by Ronald Malfi
“You’re making a mistake.”
“Goodbye, Mr. Decker.” Hercel Lovering turned on his heels and strolled toward the stationhouse doors.
“Please,” I called after him. “Please sit down with me. Let me show you what I’ve got. Let me explain.”
Without another word, he disappeared inside the stationhouse, leaving me standing by myself in the graveyard. Surrounded by the dead.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
1
You once said to me that you and I existed outside this plane, where space and time were wound into a ball and not in a straight line. We would always be together because we had always been together. We were acting out all our moments simultaneously right now. Ghosts, you had told me, were time travelers not bound by the here and now.
2
It was fully night by the time I turned onto Arlette Street and coasted along its serpentine bend toward our townhome. Ours was the only house without its porch lights on. Even the light from the streetlamps seemed to recoil from our home, as if, in my brief absence—or perhaps in yours, Allison—it had turned into something diseased and unhealthy and wholly uninhabitable.
I had debated with myself during the entire drive back from Furnace whether or not I should place a call to the district attorney’s office and let them know what corruption Hercel Lovering had orchestrated. Yet each time I convinced myself to do just that, it was Rita Renfrow’s face that floated before my mind’s eye. Chip had been right—because of me, Rita no longer had the closure she thought she had. Was I the hero or the villain in this scenario?
As I stepped through the front door of our townhome, I was greeted by the sound of “Voices Carry” playing on the Alexa speaker in the living room. What this did was reduce me to tears right there in the foyer. I dropped to my knees and sobbed like an injured child. I cannot say how long I stayed that way, but several songs had played by the time I got up, went into the living room and unplugged the fucking thing. Without a second thought, I dumped it in the kitchen trash.
Upstairs, I entered our bedroom, dropped my satchel containing your files onto the ottoman at the foot of our bed, then stripped off every stitch of my clothing with my eyes half-shut in the dark. When I climbed into bed, it was like someone clawing their way along some scorched desert landscape. My mind plummeted into sleep the moment my head hit the pillow.
It was not dreamless. Things happened. I can’t remember most of what I dreamt, although I am certain—and this certainty is born from experience—that many of those dreams were about you, Allison. But they were also corrupted by flashes of grotesqueries—of pale, rotting corpses staggering through the darkness as if spirited into half-life, spilling black river water onto our bedroom carpet as they drew nearer toward me in my slumber. I kept seeing the faces of young women, billiard pockets where their eyes should have been, teeth bashed from their skulls. An impossibly tall, impossibly thin man stood over me in bed, the profile of his face a composite of sharp geometric angles. As he stared down at me, his head proceeded to swell as—
(gas)
—steam hissed from popped seams along his cranium. His eyes blazed silver as he reached down and cupped my testicles with a set of ice-cold, elongated talons, and levered his head close to mine, where he whispered in a voice like thunder, diddle-diddle-diddle, until he squeezed—
I awoke in darkness, blanketed in sweat. Though not complete darkness: at some point, as I thrashed within the straitjacket confines of my nightmares, our closet light had come on. Blink—like an epiphany. The doorway glowed with a soft yellow light, laying down a strip of illumination along the carpet from one end of our bedroom to the other.
I sat up in bed, my back against the headboard. I couldn’t take my eyes from the lighted closet. You might walk out and into the bedroom at any second, Allison. My heart was galloping.
The closet light blazed. I got out of bed and stood there, naked, my body chilled by the sheet of sweat that coated it. My throat had tightened, but I managed to call out your name nonetheless. Held my breath. Waited for you to waltz out and greet me. Ached for it. Oh please, oh please. In that moment, inside myself, I agreed to take you in any form, in any ghostly condition, that you might wish to appear to me. It didn’t matter. My grief was so palpable in that moment that my entire body began to tremble and I thought it possible that I might just break apart and crumble to the carpet in broken shards of crockery, a powdery heap that had once been a person, which only you, in your spectral majesty, might reshape into something even more exquisite and true.
