House of Echoes: A Novel

by Brendan Duffy

  “When she died?”

  “Yes. It made me feel…tight inside.”

  “Like you were nervous?”

  “Like when you know something bad’s going to happen,” Charlie said. “I heard the phone and I knew you would be sad. It made me tight inside.”

  Dad looked sad now. Charlie wondered if, when Dad thought of Grams dying, he now also thought of Bub.

  “Bub’s not dead, Charlie. You can’t even think it,” Dad said.

  Charlie wondered if he had been reading his mind. Sometimes Dad could do that.

  But Bub could be dead. He could be dead, and they wouldn’t even know.

  Tears pushed at Charlie’s eyes, and he looked away so Dad wouldn’t notice. From the windows here, he could see all the way to the top of the mountains. Even the tallest trees looked like toys compared to the mountains. The world was so big, and Bub was so small.

  Even with Dad here and Mom downstairs, Charlie was afraid. He’d been afraid ever since he saw the man kill the deer in the faerie circle. Maybe ever since he’d been locked in the furnace room back in the city. Maybe even before that. Fear had sat next to his heart like a seed waiting for water as long as he could remember. Like a strange flower that waited until the worst of winter to bloom.

  “Why did we come here?” Charlie asked, as he tried to bury himself in the couch’s cushions. He hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but he could tell from the way Dad startled that he had.

  43

  “Why did we come here?” Charlie asked.

  Ben flinched, because the same question had rung through his mind since Friday night. Why? Why? Why? was interrupted only by How? How? How?

  Everything that happened had a cause. Maybe the reason seemed insufficient or unfair, but there always was one. It wasn’t fate that brought them to the Crofts any more than it was chance that Bub had been abducted. Why did we come here? was a good question, but why did we stay? was a better one. The former had a dozen answers, but the latter had only one: They’d stayed here because Ben was a fool.

  Though he’d done his best to try, he had no one to blame but himself.

  One of many flaws he had, he saw now in the ice-cold clarity of hindsight, was that he’d seen himself as the unerring protagonist of this story when he was at best the unreliable narrator.

  Since Caroline got sick, Ben had been convinced that she would be their undoing. He’d even faulted Charlie for a while, holding him responsible for some of the things that happened around the Crofts. Confronted with his family’s flaws, Ben couldn’t look at them without revising their characters to the way he wished they were. But it turned out they weren’t the problem in the first place. If Ben had gotten out of his head for ten seconds, he might have seen that. If he hadn’t been so critical of those closest to him, if he hadn’t fixated on the quirks of their tight familial unit or been so absorbed in his stupid book, he might have noticed the signs of things going catastrophically wrong all around them.

  Now his mistakes had cost them something that could never be replaced.

  You got everything you ever wanted, didn’t you, Benj?

  “I’m sorry, Charlie,” Ben said.

  “It’s not your fault,” Charlie said. He turned away from the cushions with red-rimmed eyes.

  But it was. Ben knew that it was.

  Feeling had returned to his hands, and he groped in his desk drawer. He had a present for Charlie in here somewhere. It was hard to believe that Christmas was a few days away. He could see it sitting like a tombstone at the end of the calendar for the rest of his years.

  “I got a book for you,” Ben said when he found it. It was set in postapocalyptic America, a place where every bad dream had come true. He was glad that Charlie had grown out of the saccharine fables that populated the bookshelves of less-advanced readers; a narrative from the wasteland of the future seemed more instructive.

  Charlie accepted the book and looked over the jacket illustration.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  Contents of the crates from the Swannhaven Dispatch archive lay spread across the table by Ben’s desk. Three years’ worth: 1878, 1933, 1982. Bad years all around, and worse in Swannhaven. Just like this one, Ben thought bleakly.

  He brushed the brittle yellowed papers through his hands absent-mindedly as he watched Charlie start to pick through the book he’d given him. He told himself that Charlie would be safe in the city by this time tomorrow. One less person to worry about. One less person to disappoint.

  Then his eyes strayed to one of the 1933 papers’ headlines. BOY LOST IN STORM rang out at him in thick lettering. He thought of Bub, and his stomach clenched.

  He had to read only the first sentence for his head to catch up to his gut.

  BOY LOST IN STORM

  On Thursday evening, Peter and Emily Lowell of Swannhaven reported to authorities that their son, Owen, aged five, was missing.

  Peter and Emily Lowell were Ben’s great-grandparents. Owen was the great-uncle Ben hadn’t heard of before finding the ancestry quilt in the Lowells’ basement.

  Mrs. Lowell informed police that she put the boy to bed at seven o’clock in a room that he shared with his sister, Alice, age nine. Owen was found to be missing at ten o’clock, when Mr. Lowell returned from his work in the family’s dairy farm.

  Police Chief Edward Stanton reported that the boy appeared to have left the residence by his bedroom window. Upon discovering the boy’s footprints in the snow, investigators tracked them to the forest on the west end of the family’s land, where, due to weather conditions, they were unable to continue following the trail.

