Chapter Twelve

TWELVE

Margaret, you look terrible,” Edie said as she joined me on the front porch. It was regrettably early in the morning, with the sun barely peeking through the trees, and I had given up on sleep.

“I feel terrible,” I said. My head throbbed and my eyelids felt like they weighed fifty pounds apiece. Every bone in my body was stiff. “It was loud last night.”

“Oh dear,” Edie said. “Is it full-on screaming yet?”

“Not quite, but it’s about to be.” I rubbed my temples. “I’d say by tomorrow night we’ll have arrived at screaming.” At least with the screaming the speaking would stop. Margaret, you can’t hide from us. Margaret, we’ll get you.

Edie looked worried. “Do you think Katherine heard?”

Interestingly enough, Katherine hadn’t come home last night. I stayed up in the living room waiting for her, drinking cup after cup of tea, but I gave up around one in the morning. The moaning had been raging for a little over an hour at that point, but I deluded myself into thinking I might be able to tune it out and get some sleep.

Edie surveyed the empty driveway. “I see,” she said.

“There was a bartender,” I said. “At a place called Boomer’s. I’m guessing that’s where she ended up.”

“Ah,” Edie said.

“It’s just as well. There’s no way she would have slept through the ruckus last night.”

“Did you get any sleep?” Edie looked the part of the concerned matriarch, the kind who offered sweaters when you weren’t cold and food when you weren’t hungry. The kind I had tried to be for so many years.

The moaning had died down around dawn and I thankfully closed my eyes, determined to get some sleep, even if only twenty minutes. I felt myself sinking down into oblivion as soon as my eyes shut, but was awakened sometime later—it could have been seconds or minutes; I couldn’t tell—by a jet-engine noise.

I opened my eyes to find the burning caverns of Elias’ pupils staring into mine. His jaw was unhinged like a snake’s, fangs pointing down at me, ready to close on my face. Inside, his maw was viscous blackness, oozing like oil. He smelled of rot.

“Jesus Christ,”I had cursed, rolling away just in time. Elias sank his teeth into my pillow and howled. He disappeared into nothingness, leaving behind a torn pillow dotted with darkness. I supposed I would be throwing that pillow away. It was hypoallergenic too—what a waste.

Anyway, that ordeal had woken me right up.

“Not much,” I said.

“Did you and Katherine get into it last night?” Edie looked sympathetic.

“More or less,” I said. “She saw the marks on my arms. The ones from Elias.”

Edie nodded. She was well aware of my attempts to befriend Elias. She, in fact, was the one who told me it was time to abandon those attempts.

“She thinks they’re from Hal. She thought that we were back to fighting before he left.”

“I see,” Edie said. Edie and Hal had never been particularly close. They had barely even interacted. Hal didn’t care for Edie, and Edie never seemed interested in pursuing the relationship. Edie knew about Hal, about our colorful past. I could tell she disapproved in a motherly, protective manner, but she never pushed the issue like Noelle or Katherine or a few nosy police officers had tried to. I was grateful to her for that.

“It’s a pickle,” I said. “I don’t want her to think that way about her father. God knows he gave her reasons to be upset with him, but he really changed. Especially these past few years.” Especially since moving in here. “She’s already having trouble with how he used to be. I hate to give her reasons to be even more upset, especially when they aren’t true.”

“Well”—Edie looked thoughtful—“which would you rather her believe: that you and Hal were fighting or that you live in a house filled with dead people?”

“Good point.” I was grateful for Edie, for the time we spent together, rocking on the front porch. Before moving here, I had spent so much of my time alone and friendless—friends weren’t against the rules per se, but they made it difficult to follow the rules, and following the rules had been my top priority. When we moved here and Hal had gotten so good at using his new therapy skills, I figured I could bend a little and made a friend in Edie. Hal didn’t like it, but didn’t cause nearly as much of a fuss as he used to. Besides, Edie and I mostly just sat on the front porch and talked, so Hal could listen in on our conversations if he ever felt so inclined. I’m not sure he ever felt so inclined, but I know he preferred to have the option.

“Speak of the devil,” Edie said, nodding towards the driveway. Katherine’s rental car was ambling down the long stretch of gravel. It was the slowest I had seen her drive—she must not have been looking forward to returning.

