by John Searles
“I know,” I told her. “You don’t have to say. We need to get you help. And I told you, I figured it all out.”
“No, you didn’t!” she screamed. “Because I bet you didn’t figure out the way I felt in all of this, did you?”
The rage, the sadness—those things in her voice frightened me into silence.
“Did you?” she screamed.
I shook my head.
“Fifty bucks to talk to Mom and Dad. That’s what he offered me. And happily, I arranged it. But Franky knew what I was up to. She was the one with me at the bar, after all. Since I wasn’t of age, she kept sneaking in and getting us drinks then bringing them out to the car. After I made the call to Mom and Dad, she gave me some bullshit excuse that she wanted to go back to a friend’s house where she’d been staying ever since we left Saint Julia’s. So I let her go. Only Franky didn’t go to her friend’s. She went to see them at the church too.”
Rose stopped. For a moment, I caught us both looking around that basement, the strange world my parents had created down there. That hatchet on the wall. The old branch with what looked like a howling face in the bark. The dozens of trinkets and objects hanging from the ceiling and filling the shelves. Those dusty old books about demons. And, of course, Penny in the old rabbit cage, smiling that placid smile.
DO NOT OPEN UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!
The sign was still there just the same.
“You know what can make a person possessed, Sylvie? It’s not Satan or Lucifer or any of that nonsense. Do you know what it is?”
“What?” I asked her, desperate to let her finish so I could get help.
“Love and hate. Greed. Revenge. Pride. Those things turned Dad into his own demon. He knew the things he was doing were dishonest. Mom’s gift wasn’t powerful or controllable enough for him. He needed something greater to get the attention he craved. He needed all of us to support his stories, so he set out to make us believers too.”
Famous? I remembered the way my father shimmied against that nozzle, rain sopping his hair, dripping from his lashes as he said, Well, now that you mention it, I suppose it would be nice to show them.
“And so, when those people stayed here in the basement, he messed with them. Putting all kinds of pills he had access to in their food. They weren’t in their right minds to begin with, but after he messed with them, who knows what sort of delusions they experienced? It was the same with Mom. He did it to her. Abigail too—”
“How do you know that?”
“You think you’re the only one to figure things out? I watched him. Made a study out of it. And I caught him one day in the kitchen crushing a pill and mixing it into some food. When I asked, he told me it was just some medicine. But I knew better. I’d read those labels on the prescription containers in his desk drawer. And the fact that I knew he was a fraud only made him resent me more.”
I pressed my face into my hands, remembering my mother being so ill and unlike herself after that trip to Ohio. Had he done that to her because she wanted to stop their work the way Heekin told me? Or was it so that she would have no choice but to believe in the power of Penny and so many other claims he made? Is that why Abigail did not feel well that last night? There was so much to understand but I found myself asking, “What did you mean about love and hate? Were you talking about Dad?”
“Yes. But I mean me and Franky too,” she said. “Those things made us demons as well. First her. And then me.”
I waited for her to tell me more, but she was crying again.
“Rose,” I said, deciding once and for all that this conversation had to wait. “I am going to call an ambulance. We need to get you help.”
I stood, went up the stairs. In the kitchen, I walked to the phone on the wall, only when I picked it up, there was no dial tone. I clicked the receiver a few times, but the line was dead.
Hands shaking still, I went to the freezer and pulled out an ice tray to get ice for Rose’s leg. But the tray was empty. Instead, I grabbed a bunch of Popsicles, wrapped them in a dishtowel, and rushed back down the stairs.
In the brief time I had been upstairs, the air in the basement had changed. Outside the window, the light was just the same. That bare, yellowy bulb still glowed on the ceiling as well. The dank, loamy smell still hung in the air. And yet, I had the sense that something had shifted. “Rose,” I said, pressing that cool towel to her leg. “The phone isn’t working.”
“Sylvie, you better go.”
“What? Go where?”
“Anywhere. Just not here.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
I heard a sound in the corner of the basement then, from behind that partition. I stood, remembering the reason I had been so determined to come down here in the first place. I thought of Emily Sanino humming “Happy Birthday.” I thought of that cake she left. I thought of all those candles too. And then I walked over and stepped to the other side of that paneled wall. There was only the empty cot covered with rumpled sheets. On the small dresser by the sliding door that led out onto the backyard, I saw a stack of empty Tupperware containers that had been left on our stoop.
I stepped back to the other side and looked at my sister, who had propped herself up into a slumped position against the stairs and was nursing her leg. “So those noises I heard, they were her?”
Rose nodded. “She was here for a few weeks after the murders. But then we agreed she had to go. Any plans we had made could no longer be. At least not until you were grown and gone and nobody suspected anything. But then—”
Again, I heard a noise somewhere behind me in the basement. I turned and looked into the shadows, where my father’s old dental chair remained untouched still. Just beyond, I could see the fuse box and a tangle of wires on the wall. It was then that I realized the phone cord had been cut. I was not sure what to do so I turned back to Rose. “But then what?”
