I remember that very clearly, mostly because it was so odd. Yes, I was Catholic, more or less, but that just meant that Aunt Kate had saint cards shoved in the edges of the bathroom mirrors and that we went to Mass on Easter. (We hadn’t managed Christmas Mass in years.) I had never been confirmed, never gone to confession, couldn’t say a Hail Mary if my life depended on it.
I wasn’t offended. I wasn’t even angry. It didn’t make sense. Grandma might as well have yelled at me for being from Pennsylvania, or for having wavy hair, or for walking upright instead of on all fours.
I took the phone away from my ear and stared at it, baffled. I could hear her still talking, tinny and distant through the receiver. Then—this was in the days of landlines—I set it back in the cradle and shook my head.
If you think that I’m harboring some deep resentment here, I’m really not. I’d called because Aunt Kate had said, somewhat doubtfully, that I should. I hadn’t thought about her in years. She didn’t do holidays. She was more like a particularly unpleasant teacher remembered from my grade school years than a relative.
She’d obviously wanted nothing to do with me. So it had seemed the polite thing to do was to oblige.
I don’t know. All I know is that she never asked for anything. Maybe it’s genetic in my family. Dad never asked for anything, so now that he had, I’d move heaven and earth if I needed to.
And that’s why I was here, in this horrible house stuffed full of baby dolls and ancient Tupperware and mouse-stained clothes, because he’d asked.
Perhaps I am a terrible person, but give me what little credit I deserve.
I was here.
* * *
The second door was not as viscerally unsettling. Not many things could be. Even a roomful of taxidermy would be less creepy, and Grandma wasn’t into taxidermy.
Nevertheless, it was a sad room, and that’s because it was her bedroom.
There was a road through the piles of boxes. The bed itself was covered in old clothes and newspapers, but I could see a deep hollow where she’d slept, the sheets bunched up around it. It hadn’t come out, even after two years of absence. Clothes lay draped over every surface, interspersed with boxes of coat hangers. The closet had a folding door that had come off its track, but was held in place by a tower of shoe boxes.
There was a large box next to the door, unopened. The outside proclaimed it as a foolproof closet-organization method. The bottom was stained where water had soaked into it, or maybe it was mouse urine. I made a noise in my throat—I couldn’t tell you whether it was a laugh or a sob—and I shut the door again.
I decided that if the third door didn’t work, I’d sleep on the couch. I could have cleared off that bed, but it would have been like sleeping in my grandmother’s grave. Even though she’d died hundreds of miles away, in a home, with my father checking on her all the time, I felt her presence in that room.
If she was a ghost, she would be an unquiet one.
The third door took some work to get to. I nearly abandoned the attempt—if the hallway was this clogged, the room was probably wall-to-wall boxes of Ziploc bags and commemorative plates.
I started to push the boxes out of the way but felt a stab of guilt. Moving boxes around inside the house wasn’t going to help. So I picked up each one and dragged it into the living room.
One was full of coat hangers. That went in the back of the truck immediately. One was full of papers, but a quick look told me they were all coupons and PennySaver mailings turning yellow-gray with age. I riffled it briefly, but no stock certificates fell out.
Well, a woman can dream.
There was a stack of empty shoe boxes all wedged together, which went out. One of the bottom boxes had a shoe. It was not a very good shoe.
At the very bottom was a carpet steamer. Thankfully it had wheels, because I could barely lift the thing. I dropped it on my foot getting it down the porch steps, and Bongo was treated to the sound of me swearing a blue streak.
“Hrooof!” he said.
I ignored this commentary on my language and wrestled the carpet steamer into the back of the truck at great personal cost to my back.
At last the door was clear. It stuck when I tried to open it, as if it had not opened for a long time, but I wedged my foot against the bottom and pushed.
It swung inward.
Into a nearly empty room.
After my first, astonished glance, it became obvious that the room wasn’t quite empty. It had a bed and a nightstand and a chair. There was a painting over the bed and a few framed photographs on the walls.
But compared to the rest of the house, it seemed absolutely bare. The hardwood floor had a thick layer of dust, but no boxes piled in it. The mice had come in, found nothing of interest, and left again.
“Oh…,” I said out loud. “Oh, right.”
It was Cotgrave’s room. Of course.
He had died so long ago. I suppose I had thought that she would clear it out, use it as storage. And yet it was empty. Sheets had been turned back on the bed, as if someone had just gotten up. Except for the layer of dust, it could have been abandoned only an hour before.
It hadn’t occurred to me as a child that my stepgrandfather’s den had been his bedroom as well. That he had not been sleeping in a bed with my grandmother when he died.
I wonder if they started that way, or if he moved out eventually.
Well. The vagaries of Grandma’s second marriage were not my concern, and probably none of my business.
“But it does make my life easier,” I told the absent Cotgrave. (It was easier to talk out loud. It made some sound in that house, which was much too quiet, except for mice and Bongo working on his chew toy on the porch. I really needed to buy a radio or something.) “Replace the sheets and a normal person can sleep in here.”
I went to the window and opened it. The wood had swollen, but after some banging, much like the door, I managed to push it open. The screens were still intact.