But you never came out of that closet. Of course not. Instead, I went inside, wincing at the over-bright ceiling fixture sizzling and popping like an Alka-Seltzer commercial. The intensity of the light was so great I thought it might burst, but it didn’t. It remained on, the heat coming off it in impossible waves.
The only thing in the closet was a trembling, pale-skinned cretin wearing my haggard, grief-stricken face, staring back at me from the glass of the beveled mirror. Nude, thin-ribbed, gaunt, haunted. Trembling and afraid, like something peeled from its shell and battered about.
“Allison,” I said, my voice a croak. “If you’re here…”
If you’re here, what? What?
The light in the ceiling made a zzzzzz sound. But nothing more.
I turned off the light and slipped out of the closet in pitch darkness, my pupils still resonating with the image of the light fixture as I felt my way back toward our bed. My whole body shook. As I reached the mattress and ran one hand along the sweat-dampened sheet, I looked up and saw another light on out in the hallway, shimmering along one wall.
I headed out of the room. The light was coming from the room at the end of the hall—our shared office that we no longer shared. Creeping down the hall, one hand running along the railing that overlooked the foyer below, I advanced toward the office, my breath wheezing from my constricted throat. I thought of the image I saw—or imagined I saw—standing in this very doorway nights earlier. The certainty that you were in that room right now was so profound in that moment that I felt a grim and terrible smile crack the lower half of my face. My arms itched to embrace you. A taste in my mouth was your taste, as if in anticipation of a kiss. As if—
The room was empty. You were not here. My desk was on one side of the room, neat and tidy, unused for some time now. Your desk, overflowing with papers and books and DVD cases and an honest-to-God rolodex, had gone unused even longer, although it looked more lived-in and homey than mine. The light that burned was from your desk lamp, a ceramic Cheshire cat whose lampshade was a sombrero. Some gaudy thing you had picked up at a yard sale one summer. The bulb beneath the sombrero burned as intense as the fixture had in the closet—so stridently that I could hear the insect-buzz of the current transmitting through it.
I stood there, waiting for you to materialize out of nothing right before my eyes. But when that didn’t happen—when the grim smile faded from my face and the taste of you drained from my mouth—I was left with nothing but a hollow jack-o’-lantern sensation, as if someone had taken a sharp utensil and scooped out all my vital bits.
I was halfway across the room, meaning to switch off the Cheshire-cat lamp, when I froze. My gaze had swung haphazardly across the jumble of madness strewn about the surface of your desk, only to lock onto a coffee mug bristling with pens and pencils. A mug you’d had for years, dating back to your childhood, Allison. A white mug with a green elk’s head on it. Not a deer, but an elk. ELK HEAD HIGH SCHOOL, it read beneath the image. Your high school, Allison.
I turned and faced the bookshelf that spanned the wall between our two desks. Japanese novels, my own translated works, textbooks on publishing and journalism, yet at the bottom, a hodgepodge of personal papers and books. Was it possible…?
There it was, Allison. Hiding in plain sight, as they say. Right there on the bottom shelf. Dropping to my knees, I slid your yearbook off the shelf and onto the floor. It struck the carpet with a muted thud. It was
right here all along, Allison—your old high-school yearbook with the image of a green elk on the cover.
On your desk, the Cheshire-cat lamp blazed like a supernova before the bulb blew out, dousing me in darkness.
PART THREE
THE OTHER YOU
CHAPTER TWELVE
1
The yearbook with the green elk on the cover was for the 2003–2004 school year. You would have been a freshman back then. Sitting cross-legged on the carpeted floor of our shared office, a fresh bulb in the Cheshire-cat lamp the only illumination, I turned the pages, the black-and-white faces of students framed in their rectangular boxes churning over to reveal a fresh crop of new faces, all of them strangers to me, all of them adults now. I turned pages until I found you, Allison—or someone who purported to be you. Allison Leigh Thompson. Despite your inner mystery, you had always been outwardly vivacious, cunning, sly as a fox and yet playful as an otter. You’d been both daring and sultry, and your beauty had always been a step above girl-next-door; more cosmopolitan, fashionable.
The teenage girl in the yearbook photograph who bore your name looked nothing like the woman you would become. This girl wore a blonde, shaggy mop of hair, choppily cut, uneven, short like a boy’s. The expression on your face was difficult to decipher, like an image reproduced over and over again until all the fine details have been granulated to incoherence. The only recognizable quality was also your darkest one—your eyes. Even at fifteen years old, they professed a dark maturity that hinted at impossible depth.
I had never seen childhood photos of you before. By the time we had gotten together, you told me none existed. After your mother had died, you had sold your familial home and had escaped the town of Woodvine, Pennsylvania, with little more than the clothes on your back. The fact that you’d had your high-school yearbook with you and never shared it with me struck me now as some indistinct betrayal. I couldn’t understand why you hadn’t showed it to me before. Moreover, if you’d been so concerned about keeping it a secret, what was it doing here in the office and not hidden in your trunk? Had you tucked it away on the shelf after showing it to Denise Lenchantin, only to forget it was here and to hide it away again? Yet in the moment, these were not the most pressing questions. The question at the forefront of my brain right now was why you had shown it to Denise Lenchantin. You told her that the killer had gone to school with one of his victims, but there were no dead girls among your records who had attended Elk Head High School, no dead girls who had lived in your hometown of Woodvine, Pennsylvania, or any of the surrounding towns.
I sat there, nude and cross-legged on the floor, studying each page with the care and deliberation of a crime-scene investigator, scrutinizing the faces of your long-ago classmates, wondering which one—if any—was the murderer for whom you’d been so desperately searching. This opened up a passageway in my mind, one in which other-Aaron functioned as a sort of de facto guide, my personal Virgil, and together we wound through the spiral of your past, and I could smell the scorched brimstone of your obsession as both other-Aaron and I pursued some non-specific figure into the black. Who was the killer? How had you figured out this person’s identity after all these years? Or had you known since you were a teenager? Had you come across the monster back then in its primordial form, its full terribleness still incubating yet not unnoticed by you, only to spend the remainder of your adult life hunting the monster down?
—That is not it, said other-Aaron. That does not fit. That does not translate.
That was true—because all evidence led me to believe that you had spent over a decade trying to uncover the identity of the killer, not trying to hunt down a specific person you already believed to be the culprit. Not until the end, anyway. Not until the Holly Renfrow murder, when you had asked Denise Lenchantin to look at a photo in this yearbook. Whose picture had you wanted Lenchantin to look at? What had finally tipped you off, Allison? What was the clue I could not see?
—So what are we left to deduce from this? posited other-Aaron. I could smell the oil burning as his machinery kicked into overdrive. That Allison had been tracking an unknown killer who, in the end, just so happened to be from her hometown? A sheer coincidence that the killer had attended high school with her?
True. The coincidence being that if you hadn’t begun your obsession already knowing or thinking you knew the identity of the killer, then what were the odds he would turn out to be someone with whom you had gone to high school? A miraculous coincidence, indeed. This would be the part in translating a novel where I would pause and shudder at the sheer crudeness of such a convenient literary device.
But this was real life. Unlike fiction, real life labored under no obligation. Stranger things have happened, so they say.
Except I wasn’t buying it. I had missed a piece of the puzzle, maybe the most important piece, and the realization of this turned my uneasiness into something more closely related to panic. Moreover, I had become increasingly aware of the Great Cosmic Clock, now a profoundly proper noun in my mind, ticking and ticking as if to count down the seconds leading to my own demise. As if my own life suddenly depended on solving the mystery you had left behind, unfinished.
—It could just be that Allison was wrong about the killer’s identity in the end, other-Aaron suggested. If all the clues led her to the wrong deduction, and she had made a leap in logic near the end—if she hadn’t gone to school with the killer after all—then that would eliminate the coincidence and put us back into reality.
