by The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares- The Haunted City (retail) (epub)
“I couldn’t connect with people the way I wanted after my brother had his nervous breakdown. I shut down as a kind of penance for being the one who didn’t get sick. Now that he’s dead, I feel like he took a piece of me with him. I’m bereft. I’d like it to be the other way around. I’d like to carry his memory with me instead, do you understand? I want to be whole,” I say, as if these harpies will understand and take pity. “Can’t you tell me what happened to him?”
Margaret smears the blood from her cut-up mouth to decorate her drawing—a circle of stick figures with giant sex organs: dicks and holes. Squiggling snakes connect one organ to the next.
Minnie follows me to the door. I’m walking backward, she’s going forward. It’s a long-distance waltz. “Does Daisy give good head, Baby-Grady?”
I get a flash of something impossible: I’m bent over Minnie’s pliant body. We’re on Margaret’s shit-crusted bed. Bartók plays. Did that happen?
I turn the knob behind me. Unlocked. A breeze of clean air rushes against the back of my neck. My god, it’s a relief. I’d almost forgotten the outside world existed.
“Oh, Grady. Fuck me, baby, one more time!” Minnie whispers.
I’m out the door, running down the stairs. Margaret’s echoless laughter follows me. “Husss! Husss!”
“Noooo!” Minnie shouts. “Come back! He raped me! RAPE!”
—
The next night, when the rest of my family is in bed, my phone rings. I’ve been transcribing Margaret and Minnie Brooks’ interview. The time I spent in Margaret’s bedroom fills nearly two unaccountable hours. There aren’t any words, just hissing and grunts. Some of those grunts sound like they belong to me.
I remind myself to name-search Anna Beth Cassavetes, the doctor/cop with the Interglot business card, who still hasn’t called me back. As I transcribe, I add two people to my list: Silas Burns, the name Minnie Brooks called me in her kitchen, and Dan Khan, the man she claimed was happily possessed.
“Hello?” I ask.
“Grady?” It’s in keeping with Tom White’s character to call at nine p.m., like the entire world exists to please him. “I read what you sent. It’s a joke. Who cares about a couple of methed-up Grey Gardens bitches? You’ve gotta get more witnesses—Lucas Novo for one. And you need the cops to comment on your evidence.”
Lucas Novo is the ten-year-old who rode the elevator down to the basement with Margaret and my brother. The footage of him is freakish. He howls at the camera. What’s more, the autopsy reports show 1.5-inch diameter bites taken from all three bodies—in other words, a kid-sized mouth. But Lucas’s parents are a power couple. She directs global warming documentaries; he funds them as the vice president for oil at Goldman Sachs.
“Novo’s parents sent a cease and desist,” I say.
“Break into their apartment. Find out if he’s got a shrink and hack the records. Anything! Just get the job done.”
“You said you don’t want legal trouble!”
A muffled, feminine voice comes through on the line. “Hold on,” Tom says. I wish I wasn’t curious, but I can’t help but listen. Is it the ex-wife, the new girlfriend, the twenty-something New Technology reporter with the long blond hair?
Words I pick up: gold, my mom, her lingerie, you prick.
Nine minutes, eighteen seconds later, Tom’s back on the phone. He doesn’t even check to make sure I’m still there. “Forget liabilities. Upstairs turned around on this. They want the story. Your job’s at stake. You’ve gotta hit this full tilt.”
“I need parental consent for anything from Novo. He’s a minor,” I say.
“You think Nigel Jaquiss worried about the slammer?” Tom asks. Jaquiss is the guy who won the 2005 Pulitzer over me. I grind my teeth just thinking about him. “You’re sitting on a gold mine—a ten-year-old rich kid murdered and ate three deadbeats from the off-ramp. People in black suits covered it up. Give me proof. Bing-bang-boom, home run! There’s your story, Grady. Your book deal too.”
I look into the phone, wishing Tom’s dick syphilitic so that it might fall off inside the next woman he beds. “You’re right,” I say. “This is my last shot.”
“So?” Tom asks.
“I’ll do it.”
Once I get off the phone, I call Novo’s mother and ask if I can interview her for a piece in the Times on global warming. We want to photograph her house and her family. I give her Tom White’s name, and she agrees. We’re to meet at her apartment next week.