“But then Franky didn’t stay away. She couldn’t. And the truth was, I didn’t want her to. So without telling me beforehand, she came back. On Halloween night, while I was out and you were here alone, she slipped in through the sliding door and waited for me. That’s when you first saw the light on again. I told her it was better to just leave it on, because I knew it would keep you from coming down here, since you thought it had to do with Mom and Dad and the things they did when they were alive. I knew you still believed.”
I stood for a moment, staring at my sister, wondering how she was capable of keeping so much hidden for so long. “Did you . . .”
“Did I what?”
“Did you kill them?”
She shook her head.
“Say it!” I shouted. “I want to hear you tell me that you didn’t!”
“No,” she said, crying and shaking her head more. “No. No. No. It was Franky. She did it, Sylvie.”
I felt cold all over. Pinpricks up my arms and down my legs and across my stomach. My entire body was shivering now and I could do nothing to stop it. Voice trembling, I asked, “How could you cover for her, Rose? How could you let me go on thinking I had seen someone I did not?”
“Because I loved her. And she did it because she loved me.”
No noise came from behind me, but I saw Rose’s gaze shift over my shoulder. I felt a presence there, and so I turned around.
For an instant, all those pictures in the living room of Emily Sanino flashed in my mind. I saw the young woman before me as a dark-haired toddler in a pink dre
ss, a few years older at the beach in a bright one-piece bathing suit, as a lanky adolescent with a mouth full of braces and a T-shirt that said GOD’S LOVE SUMMER CAMP. I remembered the trophies with the little golden girl on top. Track awards. And now that track star Rose had dated was standing before me, head shaved to the scalp just as it must have been that night at the church, one of the few details that had led me to believe it was Albert Lynch who knocked me down on his way out the door. In one ear, she sported a small silver cross, the sort my mother used to wear, but the effect was menacing instead of peaceful. When she spoke, her voice was more composed than I would have imagined. She asked, “What did you do to Rose?”
Voice still trembling, I told her, “She fell.”
“She fell? Or you pushed her?”
My sister spoke before I could. “Franky, leave Sylvie alone.”
“Why?” Franky said. “She’s the same as your parents. No good for you.”
“I don’t care,” Rose said. “Leave her alone. Let me handle this.”
“You’ve been handling this for months and where has it gotten us?” Franky shouted. “Look at the mess she’s made of you.”
She stepped out of the shadows then, coming closer. I thought of that night last winter, the sound of the gun so close to my ear before I fell to the floor and crawled beneath that pew. Like some sort of alarm the shhhh seemed to grow louder in that instant, so loud I almost did not hear Rose shouting, “Sylvie! Run! Get out of here!”
I turned toward the stairs and stepped over my sister’s leg, bent the wrong way still, like those turkeys in the field on the other side of the woods. But I only made it up a few steps before I felt a hand snatch the back of my old T-shirt. I grabbed the banister and hung on as Franky pulled and pulled, until finally, I felt the fabric start to give and then suddenly the shirt came completely free. The dank air against my bare skin sent a shiver snaking through me as the sudden shift of pressure caused me to stumble forward. My hand slipped through the space between the slatted wooden steps, and Franky came around and grabbed it from beneath. I wrenched my hand free, pulling away from her with such force that I stumbled back down the stairs again, barely missing my sister.
“Stop it!” Rose screamed as I scrambled to my feet. “Please stop!”
“I’m not stopping,” Franky told her, “because if she gets out of here, she’s going to tell the police and everyone what she’s learned. And then you and me, Rose, we are going to be sent away for a long time. And where they put us is going to make Saint Julia’s look like a funhouse. I’m not letting that happen to us.”
I looked at my sister’s contorted face and could see tears rolling down her cheeks, shimmering in the yellow light. “I’m sorry, Sylvie,” she said. “I’m so, so sorry. I never wanted it to be this way. I know you won’t believe that, but I didn’t want any of this.”
What would I have told her if I had the chance? That I forgave her? That I understood? That I would make sure things would turn out okay? But none of those things was true in the moment. The most I knew was that I felt trapped there in the basement, since Franky had made her way around from the back of the stairs and was now holding the hatchet from the massacre at that old New Hampshire farm turned inn. I thought of the Locke family my father talked about in his lectures, the bloody end the mother and children all met, the way their souls were said to haunt that old hotel for years afterward.
As if to warn me that she intended the same fate for me, Franky reached up and whacked the hatchet into the stairs. The blade sunk into the wood and she yanked it back out. It caused Rose to let out a shriek.
