbar across Ted’s face—scraps of skin and blood sprayed from the wound, spattering Hugh’s face and hands.

“Nothing you wouldn’t do, although maybe you wouldn’t. We’re just giving her what she wants, we’re giving her a baby, a baby among babies, something you’re maybe just not man enough to give her.”

The sledgehammer barely missed Hugh’s skull. He was almost to the huge convex window, his knees buckling as the backs of his legs met the window seat. The whole house was vibrating now, shivering as Ted swung the sledgehammer against Hugh’s right elbow.

“Shit!” Hugh cried out with pain, clutching his arm as he dropped the crowbar. It rolled beyond his reach.

Ted leered, his face bloody and empty of human life. “I win. Come on, baby brother, let’s see what you’re made of.”

Ted raised the sledgehammer, swinging it in a clean arc, and Hugh was sure it would come down square on his head.

4.

“Can’t breathe,” Rachel whispered, her voice growing weak.

“It’s the candles,” Mrs. Deerfield said matter-of-factly. “They’ll take the oxygen and then go out one by one. But before that happens, dear, you’ll faint, which is good. It serves no purpose for you to see what we are about to do. That’s when I will perform the insertion. The unborn child needs to crawl back inside its new mother, with a little help from Nanny Deerfield and her tools of the trade.” She held up the coring knife. Its curved blade caught the flickering light. “And then, deprived of air, you will die here in the darkness. But we will keep your flesh and blood alive. We need your womb, for within it the fruit shall ripen. Like my mulch pile, dear, your flesh will be ever so much more useful here in the crib with us than it would be if you just die the way all other flesh does.”

Rachel heard the low mewling of the thing, the unborn child. She glanced in the direction of the sound. It had furrowed its way into the opening of skin just beneath Annie Ralph’s left breast and was devouring what looked like a heart. Rachel’s own heart was racing within her, and she wondered if the chill that had suddenly descended within her was a sign of shock. It’s all a nightmare, wake up, for God’s sake, somebody wake me up! Please Hugh, wake me up now, let it all never have happened, let it be dreamland tea, let it not be so real! “Please,” she whispered.

Mrs. Deerfield sat back on her haunches. “And when he is ready to come into the world of death and pain, fully formed, he will devour flesh and avenge the wrongs done to those who clamor here in their cages yearning to be free.” She sighed, rubbing Rachel’s knees. “Yes, well, a place for everything and everything in its place.”

The fetuses within the mason jars began bobbing frantically to the surface, their formless heads poking upwards as their paws pressed frantically against the curved glass.

Rachel was not sure if she dreamed or actually heard the voice screaming, but it sounded like Hugh, and it sounded nearby.

5.

Hugh thought. This is it, old boy, when he swings that hammer down again there won’t be another chance. The pain in his right arm was enormous, and he knew the sledgehammer had shattered his bones. You just gonna sit here and let him break you bone by bone?

Ted was grinning his empty-mouthed grin, the skin around his eye sockets crinkling as if he were squinting to see better. “I’m really gonna enjoy this, Hughie, I really am, because I’m gonna go slow, first your right arm, well, next, maybe your left legs, smasherooni, then your left arm, then zigzag back to your right leg. I’d like to start the really delicate operations next, maybe that crowbar you lost, maybe prying your ribs back one at a time.” The sledgehammer went up again; Ted’s fingers cracked as he clutched it tightly. He held it up and to his right like he was about to swing a baseball bat. “Batter-batter-batter—suh-wing!” he shouted, bringing the hammer down. As the mallet hit the window seat, Hugh rolled to the floor, grabbing for Ted’s leg.

Ted dropped to his knees, off balance. He dropped to the floor, bringing the sledgehammer down in a smooth line into his own left hip. Hugh was up quickly, grabbing the hammer from his brother’s hand.

Ted stared down at his fragmented and useless hip. “I ain’t sayin’ yes.”

Hugh closed his eyes, fighting back tears, and smashed the sledgehammer against the side of Ted’s skull.

Even then the battered corpse tried to move, tried to crawl after Hugh as he ran back towards the vanity and the stairway.

“Rachel,” Hugh gasped, pain shooting through his right arm; in his left, he swung the sledgehammer.

Just as he reached the stairs, something grabbed him on the right arm, and he saw white flashes as pain shot through him. He screamed, turning around.

Hundreds of wasps formed a burning tower, humming and chewing, climbing one over the other, as if forming a long nest, and then the wasps widened and flattened. A streak of flame ran down the center of the wasp column, and they burned away.

Standing before him, emerging from what had been wasps, was Mattie, holding her daughter’s skull up before her, triumphant. “This is the hounfour, but beneath it, down there, is the cage of the dark spirits. The Housekeeper has sealed herself in with Rachel, and the unborn creature.” Overlaid on Mattie’s face was another, one Hugh didn’t recognize. It was the face of a young girl, gaunt and feverish, with large pale eyes and coffee skin.

“We will stop my child from being born,” the girl said.

6.

RACHEL!

Was the voice in her mind? It sounded like Hugh. God, where are you, Hugh? Are you there? Hugh?

But all she could see through her watery eyes was the shining of the curved blade in Mrs. Deerfield’s hand, and she knew what Mrs. Deerfield would do with the knife. Rachel tried to lift herself up farther on her elbows, but her legs were paralyzed from the drug, and her arms ached with the effort. Mrs. Deerfield was speaking in some language she could not understand, going into some kind of trance.

“Hugh,” Rachel mouthed, but no sound came from her throat.

Something pounded against one wall of the crib.

7.

When Hugh and Mattie had rushed through the vanity, down the steps to the crib, they were met with a brick wall.

Sealed her in. Buried her alive, Jesus. Hugh swung the sledgehammer back and smashed it against the bricks. The whole house seemed to shake with the impact. “Rachel!” he shouted, the numbing pain shooting up his arms, the pain and something else, something that emanated from Mattie as she touched his shoulder, something like liquid fire flowing through his arms and into the hammer. A strength he had never had before. The sledgehammer glowed with a yellow green light, and when it smashed into the bricks, the wall began to crumble.

“We will fight spirit with spirit,” Mattie growled.

As his hammer broke through the bricks, arms began jutting out to fill the gaps in the wall, long pale white arms, their hands grasping at the hammer.

Hugh drew back as a hand reached for his shirt, tearing it.

“They are the caged, they must be destroyed.” Mattie grabbed the sledgehammer from Hugh, and brought it down on one of the outstretched hands. It burst like a blood-engorged mosquito. Then she whacked at another, and the arm went flying. Hugh grabbed one of the arms and twisted it around as if it were in a shoulder socket, and then pulled with all his might; the arm broke off from the brick wall with a sickening crack and fell lifeless to the floor.

8.

Mrs. Deerfield turned back to look in the direction of the crumbling wall. “We’ll just have to hurry this along. I guess you won’t have time to die peacefully, my dear, and I do apologize.”

Rachel used every ounce of strength that was left in her, lifting herself up on her elbows. The jars of fetuses glowed nearby, and she stretched her arm out to grab at one, knocking it over. The alcohol spilled out, and the fetus fell to the ground, flapping its useless arms.

A dream. A nightmare. Can’t be happening.

Mrs. Deerfield screeched, “What are you doing? My dear sweet babies!” She leaned forward and slapped Rachel hard on the side of the face, and Rachel felt herself passing out.

Don’t lose it, not now. Scout, Hugh is almost here, don’t go off to dreamland. Let’s Pretend you’re strong. Let’s Pretend you can beat this thing, that you can do something to keep her and that thing away from you. All right, you can’t move your legs, but your arms still work, maybe if you lean forward, maybe you can at least get the knife. She tried to sit up farther but could not. Mrs. Deerfield turned towards Annie Ralph’s corpse. The creature with the blue eyes was still sucking on the dead woman’s internal organs.

“My sweet, my darling,” Mrs. Deerfield said, plucking the thing out of the chest cavity. The fetus was soaked with dark blood, its small pink tongue slurping noisily as if trying to nurse.

Rachel felt across to the fallen mason jar. The fetus had stopped floundering in the earth, and Rachel touched the jar. A weapon. No strength, oh, God, I’ll never be able to do it. But I won’t die, I won’t die here like this, not like this, not in this nightmare. She felt as if she were having a heart attack as she tried to lift the jar but couldn’t. It was too much. I’m going to die. No, I won’t. A fragment of broken glass at the jar’s edge. She cut her finger across it, but barely felt the pain. Only weapon, the only weapon, broken glass.

She clutched the shard of glass in her hand.

Mrs. Deerfield turned back to Rachel. In her hands was the creature, its mitts sprouting claws that clacked together as if it were eager to crawl inside its new mother. The thing was small, barely larger than a fist, but it was so unspeakably perverted with its blue eyes and its wart-filled mouth with a small ridge of spiky teeth just beneath its tongue, its veins on the outside of its sallow body pulsing with just-drunk blood. Mrs. Deerfield brought it close up to Rachel’s face, and the thing said to Rachel with her father’s voice, “I’m so proud of you, Scout.”

Like a streak of lightning, adrenaline pumped through her as she smelled the creature’s foul breath, and she brought her fist up, opening it, jabbing down into the soft flesh at the creature’s head. It cried out like a baby in pain. The fetus scrambled out of Mrs. Deerfield’s arms and landed on Rachel’s neck, snapping its mouth open and closed while it bawled, trying to reach up with its claws to pull the glass out.

So you can be hurt. Good, at least I can die knowing I hurt you. Rachel closed her eyes, all energy drained. Let me die now, let me die, let me out of this body.

The creature slid like gelatin off her neck, crawling around to her ear. “You’ll burn for this.” Now it spoke with Ted’s voice, and Rachel opened her eyes again. She felt its razor claws on the side of her face. “I’m gonna get inside you and eat my way out, and you’re gonna be alive for it, too, you’re gonna feel it, mother, you’re gonna feel it.”

Mrs. Deerfield lifted the knife above Rachel’s stomach and said, “You bitch, what kind of mother are you, anyway?”

A shaft of light cut through the flickering darkness.

9.

The arms and hands had fallen to the ground at Hugh’s feet; when he looked at them again, they were the rotted bodies of rats with hundreds of roaches chewing at their festering wounds.

“Quick,” Mattie said, pressing forward.

Hugh pulled at the remaining loose bricks in the wall, making a space just large enough to squeeze through.

10.

Mattie felt the chop-chop-chop of her heart as she crouched low, following the man into the crib. Nadine, be with me, child, make me live long enough to stop the house from screamin’. She could taste a blood memory in the back of her throat, her own child’s blood which she’d tasted that night so many years ago.

11.

As if the light that flooded the crib carried with it some source of power, Rachel felt the needle prick of feeling coursing through her arms, and even slightly in her legs. An almost welcome soreness soaked through her, and she began coughing. It’s air, there’s air in here now, I can breathe.

Above her, Mrs. Deerfield plunged the coring knife down to open her stomach up; but Rachel rolled to the left, and the knife sank into the damp earth. Mrs. Deerfield, off balance, fell to her side, shrieking, knocking candles over. The creature scampered over Rachel’s belly; she felt its razor claws raking across her; but then it landed in the dirt and scuffled around making mewling noises.

Then she saw it move back towards her, to her face.

Rachel was looking directly into the eyes of the fetus. Its blue eyes scowled at her, and she almost felt sorry for it with the piece of glass stilt protruding from its scalp. Rachel crawled backwards, farther into a dark corner, away from the creature and Mrs. Deerfield.

Mrs. Deerfield ignored her, turning in the direction of the shaft of light. And in the light, two blue shadows.

“Now,” the creature growled at Rachel, its head shivering.

“Now, mother, I will open you up.”

Rachel gasped when she saw what was in its small claws.

The coring knife that Mrs. Deerfield had dropped in the dirt.

12.

What Hugh saw when he bent down to go into the crib:

First, a circle of jars and a hundred or more candles. And in each jar, a fetus moving in slow motion through a watery solution.

But then each fetus began to grow, stretching out to the full size of the jars, and then the jars cracked as the fetuses grew larger, forming like clay into human flesh. On one side of him stood two children, a boy and a girl, which he could not possibly know were James and Emmie Standish. Their skin fell from their faces, their bodies ragged with scars. “Please help us find our mother,” the girl said. She reached out imploringly to Hugh. Another fetus had grown tall and wide, and was the Old Man. “Hugh,” he said, “you son-of-a-whore, why don’t you just let us have her, she was unfaithful to you, she fucked your brother.”

And Ted was there, too, his head smashed in. “Yeah, Hughie, she seduced me, man, she was so damn hot for me I couldn’t resist, although, you know, I tried. I really tried.”

“She's just a cooze like your whore friend,” the Old Man wheezed.

Mattie stepped out from behind Hugh.

“Nadine,” she said through clenched teeth. She reached into her trash bags and withdrew her daughter’s skull. She held it in front of her, and dropped it at the children’s feet. An invisible wind lifted the skull up.

For a second, Hugh saw Mattie’s daughter standing there, naked, and then it was no girl at all, but a column of wasps forming a young woman’s body. It stepped towards the children, knocking over more candles. A column of fire tore up the wasp legs, and the whole body glowed with a blue yellow flame. The little boy backed away from the wasps, but the wasp arm reached out and flicked some of the burning insects onto his scalp. The fire spread from his hair down around his face and he screamed; his sister tried to put them out with her hands. The Old Man stepped forward and grabbed the sledgehammer from Hugh’s fingers, but Hugh tugged it back and swung it around against the Old Man’s chest.

From behind the burning children, Mrs. Deerfield emerged.

13.

“Mambo whore, you are too weak, your heart,” Mrs. Deerfield said, lifting her hand to her own breast.

Mattie felt the choppity-chop of the ax in her heart, and the pain was hot like the growing fire that surrounded them. She tried to call the wasps up, tried to call up the Magic Touch, but her energy was dissipating. Hugh was swinging his sledgehammer across the burning line of apparitions. Mattie knew she would die here. One last prayer, Nadine, one last prayer.

“Your heart is breaking down, whore. I will slice it with my fingernail and swallow it while it still beats.” Mrs. Deerfield reached over and grabbed beneath Mattie’s trash bags, for the place where her heart beat.

Getting weaker.

She reached up with all her strength, bringing her trash bags down around Mrs. Deerfield’s face.

Mrs. Deerfield laughed. “Can I die twice, then? Three times? Do you think that this flesh matters? I am the Housekeeper. I am here with those who clamor.”

Mattie felt the woman’s fingers pressing into her skin, under her skin, along her ribs.

One last prayer, Nadine.

Choppity-chop-chop-chop.

I will join you, daughter. I will be with you, but one… last…

“Die now, whore,” Mrs. Deerfield said through the smothering trash bags that Mattie kept hooked around her head.

Mrs. Deerfield plucked the beating heart from Mattie’s body and with her fingers squeezed it until it burst like ripe fruit.

14.

The fetus jabbed the coring knife into Rachel’s shoulder. “I’ll find a way to get inside you, mother, and then we will be together for a long time, another four months should do the trick.”

Rachel shrieked as the searing pain went through her.

The creature lifted the knife again with both its mitts. She reached up and grabbed it even while it sliced her hand.

To her left she saw a wall of cool blue flame, and beyond it, shadows flickering.

15.

Mattie, dying, dropped her arms from around Mrs. Deerfield’s face, and the trash bags fell to the ground which writhed with flames.

Mrs. Deerfield brought the dripping heart up to her mouth. She bit down on it.

Mattie Peru’s corpse stood, quivering, staring.

From Mattie’s mouth came Nadine’s voice.

“Spirit cannot exist without flesh. It is your cage and I will free you. Housekeeper.”

The heart in Mrs. Deerfield’s mouth burst again with life, becoming a nest of burning wasps, and they dropped down her throat, stinging and biting as they went chewing into her skin. Mrs. Deerfield’s cry of rage sounded like that of a tortured animal as the wasps ate through her.

Within a few seconds, the insects had left nothing but smoldering bones.

16.

Rachel struggled with the creature. The coring knife flew out of her hand as she pulled it from the monster’s grasp. The creature began crawling down her breasts, towards her stomach. It felt cold and wet as it trailed down her body.

“Rachel!” Hugh’s voice cut through the fire.

“Mother.” The creature turned back to her. Its blue eyes were rimmed with red tears. Tears of blood. Rachel’s back was sore as if she’d been run over by a truck, but she pulled herself up and brought her hands down on the creature, wringing its neck. Its claws dug into her hands, but the thing was crying out like a baby, “Mama! Mama!”

“No!” she keened.

For just a moment, Rachel was lying in bed, holding her baby, a fully-developed sphere in her arms, and she was humming a lullaby to it, but it was crying and she didn’t know how to stop it from crying.

“Rachel.” Hugh was leaning over her. He put his arms beneath her back, lifting her slightly.

“Hugh?” She looked down at her hands. The thing had gotten away. Her hands were streaked with her own blood where it had cut her. “Oh, God, it’s still here, Hugh, it’s still…”

But he was lifting her up, covering her with her own robe as he took her through the crib, dashing back through the wall of flame, and then out of that accursed place.

She did not turn to see if the fetus with the blue eyes followed, but she thought she heard it crying in a corner as tongues of fire shot out of the crib, almost touching her.

EPILOGUE

THE ANSWERED PRAYER

1.

Hugh carried Rachel up through the house, and then back through the French doors to the patio. He kept her wrapped in her robe; his arms blistered with burns, but were blessedly numb with pain. He knew once the shock wore off he would be clenching his teeth in agony, remembering the sledgehammer slamming into his right arm. But there were worse things than physical pain. He took her through the back gate, leaning her up against the car. Where would they go? What would they run to? But in his mind, just one thought, those words, help Rachel. It was all he wanted to do. He unlocked her door and opening it, maneuvered her around and in. She held onto him, still feverish, still fighting to stay conscious. Then he went around to his side of the car and got in. He stuck the key into the ignition and turned it hard. Nothing. The car would not start.

Rachel clutched his arm. “Hugh, look -” She pointed up to the second-story window. But there was nothing there. “I thought I saw something, I thought I saw that thing.”

Hugh kissed her tear-streaked face. “It’s gone, we’re safe.”

“Let’s get out of here, please,” she murmured.

“Won’t start.” Hugh turned the key once, twice, cursing.

“I know I saw it,” she said, “look.”

Hugh glanced up to where she pointed, the French doors. For just a second he thought he saw a flash of movement, but it was red and yellow, and he realized the fire had spread to the upper story.

“Our house,” Rachel gasped, but sounded like she was recoiling from the thought.

Hugh finally got the car started, putting it in reverse. “Let it burn, let it just burn.”

He backed quickly out of the alley.

Rachel said, “Where are we -”

“I want to get you to an emergency room first. Then…” But he didn’t know what to say next. He didn’t know what would come next.

“Everything hurts. God, my arms, my legs.”

“The burns aren’t bad.”

“The house, the spirits in the house, wanted me, wanted to put that thing…”

“They’re destroyed. Scout, no more fears.”

“It was…” Rachel tried to find the word, but there was no word.

“It was hell. Plain hell.” Hugh turned the car onto Connecticut Avenue. He would drive until they were at the hospital and he would carry her inside and he would do whatever he could to stop Rachel from hurting ever again.

2.

The fire in Draper House died of its own accord. It had spread to the second floor, riding the narrow staircase up from the crib through the vanity, and then consuming the wallpaper down the hallway and the drapes, until it finally came to the living room. The photographs that Hugh had taken years ago, of scenery and of a younger Rachel, were consumed in the spreading fire, along with the furniture, the plants. The walls blackened but did not fall. And there it had died as if the air outside the crib was not fine enough to keep it burning. Neighbors had called the fire department, who came and put out what was left of the flames.

One fireman swore to his buddies that a dozen or more rats swarmed up from the downstairs, out into the alley, the lamplight shining on their backs. And what he saw one rat carrying between its jaws terrified him, for it looked like a tiny child, or a skinless animal that lived in the dark, a pink creature with blue eyes, its mouth opened in a scream while the rat shook it between its jaws.

But the man had seen this through smoke and shadows and when he told his friends, they laughed at his imagination.

3.

Almost a year later, in the suburbs of northern Virginia, in a house that had been built in the 1970s and had no history of malevolence other than the rumor that the last owner had perhaps drunk just one beer too many at the local barbecues, Rachel would lie awake at night thinking she heard Mrs. Deerfield singing lullabies to the thing. And she would scream, because it still frightened her and she knew it would for a long time to come.

“Scout?” Hugh reached over and hugged her close to him.

“Sorry.”

“It’s all right. Was it bad?”

“Same old same old.”

“Let’s Pretend, Scout, that we banished them, banished them forever. We sent them back to their cages, we threw the key away. We vanquished the foe.”

“I’m still afraid.”

“It comes and goes.”

“I love you.”

“Well, that’s news to me.”

“What if we went back? Hugh?”

“Never.”

“Good. I never want to, either. I know it’s just a house. But there’s still the chance… it’s still there.”

“No, it’s gone. And no one will ever live in that place again.”

“I just wish my dreams weren’t so bad.”

“Well, I can tell you a bedtime story, Scout. You and the lumpkin.” She felt his hand patting her stomach which had grown slightly in the past month. She knew that her baby would be healthy, that what was growing inside her was untouched by the abomination in Draper House. It just felt right. If she was sensitive at all to things, if she had any sixth sense about what was right and what was wrong, she knew her baby was right.

“So let’s hear it.” She put her hand over his as he rubbed her stomach gently.

And his stories all began the same, which is why she liked them, and sometimes they made her cry because his stories were so much sweeter than the way the world could ever be again. He would say, “Let’s Pretend,” and his voice would be soft and his story would be hopeful. Then she would drift off into a peaceful sleep of sweet dreams for at least that night.

4.

From Diaries of an Innocent Age by Verena Standish:

…One can never put such an event completely behind oneself. I carry the horror and the sadness within me even as I put pen to paper. But life takes over and years pass, and memories become less vivid. Their power to disturb loses some of its hold.

Draper House exists still at the border of Winthrop Park in Washington. It remains as cold and hard as the stone from which it is made. It is my fervent prayer that this cursed house of evil shall stand cold and hard and empty until the day of judgment when it shall be cast into the flames…

* * *

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AFTERWORD

Dear Reader,

Whew. That was one messed-up novel. Demon fetuses? Murder, ghosts, racists, the whole wasp issue. What was I thinking?

Well, I'll tell you. I wrote Breeder when I was 28, and it came out a couple of years later (after my first novel, Goat Dance, in 1989.)

I wrote the first draft of the novel in the house in which it's set, although I took liberties with the location and aspects of the home. I love Washington, D.C. -- I mostly grew up around the city and then moved to it right after college. But one disturbing aspect of Washington in those days was what was called "gentrification," which was a nice word for "throw people with less money out and attract higher-rent-payers in." This manifested itself as racism, all under the guise of "improving neighborhoods."

And then, I just made it all up, a nightmare in my mind, unfolding.

As I mentioned earlier, this is one of my nastier stories, up there with The Abandoned, The Attraction -- and maybe The Necromancer (although that's pretty much a tale of Victorian debauchery).

Hey, it's horror fiction. I write into the nightmare, and just go with the story's flow. Sometimes, the result is quiet horror (Nightmare House, Isis) and other times, it's those demon fetuses (or feti?)

But I am a lover of pulp fiction, with a capital P. I also love the literary stuff, and most things in-between, so long as it keeps me reading. I hope you've enjoyed this humble, demented little offering.

With best wishes,

Douglas Clegg

May 11, 2012

PUBLICATION INFORMATION

Published by Alkemara Press, in an arrangement with the author. All rights reserved.

Copyright © 1990, 2012 Douglas Clegg

Cover Design Copyright © 2012 Alkemara Press

Cover images courtesy of iStockphoto.com, © Erin Castillo, © Cliff Wassmann, used with permission.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Douglas Clegg is the award-winning author of more than 25 books, including Afterlife, The Children’s Hour, The Hour Before Dark, The Harrow Series, The Criminally Insane Series, Purity and many others.

Find out more:

http://DouglasClegg.com

Praise for Douglas Clegg’s Fiction

“Clegg’s stories can chill the spine so effectively that the reader should keep paramedics on standby.”

—Dean Koontz, New York Times bestselling author.

“Douglas Clegg has become the new star in horror fiction.”

—Peter Straub, New York Times bestselling author of Ghost Story and, with Stephen King, The Talisman

“Douglas Clegg is the best horror novelist of the post-Stephen King generation.”

— Bentley Little, USA Today bestselling author of The Haunted.

“Clegg gets high marks on the terror scale…”

—The Daily News (New York)

AFTERLIFE

a novel

Douglas Clegg

ALKEMARA PRESS

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“We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so at the moment after death.”

—Nathaniel Hawthorne

“There are monsters in the world. They’re called human beings.”

—Michael Diamond, from The Life Beyond

Prologue

1

In the testing room, the boy stared at the others from behind the glass.

He raised his fists and began hitting the thick pane.

The flames shot up in the booth around him, moving rapidly up the boy’s back as he pounded harder, his mouth open impossibly wide.

He shut his eyes as if trying to block it all out or to send his mind to another, safer place.

The others watched, safe on the opposite side of the triple-thick fireproof glass, and waited as the fire burned away the boy’s shirt.

They held hands, and one of the girls said, “Look how scared he is.”

“We need to get out,” a teenager said. “Now.”

And then the fire shattered the glass, moving beyond the booth, beyond the testing room, as if the air itself burned out of control.

2

In the 1970s, a rumor circulated that a small, privately funded school in Manhattan existed where young children with special talents were being observed and tested for what were then labeled “PSI” abilities.

Little was known about the school, other than what remained enshrouded in the urban legends of the city. The conspiracy theory suggested that the government or several governments funded the school and used it to learn more about the human mind, about child development with extra-sensory ability, and perhaps how to use those abilities in some covert way.

Another story grew that it was simply formed by a group who believed that these so-called “special children” should have a safe place to develop their talents.

Still, most people who’d heard about it believed that this was one of the city’s many small private schools, a target of malicious rumor from a handful of unhappy, overly entitled former students seeking to discredit their alma mater.

One of the rumors had to do with a little boy who precipitated the closing of the secret school when he somehow was responsible for the death of another child.

The school was supposed to have existed somewhere near the Chelsea District of New York City, although its exact location was anyone’s guess.

The school was called Daylight.

Part One: Now

Chapter One

1

She opened her eyes to darkness. Her breathing: slow, warm, but too shallow. Something was wrong.

Blindfolded? Not sure.

She pressed her eyes closed and then open again. Nothing but a claustrophobic night. Her breath came back at her—an enclosed space. A dizziness, and pins-and-needles feelings in her toes and fingers. Paralyzed?

Buried. Buried alive.

Throat dry. A thudding—her heartbeat? No light at all. Not even cracks through the box. Coffin? A large trunk? She was squeezed in, and her limbs felt numb.

Dear God. Dear God.

Slow, deep breath. Hammering in her head. Wetness along her neck.

You won’t get anywhere if you panic.

This crawlspace. This…casket.

Blurred images came to her: the white room, the feeling of being laid gently down on some bed, twine wrapped around his hands as he reached for her …

Your hands. Move. Reach.

Her hands were bound in front of her. Thick twine connected her wrists, and as she tugged as hard as she could—barely able to move—she remembered how he’d spoken gently to her. She had been drugged, after all. He had incapacitated her in some way she didn’t understand.

Blocked. No matter how hard she tried to roam with her mind, something blocked her.

Her lips, parched. She opened them, but only a ragged whisper of a sigh came out. Help me. Please, she wanted to say. No, there must be a way out. Must be. This may be a test. It may be another test. It may not be what it seems. It’s just a test. Surely. Please dear God.

Please, she tried to say. Someone...

Then, she heard the voice, barely a whisper. He must be pressing his face near the sealed lid of the box.

“Don’t be afraid, Gina. Don’t be afraid. Just let it happen.”

His words had the opposite effect on her. She felt as if she had begun hyperventilating. She fought back tears.

And then she felt the heaviness of her breathing—it hurt her lungs. She tried to take in too much air, but there wasn’t enough.

Please, somebody, help me.

A sound above her. Just above her face.

On the other side of the box.

And then, she gasped, because the air was running out too fast.

2

Miles from the city, in the wilds of northern New Jersey, out along the lakes beneath the great and small houses rising up among dense woods, spring has only just awakened. The ice only just melted weeks before, the new grass exploding with bright green, with the lavender and yellow of crocus and wildflowers.

Someone’s hunting.

3

A man stood on an empty plateau in a brief but undisturbed wilderness, overlooking a placid silver lake.

It was a day of winds, a good sign as far as he was concerned. He carried his burden through the tall grass that twisted as the breeze whiffled through it. His boots went into the mud deep, and he pressed slowly through the swampy land until he’d reached the slight rise of the bank.

He set the man down, relieved to be free of the heaviness.

The man looked up at him, drowsily.

He felt the push of wind at his back; he knelt down beside the man, reached into his breast pocket for the knife, and set about his grim task.

The man beneath him. Eyes open. Watching.

He matched his victim, breath for breath.

The killer caught his breath as he brought the small blade down with the precision of a surgeon.

He closed his eyes and penetrated the mind of his victim, just as surely as his knife cut into the man’s sternum:

The sweetness of the air. Electrical impulses sparking. The smell of ozone—a whiff of ecstasy, and then, gone, thrown into the other.

Penetrating.

He broke through the barrier.

He experienced what his victim felt.

Burning pain. Along his neck and the back of his head. But not in his chest area. Instead, that was a dull throbbing ache.

Then, another thrust of the blade—stabbing close to his heart—and he lost his vision entirely. Weakness flooded him. The pain was located in his head—a screaming. But he had already begun to disconnect from it, as if a cord were snapped from its power source, and he were drawn into the source of power itself.

He held a lingering connection to his body.

Within the victim’s mind, the killer experienced the curious sensation of still being aware.

Not precisely lucid, but aware.

Inside the victim’s consciousness:

He felt as if his breath contained his essence, and it coughed into a darkness—he moved, propelled, through some dark void. All the while, he was aware of the others, there, around his body, as if his memory still held them, and the place, the last moments of his life—held them in perfect balance with this new feeling.

It wasn’t a sense of being a physical body, but of being a solid form, undefined by material barriers but kept in place, an entity.

He moved through the darkness, half expecting to open his eyes. Any anger or resentment he’d felt had run its course just as his blood had trickled from his body. He was on a new voyage now, and knew that the thread was slender, holding him between his last breaths and the doorway through Death.

Then, he felt a shift—as if something weren’t working right. He kept waiting to be brought back into life, but instead, he felt a general weakness, as if his mind were growing tired.

A steep descent. Falling. Smells came up, almonds and peaches, wonderful odors that he hadn’t experienced in years—since childhood—of jasmine and fresh, running river water, orange blossom and even a sharp vinegar bite of a stink. His senses felt as if they were releasing memories, of tastes and scents, all exploding as he fell.

Fear came, as well.

Fear that leaked into madness, and he tried to cling to his memory, and tried to shout himself back to consciousness.

The killer kept the knife in his victim’s chest, experiencing everything with his victim, feeling the descent into death, trying to stay with his victim so that there was no fear of what was to come.

Chapter Two

1

In the early afternoon, off the path along one of the trails of the Jenny Jump Mountain of northern New Jersey, deep in the woods bursting with new green growth beyond the slight hills above a placid brown lake, a woman and her young daughter hunted for fossils alongside a creek.

The outcroppings of rock between patches of forest had fascinated the little girl as they’d wandered, and her mother pointed out what she’d remembered from her college years about the area. “Some of these rocks are 1.6 billion years old.”

“That’s old,” her daughter said, making her mother chuckle at how mature Livy could sound, even at six and a half.

“That’s why you can sometimes find fossils.”

“Like you used to with Gramma. When you were little.”

“Yep. Right along here.”

“I love days like this,” Livy said.

Julie chuckled. “Why’s that?”

Livy hesitated, then sighed a little. “Well, just you and me, Mommy. After school. And you don’t have to go to work today. And Matty doesn’t come home ’til later. I just...I just sorta like it.”

“Me, too, sweetie.”

The view beyond them, over the ridge, was of the Kittatinny Mountains, and Great Meadows. The sky was damp with the recently passed rain, and the fresh, pungent smell of the wild permeated the countryside.

They’d found a possum skull, two arrowheads, and what they thought might be a small cracked trilobite print on a rock fragment. “This was once part of a glacier,” she told her daughter. “That’s why we have all these lakes.”

“Like Ghost Lake. And Forest Lake. And …Lake Pesomething.”

“Lake Pequest.”

“Where’d it go?” her daughter asked.

“What?”

“Where’d the glacier go?”

“Well, the earth changes. The earth shifts, the earth warms, the glaciers melt, and then it recedes. Over millions of years a lot of stuff can happen.”

“That’s scary,” Livy said. “What if the ocean comes back?”

“Well, if it ever did, we’d have beachfront property. See this?” Julie Hutchinson held the bit of trilobite fossil up for her daughter’s inspection. “Once, these lived all over the place here. Swimming underwater.” Julie tried to remember if that was precisely correct—she had come up to these woods with her grandmother, who knew a lot more about the trilobites than she ever would. She and her grandmother had never gotten along all that well, except for their mutual love of nature and exploration.

Livy took the fossil into her cupped hands and looked at it. Then, up to her mother. “Is it a dinosaur?”

Julie considered how she’d respond. She was screwed when it came to the precise classification of a trilobite. “Sort of.”

“Wow.”

After a minute of turning the fossil over in her hands, Livy passed it back to her mother, who dropped it into the small green knapsack they’d brought that had contained their bottles of water, and now also held the smooth pebbles, bits of shell, and arrowheads they’d collected during the late afternoon. Then Livy went back down to the creek, crouching to look around the rocks and fallen logs for more fossils.

Julie Hutchinson felt a gentle tingling in her hand, and for some reason, it made her think of Hut, the way he grabbed her hand sometimes.

The way he did when she thought he was in love with her. Back in the courtship days. Back before the storm clouds had come into their marriage.

An animal scent nearby—dead raccoon? Possum? She hoped it wasn’t too close. Immediately, she glanced over at her daughter, who was teetering back and forth on a log at the edge of the creek, her small feet curving around the wood as if trying to clutch it. Livy had an enthusiastic smile on her face, and she leaped from the log into the sandy edge of the creek, causing a splattering that nearly reached Julie.

“Liv,” she scolded. The hem of her daughter’s dress was already soaked. “Olivia Hutchinson, get out of the water.”

Her daughter looked down at the water around her ankles. “I’m only a little in it, Mommy. It’s freezing. I like it.”

Julie let this one go. She glanced across to the other bank. That warm odor of a rotting wild creature wasn’t unusual in the woodlands and the several creeks just beyond their town. Sometimes she saw deer pausing between thickets, and recently, she and Livy got to see a beaver swimming down toward its dam.

“We should get back to the car. We need to pick up Matty next,” Julie said.

Julie crouched down to pick up some small, nearly round pebbles her daughter had dropped. She glanced over at Livy, who stared across at the view beyond the ridge, to the slope that led down to the lake.

Her daughter’s face had a curious slant to it—Livy squinted and her nose wrinkled slightly, her head gently turning a bit, not quite looking up at the trees, but nearly.

“Mommy?” Livy asked, detecting something was wrong. “Daddy says it’s all right.”

Julie pushed herself up from the muddy grass. “He always says that.”

“He said it just now.”

“On your brain radio,” Julie said, grinning. It was a joke between Livy and her father that they could communicate on something Hut had made up called a “brain radio.”

The wind came up again; it got a bit chilly. Julie was about to lift Livy up out from the muddy water, afraid she might get a bit of a cold from being out when the weather was about to make such a sharp change.

“Daddy’s in the city. He won’t be home ’til suppertime.”

“Silly you,” Livy said, teasing. “He’s here. He just said it.” She glanced around through the ferns and trees, as if her father were playing hide-and-go-seek with her. “Daddy?” She turned her head side to side, and then scrunched her eyebrows up, confused.

After Julie wiped her daughter’s soles off with her own shirttails and slipped her small feet into what Livy called her “sockets,” the small white and pink socks, then into her shoes, they walked back down the path that led to where she’d parked the car at the shoulder of the road below. The wind picked up and died down frequently. Her daughter clutched her hand as if she were afraid of being blown off the path. They watched some Canadian geese that had gathered on a large patch of grass near a creek, and Livy told a joke that her father had told her, “Do you know how I know those are Canadian geese?”

“No.”

“They say ‘Quack, eh,’” Livy said, and giggled as if it were the funniest joke in the world.

“You need a new joke,” Julie said, smiling.

Then, the cell phone began vibrating in the pocket of her overstretched wool sweater.

“Is it your job?”

“Maybe,” Julie said, trying to ignore the slight downward turn to her daughter’s voice whenever Julie’s work at the hospital came up. In some respects, Livy seemed like an old soul, and could see right through her mother. “Liv, aren’t we having fun?”

“I guess. I just miss you when you’re gone.”

“But you see Daddy.”

Her daughter didn’t answer. The awful and stupid guilt that Julie had worked so hard to overcome— about going back to work in the hospital again after having stayed home with Livy for her first four years—warmed her face.

“But you want to work in a hospital, too, you told me,” Julie said. “When you grow up? And you like all the stories I get to tell you from the ER. Aw, honey, I get five days with you each week. Two days away isn’t so bad.”

“I know,” Livy said, sighing. “It’s okay Mommy. I know they need you.”

When Julie looked at the number on her cell phone, she saw that it was not the hospital at all.

2

Julie dropped Livy off with Laura Reynen, the young mother who ran daycare out of her house and babysat far too often for Livy. Laura was in her mid-twenties, with two young children, and had arranged her life such that she could stay at home and run the business from a small cottage-like house, complete with wisteria creeping up the trellis at the side of the house, and an enormous fenced-in backyard, full of swing-sets and sandboxes and a double slide. Laura could take one of the kids on a moment’s notice, and Livy adored being at her home with the great playground in the backyard. Laura was the mother that Julie knew she never would be—happy with the clutter, happy with kids all over the place, happy in a way that Julie barely understood, since Julie felt like a screw-up of a mom.

At the front door, Laura, with a baby in her arms, said, “So I can expect you back when?” She always had the aura of joy around her, as if young children were somehow meant to be attached to her arms and legs and running in and out the back door all the time.

“Two hours, tops,” Julie said. Then, looking down at Livy, “We’ll eat junk food tonight, okay?”

“Mommy, you look sad,” Livy said.

Julie leaned down and gave her daughter the tightest hug she could, kissing her on the forehead. “You go play, all right?”

“Only if you promise to read to me tonight.”

“Promise,” Julie said. She hoped she wouldn’t have to break that promise.

3

The Rellingford Learning Academy was a small private school for children with certain behavioral issues. The Academy sat on three well-manicured acres at the end of a circle of buildings. Although there was a blacktop and a baseball diamond in the back, there was little else to suggest a school other than the name at the front driveway.

The school had on-staff medical personnel as well as a psychologist and a psychiatrist on-call who also conducted therapy sessions among the student body of sixty-four students from grades 6 through 12. Although the school was expensive and at times administratively pigheaded, Julie had convinced Hut that it was the best place for Matt, despite the added expense, at a time when Matt had been getting increasingly violent and uncontrollable at the public school—and at home.

Julie tried to put that episode out of her mind: that moment when Matt had pulled a kitchen knife on his father. Matt’s face full of rage, his eyes wild as if he wasn’t even seeing who stood in front of him, spit flying from his lips as some of the worst language that Julie could imagine came out of that boy’s mouth.

It wasn’t Matt. It was something else. A mental disorder that hasn’t yet been diagnosed. When he’s older, they’ll find something. They’ll get the right meds to fix Matt’s problem. I know they will.

4

At the front desk, near the secretary’s office, Julie flipped through one of the magazines. Finally, the headmaster came in.

She glanced up from the magazine. “He’s all right?”

“He’s resting. He’s fine now. I’d like you to speak with Dr. Maitland, first.”

“Maybe I should drive him over to Dr. Swanson.”

“We already put a call in. Our nurse, Miss Jackson, thinks that’s not necessary at this time. He’s fine, really.”

Julie refrained from commenting, “Cut the condescending attitude. I’m a nurse, too. I’ll decide what’s fine for Matt.”

Instead, she said, “I’d like to see him now.”

5

The school psychologist was named Renny Maitland, and he looked like a ski bum to Julie, and far too young. He was on hand every day for the students. A psychiatrist was in once per week for special consultations, but Maitland handled the day-to-day issues.

“It’s not as big a concern as we’re making it,” Maitland said. “It’s just not the first time it’s happened, and we wanted you and Mr. Hutchinson to be aware of it. It may be the added pressure right now of the exams. We’ve been going through standardized tests these past few weeks. Nothing the students have to prepare for—but they’re timed, and there’s some pressure, so there’s some...well, some students act out a bit when doing them.”

“What exactly are we talking about here?”

“He’s been carving things. Into his skin.”

“He got hold of a knife?”

Maitland shrugged. “Just a pen. A good old ballpoint pen.”

“He’s done this before?”

“Well, just with drawings. Sometimes on his hands. He seems to have an issue about his hands.”

“You need to call either me or my husband when Matt does this. We can’t be kept in the dark.”

“Mrs. Hutchinson, I did call your husband the last time it happened,” Maitland said.

She felt a brief flush of embarrassment in her face.

“He said he’d talk it over with Matt. When a child draws with a pen on his hands, we simply have him wash the ink off. It’s not abnormal for kids to draw on themselves. But today, well...He cut.”

“Is he all right?”

“I think so. This isn’t the first time a child has done this. It doesn’t always indicate anything more than a preoccupation on the child’s part. But, based on Matthew’s history …”

Julie nodded. “Of course. I can’t...I just can’t think of anything that might be bothering him. I thought with the camera, he was doing better.”

“Most definitely. That was a stroke of brilliance. He videotapes everything. He’s communicating much better because of it.”

Julie smiled, slightly, but still felt worried. “Where is he?”

6

It was a long walk from the front offices down to the nurse’s office. Julie glanced at the green walls as she went down the corridor: pictures that the kids had painted, essays pinned to bulletin boards. The smell of sawdust and paint—she glanced down a hallway as she passed by—two men working on ladders to paint the walls. She passed a girl of thirteen or so in the hall, and smiled at her. The girl stopped. Her arms crossed over her chest in anger, a pout on her lips. The girl watched her as she passed by.

She tapped at the open door of the nurse’s office. The room was white and large, with an empty cot pushed into a corner, the blinds drawn on the windows, and an examination table.

“Yes?” the nurse turned from an open folder on her desk, and smiled. “Mrs. Hutchinson?”

“I’m here for Matt.”

“He’s resting,” the nurse said, nodding toward a closed door. “Sometimes a good nap does the trick.”

Without realizing it, Julie let out a brief sigh. “How’s he doing?”

“It was rough. It started on the blacktop—one of the kids had found the hornet’s nest and they were kicking it around.”

“Wait, he got bitten?” Julie lingered in the doorway, glancing at the door beyond the office.

“Along his arm. It swelled up, no more than normal, but it just made him furious. He got completely out of control. He started kicking when anyone tried to keep him from drawing the pictures on his arms.”

“Why wasn’t I called right then?”

“Mrs. Hutchinson,” the nurse said, a slight but undeniable condescension in her voice. “Our job here is not to pick up the phone every time a student gets a bee sting, unless we’re aware of any allergies. Within twenty minutes of the bite, he was drawing all over where the swelling was.”

“I was told they were carvings.”

She nodded. “When he calmed a bit, he told me that they were pictures in his head he was trying not to forget. That’s why he put them on his skin.” The nurse suddenly had a look of puzzlement on her face. “It was odd. I don’t mean because of how he hurt himself doing it. Or even his acting out. It was odd because he said something about his hand. How his hand couldn’t work without all the fingers. Or something like that. But his hands are fine.” As if dismissing something from her mind, the nurse added, “Has he been getting enough sleep?”

7

“Matt?” Julie said, stepping into the darkness of the small room. It was little more than a walk-in closet—just enough room for a cot and a bit of crawlspace around that.

At first, Matt didn’t stir. Then, after a minute or so, his eyes opened. “Julie?”

She noticed that his Sony camcorder was pressed against his back, almost as if it were a comforting stuffed toy. “Right here, Matty.”

“I had a bad dream.”

“Oh. Well, it was just a dream. Everything’s fine.”

“No,” Matt said, turning over to face the wall. “No. It was real.”

“Do you want me to call Dr. Swanson?”

Matt glared at her. “Eleanor? No. I don’t like her.”

“How about...well, Mr. Maitland?”

He lip-farted at this.

“Did you mean to cut yourself?”

He didn’t respond. She bit her lower lip. Shouldn’t have asked that. He doesn’t need to be grilled right now. She wanted to go lift him up and hug him, but she resisted what Hut would’ve called her “smother mother instinct.”

“Matt?” she asked. “We can go home now. It’s all right.”

Still facing the wall, he said, “She’s in a box. I heard her.” Then, his voice seemed to change. It sounded...girlish. Like he was imitating someone. “Dear God. Dear God. Somebody help me. That’s what she said. She said it until she couldn’t breathe anymore.”

8

When they got out to the Camry, it had begun raining again. Julie drew Matt closer so that he could keep under her raincoat a bit. His body felt too warm.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, shivering as she unlocked the door to let him into the front seat. He was a funny kid in too many ways—violent at times, in a rage, sweet at other times, and somewhere in between he reminded her of a little kid who was smart beyond his years, yet had learning disabilities that she couldn’t figure out. Maybe it was his mother. Maybe it was whatever had driven her to alcohol and then drugs and then...the accident. Maybe whatever brain chemistry was there had gotten a little into Matt.

Julie leaned forward and hugged him, kissing him on the top of the head. “Nothing to be sorry about, honey. Want to go grab a bite at McDonald’s?”

“What about Livy?”

“She’s at Laura’s. We’ll bring her something back. Okay?”

He brightened, slightly. “Okay.”

9

After making sure his camera case was secure between his feet on the floor of the car, Matt poked around the bun of his Quarter Pounder. He lifted it up and picked out the pickle. He dropped it back in the bag.

They were at the McDonald’s off the main road through town. She’d parked in front. Her cup of coffee was on the dashboard. She’d leaned the driver’s seat back and took a bite of a Chicken McNugget.

“I know it’s crazy,” Matt said, chewing.

“What?” she asked, trying to hide her interest. He swallowed the bit of burger. And then reached for his soda, took a sip, slurping. “It was like I was in a movie.”

“We can talk about something else if you want.” She glanced through the windshield. Cars went too fast on the road. Across the street at the strip mall, a little red car was nearly backing up into an SUV that wanted to quickly take a parking space.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I just was somewhere else. In my head.”

She tried not to glance at his arms, to give him that privacy. The nurse from school had done a messy bandaging and gauzing of his elbow and forearm. She saw what looked like the drawing of a spider, a little too deep in his skin—a faint image, the ink of his ballpoint pen washed away, a lightly raised line of skin.

“Does it hurt?”

He gave a brief peripheral glance to his arm, and shook his head. “Not much.”

“You were stung by a hornet.”

“Bitten,” he corrected her. “And I think it was a yellow jacket.”

“Oh. I didn’t know there was a difference.” She smiled. “I’m not too smart about insects.”

“Maybe not,” he said, closing his eyes briefly as if a headache had suddenly come on. When he opened them, seconds later, he got a wicked grin on his face. “It hurt like hell when it bit me.”

She reached forward for her coffee and lifted the plastic lid up. She mixed in two small cups of creamer and then a packet of sugar, but couldn’t find the plastic stirrer. She took a sip. Better than she had expected.

“What about what you saw? In your mind? Did it frighten you?”

He nodded. She offered him a McNugget, and he glanced at it, then at her, then reached his thumb and forefinger into the little box and plucked it out.

“Not anymore,” he said.

She touched the edge of his arm. Next to the raised skin.

He looked away, jerking his arm. Glanced out the side window. Sparrows and starlings were over by the round tables outside, and an old man tossed French fries to them.

“Is there anyone else you want to talk to? It’s all right.”

“No.”

“I just want to help.”

“I’m not mad at you,” he said, gently.

“I know.”

“I just got scared.”

“I know you did. But it’s over.”

“No it’s not,” Matt said. “It’s just starting.”

She tried to crack a grin, hoping that somewhere behind his eyes he was teasing her a little. “What is?”

“Julie,” he said, seeming wise beyond his years with a voice that was utterly serious. “It’s a test. She told me. In my dream. Her name is Gina. They gave it to her. That’s all it is. But you only get three days to pass.”

Chapter Three

1

After picking Livy up over at Laura Reynen’s, Julie drove them both home, listening to Livy describe her afternoon with the babysitter and her family.

Now and then Julie glanced over at Matt, but he’d already gotten his camcorder out and was taping the blur of woods and strip malls and suburban houses.

As she turned the corner onto their street, which would take them first up and then down a hill to the house, Livy began singing a funny song about “After you gone, and left me cryin’. After you gone there’s no denyin’.”

Matt howled with laughter and told his little sister she was certifiable. “You made that stupid song up.”

“That’s an old song,” Julie said. “Gramma might even be too old for it. Was Laura playing it on the piano?”

Livy shook her head. “I heard it in my brain radio,” she said. Then, she continued singing, “You feel blue, you feel sad, you miss the bestest pal you ever had.”

“It’s called ‘After You’re Gone,’” Julie said. “I bet your father taught it to you.”

2

By eleven that night, he still hadn’t called, and she didn’t want to call him because sometimes he went into a tirade when she did it. And she didn’t need that—not tonight.

Sometimes he had to stay in the city late. It wasn’t that unusual, but she expected at least a call or a message.

Julie tried paging him, but got no response. She thought she heard him come in, and went down to the front door, opened it. Just a car turning around in the driveway. It seemed misty outside—not quite rain. She stood on the front porch, feeling the chill and enjoying it a bit.

She heard some noises from downstairs and went to the finished basement.

Matt, watching television.

“Matt? It’s a school night. Let’s hit the sack.”

He ignored her.

“What are you watching?”

“Some guy,” Matt finally said.

On the TV, it was Jerry Springer. A man with a ponytail who looked a little too old for a ponytail shouted at another man, who was fat, had his shirt off, and was covered with tattoos of naked women. A middle-aged woman with short blond-red hair wiped tears from her eyes. The audience screamed.

“Let’s turn it off, okay?”

“I can’t sleep,” Matt said.

She watched the back of his head. “All right. But get to bed soon. Okay?”

No response.

“Matt?”

“Okay,” he said.

“Don’t forget. You promised you’d walk Livy to the bus stop tomorrow.”

“I do it every Thursday, don’t I?” Then, he turned around to look at her. In his hand, his camcorder. “Smile for the camera, Julie.”

“Aw, you’re catching me at my best,” she laughed. “Are you videoing the Springer show?”

“Nope. Just documenting my life,” he said.

“To bed,” she said. “Another half hour, okay?”

“Watch the birdie,” he said, following her movements with the camera as she left the room and went back upstairs.

3

She lugged her laptop to bed and plugged it in and then went online. She checked her email.

One email had arrived from Hut, sent early in the day. She tried to open it but it was marked as “unavailable.” It bugged her that her email service did that at times — or Hut might’ve even done it if he had unsent the email. She wondered what it said. Maybe he had sent a note about what time he’d get home, and then had to change it. Or maybe one of the assistants had sent it. She could’ve called the clinic, but decided against it. No need to be paranoid. No more Clinging Julie, as Hut had sharply called her when she’d shown up a little too much, too often, unannounced at the clinic. She’d heard enough stories about his first wife and how she’d never given him any space for his work.

That won’t be me. I wouldn’t want him hanging around the ER, either.

She saw her sister’s name come up on her computer screen—an instant message.

“Want to Scrabble?” her sister asked.

“Sure. I could use some games. What a day I had.”

“Let’s phone,” her sister’s words appeared in a instant message box on her computer screen.

Julie picked up the phone and pressed speed dial on her sister’s number. The click on the other end. “Mel. Melly. Melanie. How’d you know I’d be up?”

“Telepathy,” Mel said, her voice upbeat, as usual. “Naw, just a guess. Julie, I’ve got to tell you. There’s a new hot guy at work. I know I’m too old to chase teenagers, but he’s in his twenties, and I just want to do him.”

“Mel.”

“Oh. Sorry. I forgot. You’re married. You’re not allowed to look at the menu anymore.”

“He isn’t home yet. It pisses me off. And drives me nuts.”

“You marry a doc, you marry a God. And God does what God wants.”

“Enough.”

“I’m sorry. You married him, not me. You could’ve had my life. The revolving door of men.”

The Scrabble board appeared on the computer monitor’s screen. Mel had already begun putting letters on it. The word “round” came up.

“What if he’s had an accident?” Then, Julie added, “I can’t believe you got all five letters for ‘round.’ You must be cheating.”

“Luck of the draw,” Mel said.

Julie figured out her word for the online Scrabble board: she just added a “g” to “round” to make it “ground.” A genuine coup in Scrabble, as far as she was concerned.

“He hasn’t had an accident,” Mel said. “It’s not like this is the first time. Shall I remind you of the other nights he’s been late?”

A slight pause on the line. Something left unsaid. Better left that way, Julie thought. Don’t think about the phone number you found in his jacket. Don’t think about it.

“He’s fine,” Mel said. “You work long hours, too. You know the life. Maybe it’s completely innocent.” Mel had that edge to her voice, and Julie hated hearing it. It meant that her sister was just saying what she thought Julie wanted to hear.

“You think everybody cheats on everybody,” Julie said.

“Maybe Hut’s different.” Mel said it with her liar voice that was a little too cutesy.

On the online Scrabble board, Mel added the word “under” to “ground.”

“You are too lucky to get those five letters. It almost feels like cheating,” Julie said.

“The luck of the draw.”

“Okay, I’ll trust you. Cheater.” Julie chuckled, glancing through the letters she had to see how she could score triple points.

“Look, Julie, if you and Hut are still having problems …”

“You know,” Julie said. “When we met, I thought I’d be working beside him. The way Mom and Dad did.”

“And that would lead to a fast divorce. Just like Mom and Dad.” Mel quickly changed the subject. “Hey, is Matty over his fever?”

Suddenly, on the monitor’s screen, Mel had just put the word “nod,” adding an “od” to the first “n” of “underground.” This really screwed with Julie’s plans to use the same squares.

“Over one obstacle and on to another. He’s not doing great. A bad episode today.”

“You sound like a wicked stepmother.”

“I am. I am. I love that kid. I just feel at a loss sometimes. I don’t understand so much about him. What he goes through. He was drawing things on his arms...in class...with his pen.”

Julie put in the letter “s” under the “u” of “underground.”

“Kids do that, I guess,” Mel said, although her voice had shifted slightly as if she were hiding her alarm.

Then Julie closed down her browser so that the Scrabble board disappeared.

“Hey, did you just destroy our game?” Mel asked.

“Let’s not play anymore. Too many things going on. Look, here’s the thing, Mel. He carved it into his skin. I mean gouged. These weird little drawings.”

“Jesus. Is he okay?”

“They cleaned him up, and he seems okay. I guess.”

“What’d the psych say?”

“Not much. The usual.”

“More meds?”

“I hate that stuff. But yes.”

“What were they of?”

“What do you mean?”

“The drawings? On his arms?”

“I’m not sure. He wouldn’t tell me. Looked like a sun maybe with sunbeams coming out of it, and then one of them looked like a bunch of circles. He talked about someone named Jeannie or Gina and something about his hand and how it was bad. I guess it was just one of his moments.”

“Aw. Poor kid. He’s been through a lot. You got to give him credit. And you, too. Hang in there, wicked stepmommy. How’s my darling niece?”

“Fine. Wonderful. She sat up with Matt and read him a bedtime story. He loved it. He was like a different kid than the one who cut into himself today. I wish the psychiatrist could...well, wishing won’t get me anywhere.”

“Aw, you’re quite a mommy. You give those kids extra butterfly kisses from Aunt Melanie.”

“Oh, I almost forgot. Livy told me to tell you that she expects to see more of you in the next few days.”

“She threatening me?” Mel laughed. “You know, she’s a lot like her gramma. Did I tell you about Mom’s new hobby?” Mel always knew how to pull Julie off her worries and into funny anecdotes about their mother’s life. Mel regaled her with a long involved tale with a funny punch line about her mother wanting to open a used bookshop that only sold self-help books. “She said it’s because everyone needs to help themselves. She thinks it’s what changed her life. All those books on codependency and her diet books and that Dr. Phil book. And now she’s getting into ESP. I think she’ll end up being a witch.” They both laughed.

When they finally got off the phone, it was nearly midnight, and Mel signed off with her usual, “When you were born, you know what I told Mom? I told her that you were going to be my favorite sister in the whole world. And you still are, thirty-four years later.”

“And it’s still easy, because I’m your only sister,” Julie chuckled. “Say good night, Gracie.”

“Good night, Gracie.”

After she’d hung up the phone, Julie drew out the previous Sunday’s New York Times magazine section and opened the page to the crossword puzzle. Puzzles helped her relax a bit, and although she had trouble with this one (nearly forgetting the name of the state bird of Hawaii—“Nene”—a crossword puzzle staple), it seemed to turn off some awful buzzing in the back of her head. She took a half-dose of something to help get her to the sleeping point.

When sleep came, not long after, she thought she heard the phone ring, but it seemed to be in the wonderful dream she was having, so she didn’t try to answer it.

4

A feeling of intense physical excitement overcame her body, and he touched her hand, lightly, and held her wrist as if to restrain her. Then, she felt a tender shiver go through her, a distinct sexual charge. Hut was there, rubbing her, licking her nipples, but she couldn’t move at all—somehow she was tied to the mattress. She felt wave after wave of delicious sensation and his hand moved down her stomach and crept between her legs.

She gasped. Something about his face had changed. It seemed to fade in and out of focus.

5

She woke to sweat-soaked sheets, in the dark of her bedroom.

Livy had crawled into bed beside her, in the night. Julie felt embarrassed to have had such an erotic dream with her daughter sleeping beside her.

She watched Livy’s face, as she slept, and waited for the sun to come up.

6

The next morning, Julie checked the machine for messages, but there were none. Hut had not come home at all. She called his cell phone, but got the recording. She called the clinic; got his voice mail.

I hate you, Hut Hutchinson. I hate you for doing this to me. For making me suspicious. For making me call hospitals in case you had accidents and then finding out you had just worked too late and hadn’t thought it important enough to call me. Or your kids. I hate you for being this cold to me.

Julie, you are nuts. He loves you. He is working on important things. He loves the kids. He probably just pulled an all-nighter working on some emergency or other and is still asleep in that little cot in the filing cabinet room at the clinic.

7

Matt had been up by six. He had his Sony camcorder out and was making a movie of birds in the backyard at the bird feeder. When he saw Julie at the kitchen window, he turned the camcorder on her and waved. She waved back, opening the window to tell him that she had some oatmeal and toast with raspberry jam for him for breakfast. He lowered the camcorder from his face, and scowled a bit. “Oatmeal? What about Pop-Tarts?”

“I’ll pick some up tomorrow,” she said. “In fact, if you want anything else special, let me know.”

“Maybe some Dr. Pepper?”

There was an everydayness about the two of them talking through the open window that made her smile and forget the bad day that Matt had, and nearly forget the little scratches and scars on his arms.

She had to rouse Livy from what must’ve been a fantastic dream, because even as she hustled her into the shower, Livy kept talking about the wondrous things she saw the previous night, including flying horses.

“And in my dream, Daddy kept asking me if I could get up, and I said, of course I can, Daddy, I just want to keep sleeping. But you know what? I did get up. I thought I heard him say something.”

“Daddy had to work all night,” Julie said, kissing her on the forehead, smelling Livy’s hair—the Johnson’s Baby Shampoo of it, the little tiny last bit of babyness in her six-year-old daughter.

“You never work all night,” Livy said. “Daddy works all the time, but you don’t.”

“I know. I have a perfect job.”

“Like on ER.”

“Just like that,” Julie grinned. “Plus, I get to be Mommy.”

“Poor Daddy,” Livy said. “He never gets to be Daddy anymore.”

“Poor Daddy is right,” Julie said, and tried not to think of the slip of paper with a phone number on it that smelled of perfume that she’d found in Hut’s overcoat, a number she had never called, a woman whose name she didn’t know, a woman who might not even exist except in a jealous, insecure wife’s imagination.

8

She did her telephone punch-in when she got to Rellingford Hospital, and then proceeded down the long rose-colored hallway to the ER.

She passed some medics and other nurses, said the obligatory morning hellos and listened to the lukewarm jokes, but her mind was elsewhere and she was craving coffee. The staff in the ER was small, like everything else in Rellingford. There was simply the doc—Dr. Davison—and a unit clerk, and a few nurses on the day shift.

Night shift was even more bare bones. Not a lot happened out in Rellingford on a continuing basis for the ER, and some days, nothing happened beyond a twisted ankle or a kid who need a few stitches and a hug. There were always lab techs around, the respiratory therapists, but it was bare bones in the ER most days, with an on-call staff in case anything major came down.

She picked up the report from Nancy Maier, the outgoing staff nurse, and then grabbed a cup of coffee from the vending machine room, and thank God it was Starbucks or she would’ve been in a bad mood over the usual mud-in-a-cup, and then she went off to triage to get the long shift going.

By the late afternoon, two new patients had come in, one of them from a car wreck out on the main highway, which made her think about Hut and hope that he was okay. Surely, he’d page her or call, and, she had to remember, if something happened to him, she’d have been contacted.

The patient who arrived had been lucky—a broken leg, perhaps, and a dislocated shoulder. With her coworkers and the doc on his way, Julie got to work in triage.

Just before five, her shift supervisor called her over to an empty office, and said, “Julie. Something’s happened.”

The supervisor had that tone of voice that meant something horrible. Something tragic. She’d heard the tone when the news came about any major public tragedy—from the World Trade Center horror of a few years’ previous to the sudden death of one of the visiting physicians. Immediately, Julie thought of the children. Matt and his troubles. Matt and the time she’d seen him with a knife, and even though he hadn’t done anything to himself with it, she had known—he'd communicated with his eyes—that he was thinking about his real mother, about where she was, the institution outside Philadelphia, about all the things that Matt had whirling in his mind at all times …

“Not Matty,” Julie said, tears already forming in her eyes. Images of Matt, memories of him, his violent outbursts, his tantrums, his moods.

“No,” her supervisor said, softly.

Chapter Four

1

The morgue wasn’t located in the hospital, but at the sheriff’s station one township over. It was an area of what New Jerseyans called the Lake District that was less wooded and natural than paved over and set up right off the major highway.

The sheriff’s station looked like an industrial park, and the morgue was toward the back. Julie had insisted that she could drive, that it was a mistake, that none of this made sense, and she was fine, until she saw the staircase down to the morgue.

It looked like she had to walk down into limbo. It grew cold with each step, and she had to steady herself on the railing. She felt as if, at any moment, she might trip on the stairs.

A policewoman accompanied her, and Julie could tell that the woman watched her to make sure she wouldn’t collapse or stumble.

She sat down on the seventh step and covered her face with her hands.

“We can sit here for as long as you want,” the cop said.

Julie wasn’t sure how much time had passed. “I’ve seen dead people before,” she said, steeling herself, wiping her eyes. “It’s all right. It is. I’m a nurse.” She wasn’t sure if she said any of this aloud or not, as she got up and went down to the chilly floor below, where the lights were a flickering blue and the smells were talcum, alcohol, and something that reminded her too much of the Emergency Room.

And then, the room itself: shiny and silver and garish in the overhead lighting, which was flat and made the coroner and the sheriff look as if they, too, were dead, as they stood there over the body. In the far corner of the room, three large blue plastic barrels that seemed out of place. It wasn’t as big a room as she had expected, and she felt crowded by the others there, and self-conscious because she was sure they were just watching her as if she might do something irrational.

She hadn’t looked at the face of the dead man until then.

2

“Mrs. Hutchinson?”

“It’s not him,” she said. “Thank God. Oh my God. It’s not him.”

The sheriff was a man named Cottrell, whom she knew only from the time he’d brought Matt in when Matt had stolen a car at twelve, and the sheriff told her that the car was undamaged, the owners were willing to drop charges, and Matt had been bawling like a baby. Rellingford was that kind of town. Cottrell had told her, then, that he understood Matt’s situation from “Dr. Hutchinson,” and so he hoped it would just be an isolated incident. Dr. Hutchinson was known in Rellingford. They knew of his first wife, and her “troubles.” They knew of Matt and his “situation.”

She thought back then she'd probably never see the sheriff again. How many times in life do you have to see the local authorities?

She took the facial tissue he offered and wiped her eyes. Her vision came back into focus. She felt a boundless happiness for that moment, and a distant sorrow for this murder victim. She looked at the face. She didn’t recognize him at all. She could see why the mistake had been made. Hut had floppy auburn hair, too, and he had that kind of square jaw that reminded her of the Midwest and cornfields for some reason. But that was really it. This corpse in front of her was pale, and the lips and nose were all wrong. “It’s a mistake,” she said. “It’s not him.”

“This is Detective McGuane, from Manhattan,” the sheriff said too formally.

Julie didn’t glance up at any of them. People make mistakes all the time. Errors in judgment. This is why they need someone to identify bodies. Human error is the norm in life. Of course that’s true. Of course.

“Mrs. Hutchinson, I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes. Perhaps not right now. Not today. But soon. The sooner the better,” the stranger said.

She couldn’t look up at his face.

She kept watching the dead man. She was aware of the wounds and knew that whoever had killed the man on the table had a knowledge of where to strike—there were knife entry wounds at the arm, the lungs, the neck, and the heart. Lacerations on the shoulders and hands, where there might’ve been a struggle. She had worked in the city and had seen murder victims before, years ago, when she had been a newly minted RN, and had often worked the graveyard shift in the ER. She’d seen the victims of gang killings then, of domestic homicide, of any number of ways that a human being could be killed.

She had been able, quickly, to separate herself from the dead, even in her mid-twenties, by viewing them as having gone on—as being empty shells. It was as she’d been taught in church, and although she only believed sporadically, it helped to think of death that way, particularly a violent death: their suffering is over. They’re in heaven now. They’re in some afterlife that was somehow better than the raw deal they’d gotten in this world.

“It can’t be him.”

“He’s your husband,” McGuane said. “We have his personal effects. Wallet, keys, and so on. Mrs. Hutchinson. This is Dr. Jeffrey ‘Hut’ Hutchinson. I know this is a tremendous shock.”

She had thought of him so much as Hut that she had nearly forgotten his real first name: Jeff. It’s not him. Why do they keep insisting it’s Hut? It’s not Hut.

She looked at the wounds, at the arms, the belly, and it wasn’t until she saw the small circular tattoo on the dead man’s left shoulder that it hit her too hard. She felt nausea in her stomach, and a distant, shrill ringing in her ears.

Someone wrapped his arms around her, holding her up. Had she been falling? She tugged away from the arms and stumbled toward the wall, pressing her forehead into the coolness of the wall itself, as if she could press herself through it.

And then, she knew that she was going to fall. She was going to fall, and it seemed in slow motion that she would hit the edge of a small metal cabinet on her way down, and then her head would hit the floor.

3

She awoke in a darkened room, the only light coming from beneath a door. The smell of fresh coffee somewhere, beyond the darkness. Gradually, as her eyes focused, she saw more: it was simply an office, probably at the sheriff’s station. She felt achy and nauseated, but gradually, perhaps a half hour after opening her eyes, she pushed herself up from the cot. Her head ached, and she reached to touch the back of her skull. Someone had already taped some gauze just under her hairline at the nape of her neck. She remembered the fall and winced with pain when she moved her jaw a little. She heard voices beyond the small room. She stepped out into a too-bright light and went to sit in a large chair in a corner of the sheriff’s office. He had glanced up from his desk and laid the phone back in its cradle.

“Mrs. Hutchinson? How are...how are you doing?”

“I’m a little thirsty, if I could …”

“Certainly,” the sheriff said, who then went out into the bustling main office to get a cup of water for her. Before the door shut behind him, she saw the man named McGuane again. He was gaunt and had lightly graying dark hair that seemed too long for a detective. He looked to be about fifty, and something in his demeanor and his wrinkled jacket made her think of a scarecrow. He stared at her as the door closed behind the sheriff.

“We had you checked out,” the sheriff said. “Your head. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I don’t think it’s a problem,” she said, but the headache was pretty strong.

Then, she was alone again in the office, blinds drawn around the windows.

After the sheriff returned with a large plastic cup of water, McGuane followed.

She watched as he went and took a chair opposite her, pulling it in closer.

She couldn’t look at him again. Not for a while.

“I wish I could be gentler about this,” McGuane said.

4

Mel came to take her home and hugged her when she saw her. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing to the padded yellow envelope in Julie’s hands.

“Personal effects, they said. Wallet, keys, watch,” Julie said, feeling dead on the inside.

“Did you hurt yourself?” Mel gasped when Julie turned away from her.

Julie felt the bandaging on her neck. “Oh. That. It’s nothing. Really.”

5

In the car, Mel said, “I don’t even know what to say, sweetie. I just don’t. We’ll go home. Somehow, we’ll sort this out.”

You hated him, Julie wanted to say. You told me on my wedding day that he was a poor bet for a husband. You told me he had too much baggage. Don’t sit here and pretend everything will ever be all right again.

Julie said, “Hut bought a gun two years ago. He said he didn’t like the way there was too much crime, even in the suburbs. He bought it and I hated it and I tried to throw it away twice. He had it locked up at the top of the linen closet. I made him take the bullets out of it and put those elsewhere. I wish I hadn’t insisted on it. I wish he had his gun with him. I wish he had it. He might still be alive.”

She felt her sister’s touch on her scalp, combing through her hair, just as her older sister had done when they’d been kids, when Julie had come home from a bad day in kindergarten or first grade, a day of fears and a day of friendships lost. Mel would comb her fingers through Julie’s then-blond hair and whisper, “I’m going to brush all the bad things from your head, Jules. Don’t worry.”

6

At home, she lay down on top of her bedspread and stared up at the ceiling until her eyes lost their focus and she had to shut them.

In her dream, she saw the face again.

His face. Not dead, but alive.

Not on a shiny metal table, pasty-white skin, covered with blotches of brown-red and bright blue bruises.

But as he had been the last moment she had seen him. Alive.

It was morning, and she had just made coffee.

She turned to him, feeling the sorrow that came with the knowledge of the loss.

His warm brown eyes brightened when he finished telling a truly bad joke to her, and she chastised him for spilling coffee on the edge of his sleeve. He had given her that look that meant he was tired of the small, petty comments. In the dream, she tried to erase even making a comment about the coffee stain. She looked at him and said, “Try to be home early at least one night this week.”

“You know how demanding things are right now.” His voice—had she even remembered it correctly in her dream? “It’s not as if I’m making people get sick so I can work late and never be home with my wife and kids. You think I’m that kind of man?”

Even in the dream, the thought of another woman whom he might or might not be seeing came up for her, a cloud that was both distant and close.

“Well, you don’t even know your son at this point,” she said—and something inside her said, don’t keep doing this to him, he’s going to want to leave you if you do, don’t become the bitch of the world—and yet, she kept saying, “I got up in the middle of the night and he was cycling again.” Cycling was their word for Matt’s phases that seemed nearly manic when he would stay up all night, playing games of solitaire for too many hours, or doodling ridiculous images in his art notebook, or playing computer chess by himself.

“Don’t worry about him. All you do is worry sometimes. I’d like to be home once and not have to be surrounded by this...this drama,” Hut said.

And then, the dream evaporated, and when she awoke, in her bed, she thought for just a minute that nothing bad had happened to him, that he would be home later that night, that all of it had just been a dream.

But the yellow padded envelope lay next to her pillow.

7

She opened the yellow envelope and poured the watch and the keys out on her bedspread. The watch was from her, on their first anniversary. It had cost too much money—just under four hundred dollars at Saks, but she felt he needed a really good watch for his work. She wondered if she were still paying on her Visa for it. He had loved the watch, and told her that it was the best gift he’d ever received next to Livy, who had arrived a scant six months after they married. His gargantuan key set—for the house, the clinic, his car, and even keys he’d told her he’d had since he was a kid. She’d joked with him sometimes, asking him if those were keys in his pocket or if he was just happy to see her. His wallet had the normal things she knew would be in there: his credit cards, his social security card, the pictures of the kids, the pictures of her, seventy dollars cash, and a few wadded up receipts.

All I have left of you, Hut. This is it.

She switched on the little color TV above the dresser, clicking the remote to surf channels, and was afraid for a moment that the news would come on detailing the murder. But no matter what channel she went to, no one mentioned Hut’s murder. We’re not the news. We’re not what people want to hear about.

A gentle tapping at her bedroom door. The door slid open slightly. Mel. Her sister’s face was ashen, but brightened a bit as if she had just remembered some piece of good news. “You’re awake.” Her voice was smooth and soft.

Julie nodded, stretching. No headache. It would be back, but not just yet. She swung her feet over the edge of the bed, but was not ready to stand up.

“Can I get you some tea? Maybe some decaf chai?”

“I’m fine. Really,” Julie said. She glanced over at the wide mirror that she and Hut had picked out at Pottery Barn two years before. Her face was all in brambles, to her. Not her face at all, just as the dead man on the table had not had Hut’s face.

“I’m fine,” she repeated.

8

She managed a shower, and while the steamy water cascaded over her, she didn’t close her eyes. Didn’t want to see inside her own head. Behind the opaque shower curtain, she could see the shadow coming into the bathroom.

Hut. It would be Hut, she knew. He would grin as he pulled back the curtain. Naked and happy as a puppy, back in their first days. His grin infectious, his way of touching her so new and so right. Alive. Alive and fresh and younger than he should’ve been in his mid-thirties then. Not in a house with a mortgage too high for an in-debt doctor to the poor and an ER nurse. But in her little apartment in the city, her crappy little place where they’d made a nest, briefly, before her pregnancy, where they’d made love too many times and for too many hours to count. How was she to know that making love was something more than pleasure? More than making a baby? It had been a bonding between them, a clasping of hands that reminded her not of sex, but of absolute love, and how he had been everything to her. Everything.

The shower beating down on her face washed the tears from her.

When she emerged from the shower, toweled off and dressed, she wasn’t sure why she even cared if she was clean.

She wanted to go to Livy, and to Matt, she wanted her children. She wanted them in her arms and she wanted them now.

9

The detective showed up at six thirty that evening.

Chapter Five

1

They sat in the living room. Although all the lamps were turned up, even the overly bright halogen one near the fireplace, Julie felt as if it were shadowy.

She had whole-wheat toast and some tea with a little honey. It was all she had eaten that day, and all she had wanted to eat.

“I don’t really understand,” she said, after the first few questions.

“It’s a pattern,” McGuane said. He drank a Diet Coke and refused the cookies offered by Mel, who sat near the upright piano but said nothing. Julie noticed his wedding band and a ring that looked like a college signet ring. She didn’t want to look back up at his face.

“Why haven’t you gotten him yet?” she asked.

2

McGuane took a sip from his soda, and then glanced over at Mel. Then, out the window. He nodded as if talking to himself. “I wish I had an answer for you. Can you think of anything that would connect your husband to this?”

“I don’t know. I can’t imagine …” Julie looked down at her teacup. Keep your fingers from trembling. Just keep the teacup still.

“We’re hoping you might have records here. Not much to go over at the clinic.”

She glanced up at his face. “He didn’t bring his work home. That was important to him.”

After the detective had passed her the beige folder with the photographs, she set her cup down on the red table beside her. She opened the folder.

“You know,” McGuane said, more to Mel than to her. “I live across the Hudson all my life, and I had no idea Jersey is anything but an industrial tract and, you know, ‘The Sopranos.’ Then I come out here and there are all these lakes and trees and it’s like, I don’t know, Pennsylvania.”

“Except without the Amish,” Mel said. She offered up a weak grin. Julie wished she’d had the presence of mind to thank her out loud for adding some humor to the somber atmosphere.

Death is everywhere. Death is all around, all the time, she thought. At work, and now here. In my living room. In my house. Uninvited. I don’t want it.

Julie turned each photograph over.

More dead people. Just faces. Pale. Not really human anymore. Like white masks. Hollow.

“I’m sorry to do this to you,” he said, his voice barely more than a mumble. “I’d rather catch this guy before he does it again.”

“I’ve never seen these people before,” she said. The sound of her own voice, weary and flat, made her feel heavier.

The pictures: two women and a man. Eyes closed. Empty shells of human beings. Gone.

Her half-Catholic, half-Episcopalian upbringing reared up in her. Their spirits have flown. They are in God’s hands. They are in heaven. Or some other finer place. Beyond trouble. Beyond this world.

Beyond the grasp of the one who killed them.

“There’s another picture,” McGuane said. “Inside.”

She checked the folder. Under a thin piece of onionskin paper, one last photograph.

It was a man’s back. Perhaps it was Hut’s. Nothing reminded her of him, but she had barely recognized him in the morgue, so she didn’t expect to identify him without seeing his face. That was why pictures like this were safe. They could be of anyone and no one at the same time.

All kinds of circles and drawings were carved into the man’s back, from the shoulder blades down to the small of the back, just above the buttocks.

“Do you have any idea what this might be?”

Julie shook her head.

“He carves things into the bodies. He has a ritual. We know a little about what the symbols are. We just don’t know where they lead us.”

Julie remembered the carving on Matt’s arm. Don’t be ridiculous. It’s nothing like this. Matt’s arm and this man’s back have different things on them. Don’t let your mind go with this, Julie. Don’t.

“No idea. What is it? They’re like tattoos.”

“Can I see?” Mel asked.

Julie glanced at McGuane who gave a slight shrug. Mel got up and went over to retrieve the picture. After glancing at it, Mel said, “You’re making her look at this kind of stuff, now?”

McGuane kept his composure. “We want to do everything we can to stop this guy.”

“It’s all right, Mel. Really,” Julie said. “We should help. I want to. I want to see who...what kind of monster …” She covered her face with her hands.

Just go away, she thought. Everyone go away. Let it be someone else who loses their husband. Not me. Let it be anyone else. Hut, where are you? Why did you leave? Why aren’t you here with me?

Mel and McGuane started talking. Mel went to sit down on the two steps that led up to the dining area, at the edge of the room. Julie felt she could shut them all out. Just block them, like she were a child with her hands over her ears.

Then, she brought her hands down from her face. They were still there. They watched her as if she were something that were about to break.

“We’ve tried to locate the orphanage,” McGuane said.

She glanced up from the pictures. “The what?”

“Orphanage. Where your husband grew up.”

She hesitated before speaking. She tried to grasp his meaning. “He had parents.”

McGuane glanced at her sharply.

“Tell me,” she said. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” McGuane said. “Nothing at all.”

“I know he was adopted,” Julie said. “But he was little. Three or four. I think four.”

“Mrs. Hutchinson, your husband wasn’t adopted until he was sixteen. Before that he was a ward of the state of New York.”

“What?”

“He was part of a special program, Mrs. Hutchinson. It was the 1970s, and there was some special aptitude your husband had to qualify for this program. As a boy.”

“Are you sure you mean my husband? Jeff Hutchinson?”

McGuane nodded. “I’m sorry that you weren’t aware. I assumed that your husband would have informed you about his past. About his childhood.”

She sat there, stunned.

“Did you ever speak with his adoptive parents about his past?”

“No,” she said, her face reddening. “What...what kind of program was he in?”

McGuane gave what looked to her like an ironic grin. “Not sure yet. I was hoping you could tell me, actually.”

“I have no idea,” she said, her voice taking on a faraway quality as if she were ransacking memories to try and remember one thing he might’ve said about something from childhood that seemed out of the ordinary. Her mother’s annoying voice erupted in her head, the bad advice given when she got engaged to Hut: Remember, wives never really know much about their husbands. It’s just the way marriage is. That’s why your father and I got divorced. They keep secrets. They hold back. To hell with it. Then, she remembered something. “Oh. He told me he was …” she glanced at Mel as if trying to get her to confirm a memory of a conversation. “You were there. It was about some accident when he was little. He said he was in a hospital for a long time.”

“All we know is that it was a school called Daylight. Or the Daylight Project. And it was not an ordinary program.”

“Why is that important?”

“Your husband may have known one of the other victims. All of them were there. Your husband may have known the man who killed him. We’re just looking into things for now. Trying to connect the dots,” McGuane said. “A man, roughly your husband’s age, was attacked by the killer. But not killed. His memory, after the attack, isn’t so good. But he knew about your husband. He knew about two women who were also killed. We’re having trouble with his story, simply because … well, he claims to have psychic knowledge.”

“Psychic?” Mel said, shooting a glance at Julie. Julie caught it: what the hell?

“Wait, are you saying that some psychic is claiming things, and the NYPD is listening?”

“We’ve had some help, at times, from the psychic community, Mrs. Hutchinson,” McGuane said, straight-faced. “I personally don’t really believe in that kind of thing. But, sometimes it helps.”

“So you’re going to use a psychic to find who killed Hut?” Julie could not repress a laugh.

McGuane glanced down at his soda. “There are all kinds of ways to find a killer, Mrs. Hutchinson. I’m sure you would want us to use every resource at our disposal.”

Mel chimed in. “Mom told me that sometimes psychics feel they see a murder scene,” she said.

“Sure,” Julie deadpanned. “Maybe we should ask Livy to tune in on her brain radio.” Then, more seriously, to McGuane, “You think that my husband knew psychics?”

“No, nothing like that,” McGuane said.

“Because he didn’t. He didn’t go for mumbo-jumbo. That’s one thing I can say for sure about him. He was a doctor. He was fascinated by scientific research. He didn’t think life was mystical,” Julie said.

“That’s true,” Mel said, and Julie was thankful she was there.

Mel got up to go get a glass of water. McGuane made a joke about crazies who phoned in solutions to murders. “This guy may just be one of the crazies, that’s true,” he said. “Still, he knew some things.”

“Where did it happen?” Julie asked, wanting to steer the conversation away from mumbo-jumbo.

McGuane looked out, beyond the living room window, as if thinking about how to delicately answer this question. “That doesn’t really matter right now.”

“It does to me.”

“All right. Just outside town. Out in some hills beyond the highway.”

“He died in the woods.”

“We found his car on the side of the road,” McGuane said. “In Newark.”

“But you found him nearby.”

“Yes.”

“I want to go there.”

3

Against his better judgment, McGuane agreed to drive her to the place where her husband had been murdered. The roads were slick from a previous rain, and he took the turns along the highway slowly, both for safety and because he felt as if he had a fragile item in his car.

They said nothing as he drove along the back road that led up to the hillside, beyond the suburbs, and Julie stared straight ahead the whole time, thinking of nothing whatsoever to mention.

When they got there, to the edge of the road where the killer had left the victim’s car, McGuane parked, got out, and went around to open her door.

“Thank you,” she said.

He had positioned the headlights of the car to shine on the narrow gravel path that cut through the woods.

“He took your husband through there,” McGuane pointed, and then made a circle with his finger in the air. “There’s a clearing when you go higher.”

“I suppose it’s too dark to go up there.”

“Mrs. Hutchinson, if you think this will help at all,” he said, “I’ll get a flashlight and we can go up there. It’s muddy, and frankly, any footprint we leave might obscure some vital piece of evidence. I hate taking that chance.”

She nodded and glanced around the woods. “Do you know when he died?”

“We’re not sure. Not yet. I’d guess it was early afternoon, yesterday. Might’ve been last night. Some mountain bikers use that path. They’d been going up and down the hills around here this morning. One of them thought he saw a dead deer and went to get a closer look. Only, well, it wasn’t...what he had thought. That was before nine this morning.”

“It rained yesterday, off and on,” she said.

“But it was fairly dry when the bicyclists came through here.”

“Where did the car end up? My husband’s Audi?”

“Mrs. Hutchinson,” McGuane said. “it’s important to examine every little detail of this crime scene.”

“It’s impounded,” she nodded, understanding. “Livy and I were here yesterday. Well, not here. Miles away, really. To the west. But we were in the woods, up in the hills.” She walked up to the edge of the path. She looked into the darkness between the trees as if half expecting someone to be there. Then, she turned, facing the headlights of McGuane’s car and said, “Please take me home now. I think I’m going to be sick.”

4

Later that evening, after the detective had gone, and Julie walked in the front door, Mel called to her from the top of the stairs. The kids were all ready for bed. It was nearly ten, and everybody was exhausted. Julie went to sit on the edge of Livy’s bed.

Matt unrolled his sleeping bag on the floor near Livy’s bed.

“It’s okay for a night or two,” Julie said. “It’s wonderful, in fact. But you need to move it back to your own bedroom soon. Okay?” Even as she said this, she wanted to bring both of them into her own bed and hold them for as long as possible.

Matt’s reaction had surprised her. She had suspected he might have a violent outburst, or become agitated. But he chose silence, instead. He had barely said a word since Julie had told him of his father’s death, but stuck close to Livy who had bawled for hours before she had just gone to her room and begun reading. Julie wasn’t sure how Livy understood death, and even as she tucked her in, Livy looked at her as if she didn’t quite believe that her father was not coming home again.

Mel sat next to Matt on his temporary bed, while Julie began singing “Lullaby and Goodnight” to Livy, who clung to her as she fell asleep.

“It’s nice of you to do this,” she whispered to Matt before kissing him good night, which he shrugged away as if he were too old for kisses on the forehead.

“I want to keep her safe,” Matt said.

Julie glanced around his sleeping bag. “You usually sleep with your camera.”

“Not tonight, Julie. I don’t feel like making a movie out of this,” he said. He covered himself up to his neck in the sleeping bag and then rested his head on the pillow. “You won’t let me go back to my mother, will you?”

Julie felt a lump in her throat. “Of course not. We’re family,” she said. “You and me and Livy. Don’t even think it. Remember when all those papers got signed? You’re stuck with me, bucko.”

5

When the kids were asleep, she went to the linen closet and drew a footstool out so she could reach the very top shelf. She drew a metal box down. It clanked when she moved it. She took it into her room and set it on the dresser. She found the small key to the lock. She opened the box. Wrapped in a thin cloth, the gun. She knew nothing about guns. She knew this was some special type of revolver that Hut had to get a license for. She hadn’t wanted to know about it. She had pretended that the bad people never showed up at your door in the suburbs.

Then, she went to find the clip to put in it. She didn’t think she’d use it. She didn’t think she’d ever need to. But she wanted to feel as if it was there for her, if anything ever threatened her children.

6

Before Julie went to bed, she looked up the phone number in an old Day Runner that she’d kept since their wedding day. She punched in the number on her cell phone. California. The area code had changed. She had to tap the number in again, this time with another area code.

At first no one picked up. Then, a man’s voice. “Yes?”

“Mr. Hutchinson. This is Julie.”

He said nothing in response.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She could not help her tears.

“It’s all right, it’s all right,” Hut’s father said. His voice had a slightly Midwestern inflection. She imagined a husky man of seventy-one with salt-and-pepper hair. “We heard from the authorities. How are you doing?”

She didn’t want to lie. She wiped at her eyes with her free hand. “I don’t know.”

“How’s Matty and Livy?”

“Sad. Quiet. I can’t imagine what they’re thinking.”

“The shock has just hit us both in the gut,” he said. “I’m glad you called. We needed to get in touch. At some point. Even if it would be against his wishes.”

“I know.”

“Joanne’s sleeping. She’s been sleeping since we heard.”

“We can talk another time. Would that be all right?”

“Of course,” he said. “And Julie, it’s good to hear from you. Even under these circumstances. We want to try and keep up now, if possible. Would that be all right?”

Julie tried to erase the words her husband had used over the years about his parents, about how horrible they’d been to him, about how they could not come to the wedding, about how they had treated him like a piece of trash since the moment they’d adopted him, about horrible verbal and mental abuse at their hands, about how he had to use college scholarships to escape them, and get beyond their cold darkness.

It didn’t seem to matter anymore. She wanted to know them. She wanted to know more about Hut.

“Of course,” she said. “I want my daughter to know her grandparents. And Matt.”

“Thank you,” the man said. “He never thought of us as his parents. Not really. But we loved him, despite everything. We really loved our son.”

It struck her as normal for him to say that, even though Hut had all but convinced her that his father was a monster and his mother was an overly passive contributor to his father’s moods. Hut was dead now, after all. It was easy for his parents to remember their love for him. She had always assumed that Hut would deeply regret the rift he’d created with his folks when one of them died. She had never anticipated that Hut would die first, and that she might finally get to know his adoptive mother and father, two people she had only briefly met, during a trip when Hut had just blown up with anger at them and he and Julie had to retreat back to a hotel “rather than spend ten more seconds with those awful people!” as Hut had yelled at the time.

7

She woke up late and couldn’t pull herself out of bed until eleven. She had the vague memory of a dirty dream—something about a man pressing his fingers into her and licking her thighs. It made her feel a little guilty to have such a dream so soon after Hut’s death.

When she finally rose, she made some calls to the sheriff. Julie learned from the sheriff’s office that Detective McGuane had gotten some kind of ridiculous permission to transfer Hut’s body to a morgue in Manhattan.

“It’s necessary,” the sheriff told her on the phone, and she had first called Andrew Money, a lawyer she knew from work at the hospital, to see what her legal rights were in this—she’d left an overly detailed message for the lawyer, which she wished she could’ve erased right after she’d finished with it.

By noon, she had tried to reach McGuane by phone, furious that she could not plan a funeral and have her husband’s body safe from the dissectors of the autopsy room.

Finally, McGuane tracked her down, via cell phone. “Mrs. Hutchinson, we need to talk again. As soon as possible.”

8

“I can drive you,” Mel said.

“I can do it. I need the drive. I’ll be fine.”

“No, I’m going to drive you. Laura can stay with the kids. You should not be behind the wheel of a car right now. Not with all this,” Mel said. “I can go shopping—where’s this guy? Hey, he’s right around the corner from Bed, Bath & Beyond. I need to get a few things. So, you just call me when you’re done. I can shop ’til midnight if I have to.”

It took them nearly two hours to get to the city, so she was at McGuane’s office just before three.

McGuane’s office was full of maps and pictures of what might’ve been forensics snapshots. A gallery of the dead in pictures.

A young woman sat opposite McGuane. She glanced back at Julie, as if startled from a private conversation.

“Mrs. Hutchinson, this is Officer Donati. She’s our point person in forensics.”

Donati nodded in her direction, a warm but silent greeting.

“Coffee?” McGuane asked, pointed toward a Mr. Coffee machine that looked filthy at the edge of his desk.

She shook her head slightly. “What is it you wouldn’t tell me on the phone?”

“Please, sit down,” McGuane said, overly polite, gesturing to an empty chair near the other officer.

Donati spoke up. “This happens from time to time with transfers between morgues and paperwork foul-ups, although in this case, it’s somewhat unique. It’s …”

McGuane cut her off. “Mrs. Hutchinson, your husband’s body is missing.”

Chapter Six

1

It was nearly four thirty when she stepped out onto the street in Manhattan and just began wandering. She felt as if the woman named Julie Hutchinson had been hollowed out, and now she was someone else.

She walked down to Sixth Avenue and cut east over to Washington Square. The great arch was fenced off, and the circle within the park had some acrobat passing a hat after a brief show. Dogs in the dog run were barking, and she almost wished she were a drug addict so she could buy some drug from the dealers at the edge of the park, some drug that would just put her further away from reality.

Then along the streets, again, past NYU, past the windows of shops full of shoes or books or pastries or trendy clothes.

She stepped into Shakespeare & Company, a bookstore that had been a favorite of hers from her student days. She browsed the shelves, wondering what she should be looking for.

Then, she remembered the conversation with her mother, after Mel had done a three-way phone conversation when the news of Hut’s murder had arrived; her mother had recommended a specific book. What was it?

Something about The Life Beyond.

She touched each book on the shelf, as if it would speak to her. None of them did.

“Can I help you?” a young woman asked.

Julie smiled, shrugged a little. “I guess I’m looking for a book. I thought it would be in self-help. It’s called The Life Beyond. At least, I think that’s the title.”

“Let me look it up,” the clerk said, and then retreated to the cash register counter. She emerged a few moments later. “I’m afraid we don’t have that one in at the moment. Michael Diamond’s books are a little hard to get these days. We could order it for you, if you like.”

Julie felt normal for the two minutes or so it took to order the book, but when she was on the street again, it was as if she were afraid to run into her old self. The sky, seen between the overhang of buildings, was shadowy with clouds. She smelled rain in the air.

2

She wandered neighborhoods, remembering how it had felt to be younger and living in the city.

She glanced in shop windows along Greenwich Avenue, crossed over to Ninth and passed by Electric Lady Studios, thinking of Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, the legends who had recorded there, past the Barnes and Noble that had, when she’d lived there, been a B. Dalton’s, past Gray’s Papaya and moved through other stops along her memory’s lane, and there she was, outside her old apartment building.

It was as rundown as it had been then, when she and Hut had their trysts, when she had just finished getting over a heartbreak of her twenties and decided that there was no such thing as romantic love, and then, suddenly, she had met Hut, and she believed in things again. She believed that love and romance and happiness were in the world for her.

She sat down on a stoop outside a junk shop on Breton Street, which conjured a scene from her twenties of buying funky lava lamps and scratched-up coffee tables, and she thought of her old friends—Alicia and Joe, whom she used to go to hang out with, see movies, explore the city, cry over relationships that didn’t work, and laugh when life just became too absurd, or the time Joe asked if she’d be the “Best Woman” at his ring ceremony with his husband, Rick, and she had stood on the corner of Bleecker and Cornelius and just wept with happiness for him because she felt someone should be happy and in love.

Those were her old days, and then, Hut had come along, and she’d left it all behind. She’d called Joe and Rick less and less, and then Alicia had grown cold (or had it been me? Julie wondered). Alicia had an art studio somewhere now, and Joe was writing novels about the gay community. She had meant to read them, meant to follow up on Alicia’s shows and installations, but Hut had brought her out to Rellingford, and they had quickly built a life, which seemed at times beyond their means. She glanced up at the window that had been her apartment, across the street.

Then down the windows to the Chinese laundry, and the overpriced Ethiopian Restaurant next door to it, and beyond that the best deli within three miles. She had loved this neighborhood. She had loved her too-tiny place with its weird neighbors and elevator that worked twice per year (the holidays, because the owner of the building got it inspected then), with its inner walls that Joe had called “birth canal pink,” and the crumbly ceiling in the bathroom.

She remembered Joe’s number. She’d surprise him. It had been at least two years since they’d talked. And now, here she was, a block away from his place. Opened her cell phone. Tapped in the number.

He picked up on the third ring. “Julie?” he asked. Caller ID ruined her surprise.

“Hey, Joe,” she said, feeling as if she were not mid-thirties but mid-twenties.

“Well, we thought you’d dropped off the face of the earth. How the hell are you?”

“I’m in the neighborhood.”

“Want to come on over? Or we can go over to Starbucks.”

“I just was remembering stuff. You remember the time when we got tickets for Phantom?”

“Oh yeah, that was great,” he laughed. “We show up on the wrong night, miss the night we were supposed to go, and then Alicia manages to flirt with one of the ushers.”

“And gets us the best seats in the house. Sneaking into a theater was never so fun. God. We used to have such adventures. Some of which are not befitting a properly married suburban wife.”

“I know. I’ll be able to blackmail you in a few years.” As he said this, she could practically hear his good-natured grin on the phone.

“We were such good friends, Joe.”

“Hey. I’ll hear none of that. We still are,” he said. “You don’t sound so good. What’s up?”

Should I tell him? No. If I tell him, it’ll lead to a long sad story and I’ll cry and he’ll cry and he’ll insist on coming down here to comfort me and I’d have to look at him and feel as if my life were nothing but sorrow.

“Just a bad day,” she said. “And I’ve got to get back to the kids.”

“Well, don’t be a stranger. Rick mentioned you the other day. He said he thought he heard your name somewhere. Couldn’t remember where.”

“It’s always nice to be remembered. I miss you, Joe.”

“Ditto, Jules.”

After a bit more of the “let’s get together” and “be sure and call back soon,” she closed the phone, reopened it and was about to call her sister. Two skinny girls of eighteen or nineteen, dressed as if they were Fifth Avenue fashion models, walked in Prada and Gucci along the cracked sidewalk in front of her. “And so I was like, he’s gay, you idiot, run for the hills,” one girl said to the other as they loped along, uncertain in the stiletto heels.

Julie glanced at the cell phone, and then set it down on the step. She opened her handbag, dug down to her wallet, opening it up and digging through a few torn small pieces of paper.

When she found the sliver of paper she had been looking for, she stared at the phone number for a few minutes as if an entire world were within it.

Whomever her husband had been seeing, this was her.

This mysterious woman in the city who had some hold on Hut. She looked at it. Looked at the scrawl of it. Not Hut’s handwriting. Did you have a lover, Hut? A woman whom you met in the city? The one who kept you there some nights, not sleeping on the air mattress or a cot at the clinic—someone you longed to see when Matt or Livy or I got to be too much for you?

She wanted to call the number.

Instead, she called up her sister, to come get her, to take her home.

3

Mel had other ideas. “You need a meal in you, and the kids’ll be fine with Laura. She said they could spend the night if need be.”

They drove to Benny’s Burritos, and Mel got them a table at a corner window so they could have a little privacy. Mel ordered a chicken burrito that they’d split, and a margarita for Julie. “A little tequila never hurt anybody.”

“Except a drunk. You shop for anything?” Mel squinted her eyes, slightly, as she watched her.

“You really want to know?”

“Sure.”

“I got a Pilates workout tape. I wanted some nice towels, but none of them seemed right. Some scented candles. They smell like blueberries. Oh, and I got you a gift. Just a little one. A bathrobe.”

“Thank you,” Julie said, managing a grin. She felt cold inside.

“Well, it’s just a terry bathrobe. Don’t thank me too much. I just don’t want to see you wandering the house in your underwear ever again.”

When the chips and salsa came, Mel pushed them toward Julie. “Start eating. I don’t think you’ve had more than toast in two days.”

Julie hesitated, then decided that appetite or no, she needed something. “It’s good.”

“It’s always good here,” Mel said. “So, why’d you keep me waiting?”

“I needed a hike.”

Mel grinned. “Good. First sign of life from you.”

“I’m running on fumes right now,” Julie said. “I am so angry. Pissed off. At the fucking cops.”

“You never swear,” Mel said. “You kiss with that mouth?”

“I’m sorry. They’re incompetent. I didn’t want him moved from Rellingford anyway. Why can’t they just do their dirty work at the Rellingford Morgue? And that stupid sheriff out there, just...signing off on this...not even asking …”

“Can you just calm down a second?” Mel asked, dipping a tortilla chip into the salsa, dripping a little on her sweater. “Look. I’m the one who told him it was okay to move the body. You were down for the count and needed sleep. Julie, it’s a murder investigation. This is some psycho who is out there killing people. Four people so far. They need help in this. And do not give me that look—you were out cold or crying, and when I talked to that detective, and the sheriff, they both made it clear that my permission or yours didn’t count. This is something that just had to be done.”

“And so, they lost his body,” Julie said, grabbing her margarita practically out of the server’s hands.

“They what?”

4

“Apparently, it’s an ordinary screw-up,” Julie said. “Ha.”

“I can just picture you with those cops. Reading them the Riot Act.”

“I don’t know,” Julie’s voice grew faint. She looked out the window and saw a crowd outside the Tea Shop across the street. A lesbian couple walked by, arm in arm, looking as if they were happier than Julie had ever felt in her life. An elderly woman in a mangy fur coat walked an equally mangy little Yorkshire terrier, pausing at the window of the restaurant as if gazing at her reflection. “I don’t know. I think I was too stunned to react. I should probably call Andrew.”

“Hell, yes,” Mel said. “The threat of a lawsuit might just do something. You know, if they don’t find his body in the next twenty-four hours …”

“Maybe it’s what Donati said.”

“Who?”

“One of the officers. She said it happens now and then when bodies get transferred. They think all that happened is that he ended up in another morgue in the city. They’re blaming the driver, who had several pickups and deliveries. It’s all very...complicated.”

“Well they damn well better find him, that’s all I’m saying,” Mel said, biting into a slice of avocado.

“It’s all too much for me. Too, too much.” Julie continued to look over her sister’s shoulder, to the world outside, the world of smart young women parking their cars, a group of men in suits talking excitedly as if they just made some corporate deal that would make them all millionaires, the woman in the ratty fur coat, picking a newspaper out of the trash can on the corner.

Then, she refocused on Mel’s face. Mel looked at her as if trying to read her thoughts. You can’t get inside me, Melanie. You can’t. I’m not that easy-to-see-through little sister you once had. Not anymore. I am made out of stone. I don’t feel anything anymore. I am impenetrable.

“It may be something else, though, Mel. It may be about the killer. The killer may come back somehow, to collect the bodies. One of the other victims also went missing. It’s just sick. It’s disgusting. I don’t even want to think about it anymore. I don’t. I can’t.”

5

A rundown Volkswagen Jetta was parked on the street in front of her house when they got home that night.

“How does she do it?” Julie asked, shaking her head. “She runs that crafts store in New Hope, gets her master’s in psychology and does crystal therapy...and has that awful boyfriend...and she still manages to get here this fast?”

Mel shrugged, as she turned the car into the driveway. “Toni Marino. AKA Mom. What more is there to say?”

6

If she were ever to draw her mother, it would be with nothing but circles and squiggly lines. Her hair was a bird’s nest of jet black with glimmers of gray, her face was round, and round glasses upon her round nose. Even the word “mom” seemed to be a round word. She somehow had lost the angular half-Italian look of her Connie Francis-inspired youth and had transformed into Earth Mother by the age of sixty-four. “I picked up the kids from your sitter,” her mother said, too quickly, as a shadow crossed her face. Her voice still with a strange hybrid of the Jersey shore and Pennsylvania clip, hugging Julie while at the same time glancing around at the living room as if about to give one of her famous critiques. Livy was practically attached to her grandmother, clinging to her skirt like it was a security blanket.

“I am so sorry, my baby,” her mother whispered, kissing the edge of her ear.

Julie fought back tears as she felt the intense warmth of her mother’s cheek pressed against her own.

7

Mel made some coffee, while Julie and the kids sat around the living room as if they had to entertain her mother. “The one thing I’ve learned about life,” her mother said with that wiser-than-thou voice. “The only thing, really, is that it’s about accepting loss.”

“We were talking about that in my coffee group,” Mel said.

“Your coffee group?” Julie chuckled, with a little too much condescension in her voice. “God. My God, that sounds like 1950s with white gloves and cute little casseroles. You mean the church ladies?”

Mel must’ve been working to keep a kind look on her face. Julie was impressed.

“The altar guild. My friend Elaine lost her husband to cancer three years ago. It was her faith that really pulled her through. There really is no death.”

“You’re only in that group because you have the hots for Father Joe,” Julie blurted, and then quickly apologized.

“It’s not like Episcopal priests can’t marry,” Mel said, shrugging.

“We all go to heaven,” Livy suddenly said, her small, wise voice a bit of a surprise.

“That’s right, honey,” Mel said.

“I don’t know,” Toni said. “A lot of people believe different. Death is just a problem of our vision. You know, how we see things upside down? How our eyes work? Our mind works that way, too. We go on. We just can’t see it.”

“Not your ghost crap again,” Mel said, a bit under her breath.

“If you have your sexy Jesus, Mom can have her spooks.”

Mel shot her a look, then glanced at Livy, as if to say, what kind of talk is that around your daughter? “Wait just a second, sweetie,” Toni said. “They’re not spooks. And I’m only a lapsed Catholic, not a heretic. I believe in heaven.” She motioned for Livy to come sit on her lap.

Livy looked a little frightened, but Julie gave her the nod. Livy went over and climbed aboard the Gramma Express. “Spirituality doesn’t start or stop with a church or a dogma. What is out there is out there. I’m not going to sit here and say that one group has cornered the market on the truth of existence.”

“Is Daddy a spirit-chew-aliddy?”

Toni kissed her granddaughter on the top of the head. “Different people believe different things, sweetie. Some people believe we come back as newborns. Some people believe we go to heaven. Some people believe we never really leave. Some go, some stay, some come back. Like when babies are born. Maybe they’re old souls.

“Who knows?” She kissed Livy on the top of her scalp. “I think you’re an old soul, sweetie.”

“Wow,” Livy said.

“I bet in your last life you were a brilliant doctor like your daddy.” Then, Toni looked over at Matt.

Matt had his camera on and it was aimed at her. “I’m on Candid Camera.”

“I like when you talk about this stuff,” Matt said, fiddling with the lens.

“Okay,” Toni said. “I think I was a Sherpa in my last life.”

“Is that like a shepherd?” Livy asked.

“Mom,” Julie said, sternly. She felt a severe headache coming on.

“What? Reincarnation’s as valid as anything,” her mother said. Then, she gave her that look that Julie hadn’t seen in years—it was one of her “Take a life lesson” looks. “You want to live a happy life, Juliet, you start thinking about what comes after. It’ll put a lot of things in place for you.”

“It’s like a nice fairy tale to tell kids,” Matt said, “but the truth is, there’s nothing after you die.” He spoke so suddenly that it was like a shock through the room. He pivoted the camera around to look at Julie. “It’s like the fairy tales about wicked stepmothers.”

Toni chuckled. “That’s a zinger, Matt. Do you ever come out from behind the camera?”

Matt put the camera down and stared at Julie and then her mother. “Talk talk talk,” he said. “That’s all anyone does. My father dies and it’s all about blah blah blah.”

He got up and stomped out of the room as if he’d been insulted.

“Teenagers,” Livy said, as if she’d heard this from her mother.

“Shouldn’t you go to him?” Toni asked, hugging Livy. She had an expression on her face that was halfway between being aghast and ashamed. “That boy needs you.”

“He’ll be fine, Mom. Don’t butt in where you don’t know …”

“Sometimes my daughters can be so cold,” her mother said, in a whisper meant to float over Livy’s head. Then, more softly, “Children need to talk about death. About what happens afterward. About where we go.”

“Where do we go?” Livy asked.

“Upstairs, sweetie,” Toni said. “Upstairs, only when we’re alive, we don’t know where upstairs goes.”

8

Julie couldn’t take her mother anymore and left the room. As she went up the stairs, to her bedroom, she heard Mel say something about sleep and shock, and Julie almost felt like going back down there and just telling them all to get out of her house and leave her and her kids alone, and wondered how much she could get away with—how cruel and mean she could get and still be forgiven later—how much slack did you get when your husband was murdered out in the woods by a psychopath?

She lay down on her bed, covering her head with the pillow, and submerged into sleep.

9

In a dream, his head was between her legs, and his tongue circled lazily, one circle wetly moved into another, opening her, with a kind of pressure of pleasure that disturbed her even while her body gave in to it. Hut whispered, his voice soft and vulnerable, like a little boy who has just discovered a new forbidden hideout, “Ah, yes. I love it. I love the taste. I love the smell. I want to be inside you. I want to dive into it. You’re the lake, and I want to swim through you.”

Her pelvis began to buck involuntarily, and she hated herself for the feeling she was having, which was not pleasure, but some kind of mechanical movement as if she had no control over her body and it had no connection to her mind, but was a machine that just moved back and forth and up and down when someone put coins in—knowing that Hut was gone, knowing that this was not really him, knowing she was in a dirty, filthy dream where nasty words were said that she’d never uttered in real life nor had he, and shivery forbidden fantasies could exist, and the reality of the world, of death, was beyond this.

10

Sometime in the night, someone touched the edge of her cheek. Julie opened her eyes, feeling nearly out of breath from a terrible dream that she couldn’t quite remember seconds after waking up.

In the bedroom, a small shadow before her. “Mommy?”

“Oh baby,” Julie said. She scooted farther into the bed, allowing her daughter to climb up onto it. The heat of her daughter’s body pressed against hers was comforting.

“I have an idea. Let’s ask God to get Daddy back.” She kissed Livy on her forehead.

“I mean it,” Livy said, her voice wispy and full of wonder at her own idea. “Maybe nobody’s ever tried, Mommy. We just ask. Maybe God feels bad for us and he’ll send Daddy back. I can ask in my brain radio. I can.”

“Oh, baby, honey, shhh,” Julie whispered. “I love you so much.”

“God can do anything. Matt said in the Bible, God sent back a guy named Lazzus.”

“Lazarus, sweetie. But it was different. That was a miracle.”

“Nobody ever asked for their daddy back. Maybe,” Livy said, getting louder, until finally she was yelling. “Maybe if someone did, it would happen. God can do it!”

“I’m sorry.” Julie couldn’t control her tears.

“I just want God to send him back,” Livy said, too loud. “I want my daddy back. God can do it.”

11

Julie dreamed of:

The day she met Hut. On the subway. He, on his way to his residency, she, with a day off, thinking about going to buy an air conditioner for her steamy apartment. The train was packed, and he gave up his seat to her. She could not stop looking at him. He was handsome in ways she’d never seen—not a pretty man at all, nor one that had a natural beauty to his face. He just had what seemed to be a chalk outline around him, for her, an aura of something that made her want to know him. He had glanced at her a few times on the train, and then had leaned over and said, “You’d think the carnival was in town,” which made her smile, as she glanced around at others on the train.

When they’d come up into a muggy afternoon, he said to her, “You know, you look like someone I’d want to get to know.”

She had laughed. “That’s the worst pickup line I’ve ever heard.”

“It can’t be,” he said. “Surely it’s only in the top ten of the worst. It can’t be the worst of all.”

From there, they’d made a casual date—to meet at the Empire State Building like Sleepless in Seattle. “That way, if I scare you, you can have the safety of all those people, plus you can throw me off the roof if you decide I’m the wrong one. You can even give me a fake name if you want so I can’t stalk you later. I’ll buy the hot dogs.”

“I’ll bring a parachute,” she’d told him.

And then, she dreamed of:

The face of the dead man in the morgue. It had not been Hut, even though it had been him. What was Hut had fled and left the empty husk of flesh behind.

The face of the dead man with closed eyes

In her dream, his eyes opened.

Chapter Seven

1

After a week, Julie felt herself rise, a waking sleeper, from some dark place.

She spent less time in bed. She began enjoying the taste of food again. Just a little. Less time avoiding phone calls from the detective. Less time avoiding her mother and sister and even her children. Livy started having bad dreams, but weirdly Matt was handling himself okay, and her therapist, Eleanor Swanson, said it was completely normal, everything that was going on. Normal, normal, normal.

Within a few days, her mother went back to Pennsylvania, and Mel came and went, and it wasn’t normal yet, and she felt as if she were hiding something, keeping a secret about how she wanted to scream and cry and yell and break things and kick walls in.

But she let some autopilot within her switch on, and focused on Matt and Livy, helping them navigate the slender canals of grief.

2

“Mommy!” Livy cried out from the backyard.

Some instinct kicked in, and Julie thought of the trowel she had left in the flowerbed, and all she could think of was that her baby was hurt.

“Mommy, hurry!” Livy screeched.

Julie nearly flew out the kitchen door, out to the patio.

Livy stood next to the low weeping willow tree at the edge of the lawn.

“Honey? You okay?”

Livy had a glow to her face—as if she’d been sunburned, almost. She had her hands to her ears. “It’s Daddy!” she shouted. “It’s him!”

Julie went to her and squatted down in front of her so they were eye-level with each other.

“He’s on my brain radio,” Livy grinned. “He’s telling me he’s okay.”

“Oh, baby,” Julie said, and felt herself get all weepy as she lifted Livy up. Livy wrapped her legs around her mother’s waist. “He’s in heaven. He’s with God now.”

“No he’s not,” Livy said. Then, whispering in her mother’s ear as if it were a big secret that nobody was supposed to hear. “Gramma was wrong. He didn’t go upstairs. He’s with us. Right now.”

3

On the phone:

“Eleanor. It’s Julie. I think maybe I’d like to ask you to talk with Livy.”

4

Eleanor made an exception that afternoon. Livy clutched her mother’s hand as they stepped into the waiting room. Julie went to the assistant, a young man named Vincent who handled three of the psychologists in the suite of offices. Then, Eleanor came out and gave Livy a warm smile. “It’s good to finally meet you,” she said. “I know your mom and brother Matt well. I’ve heard so much about you for so long, I feel we’re practically neighbors.”

Then, Eleanor asked Julie to stay in the waiting area so that she and Livy could talk for a bit. Livy looked back at her, eyes wide, mouth a small tight o, and for a second, Julie felt as if she were giving her daughter away to a stranger.

5

Afterward, Livy came out, a grin on her face, and tapped her mother on the knee.

“How’d it go?” Julie asked, setting a magazine down on the chair next to hers.

Livy looked up at her, and for just a moment Julie felt a chill as if her daughter contained some unknown well of anger and fury, and it was all in that glance.

“She’s a nice lady,” Livy said.

When Julie called to ask about Livy, Eleanor told her, “She thinks she sees her father. She told me that he started coming through her dreams, but that one night, she saw him standing over her in her bedroom and he told her he’d come for her. Now, how are you doing?”

“Me? Okay.”

“No,” Eleanor said. “Not okay. Livy told me that you aren’t talking to her as much. She said that you let things pile up.”

“Well, it’s been a little soon. It’s not like I’m completely recovered.”

“Julie, this is not something to take lightly. You are experiencing post-traumatic stress. Your husband was violently killed. It’s a major shock, to all of you. You can’t mask it. I want you to expect that your mind will be spinning around. I want you to expect that you’re going to have nights when you’re afraid of the dark. All of you will. I want you to come see me as often as you want. And I suggest that you try and get Matt in for sessions, too.”

6

Late one night, Matt was in the den watching one of his homemade digital videos on the family computer.

Julie stood behind his chair. The video had been made six months before, around Thanksgiving, and Matt’s voice on the videotape was generally happy as he narrated the world as he went through it. “Christmas shopping for Julie and Livy is nearly over,” he said with a beaming exuberance that Julie hadn’t heard from him in a while. He was in the city with his dad—there was Hut, oh my God, so close she could nearly touch him by tapping the computer monitor—and they had just emerged from the Chelsea Market, Hut with a white cup of coffee, and Matt with a Snapple that he waved in front of the camera as he turned the camcorder on himself. He looked so happy. There were a few people on the street, and it looked like Matt might walk right into them if he didn’t put the camcorder down.

His father said, “Let’s turn it off for a bit, Matty.”

Matt filmed his father’s face, then, a close-up, and then the video went to darkness.

Julie leaned over to Matt and kissed the top of his head.

He reached up toward her, without turning around, and laid the palm of his hand against her cheek. “We can see him anytime we want,” Matt said. “That’s what movies do. They keep people alive.”

7

She slipped into the bathrobe that Mel had picked up for her at Bed, Bath & Beyond, made some chamomile tea and felt a little better. Julie sat up that night, late, after the kids were asleep and after Mel was asleep, and played Matt’s videos on the computer, one after another. They were funny, or silly, and usually involved Matt after school with his friends, or Matt and Hut and Julie and Livy—ordinary happiness, as they all made supper together on a rare Saturday when everyone was free, Livy shredding Romaine lettuce for the salad, Hut chopping tomatoes and onions, and Julie sautéing the chicken in the round wide pan. Hut joked about crying over onions, and that got Livy giggling. Matt now and then said, “Now just act natural. Just act natural,” and that got them all acting a little silly for the camera. Sometimes Matt turned the camera on himself, having watched too many episodes of The Real World on MTV, and talked about what he felt like, what he was going through. Nothing startling came through in any of this. Something within Julie ached for the normalcy of it all.

And then, there were several Boys’ Day Out, as they had called the Saturdays or Sundays when Hut would spend several hours exclusively with Matt. They’d go to a Yankees game, or fishing out on one of the local lakes, or doing what Livy called “boy things,” which she demanded that her father take her on sometimes. Matt holding a big bass up to the camcorder and saying, “Julie, get ready to fry this up for supper!” or at the baseball game, Matt cursing as he videoed the game, and Hut’s voice saying, “Now, Matt, let’s not use those words again, all right?”

And then, a video of an area of cobblestone streets, where half the block was sunlit and half in shadows. The city. Hut looking a little tense. Matt swinging the camcorder to the street and just videotaping his Reeboks as he walked along. “That thing doesn’t always have to be on,” Hut said, a bit curtly.

Matt swung the camcorder up: a shot of his father’s face, neither looking happy nor solemn. Looking like he was angry at Matt. “Let’s just turn it off, Matt. All right?”

Matt lied. “Okay, Dad. It’s off. I just like looking through the lens.”

A woman walked along the sidewalk opposite them, and then crossed the street as if coming right toward them. She was pretty, wearing sunglasses, and had pale, freckled skin and shoulder-cut red hair that gleamed as she walked from shadow to sunlight in the street.

“Put it down,” Hut said, and then the video went dark.

Julie stared at the computer monitor.

Then, she heard a piercing scream.

8

It was Livy’s high-pitched squeal, and Julie instinctively leapt out of the chair in the den and went running upstairs to her daughter’s bedroom.

Matt was already standing in the doorway with the light on.

Julie looked over his shoulder—her daughter stood up on her bed, her back against the wall, shivering.

“What happened?”

Matt mumbled something, but Julie passed by him and went to Livy. “Did Matty scare you?” she asked, and then felt her face go red as she looked at Matt.

He glared at her. “She had a nightmare, Julie. I’m not running around scaring my baby sister. Jesus.”

“I didn’t mean that,” Julie said. “I didn’t. I thought maybe she saw you in the dark.”

“Something’s wrong with you if you think that,” Matt said, and turned and went back to his room.

“Honey, what is it? What was wrong?”

“I saw a man,” Livy said. “In here.”

“Was it Matt? Maybe he was going down the hall?”

“No, Mommy. It was like a ghost. It was like a big shadow,” Livy whispered. And then, as if it had just occurred to her, “Maybe it’s Daddy. Maybe he came downstairs again. Maybe he was tired of being upstairs.”

“Livy, there’s nobody. But I think you were having a bad dream. That’s all. It’s not real. If you want, I’ll go check all the windows and doors.”

“Ghosts get through doors,” Livy told her.

9

Feeling a little spooked herself, Julie poured herself the last of the Sterling Vineyards Merlot in the kitchen into a Dixie Cup and sipped it as she walked around checking the windows and doors to make sure there really wasn’t the possibility of an intruder.

10

In her dreams that night, the man on the table. Eyes opened wide. They were milky white. No pupils, no irises. It was Hut, but not Hut. His skin was translucent alabaster interrupted by blotches of bluish bruises. He rose up and reached for her. He had drawings all over his body—tattoos.

She couldn’t move.

He leaned over and kissed the edge of her neck. His lips were ragged and dry and he kissed again, with a gentle suction against her skin.

His fingers crawled down her belly, lingering just above her pubic region, and then twirling the soft hair as his hand pressed down against her, and all the while he kissed up her chin, to her mouth. She felt as if she couldn’t move, push him off her. She wanted to get away from him, but his tongue parted her lips and flickered just over her tongue and teeth.

And then she felt aroused and excited in the dream.

Ready.

“Do you want me?” his voice came to her, but not from his mouth. “Do you want me inside you?”

She awoke, jerked from the dream too suddenly so that when she opened her eyes she wasn’t sure if she was still dreaming or in her bed, but a man stood there, a dark man against the darkness, and for half a second, she thought it was Hut. Her sleepiness was like a pillow smothering her, so that she didn’t have the energy to flick on the light. Didn’t even have the energy to stay awake for more than a few seconds. She felt the narcotic heaviness of deep sleep draw her back from fuzzy consciousness. She slipped back into sleep, and when she awoke well before dawn, she began shivering, feeling as if she had a fever. She kept looking at the doorway as if half expecting someone to be there.

She remembered what her therapist had told her. About her mind at night. Night fears. Thoughts that would keep her up. Even hallucinations? Even thinking someone was in the house? Some stranger? Or that Hut would come home, just open the door and walk back in one day as if it had all been a dream?

Then, she remembered a detail about the dream: the dead man in them, who she could not completely think of as Hut, had those carvings on him.

11

Julie flicked up the light in Matt’s room. He rolled over, pushing back the sheet. The bedroom window was open wide. The room smelled like dirty gym clothes. Poster over his bed of Eminem. The place was a dump, but she never pushed him on it. “I’ll have to handle him,” Hut had told her after an early battle of wills between Matt and Julie. “He’s always going to be like this, and it’s up to me to do this. It’s his mind, Julie. He has some kind of block that won’t allow him to handle conflict well. You shouldn’t be in the middle of this.” Hut had even told her just to let Matt do what he wanted sometimes. She was the stepmother, and she had never felt completely comfortable stepping in and making him do things—even as simple as picking up the clothes he dropped on his bedroom floor.

“Julie?” he asked, shielding his eyes from the overhead light at first.

Julie went to sit on the edge of his bed. “Tell me about the drawings you made. On your skin.”

He squinted at her. “I’m sleepy.”

“It can’t wait.”

He looked over at his clock radio. “It’s four a.m.”

“You’re not going to school. You can sleep in.”

He turned back over, his arms covering the back of his head as if defending himself. “Just let me go to sleep.”

“I’ve been up half the night,” she said. “It’s important, Matt.”

“Why?” he turned around violently, shooting her a nasty look, his face a scowl. “Why is it so goddamn important?”

“Do not use that kind of language with me, young man,” she said, feeling infinitely old as she heard the words come out of her mouth.

“You think I go around scaring Liv, and you wake me up when it’s still dark out. God. You just go around sticking your nose in places where you shouldn’t, Julie. You’re not my mother. You want to see the drawings? Okay. Okay, Julie,” he said, sitting up. He drew the long-sleeved T-shirt up over his head. His chest seemed scrawny and inward-turning as if he had been emotionally beaten into submission. She winced when she thought of his mother—Amanda—and how she’d hurt him badly. How she’d tried to do terrible things to him.

She wondered if she was like Amanda now. If she was going to do something terrible.

He showed her his arm, his chest. The carvings had faded, leaving only slight striations on his arm and shoulder.

“Seen enough?” he asked.

She tried to remember the patterns carved into the dead person’s back from the photograph the detective had shown her.

She didn’t know what to say. She felt like crying but worked to hold back her tears. “I guess I’m a wreck right now,” she said.

When he spoke again, after nearly a minute had passed, his voice was gentler than it had been. “Poor you. You think I’m like my mother and I’m going to end up going crazy and hurting Livy or something.”

“Matty,” she whispered, touching his arm. “I don’t think that.”

“I’m not stupid,” he said. “She’s where they send crazy people. And I’ll end up there, too, because I see things sometimes. I just don’t tell you about them. You’ll never understand.”

“Do you want to visit your mother?” Julie asked, grasping for something hopeful to say. “I can drive you down there.”

Then he turned over, facing the wall, drawing the sheet back up to cover himself. “Turn out the light,” he said, his voice a monotone. “Go to bed. I’m sorry Dad’s dead. I’m sorry you’re stuck with me. I wish you weren’t falling apart every five minutes. I wish everything was different. But it’s not. And no, I don’t want to see my mother. Ever.”

She left his bedroom, soon after, and sat on the stairs in the hall, wondering if the pain and the pressure she felt in her head would ever go away.

12

Some nights, she stared at the wall of her bedroom and began imagining things, thinking that she heard Hut in the hallway. Livy had put the idea in her head—her bad dream about a ghost of a man.

His footsteps, heavy, coming toward her.

The bedroom door, open. Darkness in the hall beyond it.

Darkness seeping into her room.

His breath upon her face.

Do you want me inside you?

Part Two

Chapter Eight

1

In the city: blue sky as far as he could see above the towering buildings. The sound of laughter and shouting and even some cussing from kids getting out of school in the city. The harsh words of others, tromping along, up from the subway steam. The shadows were still cool with the very last breath of spring, the sunlight beyond them, warm and fresh. He felt a little bounce in his step as he bounded up from the subway steps into wonderful daylight.

His name was Terry West, and he’d just gotten out of Harkness’s lecture on the underpinnings of Jacobean Tragedy by accepting the fact that he was going to get a “D” in the survey course, anyway. Terry was feeling damn good, and if that asshole Franklin hadn’t fucked with his head that morning—on the subject of his academic future—it would be the perfect day. He caught a bus uptown to meet Anne for a beer at her little studio apartment. When he arrived, she had on that sweater that was bright yellow that made him just want to pull it off. Beneath it, she wore nothing, and his cold hands trembled as he touched the edge of her nipples—each one, special attention from his fingers while his tongue slipped between her lips, and she giggled when she felt his hardness, and he was thinking: life is better than anyone ever told me it was going to be.

In the middle of it, when he had just slipped inside her, he whispered to her that he thought he was in love with her, but he wasn’t sure if she’d heard him, and that was cool. After they had sex, he showered solo while Anne flicked on cable and watched the old “Match Game” show on the Game Show Network. When he got out of the shower, dripping as he went from tiny bathroom to tiny living area, he sat down beside her and stroked her hair. “I have to meet my mother in thirty minutes,” she said. “She can’t know that we’re fucking.”

“I thought she liked me.”

“She thinks I’m still a virgin,” Anne said, and squirmed a bit when he tried nuzzling her neck. “She’s living in the 20th century or something.”

“I guess you’re going shopping?”

Anne nodded. “That’s all she does. That’s all she ever wants to do.”

“Gee, your neck tastes good,” he said, trying to kiss her one more time, but she pulled away, and pawed the ends of the sweater arms over her hands like little mitts.

“Sex isn’t everything.” She shrugged away from him, got off the bed and sauntered to the bathroom. “When I get out of the shower, you need to be gone.”

“How about tonight? Maybe later?” he asked.

“Maybe.”

None of this ruined his good mood. He got outside and sat on the stoop of the brownstone next to her building and lit up a cigarette. Had a good smoke, watching people walk by, checking out the pretty girls, feeling a little intimidated by some of the men in suits who looked as if they owned the world, wondering if he himself would ever own much. He grabbed a hot dog down at Gray’s Papaya around two, and chowed down while calling up his buddy Rick who lived in a cool loft in Soho with four roommates (instead of at home with his mom, like Terry still did), and asked if they wanted to go shoot pool at Fat Cats on Christopher Street in about an hour.

Then, he’d gotten on the subway, and that’s when he thought the man had looked at him funny. He was used to gay guys giving him looks—after all, he was athletic and trim and twenty-two—and it didn’t offend him in the least. He’d always felt complimented, whether it was a girl or a guy. But this guy was looking at him differently.

It pissed him off. He glared at the man. The man grinned, but then turned away. The man opened a newspaper and began reading it.

He wouldn’t have thought anything more of this, except when he got off the train and began walking toward the exit, he accidentally dropped his keys, and when he squatted down to pick them up, he glanced back and noticed the guy was practically hovering over him.

Then, the man passed by. Terry waited for him to continue up the steps to the outside.

Outside, Terry saw the usual crush of people—and the man he’d seen wasn’t anywhere nearby. He called up Anne and left a message on her machine that he was with Rick and some others playing pool and maybe she might want to meet up after her mother left and they could grab pizza at Ray’s or something. “Or maybe we can do something after Bio tomorrow. Okay? Call me ASAP babay-babay,” he finished, their little in-joke. When he dropped the cell phone in the pocket of his denim painter’s pants, he felt around for cash. He counted up about fourteen bucks in single wadded-up bills, and that’d be enough for a couple of hours of pool and air hockey, and with a few bucks for the kick-ass jukebox at Fat Cats.

“I’m like four blocks from Fat Cats,” he told Rick via cell phone. “Are you down there?”

“Yep, me and Joe and Debbie. Deb’s kicking my butt in air hockey. Want to say hi?”

“Fuck. Anne’ll cut off my dick if she knows Deb’s there. Shit. And I just told her to come down if she wanted.”

“Maybe she won’t,” Rick said, and then the noise in the background rose as someone was yelling a victory yell and people were laughing. “A lot of cute girls here, dude.”

“Yeah yeah,” Terry said, and as he turned the corner toward Bleecker—to go get some more cigarettes—there was the man again.

As Terry passed by him, the man said, “Terry? You’re Terry West?”

He turned to face the guy, who didn’t look strange or scary, just utterly normal and kind of bland.

“What’s it to you?” Terry asked and felt he sounded too wimpy.

2

More than an hour later, when Terry awoke, the first thing he did was cough.

Something about his vision was off. He couldn’t quite see. Things were blurry, and he tried to reach up to wipe his eyes clean, but his hands were tied behind his back.

He tugged at them, but they wouldn’t budge.

He didn’t remember a whole hell of a lot since the man had been talking to him, talking about his mother, talking about some emergency, and talking to the point where something within Terry had felt a little tired and too confused to understand everything.

His breath returned to him, hot.

It was plastic of some kind over his face.

Tied around his neck—a cord pressed at his throat.

He tried to make out the shadowy figure that stood before him, but the light was too dim, and his own breathing had caused a fog within the plastic.

Soon, the air around his face got warmer, and when he inhaled as deeply as he could, the plastic sucked up against his mouth.

He tried kicking out, but his legs were tied to the chair.

Then, it was as if his lungs burned as he used every ounce of his energy to inhale what little air was left to him.

As he went, as he felt himself sink into unconsciousness, someone—a man’s hands?—grabbed his left arm and held it as if trying to pull him back from the brink of death.

He sucked in as much air as he could, and kept inhaling, inhaling, inhaling, inhaling.

Chapter Nine

1

Julie arranged a little memorial service in May, just for close family and a few friends.

2

They had no body to bury—it had officially been stolen, according to McGuane, and they suspected the killer himself had some access to the morgue that they’d been trying to pinpoint.

Julie felt for the children’s sake, at least, there needed to be a service. She got Father Joe from Mel’s church, St. Andrew’s, to run through a liturgy just because Mel insisted on something religious, and Hut’s parents had made it for the weekend, and her mother had brought her boyfriend, and even two of Livy’s teachers had shown up.

Hut’s mother and father flew in, and when Julie had a moment alone with Joanne Hutchinson, she asked about Hut being an orphan ’til he was in his mid-teens.

“Steve wanted a son badly,” she said. “I can’t tell you what it was like for us. We had tried to have children for years. And then when our son died. Our first boy. Before Jeff.” She called him “Jeff,” not the nickname “Hut” that Julie had only known him by. Even hearing the word, “Jeff,” sounded like a different person. She could imagine him as a sweet kid. Helpful. Generous. “Well,” Joanne said, “when the opportunity to take him in—Steve had been working with Big Brothers, and then got a call from a friend about some group home for kids who had been orphans all their lives...well, something got in us. It was like a gift from God, we thought. Steve loved working with teenage boys. He loved teaching them, and guiding them. He’s a man’s man, I guess, and he loves camping out and woodworking, and getting out with a football. Well, when he heard about Jeff’s situation—about having lived as an orphan his entire life—he insisted we adopt him. Steve was raised in foster care. He knew the routine. When they met, they bonded immediately. You couldn’t keep them apart.” As she said this, Julie felt that Joanne Hutchinson was leaving something out. But it wasn’t the time or place to ask. Yet, Julie got the distinct sense that Joanne had something more to say about Jeff.

Before they left on Sunday, Julie managed to get a few minutes with Joanne alone, while her husband was showering in their hotel room.

“I’m sorry to even bring this up,” Julie said. “But there’s so much about Hut I didn’t know.”

“He was quiet about his life, wasn’t he?” Joanne said.

“I know this is a strange thing to bring up now, but when you adopted him, did you know much about where he’d been?”

“Somewhat. He had been in a group home for a year or so at that point,” and then the tone of her voice changed—as if Joanne had guessed what this was about. “You mean the fire.”

“Fire?”

“He never told you,” she said.

“No.” But even as she said this, Julie remembered his nightmares. He didn’t have them often, but he had woken up more than once, early on, in the middle of the night, soaking the sheets with sweat. All he would tell her was that he had dreamed of something that happened when he was a boy, but he had never let her beyond that wall.

“I can’t say I’m surprised. It must have been awful. He had been trapped in a building when a fire broke out—that another student had set—perhaps a year before we adopted him. He got out in time, but some of his classmates died. He wasn’t burned, but had to spend time in the hospital for smoke inhalation.”

“His asthma,” Julie said.

“Yes, that and those night fears he had.”

The mention of “night fears” reminded her of Hut, waking up in the middle of the night as if he were a Viet Nam vet experiencing post-traumatic stress syndrome. He’d nearly leap out of bed and not be sure where he was. But it had only happened once or twice.

“Was it some kind of government program he was in, as a boy? Some special school that tested him?”

“I’m not really sure. He got a good education, though. He was smart as a whip, and was a lot smarter than either of us,” Joanne said. “Sometimes, well, sometimes it was like he knew what I was thinking. He was perceptive. My goodness, he probably told you more than he ever told us. He never talked about those years. We loved him so much, Julie. More than was probably healthy for Steve. When our son turned away from us...well, it’s all in the past. None of it really matters, does it? He was our son, we loved him. Please, let’s not lose touch.”

Julie hesitated asking the next question, but felt she had to, even though it seemed a betrayal of trust with Hut. “Can I ask you something that might be painful?”

“Go ahead.”

“Did your husband beat Hut?”

Silence on the line. Then, Joanne said, “Julie, why would you ever get that idea?”

“Hut said …”

“That’s disgusting,” Joanne said. “That’s the most obscene thing you could say to me. And now. Now. With Hut dead. No, his father never laid a finger on him. That man loved him to distraction. Even when Hut did bad things—boy things, I suppose. Even when Hut...well, that’s all in the past. But my husband gave him everything he had and then some. His father is the kindest, gentlest soul on earth, Julie. How...dare...you.”

3

The Hutchinsons were only in for the service and the weekend, and they were on a flight back home before Julie could talk to either of them again.

Julie let some things go. She just couldn’t deal with housework, and she had the cleaning service come through that Mel had recommended, although every now and then, she let a week slip by and the laundry piled up and she’d see Matt wearing the same T-shirt for four days in a row and it wouldn’t bother her one bit and it didn’t seem to bother him, either. Sometimes, she forgot to load the dishwasher, and too many nights, they ordered from Domino’s or went to McDonald’s or called up Chinese Gardens for carryout.

Sometimes she cooked eggs for breakfast and left the pan on the stove and forgot about it.

She accepted these minor infractions.

Post-traumatic stress, she told herself. Shock. Death. Murder. The news of war overseas made her depressed, so she stopped watching anything but old reruns of comedies, as well as the collection of DVDs that they’d amassed—mainly re-watching screwball comedies from the 1930s and forgetting that there were too many half-used glasses of milk and soda and water sitting around in the rec room because the kids forgot to take them up and wash them out. She didn’t let it bother her, even when she noticed. The cleaning service might take care of it. Or they might not.

Her mind was elsewhere. She did gain a great sense of accomplishment from working through two entire New York Times crossword puzzle books before June first, a record for her. She had avoided putting Hut’s things into storage or even sorting through all of his clothes that month. Sometimes, she just sat with his Burberry’s raincoat and looked at it as if trying to find him there. Livy now had her own therapist and felt completely like a princess because of it. Julie began wondering if Livy liked having her night frights just so she’d have something to talk about. But she’d been making a lot of progress since seeing Dr. Fishbain over in Ramapo Cliffs once a week. Mel had split up with her boyfriend and was thinking of buying her first house—at forty-one—not far away. Matt had kept to himself and refused the offer of therapy, and Eleanor had suggested that Julie just not push him on anything yet.