It would also thrust me back to square one. A false lead and I was deaf, dumb, and blind once again. Believing this also suggested that you had gone off the rails at some point, and that your obsession had ultimately clouded your judgment. After all this time fruitlessly searching for a killer, you had concocted one. Summoned him into existence and gave him the face of a high-school acquaintance. Or even a friend.
It was this notion that caused me to realize there was something unusual about your yearbook. There were no signatures in it, Allison. No missives from your friends, no goofy drawings, no have a great summers or see you next years on the panels of blank pages toward the end of the book. Pages left intentionally blank for that reason. No one had signed your yearbook, Allison, and this, for whatever reason, troubled me.
2
I awoke on the floor of our office, thinking the house was on fire. It was only daylight, potent and disorienting as it blazed through the windows on this side of the house. Your yearbook was a bird that had crashed down from the sky, upside down and with its wing-like covers splayed on the sawdust-colored carpet. I gathered it up, got dressed, and then carried the yearbook downstairs.
In the kitchen, I fixed up a pot of coffee then dug the Alexa speaker out from the trash. I plugged it in, watched as the color bar whirled, then stared at it in silence. It had always amused us how the thing would periodically turn on unprompted. That had taken on a different meaning since your death, of course, and I had tried hard to relegate it in its place and to refuse to assign any supernatural significance to it since then. But no longer. I waited for it to come on now, almost in anticipation of hearing your voice, static-laden and tinny, come through the speaker. I waited, with no sense of amusement, but with a staunch, bracing hope.
Nothing. Nothing.
“Allison,” I said to the empty kitchen.
The device lit up and Culture Club’s “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” spilled out of the speaker.
“What the hell, Allison,” I groused, shaking my head. “Come on.”
Boy George crooned, and I poured myself a cup of coffee. I drank it out on the deck with the door open, listening to the music. I still had the pack of smokes I’d purchased back at the Exxon in Furnace; as if in defiance of you, I dug out the pack and had a cigarette on the deck while I finished my coffee. Boy George transitioned to Neil Sedaka singing “Oh! Carol,” and I pitched the filter of my cigarette into the yard, lit another, and contemplated smoking the entire pack. If it was possible
to smoke yourself to death in one sitting, I would have tried it then. I looked down into the yard and saw you down there, sunning yourself on a beach towel or pruning the peculiar breed of flowers that sprouted every spring along the fence line, those budding strawberry-looking things with the thorns. I saw you drinking a beer, heard you laughing at a joke, felt your fingertips graze the back of my neck as you slipped by me.
Inside, the music stopped. The silence that followed was so jarring and uncomfortable that I hugged myself, then slipped back into the house, a man guilty of some travesty. Maybe I was.
Your yearbook, which I had placed on the granite island in the center of the kitchen, lay open just as I had left it. Only difference was I had left it open on your photograph, Allison—the unidentifiable fifteen-year-old version of you. Now, probably due to my leaving the door open while I smoked, a breeze had turned the pages. On one page were a bunch of advertisements. On the other was a full-page memorial for a female student who had apparently died during the school year. My own senior-year high-school yearbook had a similar page, dedicated to Michael Beamish, a lacrosse player who had died in a car accident his junior year. A dedication or tribute or whatever. The one in your yearbook was of a beautiful teenage girl, stunning ringlets of blonde hair cascading down her shoulders, her smile iridescent, her eyes possessive of that same dark majesty that I had recognized in your eyes when we’d first met. The dead girl’s name was Carol Thompson, and you’ll forgive me, Allison, for not making the connection immediately upon reading the name. You had mentioned your sister so infrequently that I should not be held accountable for my temporary oversight. Truth is, I did not realize who she was until I was halfway up the stairs, my body yearning for a hot shower.
When it struck me, I froze midway up the stairs, then spun around and hurried back down. Your dead sister’s face was still smiling up at me from the glossy yearbook page. I could see the similarities in your features—delicate, almost fragile, and emboldened by an innate brazenness that made you (and her) look almost dangerous. It was the way nature sometimes makes beautiful things poisonous.