Bongo sat up and came over to the window. He licked the screen and seemed puzzled that it tasted like wire.
“You’re not smart,” I told him. He wagged his tail and licked the screen again, on the off chance that it had become tasty.
I opened the nightstand drawer. It was full of the usual detritus that accumulate in drawers—old tweezers, broken nail clippers, the warranty for a piece of electronics that had stopped functioning years ago. There was a black book on top, with an elastic ribbon holding it closed.
I flipped the book open. It was probably just an address book, but just in case there were any hundred-dollar bills tucked between the pages…
There weren’t. It was full of handwriting instead.
I almost threw it away. I had the mouth of the garbage bag open and was moving my hand toward it when a phrase jumped out at me.
She has hid the book.
I had to read it twice to make sure I was right the first time. Whoever wrote it had neat-enough handwriting, but it was tightly slanted and the s’s and the a’s looked nearly identical.
That’s wrong, I thought. It’s either she hid the book or she has hidden the book. Pick one and commit.
Like I said, I’m a freelance editor. The Chicago Manual of Style is tattooed on my soul. I’m pretty lenient about these things when editing fiction—show me a character who uses “whom” correctly and I’ll show you a real prat—but she has hid the book? No.
The next line was I’m afraid she might have destroyed it, but there are no fresh ashes in the burn barrel. I went through the trash, but it was not there. It must be hidden. I asked her where it was, and she asked had I lost something, but there was that look in her eyes like when she hid my keys.
I sat down on the bed. Good God, was this Cotgrave’s? And was she my grandmother?
I could easily believe that Grandma would hide something and take pleasure in the other person looking for it. There’s mean and then there’s pathological. Once you start calling up people to laugh when
their dog dies, you’re way over on the pathology side of the equation.
On the other hand, Cotgrave had been getting on in years himself, and lots of old people get paranoid that other people are stealing things from them. I couldn’t swear that Grandma was doing any such thing just because she was a nasty piece of work in other regards.
I flipped to the next page.
Still can’t find the book. Checked all the shelves. Shades of the Purloined Letter.
I won’t leave without it. It’s the last I’ve got of Ambrose.
Cotgrave was clearly a trusting soul. He’d left the journal in his nightstand, and if Grandma was hiding his stuff, you’d think he’d realize she was probably reading this. Poor guy.
I turned the page again. They were old and stuck together, so I had to tug my glove off to do it.
It’s in my head again, like a song that keeps replaying. When that happens, I read it in the book, and that makes it stop, but now I can’t.
This must be what going mad feels like.
I made faces like the faces on the rocks, and I twisted myself about like the twisted ones, and I lay down flat on the ground like the dead ones.
That seems to have helped. Maybe if I read it written here, it’ll stop.
At first I thought that this was the moment when it all went bad. If I had shoved the book in the garbage bag before I read that, maybe it would have come out differently. If my stupid editor brain hadn’t kicked in when I had opened the journal, maybe I would have been able to walk away.
I can see myself, when I think of this: sitting on the bed, one leg tucked up under myself, the garbage bag draped over my other knee. I see myself from the outside, like a stranger—woman in her midthirties, gaining weight no matter how often she takes the dog out jogging. Wavy brown hair, with a few strands stuck to her forehead and dust smudged across her face.
And in her hand, the little black journal.
But now, writing this, I think maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. I was there, and I was not going to leave until I had cleaned the place out. Maybe everything would have happened anyway, and I would have had no map to guide me—even as poor and addled a map as Cotgrave’s journal proved to be.
At the time, though, I had no presentiment. I read that passage and what I thought was, Ugh! That’s kind of creepy! Twisted myself about like the twisted ones… yeesh.
It was a weird thing to find written in a book by an old man who liked cribbage and read the newspaper for hours a day.
“It’s in my head again, like a song that keeps replaying.…” Sounds like he’s talking about an earworm. Poor soul.
Lord knows I’d had songs stuck in my head before. TV theme songs were particularly bad. One time I wandered around for nearly two weeks humming the theme to Cheers, until I had to sit down and actually watch an episode or go barking mad.
This didn’t seem much like a song. Then again, I’ve known people who get poetry stuck in their head. My college roommate used to recite Poe’s “Eldorado,” and I don’t think she even knew she was doing it sometimes.
Of course, she was an English major.
I didn’t have time to keep reading a journal—I had a house to clean. I set it down on the nightstand and finished emptying the drawers.
The closet was as bare as the rest of room. A few suits of clothes. A pair of bedroom slippers and a pair of scuffed leather shoes. Three Time Life books on World War II, but that probably didn’t mean anything. Books on World War II appear spontaneously in any house that contains a man over a certain age. I believe that’s science.
On the far side of the top shelf was an ancient manual typewriter. I groaned. It had to weigh a ton. Just looking at it made my back hurt. I was going to have to get on a chair, lift it out at shoulder height, and probably drop it on my foot in the process.
Well, that was a concern for another day. I stuffed everything I could lift into the garbage bags, stripped the bed, and hauled the bag out to the truck.