And then Franky reached up and used the hatchet to smash the lightbulb. In an instant, the basement grew dark and full of more shadows, lit only by the stray shafts of sunlight that made its way through the casement window. I turned and ran toward the partition. Tangled in the blankets, I saw something I had not noticed before. When I pulled back the covers, there it was: my journal, wide open and facedown. There was no time to reach for it, so I went to the sliding glass door just beyond. When I tried to pull it open, nothing moved. I looked down and saw a broomstick wedged at the base to keep the door from opening. I pulled and pulled on the broomstick, but she must have nailed it there, because it would not budge.
When I turned, Franky was watching me calmly since she knew I could not get out that way. The only thing I could think to do was to reach for those Tupperware containers. I picked them up and hurled them at her, then stumbled toward the dental chair, where I reached into a nearby drawer, grabbed a handful of old dental tools, and hurled them at her too. None of it did anything to keep her from coming closer still, moving steadily, as though nothing would ever stop her from attacking me with that hatchet.
I ran to the hulking bookshelf, thinking I could pull it down to get into the crawl space. Penny and the cage wobbled on top as I reached around the back and began pulling. The bookshelf rocked a bit, but was too heavy. One by one, I began throwing those old tomes about demons and possessed girls my age from so long ago at Franky. She just swatted them away with the hatchet while I exhausted myself. When I cleared the shelves of most of the contents, at last I pulled again and this time knocked the entire piece of furniture over. That shelf and the remaining books and the old rabbit cage and Penny went toppling down in a loud clatter. I wasted no time pulling my body up into the gaping hole in the cinder-block wall that led to the crawl space. Only once did I glance back to see that Penny had come free from her cage and landed, lifeless and still, on the cement floor while Franky stood there looking momentarily stunned by it all.
I kept moving, crawling into the darkness, the only light a small rectangle in the distance created by an air vent on the other side of the house. My hands were grimy with dirt by the time I reached that light. I put my fingers on the metal grate and pulled. Who knew how many years it had been there. Long enough that it wiggled the slightest bit but refused to come loose.
Behind me, I could hear grunting as Franky lifted herself into the crawl space too. It made me tug on the grate even more frantically. Over the sound of the shhhh, I heard her drawing closer with every second. Soon, she will be upon me, I told myself, and it will all come to an end there in the darkness beneath our house.
With every last bit of strength I could muster, I pulled on that vent until it came loose. Fast as I could, I slid my body out into the daylight. As my feet were about to slip free, I felt Franky grab at them. But I kicked and wriggled loose before she could get hold. And when I was standing, I turned to see her hands reaching out from the vent. It would not stop her, I knew, but I stomped my foot on her fingers. The force caused her to release a loud howl, and another when I stomped again.
As Franky withdrew her hands into the crawl space, I looked around and wondered where to go. That’s when I thought of Dereck on the other side of those woods, slaughtering turkeys in time for Thanksgiving. I began running across the street, toward the path beyond the first of those empty foundations.
But Franky had made her way out of the crawl space by then and started running too. Just as I got to the edge of the foundation, she caught up and shoved me so hard from behind that I found myself falling over the edge. I landed in a murky puddle at the bottom and looked up to see Franky standing up above. My mind felt so dizzy that her image shifted and reshaped itself.
My back, my arms, my legs—all of me—felt in too much agony to move. And yet, I needed to since she was making her way
to the crumbling cement stairs. As I lay there, so many memories and thoughts flashed in my mind: There was Abigail drawing a map on the walls around me the night before she left. There was my sister and me creating the details for our imaginary home over and over again: a window, a painting, a doorway. There were my parents, who had come to this neighborhood and bought the lot across the street, starting their lives out like any other new couple. How could they have known they’d be the only people ever to live here? How could they have known how horribly wrong things would go for them . . . and for all of us?
I tried to get up. The most I managed was to roll over onto my stomach as the murky water splashed around me, soaking my jeans and sneakers. Franky ambled down the stairs, slipping on the rocks but not falling, hurrying to reach me. When she did, she grabbed a hank of my hair and pushed my face into that dirty puddle, holding me there so that I was unable to breathe.
The shhhh in my ear grew louder still, the sound warping itself into something higher pitched and hysterical. And then it became an altogether different sound—it became a kind of tune instead, one I recognized. For the first time, I heard the words as my mother’s lilting voice sang that song she used to hum:
We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing;
He chastens and hastens His will to make known.
The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing.
Sing praises to His Name; He forgets not His own.
Franky lifted my head by the hair and yanked me out of that water. For a few fleeting seconds, I saw the cracked gray walls of the foundation. I saw the fading daylight. I saw the fallen leaves around us. And then she shoved my head down, smashing my face against the cement. In the white light and blistering pain that followed, that shhhh warped itself into the sound of my mother’s voice once more. I heard her there, so close now, singing that old choir song to me:
