Bloody Bloody Apple

by Howard Odentz

  He drugged them with the contents of the pills—the contents of the pills that were replaced with sugar. He baked the drugs into a pie, secreted it into their house—probably stepping over a passed-out Mr. Berg in the process—and left a note saying it was from Mrs. Berg. Then he rang the doorbell, making sure to wake someone up. Making sure they would find his poisoned pastry.

  Carve her up—Mom.

  The contents of my empty stomach start to boil into my throat. I back away from him, my head shaking from side to side, not wanting to believe what I now know is the truth.

  Not-Becky sits on the ground, watching both of us as it spins the butcher knife round and round. Finally it croaks, “Show him the book,” like a groveling henchman. More blood dribbles to the floor as it closes its eyes in blissful, painful ecstasy. “Show him. Show him.”

  “Ah,” my grandfather says, holding up one finger in the air like he’s just heard a capital idea. “The book. Yes.” He limps over to his couch, the one that he hasn’t sat on for years, and reaches for the lumpy pillow that I almost used to block the grate in the wall. “My treasure,” he says as he unzips the flowered print and sticks his hand inside its puffy white guts.

  He pulls out a black book. It’s worn like my father’s Bible. My grandfather pats the cover with his wrinkled hand and carries it back across the room, stopping just far enough away from me so I don’t bolt down the stairs like a mouse fleeing a cat.

  He holds the book out to me.

  There’s an upside down pentagram on the front cover. I know what that represents, and it holds no more meaning for me than the gold-embossed crosses on the front covers of the books that sit behind each pew at church.

  It’s only a symbol. It’s meant to represent a belief. My father’s crucifixes represent what he believes to be everything good and safe and righteous in the world.

  My grandfather’s upended pentagram is the polar opposite. It means evil. It truly is the sign of the Devil.

  “What is it?” I ask nervously. My hand finds the back of one of the chairs in his dining room. I hold on to it tightly as I stare at the book between his withered fingers. He stretches his arm out, offering me his prize, but I’m afraid to take it. I’m afraid of what I might find inside.

  He grins and waits for me. He knows that my overriding curiosity will eventually win out over my fear. He knows that I’ll take it from him, so he waits—and he smiles.

  Behind him on the floor, Not-Becky suddenly stops twirling the knife. It stares at the dull metal for a moment as if it’s not sure what it is. Then it pulls its hand away, and the knife tips over and falls. Not-Becky blinks its eyes a few times and looks around the room, and suddenly she’s not that thing anymore. She’s Becky, and she seems as though she doesn’t know where she is.

  “Take it,” my grandfather urges me on. “It’s time that you know.”

  Becky suddenly realizes that she’s sitting on the floor in my grandfather’s living room, covered in blood, with a butcher knife at her feet.

  She looks up at the two of us, and I see her eyes grow wide as the old man extends the book out to me. Becky shakes her head back and forth and mouths the word no. I can see the fear in her eyes, and suddenly I understand something that I’ve never understood until now.

  It was never Not-Becky, huddled against the grate in her room in the basement, speaking horrific things through the walls to my grandfather.

  I had it all wrong.

  He’s been the one whispering madness to her.

  He’s probably been feeding her filth her entire life, provoking and nurturing the divisions in her head. Out of pure terror, she must have created the childlike Suzie Zickle personality, always looking to play games—to just be normal. Then, the obsessive nun appeared, reading the Bible over and over again to wipe her thoughts clean of my grandfather’s obscenities.

  Finally, when my grandfather killed Margo Freeman, the horror was so great that Becky was hacked apart once more.

  Not-Becky was born—a demon created out of the ashes of my grandfather’s madness.

  “I don’t want to take it,” I say to him as the book halves the divide between us.

  “But you must,” he says and takes another step forward. “Don’t be an ass like your father and cling to his Bible of lies. It’s a fool’s folly, Jack. It’s a work of fiction.”

  They are blasphemous words coming out of a blasphemous man—even for me, who has no belief at all. I feel the sting of what he says as surely as if I’ve been struck across the face by God himself.

  From behind him, I see Becky grab the sides of her head. She’s trying desperately to hold onto herself, instead of letting Not-Becky come through. She wants to be present in the here and now. She wants to be present for me.

  Becky takes one arm and rubs it across her ruined face, pulling back a sleeve soaked with blood. Her mouth curls as she stares at the red gore. Her eyes fill with horror.

  “I don’t have to do a fucking thing,” I say to my grandfather and push myself away from the chair and walk quickly around the table so that the ancient polished mahogany is between me and him.

  He sneers. “You dare use that language under my roof?”

  “Yeah, I fucking dare, you murderous piece of shit.” I try to dredge up the worst possible words in the world. I want to pummel him with my fists. I want to break him apart for breaking my family—for breaking Becky.

  My grandfather is a completely different person from the one that I thought he was when I woke up this morning.

  Now I know that everything about him has been a lie, just like the pills that my mother and my sister were supposed to be taking have been lies. The man who’s standing before me isn’t broken or ready to take his last breath. He’s vibrant and alive, with a gleam in his eye that’s worse than anything that I can ever imagine seeing in the eyes of creepy Father Tim.