After that, I look up the cop/doctor, Anna Beth Cassavetes. There’s no record of her name, which either means it’s a fake or she’s had her identity scrubbed. The only agency that can pull that off is the U.S. Defense Department. Then I look up Interglot. It’s from a Dutch word meaning “jail.” The closest instance is also the most likely: Interglot is the name for the offices located in the six basement floors of the Park Avenue Armory.
I look up the armory, which is right across the street from 640 Park. Turns out, it’s been owned by the city since it was built one hundred and thirty-five years ago. Budget cuts forced the sale of its upper levels to a real estate titan named Martin Fuller. The city kept the Interglot. A story in the Manhattan construction blog Demolition notes that three months ago, Fuller’s company accidentally broke through the Interglot’s four-foot concrete ceiling. The entire block was evacuated. I scroll through comments and photos until I find something familiar: a crowd of officials in black suits, drinking Starbucks near the hole. I’ve seen all of them before, in the basement after Ezra died. The woman shielding her pretty blues from the summer sun is Anna Beth Cassavetes.
I call Anna Beth Cassavetes again. It’s late and I don’t expect an answer, so I’m surprised when I get her secretary. “Are the recent murders at Six Forty Park Avenue related to your building? Did something happen during the construction accident?” I ask.
“Uh?” she says. “Can you hold?”
“Ms. Cassavetes promised she’d let me inspect the Interglot to make sure it’s up to code,” I lie.
“Code? We just renovated all the cells. Houdini couldn’t break out this time.”
“So it really is a jail?” I ask.
“Oh,” she says, her voice suddenly nervous.
“Who do they hold there? What secret is so great you’d have to clear a city block for it? What did Ms. Cassavetes mean when she told me to call if I had symptoms?” I ask.
Anna Beth Cassavetes’s secretary hangs up.
Aloud I inspect the phone and ponder, “What the hell?”
After all that, I’m simultaneously burned out and wired. I’d love to shake Daisy awake and coax her into sex, but I know I’ll make zero progress. She works twelve-hour days and is perpetually exhausted. So I check on the girls, who aren’t sleeping like they’re supposed to but watching Kevin Bacon get stabbed from under a bed in the movie Friday the Thirteenth. Little Lisa thinks it’s funny. Elaine is crying. To muffle her squeals, she’s jammed both her thumbs into her mouth.
“Why are you watching this?” I ask as I turn the thing off.
They both seemed shocked by the possibility that they have a choice in the matter. “This is bad!” I say. “At least, if you’re going to sneak, make it a cartoon!” After that, I spend forty minutes answering questions about bad guys, and whether there really are psycho killers with hockey masks at sleepaway camps. Then I read “Three Billy Goats Gruff,” a perennial favorite.
“I’ll protect you like the biggest billy goat,” I tell them.
By the time they fall back asleep, I’ve lost two hours of work on a deadline too tight to make, and I’m pissed. As I leave, I notice that Elaine has taped a strange drawing over her bed. It’s one of her typical triangle-skirted pink princesses, only the princess in question has been bisected by a curved red smear.
Weird.
Back at my desk, I look up the name Minnie Brooks called me: Silas Burns. There’s only one on record. I find him through LexisNexis.
Silas was a lecturing ma
thematician from Quebec City who invented the continuum hypothesis. When he set down roots in Evanston, Illinois, in 1893, little black girls like Elaine and Lisa went missing by the half dozen. With the Great Panic back east, there weren’t resources to investigate. Then, in 1895, a six-year-old escaped Silas’s root cellar by chewing through her rope restraints and climbing out his coal chute. The milkman heard her moans and drove her away from Burns’s property.
This girl wasn’t like the rest. She was white. The police got a court order. They found the bodies of twenty-six children, all shallowly buried in his root cellar, all partially eaten. Silas confessed to strangling while raping them, so that he might eat their souls and in that way grow stronger. He claimed to be possessed by a demon he’d met while researching his theories. The demon needed a body. He’d needed the courage to commit the heinous acts he’d always dreamed about. They were the perfect team.
