by Adam Selzer
Now I’m one of them.
I still have to pee. I stay in my room, under the covers, for a long time, until I have to go too badly to ignore it any longer. I even consider using the empty paper cup I have on my desk, but I decide that that would be going too far. I can’t let myself get so freaked out that I start peeing in cups. God.
I rush into the bathroom with my eyes closed. I won’t look in the mirror for anything. I keep thinking of some movie I saw when I was a kid, in which a person looked in the mirror and saw some sort of ghost looking back.
I laughed at the time.
The thought of looking in the mirror scares the hell out of me now.
In the morning, after a nearly sleepless night, I get a text from a local number I don’t recognize:
u believe me yet? -edward t
Chapter Twenty-One
The toilet seat is up again in the morning, and my Disney villain toys on the shelves look like they’re plotting against me, but I feel a tiny bit better. Better enough to function, at least. The world doesn’t seem as scary when the sun is out, and the lingering dread retreats enough that I can get up and walk to the bathroom. I can look around my room, even into mirrors. But the feeling of dread is still there.
I’m afraid the police will come for me.
I’m afraid I’ll log on and find a million e-mails from people who’ve read stories I never wanted them to see.
I’m afraid that a woman I thought was my friend has been plotting to kill me this whole time. Maybe tonight will be the night.
A week ago I thought it was awesome that some people had already put Halloween decorations out to go with the cold wave. Now they don’t seem fun anymore. The plastic skeletons dangling from the trees look like people who’ve been hanged and left to rot.
I lie in bed until the sun is fully out, then text Kacey to see if she wants to go on a road trip to a town called Magwitch Park.
The traffic on I-55 slows down, then speeds up, then slows, and speeds up again as I ride along in Kacey’s car. Traffic moves in mysterious ways. I kind of prefer it when it’s slow and the interstate is jammed; Kacey drives like a maniac when she has enough room.
I’ve only told her that we’re looking for clues about Marjorie Kay Stone, who ran the Finders of Magwitch Park company, who had some information about the ghosts I research for the tours. I didn’t let on about how high the stakes were. She’s excited enough.
“I feel like I should’ve brought my dog and some Scooby Snacks,” she says as she tailgates a guy with a John Deere bumper sticker. “Maybe a proton pack.”
“I’d kind of feel better if we had a proton pack.”
Then she opens the glove compartment and says, “Well, we do have a sort of Scooby Snack, I guess. Dig around in the tampon box.”
The tampon box in the glove compartment seems like a normal one at first, but she tells me to take the tampons out, and there’s a baggie of weed beneath them.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Doesn’t this stuff make you paranoid?”
“Maybe a little.”
“I’m paranoid enough these days.”
“So let me get this shit straight,” says Kacey as she passes a semi. “If ‘straight’ is a word I can use without, like, offending you.”
“Go nuts.”
“So Zoey saw a picture of you kissing a customer.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But she still never sent you a picture of herself at all? Or called you so you could hear her voice?”
“Nope.”
“So you still don’t even know for sure that she wasn’t some dirty old man?”
I don’t even answer. After Kacey passes a slow-moving Hyundai, she pats me on the knee and says, “Honey, she probably had at least five other long-distance girlfriends the whole time.”
I let that hang in the air and try not to feel like an idiot for letting things get so far out of hand with Zoey. I fail. As usual.
“Maybe. I’m just afraid she’ll start spreading my stories around. They’re fucking dark, some of them.”
“She couldn’t do it without attracting attention to herself, and that’s obviously the last thing she wants. Or he. Whatever. I’d say you’re in the clear.”
We finally pull off the interstate and into Magwitch Park, an hour or so from home. It’s out beyond where the suburban trains go, but still considered a commuter town, I think; half the people who live there probably work in the city and spend fifteen or twenty hours per week just driving back and forth.
As we drive around toward the little downtown area, I can tell that Magwitch Park is an old town, not like the suburban strip malls towns and retail wastelands that grew out of nowhere in the late twentieth century. Not one house looks less than a hundred years old, and most of them look much older than that. Almost all of them need a new coat of paint, and quite a few have settled unevenly into their foundations, so now they’re leaning a bit, ready to crumble into one another. Some have rooms and wings that were clearly added on years after the main structure was built; they jut out at odd angles like cancerous growths and goiters.
I swear, the central core of some of the houses, near the train station, even look too old to be in the Chicago area. The oldest house in Chicago proper is from the 1830s, and nothing on the outskirts is that much older. The Magwitch Park houses look too old to be real. It’s like we’ve driven through a time warp or a portal or something, and now we’re in some whole other dimension, not the edges of Chicagoland.
They all look haunted.
Weeds poke through the brick sidewalks, and a pale little kid with hair so blonde it looks white stands on a porch in his diaper, staring at nothing and looking creepy as fuck.
I direct Kacey to the address where Marjorie Kay Stone’s house was, and we find a vacant, overgrown lot, not unlike the one at the body dump. The houses on this street are huge. This space among them where Marjorie’s place used to be is like a missing tooth in a mouth full of cracked ones. Only the foundation and basement are still there, a big pit in the ground.
In the area that used to be the backyard, a dried-up pond and a bush that looks like it was maybe once trimmed to look like a dolphin are all that stand as evidence that anyone interesting had ever been there.
We hop into the pit that used to be the basement and I wander around while Kacey smokes up, but it’s not much more than a pit in the ground with scorched brick walls. There aren’t any manuscript pages tucked into the cracks or anything. I guess I didn’t expect there to be.
There’s nothing spooky about the place at all.
If Cyn punched Marjorie Kay Stone in the brain, anything she left behind is gone.
Thanks a lot, laws of thermodynamics. The only dead body around here is probably Ricardo’s hamster somewhere in the backyard.
There are no answers in Magwitch Park. Only an odd moment when I think I see Morticia looking out the window of a house as we drive by.
On the drive back, I get some texts from Edward Tweed. He texts like an old person—the way people always think teenagers do.
TWEED:
Have an idea. Good 4 all of us. Even Rick.
TWEED:
I want u 2 join my company. Tell whatever stories u want. Say I’m an idiot n a fraud. It’s fine.
TWEED:
But I need some1 fast 2 run the tours Aaron was supposed 2 run.
TWEED:
(Hear me out here)
TWEED:
I want 2 pitch an idea 4 the TV show: it follows both companies. U and I r da villains everyone will love 2 hate. Makes it a better show. Makes u more valuable alive than dead. Rick and Cyn r the good guys. U can switch maybe in season 2.
TWEED:
Can we meet n discuss? I can show u the inside of the Couch tomb.
I don’t reply to any of them, but I find myself thinking about the plan.
I did always like the villains best.
Sleep comes in fits and starts, and each fit and start brings a new
dream full of horrors that I’m glad to wake up from.
I type a few responses to Tweed, but I never send them. Maybe I don’t want a TV show. I’m scared to death that if I get famous enough that anyone knows who I am, the stories I sent Zoey might leak. Maybe she’ll post them. Maybe Tweed will, if he has them and I don’t do what he says.
If I’m not on TV, there’s not much to gain from spreading my stories around. It’s safer to be anonymous. No one. A face in the grocery store.
But even right now, I suppose it could reflect really, really badly on Mom and the business if Edward made them known just around Forest Park.
He could make me do anything if he has those stupid stories.
Why do I have to be this way?
While I stir my Cocoa Puffs around, I decide not to make any decisions today. There’s no tour tonight, no reason for me to run into Tweed or Cyn or anyone. I’ll go downtown and do more Lillian research. It’s the only thing I can think of that might distract me enough.
Mom comes into the kitchen with a cup of coffee just as I’m rinsing out my bowl. She doesn’t mince words.
“You look like shit, Megan.”
“Thanks, Mother, I’ll tell that to my body-image therapist.”
“Not funny.”
I grab a cup from the dish rack and pour myself some coffee from the pot, leaving it black instead of adding creamer, like I usually do, then sit at the table, trying to look distracted by my phone.
“What’s up lately, Megan?” Mom asks.
“Nothing.”
“You got into one of the caskets the other day. You haven’t done that since you were little.”
“I’ve grown up around them,” I say. “They’re not, like, any more unsettling to me than a calculator would be to an insurance agent’s kid.”
“No one’s so well adjusted that they just hang around in coffins when everything’s fine, Megan.”
I try to ignore her.
What could I tell her?
That I cheated on a girl who knows all my secrets?
That some old guy with a seven-dwarves beard might be ready to tell the whole world that the girl who lives at Raskin’s Funeral Home is a way bigger freak than you ever imagined?
That this job in the ghost-tour business involves a lot of killing?
That I might be next on the list, and she was totally right that me taking this job was a bad idea?
I stare at my coffee and act like I’m just too tired to converse, but she holds a thing of lipstick in my face and says, “Clarice is out sick.”
If I turn down the chance to help with mortuary makeup, she’ll know something is wrong.
I get up, force a smile, and follow her down to the basement, where an older woman is lying on the table. Her face seems familiar, and it takes a minute for me to realize why: she used to come to the grocery store. The lips I’m about to make up have personally told me I was bad at my job before.
I don’t remember specifically, but I probably imagined her choking to death on her fiber cereal.
And now, well, here she is. Just like I wanted.
I didn’t really want it.
Not really.
Fuck.
My hand is shaking, so I work very slowly to get the lipstick right, examining the valleys and cracks of her lips and making a plan of action. I let myself get so completely wrapped up in making sure I get everything perfect that I forget Mom has brought me down here to interrogate me.
“So, Megan,” she says. “Cyn told me something about you having girlfriend troubles.”
I jump and smear lipstick all down the dead woman’s face before I look up at Mom.
“When did you talk to Cyn?”
“She called to arrange another funeral for one of the residents.”
“And she said I had a girlfriend?”
“I was already pretty sure you did.”
I try to get back to the lipstick, but I mis-aim and instead of her lips, I put the stick down on her cheek.
“Oh, fuck.”
I take a step back, and Mom looks hurt. “Did you think I’d be mad, Megan? You’re allowed to have a girlfriend. I’m not some, like, conservative person who’s going to get upset about it.”
Some noises I can’t identify float through the room. Sure. Sure I’m old enough to have a girlfriend. But who in the HELL is old enough to have a mystery girlfriend who probably isn’t who she says but knows all sorts of embarrassing secrets about me? To talk to someone without being able to see where she keeps her brain. I wasn’t afraid she’d be mad about me having a girlfriend. I was afraid she’d be mad that I’m an idiot. And surely she wouldn’t support me being a cheater.
And this is just what I’m afraid of without her finding out any more details about me.
“I shouldn’t be down here,” I say. “This isn’t legal. You need a license to do this stuff.”
“You’re changing the subject.”
I put down the lipstick and turn to run up the stairs.
Mom tries to follow me, but she’s in heels.
“Megan, wait. If you’re having problems, let me help you.”
“I’m fine, Mother.”
“So fine you’re sleeping in coffins. I’ve been through breakups. Let’s talk.”
I nearly trip over an armchair in the front reception area. I know Mom wouldn’t be mad that I had a girlfriend, but a girlfriend I couldn’t see? She’d be a shitty parent if she didn’t lecture me about that. And now there’s nothing she could say, nothing she would ever dream of telling me, that I haven’t told myself.
If anything, I worry that she’d be too understanding. I want someone to tell me I was an idiot. I want someone to lock me in a crawl space with rats and skeletons.
Mom keeps following, but I lose her halfway down the block as I head for the Blue Line. I’m just getting to the station when it hits me that Cyn told Mom about Zoey.
Cyn told Mom.
If that’s not a clue that she might have told other people, nothing is.
All the dread comes back, and now I feel just like I felt at nighttime again. In broad daylight. This crushing sense of fear overwhelms me to the point that I have to stop running and crouch down on the ground, curling up like a turtle retreating into its shell, right on the sidewalk of Oak Park Avenue. Cars hiss by and a dog walker steps right over me.
After a minute I force myself to stand and keep pressing on toward the train station. But the dread is still there. Maybe it will always be there, and I’ll just have to live with it.
Everything seems scary all of a sudden.
The Victorian houses I pass all make me wonder how many people had lived in them and died years ago.
The sign over the interstate beside the train says that there have been seven hundred traffic deaths on Illinois streets this year, and I think of how all roads are connected, really. The stretch of it beside me is part of one massive tangle of concrete and blacktop covering the whole damn continent, and tens of thousands of people have died on it this year.
Even the ads with elves baking cookies next to the train line maps by the benches freak me out today. Those ads have been going on for decades, and the elves didn’t look young when they started. They have to be dead by now. Or they would be, if they were real to start with.
And the people who laid the tracks on which the train pulls up are probably all dead now.
As I step aboard I look around at all the other people. They are all going to die someday. How do they just go about their business? How do they get out of bed? Don’t they know that someday they are going to die?
Maybe this is what all those other babysitters felt like when they first saw a funeral in my house.
I am going to die too.
Maybe soon.
And I brought it on myself.
It’s like . . . all the things I did this summer . . . the things I called “charities” . . . they threw off the natural order of things. They made the summer turn into fall. Fair int
o foul. Unnatural deeds bred unnatural troubles.
The face of the grocery-store woman on the slab this morning, with the lipstick I smeared across her cheek, haunts my brain, sticks in my head like the chorus of a song. I wished her dead and now she is.
As the train moves, the noise it makes going over the rails sounds like “you’re next you’re next you’re next you’re next.”
When I see another train coming up the other side of the tracks, I keep thinking it’s going to crash into us.
“Dread,” meaning “terror,” the feeling I can’t shake, was first recorded in print in the year 1200.
In 900 the word for it was “grure.”
Later on there was also “fearlac,” from 1225. Ferd, 1330.
Gastness, 1374.
Raddour, 1440.
Mom sends me texts begging me to let her help me, and I put my phone in airplane mode so I won’t get any messages. The only way anyone can contact me now is if they come and find me. But it also cuts me off from the OED, my only reliable source of stress relief.
I think of all the people Cyn and I have taken care of. It was what they wanted but I wish we hadn’t done it. All of the stock “villain at the end of her rope” lines rush through my head.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
Only now, at the end, do I understand.
We are not so different, you and I.
I’ll get you for this, if it’s the last thing I do.
What a world. What a world.
There are things so much worse than death.
My beautiful wickedness.
Hell is murky.
When the train goes underground, the darkness is almost more than I can take, even with the lights in the train on. It’s a huge relief to climb the stairs onto Dearborn Street and see the sunlight.
In the microforms room I set up camp at a machine where I have to turn the reel manually, because the fast-forward knob isn’t working right. There are better machines, but it’s worth the hassle to be at one where I can see the doorway and keep an eye out for Tweed. Or Cyn. Even though I can see everyone coming in, I keep looking over my shoulder to see if one of them has materialized behind me.
