"I don't know. I don't think so."
"You think you saw a ghost?"
"No."
"A hallucination?'
"No."
They were both silent for a moment.
"So what happened while you were there?" Laurie asked finally. "What else do you remember?"
Josh chewed his lower lip, a thinking habit he'd had since childhood. "I remember being scared. I remember a long hallway. With dark wood and red velvet. Like a Victorian whorehouse. I remember not being able to sleep because I kept hearing weird noises. A tapping.
Like someone was knocking on my door, trying to get in. I remember that I thought your parents didn't really seem happy to see us. Like we'd come at a bad time or something. Like they were fighting but had to pretend to get along because they had company." He met her eyes. "And I remember that your dad got really mad at me because I was late for breakfast. I was tired and Mom and Dad let me oversleep, and your dad went crazy. My parents and your parents almost got in a screaming match, and I felt really guilty. I'd already woken up and come downstairs to eat, and I heard them fighting and I started crying. Mom and Dad tried to comfort me, but your dad said something like, 'That's what he deserves.' " Josh's voice had fallen almost to a whisper.
"Your dad scared me. I didn't like him."
Laurie hugged her brother. "I don't think I would've either." She smiled at him. "I'm glad Mom and Dad adopted me."
"I am too."
She pulled away. "What else?"
"That's it, really. I think we did buy some blankets from them, although I'm not sure that's why we really went over there."
"Then what?"
He shrugged. "We left. Continued on with our vacation or our travels or whatever it was. We finally settled in Thripp's Crossing, and a couple months later, you showed up."
"I just showed up?"
"Well no, not literally. Mom and Dad left. I stayed with Mrs. Kylie, and when they came back they had you."
"They never told you why? Never explained why you suddenly had a new sister?"
"Nope."
Laurie sighed. "I don't remember any of that at all. I
wish I did, but it's all a big blank."
Josh handed her back the photo. "I never put two and two together before this. I never realized that those people were your real parents. I remembered them, I remembered the trip, but I don't remember you there, so I never connected it. When I saw that picture, though .. .
something clicked."
"For me too." She grabbed another handful of photographs out of the box. "Let's see if we can find some other ones."
"There's one more thing," Josh said slowly.
Laurie looked up, and she realized that she was already holding her breath.
"I've never told this to anyone before, and I don't know if it really happened or if I just dreamed it or . . ."
He trailed off.
"What?"
"I might've just imagined it."
"What?"
"I think I watched your mother kill a lamb."
She shook her head, confused. "I don't ... I don't understand. You watched her slaughter a lamb?"
"No. The lamb was in my room. I don't know why. It wasn't night, it was daytime, but it was always dark inside that house and there wasn't much difference. I'd just come in from outside and I was going to ... I don't know, get a comic book out of my suitcase or something. I ran upstairs as fast as I could because I wanted to get back down to where Mom and Dad were as quickly as possible, and there was this lamb in my bed. Just standing there on the mattress. The covers were pulled down, and it was just . . . baaing. It couldn't really move because it was heavy and the mattress wasn't that stable, and it looked at me and cried.
"And then your mom came out of my closet and told me she was sorry, the lamb wasn't supposed to be in my room, and she lifted it off the bed and . . . slammed it onto the ground."
Laurie could not believe she'd heard right. "What?"
"She lifted the lamb over her head, like a weight lifter or something, and threw it down on the floor as hard as she could and . . . killed it. It didn't move, didn't make any noise, and she picked it up and smiled at me and apologized again and carried it out of the room. There was blood dribbling out of its mouth, but the carpeting was dark red already and you couldn't really see where it dripped. Like I said, I don't know if that was a nightmare and I imagined it or if it really happened, but I
never told Mom and Dad and I never said a word about it to anyone until now."
Laurie picked up the photo again, looked at the face of the grim woman who had been her mother.
She could see her throwing a lamb down hard enough to kill it.
"I dreamed about Dawn and a butcher. You saw my mom slaughter a lamb. This is just too close for comfort."
Josh nodded. "I agree."
"I want to see the house," Laurie said. "I want to go there. You said you'd recognize the name of the town if you saw it?"
"I just need something to jog my memory."
"Let's find a map, then."
"All right." Josh looked at her. "Let's do it."
They left before dawn, and it was still only midmorning by the time they reached the town of Pine Creek.
The country here was beautiful. Wooded foothills, redwoods, the snowcapped Sierras high to the east. The two-lane road wound through valleys and skirted canyons, twin borders of green leafy ferns hemming in both sides, low gray clouds providing a ceiling to the forest, light mist shrouding the shadowed areas between the trees.
But Laurie barely registered the scenery flying by the windows. She kept trying to remember exactly how her parents had been killed. They'd been murdered--of that she was fairly sure--but the details remained hazy, the specifics unspecific, and try as she might, she could not mentally reconstruct the events that had led to her adoption.
She had only a vague feeling that the girl, Dawn, was involved somehow and that the grim couple in the photograph whom she knew to be her biological parents had died a horrible, gruesomely unnatural death.
It all came back to her when she saw the house.
