by Tim Waggoner
“You mean like calling in an exterminator when you find out you have cockroaches? Corpse Removal R Us? I don’t think there’s anyone like that.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of the police.”
Allison’s mention of cockroaches had set Joan’s brain to buzzing. She heard metallic clack-clack-clack sounds, saw large black shapes scuttle forth from the treeline. A wave of nausea came over her and she thought she was going to puke in the wastebasket after all, but the sound went away, and with it, the urge to vomit.
“You can call the cops if you want,” Allison said. “I’m not sure what they can do, though. I admit that hiding the basement door like that is strange, but you don’t have any evidence that anything bad happened in the house. And I don’t think the cops will want to break through the concrete floor and start digging just because a couple friends started imagining the worst when talking on the phone.”
You were the one who brought up buried bodies, Joan thought. Aloud, she said, “You’re probably right.”
“There’s got to be a logical reason someone wanted to conceal the basement. Maybe the doctor’s wife was dementing before she died, and he was afraid she’d fall down the stairs if she tried to go into the basement. And after she did die, he never bothered to take the wallpaper down.”
Joan felt better after hearing Allison’s theory. It made a hell of a lot more sense than the woman’s first melodramatic suggestion.
“Even so,” Allison said, “you might want to put some air fresheners down there. Just in case.”
* * *
One of Joan’s afternoon clients cancelled, so she snuck out of the office and ran down the block to grab some caffeine at the corner Starbucks. She got her coffee, and when she checked the time on her phone, she saw she had fifteen minutes until her next client—a sixtyish woman with an addiction to both alcohol and gambling, and who suffered from a fairly strong oppositional defiance disorder to boot. She decided to take advantage of the time to sit and chill out a little. Working with the woman always exhausted her, and she wanted to metaphorically gird her loins for the battle ahead.
The café offered free WiFi, so she connected with her phone and logged on to Google. She started to type in Maegarr, but she wasn’t certain how to spell it. Instead, she entered eat the night. A lot of the results that came up were for something called night-eating syndrome, but the top result was for a Wikipedia page for Eat the Night (song). She selected it.
The entry wasn’t long. It said the song had appeared on an album of the same name, released by a band called Slogeny in 1972. There was some information about how high the song had charted (it made it all the way to number four the year it was released), how many films it had been used in (three), and such. But what interested her the most was the section labeled Themes.
Both the lyrics and music for “Eat the Night” were written by Slogeny founder and frontman Mark Maegarr.
Maegarr’s name was in blue, meaning it was a link to an entry about him, but she wasn’t ready to click it yet, so she kept reading.
He said the song was inspired by a visit to an old country cemetery.
“I saw all these old headstones. Small ones that had been so eroded over the years that you could barely make out the letters and numbers. Some of them dated back to the 1800’s, and sadly, a number of them were for kids or even babies. It got me thinking, you know? Entropy is all, as the saying goes. That’s what the song’s about. Hell, it’s what almost all my songs are about.”
She read that section several times before working up the courage to click on Maegarr’s name.
The entry for Mark Maegarr came up, and as she began reading, she felt increasingly sick. There was his autobiographical data—Born 1932, Shelton, Iowa. Died 1981, Placidity, Republic of Suriname.
She felt a pinprick of pain behind her right eye as she read Placidity.
She skimmed over the sections covering his childhood and early career—neither of which was particularly interesting—and slowed down when she reached the entry for Placidity.
In 1977—at the height of Slogeny’s fame—Maegarr stopped performing and recording music. He’d wholeheartedly adopted a view often expressed in his songs: The universe is destined to eventually suffer complete entropic collapse, but rather than heralding the end of existence, he believed this process would result in a rebirth of a new and better universe. Therefore, the most noble thing humanity can do is speed up the process. He began delving into science, religion, philosophy, and the occult, searching for ways to accelerate entropy. He drew a number of followers to him. They came from different nationalities, ethnicities, and economic levels. The only common denominator among them was a sympathy to Maegarr’s beliefs and a willingness to subjugate themselves to him. In 1979, inspired by the Reverend Jim Jones, Maegarr and his followers traveled to the Republic of Suriname, where they built a settlement they dubbed Placidity.
“What Jonestown got wrong, we’ll get right,” Maegarr said when they first broke ground.
Life in Placidity was shrouded in secrecy. During the first year of its existence, Maegarr allowed reporters access, although he was careful to control what they saw. But after that, for whatever reasons, he forbade visitors and refused to allow his followers—who called themselves the Congregation—to have any contact with the outside world. No one knows for certain what happened after that, although there is much speculation. What is known is that on the evening of August 27, 1981, during what’s known as the Big Dry Season in Suriname, Maegarr and his 363 followers died in the pavilion that served as the settlement’s central meeting place. The cause of their deaths is unknown. The bodies weren’t discovered for nearly a month until reporters from Time magazine attempted to gain access to Placidity and found the settlement no longer guarded. By this time, scavengers and the elements had reduced the bodies to little more than skeletons. Some believe that Maegarr and his followers committed suicide, copying the Jonestown Massacre. Others believe they were killed by unknown assailants, a rebel group of some sort, perhaps even a breakaway faction of the Congregation itself. Whatever happened, Suriname authorities took over the scene, buried the remains in a mass grave, and bulldozed the settlement. Nature has since reclaimed the land where Placidity once stood, and today the precise location is difficult to determine, although that doesn’t keep those obsessed with Maegarr, his philosophy, and the Congregation’s terrible end from making pilgrimages to Suriname to find it.
There were more sections on Maegarr’s personal life, his legacy, references used in writing the entry, and a list of resources for further reading, but Joan didn’t have the stomach for any more. She closed her phone’s web browser and set the device down on the table with a shaking hand.
She should’ve felt better after reading the article. She had no memory of ever hearing Maegarr’s music before or learning the fate of his followers. But she must have done both somewhere along the line, and for whatever reason, her subconscious had dredged up the horrible details and used them to create a nightmare. An awful nightmare, the kind that could unsettle a person for days, even weeks, but a nightmare nevertheless. Unpleasant in the extreme, but perfectly normal.
But her rationalization didn’t make her feel any better. If anything, she felt worse. The pain behind her right eye had intensified to the point where it felt as if someone had slid an ice pick into her brain and was stirring it around. Acid roiled in her stomach, and her intestines spasmed painfully. She felt like a furnace inside, but her skin was cold and clammy, and the beads of sweat that formed on her body were ice-cold.
She looked at her coffee, which she hadn’t touched since she’d sat down. She stood, slid her phone into her purse, grabbed her coffee, and threw it in the trash on her way out the door. Being out in the fresh air made her feel better, if only a little. As she started walking in the direction of her office, she took out her phone and called Theresa.
“Hey, it’s Joan. I’m not feeling too well, and I think I’m
going to go home early and rest. I don’t know. Flu, maybe. Can you cancel my appointments for the rest of the day? I only have two left. Sylvia Petrey and Lee Bass. Right. Thanks, I will.”
She disconnected and put the phone away. When she reached the office building, she walked into the parking lot, got in her car, and drove home with the windows down so she could feel the wind in her face.
She did not turn on the radio.
CHAPTER 4
As she drove, Joan thought about the basement, trying to determine why its discovery had so unsettled her. Finding an unexpected empty room in your new house should’ve been a good thing, so why did it feel like the opposite? It had been a long time since she’d been in therapy, but she had a good idea what a psychologist would tell her.
You’re uncomfortable about the basement because it’s something you don’t understand, and that makes it threatening. It’s no wonder you’re having a strong reaction to something that feels like a threat to your new home. Not after what happened when you were a child.
What happened…
* * *
“Can I watch The Little Mermaid?”
Joanie sat on the carpet in front of the TV set. A nature show was on, one about lions. She liked lions okay, especially the girl ones. They were strong and beautiful at the same time, a combination she hoped she’d be when she grew up. But the program was showing how lions hunted, and she didn’t want to see them chasing down and tearing apart a baby antelope or something. She hated watching things get hurt, and she couldn’t stand the sight of blood, even fake movie blood. There were even some sequences in The Little Mermaid, her official all-time favorite movie, that made her uncomfortable, if not downright anxious. But if she had to keep watching the lions, she knew she’d end up having really bad nightmares later—dreams filled with sharp claws, ivory fangs, and blood. Rivers of it.
It did not occur to her to get up and leave the room so she wouldn’t have to watch the lionesses make their kill. She was nine, and as long as the TV was on, she’d sit in front of it, no matter how uncomfortable the images it displayed made her. When no one answered her question, she turned around to face the couch.
“Mom? Can I?”
Her mother sat on the couch, doing a crossword puzzle in last week’s Sunday paper. She always meant to do them on the day the paper arrived, but she never got around to it until the following Saturday evening, and she rushed to complete it before the next Sunday paper came. She almost never managed to finish the puzzles, though, and Joanie wasn’t sure why she kept trying. Her mother was a short woman with long black hair and a dark complexion that hinted at Middle Eastern ancestry, although she’d never said anything about it. She wore glasses to help with her distance vision, but she always looked over the top of the lenses when she read.
“It’s okay with me if Ashley doesn’t care,” her mother said, not looking up from her puzzle.
Joanie looked to her sister. Ashley sat on the opposite end of the couch from their mother. She was taller than Mom and wore her blonde hair short. She was seventeen, eight years older than Joanie, and as far as Joanie was concerned, her sister was as much of an adult as their parents. She sat with her legs beneath her and her arms folded. She wasn’t looking at the TV. Instead, she looked out the front window to the right of the TV. The curtains were open, but it was after eight, and it was dark out. Joanie didn’t think Ashley was really looking at anything, though. Her brow was crinkled into a frown and her lips were pressed together in a tight line. She was looking out the window because she didn’t want to look at their mother. She was too mad.
Joanie didn’t want to say anything to Ashley. She was afraid she’d only become a lightning rod for her sister’s anger. She almost didn’t speak, but she really wanted to watch Ariel, so in a soft voice she said, “Ashley? Is it okay?”