Edie waved.

Katherine emerged from the driver’s seat, looking disheveled. Her hair was a tangled mess, finger combed and sticking up in places. She was wearing a shirt I hadn’t seen her wear before and certainly not the one she had left the house in. She held her bra in her hand. She jogged quickly up the front steps with her head down, glancing at me out of the corner of one eye before darting into the house and out of sight.

Edie and I rocked in silence for a moment, the awkwardness of the situation lingering in Katherine’s wake.

“It looks like she might not have gotten much sleep last night either,” Edie said.

I chuckled at that, and Edie accepted the invitation to laugh along with me. “Regardless,” I said, “it’s better than her staying here. I would rather she be kept awake by?.?.?.” I waved my hand in the air.

“The bartender?”

“I was trying not to say that.” I slapped at Edie’s chair and she snorted. “But yes—I would rather she be kept awake by the bartender than by all the ruckus over here.”

“Well,”Edie said, “there’s always my first suggestion.”

I narrowed my eyes at her, a laugh still light on my breath. “I am not drugging my daughter.”

“Okay, okay,” Edie said, hands up in surrender. “But just think about it. When it gets worse.” She looked at me, her face suddenly serious. “And it’ll get worse, Margaret. It always does.”

After Edie left, I went back inside to make myself some breakfast. Angelica stood by the basement door, and I shooed her away. Fredricka had rearranged all the furniture in the living room, and I would have to move it back at some point today, but right now I couldn’t be bothered. I heard the water running upstairs—Katherine was taking one hell of a long shower. I glanced at the sink in the kitchen—no blood this time, thankfully.

I made myself some toast and was about to take my plate into the living room to eat when I saw a little boy standing in the kitchen. He was about six—younger than Elias, skinnier too—and had hair that had once been blond but was currently gray with dirt and debris. His clothes were torn and his face was sallow. He raised a trembling arm and pointed in the general direction of the basement door.

This one was Julian. One of Angelica’s little friends. There was a thing about Julian, but I couldn’t quite remember—

With his other hand, Julian lifted his tattered shirt to the middle of his chest, revealing a gash that ran from hip to hip, opening like a gaping mouth across his stomach. As if no longer held back by the shirt, his intestines tumbled out of the gash, dropping onto the floor in a splattering heap. Blood started leaking from his mouth.

Oh, right. That was the thing about Julian.

“He’s down there,” Julian coughed.

I looked down at my plate of toast smeared with thick raspberry jam, and suddenly lost my appetite. Thanks, Julian.

---

—Katherine came to find me after her shower. I was lying on the couch in the living room, an arm over my eyes, exhausted from having just moved all the living room furniture back to its correct location.

Katherine stood in the center of the room, not talking. I lifted my arm to look at her. She had her head lowered and was staring to the side, reluctant to make eye contact. Still, I could see that her eyes were red and swollen. Her hair was damp from the shower and she wasn’t wearing makeup. She looked tinged with regret, and I had a feeling not very much of it had to do with me.

“I’m sorry about last night,” she said, her voice a tinny echo. “The things I said.”

I sat up. “Oh, Katherine, there’s no need to apologize.”

“No,” she said, still not meeting my eye, “I mean it. I’m really, really sorry.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “No big deal. Water under the bridge.”

“I promise it’ll never happen again.” She looked ashamed, pitiful.

She looked so much like Hal.

---

—I thought Katherine would be tired enough from her adventures the night before to keep from continuing her investigations, but she chugged an irresponsible amount of caffeine and proved me wrong. Her hands drummed the steering wheel out of time with the blaring music on the radio as we careened out of the driveway, gravel spewing behind us. I clung to the roof handle, my head throbbing.

“We struck out with bars,” Katherine shouted over the music. “But I’m trying a different tactic today. Hotels!”

On the radio, some rock band was yelling exclusively in vowels about something or other. The bass made the car rattle.

“He had to have stayed at a hotel at least those first few nights,” Katherine said. “Might even still be there—God knows he took out enough money. Someone has to have seen him.”

The radio switched to a car dealership commercial and it was so much worse.