They drove out of Pine Creek and down a narrow winding road. Josh said nearly everything had changed in the years since he'd been there. There'd been no McDonald's in town then, no Wal-Mart, no Holiday Inn, and the condos that had sprung up on seemingly every side of Pine Creek had certainly not been there.
But he grew quiet as they drove into the countryside, as they moved farther away from town. He recognized this road, he said. He recognized this area. And Laurie could tell from his tone of voice that he felt the same oppressive dread she did as the car sped beneath the overhanging branches of the trees.
They drove up and down side roads, pulling in and backing out of long dirt drives, and after an hour or so, through this process of trial and error, they finally found it.
The house.
It looked exactly as they both remembered. It had not been repainted or refurbished. It had not deteriorated or gone to seed. It looked just as it had all those years ago.
And everything came back to her.
It was as if an entirely new door had been opened in her mind. Memories suddenly flooded in: knowledge, emotions, events, sensations. Things so thoroughly forgotten that she'd been unaware she'd ever known them, their presence in her mind having left not even a residual trace.
She recalled the meal rituals, the way they'd all held hands and hummed before eating breakfasts that corresponded precisely to the dawn, dinners that always accompanied sundown.
She remembered Mr.Billington , the man who lived with them, the man who was supposed to have been her father's friend but of whom her father had always seemed afraid and who apparently had no intention of ever leaving.
She remembered the animals. The way her mother had incorporated their unpredictable disappearances and sometimes terrifying reappearances into children's stories designed to make her feel that this was normal and not something
of which she should be afraid.
She remembered her parents' deaths.
She'd been playing with Dawn, not in the woods, where Dawn wanted to play, but in the barn, which was also supposed to be off-limits. They were practicing their marriage ceremony, Dawn as usual taking the role of both minister and groom. For rings, they had Coke can pull-tabs and were wearing wreaths they'd woven from weeds. Laurie pretended to be enjoying the game, but there was something unsettling about it all, about Dawn's solemnity and almost ferocious dedication to strict marriage tradition.
Dawn had just pronounced them husband and wife and had given herself permission to kiss the bride when they heard a softly muttered "Shit!" from the yard outside.
"Hide!" Dawn ordered.
Laurie hurriedly ducked into the tool closet, closing the door. It was her father, and she knew he'd take the strap to her if he caught her in the barn after he'd specifically told her she was never to go near it.
She expected Dawn to follow her or to find a hiding place of her own, but her friend stood her ground as the big door opened and her father entered.
"Hello, Ralph," Dawn said.
Ralph! She dared to call him by his first name?
Against all odds, her father didn't seem to mind.
Didn't seem to even notice. To Laurie's shock and surprise, her father chuckled, and in a voice more tender than any she'd ever heard him use with her mother or herself, he said, "Dawn."
There was whispering then, whispering and low murmuring, and what sounded like her father's belt buckle being unfastened.
Was Dawn going to get the strap?
Laurie knew it was dangerous, knew she should remain still and quiet, but she could not resist, she had to know what was going on, and she pushed open the door a fraction of an inch and peeked through the crack.
She didn't know what she'd expected to see, but it was definitely not this.
This was something she could not have thought up in her wildest imaginings.
Her father stood there, in the center of the barn, and his pants were pulled down. Dawn was kneeling before him and his hands were on her head and his peepee was in her mouth.
Laurie grimaced with distaste, not crying out in disgust only because of the fear that now filled her completely.
She did not know what was going on out there, she did not understand what was happening, but it made her sick inside and she felt like throwing up. Holding her fingers against the door, she slowly let it close.
She was suddenly certain that Dawn had known this would happen, had known her father was coming to the barn.
And had wanted her to see it.
The tool closet had another door at its opposite end, one that led outside to the yard, and carefully, quietly, Laurie inched toward it, careful not to touch or disturb the scythes and machetes, rakes and clippers hanging on the walls. Her father was saying something, murmuring in a low soothing voice, and she did not want to hear it, she did not want to know what it was.
There was no lock on the rough wooden door, no catch, but the hinges were squeaky, and she pushed the door open slowly, slowly, trying to prevent the escape of a single sound. When there was enough room between the door and the jamb for her to sneak out, she slid through and, just as slowly, closed the door once again.
She hurried across the open yard and was almost to the house when she saw her mother emerging from the garage, carrying what looked like the can of gasoline her father used for the tractor. Laurie was about to call out, but she changed her mind when she saw the look of grim determination and single-minded purpose on her mother's face.
The feelings of shock and disgust within her were replaced by a feeling of dread, the overwhelming sense that her mother knew what was going on in the barn and was going to do something about it.
Laurie wanted to hide, to run upstairs to her room and pretend that none of this was going on and play with her dolls until her mother called her for lunch, but she knew that ignoring what was happening would not make it go away, and she was not at all sure that her mother would even be making lunch today.
She was not sure that her mother--or her father-- would still be alive come lunchtime.
She had no idea where that came from, but it grew from a fear into a certainty as she saw her mother stride over to the barn and throw open the big door.