Between days back at work (three days on, ten-hour shifts, with Laura Reynen and Mel both helping with the kids), her three hours per week with her current therapist (because she needed three hours or more to get out everything that was going on in her mind), she had managed to keep moving, although somewhere in there she’d gained twelve pounds and so had started the Atkins Diet (lasted two weeks, but cheated the whole time), then the South Beach diet (maybe three weeks, against sneaking forbidden foods at two a.m. when thoughts of life and death sent her to the fridge) and settled into a modified version of those two diets with a little Weight Watchers and Dr. Phil on the side, and then a two-mile walk every morning, and a jog twice a week with her sister. For some reason, giving a damn about the quick weight gain had gotten her out of the house and focused on something other than sorrow. She was moving forward, intentionally, away from death and Hut and murder and the ideas forming in her head about what life was about and why it should be lived at all. But the night fears continued—the dreams, the wakings, the sense that someone was there with her. She accepted a degree of insomnia, and afternoons turned into evenings too quickly, and she had to work to notice her children because it was as if her mind were clouding over real life and pushing her into the territory of dreams.

McGuane drove over to the house once or twice, for more questions, but Ben, her lawyer, suggested that she not answer much until he could explain how a body got lost or stolen in the morgue. Once, she saw McGuane sitting out in his car, on the street, looking as if he couldn’t decide whether to get out or not. Finally, he drove away.

4

One afternoon, by herself, Julie drove over to the break in the woods where the gravel path went up to the place where Hut had been murdered.

She felt a little scared, but parked the car, got out and went up the path. It was a beautiful day, and the birds were making a racket in the trees. She felt as if she were walking to his true grave.

When she reached the plateau with its clearing, she glanced about. It was just land. It was just nature. There was no sign that someone had been murdered there.

No marker.

“Good-bye, Hut,” she said out loud. “I’m sorry this happened to you. I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you. I’m sorry we couldn’t die together someday when we were old and ready for it. I’ll take care of Matt and Livy and make sure they never forget their father. I know I never will.”

And then, she walked back down the path to the car.

5

“You look good,” Mel said as they jogged the perimeter road along the lake.

“It’s all the dirty dreams,” Julie said, huffing and puffing as she tried to forget the slight pain in her left shin.

“That usually does it for me.”

“I dreamed the other night that three strange men were just licking my toes. I felt kind of dirty, but I woke up laughing.”

“That’s so filthy it sounds almost clean,” Mel laughed. “They call that a shrimp job.”

“What?”

“Toe sucking.”

“Shiver me timbers,” Julie said. “I’ll never order a shrimp cocktail again. I never had dreams like this before. It’s a little disturbing.” They came to a stop when they reached the small strip of brown beach at the lakefront along the dip in the road.

Mel lit up a cigarette. “Better toe-licking dreams than the kind where you’re falling off a cliff, says me.”

Julie chuckled, catching her breath, trying not to remember the bad parts of the dreams. “I had one dream where...well, I kid you not, I was watching a man having sex with a woman, and when he, well, you know, when it got down there, three uncircumcised penises came out of her...between her legs.”

“Oh my God,” Mel said. “That is the single most perverted thing I’ve ever heard. No wonder you see a therapist. And the best part is they’re uncircumcised.” Mel sucked back on the cigarette, and then exhaled a smoky laugh. “I never have dirty dreams. I wish I did.”

Julie decided not to tell her sister that the man in the dream was Hut, and the woman was some red-haired young woman she’d never before seen except in a video of Matt’s. Instead, she said, “God, this is the first day I’ve really smelled how good summer is. I can smell jasmine and honeysuckle. And the lake. Even it stinks good. I haven’t noticed much of anything in weeks.”

“You’re getting back to life,” Mel said. “That’s great. I was getting a little worried. Now, tell me another dirty dream.”

6

By the middle of June, she had received the first life insurance check, and it had a lot of zeros after the three. She hated looking at that check, but she needed the money and thought how wonderful Hut had been to get such a major policy even when she had argued against it. She cried thinking about this, and felt guilty for not being a good enough wife, and that ate up a large chunk of a day. The check took care of some immediate problems, including paying off most of the mortgage, and since she felt the kids should have her for the summer, she called in some favors and got a few months leave—until at least the end of September—so that she wouldn’t be in the ER. She hadn’t really accomplished much in her few days back at work since Hut’s death anyway—they’d put her behind a desk and everyone had just watched her like she was the living dead. Livy still had nightmares about seeing someone in her room, and Eleanor told Julie it was perfectly normal for a little girl to have dreams like that after losing her father. “I bet you’ve had some nightmares, too,” Eleanor said in one of their therapy sessions.

In July, in the middle of the afternoon in the middle of the week, in her therapist’s office, Julie leaned back, sinking into the cushy chair.

Eleanor had that look of God on her face. Julie thought of it as “God,” because Eleanor projected a calming presence that made Julie want to open up about everything. She was a beautiful, radiant woman—overweight, but her girth only added to the Mother Earth aspect of her personality. She had once told Eleanor that she reminded her of her mother—a younger version of her—and Eleanor had said, “We can work out that problem if you want.”

The office was decorated in muted beiges and browns, and always smelled of herb tea. It was the most relaxing place that Julie knew—a genuine refuge when she needed to work out problems.

“I feel like I’m bad because I want to find things out.”

“Why do you think that’s bad?”

“He’s dead. He was killed. My mind can’t wrap around that and still wonder if he loved me.”

“Did you love him?”

Julie nodded. “I want him back so bad. I really do.”

After she’d wiped the tears from her eyes, Julie said, “But I never really knew him. I thought I did. But I just don’t think I did at all. There were those things that went unspoken. Those things I just ignored.”

“You think he was unfaithful?”

Julie nodded. “But he’s dead now. So it shouldn’t matter.”

“He may not have been. He may have been. Why do you need to know now?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do know. You just can’t say it yet.”

“No, I really don’t know.”

“Marriage is based on trust, and what that means, really, is the opposite. You have to put blinders on to get through it sometimes,” Eleanor said.

“My mother used to tell me that all men cheat.”

“Your mother would only know that for certain if she’d slept with every married man on the planet, Julie. Are you really concerned that he was cheating on you, now that he’s dead? Or is there something else?”

“You knew him. There was always something...unspoken...his first wife …” Julie began, fumbling for words.

“Amanda had problems that had nothing to do with Hut,” Eleanor said. “Her violence didn’t come out of her marriage to Hut, Julie. She had a long history from childhood, and what was going on with her at the point they divorced had everything to do with Hut wanting to protect his son. You are going through the grief process. Stage by stage. It seems like you’re right on schedule. Didn’t you read the Kubler-Ross I gave you? Allow yourself some time. Understand that sometimes ideas float around after a violent death takes place, ideas in the head of the surviving family members, not all of which are meaningful. But they may just be ways that we all work out the shock. I would guess you’re experiencing dreams.”

Julie nodded.

“Some good, some bad, some terrible.”

Julie closed her eyes, trying not to remember the dream where the man on the shiny metal table in the morgue opened his eyes. “Just a dream here or there.”

“All right,” Eleanor said, leaning forward slightly, chin in hand, her "God" look in full glow.

“Just little things. Memories.”

“Any of them that make you angry?”

Julie fought the memory of the nightmare:

The white-blue skin of the dead man who could not be Hut.

Eyes opening.

Just milky-white eyes.

Looking up at her.

“Sometimes,” Julie said. "Sure. I get upset. Of course. Yes. But I know it's not real."

“Does Hut hurt you in the dreams?”

“No. No, nothing like that.” Julie could feel that she was blushing.

“Oh,” Eleanor said, reading her. “Sexual dreams. Seems entirely normal, Julie. Tell me about them.”

Julie nodded. “Really filthy ones. Like in porn movies.” She quickly added, “Nothing like our sex life. Which was good. It was fine. But this is like, I don’t know, cartoon sex. Ridiculous sex. Multiple...organs. Sex with women, sex with men, sex with...well, it’s all disturbing to me. I’ve never had dreams like this in my life.”

“You told me once that you didn’t think you were much of a sexual person.”

“I’m not. I’m just not. I never was. My sister is. She got the horny genes. Me, I just like it now and then if I really care for someone.” Her voice trailed off a bit, as if sorrow had returned with this thought.

“Sex and death are often intertwined in our consciousness,” Eleanor said. “Erotic dreams after the death of someone close to us...well, it’s not that strange. The French call the climax the petite mort. Little death.”

“I’m not even sure I could call these dreams erotic. There’s this sort of cartoony surreal element to them,” Julie said. “Sometimes …” The milky-white eyes. The shiny maggoty-white skin.

“Sometimes?”

“Sometimes...it’s just surreal.”

“Your mind is going to work out all kinds of issues, Julie. Expect it to. You’re lucky it’s coming through as erotic. I had a patient once who dreamed his brother slit his throat. After his brother died. Just slit his throat with a knife.”

As Eleanor spoke, Julie shut her eyes. She imagined Hut coming toward her while Eleanor’s words created an image in her mind, “Just slit his throat. Every night, for fourteen weeks he had this dream. Imagine.”

7

That evening, after the kids were in bed, Julie played some of Matt’s videos on the computer in the den, hoping to catch a glimpse of Hut and the family they’d once been.

8

The rain slashed the dark sky beyond the den window, a summer storm that was the last of a hurricane that had hit far out to sea, far beyond northern New Jersey, beyond Rellingford, a storm elsewhere, leaving heat flashes in the sky and a downpour to cool off the muggy evening. There was something comforting about the harshness of the weather. Julie clicked the mouse around until she found Matt’s video files. There were nearly a hundred of them, and she kept opening and closing the videos, depending on what they showed. The past year or so of Matt’s life flashed by:

Matt and Livy at the lake. Livy splashing around the shallow end of the pool with her friends, while Matt’s voice goaded her on to make bigger splashes.

Matt videotaping Livy trying to practice the piano—playing a little song called “The Bluebells of Scotland,” and when she hit a wrong note, she turned to the camera and said, “You’re making me mess up.”

One day, out on the canoe with all of them stuffed in, Julie sitting at one end, the kids in the middle, and Hut at the other, steering. The lake was brownish, and the sky was dazzling blue. Julie’s hair was pulled back in a ponytail that stuck through a tan baseball cap. Hut had taken his shirt off, and his hair was slick from sweat, and his skin had turned a light brown.

Matt kept surprising Livy with the camera: “I see you!”

“Shut up.”

“Livy, do not talk to your brother like that.”

“Yeah, squirt.”

“Don’t call me squirt.”

“Okay, squishy.”

“Matthew, let’s not do this. Don’t tease her.”

“He’s teasing me.”

And then, Matt had finished this brief video with a shot of his father passing him a can of Coke and saying, “Come on, kiddo, enough with the Spielberg act for now.”

9

Julie clicked on other videos. There was a series of strange ones, and she wondered if Matt might be getting artsy with the camera. A static shot of a beautiful house on a lake—maybe the lake in Rellingford, or one of the ones nearby. The house was glassed in on one side, reflecting the woods and the water. It was just a minute of a house.

Another was a shot of a chair. Nothing special about the chair. Just a wooden chair. When Julie looked closer, she saw there was a bit of rope on the floor, beneath the chair.

Another video was of a wasp’s nest. Must’ve been in the eaves of their house. It was like a small gray curled hand, with holes in it. The camera kept going in and out of focus as Matt got closer to the nest. Then, the tip of his finger touched the edge of the papery nest and quickly withdrew.

A small yellow wasp came out, its feelers vibrating. Then, a video that disturbed her, although she chalked it up to childhood fascination with the forbidden. It was just a dead dog, in the road, hit by a car, apparently. Matt had kept the camera on the dog’s body.

As she flipped the videos on and off, she began to dread some of them—he had filmed her sleeping once. From the light through the bedroom window, it must’ve been early morning.

Matt touched the edge of her cheek with his hand, and then quickly withdrew it.

The face of the sleeping Julie flushed a slight red, as if the warmth of his hand had caused a reaction.

In another one, Matt had simply filmed himself, in the hall mirror. He looked as if he’d worked himself into some kind of frenzy—his face was pale and shiny with sweat, his eyes were encircled with dark smudges, and he began touching his face all over as if checking to see if there were something wrong.

One of the videos had Matt talking to a girl at school, roughly his age. Where were they? It might’ve been the bathroom. The walls were green, with some light from a nearby window. She was pressed against the wall, and he kept closing in on her face with the camera. She had tears in her eyes. “Don’t make me,” she said. “Please don’t make me.”

10

Julie turned it off. Sat there, stunned. Didn’t know what to think. She glanced at the clock on the wall—it was nearly eleven.

After several more of these brief video clips, she found the video that had the woman in it.

The woman in the city.

She was young, and she was beautiful, and she looked like the kind of woman in her twenties who would make Hut happy.

Julie felt an insane kind of jealousy. She hated the woman. She wanted to know who she was. She felt she must be losing it if she thought a woman who happened to be at the edge of a video that her stepson had shot might be a woman who had been seeing her husband.

But still, her blood boiled a bit when she saw the red-haired woman, and her mind began imagining things.

11

She used the close-up feature to try and get a better look at the red-haired woman. Had she seen her before? She didn’t think so. Surely this was just a stranger who happened to cross the street at the moment Hut had asked Matt to put down the camcorder.

Then, she replayed other videos of the city trips on Boys’ Day Out. She saw the street again. Rosetta Street. She wasn’t sure where that was. Why would Hut and Matt be walking down that street more than once or even twice? Four times, over four or five months? Winter to spring?

Then, on the edge of one of the digital videos, she thought she saw a flash of red. She hit the close-up button, and zoomed in. The woman? Was that her face? It looked like it. It might’ve been just some other person with red hair. But it looked like the woman.

She went back to the first video that Matt had watched when she’d arrived. The Chelsea Market. Matt and Hut coming out, the camcorder capturing a moment when Hut took a sip from the white cup of coffee.

Just over Hut’s shoulder, a handful of people. She had thought they were waiting for a bus or just talking at the corner with each other.

The woman with the red hair was there, too. This time, without sunglasses. She was a bit indistinct, even in close-up. But she had glanced over to Hut and Matt and the camcorder’s unerring lens just before Matt turned the camcorder off.

12

“Why don’t you just ask Matt about it?” Mel asked.

They went out for a brisk walk in the late afternoon sunshine, while Laura looked after the kids for an hour. They were walking along the road in front of the house, then headed down the hill toward the lake.

“I can’t. You know how he is. I just don’t want to nudge him.”

“Nudge him?”

“Push him. I saw some of his videos. Some are all sunny and bright and happy. But a few are just...strange. And he filmed me sleeping. And the one of his classmate. I don’t know. It seemed...intrusive. Like he was making her do something.”

“You’re reading too much into it, Jules. For all you know, that was a drama assignment. Or it was something completely innocent. You won’t know unless you ask him.”

“All right. All right,” Julie said, clenching her fists as she walked. “But those other tapes. In the city. Seeing that woman.”

“Maybe you’re looking for things to make yourself feel better about it,” Mel said, her voice having a curious edge to it as if she were hiding something.

Julie stood still. Mel walked a few paces past her, then turned around. “What?”

“What did you mean by that?” Julie asked.

“Nobody would blame you. It’s overwhelming to me that Hut’s gone, too. That some psycho kills him in the woods not five miles from his home. But you have got to set your mind in balance, fast, Julie. You have two kids who are depending on you. Who need you badly. I’m sorry to put it this way. I am. But you have to pull it together, slap yourself awake and forget anything you’re afraid of from the past and move forward. You want to see a therapist? See a therapist. You want to take a month off work? I bet the insurance will kick in and give you summer off if you want it. But you have got to get yourself together and not dwell. That’s the best I can put it.”

“What exactly do you mean by ‘feeling better about it.’ About what?”

“Hut. Being gone. Maybe if you think he was cheating on you, somehow you can deal with it.”

“This is not Little Julie weaseling out of anything,” Julie said. “This is not me at ten years old not wanting to deal with Mom and Dad’s divorce, Mel. I loved him. I loved him. I will never love any man like that again. I miss him. I ache at night knowing that I won’t ever wake up beside him again. I am torn down the middle when I have a dream about him. I have to fight to keep from crying when Livy comes to me in the middle of the night because she wants me to help get God to send him back to us. I have to look her in the eye. She has nightmares three nights a week that a ghost is coming for her. She is seeing a psychiatrist, for God’s sake. My six-year-old daughter. And Matt. Oh my God, Mel, Matt. I have to keep him from hurting himself and maybe anyone else. I have to keep him safe when his own mother would not. And I have to tell them that life is still good. That it’s still worth something. Even if I don’t feel it inside. Even if I’m not sure it’s true. I’m not sure there’s good in the world. I’m not sure that this life is worth living. I’m not sure that if the man I love can be torn from me by some—some obscene insane fucked-up human being who the police can’t seem to catch—that I can look at my children and say, ‘God loves you. The world is God’s creation. We have a wonderful life.’ I’m not sure I can ever, ever believe that. And I won’t lie to them. But I want to know who Hut was. I want someone else to tell me what I didn’t know. I want to feel that life is worth living. Do you understand me? Do you? Can you?”

Mel had a blank look on her face. Nothing had registered. “Julie. It’s been months. It’s not like you have this luxury life. Your kids need you. I’ll help out. But don’t dwell on every little unsolved mystery of his life. He was a man. No one is perfect. You loved him. You have a beautiful daughter. She needs you like she’s never needed anyone before. You’re never going to find out if he cheated on you. He’s dead. Think of Livy. Put her first, and things will fall into place. I’m not sure that therapist is doing you any good. If you want to talk to a minister or priest …”

Julie felt an overwhelming desire to explode at her sister, but instead turned around and walked back up the hill toward her house.

13

Julie went up to her bedroom, shut and locked the door. She called the phone number she’d found in Hut’s jacket so many months before she couldn’t remember which month it had been. It felt disloyal to his memory to call it, but she reasoned that if he had been having an affair—which, with the distance of his death and the perspective she’d gained from becoming a widow, suddenly, in a violent circumstance—maybe it was partly her fault, too, maybe she was too involved with the kids and the ER and the idea of them as a couple instead of what he needed with all the stress he had at the clinic. Maybe it was just the nature of men. “All men cheat,” her mother had warned her before she’d married.

Perhaps it was true.

Mel’s wrong. It won’t make it easier. I don’t want Hut gone. I don’t want to believe he’s gone. I just want to know something. Something true about him. Even if it was that he wasn’t in love with me anymore. Even if it’s bad news.

She whispered it aloud, as she thought it, “I don’t want to lose him yet.”

She gasped. She hadn’t realized how overpowering the unspoken feeling had been.

Maybe no one will pick up.

She would tell the redheaded woman—whether real or imaginary—that Hut had died. That they’d both loved him. Blah blah, she’d say, being a wonderful and generous and forgiving widow.

Hang up, Julie. Just hang up the phone. You don’t need to know who she is. You don’t need to find out.

Someone picked up the phone on the other end.

Julie felt herself choke up. She couldn’t even say, “Hello.”

On the phone, the person who had picked up said nothing, but Julie heard breathing.

Julie waited a few seconds, glancing out to the golden afternoon beyond her window.

The breathing quieted, and then she heard a woman’s voice whisper, “It’s her.”

Then, the dial tone.

Julie tried calling back again, but the line was busy.

She tried again. This time, again she heard the breathing.

“Who are you? Did you know my husband? Did you?” Julie asked.

She heard a faint echo, as sometimes happened, and it pained her to listen to her own stressed-out voice coming back at her, “Who are you? Did you know my husband? Did you?”

Julie closed the phone and set it down and began weeping.

Chapter Ten

1

The next day, she tried the number again, but it was disconnected.

2

Julie got an email from her mother:

Dear Juliet,

Melanie told me about the cops and the psychic stuff, and I don’t know if you knew this, but there were programs, sponsored by our own government, for special schools and testing projects for children who showed psychic ability. Maybe Hut was one of those? There was a fire at one, in Chelsea, in 1977. Seven children died. Four instructors. It was an off-shoot of the Manhattan Psychical Research Institute, but was funded by tax dollars. I found all kinds of stuff online about it. What are the odds? Also, if Livy keeps having nightmares, you might want to get her another night-light. That might help. Tell her that Gramma loves her.

Love, Momma.

Julie sent an email to Mel:

Mel—

Please don’t encourage Mom with anything you hear from me about Hut and the murder. She now is Googling search engines to find out every psychic program in existence to prove her point that Hut was psychic. The Horror Show that is our mother is set loose upon me and I want it to stop. SOS.

Then, from Mel, she got this:

Julie—

I didn’t know any of this was off-limits. I’ll call Mom off you. But do you think she’s right? She told me once that Hut told her that she needed to get her brakes fixed, and how would he have known that? Maybe he was psychic.

Love, Mel

Julie shot off another email to Mel:

Mel—

Stop it. It’s upsetting me. Yes, he had those little intuitions, but he was an intelligent, well-educated man, and many people could guess that a woman who drove a twenty-year-old car and never took it into the shop might want to get her brakes checked.

Between you and McGuane and Mom, you’d have Hut involved in some conspiracy theory with UFOs. You don’t believe in psychics, do you?

Jules.

Mel wrote back:

Julie—

Sometimes, I believe in just about everything.

Open mind, sez me.

Mel

Then, one from her mother that sent her over the edge:

Dear Juliet,

I found this online. Did you know that between 1970 and 1995, the US government spent more than $20 million on research about psychics? They called it “remote viewing,” and it was to find weapons and bunkers in wartime, during the Cold War and after. They set up testing programs here. New York, Los Angeles, Washington, and Chicago. I can send you a link to the article if you want. Why don’t you ask his parents if he had any psychic aptitude? Or maybe I can research some more. You know, I belong to a group that meets sometimes. They know about psychic stuff more than I do. I could call Alice in New York. She worked on that psychic hotline. I bet she’d know something. Let me know. I always knew Hut had more to him than met the eye.

Julie deleted the email before she read the rest. Then, she just blocked her mother’s email address so that she’d get no more emails from her.

3

In early August, Julie Hutchinson got a call from Shakespeare & Company, the bookstore in the city. She had forgotten all about the book—time had both stood still to some extent and had flown, and between the legal wrangle she’d been dealing with, and getting the kids to settle in to a normal day without their father, then out of school for the summer, and balancing her work with her therapy sessions, the last thing she’d been thinking about was a book she’d ordered in some kind of fugue state after Hut’s death.

“What’s it called?” she asked on the phone

“The Life Beyond. It’s by the TV psychic. Michael Diamond,” the clerk told her. “It’s been hard to get in stock because the publisher went under, plus he’s pretty popular with his cult audience.”

The call about the book somehow pulled her back.

4

Before she drove into the city, she took the manila envelope out again, pouring its contents onto her bed. She lay next to them—wallet, watch, keys. Flipped through each key and could name them all—but two.

Two keys, one to a doorknob, one to a dead bolt. Two keys, one with the name of a building in Manhattan engraved lightly into it.

The other, with a number: 66S.

Sixty-Six-S. Sixty-Success. Sixty-Sex-ess.

She had not ventured into New York City since her third visit to the precinct where McGuane had met her. Not for at least two months.

5

“Are you a fan?” the clerk asked, as she passed the package over the counter to Julie.

“I’ve never heard of him. My mother recommended I read it.”

“Oh,” the clerk said. “I thought you might believe in that kind of stuff.”

Julie glanced at the bag, then looked inside at the book. “He’s a psychic?”

The clerk nodded. “I can’t tell if he’s real or it’s all bullshit. He does readings with people on TV. Sort of like John Edward or James Van Praagh, or—what’s that woman’s name? Sybil something. When I was a little kid it was Jeanne Dixon. Like them. Only not quite the same. His books never really go over big, but he’s got that loyal following. His show’s on really late at night—maybe at one in the morning, on cable. I guess he’s not that popular. I saw the show maybe once. Usually the people who buy his books always look a little sad to me. But you don’t.”

“My mother,” Julie grinned, shaking her head lightly. “Now she’s the gullible one. She believes in practically everything.”

Then, she glanced at the display of books near the cash register. One seemed to jump out at her. “Oops, there’s another one I want to get.” She leaned over and pulled the book off the shelf. Then, she slid it onto the register’s counter.

“Oh, I love his books,” the clerk said. “He’s very funny.”

“I’m an old friend of his,” Julie said, smiling. “And this one, too,” she added, grabbing a trade paperback off the counter. “I might as well buy up the whole store.”

“Be my guest,” the clerk said as she rang up the purchases.

6

It was a blisteringly hot, humid day, and she wore a skirt that felt too revealing, but without hose and wearing sandals and a light top, she felt less as if she were going to melt on the sidewalk. She strolled over to Washington Square Park and went to one of the green benches along its outer rim, brushed off the dirt with the edge of her hand, and sat down. The place was nearly empty, and there was something comforting about it. She opened the bag and drew the books out.

The first one was by Joe Perrin, her old pal, and she turned to the back to see his picture. He had used one from his late twenties—he had an ordinary niceness to him, and hair that was a little too long and fell over his left eye in a Veronica Lake send-up. She grinned, thinking of him laughing at using the picture. The credit for the photo was Alicia Caniglia. Julie wasn’t certain, but she thought she might’ve been there when Alicia snapped the picture. She recalled a day down in Battery Park, along the waterfront, and Joe saying he wanted to capture his youth while he had it so that when he became a famous writer, strangers would lust after him.

She missed him a lot, just looking at the picture, remembering days like that, of dreams of the future. Dreams of what was around the corner, of what could change in their lives, in the twinkling of an eye. She read the bio:

Joe Perrin is a thirtysomething writer who lives in New York City with his life partner, Rick Girardo, and a German Shepherd named Dutch. His first novel,A Perry Street Affair, was nominated for a Lambda Award, and his second novel, View from the Pier , was optioned for the movies. He is currently at work on his fourth novel.

She read the first line from Joe’s book, aloud but quietly, as if she could conjure his voice from it. “In 1873, a surgeon named Edward Whistler walked away from his family and children and his successful practice of medicine in London’s Regent’s Row and caught a ship sailing for a small island in the South Pacific, and there, fell in love with a man named after a turbulent volcano.”

She could hear Joe’s voice in the words.

She savored the moment, and then closed the book, putting it back in the bag. She brought the second book out. This was a novel by one of her favorite writers, M.J. Rose, but she quickly put that one back in the bag, making a mental note to loan it to Mel first, who devoured her novels.

Then, the third book.

A white cover, and a man’s face. Michael Diamond looked like he had been a geeky kid who had grown up to put one over on a population of Americans who wanted to believe in anything, so long as someone made it all sound true. He was not cute, and he was not attractive in the least, to her, but there was something in his eyes—in the photograph—that intrigued her. She opened the book, skimmed the table of contents, Who I Am, The Spiritual Side of Life, Death Is a Gift, Cases of Speaking With the Beyond...

She flipped to the opening chapter: Exposing Lies, Seeking Truth.

7

From The Life Beyond:

I want to add a note here about phonies and grifters and con men that get involved in the schemes of the psychic world. I do not mean the well-meaning ones who believe they have ability. I’m talking about the ones who are getting rich by spreading a lie about the afterlife that they themselves know is false. Or at best, that they can’t possibly know. They are too good at their jobs, frankly. They’ll be on television or in front of an audience at some seminar, and they’ll be so good at what they do that one is hard-pressed to discover the trickery involved.

First, let me say, if there were a hell, they’d all burn there, in my opinion. Why? Because they’re giving false hope to people, they’re adding to the delusions people have, and they’re intentionally doing it. I won’t name names here, but you can guess who the culprits are. They can speak in front of an audience of a hundred or more people, and somehow, they manage to know family names, and seemingly secret things, about these families. The truth is, they usually have done their homework.

First, most people coming to see a psychic to talk to a recently passed loved one—or even someone who died years ago—are put on a waiting list to see the psychic. Why? Because the supposed psychic or his research team needs to find out about the people on his or her list. If you have a relative who died in the past, chances are there’s an obituary that can be tracked down.

My own father died several years ago, and if you looked up his name online or through public records, you’d eventually find out that he was a colonel in the Army, that he served in Viet Nam, that he worked in military intelligence and then as a liaison in Bosnia even in retirement. You’d know the name of his brothers, of his parents, of his children and even how he died, because contributions were made to the American Cancer Society. You’d know his date and place of birth. You’d perhaps have a handful of names to research further, too. The Internet today is such that people can trace entire family trees going back centuries if they want to. How easy is that for a psychic? All the psychic has to do is spend thirty minutes or so researching one or two families who are showing up for his audience, and then he gets up in front of the audience and says, “I’m talking to someone who says he has a son here. He’s showing me something about—a helicopter? Or a plane? Some kind of military plane? I’m getting the sense that he was a soldier of some kind. An officer? But there’s something about Bosnia, too. Does this sound like anyone here?” And sheep that I am, I’d raise my hand and gasp and say, “It’s my dad!”

When in fact, it’s simply research on or off the Internet, which anyone can access if they know how.

Why would I want to expose fake psychics? After all, there will be those who believe I’m a fake as well.

Here’s why: I believe it is the greatest human evil to delude a single human being with an idea that is known to be untrue. To play into another’s delusion is equally evil. But to make a profit from that, well, some might say it’s the American way, but I’d say it’s the anti-American way, and no one should give people like that their business.

When I was a boy, I was poked and prodded by well-meaning people trying to understand why a kid of seven could predict the outcome of a card game ten times out of ten. Or how that same kid would be able to locate missing objects at a great distance. Or why that kid managed to understand what someone in contact with him had been thinking.

All I can tell you is: it wasn’t through practice. It wasn’t a trick. It wasn’t a fancy way of cheating people out of their money.

It was a genuine talent, and based on my research, it’s an inherited ability. On my television show, I don’t pretend to talk to the ghosts of the dead. I don’t pretend to call up spirits and get them to tell Aunt Mildred that she needs to move on with her life.

I am not a mystic. If you want a mystic, go get another book. Find a guru to follow. Or a priest. I am not here to tell you about God. Or gods. Or Goddess. Or the Hereafter. The life beyond is about the life beyond the borders that you impose on your mind. It is about learning to tap into talent you may already have that has not been developed. The brain is the most underused muscle in the body, in my opinion. We lift weights, we do aerobics, we go for jogs, or we swim, but we do not take our mind and exercise it, stretch it, allow it to grow.

I was born with an ability. It may be like an ability you have—only you don’t know how to switch it on. It is not magical. It is not a religious experience. It is an aspect to human life that has been untapped for centuries because the very thing I most believe in—Reason—has decreed that anything that does not make immediate sense is impossible. Yet we know now, via science, of the sub-quantum realm of existence—of being able to divide molecular structures to the left, and find that similar structures to the right respond at the same time, though they are untouched. Is this magic? At one time, it was considered such. Soon, I suspect, it will be part of scientific inquiry.

The human mind is an untouchable realm. We can test it, zap it, watch it disintegrate, observe those who suffer from its disorders, recognize a first-rate mind, but the one thing that we have never been able to do is define its limits.

Well, my friends, there are no limits to the human mind. It is a frontier of infinite proportions. And it’s time we began exploration of it.

I mind hunt. And what that means is: I sit with people, I get to know them as quickly as possible, and I delve into their thoughts, briefly. Perhaps this is a molecular occurrence. Perhaps it’s simply a strong intuition. For me, it’s a talent. I would guess that 5 percent of the US population has this talent. Perhaps it’s as low as 3 percent. I suspect a thousand years ago, it was a stronger talent in the population. I suspect that despite the cloud of superstition over the ancient world, one of the reasons for the miracle-makers, the professional fortune-tellers and witches, may have been that this talent existed in gene pools and among families, and predetermined a certain unusual life for the bearer of the talent.

I have known others with similar talents. I have worked beside them. To us, it is simply ordinary. It is not supernatural. It is no more remarkable than if one of us were left-handed, or redheaded, or had one eye flecked with blue and the other with green.

But I’ve yet to encounter a talent that could genuinely speak with the dead and the dearly departed. I believe, truly, that these are the phonies of the psychic world. I wish I could deliver kinder, gentler news than that.

Beware of these fakers and con men. I want you to believe, but not in something that I tell you to believe. Never believe in dogma for which you must pay. If you believe it, if you have your faith, that’s your decision. But don’t accept the easily-paid-for delusions of another.

I want you to go on the journey of your life and find your own treasure.

Do I believe in the life beyond?

Perhaps. I'm not all-seeing, all-knowing. I don’t make claims to fake authority. I am a seeker after wisdom and truth, as you are. I am living life as anyone would, but with an ability that arrived with me at my birth that might provide some insight for you, I hope.

But by naming this book The Life Beyond, I wanted to suggest the freedom each of us needs to feel from the chains of the past—whether the past is something tragic that occurred recently, or simply a template for all our future actions that needs to be modified so that we can change our future life. I do believe in spiritual awakenings. I believe in souls. I believe that there is something sacred about the threshold that exists between life and death. And I have been at the deathbed of people and have seen what mystics might call miracles, but what I would call natural phenomena when the soul leaves the body.

Where that soul goes is not within my field of understanding. I am not out to prove or disprove your God.

I truly doubt it is any human being’s understanding. To the religious, it may be the peace that passes all understanding. To the non-religious, it may be that the door that shuts us off from this life is enough to know for now.

As you continue reading my book, I hope you will travel with me on the journey of what I know from my psychic readings, from my experiences with remote viewing, and from my understanding of how to move from this life to what I hope will truly be, for you, the life beyond—beyond the petty anxieties, the wasted efforts, the small-mindedness of the everyday problems.

An interviewer once asked me: Do you believe in an afterlife?

I have to say: it’s not a matter of belief. I know there is one. For, centuries ago, men dreamed of flying, but could not. And now, they can fly. So that means that in dreams, we can see all that is possible. Nothing within the limits of the human imagination and mind is impossible. If it were, we could not imagine it or dream it.

But what is the afterlife? I haven’t yet been there—that I know of—but perhaps in exploring the human mind more fully, we can find the questions to ask of ourselves, of each other, as to where our journey continues, in the life beyond.

8

Julie closed the book. She put it back in the bag and folded the edges over. A woman, across the park, elderly and with a large, mean-looking mastiff, walked slowly, taking deliberate steps, as if she might fall at any moment. A long-haired young man of about twenty or so played guitar near the fountain rim, two or three friends sitting near him, singing along.

Julie then felt inside her bag, for the keys. Finally, she went to find the building on Rosetta Street.

Chapter Eleven

1

She’d narrowed it down to the block in Matt’s videos, Rosetta Street, which was near Chelsea, but toward the water. With the heat turned up full blast, she was drenched by the time she wandered down to the end of the Village, and then just beyond it, made a left onto James Street, and then a right onto Rosetta.

She had that feeling of déjà vu—remembering Matt’s video, the cobblestone of the street—it was not quite as lovely as it had seemed in the video, for most of it was taken up with meat-packing plants, and there was that awful smell in the air of raw beef and something uglier. The sidewalks outside one of the buildings had just been hosed down. A few people walked along the opposite sidewalk, obviously using the street as a shortcut from one business meeting to another, or a lunch, or lives that she could only imagine.

Then she came to the sunken doorway of the building she had been dreading since she had first found the phone number and the keys.

She tried each key on the door of the building, but neither worked.

She sat on the edge of a stone pediment, just at the edge of the steps down to the front door.

She was about to leave, when a young overweight woman with a bundle of groceries stepped off the sidewalk, heading for the door. “Forget your key?”

“I’m apartment sitting.” Julie thought it up quickly. She held up the two keys. “A friend’s cat is inside there, very hungry at this point.”

The young woman looked at her warily. Too innocently, she asked, “Which apartment?”

“Sixty-six S.”

“Ah,” the woman said. “I already put in a complaint about your friend. Last week it was like a herd of elephants were dancing up there. I hope you don’t mind my telling you. Nobody does anything about anyone here, and I’m tired of it.”

2

The smell in the building was like a pure blast of just-sprayed Lysol mixed with the undeniable warm bleachy odor of a nearby laundry room.

“This weather, can you get over it?” the woman said. “I hope fall is nice. Fall is usually nice for about three weeks. I could use those three weeks about now. Hell, I could use three days. I can’t stand winter and I can’t stand summer. I should just live in one of those plastic bubbles.”

The elevator was small, and she helped the woman with her groceries as she shut the blue door so that the elevator’s inner doors would shut properly. “I don’t want you thinking I normally call the super when anyone has a party. I don’t mind that kind of thing,” the woman said. “Parties or whatever. I mean, sometimes I feel like the people in 553 have a disco going on. It’s just that this was pretty bad. I was trying to sleep. I work weekends and the noise was bad. Press five, would you?”

Julie pressed the buttons for the fifth and sixth floors, and the elevator lurched, shook slightly, and then moved upward with a slight whine.

“Do you know the people in 66S?” Julie asked, hesitantly.

“This building is the unfriendliest in the city,” the woman said, with the kind of cadence that made Julie think she’d used this line before. “I don’t even know my next-door neighbors. But you know, sometimes that’s a good thing. God knows I hear them enough. And someone on my hall has the yappiest dog alive. I love animals, but not that damn dog.”

After the woman had stepped off the elevator, she turned slightly, smiling. “I’m not saying your friends are bad. They just get noisy sometimes.”

“A herd of elephants,” Julie nodded. “I’ll tell them to take their shoes off next time.”

“Oh ha ha,” the woman laughed. The elevator door shut again. The woman’s pale round face, her dark hair, were all that Julie could see in the round window of the outer elevator door.

Julie drew the keys out of her pocket, clutching them tightly.

At the sixth floor, she got out, fully expecting a long hall with many apartments, but instead, there were only six, 66S being the very last.

At the door, she pressed the key into the dead bolt, and it turned.

She drew the key out.

She hesitated a moment, and then rapped lightly on the door. Then, she pressed the bell.

She waited for what seemed an eternity before trying the other key on the knob. It went in easily, and she turned it.

3

She stood in the doorway.

The air-conditioning in the apartment was on high and chilly. She could see a foyer that was made up of closets on either side, and a narrow hallway. The apartment must be a fairly large one—that was her first impression. The walls were white and off-white. There was an unshaded window at the very end of the foyer, allowing a smattering of light through its casement windows.

“Hello?” she asked.

She stepped inside, closing the door behind her. She felt strangely comforted by the plastic bag with the book in it, beneath her arm. She felt as if she could just say that she thought it was someone else’s place, if caught. She could say something like, “I was given the keys—see? My husband gave them to me.” She felt her heart beating as if it were in her throat as she stepped across the floor. She took each step forward carefully, trying not to make a clicking sound with her sandals on the parquet.

When she got to the window, the apartment turned to the left, and beyond the wall that divided the foyer from the rest, it was enormous. It became a loft that seemed to be at least 2000 square feet or more, with exposed brick along one long wall, and a factory-like skylight above. It was oddly furnished—the lamps all seemed to be huddled at one end, while a broad leather sofa, love seat and two chairs were arranged alongside the far wall. The furnishings seemed years out of style, and pushed around as if intended for storage. Copper pots hung from the ceiling along the kitchen area, with a central marble island, and a bright rectangle of clean wall where the refrigerator should have been settled. There was a long butcher block table just under the enormous loft-length opaque window that was divided, factory-style, into several casements. A paleness to the room, as if it had not been dusted—or entered—for a long time.

For just a second, she thought she heard a noise behind her, and she glanced back for a second in case the woman who owned the apartment had come home—what the hell are you doing here, Julie?—but there was no one. She turned back around the corner of the hall, to the foyer, but no one had entered.

“Someone’s here,” she said aloud, as if it would make her feel safer.

It was not her voice, within her mind, saying this.

She couldn’t identify it, but she had a sudden feeling as if someone nearby had whispered this.

What the hell are you doing here, Julie?

And then she smelled something. Something that became overpowering—not just a smell. A stench. It was the smell she knew from childhood when a dead animal had lain in a ditch for days. Her mind flashed on the image from Matt’s video of the dead dog in the road. It was growing—the smell was growing. She glanced at the walls of the apartment as if they held something threatening, as if she half expected to see bloody handprints.

Then she was sure she heard something move in the room beyond the living room. Someone was in the bedroom.

Something moved there.

She heard the tap, tap, tap of shoes on a floor. Someone was coming.

Her heartbeat seemed too noisy, as if it were not inside her at all, but outside of her body, a clock, ticking too fast.

The voice in her head grew louder, pounding within her mind: What the hell are you doing here?

She saw the shadow of the person, first, in the open doorway across the room.

Then, she saw: a man standing there, only something was wrong. Something was messed up about his eyes, because it was as if his face was a blur of movement.

4

Julie took one step backward, then another.

He stood in the doorway, his face a fast-motion blur, his hands moving in what seemed like slow motion.

Then, she turned and hurried down into the foyer and out of the apartment, shutting the door behind her, not bothering to lock it. Her heart beat rapidly—it felt as if it were thudding against her ribcage—and she pressed her back up against the hallway, looking back at the apartment.

She didn’t feel safe again until she was out on the street, out among the throngs of people along Hudson Street, moving as if they were fish in a murky sea.

She went into the Chelsea Clearwater movie theaters and just sat through a movie she barely noticed, trying to erase the image of the faceless man from her mind. Then she felt that maybe it had been her mind, playing tricks, that it had been her fear, within her, perhaps building something up—and she was sure that there was no man there at all. That it was like a flash of seeing someone. Not a person at all. It was impossible for it to have been a person.

“The human mind cracks more easily than we suspect,” Eleanor had told her, in her first session after Hut’s death. “You need to be aware of it. Your brain is opening and closing doors. Some of them get slammed. Some get torn off their hinges. You bottle up too much, Julie, you don’t find a healthy way to let some of this out, it’ll rupture inside you. Just be prepared for when it happens.”

5

She left the movie before the halfway point, and, feeling better, called up Joe Perrin, and they met over at the Starbucks on Eighth Avenue. She felt as if she’d calmed down, finally, from that awful feeling she’d had. That face that was not a face.

And finally, she told Joe about Hut’s death.

6

“Oh my God, Julie. Julie,” he said. He brought his chair around the small round table and wrapped his arms around her. She wept into his shoulder, forgetting the world of the coffeehouse, forgetting anything but the comfort he offered. “My poor baby,” he whispered.

7

Her tears dry, she drank some of the cappuccino. “God, you’d think I’d be all cried out by now. It’s been months.”

“Tears are one of those self-renewing resources. And it’s only been a few months. Healing takes time.” He pushed a small plate with a big black and white cookie on it toward her. “Hungee?” It was their joke word from years ago.

She broke off a piece of the cookie, and took a bite. “Mmm. Reminds me of all our adventures.”

“Most of which are best forgotten.”

“Oh, Joe. I feel...I feel like I’ve lost my soul or something.”

“Well, I think your soul’s intact. It’s your mind that’s a bit scattered.” He had his head down a bit and looked up to her with those warm brown eyes that seemed both playful and a little sad to her, like a boy playing peek-a-boo.

“I’m sorry I’ve been distant. All these years.”

“It’s okay. It’s only been a few years, really. I saw you when Livy was what—two and a half? It wasn’t that long ago. Life takes over,” he said. “Rick and I are practically hermits since we tied the knot. If he didn’t get me volunteering at the Center, I’d probably just live in my little office.”

“I bought one of your books today,” she brightened. She brought the package from Shakespeare & Company up, opening it.

“Ooh, which one?”

She drew out the book. Dr. Notorious. On the cover, the torso of a young man, and just a sliver of his chin.

“I hate that cover,” Joe said. “The book is about a guy in the 19th century who goes to the South Pacific—after becoming sickened by European society, where he was a doctor. He falls in love on the islands, and then has to choose between his love for a man and his duty to his culture, to his family. And they put a twenty-year-old gym bunny right out of the New York City Sports Club on the cover to sell it. I could write a book about measles, and they’d put a cute guy’s butt on the front of the book. But, that’s show biz, as they say.”

“Speaking of show biz—you sold a book to the movies?”

“Sure. Everyone does. They pay you a few grand and you get to say maybe it’ll be a movie. I sell them View from the Pier and you know they'll never make that movie because no actor is going to want to play a guy who knows he’s gay, falls in love with a guy, and then stays in a marriage to destroy his wife and children and the guy he loves. It’s too...dark, I guess. Even my editor called it unsympathetic, and she loved it. You can’t make a movie about that and expect to sell tickets.”

“Sure they will. It sounds wonderful. Joe, I’m so happy for you, for all this. And I can’t wait to read this one. I haven’t kept up with your career as much as I should’ve.”

He shrugged. “It’s not exactly a career. What’s the other book?”

“It’s some psychic book. My mother pushed it on me, and in a weak moment I ordered it.”

“You believe in that stuff?”

“Not really.”

“I do,” he said. “Since my dad died. The day he died, I dreamed that he came to me and told me that he loved me. He had never said it before. Not in real life. He was a military bruiser, basically. He didn’t want to have a kid like me. Even when I was on the football team in high school, he thought I was too soft. He blamed Mom’s family—because there was another gay guy—my uncle. He said it ran in families. But in the dream, he said he loved me.”

“Oh.”

