We have one of those in our living room. It stands in a corner, collecting dust. There’s a crank on one side. I remember my grandfather telling me that you only need to turn it twenty times to make the spring tight enough to carry a thick seventy-eight through an entire song. I’ve never tried to do it myself. I was always afraid that I’d break the record player, and part of my family’s past would be gone forever—like my grandfather’s lost memories are gone forever from his addled, mixed-up brain.
My grandfather.
The words linger silently inside my head.
My grandfather.
Ka-dunk. Ka-dunk. Ka-dunk. Ka-dunk. Ka-dunk. Several more pieces of the picture in my head fall into place.
44
I STAND IN THE kitchen, frozen like a statue. I close my eyes and reach out with all my senses, mentally picturing every nook and cranny of the house, mapping out where the corners are and imagining the places where Not-Becky could be hiding from me.
The house is silent, save for a vague creaking upstairs. The sound is most likely coming from the wheels of my grandfather’s chair as he slowly pushes himself back and forth with the heel of his foot while he watches television.
I cock my head sideways and listen as hard as I can. If I try, I think I can hear the faint sound of a game show host babbling something nonsensical above my head, speaking to the man in the upstairs rooms.
My grandfather.
Is my grandfather the one that Becky’s trying to show me? Is he the one who has lost faith? All those years ago, after creepy Father Tim dismissed my father, my grandfather called my dad’s beliefs horseshit. “An upside down cross is the sign of Lucifer,” he said. “Lucifer—God’s angel—and don’t you forget it, Jack.”
My grandfather believes in Lucifer, the beloved one whom God cast out of his kingdom.
There’s a scampering of feet in the living room, and I hear freakish laughter again. I’m not sure what to do. On the kitchen counter is a blocky knife set that my mother bought at Three Penny’s a few years ago. It’s black, and where the black lacquered paint has chipped, my father’s filled it in with dark Magic Marker.
I stare at the handle of the butcher knife on top. It holds a sacred place on the pyramid, with the small steak knives on the bottom followed by a serrated bread knife and a paring knife for fruit. The butcher knife, thick and brutal, stands alone at the pinnacle of the triangle.
I slide it out of the wood with a quiet whoosh.
I hear giggling now, and in my mind’s eye, Not-Becky is sitting on the landing of the stairs where my grandmother made a swan dive to her death. I imagine both hands over its face, with its vile tongue darting through the open spaces—impressed with itself because it managed to lure me into the house.
“Becky,” I shout out, slipping her name in between the laughter, filling up the moments that she’s gasping for breath. “Becky,” I yell again into the house. My words echo in a cavern a thousand miles deep.
“Becky who?” I hear Not-Becky snarl, followed by a fetid, putrid snicker. I squeeze the handle of the knife a little tighter, and it begins to shake in my hand.
“Honey?”
A soft moan creeps down the hallway. My mother is in her bedroom, in the dark. Just as I remember that she’s there, the faint stench of cigarette smoke makes my nostrils flare.
I stand with my legs tense and my arms outstretched, not sure what to do. Then my eyes fall on the heavy butcher knife trembling in my fist.
What am I thinking? I may do a lot of questionable things, but I don’t stick pointy edges into people, sixteen times over, and watch them bleed. I don’t hang degenerates in tobacco barns and slice their throats. I don’t cut out the eyes of sad, lonely girls who are destined to live out their lives unnoticed. I don’t cut up sweet, poor, hard-working moms and leave them all wrapped and packaged on ice for others to find.
My thoughts carry weight. All of a sudden, the knife in my hand seems impossibly heavy, and I fling it from my grasp. It sails across the linoleum, twirling around a few times before coming to rest underneath one of the kitchen chairs.
I don’t want it. I don’t need it.
I refuse.
“Honey?” my mother calls out again, but this time her words are punctuated by a slight cough.
Without thinking, I leave the knife underneath the chair and walk straight through the kitchen to the hallway and down to my parents’ bedroom. Not-Becky could be right behind me. It could crawl, spider-like, into the kitchen, pick up the knife, and follow me down the hall with its hot breath creeping around my neck like a moist hand.
I don’t care.
I keep walking until I reach my parents’ door and push it open without stopping.
My mother is sitting on the side of the bed in the dark. She’s nothing more than a gray shape, but I see her put her hand to her mouth. The tip of a cigarette springs into red hot life.
“I had the strangest dream,” she says.
“What about?” I ask as I move into the room and gently shut the door behind me.
“I can’t remember,” she says and rubs her head with the hand that’s holding the cigarette. “I think I was talking to your sister.” My heart begins to beat faster.
“Dreams are weird like that,” I hear myself say. “They’re hard to remember once you wake up.”
My mother shrugs and waves her cigarette slowly in the air as though she’s dismissing what I’m saying.
“No,” she says to me and shakes her head. “I mean, yes. I usually don’t remember my dreams when I wake up.”
Behind my head, I hear a shuffle from the other side of the door. Very quietly, long, barely audible scratches come through the wood—a vampire wanting to be invited across the threshold—a vampire that knows that if I don’t make the invitation, it can’t come in.
Right now, I almost wish that were true. I wish I had that mystical power over Not-Becky, so that I could stop it from barging into my mother’s dark world.
My hands are clasped behind my back. Slowly, I back up against the door and search around desperately with my fingers until I find the skeleton key that always rests in the lock. I close my eyes, twist the key, and listen as the lock clicks into place.
Immediately, the scratching on my mother’s door stops, and I hear bare feet slapping against the hardwood floor in the hallway, fading away into nothingness.
“So strange,” says my mother again, her head shaking back and forth.
“What is?” I ask her as I move away from the door to her bed.
“My dream,” she says again. “The one with your sister.”
“Why?” I ask, not really caring what she has to say. My mind’s mentally following Not-Becky through the house.
“It’s what she said,” my mother says to me. She sighs and flicks ashes from her cigarette into a stained coffee cup she keeps on her nightstand.
“What did she say?”
My mother takes another deep drag on her cigarette then mumbles softly into the darkened room. “It’s silly, really,” she muses. “She said, ‘Five will die or six for kicks.’ Do you know what that means, Jackson?”
Unfortunately, I do.
45
THE THOUGHT OF Not-Becky standing over my mother as she vegetates in her room is enough to make me want to puke.
At some point in the last few hours, maybe even the last few days, Not-Becky has come into my mother’s room and whispered vile things to her. My mother, a hollow shell, hasn’t been able to tell if what she’s heard has been her own imagination or a tangible thing, murmuring filth.
I can’t think about that right now. All I can be thankful for is that my mother hasn’t been physically hurt.
“Why don’t you lie down for a little bit,” I say as I take the cigarette out of her hand. “You need your
rest, right?”
“I suppose,” she mumbles and closes her eyes. My mother allows me to push her gently back into bed. Her head sinks into the pillow, and she sighs. I watch her for almost a full minute before I go back to her door and put my ear to the wood. I hear nothing, so I take a deep breath and reach down for the skeleton key. My hand finds it, and I gently turn the slender rod until it clicks.
Then I open the door.
Not-Becky is standing right in front of me. Its eyes are angry and insane, and it’s holding the knife that I left on the floor in the kitchen. “This is pretty pretty,” it sneers at me in a voice that’s pure evil dipped in sugar. It’s holding the blade in front of its face like a medieval warrior who is readying for battle. It smiles—a wicked, hateful grin—and rudely licks the sharp metal, probably sampling how much pain the blade can inflict. A wash of blood appears on its gray tongue. Not-Becky laps at it, then spits onto the wall to my right.
Red saliva splatters everywhere.
I’m rooted to the floor by fear, but somehow I find my courage. “Go back downstairs,” I bark at the monstrosity, adrenaline fueling my anger.
“No,” it croaks and swings the knife wide. I dart backwards as the silver metal sails by me and wedges in the wall to my right, smack in the middle of the splatter of blood.
We both freeze and stare at it.
In that moment—a second that seems to last forever—I realize my sister is truly gone. Suzie Zickle is gone. The obsessive nun is gone, too. The only creature left is Not-Becky, and even if my sister were to somehow come back, her personality would be the fake one.
I react quickly, grabbing for the handle, my fist closing around the heavy wood. Not-Becky grabs for it, too, raking its ragged, sharp nails across my knuckles.
I stifle a howl as we struggle in silence over the butcher knife—but Not-Becky is small, and I’m heavier. I maneuver my body and use my shoulder to shove, low and hard. With a wrench, the blade pulls free of the wall and out of my hand—onto the wooden floor.
“Mine,” Not-Becky wails and throws itself on top of the butcher knife. It’s bony and quick. Somewhere beneath its frail body, Not-Becky grabs hold of the handle and scrambles to its feet so that its back is to me.
It looks over its shoulder, and for a quick second, I see Becky flicker in its eyes. “Help me,” she whispers. She looks frightened, like a person afraid of heights at the very top of a rollercoaster that’s about to plunge to the ground.
I don’t care.
I don’t believe it anymore.
Creepy Father Tim says the Devil lies.
In an instant, Becky’s gone again, and Not-Becky spits out, “Mine.” It runs down the hall in a hunched-over gallop. “Mine. Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine.”
Not-Becky disappears into the living room, leaving me alone and breathless. The bloody scratches across my knuckles ache. My eyes travel back and forth between the empty hallway, my parents’ bedroom, and the ruined wall next to me.
“No fighting,” my mother murmurs dreamily from her bed. She sounds absurd.
I close her door behind me, leaving my mother in comfortable oblivion beneath her bed covers. Then I wait and listen. After a moment, I hear a creak that sounds like wood settling, and I know what it is. Not-Becky is on the fronts steps. It’s placing its bare feet carefully on each tread, trying to be quiet, but I know it wants me to follow.
That’s what it’s always wanted.
I take off my sneakers, leaving them on the floor underneath the blemish of blood on the wall, and quietly steal down the hallway to the kitchen.
The back stairs, the ones in the little alcove between the kitchen and the porch, wind in a steep curve through the guts of the house. I slowly climb them, my stocking feet gliding smoothly between the piles of old paper. For the past two years, ever since Becky got sick and my grandmother died, I’ve been bringing my grandfather his meals up these winding stairs—day after day, month after month, up and down to the man above our heads.
As I climb, I begin to hear the voice on his television set. My grandfather’s probably sitting in his chair, snoozing—blissfully unaware that Not-Becky is sneaking closer and closer to him with a butcher knife.
As horrible as it sounds, I’m happy it’s going after my grandfather instead of my mother. He’s had his life. His days and nights are now mixed up together in his head, and his dreams and reality are one and the same. If I ever make it to be that old, I hope I don’t end up like him. I want my memories. I want to be able to sift through them when I’m ancient and feeble, so that I can find the good ones amidst all the bad and drink them in like aged wine.
They say that bad memories fade away, and that’s why women go through childbirth more than once. I hope there’s some merit to that, because the last few days of my life should be parceled together and thrown away someplace deep and dark so they’ll never be found.
A few steps further, and I’m standing at the back door to my grandfather’s apartment. It’s closed, and I hear the television through the door. I can’t make out the words. Carefully, I grasp the old-fashioned glass knob, its cut and polished surface smooth against my skin. I softly turn it until the door dislodges from its frame, and I can sneak inside.
My grandfather should be in the living room. If I can just make it to the front door of the apartment before Not-Becky finishes her climb, I may be able to lock it and protect the old man.
Quickly, I move through his kitchen, only barely registering that there are apple peels on his kitchen counter, along with a pie rack and the faint smell of McIntosh, cinnamon, and caramel in the air.
I’m moving too quickly to piece those final images into the puzzle in my head. Instead, I’m more focused on the fact that the front door to the apartment is wide open.
Not-Becky is sitting cross-legged at my grandfather’s feet, crimson dripping from its bloodied mouth and manacled wrists. The television is off. There’s no game show host.
My grandfather is talking to Not-Becky, and it’s staring up at him with wide, attentive eyes. The butcher knife is upended and balanced on the floor, and Not-Becky is slowly spinning the blade on point as it listens intently to him.
I stop. It’s not because of Not-Becky. It’s not because of the blood or the knife or the fact that my grandfather is talking. It’s not even because the entire apartment smells like apple pie. I stop because my grandfather’s not sitting in his wheelchair. He’s standing above my sister, slightly bent, exactly like creepy Father Tim was that day that Becky asked him about the upside down cross.
My grandfather’s standing. It’s a miracle.
Only it’s not.
46
MY MOUTH FALLS open. “You’ll catch flies, boy,” he says to me with a grin, not unlike Not-Becky’s.
“How . . . how are you standing?” I whisper. Still, my voice cracks like it did a few years ago when I hit puberty and everything turned adult.
“On. My. Feet,” he says to me in very short, clipped words. Drool stained with blood spills from Not-Becky’s mouth in a thick stream. It pools on the floor. Not-Becky laughs, though, when he says that, and its shoulders jump up and down like they’re attached to marionette strings.
“But . . .” I say. “But you can’t stand. You haven’t stood for two years.”
He takes his old, gnarled hand, covered with age spots, and softly pats my sister on the head like a dutiful dog. Not-Becky’s bloody tongue hangs out of its mouth.
“I’ve stood plenty,” he says to me. “I’ve done plenty.”
I’ve done plenty.
Ka-dunk, dunk, dunk. Those words, those last three words, are the final pieces of the puzzle for me. They form together inside my head and fit neatly into the picture I’ve been building there. I know it’s finally time for me to look at it, so I can see it for what it really is—and when
I do, everything begins to make sense.
“It’s you,” I croak.
One of his eyebrows lifts up. “It’s me, what?” he says, shifting on his feet and taking two quick steps toward me. He limps as he moves, slight but noticeable, like the figure on the tracks that Newie and I saw—the one that was carrying a bag—a bag filled with the things needed for a night’s worth of evil.
“You,” I say again as my world turns on its head like the crosses in my father’s workroom. Everything I’ve ever known to be true is a lie.
For sixty years, the town of Apple has been plagued with murders, unspeakable things, every September and October. My grandfather would have been only a few years older than me when they started. He lived in this house then, with his parents. They were staunch, devout people.
Just like my parents.
But my grandfather wasn’t like them, was he? I see it now. The boy who lived in this house so many years ago had turned away from the beliefs of his mother and father. Whether by fate or design, he somehow cleaved to a different God—a cast-out God.
The God of lies.
The crystal clear picture swims behind my eyes. I see a boy praying to his false God in secret. I see him waiting in anticipation for the dead leaves to come each year so that he can pay homage to the death of the earth with deaths of his own—to please the fallen one, the horned one.
Lucifer.
“It’s you,” I say again as I see the picture in all its hideous glory. I see my grandfather sneaking out at night, first as a young man, then as a husband and a father. I see amazing kills in ritualized fashion, from skinnings to beheadings to awful, hideous disembowelings.
Then I see the years piling on top of him, until he can no longer bear their weight alone. I see his tributes to his God coming from closer and closer to home. First there was Margo Freeman, and this year there were people from my school like Ruby Murphy and Claudia Fish—because death was her wish—and finally, people from my life—Mrs. Berg and almost Annie and her father.
Bloody Bloody Apple Page 20