A traffic light a block ahead of us turned yellow and Katherine floored it. I clenched my eyes closed and said a prayer to nobody in particular that we would both make it out of the car alive.

“There are a couple small motels near the center of town, and then a bunch of big hotels closer by the highway. Hopefully we’ll get lucky and won’t have to drive that far out,” Katherine said. “Besides, the cheapest places are the motels. At least that’s what Tabitha?.?.?.” She trailed off, realizing her admission. The bartender. She glanced at me to see if I had noticed. I pretended I hadn’t heard her, which I barely could anyway.

“Cheap” was an understatement for the first place—an old cinder block building by the name of Value Lodge. The light for the letter U had burned out in the neon sign. We walked through the thick smell of cigarette smoke and stale alcohol as we entered the main office. In one of the rooms nearby, a couple was either having enthusiastic sex or murdering each other—it was difficult to tell which.

“I don’t think I’ve seen him,” the acne-faced kid working the front desk said to Katherine as he studied Hal’s picture. “But I just started working here a few days ago. I can ask Bill. He’s been here for longer. He might know.”

“Great,” Katherine said. “Can you get Bill?”

The kid turned his head and looked me square in the eyes. “He’s down there,” he said.

I blinked. “What did you say?” I asked.

The kid looked flustered. “He’s down there with his family today. Down in the next town over. He won’t be in again until tomorrow.”

“I guess we’ll come back tomorrow, then,” Katherine said, shooting me a strange look out of the corner of her eye.

Back in the car, my body grew a mind of its own, trying desperately to slip into sleep. My head bobbed up and down as Katherine told me about the next motel. She made comments about my strange behavior at the Value Lodge, but her words were coming in fuzzy.

The car hit a pothole at full speed and I jerked awake, neck snapping up hard enough to give me whiplash.

“I mean, if we act like weirdos, they won’t want to help us,” Katherine was saying.

“Of course, dear,” I mumbled, the world already growing hazy in front of my eyes. The radio was too loud for me to fall into a complete sleep, but I could feel the edges of the world blurring around me. An indiscernible amount of time later, the car slammed into park at the next motel.

“We’re here,” Katherine called at me, already out of the car.

I followed her through the parking lot, rubbing at my eyes. This place was called the Paradise Motel, although it hardly looked the part. Longer-term tenants sat outside of their respective rooms, smoking cigarettes. There was a surprising number of stray cats milling about, sniffing at pieces of trash.

A bell jangled as we walked into the main office. Inside, twangy music played softly over invisible speakers. A young man in a hat sat behind the counter, engrossed by his phone. “Help you?” he asked, not looking up.

Katherine pulled Hal’s photo from her purse. It was starting to wear at the edges. “My father has been missing since the beginning of August. We think he may have stayed in a motel around here.”

As Katherine spoke, I walked around the lobby, trying to keep myself awake with movement. The brown walls of the office were bare, save for a few pictures and a framed map of the town; a smattering of brochures for local attractions was displayed on a nearby shelf. There was a small arrangement of various toiletries for purchase by forgetful guests: travel bottles of toothpaste, single razor blades, sanitary napkins. My eyes rested on a small pack of sleeping pills and I heard Edie’s voice in my mind. It’s a solution.

“No,” I said, shaking my head with a half smile. I hadn’t meant to say this out loud, but I did, anyway. Luckily, Katherine and the man weren’t paying attention.

“He doesn’t look familiar to me,” the man was saying as he studied the photo, his eyes finally off his phone. “But let me get Ted. He might’ve seen him.” The man looked over at me. “He’s down there,” he said.

I blinked at the man. A question started to form in my open mouth, but the man turned back towards Katherine.

“By the pool,” he said. “Fishing out leaves. I’ll radio for him.” He picked up a walkie-talkie from the desk and said something unintelligible to Ted while I shook my head, trying to jostle myself back to life. I wasn’t thinking straight.

Ted, a portly man in a stained gray shirt, joined us with a young woman in tow. She had long brown hair and chomped on gum. “I brought along Angelica,” he said. “She has a good memory.”

I shook my head again. That was a coincidence.

Katherine ignored me and pushed Hal’s picture towards them. “Like I was telling— I’m sorry, what’s your name?”