“No, not ‘oh.’ When I woke up, I saw him. I saw him as clear as day. He was at the foot of my bed and he said, ‘I’m glad you found love, Joe. You have a lot to give. I love you, Jojo.’ And then, he faded.” His voice cracked a little, and she thought she caught a glimmer of a tear in his eye, but his smile belied any sadness. “Maybe it was, you know, a cobweb of wishful thinking. Or one of those hypnogogic things, where you’re still half asleep and a dream seems real even when you’re awake in your bedroom. But it was some kind of gift. I believe it. Maybe I choose to, because it makes it all easier. It didn’t change my core beliefs. But it showed me that there’s something else out there. Something we don’t yet understand. He was as real as you are, right here. I think maybe we have these kinds of experiences all the time, only we don’t know how much of a gift they are. And it made me remember all the good things. All the things about him I’d pushed aside because of our differences. All the wonderful things he had been to me, despite his worst nature.” Then, he gave her a look she thought of as his “wait a second!” expression. “You must’ve had some kind of...unusual experience...or you wouldn’t be picking up books on the afterlife, right?”

“No,” she said. Thinking of what she saw in apartment 66S. The face that was not there. The blur of movement that was the figure of a man. Only not a man. But I am losing it now. I am seeing things that are not there. I won’t mention this to Joe. Not yet. He’ll look at me sweetly and sadly and tell me that it’s normal to see faceless men after a tragic death. “I think Mom wants me to feel better. She’s got the hots for this psychic.” She brought The Life Beyond out and showed the cover to him, with Michael Diamond on it.

“Oh, him,” Joe said. “He’s so serious looking, isn’t he? I guess I’ve caught his show a couple of times. He’s a complete fake. He has to be. His stuff is too good. When a psychic’s that good, there’s some trick going on. I don’t think psychic stuff is like a drive-through or something. I don’t think one psychic can serve a billion customers. I think it’s more personal. You should have a psychic reading sometime. They can be really good. I know this woman who does them. It’s not creepy at all, believe me.”

8

After coffee, they walked through the old neighborhood. Joe updated her on each window, who lived there before, who had moved, who was turning into the cat lady, who had become the Neighborhood Watcher, and what had happened to the little old man in the fedora who used to feed pigeons on the rooftop, thus pissing off everyone who lived on the block because of the increased bird shit on the street. They wandered over to a bakery that was renowned for its cupcakes, and split one, and then went over to another bookshop nearby, called Three Lives & Company. It was a small, quaint bookshop packed with books. “Remember this place?”

She drew a blank. “Sure.”

He made a face that she could only classify as dimwitted. “Julie. It’s where we met.”

“Oh,” she said, clapping her hands together. “How could I forget that?”

“Yeah, some strange chick coming up to me telling me that I shouldn’t read Mary McCarthy because she claimed she was a fascist, when in fact it was Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian I had in my hand.”

“I don’t know why I was so hard on Mary McCarthy. She wasn’t a fascist at all. I think I just wanted to say the word fascist and apply it to anyone and everyone.”

“And I told you that Ayn Rand wrote books for humorless Sarah Lawrence girls who wanted to get laid but still feel smart afterward,” he said. “And then you said that I was sexist and probably racist and probably homophobic. And I said...”

“You looked at me as if I had just slapped you hard in the face and said, ‘I can’t be homophobic because I’m a homo,’” she chuckled. “Whatever happened to those two stupid young people?”

“I don’t know, but I read Atlas Shrugged all the time and it never helped me get laid,” he said.

Finally, he walked her to where her car was parked and kissed her on the cheek. “You need anything, I’m here. Rick and I can be out in the ’burbs on a moment’s notice.”

“I thought you were anti-suburban?”

“For you,” he said, “I’ll brave the wilds of Jersey. I miss my old buddy. I miss you. I want to see Livy, too. And Matt.”

“We blocked you out, didn’t we?” she said, sighing.

“Not really.”

“No, we did. Hut didn’t like you. I guess I can say that now. I think he thought you were a threat in some way.”

Joe grinned, big and broad just like he was a wicked kid. “I am the all-powerful Oz.”

“I can’t throw all the blame on him. I went along with it. I should’ve fought. But I was busy with the kids, and I was busy with the house and my job. And I just let it all go.”

“Well, none of that matters. We kissed and made up. You’re my old buddy, Julie. And don’t read that Michael Diamond book. Okay? He’s full of it. Go get a John Edward book. Or even Sylvia Browne. She’s good. Diamond has something wrong with him. I’ve seen his show. He just gets pretty nasty. I don’t think he helps people at all. He does more damage than good.”

Another kiss, and Julie was in the car and driving out to the Westside Highway, to the Lincoln Tunnel, and then, north up to Rellingford, the city vanishing as she entered the suburban wilderness.

9

“What do you know about this?” Julie asked, dropping the keys on the table between them.

Outside, with Matt, on the picnic table in the backyard.

“They’re keys.”

“Keys to an apartment on Rosetta Street. You used to go there with your father.”

“That’s crazy,” he said, looking up at her.

“Matt, I know this might not be easy for you. I know we’ve had our ups and downs. But I want you to tell me about this. It’s important.”

“Important to who?”

“To me.”

He didn’t look her in the eye. “You’re nosy.”

She glared at him. “Just tell me.”

“I feel sorry for you, Julie. I really do. Sometimes I hate you. But I feel bad for you because you’re too much like my mother. You stick your nose in where it doesn’t belong.”

It stung when he said it. He’d never said anything like that to her before. He’s been through hell. Cut him some slack.

“All right. Well, you can hate me. It’s okay by me. That doesn’t answer my question.”

“I don’t remember,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“It means: I don’t remember. Maybe Dad took me there. I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

“You mean you don’t want to tell me,” she said, trying to remain calm.

“God, you are such a fucking bitch,” he spat, his face suddenly going red. This wasn’t the first time he’d gotten this over-the-top angry. She’d understood—from Eleanor and from Hut—that Matt had something wired in his brain that just didn’t stop him from taking things too far. Knowing that helped her deal with it. “Why don’t you ask my mother about those keys? Why don’t you fucking ask her? She knows everything. She’s the one who knows it all. Quit fucking bothering me.”

Julie leaned forward, touching the edge of his hand. “Oh, honey. You know I love you. You know I’m not trying to upset you.”

“You know I love you,” he mimicked. “Love love love. Fuck this. Just ask her.”

Julie sat there, stunned. She knew from her sessions with Eleanor that Matt needed to feel safe. That he needed to act out. That he needed to say things that might be hurtful sometimes. It’s part of what he’s dealing with. He’s working out past abuse from his time with his mother.

“Ask her. Ask her whatever you want. Just leave me the hell alone, bitch.” He swiveled around on the bench and got up, one last look of contempt shot her way, and then stomped off into the house.

Then, she heard him go on a rampage—something that Hut had only referred to from the past—one of Matt’s fits of rage.

First, the sound of breaking glass.

And then, shrieking as if he were hurt.

10

In therapy:

“I can’t convince you not to pursue this?” Eleanor asked.

Julie shrugged. “Maybe.”

“What do you think you will accomplish?”

“Closure?”

“You don’t sound sure.”

“I’m not. Matt won’t talk to me. Not right now. He’ll yell at me, but not talk. I haven’t heard him swear in a long time. I’m not a prude about language. But it shocked me. It was so...sudden.”

“Violent?”

Julie frowned, slightly, nodding. “I didn’t feel threatened. He broke a couple of plates. He tried to slam his fist into the wall. No real damage. He was fine ten minutes later, but he didn’t want to have anything to do with me. Just turned sullen and quiet and I figured I needed to leave him alone for a while. It just seemed...out of the blue.”

“Anger is normal. You’re being very confrontational, Julie. You must acknowledge that. You know that Matt has limited resources within himself. Whatever happened when he was young can’t just go away. A lot is going on inside him, and his father’s death probably left him afraid that you’d abandon him, too.”

Julie raised her eyebrows slightly.

“I’m not here just to tell you what you want to hear. Look, give him a break. He’s had too much loss in his life. He’s probably afraid that you’ll give him up. You’re not his natural mother. With his father gone, it’s normal for him to have that kind of fear. Plus, you’re digging, and he doesn’t like it.”

“I feel it’s important.”

“To whom?”

“To me.”

“Why are you asking my permission for this trip?”

“You’re my therapist.”

“I’m not your mother.”

“She wouldn’t sign my permission slip.”

“This woman has attempted suicide three times in her life. She has a history of violent behavior. God knows what she did to her son in that short period of time when she raised him, but I doubt she was a fit mother for a child. I just think you’re playing with fire here.”

11

Julie called the psychiatric center that afternoon and set up an appointment to see Hut’s first wife.

Chapter Twelve

1

The psych rehab center was just outside Philadelphia in a lovely suburban world (called Greenwood) that had a fringe of country to it. The area was surrounded by woodlands, and she barely saw it off the highway in time to make the turnoff onto Beacon Drive, and from there, to the gates. It looked like an old mansion that had been grafted onto a nursing home, and its bright neo-classic exterior with pergolas and balconies and colonnades belied the monastic sparseness of the interior of the building.

“She lives in West,” the clerk at the front desk said. “I need you to hand over that bag,” she pointed to the handbag. “Any keys, pens, anything sharp, too.”

Julie passed her handbag over. “My appointment was at three.”

“It’s all right. We know traffic can be bad. She probably just had a nap at this point. Go down through the double doors, elevator on the right—the red elevator, not green—and take it to the third floor. Make your first left, two doors down is the social worker’s office. That’s Gigi Kaufmann. Gigi. She’ll take you to see her.”

2

The social worker was in her mid-fifties, wore thick glasses, and her hair, nearly white, was wrapped around her squarish face like cotton candy. She spoke in a loud whisper, reminding Julie of being a kid in a library. “She was doing great, up until the news in April. I’m afraid it caused her some agitation. But she’s better now, I think.”

“Is there anything I should know? A way I should talk?” Julie found herself whispering as she spoke.

The social worker strode down the hall as if she were in a hurry to get this over with. The halls were painted a muted pastel yellow, and they passed other patients’ rooms, which seemed uniformly dreary and white. A woman in bed, her hair a bird’s nest tangle of white, sat up and stared at Julie as if she’d brought bad news. Two men, orderlies, stood at the end of the hallway by the barred window, one sipping coffee, the other gesturing as if toward a third person who was not there.

“She’s not dangerous to anyone, if that’s what you mean,” the social worker said. “She’s really a model patient. The medication helps, of course. It grounds her in reality a bit. You’ll find her quite chatty.”

“Is there anything I shouldn’t mention? Any subject matter to avoid?”

The social worker grinned. There was something uncomfortable in the over-familiarity of the smile, like she was sharing a joke. “Well, all I can say is, don’t talk about sex. She has some hang-ups, as they say.”

Before Julie could figure out what that comment meant, they were at the doorway marked Amanda Hutchinson. The social worker stopped, checked the clipboard that hung next to the door, and scribbled something across it in pencil. Stuck her head through the open door and announced too loudly, “Hello, Mandy. We’ve got a visitor.”

3

“Come over here, sweet pea,” Amanda Hutchinson said, motioning with her hand. Her voice betrayed her southern accent, something that Julie was surprised hadn’t faded away over the years. Amanda had been born in Georgia, had moved with her family to New York when young, and somewhere in there had moved south again before moving back to Manhattan when she and Hut had been together as a couple. She sat in a cushioned chair, near the window. There were ornate scroll-like iron bars across the window, as if the institution wanted to disguise the fact that this was to keep patients from jumping, and instead, made it look like decorative art.

Julie noticed that mental illness had been kind to Amanda. She didn’t have the look of the others on the hall. She had retained her beauty—at forty—and her mane of jet black hair was shiny and neatly arranged around her shoulders. She wore a minimum of makeup, and her face was a pure white. She had the formal air of a deposed princess that Julie had remembered from a previous visit, before Livy was born. Although, back then, Amanda had been more heavily sedated, and the right meds had not quite been found for her, so she had looked haggard. Now, she positively glowed.

Julie stepped into the room. It smelled clean and fresh, with a faint pine scent lingering.

Amanda held her hand up. “Come on, I won’t bite, even though they say I do.”

Julie grinned, and went to her. Took her hand. “Hello, Amanda.”

Amanda squeezed her hand a little too tightly, and Julie felt intense heat in the palm of her hand. “Aren’t you just the picture of delicious? You got balls coming here, Mrs. Hutchinson Number Two. Big hairy balls.” She said it in a southern singsong voice, like she was the mistress of some great plantation.

“Call me Julie. Please.”

“I like calling you Number Two Wife. I’m Wife Number One. Mother to the heir apparent. You’re just second in the harem.” She let go of Julie’s hand, finally. Julie noticed that there were faint scars on Amanda’s hands, as if a cat had scratched her up.

Amanda rubbed one hand over the other, unselfconsciously. She seemed to enjoy the attention. “Tell me, sweet thing, you have any contraband?” She said “contraband” like it had seven syllables, the honeyed southern thing growing a bit old for Julie. It felt like an act.

Julie tried to keep the slight smile plastered on her face, but it was getting difficult.

“I just mean cigarettes, dear gaw-ad,” Amanda said, “you look like you thought I was asking for cocaine or something.”

“Want me to go get you some?”

Amanda’s eyes twinkled. “He must’ve loved hearing you ask ‘How high?’ whenever he asked you to jump.” She motioned toward a wooden chair in a corner. “Pull that thing over. Just throw all the magazines off.”

After Julie scooted the chair closer to Amanda’s, she sat down and hesitated before saying, “I’m really glad you agreed to see me.”

“Why wouldn’t I? I have nothing to fear now. I’m dispatched like a queen to the tow-uh. Look at all this,” she laughed, pointing to the TV set on the wall, and narrow bed. “I suppose I’ll be here until the day I die. I’ll be moved downstairs where the little old ladies push their walkers around and talk about how life turned out awful for them. But it’s better than being out there, out where the wild things roam.”

“You’re not in here against your will,” Julie said.

Amanda Hutchinson smiled, broadly. She looked down to Julie’s feet, then up her legs, her hips, her waist, her breasts, settling on her face. Julie remembered something that Hut had told her, about Amanda’s ambiguity. She had always thought he’d meant something to do with her indecisiveness, but now wondered if he hadn’t meant that she was bisexual. She certainly seemed to be checking her out the way crude men sometimes had in the past.

“I completely volunteered for this, believe me.” Amanda turned and looked out the window; through the bars, the beautiful lawn and the neat rows of boxwoods around a central stone fountain. A bitterness entered her voice. “I have been diagnosed, my dear. It’s a diagnosis that keeps me safe in the Tower, away from the dreaded Executioner. I wonder if Anne Boleyn longed for the sword to the neck by the time she’d lived in the Tower long enough? I don’t. I don’t want my head to roll. I keep that one awful thing alive. That one terrible thing. Hope. Hope that maybe I’m insane and all these meds will help me. That these Tower walls will keep me safe.”

Then, she shot a sharp glance back at Julie. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit, Wife Number Two?”

“I thought maybe there’d be pieces of Hut’s life that you...well, that we could discuss.”

“How’s my son?”

“He’s doing good.”

Amanda gave her that catlike look, as if she were playing with her. “I’m surprised.”

“He’s a...a wonderful boy.”

“That’s more of a surprise. I haven’t seen him since he was six. He was a pretty little boy. But he’s dead to me, isn’t he? Does he ask about me?”

“Sometimes.”

Amanda laughed, full-throated, with something malevolent in the sound. It made Julie nervous. “I bet it’s not good when he does. I bet he gets violent. I bet he curses my name. As well he should. I’m a monstrous mother.” She said this last part as if it was of no consequence. “He’s a little brain-damaged boy.” She watched Julie for a reaction. “I dropped him on his head when he was a baby. I suppose that’s what Hut told you. I beat him until he just got to be damaged goods.”

Julie was ready. She reined in her reaction. Don’t give her ammo. Julie fingered the edge of her chair. She looked at her own hands. At the ring on her left hand. Do not react to her poison. That’s what Hut had called it. Her poison.

“You knew Hut when he was young,” Julie said, slowly.

“We were kids. It was the last good time of my life. Under the age of twenty. After twenty, it was all downhill for me. Nervous breakdown city. Hallucinations. Seeing...ghosts.” Amanda grinned wickedly. “But I don’t want to bother your pretty little face with any of that. So, now that he’s dead, you want to know about him? Why’s that, Wife Numbah Two? Because when he was alive, maybe you never knew him at all? That doesn’t surprise me, either. Nothing surprises me. You think he didn’t pick you out of a lineup of possibles. He did. I know him. I’ve known him since he was younger than Matt. You know, he’s still with us. He may be in the backseat of your car right now, for all I know. Just waiting to surprise you.”

“I don’t find this funny at all. This kind of talk.”

“Sensitive pretty little Wife Number Two. All right, fair enough. You want to know what Hut was like? I knew him before he was adopted out. I knew him when he was a bad bad little boy. Worse than Matt, and you think Matt’s bad.”

“Matt is an angel,” Julie said, feeling defensive.

“You’re good. You’re really good, Wife Number Two. You can lie with the same look in your eyes as when you tell the truth. My foster mother used to call it the clear blue eyes of a born liar. They say it takes a criminal mind to do that well.”

They both were quiet after this for several minutes. Amanda Hutchinson glanced around the room as if she were taking mental photographs of the moment.

Then Amanda broke the silence. “Did he ever tell you about when we were children?”

“Only a little,” Julie said. Then she added, “You were in a school together?”

Amanda kept a Cheshire cat grin on her face. “The drugs I get here stunt me a little. In the brain. They turn off things that hurt, and they seem to turn on the warm fuzzies. But I can’t get used to it. Not being able to figure things out, the way I used to. Like why you’re really here. It’s not about my son, it’s not about Hut. It’s about something else, only the warm fuzzies have taken over my brain and I can’t quite pinpoint it. You’re pretending it’s about remembering Hut in all his glory, the doctor to the poor, the wonderful man who gave you a daughter and me a son. But you want something from me. What is it? Let’s just get this over with. Fish or cut bait, as they say.”

“I’m not really sure why I’m here.”

Amanda gave a low growl of a chuckle. “It’s because your poor pathetic little life is a big fat lie, Number Two Wife. It’s because he never let you in on his secret. His deep dark wound of a secret that would destroy you if you knew it. And I can’t even tell you about it. Even if I wanted to. Even if I dreamed of doing it. The warm fuzzies have me. You found out about Rosetta Street, didn’t you? That’s why you’re here. You found out about 66S. You are so warm, Wife Number Two. Warm and getting warmer. But you get too warm, you burst into flames. I did. I got too warm. I got too hot. I burned up there, in 66S. I dream about it now, it’s a nightmare from hell, but I dream about it, and what happened, and you want to know why a mother hates her own son, Wife Number Two? Why my little baby Matthew is dead to me? Just go ask them. Ask 66S. You can get burned, too. Or if you’re smart, if you’re a genius, you will walk out of this room, and go home and pick your daughter up and get as far away from 66S as you can, before it happens to you, too. Because eventually, we all burn, Julie. All of us. We burn eternally.”

“I’m sorry,” Julie said.

“Do you believe in heaven? Do you? Or hell? Or anything?”

“Maybe.”

“You should. There’s something else out there. Something beyond this life. Something that’s worse than dying. Worse than suffering. Worse than the worst torture of being alive.” Her voice grew into an undertow of a growling sensuality, and Julie felt as if she were being hypnotized by it. “It’s not beautiful heaven. It’s not even beautiful hell. It’s a thousand times more terrifying than anything you can dream up in your feeble nightmares. The apartment on Rosetta Street is a burning place, Julie Hutchinson, Wife Number Two, it is a torture chamber, and you will find yourself on fire if you ever go there.”

“I’ve been there,” Julie said.

Amanda looked at her, as if just seeing her for the first time. Her eyes widened, and the smile crept up wider than before. She had a full toothy grin, and her face seemed to gleam as if it excited her to hear this.

“It’s a place of impossibilities. And burning. If you’d really been there—really been in 66S...we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.”

“There was nothing there.”

“Oh. There was something. You just didn’t look hard enough.”

Julie briefly closed her eyes. Remembering the blurred gray face of the man in the bedroom doorway.

“Open your eyes,” Amanda said. “You were there. You saw something. Only you left. Fast. Fast as your pretty legs could carry you.”

Amanda Hutchinson went silent, and looked down at her hands, wiping them against each other as if washing them clean.

When Amanda Hutchinson spoke again, it was in a whisper.

“I’m sorry,” Julie said. “What?”

Amanda whispered again. Something playful in the curve of her lips, in the way her eyes flashed.

Julie smiled back, almost involuntarily.

Something about the way Amanda leaned forward made Julie get up and lean closer in to her.

Julie tried to make out the words forming silently on Amanda’s lips. Something in her went cold—something about being so close to Hut’s first wife—and yet she felt nothing but heat emanating from her.

“He’s trying to contact you. They do that, you know. After they’re gone. They try to. That’s why you’re here. You want to know. But I can’t tell you. The warm fuzzies have me, they have me, have me, have me,” Amanda said, softly, so softly that Julie could barely hear her. “You want to know who lives in Apartment 66S?” Amanda reached over to touch a strand of Julie’s hair—Julie gasped for a second, her nerves tingling—Amanda then gently placed the strand of hair back behind Julie’s ear like it was a flower. Her touch, almost sexual. Almost threatening.

Julie felt something at the center of her being, no, lower, something that was like a gentle tickling, from the inside. Her breathing slowed.

She smelled a musky scent from Amanda. Musk and something sweet.

Amanda’s breath—warm and sweet.

“Pretty Number Two Wife. So beautiful. So sad. So wanting.”

Julie looked into her eyes. Amanda’s eyes seemed endless to her—deep pools of darkness.

“Sixty-six S,” Amanda whispered, letting it become a hiss.

Then, Amanda leapt toward her, and for just a second, Julie felt as if she were watching some wild animal, sprung loose from its cage.

4

Julie’s chair went backward, and her legs went in the air. Amanda Hutchinson was on top of her, swinging her fist down for the side of her head.

Once hit, Julie felt as if she were losing consciousness, and wasn’t sure, but felt a strange warmth—as if Amanda’s hand were now going down between her legs, down to touch her, beneath her skirt, the edge of her panties.

Amanda’s urgent whisper in her ear, “Does he come to you at night and touch you, only it’s better than he ever did before? Does he make you moan, Wife Numbah Two? Does he try to get inside you?”

Julie took a deep breath, and brought her knee up, knocking her attacker in the arm, pushing her hand away.

The fingers had just grazed the skin beneath her panties.

Then, an orderly was running in the room shouting, “Mandy! Get off her right now! Holy shit, Jimmy, get down here!”

5

“Ms. Kaufmann? Gigi?” Julie asked, nearly out of breath, tapping at the door of the social worker’s office.

The social worker came to the door, opening it a crack. “Yes?” Large steel blue eyes behind thick glasses. “Mrs. Hutchinson? My God!”

“I think...I think she’s upset. Something’s wrong.”

The social worker looked at her. “My God. Are you all right?”

The screeching could be heard down the corridor.

“I’m fine.” Julie wasn’t sure if this was true.

“Your face.”

“It’s all right. Please. She needs help now.”

6

After Amanda had been subdued, Julie stood just outside the doorway to her room. She briefly glanced inside. The orderlies had not yet righted the overturned chairs. They had just finished tying her in restraints to the edges of the mattress. Although she’d been given a shot of some kind of sedative, Amanda continued to struggle in the restraints. One of the staff nurses bandaged her fingers where the nails had torn.

The social worker touched Julie’s arm. “She’ll sleep now. It’s all right. Sometimes there are flare-ups. Let’s get you down to the nursing wing to look at those cuts.”

7

“She jumped me,” Julie said, as a young male nurse daubed a Q-tip soaked in hydrogen peroxide on the slight cuts on her arm.

The nurse grinned. “You’re lucky. She took someone’s eye out last winter.”

“My God.”

“It happens now and then. Mandy is docile as a lamb for eleven months of the year, and then one day—or night—snaps. Sorry for the gallows humor. I know it can be pretty scary. She went Lizzie Borden on me once, too. Right after I started.”

“I just didn’t expect it,” Julie said. “We were...well, I hope I didn’t do something to provoke her.”

“Probably not,” the nurse said. Then, noticing the cuts on her knee, “She didn’t...do anything else, did she?”

He means “did she touch me down there?”

“No, well, I mean, she sort of scratched me up...all over.”

The nurse nodded, as if considering all of it. “Sometimes, she does some inappropriate touching.”

“I’m sure that’s not what it was.”

He shrugged. “Business as usual,” he said. “You probably just upset her a little, and that’s enough for her to go full throttle. Ever since her son’s death.”

“Her husband,” Julie corrected. “Her ex. My husband.”

“Oh. I’m sorry,” the nurse said. “I’m sorry to hear that. I can’t believe I got it wrong. Well, it really gets her going, sometimes. Probably you just reminded her of some bad stuff. And she never really sleeps much. She wanders sometimes, at night. Just wanders, and thinks someone’s following her. She thinks someone is trying to kill her.”

When Julie looked up at the doorway, the social worker stood there with a slight frown to her face.

“I’m afraid I have to ask that you not make these kinds of visits,” Gigi Kaufman said. “Whatever you said in there upset her tremendously.”

Chapter Thirteen

1

That night, Amanda Hutchinson awoke from a deep sleep that had been completely dreamless. She found that the restraints on her wrists had been loosened, and she easily slipped out of first one, and then another. Then, she sat up, working on the restraints on her ankles.

Her room, dark except for the patch of light from the hall, her door just half-shut, had been cleaned up, and overturned chairs had been righted. She listened for orderlies or nurses in the hall, but there were none.

She got out of bed and went to the window, looking out on the moon glow across the lawn and trees.

And then, she heard the voice in her head. A voice she had managed to block—that the warm fuzzies had blocked—and that she had thought would leave her alone.

But it was that woman. Julie. Coming to her. Pushing at her. Making her remember things that were best forgotten.

2

After she’d written the note, she went into the small bathroom and took off her clothes. She turned on the shower, making sure it was as hot as she could get it. She got under the water and let it burst against her scalp, trying to wash memory from her, clean the past out.

Instead, his face came back to her, inside her mind, opening her up for other memories, breaking down doors she had let the warm fuzzies seal up.

She slammed her head against the tile of the shower stall.

Again.

And again.

Until she felt the blood dripping down along her face, down her shoulders and breasts, into the drain at her feet.

She kept it up as long as she could, bashing her head into the tile, trying to lock every door she had before someone tried to pry her open.

She heard one of the night nurses calling out, trying to open the bathroom door, but she had jammed it so it couldn’t open, Amanda Hutchinson drew her bloodied head back and slammed it as hard as she could against the tile.

The last things she heard were a sharp crack and the cry of the nurse as the bathroom door flew open.

Amanda sank down in the shower stall, resting her head on the cool floor by the drain. Her vision weakened, and the throbbing in her head went from burning pain to a frozen numbness.

She felt her consciousness fading. She tried as hard as she could to open one last hidden door within her mind, and let go of the flesh.

Chapter Fourteen

1

“You went to see who?” Mel nearly shrieked.

“Take off the sister hat and put on the friend hat,” Julie said.

“I’m wearing the smart hat. What in God’s name were you doing there?”

They were driving around looking at real estate listings in Forest Lake, because Mel was still thinking of buying a place nearer Julie—“but not so close that I see you every day,” Mel had said.

“Look at that one.” Julie pointed to a small house at the edge of a hillside. “Look, it must have a view of the lake in back. Write down the realtor’s number.”

“Why the hell did you go down there? What good would it do?”

“Quit yelling at me.”

“I am not yelling.”

“I didn’t think it would turn out like it did. I thought maybe...I don’t know. I thought maybe she’d know something I didn’t.”

“She’s insane, Julie. He divorced her because she tried to kill her own son. Isn’t that enough for you?”

2

She dreamed that night of Amanda Hutchinson, stunningly beautiful, dressed in one of Hut’s business suits. Julie lay on a bare mattress on the floor of some auditorium. She had the sense that people were watching her. She struggled, but her hands—though not tied down—wouldn’t move. Nor would her legs.

Julie became aware of her nakedness only when Amanda bent down and touched her foot. Amanda licked the edge of her foot and took a toe in her mouth.

Then, on all fours, Amanda climbed on top of her, bringing her face within an inch of Julie’s.

“Does he touch you like this?” she asked, her tongue flicking out and lapping at Julie’s lips. “Like he’s more alive than he’s ever been?”

In the dream, Amanda Hutchinson’s hair was no longer black, but bright red. Julie noticed that there was a chair, above her, hanging suspended from the sky as if by a wire that went all the way up to heaven.

Julie felt a hand on her belly, fingers moving down toward the thatch of pubic hair.

Amanda Hutchinson’s face became Matt’s face, but with the same long red hair.

He had carvings all over his skin.

But it wasn’t Matt. It was Hut. Hut with tattoos all over his body. Holding her arms down at her side while his enormous penis pounded her. And she felt herself opening in that space, between her legs, opening herself to his sex, to his forced entry, unlocking the doors for him, letting him through.

In her dream, she whispered, I want you inside me, Hut. I want you inside me.

3

She awoke, thinking she’d heard Livy cry out. It took her a minute to adjust to the darkness. She was used to this by now—the routine of Livy’s nightmares. She rolled out of bed, putting the terry bathrobe on, and padded down the hallway through the veiled darkness, punctuated by the numerous night-lights she’d scattered in the various outlets so that Livy could see her way to the bathroom without getting scared.

Right on schedule, Livy was standing in the hallway, her back against the wall. Julie flicked up the hall light.

“Honey,” she said.

Livy looked up at her, her eyes wide. “I’m sorry, Mommy. It just scared me. I know it’s just dreams. But it seemed real.”

“Well, but doesn’t Dr. Fishbain talk to you about this?”

Livy nodded.

“Does it help?”

Livy nodded again. “But Dr. Fishbain doesn’t have to sleep here.”

Then, Julie had an idea. “What if I could prove to you that there’s no ghost?”

“How?”

4

Julie enlisted Matt to help set up the old NannyCams that they’d used when Livy had been younger and before they’d discovered Laura Reynen as a sitter. Julie had loved the NannyCam—Mel had convinced her that all babysitters were potential child-abusers after Livy had been born (“it’s always on the news. Nannies can be bad.”) So Hut had, one day, brought home their first NannyCam, and Julie had discovered that, in fact, none of their sitters slapped the baby. It was the NannyCam that had given Julie the idea for getting the camcorder for Matt so that he’d have a way of expressing himself and having a fun hobby, as well.

They set up one of the NannyCams along the stairs, and then the other one at the entrance to Livy’s bedroom. Matt brought up the VCR from downstairs, and then she got the old one that was in the storage closet next to the linen closet. They tested them, since none of them ever watched VHS anymore, having gone to DVDs. Both machines worked fine. He set up the wires and cables, and put some tapes in each machine. “See, Livy? This one,” he pointed to the NannyCam in the hall, “goes to this VCR. And that one, in your room, goes to the other one. If anyone comes in, we’ll catch it on the cam.”

Livy went around lining up more night-lights, pulling them from the three bathrooms in the house, and then the ones that Julie had bought at Home Depot. “They’re like little soldiers,” Livy said.

“See? We’ll catch the ghost,” Matt said, attaching the NannyCam to a small block of wood to steady it.

“There’s no ghost,” Julie crossed her arms, a bit annoyed with Matt for saying it in front of his little sister.

Livy seemed thrilled to think that her bad dreams might end.

5

The first morning after they’d set the NannyCams up, Julie sat down with Livy and fast-forwarded through the resulting videotape in the rec room. The hall tape showed nothing but the sentry line of night-lights, occasionally punctuated by Matt coming out into the hall and walking sleepily to the bathroom. “He pees a lot!” Livy giggled.

She and Livy laughed while Matt sped up, walking like a fast-paced Charlie Chaplin up and down the hall to the bathroom. For fun, Julie showed it backward and then forward.

“See? Nobody.”

“Matt was funny,” Livy giggled. “Let’s make him walk fast again.”

“Okay,” Julie said. Then, she sped through the rest of the tape. “See? Nobody’s in the hall. No one in your room other than you.”

Livy shook her head. “He didn’t come last night.”

6

They repeated this morning ritual for the next several days, and Livy was thrilled to see Matt—or even herself—wander to the bathroom in the purple light of morning. One tape had her looking right into the NannyCam and singing a silly little made-up song. She played the tape for Livy, and Livy laughed at herself and told her to turn it off before she exploded. Then, she let Livy watch herself sleeping in bed. “I snore!” she cried out with glee. “Just like you do, Mommy!”

One morning, Julie woke up and Livy was in bed with her, pressed against her back.

7

“I had a bad dream again,” Livy said.

After they’d been up a bit, Julie got out the videotape and said, “Let’s watch the NannyCam and see.”

“No,” Livy said.

“Come on. We can laugh about how Matt waddles down the hall.”

“No, Mommy. I don’t want to see him.”

“I promise you won’t,” Julie said, playing with Livy’s hair. “I promise you, Olivia Hutchinson, that you will not see a single person on the videotape unless it’s you or Matt going down the hall to the bathroom.”

Livy reluctantly agreed, and they went to watch the tapes. Julie sat in the rec room and fast-forwarded through the NannyCam tapes. There was Matt on his nocturnal trip to the john, and then, she saw a blur of movement. She stopped the tape, and then froze on the picture.

“That’s him!” Livy cried out, pointing to the screen. “That’s the ghost!”

Julie shushed her and told her that it was nothing. “It’s just shadows, baby. It’s not a ghost.” But she shut the tape off and tried to get Livy to think of something else. She took her out into the garden and they planted some seeds from packets that they’d bought at the local nursery. Livy, now and then, mentioned the ghost, and Julie did what she could to talk her out of it.

But later in the day, when Livy was in her room reading, Julie went back down to the rec room to watch the tape.

It wasn’t much. Might’ve just been a problem of the tape. She played it in slow motion.

She held her breath for a moment, surprised.

It was a blurred figure moving down the hall, but in weird jumps of motion. Then, she played the video at regular speed, but it was impossible to see it. She could only see it when she slowed the tape down.

She went backward and forward with the tape.

The hallway with the night-lights in a row like luminaria outside Livy’s bedroom.

It wasn’t that it was a blur—it was that whoever was crossing in front of the nightlights darkened them in such a way that they created a blurring effect. There was no way that it was Matt. It was a large person. An adult.

Then, she put in the tape for Livy’s bedroom NannyCam.

Fast-forwarded through the night as Livy tossed and turned, throwing her American Girl doll from the bed (where it should not have been in the first place), and pulling her pillow down to her chest. And then—Julie paused the tape, freezing the picture.

It looked like a dark movement, near Livy’s bed. For just the flash of a second.

Then, it was gone.

After it moved back into the shadows, Livy’s eyes fluttered open, although it was hard for Julie to make out much about her face in the darkness.

Livy sat up and looked as if she were watching someone in her doorway. She clutched her blanket and pulled it up around her shoulders, and then shut her eyes tight.

8

Julie got Matt to watch the tape with her, and he said, “Wow. I wonder what that is?” He squinted. “It’s hard to make out in the dark. Sometimes video sucks.”

“Do you think it’s a person?”

“It has to be, Julie. Look at that—the way it moves around. That has to be an arm—right?”

“I don’t even know what this means.”

“Maybe it means someone is coming in our house at night,” Matt said.

9

Julie showed the tapes to Mel, who told her she wasn’t sure it was a person at all.

“I don’t know. I don’t want to jump to conclusions,” Mel said. “I think it’s just shadows and stuff. I don’t really see anyone.”

But she suggested that Julie get some kind of protection system in place. Julie decided to go all out: she got a burglar alarm system that keyed to the windows and doorways. They installed it within a week, and although it cost a small fortune, she decided it was well worth it. She made Matt memorize the code, but she kept it fairly simple.

“At least until it gets cool, we keep the windows closed, and only in and out through the front door, okay?” She told both of them not to play with it. Then, she tested it once to see how fast the local police could get there.

She had a nice talk with the cops who showed up, and told them about the tapes. One of them volunteered to sit down and fast-forward through the tape to see what he could make of it. When Matt came back up from the rec room, he said, “Julie, you must’ve erased the tapes last time you watched them.”

“Yeah,” the cop said. “It looked like old reruns on one of them.”

“Must've been Mel,” Julie said.

Matt turned to the cop and said, “My Aunt Melanie. She loves doing that. She taped over my movie of last year’s Fourth of July parade, too.”

10

Julie kept taping the hall and the bedroom for several days, but didn’t see the shadowy movement.

And Livy began sleeping through the night.

11

On the phone with her mother the next day: “Did you read it?” her mother asked.

“Read what?”

“That book. The Life Beyond.”

“Some of it.”

“Well? Did you love it?”

“Mom, you know I don’t believe in that stuff.”

“I’ve seen him twice. He’s fascinating.”

“I am not going to delude myself, Mom. I’m not going to pretend that there’s someone out there who speaks to the dead.”

“No, it’s not like that. He doesn’t do that,” her mother said. “He just picks up things about you. When I was there a year ago, he told a man that his brother was looking for him. And within a month, it turned out the brother he thought was dead was actually alive. And a woman who had blocked childhood memories suddenly recalled that she’d witnessed her mother and her uncle making love. And that’s why she’d hated her mother so much. It’s halfway between psychic and therapy.”

“I have a great therapist.”

“Anyone can be a therapist,” her mother said. “Michael Diamond is a psychic. A real one. Did you read the whole book? I thought not. He’s not like those others, sweetie, believe you me. I’ve researched them all. He’s not as flashy, maybe, but he delivers the goods. And we have tickets to his show. I’ve been waiting for them to come through since mid-May. And guess what? It must be fate. They came through today.”

“I am not going,” Julie said, and clicked the phone off.

Chapter Fifteen

1

“I don’t know how you roped me into this,” Julie said.

It was a lie. She knew how her mother had done it. Julie’s interest had been sparked by Michael Diamond’s book and her curiosity about Hut’s childhood, and how it might be connected to psychic ability, whether that existed or not. People believed in it. Detective McGuane had even told her that while he didn’t wholly believe, he'd seen psychics consult on murder cases once in a while, with impressive results. She didn’t believe in it. But other people did. Even the US government, for God’s sake. Even homicide detectives in New York City, the city that wasn’t exactly the city of gullibility. Cops who couldn’t catch killers believed it.

She sat sandwiched between her mother and sister in the television studio with its uncomfortable chairs and blinding overhead lights. The place was packed, but Julie guesstimated that there weren’t more than two hundred seats. The stage was round and small. Three large cameras and their operators moved around on it. And various lights came up and down. Taping wasn’t scheduled for another twenty minutes.

“I can’t wait to get his autograph. I loved his new book,” her mother said. She had a small cloth bag stuffed with paperbacks. “Melanie, you really should read some of them.”

“I prefer to stick to the classics,” Mel said, grinning, poking lightly at her sister.

When the show began, Michael Diamond came out onto the stage. He was tall and looked something like a gawky high school kid who had just hit his mid-forties. His hair was a little too long, and he had the sheen of one who has just been made up to look fantastic—but Julie was unimpressed. He looked slick and sort of comfortably geeky at the same time—not her type at all, although Mel raised her eyebrows a bit, her signal that she thought he was cute.

He spoke more to the cameras than to the audience, but within several minutes had stepped off the stage and went into the audience. He asked about someone who had lost a child, and a woman in the back raised her hand.

He jogged up the steps to where the woman now stood. The woman was short and stout, had a mullet-style hairdo, and wore a sweatshirt and jeans. Diamond went to her and took her hand. One of the cameramen followed, trailing thick electrical cords up the steps.

“What’s she saying?” Julie’s mother asked.

“Quiet,” Mel whispered.

“Here’s what I’m getting,” Michael Diamond said. “You have been beating yourself up for years about the event. Do you have an item?”

The woman nodded, producing a small shoe from a wadded-up brown paper bag.

On the monitors that hung over the stage, the cameras went in close up on the small red sneaker in Michael Diamond’s hand.

Diamond closed his eyes. He said, “His name was Jimmy. He was four. No, five. You lived on a...cul-de-sac. In...somewhere in Connecticut.”

“New London,” the woman nodded.

Diamond opened his eyes. “Please, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. Let me tell you, and you can tell me if I’m wrong.”

He closed his eyes again, pressing the shoe against his left ear as if the sneaker were a seashell and he was listening to the ocean. With his free hand, he pressed his fingers into the corners of his eyes, rubbing at his eyelids.

Then, he opened his eyes and passed the shoe back. “I’m sorry. His name was Dennis. You lived separately from his father. A woman with the name of M. Mary? The name Miranda is somewhere in there. Or a name like that. Mary Anne? Marianna. That’s it. Is it?”

The woman nodded.

“You need to forgive her,” Diamond said. “She’s not at fault. It was an accident.”

The woman took the sneaker back, staring at it.

“If he were here, he’d want you to forgive her. That’s really all I can say,” Diamond said, touching her gently on the shoulder.

The woman’s head slumped against his chest.

“You need to get some rest. You can’t put yourself through this. You’ve relived that car accident for two years. Dennis wouldn’t want it.”

“I hate her,” the woman whispered, her voice barely audible in the microphone that hung suspended on a boom one of the TV crew held overhead.

Michael Diamond pulled sharply away from her and put both his hands on her shoulders—more to separate himself from her than to console. “You need to look in the mirror, Alice. You need to see what role you played in this. Accidents happen. You need to forgive Marianna. She was only a girl herself. She had just gotten her driver’s license. You could as easily blame yourself. But Dennis would not want you to do that. Dennis is gone.”

Julie touched the top of Mel’s hand. Mel looked over at her, a question forming on her face.

Julie whispered, “He seems a little harsh.”

2

After two more readings, Michael Diamond went to the stage and said, “Someone is here who recently lost a husband. Someone named Jewel?”

“Julie!” her mother called out, pointing to her daughter.

3

“I’d like to do a one-on-one this time,” Diamond said. His face was enormous on the monitor screen that Julie watched. She felt she could count every pore in his skin. She saw flecks of yellow in his brown eyes.

Then she looked from the screen down to the man in front of her. He half smiled, and for some stupid reason, she felt comfortable with him, as if she’d known him all her life.

“Okay,” she said, and just before she got out of her chair, Mel leaned over and whispered, “Sit on his lap.”

4

The one-on-one was a segment of the television show where the subject sat with Michael Diamond on the low-backed curved sofa at the back of the stage.

“You’re still grieving,” he said.

“Yes,” Julie said. She was about to say: And I don’t believe in psychics, thank you.

“It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe in me,” Michael Diamond said. His words sent a shock through her. “Belief has nothing to do with it.”

5

“Tell me about the brain radio,” he said.

“That what?”

“The brain radio,” Michael Diamond grinned. He kept his hand on her forehead. She felt a warm gentle pressure from it, but the headache she’d had began to dissolve.

“It’s what Livy—Olivia—my daughter—calls it when she hears things.” Then, Julie realized that was inadequate as an explanation. “She thinks she talks to people with it. Or hears songs on the radio even when the radio isn’t on.”

“She talks to your husband. Sometimes.”

“When he was alive. They had a pretend game like that.”

“Do you listen to what your daughter says about it?”

“It’s usually silly, fun stuff.”

“Your husband was murdered.”

Julie gasped. She glanced toward her mother and sister, who sat at the far end of the couch. The bright lights and the anonymous eye of the camera seemed to wall her in. “Yes. He was.”

“It’s terrible,” Michael Diamond said. “You’ve been fumbling through things since then. You’ve seen movies? Movies of some kind. There’s a place. A place in the city. A number and a letter. You won’t face what others want you to face. You...you haven’t listened. No. No, that’s not true. You’ve tried to listen. You just don’t know what it is you’re hearing. Your daughter. Your daughter needs you. She needs you. Someone else needs you. Needs her. Someone needs both of you. Someone desperately wants you. Male. Someone male. Someone wants you to understand. Badly. But death is all around you. Fear of death is inside you. Ah,” he said this last part as if catching his breath upon seeing something—something that left him awestruck.

And then, she felt it.

No longer in the studio, no longer with lights and camera and mother and sister and audience and sofa—

She felt as if he had pressed his warm hand beneath her breast, and rested it just along the thumping halo of blood encircling her heart—as if he had reached within her and emanated a strange warmth that took her back to her dreams of Hut:

Making love to Hut in the warm bath, candles glowing all around the tub, Hut pressing into her, as she gasped and felt love in a way she had not thought possible—

Giving birth to Livy, the way Hut had clutched her hand tightly, had breathed with her and kissed her on the forehead as Livy arrived into the world—

Holding Livy for the first time, a bloody, hideous baby that was the most beautiful human being she had ever seen, and Hut there, his happiness extreme as he laughed with her, with the exhaustion at the end of labor, with the surrender that childbirth demanded—

And then, a moment in time that had been long forgotten—but it came to sudden life within her mind as she felt an electric shock—seeing Hut in the shower, water cascading over his body, his muscles taut, drawing back the shower curtain and seeing the look on his face, the seething anger, and he turned to face the tile wall, and then, seeing the scratches along his back, and wondering if he had been in an accident, and then she realized it was something else—something about why Hut hadn’t been home in three days—

And then, her vision turned red, and Hut, not vibrant Hut, but the dead man from the metal table, milky eyes, shiny maggoty skin, his arms around her, pummeling her with his hips, driving himself into her, turning her over onto her stomach, taking her like that—and she felt ecstasy as he whispered filthy things, his lips pressed into her earlobe, his tongue etching fire as he said things she’d never heard a man say.

