Circling the Drain (House of Crows)

by Lisa Unger

  She took a sip of coffee, shook her head a little. “But she and my mom—I don’t know. Amelia felt like it was her job to take care of her. And then Brad came on the scene, Mom’s new boyfriend. My dad tried to get Amelia back because Brad had a record, and that violated the custody agreement. But Amelia wouldn’t leave her, and my dad finally relented.”

  Samantha heard movement upstairs. It was too early for Jewel, so she imagined Matthew would be down soon, expecting to follow his newly normal routine. He’d go in the study, look for a job, maybe work on editing and rewriting the book that kept getting rejected. Matthew had published some poetry in prestigious journals, a short story, an essay about the real-life crime that inspired Nabokov’s Lolita. But he’d yet to find a home for his first novel. She knew this was yet another frustration for him, though he stayed verbally upbeat about it. He hadn’t let her read it, wouldn’t even talk about it. She tried not to be hurt; after all, it was the least of their problems. Once he’d finished those tasks, he’d set about his Merle House punch list with grim workaday purpose.

  But she didn’t hear him come down the stairs.

  “I was away at college when Amelia went missing,” Avery went on. “She didn’t apply anywhere, wouldn’t have gotten in anyway. Her grades were terrible. She was smart, just one of those kids that don’t do well in a classroom setting. She was going to enroll to take classes at the community college, though. She wanted to study beauty—hair, nails, whatever—have her own salon. She would have done that, I think.”

  Samantha stared at the picture.

  “So why here? Why do you think you’ll find answers here?”

  March looked down at her cup. She wore a platinum band on her right ring finger, studded with diamonds. She was clicking it on her cup.

  “Your husband used to spend his summers here.”

  “That’s right,” said Samantha slowly. “Until he was sixteen.”

  “Has he ever talked about his friends from back then?”

  He’d mentioned Merle House, his grandfather, his summers here. But it was always broad strokes; they weren’t close to his family.

  “Some. He only recently told me about this place at all.”

  “So Matthew never mentioned Mason Brandt?”

  Matthew had mentioned him, but not with affection. Something had happened there; Samantha didn’t know what. Part of her husband’s past, nothing that had ever touched their present tense.

  “Maybe?” She felt the urge to be vague, protective. Not of Matthew necessarily, but of what was left of their life.

  “Claire Allen? Ian Randall?”

  She nodded. “Yes,” she said. “I’ve met Claire and Ian. Not Mason.”

  “Well, they all spent lots of time together that summer, here at Merle House and—on the property,” said March. The other woman gazed at her, like that should mean something to Samantha.

  “Okay,” said Samantha. She wasn’t sure what else to say. Avery March was a desperate woman, with a cause she couldn’t let go. She’d made a deathbed promise to her mother, and she was no closer to the truth. She was reaching into the past for connections. Samantha could understand why Old Man Merle had kept her away. Maybe she should have done the same. Desperate people created damage without even meaning to.

  There was a heavy creak in the ceiling above them, and they both looked up. But it went quiet.

  “I think your husband’s friend Mason knows what happened to my sister,” Avery went on. “He was the last person to see her.”

  “So why not reach out to him?”

  “I have done,” she said. “Every so often, I reach out again.”

  The creak again. What now?

  “In fact,” said Avery March, “I think they all know what happened to Amelia. And I think the truth is somewhere on this property.”

  Samantha felt a little notch in her solar plexus, as she made a connection she hadn’t—or hadn’t wanted to—consider before. The other missing girl. Sylvia, Matthew’s student, the pretty young thing who claimed they’d had an affair, who accused him of violence when she tried to break it off. The one who had disappeared without a trace. So Matthew was now connected, however distantly, to two missing women.

  She was startled by a dark form in her periphery. When she turned to look, she saw Matthew standing in the doorway. The look on his face. She’d never seen it before, except once when he didn’t know anyone was watching.

  6.

  Ever since he was a kid, things, most of them bad, just seemed to happen to Mason. Maybe as the child of neglect and abuse, he was just more vulnerable, less protected than other children. He was bullied on the playground, got pushed from the monkey bars once and broke his arm. As he got older there were fights—bloody noses and black eyes. Bike accidents. His whole family was like this—disease, car wrecks, bar brawls turned deadly, arrests and stints in prison. His childhood seemed a parade of funerals and hospital visits.

  “It’s a family curse,” his father used to say. “The Brandts and the Granns. We’re marked.”

  And he’d said it often enough, probably starting long before Mason was even old enough to understand, that he grew up thinking it was true. That bad things were going to happen to him. Or that he was going to do something bad.

  His father was standing over him now. “You let that girl get the drop on you, Mace. Are you stupid?” The old man looked as Mason had last seen him—pale, broken.

  Mason woke with a start.

  There was Marla, standing with her hands on her hips. Maybe he was still dreaming. Because truth be told, he’d dreamed of Marla before. He’d dreamed of her, soft and tender, yielding, needing him, his strength, his comfort. It wasn’t sexual. Well, it wasn’t just sexual. When she’d called for his help, it was that Marla he’d imagined.

  There was a terrible pain in the back of his head, a fogginess to his vision. He tried to move but realized that they’d duct-taped him to a rickety old chair. What the fuck?

  The boyfriend—Mason grappled for the name—sat on a chair in the corner, a bulky shadow. Drew, that was it. The whole scenario had taken on a strange fuzziness, a nonreality. What were these idiots playing at?

  “Pastor Mason,” said Marla.

  He tried to stay calm, be reasonable. “Marla, what’s the endgame here? How do you see this going?”

  She ignored the questions.

  “Did you get kicked out of the priesthood?” she asked.

  Christ. The damn internet.

  “Not exactly.”

  “Defrocked,” said the shadow, then laughed stupidly, guffawed actually.

  “Then what, exactly?” asked Marla.

  “I dropped out of seminary school.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  He was getting annoyed, started struggling against the bindings. “Why do you care? What are you doing?”

  Some people were just sadists; he knew that. His father had been one. Mason’s father had just been happier when other people were hurting. Mason had read in a book somewhere that if you didn’t believe in evil, you were destined to live in a world you couldn’t understand. It struck him as grimly true.

  “Answer,” she said.

  He’d thought he’d heard the call to God. After all the pain and misery of his childhood, the loneliness, the idea of himself as a misfit. After Amelia, his father, and all the trouble he’d gotten into after, seminary school had seemed like a safe and good place, a brotherhood. He was smart, had good grades. He even had a benefactor, Old Man Merle. As a young man, he was sure that to serve God was the only way to do penance, the only refuge he would find.

  “Because I didn’t believe.”

  “In God?”

  “In God. In the church. In the priesthood. In religion. It was a lie, a sham. Just another money-grabbing institution using people to make itself richer and richer.”

  “You failed out.”

  “That was my way of dropping out, I suppose.”

  His head was pounding. Nausea
came in ugly waves. That pizza. He was going to hurl for sure.

  “I think I need a doctor, Marla. Whatever you’re planning, let’s just walk away from it. Whatever it is, let’s just forgive and forget. I won’t call the cops or your parents. We can just walk away from this night and pretend it never happened.”

  “But now you’re a pastor. How does that work? When you don’t even believe in God?”

  He didn’t need anyone asking questions about his qualifications to work at the center.

  “I believe in helping people,” he said. “I believe in being a good person, serving that good. Let me help you through this, okay, whatever it is? Untie me.”

  “Ask him,” said the shadow. “Tell him what we want.”

  “And then he can go, right?” she asked. He could hear the uncertainty in her voice now.

  “Yeah,” said the shadow. “Then he can go.”

  His voice dripped with sarcasm, but Marla didn’t seem to pick up on it.

  “Do you know how to call the Dark Man?”

  The name sent a shock wave through him, as it did every time he heard it. But he managed a laugh.

  “The Dark Man doesn’t exist. It’s an internet hoax.”

  “That’s not what you told the police when you were the main suspect in that girl’s disappearance.”

  “I was a kid,” he said. “I was terrified.”

  “So it wasn’t true?” pressed Marla. “She didn’t ask the Dark Man for something, and then disappear forever?”

  And just like that, he was back there.

  Lovesick teenage Mason followed Amelia and the stranger through the darkness of the woods. He hung back so far that he almost lost them a couple of times.

  He wasn’t sure how far the old school was, just that it was far. He’d never been there, but he’d heard about it in woodshop. People went out there to party. Last year, there had supposedly been a rave.

  They walked and walked, Mason following the sound of Amelia’s laughter. Once he heard her singing a song he didn’t recognize, but her voice was sweet. He thought about calling out to her, but he thought she’d probably tell him to go home. Maybe the guy she was with would be mean, make fun of him. And that would be humiliating in front of Amelia.

  Mason kept following, the night cool going on cold, his feet getting wet from the detritus on the forest floor, branches touching his face.

  The moon was high when Amelia and the stranger were swallowed by the huge old building, disappearing through the wide mouth of its door, its window eyes watching Mason. Wow. What a place, a hulking shadowy building in the middle of the woods.

  Already, Mason was planning to bring Ian, Claire, and Matthew back here. They were going to freak; he imagined how cool he’d seem, knowing about this spooky place. Claire wouldn’t like it. She’d probably get mad, but Ian and Matthew would think it was awesome. He was playing it all out in his mind as he followed Amelia inside. Almost immediately, he heard voices echoing off the walls and the tall ceilings, coming up through the rotting floorboards. He kept following.

  There was a small crowd down in the basement, maybe ten other kids. They were all strangers. He’d never seen any of them before. They were all young, teenagers. Except for the guy Amelia was with.

  Now that Mason had a clear view of him, he looked a lot older—wearing round glasses, with a mane of long dark curls. Mason sat on the staircase, hidden by the darkness, as the kids moved around a black chalk drawing on the floor—an X inside a circle. The room flickered with firelight from a hundred candles all around. Some tall, some melted low, on the ground, pressed into holders. Clearly, a lot of people had come here and done whatever this was before. He felt like he was in Lord of the Rings, a hidden hobbit watching some secret ceremony.

  “Has anyone ever tried to call the Dark Man before?” asked Amelia’s friend. In the shifting candlelight he looked like a ghoul—face drawn, picking up shadows. He was rangy with taut, long muscles; his open shirt revealed a hairy chest. A few uncertain hands went up.

  “Has anyone ever seen him?”

  Some muttering and shaking of heads. Mason had heard of the Dark Man before. It was a story, an urban legend, right? What was this guy doing, and why was Amelia with him?

  “I’ve seen him,” the stranger went on. “I’ve done his work and I’ve been rewarded. It’s real.”

  Silence from the group.

  “What is your deepest desire? The thing you want more than you want anything else? And I’m not talking about wanting to be rich or wanting a new car. Not the shallow stupid things we think we want.”

  Mason didn’t have to think very hard about that.

  “Sometimes these desires are ugly and wrong,” said the stranger, as if reading Mason’s mind. For a second, he seemed to be looking right at Mason, but then his eyes shifted away. “But the Dark Man, he doesn’t judge. There’s no difference between right and wrong, good and evil in his view of the universe.”

  There were whispers from the group.

  “When you come to stand in the middle of this circle, you can ask the Dark Man for what you want. If it’s true, if it’s real—he’ll grant it. But you’ll be asked to do something for him first. When it’s done, you’ll be rewarded.”

  Mason wanted to leave suddenly, a tingle of fear moving up his spine. But then he’d have to go home through the woods alone. He stayed rooted, made himself small like he did when his dad was drunk and raging. He could almost disappear into himself when he tried.

  “How do we know what he wants us to do?” The voice came from somewhere in the group. Mason wasn’t sure who’d spoken.

  The stranger just smiled. “You’ll know.”

  The same voice, a boy in the back: “What if you don’t do it? Or can’t do it?”

  “Then you’ll pay the price the Dark Man determines.”

  More muttering. Then Amelia stepped forward from her place in the circle. Mason could see the gleam of her long black hair, her back to him.

  “I’ll go first.”

  “Brave girl,” said the stranger with a wide smile, nodding his approval.

  Mason wanted to call out to her. They were friends, weren’t they, of a sort? If he called to her and asked her to leave, maybe she’d do that. This was bad. Neither one of them should be here. Whoever this guy was, he wasn’t good. But the words lodged in his throat, and Amelia stepped into the circle, the candlelight dancing on her pretty skin, twinkling in her dark eyes.

  Amelia, he thought, don’t do this.

  “Dark Man,” she said, her voice wobbling a little. “I hate this town. I hate my life. I want to leave and never come back. I’ll do anything.”

  “Say it again. Loud. Like you mean it.”

  She looked at him uncertainly. But when she spoke again, her voice rang out.

  “I hate this place,” she yelled, her voice echoing. “I hate my life. I want to leave and never come back.”

  A big cheer went up, and then others started to take their turn in the circle.

  I want my uncle to stop touching me and go to jail.

  I want Jessie to love me forever.

  I want my mom to come back home.

  I want my dad to get well.

  I want to be a doctor.

  I want to have enough money to take care of my family.

  All the expected banal wants of lost teenagers. It was depressing; Mason felt like his life was being drained from him with each teary declaration. Not one of them wanted the thing that Mason wanted. Or at least that was not what they said when they got into the circle.

  “Is there anyone else?” the stranger asked when everyone was done. A heaviness had fallen into the air. Someone was crying. The stranger peered into the darkness where Mason hid. “Don’t be afraid.”

  Mason felt the jolt of the older man’s gaze. He got up, turned, and ran from the basement, fast as he could.

  Now, back in the shack with Marla, he said again: “There’s no such thing as the Dark Man.”

&
nbsp; But Marla wasn’t there at all.

  Mason was alone in the dark of the strange structure. He was not bound but slouched on the tilting chair. He rose, chair creaking, back screaming. The shadows all around him seemed to vibrate with menace.

  “Marla,” he called out.

  Had he passed out again? Had they gotten scared, left him there for dead?

  “Marla, what are you playing at?”

  He stood, unsteady, the back of his head throbbing still. What was real and what was dream? It was an ugly, indecipherable blur.

  Then, on the ground, the body of a girl, pale, ruined.

  So much blood.

  It was Marla, then Amelia, then Claire.

  Mason backed away, hand flying to his mouth. Nononono.

  Then it was gone, disappearing like smoke rising from a fire.

  You still owe me, Mason. The voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. The bill is due.

  Mason’s body was cold and stiff with fear; he leaned over to vomit on the ground.

  And then there was Amelia. She leaked from the darkness, beautiful, graceful.

  I always loved you, Mason. Why did you never try to kiss me?

  She was just as he’d last seen her, young and full of every promise, her eyes glittering. He was drawn to her as he always had been, reaching for her.

  But as she came closer, before his eyes, she started to rot, her flesh going gray and peeling back. She disappeared into the night bit by bit, like ash. And by the time he reached her, she was nothing.

  A shadow paced within the darkness, but Mason didn’t stay to see what shape it would take. He ran from the shack, tripping over his own feet, then running for the van.

  The voice followed him, ringing in his ears, vibrating in his skin.

  You can’t run, Mason. Not anymore. Time is up.

  Inside the vehicle, he gunned the engine, tires ripping at the ground. He drove and drove, just his headlights and the dark road. He didn’t stop until he was back at the church.

  What had just happened? What was happening to him?

  He got out of the car and entered through the back door into the silence of the building. His heart was an engine, head slick with sweat.