Laurie dashed back across the trampled grass. Her mother had run into the barn and opened up the can and was furiously splashing gasoline over the bodies of Dawn and her father, now on the dirt floor without their clothes. Her father was sputtering angrily, yelling sounds that were supposed to be words, but Dawn was laughing, and it was that high tinkling musical sound that scared Laurie more than anything else.
"No!" Laurie cried. "Stop!" But no one seemed to hear her, and her mother tossed the gasoline can aside and pulled out a matchbook and lit a match. Screaming crazily, she threw the lit match onto the gasoline covered bodies.
"You bastard!" she yelled. "She's mine! She's mine!"
There was a huge rush of flame, a sucking explosion that simultaneously drew in air and expelled agonizing heat.
"Mom!" Laurie cried.
Her mother pushed her aside and, stone-faced, strode through the door and across the yard toward the house.
Laurie saw Dawn's hair catch fire, the skin of her face darken and crinkle. Her father's back blistered and peeled open, his blood bubbling black the second it hit the flames. They were both writhing and rolling on the dirt, trying to get away, but the fire was not around them, it was on them, and there was no way they could escape from it.
Laurie ran around to the side of the barn, got the hose, turned it on full blast, and squirted water on the fire, but it didn't do any good, didn't make a dent, and she ran sobbing back to the house to tell Mr. Billington to call the firemen, knowing even as she did so that they would not arrive in time to save her father, Dawn, or the barn.
"Mr. Billington !" she screamed. "Mr. Billington !"
Her father's friend was nowhere to be seen, but her mother was lying on her back on the floor of the kitchen, her skirts hiked up.
With Dawn.
The girl was naked, but she was not burned and not dead, and the shock of seeing her here, alive, only seconds after watching her burn in the barn, overrode for a second the shock of what was happening.
Then Laurie noticed what was going on.
"Yes," her mother was saying, and Dawn's head was between her legs, moving slowly around. Laurie screamed at the top of her lungs, a desperate cry for help from someone, anyone.
All of a sudden, as her mother moaned in pleasure, the girl became a goat, arms turning to legs, gray hair growing over skin, and she started bucking, shoving her head forward with animal roughness, the horns spearing through the bare flesh of her mother's stomach, as her mother's expression of happiness and bliss changed instantly to one of horror and agony.
"Mom!" Laurie screamed.
For the first time since seeing her mother in the yard with the can of gasoline, her mom seemed to hear her, recognize her, acknowledge her. She was screaming in pain, trying to push the bucking goat away, but her eyes were hopeless, sad and despairing, filled with agonized regret, and they kept darting between Laurie and the door, and Laurie took the hint and ran.
She did not know where to go. The barn fire had not spread as she'd expected but seemed to have gone out, and that seemed ominous. Laurie ran unthinkingly, away from the barn, away from the house. Part of her wanted to find Mr.Billington , but another part of her, a deeper truer part, knew that he was somehow involved in this, so she did not call his name, did not call out anything, but simply ran.
She could not go into the woods--Laurie knew that much--but she was afraid to stay near the house, so she headed through the trees that paralleled the drive, heading toward the road. She heard Mr.Billington call her name, from somewhere far behind her, but she kept running.
She slept that night in a ditch by the side of the road, and the next da
y made it into Pine Creek, where she stumbled into the police station and blurted out everything that had happened.
No one believed her, of course. Or at least they didn't believe all of it, but they found the bodies of her parents --her father's charred corpse, her mother's gutted form--and Laurie spent several weeks in a foster home until one day, somehow, some way, Josh's parents showed up and took her away to live permanently with them.
Laurie glanced over at Josh and, not for the first time, she was grateful that she'd been adopted. What had happened to her real parents was terrible, horrifying, but as emotionally scarring as it had been, she was aware of the fact that she'd been better off without them, better off away from the house, better off with Josh and his parents.
Their parents.
Yes. Their parents. No matter who had sired her, they had raised her and it was their love, their values, their influence that had shaped her into the woman she was today.
"Are you all right?" Josh asked, looking over at her.
Not trusting herself to speak, she nodded.
Josh parked the car in front of the garage. Laurie got out silently, looked to her right at the barn, to her left at the house. Nothing had changed in all those years. It was as if the place had remained frozen in time, waiting for her return.
She thought of Dawn. Shivered.
"Where do we start?" Josh asked, squinting against the early afternoon sun. He stared up at the house.
"Damn. This place is as creepy as I remember it."
Laurie smiled wryly. "Tell me about it."
She walked toward the front of the house, saw in real life the angle they'd seen in the photograph.
"It is a place of power," Josh said.
She ignored him. She wasn't in the mood for metaphysical chats, and though she wasn't exactly sure what she hoped to find here or what she hoped to accomplish, she knew she wanted to get it all done this afternoon.
She did not want to be anywhere near the house when night fell.
Taking a deep breath, Laurie walked forward, gravel crunching beneath her feet. She reached the porch stairs, and it was as if her body were on automatic pilot. She grabbed a corner of the banister, leaned on it, then trailed her fingers along the wooden railing as she walked the four steps. It was the way she'd walked up these stairs as a child, and though the movements were instinctive, she was acutely aware of them, and she found it disconcerting to think that even though her mind had forgotten about the place for many years, her body apparently had not.
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