Julie felt as if her consciousness were shot out of the barrel of a gun—it hurt to open her eyes. She had to force them open, feeling as if heavy weights kept them closed, kept her in the darkness of her own mind.

Open. She saw the others there. The watchers. The audience.

She felt shame the likes of which she hadn’t felt since she’d been a child, caught naked with a little boy, playing doctor. She felt as if all her secrets had been announced on loudspeakers, and the people in the audience had used what was in her mind as entertainment, something for their amusement: her shame.

Her breathing felt labored. It was as if she’d been running and had suddenly stopped, unable to catch her breath.

She was in the television studio. On the sofa.

Michael Diamond’s palm was warm and moist against her forehead, and he was whispering something to her...no, not to her. To the others. The audience. To the world.

Some secret about her. Something she had harbored.

“You want him to be alive,” Diamond said. “You feel guilty because you stopped loving him. And then, when he was killed, you wanted more than anything for him to be alive because...because it meant that you could leave him. But now, you are stuck remembering only love. You’ve forgotten the winter that settled between you both. The fighting. The arguments. The dislike. The indifference. The lack of trust. You were in love with him for two years, and then you caught him in too many lies. You stopped trusting him. You were planning on leaving him. One day. One day soon.”

Michael Diamond’s face shone with sweat. His eyes had gone from a beautiful deep blue to gray, and the whites seemed bloodshot. It looked as if—in the few minutes he’d been doing the reading of her—that he’d been up for nights. “I’m sorry,” he said, under his breath. Then, more loudly, “Love and Death are strange companions. Those whom we were conflicted about in Life, we now are tied to in Death.”

Julie felt as if she had been invaded. As if someone had crawled inside her, and taken, forcibly, things from her. She felt icy inside, and burning on the surface of her skin. “What the hell did you just do to me?”

She pushed herself up from the sofa, but felt the room—the watchers—the cameras—spin around her.

Her knees buckled beneath her, and she collapsed.

6

Julie lay on the couch in the Green Room—which was not green at all, she noticed, glancing around at the pale walls—and finally took a sip of the orange juice that had been offered by the assistant who had rushed in after they’d helped her out of the studio’s auditorium.

She looked up at her mother, who stood nearby. “Why did you set this up?”

“Honey, I didn’t. I really didn’t. I’m sorry,” Toni said. Her mother’s eyes were red from crying.

Julie closed her eyes and tried to push away the conscious world. She had to force herself to breathe more slowly. Counting to four seconds in, four seconds out. For the first time in her life, she understood what a panic attack might be.

7

After her mother left to go sit in the car, Mel sat with her awhile, once Julie felt strong enough to sit up in a chair. They brought some sandwiches in, and Mel cajoled her sister into taking a bit, “for energy.”

“I can’t believe he’d...he’d lie like that,” Julie said.

“That’s show biz,” Mel said. “Don’t worry. I don’t believe a word of it. He’s a con artist. Cute, but still a con artist.”

“Did Mom set this all up?” Julie asked. “Did she?”

Mel shot her a harsh, unforgiving look, as if Julie had just said something terrible.

8

When she was feeling better, she demanded to see Michael Diamond, and Diamond’s assistant rushed her into his office, which was a suite of rooms down the long corridor.

He looked different to her than he had in the studio. He seemed older, and perhaps exhausted, as if he’d been up for several nights in a row. His hair was slicked back and his forehead had speckles of sweat. Something about his face reminded her of a hawk. She remembered the cover of his book, where his face seemed geeky-sexy. Now, it just seemed tired. He sat on the edge of his desk, his arm extended for her to shake.

She kept her arms crossed.

“If you’re so psychic, tell me what I’m thinking,” she said.

“I’m sorry that was so harsh,” Michael said. “I know you’re in pain. Look, we’ll cut the segment. Don’t worry. It won’t be televised.”

She said, “What did you do to me in there?”

“You don’t believe in psychic ability, Julie. I’m not here to change your mind. I’m sorry what I said hurt you in some way. I can’t take it back. It happened. It’s what I picked up from you,” he said. “You know, sometimes, I feel things that are terrible. I pick up images and words from someone—on the show—that I couldn’t possibly verbalize. It would be too awful. It would be too painful for the person to hear. But something inside you wanted it to come out. What I said, what I saw inside you, Julie, wanted to come out.”

While he’d been speaking, she felt as if she were being drawn to him. As if he had a level of charisma that went beyond normal charm or attraction. She felt she trusted him the way she trusted her therapist. When she took a deep breath, she tried to analyze the feeling, but could not.

“What was inside me?” Julie asked. “What did you see?”

“Just a glimpse,” he said. “Of something terrible. I...I don’t know what to tell you.”

“If you’re psychic, read my mind.”

“It’s not like that,” he said. “Mrs. Hutchinson, you’ve got an aura of death around you. I’m sorry to say this. You’ve been touched by someone who died.”

“That’s easy enough to figure out,” she said, feeling a bit harsh but happy to throw it back at him. “My husband died in April. That’s what you were so glib about in front of your audience.”

“No, this is a woman,” he said. “Somehow, she’s connected to you. She had answers for you but couldn’t let them out.”

9

She went out and got in the car. Mel was in the front seat, her mother in the back. “Don’t talk to me,” she said. “Just drive. I want to go home.”

She could feel them making concerned faces to each other, but she was pissed off at everybody. Fighting back the urge to cry like a baby. I am not a two-year-old. This is all bullshit. Hut was not part of some psychic program. Michael Diamond is a grifter with a camera in his face and probably six ghostwriters writing his bullshit books. It was all a guessing game. He had seen Hut’s obituary. He might’ve even heard about the murder. He had exposed himself already: in his book, hadn’t he said about how, if a show had a waiting list, the psychic could research the people in the audience? He’d have their names, a phone number, an address. How hard was it to find Hut’s obituary?

10

At home, Julie had another argument with her mother on the phone and accused her mother of setting her up for Michael Diamond’s show at a particularly vulnerable time in her life. As soon as she’d hung up the phone, it rang again. Thinking it was her mother, she picked up and said, “I am not changing my mind.”

“Hello?” a woman said on the other end.

“I’m sorry,” Julie laughed. “I thought you were my mother.”

“Mrs. Hutchinson?”

“Yes.”

“I’m calling about Amanda Hutchinson,” the woman said. Julie placed the voice: it was Gigi Kaufman, the social worker with the owl eyeglasses. “I’m afraid something tragic has happened.”

Julie held her breath, waiting.

“She died late last night. It was...well, she left a note. For you. Once the certificate is signed and everything has been put in order, we’ll send it on to you.”

Chapter Sixteen

1

A week later, after she got home, she checked the mail. Bills, mainly, for Comcast cable and Sprint, and there was some invitation to a Health Care Forum in Montclair, and then a letter, with the name Kaufman on the return address.

She opened it up. It was a photocopy of the note that Amanda Hutchinson had written the night she had killed herself.

Dear Wife Number Two,

If you’re reading this, it’s because my plan to somehow jump out of this body worked. It’s the warm fuzzies. They fucked my brain up too much. They made me think different. They made me remember things wrong. Say things I don’t always mean.

You knew Hut. But you didn’t know him. You thought he loved you. But I knew he didn’t. It was all because of the hand. Five fingers, all separate, but they are all part of the hand. You can put your hand down a garbage disposal and turn it on, and it can tear into you and make your blood spurt up out of the sink. But when you pull your arm out, the hand is still there. Do you understand?

You will see Hut. He will haunt you. He haunts me. Even in the warm fuzzies I see him. He has come back now and he will never let you or your daughter alone. Do you understand? Do I make myself clear? Don’t hate the one who killed him. Sometimes, death is not the worst thing.

It’s not that you can ever bury someone. Julie, there is no death. There is no death.

I am going to try to die. If I don’t, you’ll never see this note. If I do, you’ll read it. Consider this my warning to you.

Worse than seeing Hut, Julie. You may see the other ones, too. The fingers. They may be all around you, grasping. Because from you, something has come out. I knew when you visited me. Something is inside you and it’s coming out, and they want that. It’s something they can’t have because of who they are. They are not dreams, Julie. They are real.

We kill our children so they can wake up, only they wake up somewhere else. And they shouldn’t wake up. I should’ve killed Matt the night I tried to. I wish I had. He was already dead to me.

If I wake up from this, you’ll know. But if I don’t, thank God.

Love,

Amanda, Wife Number One.

2

Julie put the note down, folding it over. She had the urge to throw it out. It seemed obscene—insane and evil in a way she had never thought the written word could be. She felt a lump in her throat, thinking about Matt’s mother. And now, how she was going to tell Matt. She had to do it.

She knew that if she didn’t do it now, she’d lose her courage.

She found him at the kitchen table, with a microwaveable macaroni and cheese snack bowl. A carton of Jersey Farms Milk next to his half-empty glass, and a jar of Ovaltine beside it.

She sat down next him.

“Yeah?” he asked, looking at her suspiciously.

“Matt, I’ve got some bad news.” She felt her eyes tearing up.

“It’s my mom,” he said. “I know.” He took up a forkful of mac and cheese, slipping it between his lips. “They called here earlier.”

“I want you to know—” she began.

“Fuck it,” he said. “She’s been dead for years as far as I’m concerned. She tried to kill me. That’s something you don’t forget. She tried to set me on fire, Julie. She poured gasoline all over my body and tried to light me up. Do you think I’ll ever forget that? Or how I was crying and asking her not to do it, and she just kept telling me I was from the devil and needed to go to hell. Do you think I care if she finally died?”

Julie couldn’t control herself. She reached out and slapped him on the cheek as hard as she could. It knocked him back slightly. “It’s your mother,” she said.

Her red handprint on his face. It remained too long. Seconds passed. He stared at her, his mouth a small o.

“I hate you, Julie. I hate you. Hate you. Hate you,” he spat. And then he began weeping, his shoulders heaving, and she drew close and held him tight, and no matter how he struggled, she wouldn’t let go. She whispered, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and finally, he stopped crying and kissed her on the cheek and told her he prayed every night that she would be his mother but was afraid that she’d leave him now that his dad was dead.

“You’re my son,” Julie whispered. “You and Livy are my children. Don’t ever be afraid that I’ll leave you.”

3

Julie got in the Camry and just drove off. She knew she shouldn’t leave Livy and Matt home like that. She knew that she should turn around, ten minutes into the drive, and go back home. What if something happened? Something unexpected? What if there was a gas leak? What if she’d forgotten to turn off the stove? What if …

Didn’t matter. Drive. Just drive. Drive and be free. She sped along the winding roads of Rellingford, down into the darkness alongside the lake, taking the curves too fast, unconcerned about pedestrians (though the street was empty), windows down, her hair blowing back, feeling as if she were sixteen again, sixteen and free of every obligation, every weight, every care.

She parked near the gap in the woods that was the beach. She first took off her shoes in the car and walked barefoot out onto the grassy dirt patches that became fine sand, and then, her bare feet felt the welcome chill of the lake as she waded in. Across the lake, the lights of houses. The richer people of Rellingford lived on that side of the lake, with houses that cost a fortune. It was like seeing a string of pearls along the throat of night.

She unbuttoned her shirt and took it off, and then unzipped her dress, slipping out of it, getting it wet in the process.

Then, her bra, and finally, her underwear.

She tossed them back to the shore.

The mugginess of the evening clung to her naked form. She felt alive in a way she hadn’t in months. She stepped forward into the water.

Another step.

Another.

She put out of her mind the snapping turtles and the freshwater eels and snakes and any of what Livy would call the squirmies, and went farther into the water until she was up to her neck. It was so dark that she felt as if there were no separation between the water and the woods and the sky, and she dipped her head beneath the surface of the water.

Coolness.

Up again, to breathe, to gasp.

The lights across the water.

The dark sky above, but now, she saw the faint prickles of stars, and as she kept watch on the sky, they seemed to come out by the hundreds and thousands.

It had been years since she’d looked up at the stars. Years, even, since she’d gotten into the lake that was less than a quarter mile from her house.

Years since she’d felt young.

And she remembered:

She and Hut had been talking divorce. Well, she had been—he had ignored her. He had told her she needed therapy. He had told her that she needed to start taking antidepressants. He had told her she needed to quit the job at the ER and be a better mother.

They had been fighting.

The last three years had felt like hell to her, but she’d put up with it, for Livy. For Livy and Matt both, and for the shred of memory of love she still carried.

Somehow, it had all been wiped away in the murder.

Somehow, her mind had changed the bad memories to good.

Somehow, she’d turned Hut into a saint after his death.

He was a difficult, complex man, perhaps. And she’d loved him as much as she could, until he had turned mean, and cold, and unfeeling.

And the day she saw him strike his own son, she had been planning on how to leave him and somehow get Matt away from him.

All pushed aside, blocked, when he’d been murdered.

And the touch of one man had opened it, like an old Christmas present at the back of a closet, forgotten, hidden, pushed aside, and then, drawn out into the light of day, its wrapper torn back. Michael Diamond. He was bullshit. But he knew things. How had he known? How had he been able to know about Amanda Hutchinson’s death?

She walked back to shore, dressed, and hurried back to her car.

At home, in bed, she stayed up later, reading Diamond’s book, The Life Beyond.

4

She had an eleven a.m. with Eleanor Swanson, who wanted to meet at Julie’s house. “My office is being redecorated by the group.”

“The group?”

“The Seven Arts Medical Association. Every five years they decide they need a different look, redo the offices, and suddenly, I’m paying more in rent.”

“Oh,” Julie smiled, and set a cup of coffee down on the table in front of her.

“Thank you, dear,” Eleanor said. “I’m glad we could meet here. I’d have suggested my house, but it’s a mess right now.”

“It’s nice to do this here,” Julie said. They talked a bit about the heat and vacations, and then Julie said, “I have to talk to you about these sexual dreams.”

“Still going on?”

“They’ve intensified, Eleanor. I mean, they’re full of perversions and things that I’d never do.”

“Hut’s in them?”

“Sometimes it’s Hut. Sometimes, not.”

“Well, what’s disturbing about them?”

“It’s like I close my eyes. And suddenly, they just begin. It’s a roller coaster.”

Eleanor nodded. “Maybe you need a little something to help you sleep.”

“I’ve tried sleeping pills. I have a prescription. But it doesn’t take them away.”

“I’m not much of a conventional therapist. I’m no good at just sitting and listening. If I think I can help, I’ll try and bring my insights to this. You’re in your mid-thirties, you lost your husband. By your own account, you had a less-than-satisfactory sex life with him. Now, I think your subconscious is making up for lost time. Sure, there might be disturbing or—as you put it—perverted elements to the dreams. But all of us have them. All of us have pent-up fantasies that now and then become unleashed in our dream life. Women peak after thirty. You’re right on schedule. Part of this is, you’re horny. The way all adult human beings get, particularly when they’re lonely.”

“But, it’s not as if I enjoy them.”

“Don’t you?”

Julie stared at her. “They’re horrible. Some of them.”

“But you’ve told me all along they’re erotic.”

“Yes, but...there are things in them …”

“What things?”

Julie hesitated. She crossed one leg over the other, leaning back in her chair. She looked up at the ceiling. “There’s a kind of cruelty to them. There’s a meanness. In them, Hut is dead. I mean, dead. A corpse. His eyes are...well, they’re not human. And there’s a woman—with red hair—who...who …”

“Ah,” Eleanor said. “You’ve been holding out on me.”

“I couldn’t say it before. I just couldn’t.”

“You experience pleasure in these dreams, but you feel guilt because Hut is dead, even in the dream. Thus, they’re cruel and mean. And jealousy, too, with this other woman.”

“Even when he’s making love to me,” Julie said. “Like necrophilia or something.” Suddenly, Julie asked, “I’m not some nut who thinks my husband’s trying to speak to me from the great beyond or anything. I mean, you don’t believe that kind of thing, do you?”

Eleanor wore a half-smile. It was a God smile, and her eyes were God eyes. “Why would you ask that?”

“I…well, my mother took me to this psychic …”

“Oh.” Eleanor wrinkled her nose as if she smelled a fart.

“He told me that someone who was lost was looking for me. And that...doors in my mind were locked, and needed opening...and other stuff.”

Eleanor smirked. She lifted her cup and took a sip of coffee. Glanced up, mid-sip, like an amused parent. “Sometimes mysticism helps people get through grief. Did it help?”

“I don’t know. I just...these dreams feel like...sometimes, I think it’s like he’s not really gone. Until I wake up.”

“Julie, dreams are just dreams. It’s the mind, sifting through things. We can do some more work here, if you want. But you’re working through guilt and anger and shame and fury and fear. All the things that accompany the death of a loved one.”

“Did I really love him? I’m not even sure.”

“See? Even now, you’re expressing a perfectly normal anxiety. Don’t fight the dreams. Don’t fight what you’re going through. Follow it. Go on a journey. Celebrate life when you can, but let your subconscious work through what it needs to. Now, tell me about this visit to the fortune teller.”

Then, Julie told her about the TV studio, and Eleanor said, “Oh. Of course! One of those TV people. It’s great show biz to do what they do. Do you know the technique? There’s a way to anticipate what people will say next, just from eye movement and very minor facial movement. But you can’t believe that nonsense. It’s not rational. Do you believe it?”

Julie frowned. “I don’t think so. It just seemed...true.”

“Maybe there’s something to it. I just can’t say. My favorite is John Edward. He’s adorable,” Eleanor grinned, ear to ear. God and the Earth Mother converged for a moment. “Do you ever watch him? I don’t often, because I just hate seeing mysticism being promoted like that. It’s not my thing. But you can believe what you like. I don’t mean you’re wrong. Or even that they’re wrong. I just don’t think it’s true, myself. Did you learn anything good from this guy?”

Julie shook her head. She didn’t want to talk about it anymore. It felt too private, even for Eleanor.

5

Julie went online that night and ordered a few of Michael Diamond’s books on tape from Shocklines, a bookseller that sold occult, horror, and other strange books. She also found his book called Unlocking Dreams, and ordered that one, too.

Within three days, the tapes and book had arrived. She went out jogging with her Walkman hooked up, listening to his book called The Mind’s Journey. When she drove Livy to Dr. Fishbain’s in Ramapo Cliffs, she kept the book on the tape player in the car and sat in the parking lot, listening, while Livy had her appointment.

6

From The Mind’s Journey

Some have called this astral projection. That, to me, implies mystical, magical places and other dimensions. Remote viewing is something that seems anything but magical to those who do it. Your consciousness roams. At first, it just rises up from your body, after meditation and relaxation of the body have been achieved. It remains near you, mainly because you fear this new ability. Then, as you get used to it, your mind—or mind’s eye as I like to think of it—moves outward, exploring. As you become more brave, it goes farther. The view from this is like a wide-angle lens. Peripheral vision is out of focus, but the central vision is nearly normal, with some distortion. I liken it to being slightly drunk—you swing around a bit, you move in fits and starts. But it is simply consciousness, projected outward.

7

In the night, Julie awoke—it was still dark—but she had the sense that someone else was in her room. She half expected it to be Matt, because she was sure it was a man.

After several minutes, she was wide awake enough to get out of bed. She flicked on the bedside lamp, as if to dispel the shadows. No one there.

She turned the lamp off. Pressed her hands into her forehead. A terrible headache had come on.

She rose to go to the connecting bathroom to get some aspirin and a glass of water. In the dark, she fumbled through the medicine cabinet for the aspirin, and when she shut the cabinet mirror, she saw Hut.

His face.

He stood there.

She was too terrified to turn.

Her throat went dry, and she dropped the aspirin bottle into the sink.

She leaned over clutching the rim of the sink, staring at him.

His eyes were not the milky white that they had been in her nightmares. They were normal. Even in the dark she could tell that.

He looked just as he had the morning before he’d died.

She raised a fist and slammed it into the bathroom mirror, cutting the edge of her hand. Don’t believe. Don’t. It’s a dream. It’s a nightmare. It’s your mind fucking with you because some part of you doesn’t want to look at his death. Some part of you is resisting the idea that he’s gone. Some part of you feels guilty because you didn’t love him enough. You didn’t make yourself available to him enough. You weren’t a good enough wife. You’re not a good enough mother. You are punishing yourself with this.

She felt a panic—a sense of insanity inside her mind, of hallucinations brought on by stress and grief, or else it was some trigger inside her that had been pulled tight and then released. For a moment, she felt as if she were dreaming, because that would seem all right.

But it was no dream.

She struggled to reach to the light switch by the door, sure that at any second, the dread she felt would somehow stop her heart from beating.

The light came up in the bathroom.

Behind her, the photo collage of their first few years together, with Matt and Livy at the tidal pool in La Jolla, with Livy with her gramma, and Matt’s sixth-grade class picture.

No one.

She was alone.

The mirror on the cabinet, cracked like a spider’s web.

The blood on the edge of her palm was real enough.

She opened the cabinet again and brought out the brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide. She got a cotton swab and dipped it into a capful of the peroxide, and then pressed it lightly on her cut. She washed it off, then swabbed, then washed, and then pressed toilet paper against it to stop the slight flow of blood.

She couldn’t sleep the rest of the night. The following night, she stayed up reading more of Michael Diamond’s books, and rereading sections she’d only skimmed of The Life Beyond.

8

“Mommy!” Livy called out.

Julie woke up, with a start. She had a feeling as if she’d been having a nightmare. Livy’s voice rang out, shrill.

When Julie got to her bedroom, Livy stood on her bed, in her jammies.

“Honey?” Julie asked, rushing to her.

Livy, trembling, tears pouring down her face. She pointed to a shadow along the wall. “Daddy was here.”

“Aw,” Julie sat down beside her and flicked on the lamp on the table. The shadow vanished. “See? Maybe you were dreaming.”

“No. He was here. I woke up. He was right there.”

Julie hugged her daughter. “Oh, baby, it’s all right. Maybe it was on your brain radio.” Julie tried to block her own strong sense of seeing Hut standing behind her, in the bathroom of the master bedroom.

Standing there, just watching her.

“Something’s wrong with him,” Livy whispered, as if her father might hear her.

9

Joe Perrin and his husband had come out to the ’burbs one Sunday when the weather was perfect, and they had a little barbeque out on the patio. Burgers and corn on the cob and Rick brought some great French wine from the place in the Chelsea Market and they brought their big friendly German Shepherd, Dutch, which both Matt and Livy took to right away. After the meal and some retreading of old memories, Julie sent the kids into the front yard, playing with the dog, and Rick opened the wine.

Joe and Julie and Rick hung out on the picnic table, blue plastic cups in hand, looking over the back lawn, beyond the neighbor’s house to the dip down the hill and the bit of lake they could see through the trees. They talked about anything and everything and eventually, third or fourth cup of wine in, Julie brought up Michael Diamond and Amanda Hutchinson.

“He said I had a connection with her. A woman. And then, his wife is dead.”

“Sounds psychic to me,” Rick said, grinning.

“Oh, you,” Joe said. “Rick doesn’t believe in it.”

“It’s nonsense. Julie, if we could get into each other’s minds, wouldn’t we have solved the greatest problem in the world?”

“What’s that?” Joe asked.

“The distance between two human minds,” Rick said. “If we could really get inside somebody’s head, would we have wars? Would we need territory? Wouldn’t we understand each other so well that we’d just support and help everybody?”

“Rick’s theory of the benevolent universe,” Joe laughed. “No, Ricky, I think if some of us got inside the heads of people around us, we’d probably try and manipulate things. Take control. Turn people into, I don’t know, love slaves. I mean, now, I’m saying this if I were single, so don’t take it personally, honey, but if I could get inside other guys’ heads, I’d just have them take off their clothes and dance around for me all day long and do my wicked bidding.”

Julie grinned, having drunk a little too much wine. “If I could get inside people’s minds, I’d probably try to get them all to give me a dollar. All I’d need would be a million people, and then nobody would be hurt, would they?”

“You think people are greedy,” Rick said, nodding.

“No, I think I’m greedy,” Julie said. “My point is, if I were psychic, I’d do all kinds of things. And I think I’m a nice person.”

“So do I, baby,” Joe said, lifting his plastic cup in a toast. “Just imagine if the people who aren’t so nice could do this. Well, maybe they’d all become the Michael Diamonds of the world.”

“I just don’t buy it at all,” Rick said. “It’s like believing in ghosts. It’s like once you open up yourself to that kind of magical thinking, you’ll swallow anything.”

“I believe in it,” Joe said. “With some restrictions. I don’t believe that psychics can really see anything you don’t want them to. I think our own minds can block things.”

“Hon, I love you, but that’s magical thinking,” Rick said. “That’s like, if I think about flowers, suddenly I’ll get flowers.”

“It is not,” Joe said, ticked off. “Maybe you should consider things outside of your narrow view.”

They got quiet, too suddenly.

Julie reached out and touched Joe’s hand. “I don’t know if I believe in this stuff or not. But I could’ve dismissed everything that happened with Michael Diamond. Except that he told me that Hut’s ex had killed herself. I don’t know. I feel like all this psychic crap is surrounding me. From the whole thing about the school Hut went to, to this.”

“What school?”

“Oh. God. I feel a little awkward talking about it. My husband was tested for psychic ability as a kid. In some program. It’s all been news to me. I guess that’s why I was willing to see Diamond. Hut must’ve wanted to put it all in the past. He did that a lot. He put his first wife in the past. He put his adoptive parents in the past. I think he may have even been ready to put me in the past. I don’t know. It all gets confused in my head. I see things sometimes now. I have these...delusions. Hut’s death may just have been too much for me. But...he was who he was. And I need to get on, right?”

“Right,” Joe said.

“But give yourself a lot of time to heal, Julie. Don’t shortchange this process,” Rick said.

“You sound like my therapist.”

“Dr. Rick,” Joe laughed, swatting his partner lightly behind the ear. Then, he said, “So Hut had secrets. I knew it. He was a man of mystery.”

“He was. I’m not even sure how much to believe. My mom sent me some stuff. Our government sometimes had these aptitude tests when kids showed some unusual ability.”

“The Remote Viewing tests,” Joe said. “I read about them. In the Fortean Times. They were cut off around the Gulf War in the ’90s. But they go back a ways.”

“Joe? Really? You read about them?”

“It never amounted to much. But a lot of tax dollars were spent.”

“Wasted, is more like it,” Rick said. “Just like I don’t believe God came down from the sky and made a virgin get pregnant and I don’t believe that vampires get up out of their tombs at night to suck blood, I don’t believe this stuff. I think human life is rough enough without these...popular delusions.”

“You told me you were skeptical,” Joe said. “I didn’t know you thought I was delusional.”

“Baby, not you. I respect your beliefs. I just don’t believe this stuff.”

With this social stalemate threatening to bring storm clouds, Julie suddenly got the idea that they should get the croquet set out and get the kids playing in the front yard. It helped break the brief, slightly drunken tension between Rick and Joe, and Dutch, the dog, loved chasing after the croquet ball.

10

Rick and Joe were going to get the guestroom, and when everybody was getting ready for bed, Rick pointed to the little night-lights. “What’s with all the night-lights?”

Julie was in the bathroom, standing there with Livy, both of them brushing their teeth in the mirror, Livy standing up on the footstool that allowed her to get up high enough for the sink and mirror. When Julie rinsed, she said, “It’s because it’s too dark at night.”

“It’s for me,” Livy said. “I see a ghost sometimes.”

11

Right on schedule, her erotic dream took her over when she fell asleep.

The dead man who was not quite Hut turned her on her stomach. He began licking from the nape of her neck down her shoulder blades, following the slight knobs of her spine, his tongue wet and flickering as he tasted her skin. He held her wrists back with his hands, and he went lower, and when he reached the dip in her back, just before the rise in her buttocks, he made a slow long circle there, and bit slightly down on her cheek before his mouth went between the cleft.

She moaned into the pillow, but she was not in her bed, but on a dirty mattress in what seemed like a dungeon, with gray stone walls around her, and what looked like metal instruments of torture hanging from the ceiling.

He licked her inside and out, up and down; every part of her below the waist grew moist and warm with his ministrations.

Then, he rose over her, hefting his weight onto her back until she felt crushed, and her breath came hard to her, and then, he entered her from behind, first in one entry, then another. She felt a burning sensation. Oh, but it felt good, and the dead man whispered in her ears, his spit sliding just inside her earlobe, “Do you want me inside you, Julie? Do you? Do you want me all the way in? Every way? I want to open you. I want to open you, Julie.”

She opened her mouth wide to say yes, but a muffled sound came from her that was not quite her voice.

Then, someone said, too loud, “Julie? Julie?”

12

Julie looked up in the dark. A man stood there. Her eyes adjusted, and she reached for the bedside lamp, fear pulsing through her.

Flicked the light up.

It was Joe, wearing a San Francisco 49ers T-shirt that went all the way to his knees. “Are you okay?”

“Joe? Joe—what’s wrong?”

“You were screaming,” he said. “In your sleep.” Then Julie realized that she lay there naked, the covers thrown off the bed, her pajama bottoms pulled down around her ankles. Quickly, Joe looked away, and Julie reached for the bedspread, pulling it up over herself.

Chapter Seventeen

1

After Rick and Joe and dog left for the city again, Livy asked to talk to her in private. Julie went with her to her room, and Livy shut the door behind her.

“What’s up?” Julie asked.

“He came into my room last night,” Livy said.

“Who?”

“Daddy.”

“Honey, it’s not Daddy. You know that.”

“It is,” Livy said. “But he told me you wouldn’t believe me. He told me he was going to come for his family and that he loves all of us and not to cry.”

“Livy, it was a dream you had.”

“Maybe,” Livy said, looking at her curiously as if she didn’t believe a word that her mother said.

“There’s nothing to be scared of. We have the burglar alarm. We have the NannyCam. Don’t be frightened by these dreams. You’re safe.”

“I’m not scared anymore,” Livy said. Then, she went to open her bedroom door again and went down the hall to the bathroom, shutting the door behind her.

Julie sat down on Livy’s narrow bed and looked up at the NannyCam on the bookshelf by the door. She went to get the videotape from the previous night.

2

She fast-forwarded through the tape of the hallway NannyCam. Joe and Rick stumbled back and forth to the bathroom at the end of the hall. Matt got up to use it. And then, nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Empty hall. Bedroom doors either shut or slightly ajar.

And then, a movement through the hall.

Julie felt her heart leap into her throat. Adrenaline pumped through her veins. She paused it—looking to make sure that it wasn’t somehow Joe or Rick. That it was someone else.

It was a tall man with broad shoulders, but she couldn’t make out much else. It was like a dark shadow moving in the hallway, obscuring the night-lights as it went.

And then, it passed Livy’s bedroom.

It kept going down the hall.

Straight down the hall to Julie’s room, pushing the door open slightly.

Then, the shadow passed into her room.

It could not have been a shadow, she knew. It was someone. Some man.

Some stranger had gotten into her house and had gone into her bedroom.

And then the NannyCam’s videotape went to static as if it had shut off prematurely.

3

She checked the burglar alarm, made sure it was operational. Checked all windows. Double-checked the locks on the doors. Grilled both Matt and Livy when they got home from school in case there was any joke going on, but she didn’t tell them what she’d seen.

She asked Matt to move the wires and the videotape equipment for the NannyCam to her bedroom. They put one on her dresser, to the left of her bed, aimed for a shot of her entire bed. Then, the other one on the doorway. When Matt asked what it was about, she told him it was just an experiment to see when she snored because she had to see if it was sleep apnea or not. He didn’t quite get it, but he didn’t ask her too many more questions after that.

She couldn’t fall asleep that night until five a.m., because every time she started to close her eyes and drift off, she thought she heard a noise and woke up. She ended up sleeping all day, and then getting up that night to try it again.

She looked at the tapes of the first night, anyway. But there was nothing. It was too dark in her bedroom. She could just make out her sleeping form. Then it went to morning, and she fell asleep. Light came through her window. The clock’s display read 6:20 a.m. Matt and Julie would probably be waking up. Nothing happened. The light came more fully up, and Matt came in to get her out of bed.

The next night, again, she had trouble sleeping. She took a sleeping pill, and did something she knew was stupid. She had a glass of the wine that Rick and Joe had left behind. Sleeping aid and booze, she thought when she watched the video later. Nice descent into pathetic, Julie.

That night, she had the dream of the dead man, again, lifting her up, her legs around his waist as he pierced her, and she opened for him and he entered her deeply and she felt as if she had been plugged up, that she had no opening, and he took his fingers and pushed them into her mouth and she tasted his skin and in the dream she kept telling herself it was a nightmare and she had to wake up, she had to wake up right now!

She fast-forwarded the video, watched herself finish off the glass of wine and lie down.

And then, when the clock’s display read 3:00 a.m., a shadow moved into the room.

4

She could not see more than his dark form—his body was so much like Hut’s, it shocked her—but his face was darkness, and he came to her bedside, putting his face near hers. Then, he slowly slipped a hand beneath the covers and drew it back, exposing her in her night shirt. Then, he ran his hand down along her breast, squeezing lightly. She shivered as she watched it.

Slowly—it might’ve taken him a half hour—he unbuttoned her top and unlaced her bottom, pulling them both off, while she slept through this, moving slightly.

When he had her naked, he pressed his mouth against her forehead while his hands roamed down over her breasts, and then farther down, between her legs. He pressed his hand down into her, and the sleeping Julie lifted her hips to him.

“Fuck,” Julie said aloud, watching this, not believing it, her mind spinning out of control.

Then, he brought his hand back up to her mouth, and pressed his fingers between her lips. Julie couldn’t quite see, but it looked like the sleeping Julie sucked at his hand. Then he went to her breasts, taking each nipple in his mouth. For the flicker of a second, she was sure that he was looking straight at the NannyCam lens, knowing that he was being watched.

Then he kissed down her navel and belly and went to her pubic hair. He moved around so that he was crouched over. He was naked. Had he taken his clothes off? She hadn’t been able to tell because of the darkness. His penis was hard and long and poised over her mouth as his face went between her legs.

Julie stopped the tape, freezing it. She felt as if she were having a heart attack. She felt as if she had been raped, but wasn’t sure if she could really believe what she was seeing. It was like this was a tape, not of her bedroom, but of her dreams, of what she experienced in them.

She hit “play” and the tape continued.

The man’s head went between her legs and moved around in circles as he dipped and wiped his penis across her face. Then, sleeping Julie opened her mouth and took him inside her. His buttocks began pumping against her face while he lapped at her vagina.

Then, after minutes, he drew out of her mouth and sat up beside her on the bed. Looking straight at the NannyCam, he rolled her over on her stomach. He got down on all fours and began licking down her back, to her buttocks—as she had remembered from the dream—and then he pressed himself deep into her, and sleeping Julie cried out into the pillow, and he had his face next to her, against her ear, and she cried out again, and his buttocks pounded harder into sleeping Julie.

And then, the tape went to static.

Part Three

Chapter Eighteen

1

She rewound the tape several times and watched it slowly and quickly and backward in parts. She tried to get close to the television to see if she could make out a face. At first, she’d felt horror at watching it, then she was fascinated and generally confused. She cried on one viewing of it, because she was sure that it was a rape, but she didn’t understand how it could be rape because she looked as if she were going along with it. After all, although her eyes seemed closed—she couldn’t quite tell—it looked like the sleeping Julie opened her mouth on command for him. It looked like the sleeping Julie was fine with rolling over. There was no struggle. Worse, she had begun to think of the man as Hut, although their sex life was not nearly as exotic as the mating she saw on the video.

Watching it, she grew increasingly angry, and finally turned it off and drew the tape out. She called up Mel and told her about it, and Mel suggested that she call the police. “What if it’s the man who killed Hut?” Mel asked. “What if he somehow drugged you?”

“With a sleeping pill? A mild one at that?”

“You never know how this stuff works,” Mel said. Then she regaled Julie with the story of a teenaged daughter of a friend who was drugged with something called the date rape drug and was conscious through the whole horrible ordeal. But the family brought charges, and the boy responsible was behind bars. Then, Mel interrupted herself, “I’ll be over in half an hour.”

Mel came by and Julie reluctantly popped the video into the machine and pushed play on the remote control. When the video played, everything was the same as before—with the clock reading three a.m.—but there was no dark figure coming into the room at all. Instead, Julie threw off the covers and began taking her nightclothes off. Once she was naked, she began stroking her nipples. Then, she lifted her left hand and reached with it down between her legs.

“Oh my God,” Julie said, and turned off the tape.

Mel sat there and stared for a few seconds at the television screen. She looked over at Julie.

“Mel, I swear to God, that is not what was on the tape before.”

Mel offered up a warm look, and she looked too much like their mother at that moment. “Julie? What’s going on?”

“That was not what I saw. I saw a man. I saw...Hut,” she said it aloud, finally. Something in her mind cleared. “I slept through it last night. But I know I saw him.”

“You know what we both just saw on that tape,” Mel said in a too-sympathetic tone. “Why would you tape yourself like that?”

“Mel,” she said. “You know I’d never do that.”

“All I know is I didn’t see Hut in it, Julie. Hut is dead. He was murdered. I know that’s hard to face. To look at. And I love you. You’re my sister. We’re best friends. I have nothing against anyone getting their jollies from innocent stuff, but...I didn’t expect this. Are you doing okay? Is that therapist even helping you through all this? I’ve seen the house. I know it’s a lot to keep up with, but have you looked around? I can only come over and help so much, Julie,” Mel said, her hand laid gently on Julie’s arm.

2

Mel told her to rest, that she’d take the kids for a few days, but bring them over after supper so she could get some peace and do whatever it was that “will make you whole again.” She lectured her that she needed to somehow face herself, deal with life as it was, “the hand that the fates dealt.” Mel talked a blue streak about responsibility and shirking and getting back on your feet and her work at the hospital and planning on the future happening even if Julie wanted to remain behind, and it just went on and on. Julie listened, nodded at the appropriate times, but began to resent Mel—resent her family—resent Hut and his death and the cops who couldn’t catch the guy who’d killed him and a few others and even Rick and Joe and their oh-so-perfect coupledom and finally she just told Mel to leave, that she was getting a headache and they could talk about this later.

Then Julie wandered the house, room to room, looking at it in a way she hadn’t in a long time. There was dust and dirt where the kids had brought it in from outside. Hadn’t she cleaned up for Joe and Rick? Perhaps she’d been preoccupied. Then the kitchen, with dishes and glasses piled in the sink, and three dirty saucepans on the stove, with some stains around the counter, and empty soda cans near the toaster. That wasn’t too bad. She wasn’t much of a housekeeper, but she hadn’t even called in the cleaning service in weeks to help out. She saw the piles of clothes on the washing machine, and more of them as she passed the kids’ rooms—in the corner of Livy’s room, her T-shirts and shorts from the summer in a heap. The whole house seemed dull and gray.

She went into her bedroom and for the first time felt as if it were stuffy. She went to open the windows, and then saw her own clothes on the other side of her bed. In her bathroom, the medicine cabinet’s mirror was still broken. She hadn’t even thought of going to Home Depot to get another one. And she had done so little shopping in the past week that she wasn’t even sure if the kids had snacks or if they had what they needed for the first weeks of the school year. Mel had taken up the slack, and she supposed Matt had done some of it, too.

How could she have had friends over with the house in that condition? What was wrong with her? She looked at her cracked image in the mirror and wondered what it was that made her see a man who looked in the dark very much like Hut, having sex with her while she slept, forcing himself into her and against her body, and yet, somehow seeing a video of herself masturbating? Where am I in all this?

She lay down on the bed, but could not stop looking over at the NannyCam’s metal eye, watching her.

How can someone put an image in my head like that? Make me see it on a video that changed when someone else saw it?

She got up and tried calling her mother, but couldn’t. Next, she tried calling Michael Diamond’s office, but tracking him down was next to impossible.

Julie couldn’t bring herself to watch the tape again until after more wine. She watched it again, and this time, it was exactly as she’d seen it with her sister: she was masturbating, alone in bed, and the room seemed to have more moonlight in it, for she could tell that her eyes were not closed. The video itself didn’t seem that fuzzy. They were open. She felt disgusted with her own body, watching this. She felt as if a nerve pinched inside her mind as she tried to make sense out of this—out of the dreams, out of the tapes, out of seeing things that weren’t there. Seeing things that could not be there.

She had two choices: she was either losing her mind, or this was something else.

3

Her laptop open on her bed, she connected the cable and went online. She pulled up some search engines—Google and Yahoo—and began searching for the terms “school,” “psychic,” “remote viewing,” and “1977,” hoping this would come up with something. In each case, there were pages upon pages of listings, and she scrolled up and down the screen, taking a stab at each listing or mention. None of it seemed to point to anything helpful.

After about an hour of searching, she nearly gave up, but came upon a link to a web page that didn’t have much on the surface—mainly just a mention that there had been a sleep study for psychic ability in the 1970s in Los Angeles, and it had been completely unsuccessful. In the brief article, the writer referred to the “legendary scandal of Project Daylight.”

Julie saved this page and opened a new browser window, looking up the words “Project Daylight,” “remote viewing,” and “New York.”

Nearly one hundred references came up for these search terms. It completely surprised her.

She began clicking links into each one of the terms. All seemed to go to conspiracy-theory-type sites. Some of the sites dealt with paranormal phenomena, some with urban legends, some with UFOs. When she found mention of Project Daylight, she found mention of a sleep study of children with sleep disorders—whether “night fears,” or general insomnia. Each website she visited seemed to have a different piece of this puzzle about Project Daylight. Brief mentions. “Nobody really knows about Project Daylight, other than a fire destroyed the house where the research took place.” That was really the most definitive statement she could find. There were at least twenty children in the program, and many of them had come from the foster care system. One of the children had shown what they called an “advanced PSI ability,” and she wasn’t quite sure what PSI meant, other than psychic and a variant on the acronym ESP. In due course, she found its definition, and it did, indeed, refer to paranormal ability such as clairvoyance, telepathy, psychometry, and psychokinesis. She knew the first two terms, but was unsure of psychometry or psychokinesis, but she could take a wild guess.

The Chelsea Parapsychological Institute kept coming up as a connection with the Daylight Project. She looked them up, too, and found that they’d shut down in the early 1980s, although it gave their old address.

It was the building on Rosetta Street.

Sixth floor of the building.

Sixty-six S. Sixth Floor, Sixth Apartment, Letter S.

And she found out something else about the Chelsea Parapsychological Institute.

A retired colonel in the Army who had once worked in military intelligence had run it. A man named Alan Diamant.

She remembered something in Michael Diamond’s book about his father.

4

She sat at the kitchen table, with Diamond’s books open. She skimmed pages, trying to remember where he mentioned his dad. Then, she remembered. It was the first thing she’d read. She opened The Life Beyond and scanned the introduction.

She found it:

My own father died several years ago, and if you looked up his name online or through public records, you’d eventually find out that he was a colonel in the Army, that he served in Viet Nam, that he worked in military intelligence and then as a liaison in Bosnia even in retirement. You’d know the name of his brothers, of his parents, of his children and even how he died, because contributions were made to the American Cancer Society. You’d know his date and place of birth. You’d perhaps have a handful of names to research further, too. The Internet today is such that people can trace entire family trees going back centuries if they want to. How easy is that for a psychic? All the psychic has to do is spend thirty minutes or so researching one or two families who are showing up for his audience, and then he gets up in front of the audience and says, ‘I’m talking to someone who says he has a son here. He’s showing me something about—a helicopter? Or a plane? Some kind of military plane? I’m getting the sense that he was a soldier of some kind. An officer? But there’s something about Bosnia, too. Does this sound like anyone here?’ And sheep that I am, I’d raise my hand and gasp and say, ‘It’s my dad!’

5

Back at her laptop, Julie did a search on terms she thought most likely to come up with an obituary of a man named Alan Diamant. It took her three tries, adding search terms each time.

Finally, an obituary from 1982 showed up as part of the online archives for the Journal for Paranormal Research of America.

It had all the particulars: Colonel in the Army, Viet Nam, went from military intelligence to applied research to parapsychology to founding—and funding—the (CPI) Chelsea Parapsychological Institute for the decade of its existence. Married, divorced, remarried, divorced again, mention of the closing of the CPI, mention of two children. No mention of cancer as cause of death, as Michael Diamond had indicated in his book, but “as the result of an accident.”

There was a picture accompanying the obituary of Alan Diamant in his late twenties, in uniform.

The obituary turned into an article about founders of various paranormal groups, and something about U.S. government supervision of certain programs.

6

“It doesn’t mean it’s his father,” Joe Perrin told her when she called him up. “Even if it is …”

“If it is, he might know about Hut. If Hut was there. If any of this matters,” she said. “Joe, you told me you believe in this kind of thing. I’ve experienced something recently.”

“A ghost?” His voice carried with it a half-joke in the word, as if he were uneasy mentioning it.

“I don’t know. A phenomenon of some kind that would make any sane person start drinking and any insane person start jumping out windows,” she said, completing his joke to keep it light.

