by Nick Lake
Simultaneously, the voice said:
“Tell him to **** off, or I take the whole finger next time.”
I put my hands over my ears. My palm was tacky with blood; I could feel it sticking to my hair. I hated cursing. Cursing was what my dad did.
I looked up.
“**** off,” I said to Mr. Fortey.
“What the ******** ******** ******* **** were you thinking? Are you ******* insane?”
That was Dad, when he got home that evening. I told you he would fill the page with stars. He was wearing his restaurant apron, stained with pizza sauce. He never actually made pizza; he always sat with the regulars, being the “face of the place,” as he said. But he had some theory that people liked to see him in the apron, like it made the joint unpretentious.
I didn’t say anything. I had no idea what to say.
“You coast at school when you’re smarter than most of the teachers. You won’t work at the restaurant anymore. You think your mother would be proud of you?”
“You think she’d be proud of you?” I asked.
“Get upstairs to your room,” he said. “No dinner for you.”
I did. What else could I do?
In my room, lying on the bed, I listened for the voice. Nothing.
“Are you there?” I asked.
No answer, but I sensed something. A coiled presence.
“Please, whoever you are, don’t do this,” I said. “Don’t make me … don’t make me get hurt.”
Silence, and I was just turning to look out the window, I don’t know why, just for something to do, when it said—
“It was necessary to ensure your obedience,” said the voice. “You will be punished when you do not do as you are told.”
“Why? Why are you—”
“You are not worthy even to eat the crumbs that are left after others have dined. You are nothing. Do you understand that?”
I didn’t say anything.
“DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT?”
When the voice shouted, I can’t describe it. It was like a demon, right in my ear. Like every horror film you have ever seen, rolled up and squeezed into sound, and piped into your head. I would like to say that I resisted for a few days, that I stood up to it, but I broke straightaway. I thought the devil had possessed me. I really did.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes. But … what do you want from me?”
“Right now,” said the voice, “I want you to clean your room.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Clean it. It’s filthy. Pick up all this ****. These clothes, these books.”
What could I do? I tidied my room. The place was a mess; I will give that to the voice. It was mean, but it wasn’t in that case strictly inaccurate. I cleared the floor, hung up clothes in my closet, put books back on shelves, threw some stuff in the laundry basket.
“Now get the vacuum cleaner.”
“Dad will hear.”
“So? He knows you’re a dirty *****. He’ll be happy you’re cleaning.”
This, actually, might just have been true. I went downstairs quietly all the same and snagged the vacuum cleaner from the space under the stairs. I dragged it back up to my room and sucked up all the dust and dirt, maybe three years’ worth. I found a Tamagotchi under my bed that must have been there for ten years. More, maybe. I wondered for a moment if the little digital creature was still alive, trapped in its little plastic case, desperate for food. For water.
I looked at it: no, the screen was black.
I continued to clean.
The last person to do this, I thought, was probably Mom.
I shook away the thought, like a wasp in my hair.
The voice said something, then, but I couldn’t hear properly over the roar. I pulled the plug on the vacuum cleaner.
“What?” I said.
“Enough,” said the voice. And did I file away even then that the voice hadn’t been able to speak over the noise? I guess maybe I did.
Just then Dad’s voice came from downstairs. “Cassie, what the **** are you doing?”
“Cleaning,” I shouted.
He didn’t seem to have anything to say to that because he went quiet. Later I heard the front door open and close and I guessed he’d gone out to the restaurant. It was weird; he spent so much time in a place I hadn’t even been to since Mom died.
“Now the bathroom,” said the voice. “Scrub your face.”
I went to the bathroom; I scrubbed my face. The voice had me do it with a nail brush.
“Again,” said the voice.
And:
“Again.”
And:
“Again.”
Until my skin was raw and red. I cleaned my teeth—the voice made me do it three times—and then I went back into my room and fell on the bed.
“See?” said the voice. “It’s easier when you obey.”
“Please,” I said. “Please don’t … get me into trouble at school again. My dad … He’ll kill me.” I think, right at that moment, I considered this a real possibility, not just an expression. Things between me and Dad had not been good for a long time. I’ll get to why, later.
“Promise to obey me,” said the voice.
“I promise.”
“Promise again.”
“I promise.”
“You will speak to no one outside school. Only me. And your father.”
I blinked. “I don’t speak to anyone anyway.”
“Good. Then we will see about school.”
I reached for the book I was reading, For Whom the Bell Tolls.
“No,” said the voice.
“No reading?”
“No reading stories.”
I think I shed a tear then.
“Please,” I said.
“No,” said the voice. And then it stopped talking and I closed my eyes and the redness of my eyelid capillaries was bursts of blood and horror in all directions and then at some point I fell asleep.
NOTE:
For the purposes of this account, you can go ahead and assume, even if I don’t write it down, that the last exchange between me and the voice before I fell asleep that night—me saying “please,” the voice saying “no”—happened again and again over the days and weeks that followed.
In fact, you can mentally insert the following between almost every paragraph of the rest of this:
ME: “Please.”