  “Take it,” he growls, and the glint in his eye sparks fire.

  “You filled Mom’s and Becky’s pills with sugar,” I blurt out.

  “Had to,” he says. “They were both beginning to understand the way of things.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Becky’s still on the floor, but she’s listening to us now. Not-Becky has disappeared into the back of her mind.

  “It seems we were starting to have a crisis of belief in this family,” the old man says to me. I can’t think of him as my grandfather anymore. All I can see in front of me is a creature wrapped in a skin. It looks like my grandfather but is really something dark and evil.

  “Besides,” he says and grins again in that horrible way. “Your poor excuse for a mother was always meant to wallow in her own depression. I only let it happen.” He turns for a moment and steals a glance at Becky. “As for my granddaughter?” he says. “Well, I have high hopes for her. What good is she to me drugged? I let the pills take her at night, but during the day? No-sir-ee-Bob. The daytime has been for studying.” His words bubble out of him covered in thick, oily slime. “Someone has to be the keeper of tradition.”

  “Tradition?” I gasp.

  “Yes,” he says and drops the book on the table. “Tradition—the festivals to honor the true God, cast out of heaven—the Sacrificial Rituals.”

  I feel as though the room is tilting on its side. I stare at the book in front of me. The binding is old and worn, held together in places with tape. Brittle paper sticks haphazardly out of the top and sides—newspaper clippings that are too large to fit on the pages.

  Sixty years’ worth of newspaper clippings.

  I want desperately to run my fingers across the cover. I have to open it. I have to look inside.

  “Don’t,” I hear Becky say. She’s standing now, a little unsteady on her feet. She’s not hunched over like Not-Becky. “You mustn’t look,” she says.

&nbs
p; “He must,” snaps my grandfather.

  “No,” she pleads with him. “Not him. He doesn’t need to know.” She stands behind my grandfather, and for the first time I see that the butcher knife isn’t on the floor anymore. It’s in her fist, the blade sharp and gleaming, yearning to be brought to life.

  My grandfather doesn’t look at her. He stares straight at me. “For years, your grandmother knew nothing, then she found my book two years ago, and I had to cast her out. It was what my God commanded of me. Don’t you see? It’s what he commanded.”

  The words come back to me once more as if he’s speaking them now for the very first time.

  I cast you out. I cast you out. I cast you out.

  He wasn’t trying to cast Not-Becky out of his home. He was casting out his own wife. He pushed her out the door, and she tumbled down the stairs to her death, and all this time, we thought it was my sister who killed her.

  It wasn’t. It was my grandfather.

  “Please, no,” says my sister again. There is a sadness in her voice and a sort of resignation that I can’t identify.

  “He needs to understand the work I’ve done,” snaps my grandfather. “He needs to see how one pays tribute to the true Lord.” He licks his lips with anticipation, waiting for me to open the book—waiting for me to see his life’s work in newsprint.

  Murder after murder after murder—year after year after year.

  “You promised you would leave him alone if I listened,” Becky cries. “You’ve always promised.” My grandfather’s eyes are locked on mine. He just waves his wrinkled hand behind him, willing her to shut up.

  “Liar,” she screams. “Liar, liar, liar.”

  With a swift motion, she brings the knife down hard, burying the blade deep into my grandfather’s neck all the way to the heavy wooden handle. The old man’s eyes grow wide. He reaches up, not sure what’s just happened, trying to grasp where the pain is coming from—but by then he’s already gurgling, and blood is bubbling out of his mouth. He sways back and forth, back and forth, not sure where to fall.

  When he finally does, hitting the floor with a great thud, Not-Becky fills my sister up again. “Five will die,” it cackles. “Five will die or six for kicks.”

  It laughs out loud and grabs the book off the table, then disappears down the front steps before I can even process what my sister has done. As it hops away from me, bent over and evil, I hear it scream those hateful words again. “Five will die or six for kicks. Five will die or six for kicks.”

  My grandfather was the fifth.

  47

  A POOL OF BLOOD is spreading across the floor. As the last of the old man’s life leaks out of him and seeps into the hardwood, I wonder who will clean it up. I wonder why it happened in the first place. Then I wonder if it was self-defense, because Becky couldn’t take his abuse any longer.

  I see him replacing the contents of the pills with sugar, to keep my mother a zombie and Becky deranged during the day. I see him setting her free from the basement while I’m at school and my father’s at work, bringing her up to his apartment, so he can continue indoctrinating her into what he believed to be true. He probably showed her the contents of that damn book hundreds of times, gloating over each article and reciting the names again and again.

  I can imagine him telling her that he’ll hurt me, or the rest of the family, if she doesn’t promise to listen, and I can imagine Not-Becky soaking up his lies and becoming more demented and evil with each passing day.

  It’s been the dissociative identity personality that he’s been fertilizing with his filth. It’s been Not-Becky who’s been growing and growing, and my sister becoming nothing more than a shadow.

  With that realization, it becomes clear to me what I have to do. Becky saved me. I see that now, so now I have to save her. That’s what she would do if she were me.

  “I love you, Becks,” I whisper softly as I step over my grandfather’s lifeless body.

  It’s funny how the love that you feel for someone can evaporate as quickly as morning dew. Once you peel back the layers and see the darkness that boils beneath the surface, it has a way of deadening love. As for me, I feel nothing when I look at the wrinkled sack of flesh in front of me. It was twisted and psychotic, and now it’s dead.

  In a way, what Becky did was humane. Now it’s my turn.

  I go to the top of the stairs and stand there, turning my head to one side and closing my eyes so I can hear what’s going on below. There are no creaks of tiptoeing footsteps slinking through the house. There’s no laughter. There’s only silence.

  Each step I take seems hindered by a thick dread. Is Not-Becky going to be waiting at the bottom of the stairs for me, holding the butcher knife that’s stained with my grandfather’s insides? Maybe it will be crouching behind the couch in the living room, or worse, maybe Not-Becky is already by my mother’s bedside, staring at her with a freakish sort of detachment, getting ready to whisper bloody, awful things to the woman who bore it.

  No.

  By the time I reach the bottom of the stairs, I know where my sister is.

  All of the crucifixes in the living room are turned upside down. It’s as though whatever’s left of Becky is blazing a trail for me to follow, and I know where I have to go.

  My father’s garage.

  I’m no longer afraid for my mother. My sister isn’t in the house anymore. She’s already out the screen porch and down the steps, across the yard, and into the doorway to my father’s private place. I’m as sure of it as I am in the belief that there’s no God and there’s no Satan.

  There’s only good and evil—and crazy somehow mixed up between the two. I don’t know how my father never saw it before, or if he did, why he chose to ignore it. All I know is that I’m as true to my convictions as my father or my grandfather ever were in their own beliefs.

  I don’t know why, but I shove my middle finger up in the air at the crosses hanging on the wall. Maybe it’s because of all the harm they’ve done to my family, or maybe it’s for all the people who’ve been destroyed in Apple over the past sixty years.

  Sixty years. Ever since my grandfather was a young man, insane enough to think that whatever he was doing every fall was somehow the right thing to do.

  I walk through the house to the little alcove with the backstairs leading up to where my grandfather’s corpse is bleeding out on the floor and out the screen door.

  Across the lawn, my father’s workroom door is open. I’m meant to go there. My sister has something to show me, and in the pit of my stomach I know what it is. It’s like the real final piece of the picture in my head. It’s the five-hundred-and-first piece in a puzzle that’s only supposed to have five hundred pieces.

  It’s the final thing that must happen in all this madness—and I know. I know what I’m going to find.

  I cross the yard, step by step, like I am being propelled forward by an unseen hand pressed against the small of my back. It pushes me with purpose.

  I know I’ll be strong. I’ve been strong my whole life and even stronger since Margo Freeman died and everything went to hell.

  I’m strong and I’m here, and that’s what I keep telling myself as I cross the yard, grasp the doorknob, and pull the door open wide. I step inside without even a glance ahead of me.

  The lights are on, and that’s a good thing, because I can see the forest of upturned crucifixes all around me. The great crucifix is in the middle of the room, tied upside down to the rafters with the thick cord that looks like a fisherman’s rope, and Becky’s there—not Not-Becky, but my sister. She’s standing on my father’s stool, the one he sits at when he studies his Bible, and she’s knotted the rope that drapes over the rafters into a noose, and has slipped her thin, ratty head into it.

  Her eyes meet mine, and they are Becky’s eyes. She’s holding the bu
tcher knife in her hand and has the sharp blade against her wrist.

  “I can’t be like this anymore, Jackson,” she says as she strokes the rope with one hand and rubs the edge of the blade gently over her wrist with the other. “I can’t be like this anymore, and I need you to help me.”

  I know what she’s asking me to do. It seems I always knew it was going to come to this. I knew I would have to take all the puzzle pieces and own the picture that they make—but I can’t do it. A new horror begins to dance across my face. I can’t do what she’s asking me to do. It would be a mercy. It would be an act of love—but I can’t do it.

  She’s always been the strong one, not me. I know that now.

  “I . . . I can’t,” I whisper.

  She sighs. “All right.”

  “All right?”

  She nods and drops the knife to the floor. Then she twists her body around so she’s facing away from me. The rope makes that terrible tearing sound as little fibers of horse hair rip under the pressure of her weight.

  “Six is for kicks,” she whispers, and she says it again. “Six is for kicks.”

  My sister kicks the stool out hard from beneath herself. It twirls on one leg and falls to the floor. There’s a wet snapping sound and the groan of the rafters and more tearing of rope.

  “Six is for kicks,” I say as I turn and walk out the door, flipping the light switch as I go.

  Only when I am halfway across the yard do I stop, and I stand there staring into space for what seems like hours.

  Six is for kicks.

  Six is for kicks.

  Six is for kicks.

  Epilogue

  ANNIE WAS SENT to live with her aunt in Springfield after Becky and my grandfather died. I saw her at her mother’s funeral, but I was on the other side of a crowd of people from where she was standing. She was flanked on one side by Officer Randy and on the other by a flabby, superior social worker with her arms crossed over her chest.