“I believe in ghosts,” Joe said. “And I know our government backed programs for remote viewing. I’ve read too many articles about it not to believe it. It’s tough thinking they might’ve used kids, but if it was a sleep study, maybe.”

“I’m going to ask him.”

“You got balls,” Joe laughed, but she didn’t. His comment reminded her too much of something Amanda Hutchinson said to her.

“Well, if it’s not his father, he’ll laugh. He told me that I should come talk to him. Maybe he’s psychic. I just am beginning to push to that side of things.”

“Belief?”

“Belief. Or being open to this. Now. Given everything. And if Alan Diamant, well, maybe he knows something. Maybe he was there. If your dad runs a parapsychological foundation, it’s pretty likely that you may grow up to be a psychic,” she said. “Right?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. But Diamant is a different name than Diamond.”

“I don’t know. It’s not so different,” she said. “Maybe he’s ashamed of his father. Or maybe the name Diamond is just more …”

“Hollywood,” Joe completed her thought. “He’s cubic zirconium. Diamonds are not always a girl’s best friend.”

“Ha,” she said.

“Don’t forget me when you’re in the city,” Joe said before they hung up on each other. “I’ll do some snooping around in all these books and magazines I’ve got piled up. Do you want a psychic reading? I can ask my friend Lauren. She’s excellent.”

7

She decided to tape one more night. She went to Matt and asked about his camcorder. Could it be set up with a timer? Yes. Could he set it up so that it could shoot reasonably decent video in the dark? Yes. Could she then take the DVD and put it right into the computer without him seeing it? Yes. This time she intended to be drugged out of her mind with whatever substance could knock her out. She had an old bottle of whiskey in the liquor cabinet that she and Hut never drank, but she knew it was the good stuff. She took a few swigs before going to bed, very late, and then lay down on her bed. This time she kept her clothes on—her shirt and jeans and a sweater.

She drank three small glasses of whiskey and sat up too late, and then sleep came and it was deep.

In the morning, she took the NannyCam tapes and watched them, and there was nothing. Same for the camcorder’s tape. She tried it three more nights. Nothing. Nothing.

And then, the fourth night was a charm.

8

Although the visuals were too shadowy in the NannyCam tapes, Matt’s camcorder had night vision technology, and she saw the dark of her room with greenish glows. The green-black figure of a man. His face so much like Hut’s it made her gasp.

And then, as she watched, she had the strangest feeling she’d ever experienced. It was as if he was looking at her, watching him. Knowing that she would watch him hours later. Knowing that she would see this videotape.

He went to where the camcorder was set on the tripod and looked directly into the camera. It was Hut. The video was dark and glowing green and grainy, but there was no doubt about it. He seemed to be trying to say something, but there was no sound on the video. Then, he fumbled with the camera. He lifted it up, and now, he had it in his hands and was filming the bedroom. Filming her. With one hand, he unbuttoned her sweater, and then, beneath this, unbuttoned her shirt. He spread the material apart, and pressed his hand in the brief gap between her breasts. Then he kept the camera focused on where his hand went. He delicately drew back each side of her shirt, exposing her breasts, and then put his fingers around the nipple of her right breast and twisted it slightly. He cupped her breast in his hand, then drew the camera back.

He continued to undress her with some dexterity, filming each movement he made.

When he had her completely naked, he put his hand between her knees and pushed them apart. Then, he put the camera there, close enough that she could see herself—and he began stroking her there, between her legs, all the while keeping the camera focused where his fingers played.

She couldn’t watch it anymore. She shut it off. Covered her face in her hands. She couldn’t even conjure tears.

9

“I’d like to speak with Eleanor Swanson,” Julie said, holding the cell phone close to her face.

Eleanor’s assistant told her that she was out for a few days. “Just a brief holiday,” he said. “If it’s an emergency, I can make sure she has your message before the end of the day.”

Julie paused, and then said, “No, it’s all right. I’ll call her when she gets back.”

10

She remembered Matt’s video that had struck her as odder than odd: the one where he’d videotaped her sleeping. She went to the desktop computer in the den and pulled up his videos. They were numbered, but not otherwise labeled. She knew there was one of her sleeping, and then the very strange one of the girl that was probably from his school. It had been in the back of her mind to ask him about them, but she hated to push him on anything after what he’d gone through. Eleanor had told her to expect that he’d be like stone about his mother’s death for at least a few months until he got through a protective layer inside him. “And then expect Niagara Falls and some yelling and maybe some well-placed anger,” Eleanor had said, suggesting several therapists he could see if he still didn’t want to talk to her again.

Julie tried to open some of the videos, but none of them would open, and she wasn’t technologically advanced enough to figure it out.

Then she made a call to Michael Diamond’s office. They gave her the runaround and put her on hold (twice). She made sure all the doors were locked, windows closed and locked, checked the burglar alarm and got in the Camry and drove to the city.

In the backseat of the car, she’d tossed copies of The Mind’s Journey and The Life Beyond.

Chapter Nineteen

1

“I’m sorry,” the woman at the front guard desk said, looking at her with what Julie assumed was the kind of sizing up a security guard needed to do if they smelled a stalker. “His show tapes Mondays and Tuesdays. If you’d like to get tickets, the ticket window is—”

“I’m not here to get tickets,” she said, and then left abruptly. She got a bagel and bad coffee from a street vendor, and stood on the corner of Fifty-Third and Sixth Avenue, wondering when she had transitioned from a widow to a stalker.

On her cell phone, she dialed the studio, got a recording, and on the recording was an eight-hundred number for buying Michael Diamond’s books and tapes. She called it and got an operator.

“I need to reach him,” she said.

“I’m sorry. We’re a warehouse fulfillment service,” the man said on the phone.

She hung up.

Then she opened the book and looked at the last few pages. Diamond was shilling his tapes and books and seminars and...consultations.

She called the number listed for the consultations. “I’d like a consultation. But I want it immediately.”

“I’m sorry,” the young woman said, her voice practically a chirp. “Mr. Diamond has a waiting list. The consultation price is $2,000 for one hour, and I can put you down for...how’s October 12th?”

“Listen. I don’t care about his schedule. You tell him—or his handlers—that this is Julie Hutchinson. The woman he had on the show recently. The one who he told that someone would die. That person died. You tell him that if I don’t see him, and fast, I’m bringing a lawsuit down on his head that will ruin him forever.”

2

He agreed to meet her at a restaurant called Pastis that was just outside the Village, toward Chelsea, in the meat-packing district. They sat outside, the restaurant’s awning shielding them from the sun. She ordered steak frites, and he ordered beans on toast and a glass of white wine.

“So, you’re threatening me,” he said.

“I had to see you.”

“I know.”

“What...what was that all about?”

“In the studio? It’s what I do. I viewed you.”

“Viewed?”

“I go inside people, sometimes. It’s like possession, I guess, only I’m not a ghost. It’s my mind—it’s not magic. It’s a genetic mutation, I think. My grandmother had this, too. One percent of the population has it. You know, I thought you hated my guts after our session.”

“I did. But...you said things that...well, they were accurate. I had buried them, but they were true. I’ve never admitted them to anyone. Not my mother, my sister, not my kids.”

“I know.”

“You know all?”

“No, I don’t. I know very little, in fact. What you consider normal intuition—I’ve got zero. Truthfully, if I didn’t have this ability—we call it Ability X—I’d be a bum in the street. In fact, I was, for several years. It goes in and out, depending on a host of factors. But it’s come on strong in the past six years, so...well, I’ve had to make hay while the sun shines. So, you need my help with something you don’t really understand. Is that right?”

Julie nodded. Their food came, and Julie picked at her French fries.

“But you don’t really believe,” he said. “Now.”

“I thought you said belief doesn’t matter. There are things I need to know.”

“About your husband.”

She nodded. “I know it sounds crazy, but …”

“You’ve seen his ghost,” Diamond said.

“I wish that’s what it felt like. I think I’m losing my mind, since he died. I think my mind is flashing on and off or something. A few nights ago, I thought I saw him. As close as you are. I thought I saw him, but then, when I turned on the light, he wasn’t there. And then, on a video I made. He is in it. But the video goes bad. All the videos went bad.”

“I have to tell you, Julie. I don’t believe in ghosts. Not like you’re saying. I don’t believe there are physical manifestations of spirits where you can see them.”

“So, I guess I’m halfway to the psych hospital,” she said, and tried not to imagine Amanda Hutchinson.

“I didn’t mean that,” he said. “I meant, sometimes what happens is our brain gives access to projections—so what we see isn’t a ghost, so much as...well, a movie. A movie our mind creates, influenced by either our own psychic ability, or someone nearby who has that ability. Your daughter, for example.”

“Livy?”

“Well, you told me about her brain radio. She thinks she communicates with her dead father.”

“I didn’t tell you that.”

He grinned. “For all you know, you live in a psychic household. Let’s assume your daughter has some psychic ability. Anyone else in your family have this?”

“My mother thinks she does. But she doesn’t. Believe me, she doesn’t.”

“It’s usually genetic.”

“Ah.”

“I can tell by that ‘ah’ that you think this is one loony bin candidate talking to another. Think what you want, just stay with me on this. You’ve read my books. You know what remote viewing is. That’s why you’re here. You know about the Stream, don’t you?”

She nodded. “In your book. It’s what connects consciousness between people.”

“It’s fluid, and just because physics hasn’t yet described it, doesn’t mean it won’t eventually be mapped out just like DNA. I believe it’s the connection between entire species. Ants have it—and it’s obvious they do. Birds that migrate have it. As we go up the food chain, it seems to have been weeded out. Who knows why. And now, it just shows up as a genetic burp. That’s what I think I am, a burp.”

She laughed, and for just a moment forgot her headache—the one that hadn’t disappeared in days.

“I am here,” she said, “to find out if you know about something called Project Daylight.”

3

A strange look flickered across his face, as if he were deciding on something that might affect her.

“It was your father running that program. Am I correct?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“It was on the sixth floor of an apartment building on Rosetta Street.”

Again, he nodded. “It began as a sleep study for children with certain disorders. My father hired several medical people to oversee aspects of it, but this was a cover for what it was really about. He had received funding from the Army to find out if there was a key to turning on Ability X in people. Children with the ability seemed to have an easier time of it. My father was misguided. He assumed all children were good. But they are not. Some children...well, particularly children who had come from abuse and were angry and had the seed of something more in them...well, the place was badly ventilated, apparently, and when the fire broke out—caused by faulty wiring, ultimately—many people died. My father was burned. Forty percent of his body, mainly his legs. He lived a few years beyond this, but ended up taking his own life. Project Daylight was a disaster, it cost too much money, and the Army wanted to hide it once the fire happened. So, it got buried.”

“My husband was in Project Daylight.”

“Then your husband was psychic. Or had some level of ability. As a child.”

“He never told me about his childhood,” she said.

“Given what happened in Project Daylight, I doubt he would,” Michael Diamond said.

4

Although she wanted to open up to him, Julie became worried as Diamond spoke to her that she would sound too crazy. She wanted to unleash everything, to ask a thousand questions. But it all came down to one question. The one question she had never known in Hut’s entire life. “Do you know who my husband was?”

Diamond put down his fork, and said, “I’m not sure. All of us in that program, Julie, lost memories.”

“You were in it?”

“My father had some psychic ability, and I inherited it. My mother, too. People with Ability X often seek each other out. I’m surprised you don’t have any.”

“Well, I don’t.”

“You don’t really believe in it, do you?”

“I believe that people believe. And maybe I want to know more,” she said. “Did you...did you know Hut? Well, his name was Jeff. I don’t know what his last name would’ve been. He was a ward of the state at the time.”

“Well, memories were lost, believe me,” he said.

She nodded. “A boy was burned.”

“He died,” Diamond said.

She remembered something that Detective McGuane had mentioned. “Died? I thought he lived. The cops think that man who killed my husband might have been that boy.”

“Do they? They think a dead boy killed someone?” He let the question hang in the air. Then he said, “I can show you the few memories I have of it. But they’re vague. They’re out of focus.”

“Show me?”

“Whether or not you believe in Ability X, Julie,” he said, “doesn’t matter. I can bring you inside myself. I can show you what I remember. At least fragments.”

“How?”

“If you really want that, I need total access,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“It means, I need to delve into you—into your psyche. I need to unblock and open doors in your mind. I need to let things out that you don’t want to get out. It’s not selective. I can’t pick and choose which door to open. I’m just the locksmith. I can unlock the door, but I can’t prevent things from spilling out. Do you understand?”

She squinted as she looked at him. “I guess I’m still skeptical. But, when you touched me in the studio that day …”

“Ah. The laying on of hands. In religious mysticism, it’s the most important way to Stream. To move from my consciousness into yours. Once you’ve let me inside you, you can slip into me.” He took a sip of wine and grinned like a teenage boy who just shot off a bottle rocket. “It’s like I feel everything the other person has felt. It’s like unleashing impulses. It’s like...well, pardon me for saying so, like an orgasm. And it’s scary.” He touched the tip of her fingers as she reached for her water glass. She withdrew her hand.

Maybe he’s just nuts, she thought. Maybe you need to get out of this lunch. Maybe whatever little bullshit ability he has isn’t going to be what you want. You’re smart, Julie, Eleanor told you that you might hallucinate and see Hut. That it was the normal grief and stress and longing. That it’s not some supernatural event. It’s just the human mind with a few cracks in it.

“Maybe I am nuts,” he said.

“You read my expression,” she said. “You wrote that in your book, about the con artists. They know how to read people from body language and even the looks on their faces. My therapist said it, too. Things most of us don’t even notice, but you’ve trained yourself to do.”

“But you don’t believe that, do you?” he said. “Not after recent experiences. You didn’t seek me out because of lack of belief. When I viewed you, Julie, I was there, with you, inside you, Julie. The birth of your little girl. Making love to your husband. I was there, with you, in your memory. As creepy as it sounds, it’s not. It’s a beautiful experience. It’s a connection of souls. It’s like a spiderweb inside each of us, and each strand of that web is a different world within us, and each strand shoots out and connects with strands of others, outside of us. A few of us are lucky enough to go inside. We need permission to do it. We can’t just slip into someone else. They have to want me inside them.”

His words made her shiver, slightly. Reminding her of words the dark figure had whispered to her in her dreams: Do you want me inside you?

She closed her eyes, made a brief wish, opened them. His face seemed open and warm and unassuming.

It was like stepping off a cliff, stepping into his world of psychic “reading.”

A world of illogic and mystical crap and all the things she’d fought her whole life never to believe.

“Can I trust you?” she asked. “I mean, really trust you?”

He nodded, without hesitation.

“I saw his wounds when he died. I was at the morgue. He is dead. But I see him. I think...I think I’m being haunted by him. Look, I’ll pay you whatever it takes just to find out if I’m sane or not.”

“I don’t want your money,” he said.

5

His apartment was less impressive than she’d expected. It was a three-flight walk-up on Perry Street, in the Village. When he opened the door, she saw a place that looked like it had only been lived in for a few weeks.

“Most of my money goes to organizations I believe in,” he said, noticing her raised eyebrows. “It’s the main reason I write the books and do the show. That’s the carnival aspect of Ability X. My income mostly goes to nonprofits that deal with, oh, the usual.”

“Animal rescue groups and homes for wayward girls?”

“Something like that. When you live mainly in your mind, you have modest needs.”

6

“On the table,” he said, directing her to what looked like a massage table near the window.

He drew the shades. He stood over her. For a moment, in the shadows, he reminded her of someone else.

Then, he sat down in a chair beside her.

“This’ll seem awkward. Just try to relax. All right? This is called body work. Just think of it like a massage. I need you to loosen your shirt. Would you mind taking it off?”

“Why?”

“Trust me or don’t trust me. You’ve had massages, I assume.”

“Yes. But usually...in a spa.”

“Tell you what, keep your cell phone on autodial for 911 if you’re afraid of me.”

She was about to pull out her cell phone. Everything had begun to frighten her, but she’d begun feeling a certain numbness inside. She remembered the video of watching Hut looking at the camera, saying something, and then filming her in the most obscene way. Is this what insanity is? Is this what Amanda Hutchinson felt like? Is this how it crawls inside you? Finally, she said, “I’m not afraid of you.”

The look on his face was of utter seriousness.

“Clothing interrupts the Stream.” He said it so matter-of-factly that she felt as if any threat had been removed.

He wasn’t even interested in her, in that way. She could sense it.

“If I were a doctor, you’d have no problem removing your clothes. If I were a masseur, you’d be naked before I could say, ‘get on the table.’ Think of me like that.”

She fought an internal battle, wondering if she had gone off the deep end. But finally, she unbuttoned her shirt and drew it off.

“I’ll get you a towel,” he said. “For modesty.”

He got up and went toward the bathroom. When he returned, he tossed a large white fluffy towel at her. It smelled fresh, as if he’d just done his laundry.

“I’ll go make some tea,” he gestured toward the boxcar kitchen.

After he’d gone over to the sink, she slipped out of her skirt, but kept her underwear on. She wrapped the towel around herself, and it managed to cover most of her, breasts included. She had an awful feeling that she was stepping into a trap. That she had let a dream rape her, and now she was setting herself up for a man who was a virtual stranger to do the same. And yet, she had to see where this went. She had to know what was in his mind, his memories. She had to know more.

After he poured himself some tea, he returned to the living room and sat down beside the table.

“Are you comfortable?” he asked.

“Mmm.” She stared straight ahead: her view was the bathroom door, with its mirror. She saw her face, and Michael Diamond as he sat down in a chair beside the massage table.

“I want you to know that you are safe. I won’t be touching you, but your mind will think I am. Have you ever gone to a Reiki therapist? They hold their hands just so, above certain points of the body. They believe they’re directing their healing life energy to the subject. This is somewhat similar. My hands will be this far from you the entire time. I want you to be aware of it, because there will come a point when it feels as if I’m touching you. Do not break the Stream. I Stream into you. I want you to close your eyes. Now. All right. Think back to a time when you first remember seeing a flower. Yes, a flower,” he said the words slowly, carefully, and she felt his hand on the back of her scalp. As he kept his hand there—barely touching her hair—she began to feel an intense heat, as if his hand emanated an aura of warmth. He guided her through looking at the first flower, then the first friend, then the look on her mother’s face when it was Christmas, and each time he took her mind somewhere new, she felt the presence of his hand again—not his hand itself, but the warmth beneath it as it hovered at the back of her neck, between her shoulder blades, down her spine, as he parted the towel, to the base of her spine, and then, slowly back up again.

She remembered other things from her childhood, remembered a fight her parents had, remembered when she and Mel had dressed up their pet schnauzer in baby clothes, and then the memories came forward as if, by touching her, he had begun opening doors in her mind that she’d been shutting behind her.

Soon, she had lost even the sound of his voice, but felt him there, his hand no longer moving just above the surface of her skin, but inside her in some impossible way—beneath the surface of consciousness, and his hand guided her along through memory, through doors that opened, one after the other, and behind them, memories. Then, more than memories—fantasies began coming to her—of flying in the air, of swimming like a fish through the water, and then she felt as if she were butting up against some door that wouldn’t open, but his hand was there, with her, and finally it flew apart as if smashed, and behind it was a blood-red room, and she was there, and a man without a face, and he caressed her and touched her, parting her legs as he parted her mouth with his tongue, and in this red room, she felt no shame and had no care that they were being watched by the outsider, by the psychic who chaperoned her journey into her subconscious. The faceless man against whom she twisted and bucked in a sexual fantasy of frenzy and animal lust, now took on the form of Michael Diamond himself—for a flickering moment—but then, as if propelled by pathways of the pulse, she was ejected from her inner fantasy, and moved again to memory—to a row of iron doors that looked as if they were locked, bolted, and bound by some kind of interconnecting bloodroots, but she heard a distant sound of a series of pops, and the doors opened, all of them, and it was as if she were spying on herself, spying on her life with Hut, on the life they’d built, only she watched it like it was one of Matt’s movies, she watched their life, and as she watched, she saw Hut for who he really was, not the man of her fantasies and not the man of her illusions, but a man who was cold with her, and brusque, a man who was selfish with his time and displayed little love even for his son—a handsome, vain man who watched her at times as if she were not entirely human to him …

She heard Michael Diamond’s voice, “Let’s move beyond all of this, there’s another place we need to go. You may be afraid, you may not want to go there. But fear isn’t what it seems. Fear awakens us to our abilities, our senses that have been hidden. Fear is the key to the final door inside you.” She felt as if someone had taken her wrist and tugged on it, pulling her into a dark place inside her mind, a dungeon where some beast growled in a corner.

“There’s a place inside you,” Diamond whispered. “A place where you’ve been, but you don’t remember. It’s been hidden from you. But you know it. I want you to face your fear and venture there again. With me.”

7

Julie moved as if swimming underwater, with dark vines moving slowly as if pushed by some unseen tide, and the doors were there, before her.

One of them began to open.

When it did, she saw Hut.

His eyes, milky white, his grin impossibly wide. His arms outstretched.

And she moved to him, as if some invisible tide pushed her toward the dead man.

8

Julie’s eyes opened, suddenly.

Got her bearings: she was in Diamond’s apartment.

It was mid afternoon.

An overwhelming pounding behind her eyes, as if she had a terrible headache that had just erupted. She glanced straight ahead at the long, vertical mirror on the front of the bathroom door. Her face—her eyes were bloodshot, she’d been crying—and Michael Diamond sat in a chair next to her. He looked up, at her staring at his reflection.

Only it wasn’t his face in the mirror.

It was a blur of grays and blues.

It was the face of the man in Apartment 66S. His body was different. She saw him as if he were naked, standing in the mirror. Covered with burns. Covered as if most of his body had been consumed in a fire.

Chapter Twenty

1

“You’re the boy,” she gasped. “You’re the boy who burned. The boy didn’t die. He didn’t. He lived. It’s you.” Her throat clutched as she said it, and she pushed herself up on the massage table, drawing the towel more tightly around her.

“Julie?” he asked.

She looked at him, and he was normal again, then into the mirror and he was also Michael Diamond, dressed, rising now from his chair.

She dressed quickly, feeling a pulse of horror within her body. Diamond may have been speaking, but she didn’t hear a word. She just knew that if she didn’t leave his apartment, she would scream, or she’d want to jump out a window. She felt the urgency of it, as if something was coming toward her, some shrieking insanity swooping down from shadows. She thought of Amanda, with her caged animal beauty, her fierce attack, and wondered if she hadn’t experienced what was going on in her mind. If she hadn’t begun to see people’s faces as blurs of gray and blue. She felt as if she’d been infected with something, some awful poison, something that had begun eating away at her sanity.

She raced down the stairs, not caring if she tripped and fell, and out into the street. She was disoriented, and couldn’t remember where her car was parked. She wandered through the village, her heart seeming to beat a thousand times a minute.

As she rounded a corner at Bleecker and Cornelius, she saw a crowd gathered around what must have been an accident. She felt drawn to it and went to the group of people, who all stood still, watching the delivery boy, on the street, his bicycle mangled. Several feet ahead, on the road, a taxicab, with its driver standing half in and half out of the car, door swung open, looking shell-shocked.

The boy had been knocked off his bike, and his head was twisted unnaturally around. His left arm was bent over his right shoulder. He looked as if he were no more than seventeen years old.

His Chinese food he’d been delivering lay in mashed white cartons beyond the small crowd.

The sound of the ambulance, rounding the corner. She looked in the boy’s eyes, she had to, she wanted to see what death was again, she wanted to believe it was final, and that whatever had been that boy was now gone, irretrievably.

Then she felt a tender cracking, as if inside her skull, and for a moment, she wondered if this was what a brain aneurysm began with—a slight cracking sound—and then, she heard her husband’s voice.

“I would never leave you, Julie,” he said. “Death is everywhere. But not where I am. Do you want me inside you?”

2

She dropped by Joe and Rick’s place.

“Jesus, Jules. You’re white as a sheet. And that’s something I never thought I’d ever get to say out loud,” Joe said after he opened the door.

“I’m losing my mind,” she said.

3

After she told him everything, Joe said, “He might as well have raped you, Julie. He told you to take your clothes off? You did it? You went along with it? How do you know he didn’t hypnotize you or something and then do something awful to you while you were under? You’ve got to be more careful. God, should we call the cops?” Realizing his tone, he calmed a bit. “No, we call them, how is it going to look? Julie? Do you really think he killed Hut? I mean, that you happen to read his books. You happen to go to his studio. You happen to …”

“I know it sounds crazy, Joe. But you believe in this stuff. What if he had psychic talent to draw me to him? I mean, what is the extent of this kind of thing?”

“It sounds like something I’ve never heard of. I mean, if I believed that …”

“What about the burns I saw? In the mirror?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and for the first time ever in their friendship, she thought she detected a flicker of distance in him. As if he were looking at her in such a way that he needed to see her as damaged. As deranged.

“Joe, I’m not crazy. I know I’m not. I saw him. I think he did what he said—he streamed into me. And when I came out of it, too suddenly, I saw him for a split second. He told me that I couldn’t be inside him unless he first opened me. He said it. And that’s what it was. I saw inside him. That’s what I saw with the burns. But...if he were burned as a kid, how could he look so...normal?”

Joe thought a moment, and said, “I worked with a woman once who had been in a car crash. Eighty percent of her body had burned. Five years later, with a lot of surgery, she looked better than she ever had. I guess, maybe if you saw him naked, you’d see the burn. If...if you really saw something that was real. Julie, now don’t get pissed off at me or anything, but if you saw this for just a second, couldn’t it maybe have been some kind of hangover from what he did to you? Like waking too fast from a dream?”

“Joe,” she said. “I saw things. Things I’ve forgotten. Things that...he unlocked inside me. And then, I thought I heard him. Inside me. But not from me. Maybe it was crazy. Maybe it was my mind on hyper speed. But I saw him.”

“Diamond?”

“No,” she said. “Hut.”

4

Julie finally opened up about the apartment on Rosetta Street.

“I know that block. It’s creepy already. I had to walk through there at night one time, and I swear the ghosts of all the cows they killed down there are wandering.” He grinned. “You still have the key to the place?”

Julie nodded.

“Let’s go,” he said.

5

This time, to get through the building’s security door, Joe buzzed one of the first floor apartments and pretended to be the son of an old lady on the sixth floor. It took three tries before he got buzzed in—“It’s not the nicest way to sneak into a building, but it works sometimes”—and when they got to 66S, Julie reached for her handbag, but Joe said, “I guess we didn’t need the keys after all.”

The door was ajar.

“What if someone’s in there?” she asked.

He smiled. “We say we had the wrong apartment and we back out slowly. Gee, makes me feel like I’m one of the Hardy Boys.”

6

Inside, the light switch didn’t work. It was growing dark outside, but there was still some light from the large factory-style windows of the apartment.

“Hello?” Joe asked, his voice booming. He turned back to her, “Open the door wide so we can get more light in here.”

She pulled the door back, and a rectangle of white from the hall light illuminated the foyer.

“Stinks,” Joe said, holding his nose.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“There’s bound to be another light around the corner,” he said, talking completely through his mouth as if trying to close off his nose from the smell that emanated from within.

She watched his silhouette as it melted into the grayness.

Then, a light flicked up in the next room. She went down the hall and into the living area. It was now completely empty of furniture, as if someone had moved.

There was one high-backed wooden chair at the center of the room. It reminded her of a chair she had seen in a dream. Somehow she’d seen it, but she didn’t mention this to Joe.

“I guess they got evicted,” Joe said. “Nobody home.”

Then, he went to check in the bedroom. She waited, remembering seeing the man standing there. The man who had the same blurred face that she’d seen in Michael Diamond’s mirror.

Julie’s imagination began to run wild. You’re a fool, you can’t have seen anything in the mirror. You can’t have seen a man with a blurred face anywhere. It’s the dreams you’ve been having. It’s Hut’s death. It has gotten to you and instead of dealing with it, you’ve been dancing around it. You saw the video with Mel. You saw that all you filmed was yourself, maybe dreaming of sex with Hut. Maybe dreaming of things because the raw deal you got with his murder was too much for you to handle. Hut was part of some psychic study as a kid. No wonder he never talked about it. But he did talk to Livy about her brain radio. He did try to tell her—she was sure of it—that something bad had happened in his childhood. Maybe when he talked about the Hutchinsons being horrible to him, he was
confusing it. Maybe his memories had been like crossed wires. Or maybe Michael Diamond had been telling the truth: that the fire in the building took the memories. Blocked them. That’s nuts to think any of this is real. You don’t genuinely believe in...but the Streaming session with Diamond had seemed too real. She had never felt someone else’s consciousness, inside her like that. Am I going insane? Is this what it is? But she could answer her own question: it was as if someone was fucking with her. As if someone had already crawled inside her mind and was screwing with the way she saw things. The way she perceived. The video. The Streaming. It was all about her brain itself hitting short-circuits. It was not insanity. At best, it was shock and paranoia. Post-traumatic stress. Seeing her husband’s body on a metal table. Seeing how he’d been carved into. Seeing Matt’s arm, with its carvings. Seeing things. That’s all it was. Seeing things. It wasn’t that she herself was losing her mind. It was a problem of vision. It was a problem of how things are seen, and what happens when a shock occurs.

She waited for Joe, and her mind spun until she just wanted to feel as if something made sense.

Joe came out of the bedroom and said, “Nothing there, either.”

She could see in his face the doubt. Even Joe, who believed in psychic phenomena wholeheartedly, thought she had gone off the deep end.

“Look,” he said, anticipating her mood. “You’ve had some shocks. I’m not saying that none of this adds up to anything. But I think if we’re going to call the police, we need more. I’ll look up some stuff and call some friends who are more expert on this. I’ll find out more about Project Daylight. Don’t worry about this. Let me drive you home, okay?”

7

Joe drove her back in her Camry, and when they got near Rellingford, he offered to spend the night, but she could tell he wanted to get home. She insisted that she was all right. So, they drove to the train station and she saw him off. She enjoyed the ride back with all the windows down and the slight wind blowing through the car, giving her a nice chill. She felt better. She wasn’t sure what to make of Michael Diamond or what she’d seen—or hadn’t seen—at his place. But she’d handle it later.

When Julie walked in the front door of her house, her sister was in the living room, covered with a blanket on the couch, with Livy, in her jammies, curled up around her.

Mel opened her eyes. “How’d it go?”

“I’ll tell you tomorrow. Thanks for coming over,” Julie whispered, lifting Livy up in her arms. Livy was so sound asleep that she barely stirred as her mother carried her to her bedroom.

She was too tired to clear out the guest room for Mel, so she and her sister slept together up in the big king-sized bed in Julie’s room. When Julie got up in the morning, Mel already had coffee made. The kids had gone off to school. It was after eleven.

Mel barely said a word, but hugged her. “I love you, Julie. You’re the best little sister in the whole world. But I don’t want you going in the city anymore. And I don’t even think your friend Joe was much help to you. And I certainly think that Michael Diamond was bad news from the start. I wish I’d told Mom to go by herself to that stupid show.”

Julie said very little, certainly didn’t want to add to her sister’s sense that she was losing it by telling her about Project Daylight and Michael Diamond and seeing blurred faces and burnt bodies. As the thoughts spun through her head, Julie giggled a little and then noticed Mel’s unforgiving look. She knew what Mel was thinking. You’re thinking that I am a terrible Mommy and I need to somehow be strong and pull through and just focus on Mommydom and forget that I had a husband, forget that even though you saw your little sister masturbating on videotape that I saw a man who might’ve been a dead man molesting me in my sleep and you think that I need meds and a good long rest and you’re probably even thinking of taking Matt and Livy away for a while until I get a good doctor and end up like the Numbah One Wife, Amanda Hutchinson, who thought I had big hairy balls. Absurdities encircled her thoughts, and nothing made sense, and she knew that the longer Mel watched her, the worse she would feel, the more she would go whirling into an oblivion of fear and belief and shadow.

Julie thanked her for the coffee and for cleaning the house. She thanked her for taking care of Matt and Livy. She told her that the rest had done her good last night, and that she knew she’d been experiencing crazy thoughts. “Eleanor called it post-traumatic stress disorder,” Julie said. “But I’m getting good care. Honest. I am.”

8

“You went to see this con man again?” Eleanor asked, on the phone. “Julie, you have been through a trauma. Your husband was murdered. Do you think your mind is going to work right, at this point in time? Do you think you’re not going to hallucinate now and then? See things? Wish you could see him? Wish you could hear him? When soldiers come back from war, they often suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Why? They’ve witnessed atrocities. You have experienced a personal atrocity. Your husband, the father of your child, was murdered, in a terrible way. Psychics like this man are preying on people like you. They may be worse for you than anything else. He may be giving your subconscious mind permission to break down.”

“Can I see you?”

“Immediately,” Eleanor said. “I’ll be at my office in twenty minutes. I consider this an emergency.”

9

A bald man in a gray, expensive suit sat in the overstuffed chair that Julie normally occupied during her sessions with Eleanor Freeman.

He rose up as Julie entered the room. She had the feeling that he had too much of a good sense of himself. He must be a doctor.

“This is Dr. Glennon, from Hillside,” Eleanor said. Julie shook his hand and went to sit on the couch next to Eleanor.

“I’ve brought Dr. Glennon in, Julie, because I thought you two might talk more openly. I feel I’m a little too close to the situation to be of much help.”

“But …” Julie began.

Then, “The situation?” Eleanor smiled. “What you’re going through. Your sister called last night. She was worried about you.”

“She called you?”

“Now, don’t be angry with her,” Eleanor said. “She’s thinking of your well-being. You’ve been through a lot, Julie, and my fear is that I haven’t been as much help as I should’ve been.”

Julie picked at the hem of her skirt. “All right.” Then, to the doctor. “You’re a psychiatrist?”

Dr. Glennon nodded.

Eleanor patted Julie on the knee, and then got up and walked over to the doorway. She stepped out of her office, shutting the door behind her.

Julie glanced back, toward the door, feeling like a little girl being left behind by her mother on the first day of school.

10

An hour later, she stopped by the pharmacy to fill her prescriptions for Xalax and some drug she’d never heard of called Darmien. She had seen them advertised on TV commercials constantly—the green pill was Darmien, and it ensured “a restful vacation in one night,” according to the advertising. Less familiar with Xalax, she had remembered Dr. Glennon mentioning something about how it was a mild sedative. She wanted whatever would be necessary to somehow help her mind clear up. Glennon had told her, “You can take them together, and they’ll act fairly quickly. Take them when you’re feeling run down, or when your mind seems to be doing that thing you called letting off sparks.” He seemed like a good man, and he told her that the drugs had few side effects and would just be for the short term.

She took the Xalax and Darmien with some Snapple when she got home, and then she went to lie down in the bedroom and let the supposed relaxing benefits of the new miracle drugs take her over.

At first, she watched the ceiling with its swirls of patterns, and then she felt as if she were moving into the patterns. She felt quite wonderful and rested and only vaguely sleepy. The sex dream came, of course, and in the dream she had no fear at all. Hut parted her legs, his mouth pressing into her, his hands reaching up and around to grasp her breast and stroke her. It wasn’t like the nightmares of sex and lust, this was lovemaking, thank God, she thought, thank God for drugs and psychiatrists, this wasn’t post-traumatic stress, this was love, this was love that never died, this was no ghost making love to her, but a man of flesh and blood, and the world was fuzzy—she remembered Hut’s first wife’s phrase, “the warm fuzzies”—that’s what this was, the warm fuzzies had her in their thrall. She felt taken care of again, secure in his arms, his ministrations, and she realized he had never done this before, when they were married, he had never taken her like this in real life, this pounding and battering and swirling and lifting, but with the warm fuzzies, he transformed into this sexual dynamo who wanted her, and her alone, wanted to be within her, wanted to find her pleasure and press into it, delight her, awaken her, but the warm fuzzies pulled her back, ah, she could not be awakened. She could not. The warm fuzzies drew her down into a rich comforter of Hut, his body, wrapping around her as he moved upward, kissing her navel and flicking his tongue within it. She didn’t care that several cameras were filming them—it was a porno movie, she saw people filming them as he took her again and again and she gave herself to him. Then, moving to her breasts and taking each nipple in his mouth, like he was a baby, like he drew strength and comfort from her, like she was his mother and his lover and his wife and his whore and his savior.

And when he came up to her face, when she looked in his eyes, his eyes were normal, his face was normal. Not milky white. Not a nightmare at all.

His body was covered with strange markings, whirligig drawings and little sunbursts etched into his skin, but it was him. It was Hut.

She was sure.

He pressed himself into her, inside her, and she opened, she blossomed—ah, the warm fuzzies made it easy. That Darmien sure could get a person in trouble, she giggled softly. Had she said it aloud? Ah, but it was her warm fuzzy-maker, that Darmien, and she didn’t even have to move or struggle or embrace him. Her arms and legs felt as if they couldn’t move, but it didn’t bother her. She liked that he had taken control. She liked that Hut was there, taking her. Taking her the way men took women in fantasies. She loved this fantasy.

She awoke several hours later. In the dark. God, another insane dream, she thought.

Someone had screamed.

As the seconds passed, she was sure of it. But the house was silent. No, not a scream. It was as if the silence itself had made her wake up.

The scream, or cry, or quiet, she wasn’t sure whether it was that or even a little shriek—it must have been what had snapped her out of sleep. Or it was in a dream? she couldn’t quite remember—like a spiderweb of a dream that she’d somehow broken through.

11

The headache from hell battered at her, but she managed to dress. Had she undressed herself? She couldn’t remember. She went into the hall and flicked the light on, but it didn’t come up. Have to change the bulb. Damn it. She went down to Livy’s room. It was dark, but everything was in place. She looked in at shadow upon shadow—the toys, the doll collection, and then the small, perfect bed, piled high with pillows, which was how Livy liked to sleep. Hokey Pokey Elmo sat square on the bed as if watching her. She saw a bit of Livy’s hair over the pillow. Livy liked to scrunch down under the blanket at night, “like an oyster in a shell,” Hut used to joke. She stood in the doorway, feeling a bit of relief. But when she passed Matt’s room, she stopped. Then, she turned the knob. It was locked. She had allowed him his privacy like that, ever since she’d walked in on him masturbating the year before. She had felt more embarrassed than he had, and she didn’t blame him for locking up now and then. She could easily unlock it with a credit card or even the front door key, so she wasn’t worried. Matt was fine. In fact, she thought she heard him snoring a little through the door.

She felt a chill from the hallway and went down the stairs to the living room to check to see if a window had been left open.

Instead, the front door was open wide. She glanced at the small plastic box that housed the burglar alarm system. It no longer had its little green lights flickering. Damn it. Damn it. She’d forgotten to turn it on. Had she even left the front door open? Had the damn drugs made her too groggy even to be sensible?

She looked out into the night, and the stars seemed to have dimmed above the trees, against moonlit sky.

12

Julie shut the door, locking it. She flicked up the living room light switch. It was dead. Then she went to the kitchen and got a flashlight from under the sink. She went out the back door and checked the switches. She toggled them back and forth, unsure as to what she was really trying to accomplish. No light came on in the house.

She went back inside with the flashlight, and as she walked from the kitchen down the main hall, and the flashlight’s beam hit the back of a mirror, it illuminated the room.

She was sure that someone stood behind her. She turned around quickly, shining the light.

The beam of light hit Michael Diamond’s face.

Chapter Twenty-One

1

“Julie,” he said, his hands going up. She kept the flashlight on his face. She thought about the gun. Upstairs in the bedroom. She thought about how fast she could run there. Could she get there fast enough? Could she lock the bedroom door behind her? Could she get the key out—in the dark—and open the metal box—and get the revolver and get back out to make sure her children were safe from the man who she was now sure had murdered her husband?

“Julie,” he said. “I’m not trying to scare you.”

“Shut up,” she said. “What...you broke into my house?”

“No,” he said. “The door was open. The lights were off. Please. Let me explain.”

“What in hell are you doing here?” she asked, and then wondered how long it would take for her to find the cell phone and call the police.

2

“Please. I can understand every single thought you’re thinking of. I was the boy who was burned.”

“You said he died.”

Michael didn’t respond to this. “But my memories are like flashes of lightning, Julie. I can’t see everything. You know what I did with you. You know where I took you, where you showed me what was inside you. You were there. You aren’t crazy. This makes sense if you believe, Julie. If you believe. You resisted me. I could feel it when I went into you. You had fear, and fear is the thing that has power over you now. But you’ve got to let it go. Somehow. You know how I Streamed into you. How you went to doors in your mind. You saw things. You relived things. But there’s something important now. Something more important than that. There’s a door in you that needs opening, but they’ve blocked it.”

“They?”

“If I told you who, you would not believe me,” he said.

“Try me.”

“Your husband,” he said.

“My husband is dead.”

“There is no death, Julie,” Michael Diamond said. “Let me show you.”

He moved toward her, and she stepped backward and felt fear clutch at her. She was sure he was going to kill her, she stepped back and felt for the doorknob to the front door. She turned it. But it was still locked. The chain was on, as well. She pressed her back against the door. Her mind flashed on things—on what she could grab to protect herself. Where she could run. Her heart beat a mile a minute as she began hyperventilating.

He came nearer, and she kept the flashlight beam on him. He unbuttoned his shirt.

The light shone on his skin. It was scarred and layered. “They set fire to me. They wanted me to burn, Julie. They stood by and watched me die. But I can show you. Just as you showed me what was inside you. I want you inside me. I want you to see this,” he said, and reached out and took her trembling hand while she kept the flashlight on his chest. He drew her hand to the middle of his chest and she felt a surge of energy, and she knew it was the Stream because she felt herself—not her body, but her true self, something in her mind—flow into him, sucked along as if she were liquid and were being poured into a dark lake.

3

The first thing she felt was that gradual warmth and a sense of safety, and then pleasure sensations ran through her. She heard his voice, with her, guiding her. “Julie, this is the Stream, I’ve brought you into it,” and she tried to resist moving along with his voice, but she didn’t feel the same fear as she had seconds before. She saw memory screens inside the darkness: his father holding his hand as he led the little boy toward the doctor who took him through several doors, into a room with a series of beds. Two boys and three girls, of varying ages, lay on the beds, their eyes closed, small wires attached to what looked like polka dots on their foreheads and just beneath their left nipples—for they were in their underwear, sheets drawn up just to their stomachs. He cried when he was told to take his clothes off and get onto one of the beds, and watched in terror as the polka dots and wires were attached to the top of his head, making a slurping sound as they suctioned his forehead.

“This one for your heart,” the doctor said as he placed his cold hand near his chest. “It’s so we can make sure you’re okay.”

The lights were kept on, and his arms were tethered to the bed so that he had a range of movement but he couldn’t get up. “I have to pee,” he said, repeatedly, but no one came to take him to the bathroom. He was in a white room with long mirrors on all the walls. He wasn’t even sure where the door was.

Eventually, he peed in his underwear, and fell asleep, exhausted and a little scared.

Another memory screen: a classroom of twenty children, with three stern-looking women at the front of the class, near the big teacher’s desk. He sat in the third row back and they were all being told to close their eyes and try to think of nothing but darkness. But he couldn’t. Every time he shut his eyes, he saw something awful, although as soon as he opened them, he couldn’t remember what it was.

“You don’t go home?” Julie asked in the Stream, shocked that she was able to speak at all.

The little boy answered her. “For some of us, our mommy and daddy never pick us up. We stay in that room with the lights and all the mirrors. They put the polka dots on us every night.”

It was night, she assumed, but the lights above never gave an indication of morning or midnight. One of the boys plucked the polka dots off his forehead, and laid them on the bed. “Mikey,” he said. “They’re stealing your dreams.”

“Are they?” he asked. “My dad wouldn’t do it.”

“Don’t lie to him,” the sad little long-haired boy said. He must’ve been about fourteen, but he looked younger than Michael, who was almost thirteen. “They’re checking for brain activity. That’s all. They want to see patterns while we dream. Don’t worry, Mike, nobody can steal your dreams.”

“They are too,” the older boy said. He was at least fifteen, but seemed older. “They’re trying to steal from us.”

The girl of eleven or so who Julie thought might be the long-haired boy’s sister, piped up, “I just want to go home.”

“There is no home,” the older boy said. “None of us have parents.”

“I do,” Michael said, and the little girl nodded, “Me, too.”

The older boy smirked. “If you call those people parents. They’d sell you if they thought it could buy them something. Don’t you think that, Mikey? Don’t you? Since as far back as you can remember, don’t you remember how they hated you? How they think you’re a freak because of what goes on in your head? That they think you’re going to go nutso because you keep predicting things—bad things—like you’re a bad luck charm? Like you’re a jinx? I wouldn’t want a kid like that around the house,” he said. “Who would?”

The long-haired boy said, “What about you?”

“My parents died,” the older boy said. “In a car crash. I knew it was coming, only I didn’t tell them.”

“That’s mean,” one of the girls said.

“Is it? I was only four. What did I know? I didn’t know people died like that,” the older boy said.

“Don’t you feel bad?” Michael asked.

“Why should I? I didn’t make them die. It was an accident.”

“But you saw it coming.”

“There’s a lot of things I see coming,” the older boy said, looking at the boy with the long hair.

(A voice outside of the memory, Julie’s, “Who are they? What are their names?” and it jolted her off one memory screen and onto another.)

