* * *
I went into town to drop off the contents of the closet and get coffee and Internet. The Goth barista was on a tear about a woman who had brought in her baby and tried to change it on the coffee table. “I told her no and she just kept saying it was no big deal!” she said, waving her hands in the air. “It’s a big deal to me! It’s incredibly unhygienic! I mean, if you want to bring a kid in here to get coffee, that’s fine, whatever, but don’t put their poopy diapers on my table!”
I looked at the table that I had been about to set my laptop on and took a step back.
“It’s fine,” she said, collapsing over the counter. “I hosed it down with bleach. I hosed everything down with bleach. Do you want coffee?”
“Yes, please,” I said meekly, hoping that it did not come with bleach.
She filled a coffee mug and slid it across the counter. “How’s the house coming?”
“Horrific,” I said, feeling vaguely pleased that she had remembered who I was. Small towns. I’d forgotten what that was like. “She had a baby doll collection. There’s a whole room full of these awful dolls.”
“Ewwww,” said the barista, which was strangely gratifying to hear. She wrinkled her nose.
“Yeah.” I opened my laptop. “I had all these thoughts about donating them to needy kids or something, but I think the needy kids have probably suffered enough. I’m just going to take them to the dump.”
“Probably for the best.”
I passed a pleasant afternoon in the coffee shop, feeling… normal. I was a perfectly normal freelancer in a nice little coffee shop in a nice little town, doing my job trying to convince authors that semicolons were their friend. My problems were normal problems, like chasing invoices. Other than having to go outside and close the sunroof on the truck when it started to drizzle, everything was fine. (Bongo was napping in the back seat and did not notice that he was getting rained on.)
Eventually, though, I had to go home. The coffee shop closed at five, and there was still time to get a load of dead plastic babies ready to go to the dump. Note to self, do not call them that when you see Frank.
I swung by the hardware store and bought even more gloves. I got dark gray work gloves this time, with serious-looking straps and buckles and rubber guards over the knuckles. These were gloves for handling a doll collection.
The doll room itself was… not as bad as it could have been, honestly. I turned up the radio and began hauling out clear plastic bins. I didn’t have to actually open them to see what was in them, which made it go a lot faster. A quick look through jumbled jointed limbs, no typed manuscript wedged in anybody’s diaper, no green book covers, bin is done and can be shoved into the living room.
Once I had moved out all the bins, things slowed down. I had to grab loose dolls and shove them into trash bags. The gloves helped. As long as I had the gloves, I didn’t have to touch them. The gloves made me invincible.
I stayed invincible right up until one of the dolls batted its eyelashes at me.
I let out a yell like I’d been shot and flung the doll across the room. Bongo leapt to his feet, baying in a panic.
The doll landed head downward, facing me. The eyelids slowly clacked back open, aided by gravity.
Oh. Oh. It’s just one of those stupid dolls that open and close their eyes. Right. Okay.
I picked it up gingerly and shook it back and forth. The eyelids moved in time.
Yeah. Yeah, okay.
Bongo stood in the doorway, stiff legged, making sounds he usually reserved for the UPS guy.
“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s okay, buddy. Just… a little more on edge than I should be…” I dropped the doll into the trash bag and cinched it closed. Let it bat its eyelashes at Frank at the dump.
I went into the kitchen and turned the radio up as loud as it could go. The announcer introduced herself as Elaine Rogers and told me about how much they depended on my support to bring them all the great programming I enjoyed. Her cohost made a pun that would have needed a major overhaul to achieve the level of a dad joke.
If I did not want to be listening to Pledge Week for the rest of my life, I was going to have to finish clearing this goddamn house.
Bongo cocked his head and gave a last “Hrrrr-ufff,” although whether it was a commentary on dolls or the radio, I couldn’t say.
I had taken the precaution of buying a bottle of wine. I poured a glass—still wearing my work gloves—and went back to work.
* * *
A couple of days went by, and I’d tell you if anything interesting happened, but it really didn’t. We got into a routine. I’d get up, hit the on switch on the coffeemaker, take Bongo out to sniff around and pee on things, go inside, drink the coffee, eat instant oatmeal, and drag trash out to the truck. When the truck was full, I went into town, dropped it off with Frank, and went to the coffee shop. I then had more coffee, worked on edits, responded to e-mails, and pretended I was a normal human being who wasn’t spending the evening sleeping in a dead man’s bed with a flatulent coonhound. I would eat lunch. I would come home, take Bongo for a walk, load up another round of trash, take it to Frank, go back home, throw junk in bags, listen to public radio, and either eat ramen or (increasingly) go across the road and eat with Foxy, who was horrified by my ramen habit.