  Chief Stanton confirmed that Alice Lowell had not woken during her brother’s disappearance, making the possibility of an abduction unlikely. “We do not believe that the boy was forcibly taken from the residence,” Chief Stanton said. “Based on the evidence and interviews with the family, it is likely that he snuck outside to play in the snow. He must have become disoriented in the dark and wandered into the forest.”

  With temperatures as low as twenty degrees below freezing, the probability of the boy having survived the night is considered remote.

  The article was thin and perfunctory, but it still left Ben shaken. He wondered if his great-uncle’s body had ever been found. There was a photo of Owen above the headline. It was hard to make out between the yellowing paper and the faded ink, but Ben could see that the boy was not smiling.

  For the hundredth time that day, Ben wished that his grandmother were still alive. She’d been nine when Owen died—not much older than Charlie was now—but that was old enough to remember the death of a brother. Ben wondered about Owen, if the boy had spent his hours playing among the trees. He wondered if his parents had ever found him in the fields at night, running to the beat of the land.

  Through the attic windows, Ben watched snow whirl through the air. From where he stood, he could see Charlie in profile as he read his book. Ben would have to go outside again soon. He would need to find some way to flush the man from the forest. That’s when he realized that Charlie hadn’t been reading his book at all. His pale eyes were focused above the page open before him. He was watching the mountains.

  —

  “Do you have him?” Ted asked.

  “No,” Ben said. “Not yet,” he corrected himself. He could hear Ted’s exhalation rattle through the receiver. “Where are you?”

  “Cleveland,” Ted said. “There’s a lot of weather along the coast. There’s still a chance flights will start up again, but if not, I’ll rent a car in the morning and start the drive.”

  “Thank you, Ted.” Charlie was on the other side of the attic, and Ben tried to keep his voice from breaking. “You don’t even know what it’s been like. You have no idea. I don’t even—I don’t even understand how this is happening again.”

  “I’ll be there tomorrow even if I have to walk, Benj,” Ted said. “I’ll get Charlie out of there so you and Caroline can do what you have to do.” He cleared
his throat. “How is Caroline?”

  “The same way anyone would be,” Ben said. “Tearing the place apart.” He had to clamp down on a hysterical laugh that had fluttered up his throat. “I guess you were right about me, Ted. Right about this place. I got everything I ever wanted, and look at where it’s landed me. I’m such an idiot.”

  “What are you talking about, Benj?” Ted said. “Look at everything you’ve done, coming from the place we came from. You can do anything. Anyone would tell you that. You’re only an idiot if you can’t see that.”

  Ben found himself dangerously close to tears.

  “I’m proud of you, big brother,” Ted said. “Remember, you’re not in this alone. Hold it together a little longer. I’ll be there soon.”

  They said their goodbyes and Ben found himself unmoored, reeling from emotion to emotion and always perilously close to panic. What was he going to do? What was he going to do?

  The phone was in his hand, and by the time Ben’s mind caught up, his fingers had already dialed.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s Ben, Mom.” His voice sounded like a rusty door.

  “Ben?” she asked. One syllable, but it was all he needed to determine that her blood alcohol level was above the legal limit in every state. “What an early Christmas present this is,” she said. “Twice in one year! I wonder if even the pope is treated this nice. You see much of your brother? Haven’t heard a peep from him in years.”

  “When I can.” He’d never called her from his cell phone before because he’d never wanted her to have his number. Another of his ridiculously invented problems of Before.

  “He doing okay?”

  “He’s great. We’re all great.” He just wanted to hear her voice. He just wanted her for one moment to be a tiny fraction of what a mother was supposed to be.

  “It warms my heart to hear it.” Over the line, her voice was not cruel or ingratiating, only faintly ironic. She didn’t know why Ben had called but didn’t yet realize that he wasn’t entirely sure himself.

  “I told you I visited Grams’s family’s old farmhouse.”

  “The place she left to you boys and not to me, her own daughter? The one you seem so sure you’ll never see a red cent for? She used to talk about that old place, your grams. I always asked her why they left. We had that sweatbox of an apartment in Weehawken—nothing like the nice neighborhood where you grew up. I used to imagine I could have been some kind of dairy-land princess if they hadn’t left that farm.”

  Demons in the wood and devils at the door: That was what she’d told him last time. Ben hadn’t asked her about it then, and maybe he should have. If he had, maybe things would be different.

  “What did she say?”

  “What did she usually say? Something about the water being bad. Also said that her daddy had gotten tired of farming. Though I can’t imagine working at a gas station could have been much more glamorous.”

  Demons in the wood and devils at the door: Of course she’d been making it up.

  “You okay, Benj?”

  “Yes, I’m great.”

  “How is your wife?”

  “She’s fine.”

  “And the kids?”

  “Couldn’t be better.”

  “How many do you have now?”

  “Two.”

  “Right. Charlie and…what do you call the other one?”

  “Robert.”

  “Two boys. Just like you and Teddy. Would you send me a picture?”

  “Sure. I gotta go, Mom.” Ben wasn’t sure what he’d needed from her, but now he knew he wasn’t going to get it.

  “You still in the city?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Where are you?”

  “We got this place upstate.”

  There was silence on the line.

  “Ben, do not tell me that you moved to that village,” she said flatly.

  “What village?”

  “You know what village.” The way she said it made him jump. She used the voice that had yelled at him for eating too much or not enough. It had berated him for running or for not getting somewhere fast enough. “Grams’s village.”

  “What’s wrong with the village? You just told me that they left because they were tired of farming.”

  “Didn’t you ever hear her when she’d get into her cups? Singing her lullabies?”

  “Grams didn’t drink.”

  “Maybe not when you knew her, but she had her day. You think my thirst invented itself? You think she was a saint? She was the saint and I was the demon? Well, she was no saint.”

  “What did she say about the village?”

  “A million reasons to leave, to hear her tell it. Said the woods were haunted and the village was worse. Said there was a curse on the place. It took her brother. My uncle. After Grams tied a few on, she’d sing the lullabies she used to put him to sleep with. For hours, sometimes. Well, he didn’t need the lullabies anymore, I’d tell her.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this the first time I asked?”

  “You have kids now, Benj. You know why. I bet you’re a good dad. Isn’t most of it trying to pretend the world isn’t half as bad as it really is? If they knew it all up front, what kinds of people would they grow up to be?”

  “Which half of the world’s horrors were you protecting us from?”

  She laughed and then began coughing.

  “You always hid razors in your words, Benj. And you’ve done all right with them, haven’t you? And what were the odds that you’d move there? Of all the miserable places in the world, how could I know you’d choose that one? Now, are you going to tell me what’s wrong?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re not fine, Benj. Why else would you be calling?”

  44

  Ben left Charlie with Caroline as she took apart the upper story of the central staircase.

  She fought like a locomotive against the Crofts, but Ben got the sense that what powered her impossible energy had begun to flag. They’d both been awake for over forty-eight hours, and Charlie needed an alert set of eyes on him, so Ben had called Father Cal. Ben recalled only pieces of the hours that followed Bub being taken, but he could still feel Cal’s firm grip on his shoulder. He knew he could count on the priest.

  Ben decided that when Cal arrived, he would set up in Charlie’s blind to watch for the man. Charlie had seen him up at the lake more than once, and waiting for him there was the only thing Ben could think to do.

  While the priest braved the roads, Ben took another lonely sojourn into the woods. The villagers’ cars were gone from the gravel path, except for a battered sedan far down the slope.

  Though the gravel path was nearly empty, he’d never seen the county road along the edge of the valley so busy. The sight of two vehicles at a time had been a rarity, yet nearly a dozen now drove along where the road hooked like a question mark around one of the foothills that framed the valley’s north pass.

  From his high vantage point, Ben could make out rows of cars parked in front of the church and gas station. It was Sunday, but the chief said the service had already concluded.

  Ben tried not to worry about why all the villagers were gathering. There was no reason to assume it had anything to do with him. If it did, it might just be because the chief had a new plan for searching the Drop for Bub. He had to keep his imagination in check. He had to think straight and not let his mother’s words get into his head. Demons in the wood and devils at the door. A world without sense and trust and security was her belief, not Ben’s. As he walked down the Drop, Ben watched more cars wend their way from the far corners of the valley to the village’s little church.

  Ben would have asked his mother more questions if he’d thought that she had the answers. But if she’d known any details, she would have released them in a barrage at the height of her rant. Instead, she’d begun to repeat herself. This is what she did when her ammunition ran out before her fury. She spouted platitudes of fear
and paranoia that meant nothing yet still managed to fill him with dread.

  He hadn’t salted the gravel drive since the dinner party, and the surface was slick. Ben realized he recognized the old Toyota ahead, along the hulk of naked trees. It was pulled off just to the side of the road, and he thought that, without four-wheel drive, Lisbeth would have a tough time getting out of the snow. She’d dropped off some food the day after Bub went missing, but Ben hadn’t seen her since. This seemed strange now that he thought about it.

  Ben followed Lisbeth’s footprints through the trees. The deeper he got, the better idea he had of where he was headed. After a few minutes he sensed the clearing ahead of him. He parted the branches, and the stone angel welcomed him.

  Lisbeth stood facing the statue.

  “Heard you coming,” she said. A bouquet of dried red wildflowers lay at her feet. Their crimson petals lanced the snow with their color.

  “It could have been anyone,” Ben said, but Lisbeth shook her head.

  “I’ve been praying for you, Ben. For you and your family.”

  “I could use all the prayers you’ve got.” Ben had many questions, but he didn’t know how to ask them. They had been building in him throughout his months between the mountains. He had a queasy feeling that giving them voice would give them substance, and they were the kind of questions that, once asked, could never be taken back.

  Lisbeth nodded. “Life can be hard, but we’re never given anything that we can’t handle. Gotta keep strong, gotta keep faith. Gotta do what has to be done.”

  “Gotta keep up the light,” Ben said.

  “What’s that, now?”

  “Something my grandmother used to say. Keep up the light. To do the things that have to be done, no matter what.”

  “I know the expression,” she said. She turned her head toward him, and he saw her face for the first time. She looked tired. “You never know what you’re capable of surviving until life demands it of you.”