There was an isolation booth. A glassed-in cage, but with a doorway that led into a larger room that was the testing room.

(“Why is this important?” Julie asked.

“Something bad happened here,” Michael said.)

Then, another memory: the older boy and three girls and one other boy stood on the stairs in the schoolhouse, blocking the way for Michael to pass.

“You can’t come up,” the older boy said.

“Why not?”

“We’re testing someone.”

“You’re testing someone? You’re not supposed to run the tests. Where’s Dr. Stone?”

“Getting a taste,” one of the girls—a tall, wiry one with braces, “of his own medicine.” She and one of the other girls giggled.

“If you know what’s good for you,” the boy said, “you’ll just go back downstairs.”

Michael noticed the way the five of them had carved spirals and things on their bodies. “Why’d you do that?” he pointed to the girl’s arm.

“We’re a special secret club now,” she said.

“You can’t join,” the older boy said, quickly.

“Why not?”

“You’re not good enough,” he said. “You’re fake. You’re one of the twenty-six percenters. We don’t want you. We want the ninety-nine percenters.”

Another memory screen:

Michael was weeping, wiping his eyes out as he walked down the corridor, and when he came to the Sleep Room, he looked through the door window and saw something that almost made him laugh, and then it scared him.

(“What is it? What did you see?”)

In each of the narrow beds, the doctors and teachers and the parapsychologist, all lying down as if sleeping, polka dots on their foreheads. Michael tried to make his mind roam into the room, but something blocked him. Why were they just lying there? What had done this?

His mind sped through possibilities—thinking of his classmates, and he knew it was the older boy. Something terrible. Something they had done: the ones who gathered at the top of the stairs. They had scrambled the minds of their teachers, of their doctors, and of Mr. Boatwright, and maybe even his own father.

They weren’t dead, he was sure. Their eyes were open, and their lips seemed to open and close as if they were fish pulled from water, dying on dry land.

And then, Julie heard what sounded like an explosion and saw a little girl screaming as she tried to open the door to a glass booth—inside it was an inferno. The door finally opened, and a boy, on fire, came running out.

And then, Julie felt other things. She felt a sense of benevolence like she’d never experienced. She felt kindness. She felt something sacred. Michael’s voice in her mind, “I died, Julie. I died then. You’re with me, feeling that. Don’t forget it. Don’t ever forget what you’re feeling. It’s not a terror. Death is not a terror. It is the doorway to something sacred. See how I felt it? Stay with me. Stay with it.”

Wave after wave of elation seemed to sweep through her. “It’s the human soul,” he said, with her inside him. “It’s the human soul, inviolate. Don’t ever forget that, Julie. Don’t. Death is just a stop along the way.”

Then, she felt herself heave as if about to vomit, and she sucked air—but it was not her, was it? She experienced his memory—his fragments. He was alive. They stood around him, pointing. The other children.

The older boy stepped forward and whispered in the ear of the boy who had been burnt. “You passed the test,” he said.

It was Hut. She knew it was Hut. She could see in the boy’s face that it was Hut. Hut was the older boy. Hut helped set the boy on fire. Hut was doing something evil. Something terrible as a child.

The fear rose up in her. The fear grew quickly, like a fire itself in her mind, and she felt Michael’s consciousness grasp at her, trying to tug her back, but the fear shot her out of the Stream and she was once again in her front hall, her back pressed against the front door, but the flashlight had fallen to the floor.

Michael Diamond had released her hand.

“Julie,” he said, his breathing heavy. “I did kill him. But not because of revenge. But because he was bringing things into existence. He was doing something terrible.”

She stood there, breathing heavily also. She crumbled to her knees and sat down on the cold floor.

“You murdered my husband,” she said. “And now you come here with this. This...magic trick. To make me feel things. To make me think you’re not the man who stabbed my husband. Who sadistically killed him.”

“You believe,” Michael Diamond said. “You can’t go back from that. Once you believe, you can’t.”

4

Inside her own consciousness, without the sense that Diamond was inside her, Julie felt a growing belief. She felt it more than she had ever felt anything before. His words: the human soul inviolate. Inviolate. There was something more than just this existence. She’d sensed it, she’d been exposed to it in the past, but she had never believed it because she had no direct experience. But now, here all this was. As if it were meant to come to her. As if it were falling into place for her.

And yet, he murdered Hut.

“I want more,” she said, feeling hungry. “I want to be inside you. I want to see more. I can’t live like this. I can’t be like this. I can’t have all these things in my head. What I’ve seen. What I’ve experienced.”

“It’s unexplainable in words,” he said. “Here, take my hand. Just take my hand. I can bring you back inside me, but there’s something inside you that’s still blocked, Julie. Something they blocked.”

“They?”

“There are at least five of them, still. They’ve done terrible things. Worse than you can imagine. If I were to tell you,” he said.

“Show me.”

5

In the dark, he took his shirt off and crouched down beside her. Then, he guided her hands to his chest.

“Accept the Stream,” he said. “I’ll bring you in. I’ll show you what you want.”

Soon, she felt as if she were flying into shadows. She knew from her reading that this was the astral projection that was often written about—the remote viewing, where one consciousness invaded another. And she saw the memory screens—it was like blinking, and each time a new image or moment of his life came up.

From his early life and his first experiences of Ability X (even his language invaded her mind, and she understood and accepted it) when he was seven and his father, in his military uniform, in a boardroom of some kind, tested him with cards, and then with mind games where the boy had to tell what he saw in pictures from his father’s thoughts.

The little boy scribbled houses and horses and cats and women and his father each time nodded, and then the boy was in a room with his little sister, and more tests.

She saw the building that was the Chelsea Parapsychological Institute, and she was there when the sleep study began, but his consciousness guided her through these screens, into other memories, after the fire. Here was the hospital where he spent nearly a year. She watched from above as skin graft procedures, and painful salt water treatments were done. The boy in the bed howled in pain and begged his father to see his sister.

Then, she roamed through the open Stream—floating down halls of the hospital while pain intensified for the boy in the room.

Moving through windows, out into daylight, out into the world and traveling above the trees until finally, coming to a graveyard and drifting down among the oaks like a kite falling to the ground, she saw the grave of a girl named Cassandra Diamant. His sister

More screens came up, and Julie blinked through them feeling as if she were swimming underwater with her eyes only half open.

And then: operation after operation while the boy recovered, a teenager, nearly a man, and learning to test himself, test his abilities, but still too weak. Not recovered. And then, she went further, and felt as if she were going into the whorls of a dark shell. She was inside him, behind his eyes, seeing what he saw. And it was as if he were directing her back in time to look out through him. She saw the clippings on the wall—the murders. She saw things that he could Stream—and there was Hut, somehow he’d Streamed to Hut, Hut when he was in his late twenties with Amanda, who looked more beautiful than Julie imagined she had been, more radiant than any woman could be.

Amanda had Matty, a two-year-old at this particular moment. They were in Tompkins Square Park in the city. They talked, but Julie couldn’t hear their words.

But she saw Hut’s face. She saw a level of darkness there—as if there were an aura of ravens around him—and he argued with Michael. Hut was angry, and then laughing at him, and some of the words came through, “you idiot,” “wasting your life,” “you can’t see what we’re trying to do,” and Amanda looked as if Hut had frightened her when he picked Matt up and took her hand, tugging her away from Michael Diamond.

Michael turned around on the street, and there was Hut again, only it was the Hut that Julie remembered. It was the Hut that she’d seen their last morning together.

Again, she couldn’t hear the words. Not clearly. The volume was too low on what she experienced, but she felt what Michael Diamond felt, and she saw the anger in Hut, and then the two men went to the curb, and Hut told him to get in. Hut had a small knife. He was threatening Diamond. But Diamond got into the car, and they drove. The consciousness crashed in a wave, and Julie felt herself being pulled into an undertow, deeper into Diamond’s mind.

And then, she was at a clearing in the woods, and it was Hut with the knife. Diamond argued, and Hut jabbed the air in front of him. Julie understood: Hut had wanted to kill Diamond. In her mind, Michael Diamond said, “I was the instrument that allowed him, and the others, to discover resurrection.”

Julie shot out of his mind, just as sure as if she’d been catapulted.

She opened her eyes, and it had begun to be light out. It was already morning. She was soaked with sweat, as was Diamond. “Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God.”

“Try to stay calm,” Michael Diamond told her. “Please. It’s something that they discovered when they tried to kill me.”

“What is it?”

“There is no death, Julie.”

6

“At least, not how we think of it. Death is like a train station. You leave one train and get on another,” he said. “Only some people—with Ability X—can alter the process. I don’t completely understand it, nor do I care to. I experienced death briefly. They were testing me, Julie. They’ve tested others. Most fail. Even with Ability X, the failure rate is high. They’ve killed some people. Some of their own children.”

“Who are they?”

“There are at least five of them, but I’m sure there are more by now. I’ve been trying for the past seven years to locate them, but they...well, they block me. They can do that.” He must have read the shadowy expression on her face. “I know it’s hard for you to believe. You’ve just come to this.”

“But if Hut...if Hut were really …”

“You saw inside me. You experienced it.”

“You carved into his body,” she said. “And others. I saw them.”

“I only killed your husband, Julie. They killed the others. And more that still have not been found. They kill their own children, Julie. Just as they tested me, they’ve been testing each other for years. They carved the symbols into your husband’s back. They were there, watching. That’s why he stopped the car at the path into the woods. I couldn’t detect them, but I know they were there, and I did my damnedest to make sure that your husband could not come back from the dead. They are a death cult. They have turned their ability into something … unspeakable.”

She felt a shivering rack her body, and she pushed herself up from the floor. The ordinariness of the early morning light coming through windows, of the shadows being erased along the living room and down the hall to the kitchen, made her wonder what life was, and where the real and the unreal separated.

“You’ve been inside me, Julie. I’ve been inside you. You can’t go back from that. You know—inside you—that what I’m saying is true. I showed you,” he said.

She rose up, keeping her back to the door. “I don’t know,” she said, trembling. “You have this ability. I know you do. I don’t know what to think. I just don’t. What if you’re lying? What if you can show me things that never happened?”

He pressed his hands to his forehead, as if he were stopping a headache. “Don’t doubt me. Please, Julie. It’s important. I’m here with you because I knew what you were going through. When you came to me, and I went inside you, I knew the pain you’d felt. I knew the desolation. It’s because your marriage was a lie. He used you. He is still using you.”

“He’s dead. My husband is dead,” she said, angrily. She stepped around him and went toward the kitchen. “I need time. I need time to think.”

“There’s no time,” he said. “They’ve already tested others.”

She half turned, stopping. “What do you mean?”

“Your children,” he said. “They have some of their father in them. They have the genetic material for Ability X. You know that your stepson has things he can’t express. You know that your daughter thinks she has a brain radio. That she communicates with her father. Some of them have already murdered their own children, trying to resurrect them. Do you think your children are safe?”

Julie glanced upstairs to the bedrooms. “Stop it. Please. If that’s true. My God, if that’s true, then why didn’t Hut just come here and take them? Why all these months …” She tried to block out the videos she’d seen. That’s insane. It was your mind. It was stress. Post-traumatic stress. Eleanor called it that. Shock. Shock of having your husband murdered. Shock and despair and anger and grief and mourning and cracks in your mind where you fall off a cliff of life and dangle from a thin branch over a chasm. Nervous exhaustion. Night fears. Erotic dreams. Rape dreams. Short-circuiting in the face of an enormous shock. That’s what it was. This is insane.

“You don’t come back all at once,” he said. “First, your autonomous nervous system kicks in when Ability X turns on another part of the brain. Then, it takes weeks before your memories come back. And they only come back if others with the Ability are there to bring them into you. To get inside the Stream with you. To reopen the doors that have been closed. But you’ve seen him. In your dreams. In the movies in your head. The movies on screen. He is blasphemy, Julie. He violated the sacredness of death. He violates the soul. He does not believe in the soul. He puts himself above the laws of nature, which are here for a reason, Julie. It’s what I learned in my death. If I could take away my life now, I would. I’ve tried. But I can’t. Only when my brain itself breaks down, will I finally find release and enter the Stream that connects us all. And then my soul will go where it is meant to and not be shackled by this body. I wish I could make it untrue, Julie,” he said, getting up from the floor. He came toward her. “I wish I could say I made it all up. That I’m just a murderer. That I murdered your husband and I’m here to hurt you. But it’s not true.”

“Don’t come near me. Please,” she said, feeling an immense ache within her.

“You’re feeling separation from me. It’s all right,” he said. “It passes. It’s what we feel when we’re too much within another. You don’t have Ability X strongly enough. Everyone has it to some small degree. Your husband has it greater than anyone I’ve ever known. You seem to have perhaps three percent. A drop of it. But it’s enough to make you ache when you separate from going inside someone in the Stream. It’s what we all feel,” he said, and as he went toward her she slowly moved back, through the doorway into the kitchen. “I learned something in my death, Julie. I learned about the soul. And death is the sacred doorway. I should not have been pulled back into life. I should not have come back into my burnt body. But they were there, and they got inside the Stream, and they drew me back because I was their experiment. I was their guinea pig. But I came back better. They don’t always. Sometimes, they come back violent. Sometimes, they show up with nothing but evil in them. Sometimes, they come back as a child who can’t learn right, who can’t remember, who can’t express himself, who gets angry and violent and pulls knives.”

She stared at him, angry now. “Matt? Matty?”

“He killed him. When he was only three. That was too young. But he doesn’t care, Julie. It was a test. I know, because his wife came to me. Amanda. She came to me and she was losing her mind with fury for what she’d allowed them to do.”

“Matty? He’s not dead. He’s in his room, sleeping. He’ll wake up soon.”

“She told me that she fought him—your husband—to make him stop. But the problem with what they do, Julie, is they want fear. Fear makes the adrenaline pump. Fear makes them come back. It wakes up a part of the brain after one part of it turns off. Fear is a switch. It gets the Ability going at hyper speed. They need that. It opens a door that should be permanently sealed in the brain. It turns on something. When one part of the brain diminishes, another part begins to rewire and come alive. Do you know how they did it to that little three-year-old boy? Do you?”

“He doesn’t have the carving,” Julie said, her eyes watering up with tears and she went to the knife block and pulled out a long sharp knife. She held it up, more afraid than she’d ever been in her life.

“Amanda stopped them from carving into his skin after he was dead. But before he died, they had to frighten that little three-year-old. They had to do something so terrible to him, Julie, that his system would go into shock. And then they drowned him. They made his own mother do it. Your husband made his wife wrap her hands around the boy’s neck and press him into a bathtub and the fear was like electricity so that even she felt it. But he had some of the Ability. He came back. But he didn’t come back without something not right. That’s what they do, Julie. They think that they’re changing the world. They think by doing this, they’ll eradicate death. They’ll close the door of death. But it doesn’t always work. Sometimes the body rots. Three days are crucial. If the mind does not awaken in three days, corruption sets in, and it’s too late. If the brain doesn’t turn on, then natural death occurs. But they stay inside them for three days. They stayed inside me for three days after the fire. They made sure I turned on and came back from the dead. And they did it with your husband. And his son.”

“Hut saw her. That’s not true,” Julie said. “He saw her. He told me. He said she was trying to kill him. When he was eleven.”

“Maybe she was trying to send him where his soul had been meant to go,” Diamond said. “Julie, there’s no time now. I want to ask that you and your children come with me. I’ll protect them. They can’t really hurt me. They can’t do anything to you once you’ve died and come back.”

“No,” she said, wiping at her eyes with the back of her left hand. She held the knife up, sobbing. “Matty’s a good boy. He’s good. There’s nothing wrong with him.”

“It doesn’t make you bad,” Diamond said. “But there are no guarantees how we come back. None. Nobody understands how the brain—and mind—work, Julie. Nobody understands the enormous part of our minds that is untapped. They play with fire. They murder and call it understanding.”

“That’s insane. You’re talking insane. This is not real. This is not happening. Please, just leave. Just go. I...I’m confused. I don’t...I don’t want this. Please.” She tried to reach for the phone on the counter by the sink, but wasn’t quite there. He stepped toward her, and she jabbed the knife in the air.

“We’ve been inside each other. You know this is true. You know it.”

“Stop saying that! It’s obscene. It’s disgusting. He’s dead. You killed him. Please. Why don’t you leave? Why don’t you leave?”

“I know you won’t stab me,” he said, stepping closer. “I’ve been inside you. I know you, inside and out. I know.”

“Don’t, please,” she sobbed, slashing at the air, less than a foot from him, crumbling to the floor, wishing the world would disappear, wishing she could feel safe again.

“There’s something I need, Julie. You know where they are. But they blocked you. But I can unblock it inside you. I just need to go find that door. I need just a little time to find that door. I can stop them for good, Julie. Inside you, you have a memory. You’ve been to where they’re giving their tests.”

“Sixty-six S? Is that what this is about?”

“No,” he said. “That was a young woman’s apartment. A woman I knew. Her father had been friends with my father, and he gave her the apartment after it was converted into units. A woman named Gina Lambert. Another one of us. But she was the daughter of a girl named Nell who had been in Project Daylight. Her mother was one of them. And they got her. They killed her to test her. They killed a boy named Terry West. He was still in college. He had Ability X. Do you want to know how? They had to create great fear in him before he died. But he still died. He didn’t come back. Do you want to know how monstrous they are?”

“I don’t know anything, I don’t.”

“Let me inside you one last time. Just one last time,” he said, “Please let me get inside you.”

She jabbed the knife at him, almost touching his skin. “No, please, no.”

“There’s a place inside you. I know it’s there. We were almost there. Almost. I almost found it. If you can let me in, I can stop them. I know I can. There’s always hope. It’s a blessing and a curse. But sometimes, it’s all we have. Yet, when faced with this, there is no hope. There can be no hope. Do not let hope cloud your resolve. Help me find them. Help me open that one door in your mind.”

“Please,” she wept, slashing blindly. “Go away. I don’t want this. It’s not happening!”

He reached out and touched the edge of the knife, and then the tips of her fingers. “Let me inside you, Julie.”

She felt a spark between them, and a lubricating familiarity as he slid into her and she shut her eyes for just a moment and felt him moving, and now she tried to resist but he was pushing her hard, slamming up against her on the inside, his consciousness roaming and tearing at walls and doors and things that she felt were the tunnels into her memory.

And then she saw it at the moment he did.

It was simply a house.

It was a house with glass walls on one side.

She had seen it before but she wasn’t sure where. She could not name whose it was. She vaguely remembered a video of Matt’s that was just a house on a lake. On the lake, she thought. Their lake. Somewhere right here. Somewhere in Rellingford. On the lake. She remembered the rich people’s houses across the lake, and felt as he searched her memory for who owned this house and why she was there, and she saw a woman coming to the door as she stood out in the side yard looking at the brown lake, and she turned to see the woman more clearly, but the image was out of focus and she almost had a name …

And then something exploded. She felt a sudden rush of wind inside the Stream. Diamond was no longer there with her. She opened her eyes.

At first she thought the noise was from outside the windows, a cherry bomb blast.

She looked at Michael Diamond’s face. He wore an expression of shock.

He tried to reach around to his back.

He fell hard on the floor.

Behind him, Hut.

Chapter Twenty-Two

She felt the world spinning around her. She saw Michael Diamond wriggling and then trying to crawl. Looked up at Hut. She looked at Hut as if she’d never seen him before. Trying to comprehend. Trying to make it all make sense to her. Reason was gone. She knew Michael Diamond. She knew him. She didn’t know Hut. She had never known Hut. He had hidden from her. He had...used her? For what? For making a child? Another child? Another test to pass? Livy? With her brain radio? Was that it? Were they all making children? Stealing children? With Ability X? That’s insane. It couldn’t be. Why? What purpose? Why kill them? Why do it? Hut can’t be here. It has to be like the movies. It has to be just me. How is it possible? But she remembered the feeling within the Stream. She could not deny that. She had felt...wonderful and terrified, as if it were something that...her soul had known existed. Diamond believed in the soul. The human soul, inviolate. Not to be violated. Not to be played with. The soul’s journey along the Stream after death. After life. Beyond life.

Something in her brain began to fade, as if she no longer could tell the difference between dream and reality, and words and images came up to her, trying to draw her back from what she saw in front of her, trying to make her close her eyes and return to the Stream that Michael Diamond had taken her into with him.

Hut stood there in a white shirt and khakis, the revolver from the metal box in his hand.

“Don’t scream,” he said, softly. “The kids are probably waking up now. They heard the shot. Even the neighbors, although it’ll take a little while to identify where this came from. Shhh.” Then he bent down and took the knife from Julie’s fingers, and put his foot against Michael Diamond’s throat. “Look at him. He’s dying. But he can’t die. But he can suffer. He can go towards death. But in three days, he’ll come back. Once you pass the test, Julie, you can’t die ever again.” Then he leaned closer to Julie. She could feel his breath, which was sweet. “If you let me inside you now, I can take all the pain away,” he said.

She stared at him, feeling as if she were surrounded by ice.

“This is shock,” he whispered, stroking the side of her face gently. “Do you want me inside you?” Hut asked. “If you let me inside you, Julie, I can take away hurt.”

She felt his consciousness come into her and suddenly, she felt sleepy and tired as if she’d been given a sedative. He was stroking her on the inside, altering the pain, softening her confusion, making her black out.

As she sank down into a dark oblivion, she thought of Livy and Matt, and she wanted to claw her way up from the darkness for their sakes. Please, Livy. Please, Matt. Don’t let your Daddy near you. I don’t know what to believe. I don’t know if I’m really here or if my mind is gone. Please God, help my children. Please Michael. Please someone. Hut please don’t hurt them. Don’t let this be happening.

Part Four

Chapter Twenty-Three

1

The headache blasted into the back of her scalp. Jesus. I have to tell Dr. Glennon that Darmien is like an axe. Christ, I’ll never take it again.

Her eyes opened. She looked at the clock. It was after three.

She began to get fragments of memory back. It was dreamlike and vague, but then she felt terror clutch at her. She got out of bed and went down the hall to Livy’s room.

Her bed was empty.

Then, to Matt’s room.

First, she called the police, talked to the sheriff, but midway through speaking, she could tell that he was patronizing. “Julie, I’m sorry. Have you checked with the schools? With anyone? Could they possibly be somewhere together?” Then, he said, “All right. I’ll send someone by.”

She demanded Detective McGuane’s number, and when she got it, she called and had to leave a message on his voice mail. She spoke slowly and as coherently as possible. She tried not to bring up everything that Michael Diamond had told her or shown her. She was beginning to doubt herself by the end of the message.

She finally went to the kitchen. The knife was on the floor. She picked it up and put it in the sink. She thought she saw something under the cabinetry on the tile. She reached down and felt around to see what it was. It was the revolver.

A police cruiser came by, and she met the two cops outside. She worked hard to retain her composure. She didn’t tell them everything. She watched for their reactions to her story. She didn’t say “my dead husband,” and she didn’t say “psychic.” She just told them that some crazies broke in. That she passed out. That there was a gunshot, and she had the gun. That her children were missing. They wrote some things down and told her to wait at home, keep the doors locked, keep the phone line clear.

But as soon as they’d left and she returned to her house, she got the revolver and got into her Camry and drove down to the perimeter road of the lake.

2

She drove slowly on the opposite side of the lake. The house in her mind had been a large one. It had a seventies-style architecture—rectangles and squares and too much glass. She stopped in front of several of them, but each time, it just didn’t seem right.

And then, she saw the house, with a circular driveway in front.

She had been there. She remembered being there, but she could not remember who lived there. Why she had visited it. Had it been another dream? She remembered Matt’s video of the house clearly now—he must have been in the canoe. Maybe with his father. A Boys’ Day Out. Matt must’ve held the camcorder up and just videoed the back of the house on the lakeside.

And here she was, at the front. She parked on the road and walked up the driveway. She did nothing to conceal the gun in her hand. She stepped off the driveway onto the slate walk that went around the side of the house. It was an enormous house, and although it had huge glass windows, the shades were drawn. She went back to look at the lake, and then to look at the house.

It was the one she remembered. It was the one from Matt’s video.

She felt her heartbeat, too rapid, and a clutching at her throat. She raised the revolver slightly as she went back around to the front of the house.

She stood at the bottom of three steps that led to the front porch. A slender patch of garden bordered the porch—peonies and pansies and irises.

She took each step slowly, feeling a thudding on the inside. A gentle shivery wind down her back.

When she got to the door, she rang the bell and waited.

3

No one came to the door. She rapped at it. Waited. The revolver felt heavy in her hand, and she lowered it. She began to doubt her vision. Her memory. Was this the house? Whose was it? Who was the out-of-focus woman from her memory that Diamond’s consciousness had brought her back to see?

Who would she know who would know Hut? Would know Amanda? Might have known them years before Julie had ever met Hut? He didn’t have many friends outside of people at work. But none of them lived here. Who lived on the lake? Who was it?

When the door finally opened, she already knew. The name came up to her. A name that Michael Diamond had mentioned.

Nell. That had been what she was called as a girl in Project Daylight.

Eleanor, on the other side of the door, looked startled.

“Julie?” Eleanor asked as if she had expected someone else.

Julie brought the revolver up, pointing it at her.

“Where are my children?”

4

She stepped over the threshold of the house as if she were in a dream. How could this be real? How could Eleanor, a therapist, for God’s sake, be part of some insane psychic conspiracy? What was she thinking? How was it possible? But possible didn’t matter anymore.

“Now, don’t get excited,” Eleanor said. “You’re experiencing—”

Julie cut her off. “I know. Post-traumatic stress blah blah blah.” She kept the revolver pointed at her doctor.

“Julie, put that thing down,” Eleanor said. “Right now. You're not in any danger, believe me.”

“Where are they?” Julie asked. "Just tell me. That's all I want to know."

“Matt’s asleep. He needed rest.”

“Did you hurt him?”

“Of course not. He was getting violent. You know how he is. We had to...give him something.” Eleanor spoke as if she were in her office again, dispensing advice and meds.

“You are so good, Eleanor. Or Nell. Or whoever you are. You are just so damn good,” Julie said.

Dr. Glennon came out of a room down the hall. He glanced over at Julie, nodding slightly. “Can’t say we didn’t expect this.”

“I know,” Eleanor said. “Hut’s been careless. And cruel, in my opinion.”

“Mrs. Hutchinson, please, just think for a minute," Dr. Glennon told Julie. "I know you’ve heard some mumbo-jumbo from that Diamant character. But he’s taken care of.”

“Did you prescribe him some Xalax? Or Darmien? Something to make him sleep? Is that what you gave Matty, too?”

Dr. Glennon held up his hands, slightly defensively. “I know what that man told you, Mrs. Hutchinson. But there’s more to it. Believe me.”

Eleanor said, “Julie, we had to do it this way. We had to wait until Hut was fully himself again. He’s better than he was. He really is.”

“You people brought him back from the dead.” Julie was surprised how easy it was to say it.

“I would’ve thought you loved him enough to want him back,” Eleanor said. “He's got Ability X stronger than anyone we’ve known. He loves you, Julie. Surely, you’d want to be with him.”

“Not like this,” Julie said. “You’re a pack of monsters.”

Eleanor shot a look at Dr. Glennon, who went to sit down near the bottom of the stairs. He let out a huge sigh and shook his head, wiped his eyes, and muttered, "We should've never let Diamond get to her."

Julie noticed sweat on the doctor's forehead. She was scaring them. Just a little.

"Julie, just put the gun down and give us a chance," he began, but she cut him off.

“Zombies don't get chances." Julie marveled at the coldness of her own voice. Would I shoot them? Could I? Of course. Easy enough. They're already dead.

“Oh, Julie,” Eleanor clucked her tongue as if she were dealing with a naughty child. “This is the human brain. It’s not mystical crap like Diamant believed. Project Daylight was a scam. They were trying to find out things to justify war. To justify invasion. To milk little children of their abilities. But we had the ability, after all. We all learned, together. We studied this thing -- this special thing -- we all have. And we’ve put it into action.”

"It's really an atavism," Dr. Glennon said. "A throwback. No doubt thousands of years ago, in various cultures, they knew about it. But of course, they didn't have the science."

"You kill. You kill each other," Julie whispered. "You kill your own children. I didn’t even know you had children, Eleanor.”

Eleanor began to look at the revolver as if she might reach over and grab it at any moment. Julie grinned. She was happy to feel that she had power in this situation.

“You’ve been in the Stream, Julie,” Eleanor said. “You know how life and death are definitions of the imperfect human brain. There is no death. There doesn’t need to be. We can change how human beings exist. We can alter the course of the future.”

“Not all of you come back, though. Not everyone does, right?" Julie said.

"Sometimes there are problems." Dr. Glennon shrugged. "Sometimes bad things come back."

Eleanor made a small noise as if annoyed by Dr. Glennon's candor. "Well, it's true," he said. "She might as well know. But most of the time it's fine, it's just fine."

"Am I even talking to a dead person?" Julie asked, looking over at Eleanor again. "Have you died yet, Eleanor?”

“I guess there’s no reasoning with you,” Eleanor said.

And then, Hut came around the corner with others behind him. People she didn’t know—three or four of them. The redheaded woman from the video was there. Gina? Was that her name? She stood back with a middle-aged man who had tortoise-shell glasses on and thinning hair.

“More zombies,” Julie said.

“Baby,” Hut said, moving toward her too rapidly. He looked well-rested. He seemed healthy. He wore one of his favorite T-shirts and blue jeans, and didn’t look like he was in his forties at all. He looked better than she remembered him looking. Life was in him. New life.

“No, Hut,” she said. She raised the revolver. “I saw you shoot Michael Diamond.”

“He’s not dead, though,” Hut said. “He’s somewhere safe now. He won’t harm you again. And he won’t harm us. He's a dangerous man, sweetheart.”

“If I shoot you, maybe I’ll feel good. Maybe it’s enough.”

“If you shoot me, will you shoot all of them?” Hut asked. “Will that get you what you want, Julie?”

Julie took a breath. Looked around at the gathering.

“Where’s Livy?” she asked.

Eleanor cleared her throat.

“Matt’s resting, upstairs,” Hut said. “You can go see him if you want.”

“You drugged him. You...you killed him...when he was practically a baby. You tested him,” Julie said.

“What is it you want, Jules?” Hut asked. His eyes seemed kind. He didn’t look like the undead. He didn’t look like a vampire. He didn’t look as if he meant to hurt her. She hated him most for that. She tried to remember Michael Diamond’s words. Things he’d said.

She tried to remember the feeling of Michael Diamond inside her and being inside him. The safety of it. The warmth. The complete connection between the two of them.

“I want my children.”

“Yes,” Hut said. Dr. Glennon looked up at her husband, a question in his glance, as if this were the wrong answer to give the crazy woman with the gun.

I'll show you crazy, Julie thought.

“Julie, you’ve been through an enormous shock,” Eleanor said, taking a step toward her.

Julie pointed the gun toward her. “Back, Eleanor.”

“Nell, please,” Hut said. He stood still, his arms outstretched. “Julie. You’re the love of my life. I hated being separated from you. I've hated all this. But...when you recover from what I came back from...it's confusing...there are things you need to relearn. Like recovering from a stroke. It's rough. Otherwise I would've come to you before.”

“You came to me at night,” she said. “You Streamed or you broke in or you did something. While I was sleeping.”

“In your dreams, you told me you wanted me,” he said. “I asked, and you said yes. I wanted to be with you. The way that I could. In the Stream. Together.”

“I said 'yes' because I thought it was a dream,” she said. “Anyway, I don't care. I don't care about any of it. Where’s Livy? I want to see her.”

“You can’t right now,” the red-haired young woman said from the back of the hall. “She can’t,” she added, turning to the middle-aged man with the thinning hair. “Can she?”

“Oh my God,” Julie gasped, nearly losing her balance, trying not to crumble on the inside with the thought of it. “You killed her. You already killed her.”

Everyone remained frozen in the room for a moment.

“She’s only sleeping,” Hut finally said, gently. “You have to believe that.”

He motioned to Dr. Glennon to move out of the way.

“It’s all right,” Hut said. “Julie, let’s go upstairs. She’s upstairs now. You can be with her.”

5

At the open door to what she had assumed would be a bedroom, Julie glanced back at Hut, close behind her.

She kept the revolver ready, because she was determined that somehow, some way, she would see Livy and Matt through this.

Her life didn’t really matter anymore. Her children were all that mattered. She could shoot at least two of them if she had to, and it might buy enough time to get Livy out to the car and get her cell phone in the glove compartment and call the police as she drove away. If she believed in what they were doing, they wouldn’t really hurt Matt. They couldn’t, not if it was all true.

If it was true, Matt had already resurrected from the dead. Once the police came back—and she’d tell them that they had kidnapped her children — she wouldn’t tell the police about psychics and resurrections and Ability X, Y or Z.

She would be sane. She would stop this, somehow.

She had a pang in her gut—as if the bond of marriage still existed and was causing her pain. He’s a murderer. He’s insane. He’s a zombie. He’s a psychic vampire. He’s not even real. He can’t be. But even if he is, he believes everything he says.

Hut said, “Let me tell you about life after death. The only way to overcome it is to have the talent and knowledge, and 99.999 percent of human beings don’t have it and never will. And many of those who have it never use it. I suppose a few have, and have been elevated to the level of gods. But there’s no God, Julie. No matter what Diamant told you about the human soul. There’s no soul except for life in the flesh. The brain is the seat of power. In science, we just didn’t know how well it could regenerate itself. Turn itself back on, if you will.”

"Why even listen to you? You’re a liar. You and your doctors from hell.” Julie glanced into the room, but could not yet bring herself to go in.

“Every obstacle, Jules, contains the seed of its own destruction. Within my being is something more powerful than the horizon we call death. It’s not any goony theory of magic or miracles. It’s simply a process that can most likely be described scientifically. My only understanding of it is that I have it. That my brain didn't die when my body did, and that there is something that comes from my mind and manages to overcome what you and others call death. I wasn't really dead. Maybe no one is, but the poor bastards don’t have the ability to summon themselves back to the world of the living. And so, they rot and putrefy. But my mind communicates life, back into me. Back into my bones. Into my flesh. Not from magic, not from the spirit world. But from an ability that others have. Others have and don’t always even know they have it. It’s like a vacuum. Sucking at you. Drawing you away. Drawing you out. It’s passing from one state of consciousness into another. It’s the body that rots. Consciousness can move molecules. Consciousness can raise the dead. I’ve done it. But I’m still not sure how it happens. I resisted death. Three days is all I needed. Three days to remain dead, for my consciousness to grow strong again after the point of weakness of the physical death.”

“You’re talking, but I hear nothing but bullshit,” Julie said, but the truth was, she heard it and she hated him and this house and these horrible undead people but the last thing she wanted to do was step into that room.

6

But she finally did. She went in, feeling as if she were entering a dark cave. The narrow bed pressed up against the far wall. Candles were lit around the child’s bed, and some of this Inner Sanctum’s members were there—a man of about thirty with thick blond hair sitting on a chair near the shuttered window, and a teenaged girl who had a Sony Walkman in her hand and earphones in a halo over her head. She drew them off, looked at Julie, then at the blond man, and then at Hut.

“Christ,” Julie said. She had lost the nervous feeling, knowing she had a purpose here that was not about herself. That was not about weakness. But she saw Livy’s hair poking out from the covers, falling across the small pillow, and the shape of her body beneath the covers.

The blond man’s face betrayed nothing but caution. He half-rose up in the chair, and then, seeing Hut, sat back down.

Eleanor’s voice behind her. “Now, Julie, you must be exhausted. Why don’t you just …”

“I’m not your patient anymore,” Julie said. “Talk to your Great God Hut.”

“He’s not a—” the blond man began, and then silenced himself.

Julie said to herself: Don’t be afraid. You don’t matter anymore. They don’t matter. All that matters is Livy. All that matters is my little girl.

“You’re ghouls, aren’t you?” Julie whispered. “I’m not even sure if you’re human.”

“Good grief,” Eleanor said. “Julie, this isn’t mysticism. It’s pure science. It’s just a science we didn’t know about.”

“I don’t need to hear about this death cult anymore,” Julie said. She had that one thing left in her. She had hope. Maybe Livy was alive. They’d only had her one day, after all. Not even a full day.

“It’s reality,” Eleanor said. “It’s not a cult.”

“It’s not therapy, either,” Julie spat back. She pointed the gun at the teenaged girl. “Get away from my daughter.”

“Julie,” Hut began, but silenced himself.

She fought to keep her eyes from welling with tears. She went over and sat at the edge of the bed.

“Livy,” she whispered softly. “Livy.”

“She can’t hear you,” Eleanor said. “The auditory nerve is—”

“Shut up, Eleanor,” Julie said. “Just shut up.”

Julie felt a hand on her shoulder. Eleanor. Old friend. Comforter. Therapist. Monster.

Julie shrugged her away.

“My God,” Julie said, barely able to get the words out.

Minutes seemed to pass as she turned the words over in her mind.

She’s dead. They did it. They killed her.

Her own father...

She hadn’t really believed it would happen. She hadn’t believed in her heart that it wasn’t all fantasy. That it wasn’t all mumbo-jumbo. PSI. Ability X. Resurrection. Death Cult. Project Daylight.

Then, her voice returned. “My God. She’s dead. She’s dead. You already killed her, you really killed …” Julie murmured, covering her face, the tears breaking from within her, a dam burst, and she couldn't see when she brought her hands away from her eyes, tears nearly blinded her. “Monsters! Monsters!”

Hut’s voice, “Death's a state of consciousness. She's not dead. Not in the way you think.”

“You sick perverted bastard," Julie thought she said, but wasn’t sure, because she felt knocked out, wiped clean, somehow destroyed by the knowledge of her daughter’s death.

“Three days,” her husband said, his voice far too reasonable and understanding. “You can’t believe the lies Diamant told. You can’t, Julie. Matty wasn’t right. Mandy and I were too much to produce a child that worked. Two Ability X’s should never bring children into the world. Livy will work, because in you, like most people, the gene doesn't get switched on right.”

Julie reached out to touch the edge of Livy’s hand.

“It’s science,” the blond man said. “Pure and simple. It’s a truth that’s been locked away.”

“Locked away by crap mysticism,” Eleanor added. “And just plain ignorance. There is nothing but animal life. We are animals. But we’ve developed the ability to take this beyond our lifetimes, Julie. Our single lifetimes. To wipe away thousands of years of ignorant mysticism, of this ridiculous magical thinking about life and death.”

Someone else chimed in, and then someone out in the hallway, and Julie didn't care to listen anymore. Their voices receded into the dark background of her mind. They babbled on, she knew, but she leaned forward toward her daughter, her beautiful Livy, and remembered the first moment she had known Livy was in her body, and the first moment Livy had cried out at birth. How Hut had helped change diapers, and how Julie had somehow believed that her family was wonderful and that she and Hut were a team, and that Livy was going to grow up to be a doctor like her daddy or a nurse like Mommy or to be an actress like Livy wanted to, or grow into a teenager who would go to her prom, fall in love, go to college, experience the world, travel, and she, her mother, would have all those years with her, would watch her as she grew and changed and became the wonder that Julie knew she would become.

7

Julie lay down on the bed, cradling her daughter’s lifeless body.

Around her, she saw the others draw together in the shadows. She ignored them. All that mattered was Livy.

She's all that remains.

Let them burn away, let the world burn away for all I care, Julie thought.

She kissed the edge of her daughter’s fragrant hair: chrysanthemums and lilacs, musky and sweet mixed together. She didn’t want to think about how they’d killed her. About how they needed to create fear before death to make their ritual work right. She didn’t want to think about her baby crying out for her Mommy while they did something awful and monstrous to her in her last minutes of life.

Julie closed her eyes, blocked out the others in the room, and held her child tightly.

Perhaps minutes had passed, or hours. Perhaps she drank the chai they brought her, and perhaps she nibbled on some cheddar crackers that Eleanor set down on a plate with some cream cheese. Perhaps it was a day that passed. She slept, she woke, she clutched the gun, but no one bothered her. No one tried to move her or take her weapon away. She got up once or twice to use the bathroom in the hall, and when she did, she felt them watching her, but she refused to look them in the eyes.

She had blocked the others out and only knew her child’s body, pressed against her own. She lay on the bed, slept, woke, tried to feel that inside feeling with her daughter that she’d felt with Michael Diamond.

At some, early morning or late night, Julie felt life stirring in Livy’s body.

Eleanor’s voice, beyond the darkness of Julie’s mind, “Look. Look.”

It’s not real. It’s not real. Don't believe it. Don't hope.

Julie felt the warmth and the pulsing heartbeat along her daughter’s side.

The slight heat of her daughter’s breath against her cheek. Had she imagined it? The warmth? The trickle of air?

Eleanor whispered something that almost sounded like a prayer.

Julie opened her eyes and gazed at her daughter’s face.

Remembering what Michael Diamond had told her.

“There’s always hope,” he said. “That’s the last thing to go in life. It’s a blessing and a curse. But sometimes, it’s all we have. Yet, when faced with this, there is no hope. There can be no hope. Do not let hope cloud your resolve.”

“But what hope?” she wanted to ask him now.

And then, his voice was in her head again. Not imagined. Real. Inside her. His connection to her remained, somehow, even among these monsters.

“The human soul is inviolate, Julie. There is always hope because of that. The human soul is inviolate.”

Julie tried not to think of Matt. Of how Diamond had said he’d died. Maybe it wasn’t completely true. Maybe there was truth on both sides. Only Livy matters. Only Livy.

The human soul is inviolate.

Livy's soul was somewhere in her body. It could not die. There was no death except for the flesh. But the soul had its journey. Michael Diamond had moved elsewhere when he was burned at Project Daylight. Opened another door. Passed into a passageway that had remained unseen. And then, came back. And he wasn’t dead, was he? Not even now? Maybe they’d done something to him. Maybe they’d buried him alive. Or subdued him in some way, but if she could somehow get him to help again...

But Livy did not have to go through that passage. Not yet.

She may not even come back bad. She may not be spoiled, the way Diamond had warned. Livy might be the same. She might even be better. Michael Diamond had been better, after all. Maybe Hut wasn’t better in his resurrection. Maybe Matt had come back with slight problems. But it didn’t mean they all did.

She believed it with a ferocity of emotion. There was no more reason in her life. She had to cling to belief. She had to remember that the world was not all murky darkness. It had benevolence. It had love. It had stronger elements than this Death Cult imagined.

It had hope.

Even in this murderous circle, there could be good rising from it. A hand could be uplifted. A hand could be held. They weren’t alone. Livy would not be alone.

I’ll be there for you, Liv. I will not abandon you no matter what. I’ll help you find your soul. I promise.

The human soul, inviolate.

She clung to this idea, as she felt her daughter’s small fingers clutch at her arm and heard the faint growl of a child’s voice.

CONTACT DOUGLAS CLEGG

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BOOKS BY DOUGLAS CLEGG

Click here to discover more fiction by Douglas Clegg.

STAND-ALONE NOVELS

Afterlife

Breeder

The Children’s Hour

Dark of the Eye

Goat Dance

The Halloween Man

The Hour Before Dark

Mordred, Bastard Son

Naomi

Neverland

You Come When I Call You

SHORT NOVELS & NOVELLAS

The Attraction

Dinner with the Cannibal Sisters

Isis

Purity

The Chateau of Devils

The Words

SERIES

THE HARROW SERIES

Nightmare House, Book 1

Mischief, Book 2

The Infinite, Book 3

The Abandoned, Book 4

The Necromancer (Prequel Novella)

Isis (Prequel Novella)

THE CRIMINALLY INSANE SERIES

Bad Karma, Book 1

Red Angel, Book 2

Night Cage, Book 3

THE VAMPYRICON TRILOGY

The Priest of Blood, Book 1

The Lady of Serpents, Book 2

The Queen of Wolves, Book 3

COLLECTIONS

Lights Out: Collected Stories

Night Asylum

The Nightmare Chronicles

Wild Things

BUNDLES & BOX SETS

Coming of Age

Criminally Insane: The Series

Halloween Chillers

Harrow: Three Novels (Books 1-3)

The Vampyricon Trilogy

With more new novels, novellas and stories to come.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Douglas Clegg is the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of Neverland, The Priest of Blood, Afterlife, and The Hour Before Dark, among many other novels, novellas and stories. His short story collection, The Machinery of Night, won a Shocker Award, and his first collection, The Nightmare Chronicles, won both the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award. His work has been published by Simon & Schuster, Penguin/Berkley, Signet, Dorchester, Bantam Dell Doubleday, Cemetery Dance Publications, Subterranean Press, Alkemara Press and others.

A pioneer in the ebook world, his novel Naomi made international news when it was launched as the world’s first ebook serial in early 1999 and was called “the first major work of fiction to originate in cyberspace” by Publisher’s Weekly, covered in Time magazine, Business Week, Business 2.0, BBC Radio, NPR, USA Today and more; his book Purity was the first to go onto a mobile phone in the U.S. in early 2001.

He is married, and lives and writes in New England in a house called Villa Diodati.

DISCLAIMER

Afterlife is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual locales, events, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

PUBLICATION CREDITS

Copyright 2004 Douglas Clegg

Published by Alkemara Press in the United States.

Proofreading services provided by:

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Cover art provided by:

Damonza.com