THE VOICE: “No.”
You.
It’s funny, even just typing “you” gives me tingles.
But you don’t appear, not quite yet. Nearly, though. You’re waiting in the wings, ready to come onto the stage, ready to walk into the apartment above our garage, and my life.
It feels weird, thinking about you, before I knew you existed. I wonder what you were doing.
I think I like picturing you standing in the wings.
A hero, listening for his line, his cue to enter.
But a tragic hero. A hero betrayed by me.
The voice let me go to school the next day. In fact it was silent all through my walk there, and all through my classes. I apologized to Mr. Fortey. He said, “That’s okay, Cassie. To be honest it was good to hear your voice in class, for once.”
Huh.
As usual, no one else spoke to me, and neither did the voice. I ate my lunch in the cafeteria alone, at a small table.
Everything almost seemed normal.
The voice didn’t come back till I was walking to the library after school. I think I already had half an idea that I was going to do some reading about the Houdini Killer.
I took the ocean-view route, but avoided the part of the boardwalk where Dad’s restaurant was. The day was warm but there was a very light rain, so light that it seemed not to be falling vertically. It was more a mist that hung everywhere, thick with the smell of the ocean. I was hungry—I’d skipped breakfast to avoid Dad, and the food in the cafeteria sucked. I ducked into a bodega on the corner near the house and grabbed some Skitt
les. I don’t even really like Skittles, but they’re not produced in a factory that handles nuts. Most chocolate bars, even if they don’t have peanuts in them, could kill me.
There was a guy in the store, an insurance salesman or something, I don’t know. Cheap suit, Pulsar watch. A backpack with the suit, which made me think he was staying in a motel while doing whatever business he was doing. Thin; pasty skin, acne scars.
Anyway, when I left the store, he followed not that far behind, having bought a pack of menthol Newports. He lit up as soon as he was on the street. I turned right onto Ocean and he turned right too; I could hear his leather shoes slapping the sidewalk.
That was when the voice came back.
“That man is following you,” it said.
Behind me, the footsteps sped up. I could almost hear traveling-salesman guy’s breath, could almost feel his fingers around my neck.
“He wants to hurt you.”
I picked up the pace, nerves dancing now despite myself. Looking for anything to distract me: the license plates of cars, their models, whether they were out-of-towners or not. That’s a game I used to play with my dad—guess without looking at the state tags whether a car belonged to tourists or not. It’s not hard, though my dad made me figure it out rather than just telling me: the townspeople’s cars are nearly always rusting, from the bottom, because of the ocean air.
“He’s just a guy,” I said to the voice, under my breath, as I passed a Toyota Corolla that by the red stains around its wheel arches belonged to a townie.
“He wants to **** you and then dump your body at sea, for the crabs and fishes to eat.”
“Please stop,” I whispered.
Then I felt a touch on my arm and I swear my heart nearly stopped. I spun around, arms up.
“Whoa, hey,” said the guy. He sounded like a surfer dude, his vowels long and lazy. “Easy there.”
“Say a word to him and I’ll make you pay.”
That was the voice, of course—so I just stood there, looking around me to see if there was anyone passing, anyone who could help me if he did want to hurt me. But there was no one; the street was empty.
The guy peered at me, puzzled. He had washed-out eyes; there was something sad about his whole appearance. He didn’t look like a killer. “I just need directions,” he said. He took a crumpled piece of paper from his jacket. “West Construction, on Fourteenth. The guy in the store didn’t know.”
I did know where that was, and opened my mouth—
“Speak and I’ll make your dad bleed. You speak to no one.”
I shut my mouth again. I turned and started trying to walk away, hoping and hoping he wouldn’t follow, but I was so scared my legs wouldn’t work properly. Then a big guy in a Giants shirt turned the corner and started walking toward me, laughing loudly into his phone. It was as if I’d been in a twilight zone thing where the whole world had stilled and turned into an empty film set, and then he’d come and broken the spell.
Relief shot through me like antifreeze, thawing my limbs, and I hurried off.
I heard Mr. Suit behind me say, “Hey! What’s the deal?”
But I didn’t stop; I kept on walking. I didn’t even feel that guilty. I mean, if you’re a man, you have to figure that stopping a teenage girl for directions on an empty street is stupid, right?
As I kept on walking toward the library, I checked there was no one near me and then said, “Why can’t I speak to people?”
I could feel the voice considering. “You deserve no human contact. You are poison.”
I think I actually gasped. Rivets of pain and horror pinned me to the sidewalk, and I stopped still again. You have to understand, when you’ve felt for a long time that you are dangerous to people, that you are a stain, and then someone else says it, it’s a shock.
“Remember?” said the voice. “Remember what you did?”
“Shut up,” I said. “Just ******* shut up.”
The voice laughed. “Nice way to talk,” it said. “Slap yourself.”
“What?”
“Hard. On the face. So it stings.”
“But—”
“Do it. Now.”
I did it.