He kept himself busy while awaiting trial by drawing eighty-four sets of eyes along his jail cell’s archway. He claimed these came from the souls he’d eaten. When locals set his house on fire, they found the remains of a dozen more young girls, all horribly mutilated. He was sentenced to death by hanging with no audience, at a secret location in Manhattan called the Interglot.
The Interglot?
When I finish reading, I wonder if I’ve gone crazy like my brother. Obsessive pattern recognition is an early symptom of schizophrenia. I rub my eyes, stretch my legs. Search Silas Burns’s name all over again, on a different engine. The first image that pops up is a drawing from the inside of his cellar. The walls are marked by runes identical to Ezra’s. One English sentence is sprinkled throughout: Silas is dead.
And then, in the very middle, I find something new:
Fucking kyl those litel grrls.
Something inside me squirms. It’s like eggs breaking along my face, the yolks falling back behind my eyes. My hand hurts. Everything goes dark.
When I look up, I’m holding a red crayon.
It’s dawn now, that wonder hour when I feel most like a stranger in my own home. I check on the girls, then crawl into bed with Daisy. In that moment, it’s as if I have a special sense of smell for the female body, and I’m repulsed.
Not that I want them all dead. Of course not.
—
“Dad!” Lisa calls as she climbs into bed with me three hours later. We’ve been feeding her too much. She’s fat. But we’re doing a lot wrong with these kids. Daisy’s so fucking lazy.
“Is today a school day?” Elaine asks as she enters the room. She’s more polite then her little sister. Then again, she’s fragile. You’d think we fed her milk from a barbed wire teat when she was born. She leans against my side of the bed, gazing unblinkingly into my half-open eyes.
Daisy’s got a conference at the data center in New Jersey, so it’s just the three of us this fine Saturday morning. I sit up. “Clothes,” I say. “I’m timing you little bastards.”
They scamper from the room like it’s the best game in the world. They’re back in a blink, wearing fresh footie pajamas under tutus and pink shawls. They’ve both got watery red eyes from lack of sleep, meaning I should expect double the usual meltdowns. “Two minutes flat,” I tell them.
We three stagger into the kitchen. I pour cereal. Then I set up my laptop to stream classic cartoons. It’s a weekend tradition. I stare out the window, pretending the best of my life isn’t over; they eat Honey Smacks.
Four hours of television later, they get cabin fever. Lisa pinches Elaine, who slaps her face. It’s got something to do with a broken pink princess wand. Then they’re rolling around the den, bawling, screaming, etc. Someone bangs from the apartment below. It’s our bad luck to live over booze hounds with hair-trigger tempers.
I bundle them up and we head to Central Park. On the N train, people stare. “You can’t do that,” an old black woman tells me, pointing at Elaine’s footy pajamas. “That’s for bedtime!”
I’m used to this. Old black women all over New York City feel it’s their obligation to advise parents on child rearing. Because my daughters are black and I’m white, I’m particularly targeted, as they seem to think I might be a child molester.
I take out my reporter’s notebook. “Let me write that down. Pajamas are for sleeping and not for subway rides. Sage advice.”
The woman turns to her obese friend. They’re sharing a super-sized bag of half-eaten movie popcorn, sitting in the handicapped section while the girls and I stand. “Got no sense,” she says.
“No business with those girls,” the other woman agrees.
The girls pay zero attention. They’re used to this nonsense, just like they’re used to being told that blond-haired, blue-eyed people are prettier, and that they come from slaves. Neither of these is true, and I resent all these shitheads we’re surrounded by, who feel it’s their moral obligation to educate my daughters in victimhood.
We get off at Columbus Circle and our first stop is the hot dog stand. Then the Ramble, where we watch turtles stack on top of one another in the man-made pond, the weird things. By now, the girls’ hands have turned red from cold. Lisa’s moaning from discomfort. Elaine’s threatening to hit her for it. I’m wishing I’d brought scarves and gloves.
From the boulder upon which we sit, we can see the entire East Side: the Metropolitan Museum, the Pierre, the Frick, the Park Avenue Armory. “I always thought we’d live in Manhattan,” I tell them. “I wanted you girls to go to a proper school with proper friends.”
“We’re proper,” Elaine says. “I can do capoeira and real ballet.”
“And mommy too. Mommy’s proper,” Lisa adds.