“Julian,” the man in the hat said.

I blinked. This might not be a coincidence.

“Like I was telling Julian,” Katherine continued, “he’s been missing since August. He doesn’t have a driver’s license, so we don’t think he went far out of town. We think he might’ve stayed in a motel around here.”

Angelica looked at the picture and snapped her gum. “He doesn’t look familiar to me.”

“He probably paid in cash,” Katherine offered. “Like, only in cash.”

“You’re describing most of the people who stay here,” Julian said. He was back to fiddling with his phone.

“Yeah,” Ted said. “I don’t think I’ve seen him either. But a lot of our customers keep to themselves. I can keep an eye out for him, let you know if I see him.”

Angelica was still leaning over Hal’s picture, but her eyes were pointed directly at me. He’s down there, she mouthed.

Ted handed Hal’s picture to Julian and told him to go make a copy of it. Julian sighed, deeply inconvenienced, before grabbing the picture and disappearing into a back room.

“My sister’s husband ran off too,” Ted said, looking sympathetic, to Katherine, “so I know what you’re going through.” He turned his eyes on me and his expression flattened. “He’s down there.”

“Well, we’re afraid he might have gotten in some trouble or something,” Katherine was saying, frustrated by the insinuation that Hal had simply run off, but I wasn’t listening to her because I finally heard the music that was playing through the speakers.

It wasn’t the same recording we had heard on the radio yesterday, but it was the same song.

Wake now, my darling. Open your eyes.

Mommy must leave now. Don’t you cry.

Angelica was still staring at me. Julian returned with Hal’s photo and he was staring at me too.

Ne’er shall you worry. Ne’er shall you mourn.

You won’t see your darling mommy no more.

That urge to return home flooded back, tugging on my mind with new insistence.

She ain’t in the kitchen. No, she’s long gone,

But you’ll see her old face again ’fore long.

Katherine was thanking the employees for their time, shaking their hands. Apparently, she’d figured out being nice was a viable strategy when asking others for favors. That might have been another thing Tabitha had taught her last night.

It all comes around with the moon and the sun,

And no one escapes when the time has come.

“No problem,” Ted said. “If you want to check back, you can ask for me. The name is Ted Vale.”

The bell on the door chimed behind me as I fled from the office, leaving Katherine to stare after me in confusion. I was no more than two steps into the parking lot when I came face-to-face with one of the tenants who had been seated in a plastic chair outside his room, smoking, when we’d arrived. He was dressed in a grimy undershirt and baggy shorts. He had a blank expression on his unshaven face and a lit cigarette still dangled in his limp hand.

“He’s down there,” he said.

“Jesus Christ.” I pushed past him and waited by the car for Katherine to return.

Katherine drove us out towards the highway to ask around a few of the other hotels. I waited in the car. When Katherine stopped at a gas station to fill up, I went inside and asked the attendant for two packages of DoZZZe-Rite, the extra-strength kind.

---

—“That’s odd,” Edie said to me as we rocked together on the front porch. The sun was dipping low behind the trees and the sky glimmered with pink and dusty blue—cotton candy colors. Katherine was upstairs in Hal’s office trying to hack into his computer on the off chance he had saved a document entitled “Where I Disappeared To” directly onto his desktop. She was frustrated with me for being unhelpful at the hotels earlier but was trying not to break her promise about yelling at me within the same twenty-four-hour period in which she had made it.

“It sure was,” I said. “Nothing like that has ever happened before, I don’t think.” My eyes were half closed against the dull headache that lingered behind their sockets. It was likely I’d have this headache until October.

“Is it another September thing?” Edie asked. “A new one?”

“Who knows?” I stifled a yawn. “Lord knows Hal and I never ventured out very often. Maybe September shenanigans spill out into the rest of the world too and we just never had a chance to notice.”

“At least Katherine didn’t notice all the hullabaloo,” Edie said. “One less thing to try to explain to her.”

“She noticed me,” I said. “I’m sure she thinks I’ve got a screw loose.”

“She’s not wrong.” Edie poked at the arm of my chair, grinning at a joke we both knew wasn’t funny, given my family history. I chuckled out of obligation.