My mind floated away from my body, a balloon with its string cut. I was in the sky, with the clouds and the seagulls. Cass, Cass, Cass, they called, and I thought of Procne, her soul put into the body of a nightingale to save her from Tereus, and I wished right then that my soul could turn into a seagull, could fly away into the wet sky, full of hanging raindrops, a screen of shimmering water that was in all places at once.
Then, after I don’t know how long, my breathing started to slow. The world came into focus again, slowly. I started walking. The voice didn’t say anything.
I passed the baseball cages, where Dad and I used to go sometimes when I was young. Mom would come too, but she’d go for coffee at the diner on the corner. She said she didn’t want to be there to see it if a ball gave me a black eye.
Now, the place was boarded shut—a lot of stuff was boarded shut. There’d been the financial crash, in 2008. I was young then, but of course I’d seen how the number of tourists went down every year, how the businesses closed one after another, enough that I had spent most of my life worrying about my dad and the restaurant, even before what happened with my mom. And then there’d been the killings. A lot of people said the town wouldn’t recover until the murderer was stopped. Families with teenage girls didn’t want to come here on vacation, just in case.
That was the theory anyway, to explain why the town was dying.
I kept going. Came to a construction site where a row of old condemned houses had been. This was the other thing, along with stuff being boarded up: a load of projects had been abandoned. There were empty lots up and down the boardwalk and the avenues behind, like the sockets of pulled teeth, the closing bracket of decline. Scaffolding that never came down.
The only new businesses you ever saw: gambling shops, bars, discount stores. The town had a lot of gamblers and drinkers now.
“Are you a ghost?” I asked as we passed a rusting crane, towering above us. “Are you dead?”
The voice didn’t answer.
“Am I going mad? Answer me. Please.”
“No,” said the voice.
(NOTE: Remember me saying this exchange happened a lot?)
“What do you want?” I asked. “What do you want from me?”
“I want justice,” said the voice.
“Justice?”
But the voice was gone; I sensed it withdrawing, the dispassionate eye of some great predator wheeling away, distracted, for now.
Justice? I thought. Justice for what?
Unless … I thought of the foot on the beach.
But no. It was a crazy thought.
I kept walking to the library. This was another piece of vernacular architecture—white and blue, art-deco curves, on a street just one block back from the ocean. In any other town it would have been a tourist destination; it was beautiful. But people just walked past it.
Not me.
I went in, and Jane raised a hand. “Hey, Cass.”
I nodded. The voice had said not to speak to anyone. But Jane didn’t seem to mind; she smiled. I liked her. She wasn’t much older than me, maybe twenty-two. Her hair had a streak of purple in it, and she had a tattoo curling all around and down her arm that she said came from a standard introduction to Russian fairy tales: WHAT WERE THE FAIRY TALES, THEY WILL COME TRUE.
I paused, looking at the tattoo, thinking of fairy tales, and how I wished they would stay that way, just stories. I mean, a voice from nowhere was speaking to me, punishing me. I felt a twinge of sickness, deep in my belly. The fairy tales were coming true. The curse of Cassandra.
I felt, at that moment, truly cursed. Like there was a spell on me, an evil one, and the worst thing was I knew that I deserved it.
“You okay, Cass?” asked Jane.
Cassie, get a grip on yourself, I thought. I nodded aga
in and did my best approximation of a smile. Jane smiled back. “Well, you need anything, you call me,” she said.
I nodded. I did a lot of nodding in those days. Then I was about to look at the fiction shelves when I remembered what the voice had said—no stories. I shook my head, thinking what am I supposed to—
And then I saw a display Jane had made, a freestanding shelf with books on it about murders, most of them relating to the Houdini Killer. In my memory, a shaft of sunshine came through the window at that moment, breaking through the clouds outside, illuminating the books, trapping motes of dust suspended in light.
I went over and took down a slim book called Murder on the Jersey Shore that Jane had put a staff recommended label next to. I carried it over to a table and started reading. It was pretty interesting. There wasn’t much detail about the murders; I mean, with no bodies it would be hard to give any. The focus was mainly on the girls—most of them under twenty—who had been killed. The author was disgusted at the lack of police progress; his whole thing was basically that it was a huge stain of shame on them and on the state of New Jersey and the entire country that these women had been murdered and that because of their profession no one cared.
I care, I thought, half-surprised to realize this.
I looked at my watch. I needed to get home or Dad would be angry, and I didn’t want Dad angry. I put the book back and got ready to leave. As I picked up my thin summer jacket—looked great online; looked awful on me—Jane glanced up. And as I passed her station, she leaned over the counter and pressed a book at me.
“Might cheer you up,” she said.
I glanced at the cover. Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
“It’ll take you to another world,” said Jane. “I don’t think I’ve got you hooked on Murakami yet, have I?”
I shook my head.
“God, I sound like a pusher,” she said. “Like I’m handing out meth.” She laughed.
LOOPHOLE!
I laughed too. I mean, laughing is not speaking, right?
Jane seemed pleased to see me laugh. She tapped the book, nodded, like, this is the answer right here to all your problems, and sat down again. She was nice—she was always nice to me.