Ashley didn’t respond at first, and Joanie was debating whether to ask again and risk making her angry when she finally answered.
“Do what you want. I don’t give a shit.”
Joanie gasped. She had heard Ashley swear lots of times before, but never ever in front of one of their parents.
But instead of yelling at Ashley, Mom said, “You can be as big of a bitch to me as you want, but don’t take it out on your sister. She hasn’t done anything to you.”
Mom didn’t look up from her puzzle as she said this, and Ashley didn’t look at her. But Ashley’s face reddened and her lips whitened as she pressed them together harder.
The atmosphere was thick with angry tension, and it was so much worse than watching lions stalk and kill prey. Joanie felt tears building up behind her eyes, and she debated whether she should forget about her movie and run to her room, shut the door, climb in bed, and hide under the covers and let the tears come or if she should pretend that everything was okay, put the movie in, and watch it, singing along with the songs as if it were a normal Saturday night. She was old enough to understand that adults spent a lot of time pretending things were all right when they weren’t. And who knows? Maybe the movie would cheer up her mother and sister. Who could stay mad when such as awesome movie was on?
Joanie stood, went to the cabinet where they kept the movies, found The Little Mermaid, and slid the cassette into the VCR. The TV remote sat on the coffee table, and Joanie walked over to it and changed the channel to display the feed from the VCR. She wanted to turn the volume up higher—she liked to listen to the songs as loud as she could get away with—but she didn’t want to press her luck. If the movie was too loud, either Mom or Ashley might make her turn it off. So normal volume it was. As the movie started, she sat on the couch between her mother and sister, an equal distance from both. She hoped her nearness might keep them from fighting with each other. Besides, her butt hurt from sitting on the floor.
As tense as the emotional atmosphere was in the family room, Joanie knew it would’ve been much worse if her father had been there. But he was out in the garage, tinkering with the engine of a Ford POS—whatever that meant. He worked as a plumber, but his passion was cars, and he spent almost all his free time messing around with them. Joanie was glad he had something to keep him busy right now, but she was also sad he wasn’t here. Even when things were strained in their family—which they often were these days—she preferred them to be together. That’s what the word family meant to her: togetherness. Families were supposed to take care of one another, even when they didn’t always like each other. Especially then.
Togetherness meant home, it meant peace. It meant something even deeper than those things, a grown-up word she didn’t remember hearing before but which she nevertheless knew.
Placidity.
The doorbell rang fifteen minutes into the movie. Ashley started to get up to answer it, but Mom motioned for her to remain seated.
“I’ll get it,” she said. She put her puzzle and pen on the coffee table, rose from the couch, and headed toward the foyer.
The doorbell rang again before she was halfway there.
“I’m coming!” she said, irritated.
Joanie didn’t watch her mother as she walked out of the family room. Instead, she watched Ashley. Her sister’s body was rigid, and she’d sucked in her lower lip. She stared after their mother, eyes wide, as if she was scared. But coldness accompanied the fear, along with growing anticipation. Joanie had no memory of ever seeing such a strange mixture of emotions in anyone’s eyes, but she instantly recognized it. Ashley was both frightened and excited at the same time. She knew what was going to happen next, and she both dreaded it and was looking forward to it. And what was the it? There was no way Joanie should’ve known, but she did. The it was blood.
Mom opened the front door, and all she managed to get out was, “Billy, we told you—” before an explosion cut off her voice.
Joanie saw her mother’s body fly backward and hit the foyer floor with a dull thud. Her chest was a smear of crimson, and her arms and legs twitched like she were an insect that had just been stepped on.
She practically shrieked that last word and kicked Mom in the head a couple more times.
A harsh tang drifted into the family room, and although Joanie had never seen anyone fire a gun in real life, she knew she was smelling gunpowder.
Billy stepped into view then, a wide grin on his face. He looked at Ashley and his grin grew wider.
“Didn’t think I’d have the stones to do it, did you?”
He was a skinny kid, thinner than Ashley, actually, with stick arms and legs. He had long, greasy brown hair, and his complexion was pale, as if he never went outside. He wore jeans and a T-shirt that said Take the Skinheads Bowling. Joanie had no idea what it meant.
She hadn’t moved from her position on the couch, and she didn’t do so now. Her throat felt as if it had closed up, and without thinking about it, she removed her inhaler from her pocket, took a hit, then replaced it. She stared at her mother’s body, noting that her limbs no longer twitched, and desperately tried to process what was happening. Billy wasn’t supposed to be here. Mom and Dad had forced Ashley to break up with him after the police caught him mutilating a dead dog in an alley behind a Laundromat downtown. They’d said he wasn’t the kind of boy their daughter should be dating. But from the expression of savage joy on Ashley’s face as she gazed down at their dead mother, Joanie thought that Billy was exactly her kind of boy.
You’re in shock, she thought. Except the thought-voice didn’t sound like her, didn’t feel like her. It felt like someone older. Sadder.
She heard the garage door burst open then, followed by her father’s footfalls as he pounded through the kitchen. He entered the family room from the opposite direction, a claw hammer gripped in his hand.