The sky was a richer pink now, the blue giving way to blackness above. I saw the first stars peeking out as the sky darkened. The screaming was coming—soon, soon, soon.

“Have you thought about taking some sleeping pills yourself?” Edie asked. “You really look like you could use a good night’s sleep.”

“I can’t,” I said, “not with Elias lurking around. I don’t want to wake up with bite marks all over my face. What would I tell Katherine then?”

“Good point.”

“I just got those DoZZZe-Rite things as a precaution, anyway.” I looked pointedly at Edie. I’m not drugging my daughter.

“Right,” Edie said. “Just a precaution.” She didn’t believe me, but I appreciated her pretending.

When I walked back inside, all the pink was gone from the horizon. Stars dotted the sky, and I wondered if it was too much to hope for a peaceful evening. I closed the front door behind me and froze.

Katherine had come down from her room some time ago, and she stood in front of the basement door. The open basement door. The yellowed pages of the Bible we had taped to the back of the door were fully visible, tattered edges fluttering from the door’s being disturbed. Katherine’s palm lingered on the handle and she peered down into the darkness quizzically, her nose crinkled slightly at the smell. A vision of Father Cyrus—frozen in possessed rigor mortis, a cloud of flies streaming from his gaping mouth—flashed through my brain, followed by a picture of Hal’s shredded leg as he had limped back up the stairs after that third September. I saw Katherine lift her foot, sliding it towards the first step.

“NO,”I screamed, lurching into action and sprinting towards Katherine. She looked up at me, her face full of surprise. I wrenched the door from her grasp and slammed it, hard, the force of it fluttering my hair.

“What the fuck?” Katherine said. She looked too stunned to be angry, but I had a feeling it was only a matter of time before she found her way there.

“Do not go down there,” I shouted, momentarily forgetting my goal of keeping Katherine from thinking I had a screw loose.

“Why the hell not?”

With the door closed firmly behind me, my body blocking her from danger, my panic had lessened just enough for me to realize my misstep. The wheels in my head struggled to crank over the rapid pounding of my heart. “It’s?.?.?. not safe.”

“What do you mean?” Katherine asked. “And what is with that shit on the back of the door?”

“Mold,” I gasped. It was all I could think of. “We had a leak down there ages ago. A bad one. And now there is mold. Everywhere.”

Katherine raised an eyebrow, undecided on the extent to which I was full of it. “Mold?”

“Black mold,” I said. “We had a person come look at it. An inspector.” I didn’t even know if that was a real thing. “He said it was very bad and we shouldn’t go down there. For our health.” I went to guide Katherine away from the door, into the kitchen, but out of the periphery of my eye, I saw Angelica and Julian standing in there just behind Katherine’s back, staring at us and pointing straight ahead, at the basement. Julian’s intestines had already spilled out onto the floor. We would be continuing this conversation right where we were, then.

“Is that what that smell is?”

“Yes, it is.” She was believing me. Thank God. “Awful smell, isn’t it? It really is very bad in the basement. That’s why we keep the door closed at all times. And never go down there.” I guided her towards the living room, taking care that she didn’t turn around to look into the kitchen. I could see Angelica’s and Julian’s heads turn, their gazes following us as we left. They lowered their hands.

“You should really get that taken care of, Mom.” She still sounded skeptical, but she was going along with it, and we were moving away from the basement—safe, at least for now.

“I think Hal found the number for someone,” I said as we walked down the hallway. “I’ll have to find it in his things.”

In the living room, Fredricka had taken all the cushions off the couches and stacked them vertically in the center of the room. Katherine didn’t need to ask the question—her face said it all.

Goddamnit, Fredricka.

“Oh, sorry about the pillows,” I said, walking over to the pillow tower and grabbing a few off the top, trying to sound as if this sort of thing were normal. My adrenaline was fading, and I was too tired to come up with another excuse off the top of my head. Katherine said nothing and helped me return the cushions to the couches, her wary gaze pointed at me the whole time.

Later that night, I crushed up two DoZZZe-Rite tablets and mixed them in with Katherine’s tea. I watched her bob and blink on the sofa for twenty minutes before excusing herself and going upstairs to bed.

Even later that night, the screaming started in earnest.