“C’mon, Bongo. Let me show you the new digs.…”
Bongo seemed cautiously pleased. He got up on the bed and made putting the sheets on extremely difficult, anyway.
I resigned myself to the red Christmas-tree sheets smelling like hound. Most of my stuff does.
“For my next trick,” I told him, “I’m going to see if I can’t excavate a counter in the kitchen.”
He accompanied me to the kitchen, discovered that I wasn’t doing anything that would result in dog treats, and slumped to the linoleum with a tragic sigh. Unfortunately, there was only one bare patch of linoleum, so I was stepping over him every time I turned around.
“You’re not helping.”
He let out another sigh. Occasionally my dog sounds like he is deflating.
I tried to sort Tupperware for about five minutes. Then I gave up and just swept the stacks into garbage bags. Bags full of wadded-up plastic bags got the same treatment. (I can see the reason for keeping plastic bags around, but my grandmother had more than her own body weight in the things.)
I tried to think of a song to sing. I really had to get a radio for in here. The house was too quiet.
And I twisted myself around like the twisted ones.…
That wasn’t a song.
I dismissed it and started the first song I could think of, which was one we sang at camp approximately a thousand years ago.
“I woke up Sunday morning, I looked up on the wall, the beetles and the bedbugs were having a game of ball.…”
Bongo let out another sigh from the bottom of his toes.
I worked my way through the vast number of verses, including the one about dying in a sewer that the counselors wouldn’t let us sing, and cleared a counter back to something that was probably a toaster. Corrosion had sealed it to the countertop. There was a fork sticking out of it, which seemed like a generally bad idea. Fortunately, the electrical cord had rotted through, so the toaster was harmless. I was a little more concerned about the cord that was still sticking out of the wall socket.
There were two microwaves stacked on top of each other. One looked to be made of plastic and one looked like it was made to withstand the atomic bomb.
Somehow I got about half the kitchen counters cleaned without electrocuting myself. The metal microwave was incredibly heavy. I made a mental note to go rent a handcart. I also uncovered a mouse nest and about twenty containers of ant poison, which sealed my resolve not to let Bongo run around loose in the house.
I opened the refrigerator. It looked very dirty, but the air inside was cold. I dithered over scrubbing it out—did it matter? It was ancient, and I was here to throw things away—but eventually decided that I didn’t want my food to sit in a fridge that was covered in stains and mold.
It occurred to me, somewhat belatedly, that there’s a disease you get from mold that lives in closed-up refrigerators. But I was down on my knees wielding little green scrubby pads, and whatever it was, I was probably thoroughly exposed. So, y’know. Oh well.
By the time I finished with the fridge, it was getting dark. I got back in the truck and drove into town for a drive-through meal eaten in the car. Bongo got another illicit cheeseburger. I would have to pick up groceries tomorrow, but the idea was exhausting.
We went back… well, home is the wrong word. We went back, anyway. I’d left the porch light on and most of the lights in the downstairs. From outside, it looked almost like a normal house with warm light spilling through the windows. Moths banged at the porch light.
I sat in the car so long, looking at the house, that Bongo got bored and began chewing on his nails. So I sighed and pulled the keys out of the ignition and grabbed my suitcase out of the back seat. “C’mon, boy. Let’s go.”
Clutter aside, the house seemed solid enough. Probably wasn’t going to fall down on my head. If I could just clear the junk out, we could put it on the market. Dad had made noises about splitting the money with me, and I sure wasn’t in a position to turn money down.
; I told myself all this three or four times as I slogged up the steps, Bongo yanking at the leash.
3
Cotgrave’s room still smelled of dust and mice. I thumped my suitcase down on the floor, dug out toiletries, considered the state of the bathroom, and decided to brush my teeth tomorrow morning with bottled water.
I lay down on the bed. The mattress had a body-shaped dent in it that I didn’t like to think about much. Still, it was probably better than the couch.
Bongo leapt up on the bed and arranged himself in a neat ball. Then he farted.
“Gaaaah!”
I made yet another mental note, this time to buy even more scented candles. Perhaps incense.
Perhaps a gas mask.
I retrieved the scented candle from the kitchen. This required me to turn on every light in the hall, partly so I didn’t trip over anything, partly because I didn’t like the shapes the piles of boxes made in the dark.
I checked the front-door lock several times, just in case.
Since I had to keep the door to the bedroom closed, the smell hadn’t dissipated. I was going to have to burn the candle and stay awake while I did it so that the whole place didn’t go up in flames.
I had brought my e-reader. That would have been useful if I’d had any Wi-Fi to download books with. I’d finished my last one over lunch. For lack of anything better to do, I picked up my stepgrandfather’s journal and began to read.
The pages weren’t dated, so I had no idea how much time had passed between entries. He had changed pens, though, whatever that meant.
Still haven’t found where she hid the book. Should never have married her.
(No shit, I thought.)
She had that power, though. They didn’t come around her. Needed that. Didn’t realize what she was like.
I had no idea who they were that didn’t come around her. Probably Cotgrave’s family, but really, it could have been anybody. Grandma had that effect on people.
The Twisted Ones Page 3