“Do you love us?” Elaine asks, just at the moment when I’m wondering how my career might have progressed without them. It’s like she’s psychic sometimes.
“I think so,” I say.
“You’ll never hurt us?”
I feel a rush of fury. My hurt hand stings. “What a terrible thing to think. Why would you ask that?”
“I don’t know,” Elaine says.
“What are you talking about? Do I know what you’re talking about?” Lisa asks.
I want to shove Elaine off the rock and break her in two. Then slaughter her sister. I want to make them disappear. They’re mine, so I have that right.
“Of course I love you. I’d never hurt you.”
“Really?” Elaine asks.
“Yes,” I say.
She starts to cry, so I take her in my arms. She’s so sensitive. Just like me. “Promise?” she asks, her brown eyes digging straight into mine, holding me.
“I promise,” I say.
Then comes Lisa, who has no idea what’s happening but wants to be part of the hug. They’re both on my lap. I rub their hands to warm them up, and they kind of purr in gratitude. “Oh my daddy, oh my dadd-a, oh my da-da-, do-be do!” Elaine sings to the tune of “Darling Clementine.” “Poopy rabbit, poppa-pooh-pooh, pee-pee-pee, and shoop-dee-doop!” Lisa answers.
Right then, I feel what I’ve told them. It shivers through me like electricity. “You’re everything,” I tell them, because they are. “Every goddamned thing.”
—
When we get home, I find Daisy waiting with a huge home-cooked dinner: chicken cordon bleu, baked potatoes, greens, and pumpkin pie. We eat a hot meal for the first time in weeks, sitting at the round kitchen table like normal people.
At bedtime, I notice that there are now a dozen bisected princesses taped over their beds. “Creepy,” I say, pointing at the topmost picture, in which a stick figure’s been cut open from the waist down, her legs bleeding. Or is it just red trousers over a triangle dress?
“You’re crazy!” Daisy answers.
We’re exhausted by the time we shut the kids’ door, so I’m surprised when Daisy leads me to our bedroom. She hasn’t bathed. It’s a musky, familiar scent that I used to like but lately seems too human. We make routine love: hands on genitals, quick here, quick there, half clothed. I’m so angry w
ith her. I don’t even remember why.
But we keep going. After a while, we loosen up. She lets her belly go slack and so do I. It’s playful. To keep from waking our nosy children, she bites my shoulder. Then we lay there. It’s the first time we’ve both sweated in years. I remember then what I’ve forgotten. I married her because I loved her and could imagine no one else.
“Thank you,” I say.
“It’s been too long if you have to thank me.”
“Yes,” I say, still high. “It’s my favorite thing.”
“I don’t always feel as good about myself,” she says. “I don’t look how I used to. I mean, in high school I was prom queen runner-up. I wish you’d seen me then.”
“You’re beautiful,” I tell her.
“Have you seen my ass? I’m turning into my mother.”
“Don’t be vain. I like your mother.”
“Grady?”
“What?”
“Are you having an affair?”
I laugh, but I’m not amused. “So that’s what this is about.”
“Are you?”
“No.”
“Then why have you been such a weirdo?”
I almost roll over and say nothing. Keep it bottled, so that in my dreams tonight, I’ll scream at her. But she’s looking at me, her face flushed and frightened. I remind myself that when people ask these kinds of questions, it’s because they give a damn. “It’s Ezra,” I tell her. “He killed those men. He wasn’t alone, but still. It’s not how I want to remember him…I have a theory that it was toxic exposure from a nearby jail—this place called the Interglot—but I can’t get the EPA or the Department of Health to investigate. They say they need proof. I can’t even get Adult Services to check on these crazy women I interviewed.” I look at the ceiling, which is low and cheap. “I feel like the world’s run by invisible monsters. I can’t navigate it. Everything I do is bound to fail.”
“I hear you,” she says. “I really do.”
“You do?”
“Of course. Look who you’re talking to.”
“That’s my problem with this story! Jesus, with all my stories lately—no one’ll talk to me! The people who are supposed to help, they say it’s not their job. The cops, social services, environmental services, wrongful-death lawyers—none of them cares! I mean, who cremated Ezra? Not me; I didn’t sign any paperwork. Not my parents. So, who did it? And why?”