“Your momma wouldn’t let you eat that,” she said. “It’s deep-fried, you know.”
“We’re having deep-fried pickles,” I said.
“Pickles is pickles. It’s a vegetable. It’s practically health food.”
I swirled my breaded, deep-fried pickle slice in ranch dressing and did not argue the point.
I got to know the trio at the commune pretty well. Tomas was the responsible one. He did jobs, he said, helped out some farmers here and there. “Ah, you know… hog-cutting season, snip-snip…” He made vague hand gestures. I didn’t ask for details.
Skip had a sly sense of humor and didn’t talk much, but when he told stories, everybody listened.
He didn’t come to dinner one night, and when I asked, Foxy shook her head.
“Bad brain day,” she said. “Skip’s got the bipolar thing. He’s got meds for it and he takes ’em real good, but he still has bad days. I’ll take him out a plate later.”
“He does real well,” said Tomas, almost defensively. “He’s a real good potter, hey?”
“Relax, Tomas, she didn’t say anything.”
“Friend of mine in college was bipolar,” I said, and watched Tomas visibly relax. “It’s cool. They didn’t have the good meds back then, you know? She’s doing a lot better now.”
“Amazing the stuff they’ve got these days,” said Foxy, popping a fried pickle into her mouth. “But they still can’t do shit about a hangover.” She poured out more bourbon, possibly determined to be a viable test subject.
After dinner at the commune, I went back home. Bongo would find something outdoors to pee on, and we’d be in bed by nine-thirty or ten.
I still hadn’t found Cotgrave’s typed manuscript. It had to be in the house somewhere—my grandmother would never have thrown it out—but it wasn’t in the doll room or in her bedroom. I was starting to worry that it was upstairs. I couldn’t handle the thought of upstairs. Every time I looked at the stairs, I just looked away again. The downstairs had been so bad—nine days of work and I was only about two-thirds done—and the idea that there was another floor left to go was more than I could take.
I did clean out her bedroom more easily than I’d thought. I’d worried I would be sad, but I was still angry over the way she’d treated Cotgrave, and the anger carried me a long way. I kept the radio on loudly, and every time I would look at the pitiful pile of junk and start to feel melancholy, Elaine Rogers would remind me of why I valued public radio.
Honestly, that Pledge Week had gone on so long that I no longer really believed in it. One of these days I was going to drive out to the radio station and it’d be an empty field with an old man saying “Rogers?
She’s been dead nigh forty years! Ain’t no coffee mugs here!” and there I’d be, haunted by the most benign ghosts known to man.
Anyway, the closet in my grandmother’s room was all old-lady clothes. I hauled the whole pile out and dumped it in the Goodwill donation area and drove away before they could associate me with the bags.
There was also an underwear drawer. I emptied that straight into a trash bag and tried not to think about anything. I mean, obviously my grandmother wore underwear, but I could have gone my whole life without having to see it.
The mattress required wrestling. I enlisted Tomas one afternoon and we dragged it out, and the bedframe and dresser too. He wouldn’t take money, so I picked up a bottle of good bourbon at the liquor store and brought it over to the next dinner.
It was all fairly normal stuff. Aunt Kate e-mailed to say that the house was fine, nobody had broken into it or set it on fire or anything. My father called occasionally to see how I was getting on. Frank started greeting Bongo by name and reaching in the window to pet him behind the ears.
I tell you this so that you won’t think I’m a complete idiot—or maybe so that I can convince myself that I’m not a complete idiot. Maybe after the stones and Cotgrave’s journal, you think I should have been on edge. And yes, I probably should have been. Hell, I should have been yanking up topographical maps and conducting experiments to see where the hill with the bald was and where it wasn’t. I should have bought a camera and taken photos of the stones with something that didn’t catch fire when I turned it on.
But I didn’t. My days were all normal. And they were normal in a stressful kind of way, and I needed so much mental energy to keep from freaking out about the fact that I was cleaning out this awful hoarder house for a woman I hadn’t even liked. I just didn’t have anything left over to think too much about the stones. It seemed like something distant that had happened a long time ago.
If I thought about it, I mostly thought, It was just a weird thing. I had low blood sugar, and maybe some trick of the landscape made it look like a hill and valley. That’s all. And the stones were strange and I twisted myself around like the twisted ones, but they were just stones and somebody carved them into weird shapes.
I didn’t gnaw it over like you might think. I couldn’t get any farther with it by thinking about it, so I sort of shoved the whole experience aside and stopped worrying about it. I had so many things on my plate that weird stones in a place I wasn’t going to walk again just didn’t seem that important.
And then the next thing happened, and this time it was something I couldn’t ignore.
* * *
Bongo was restless. It had rained the day before and he’d been stuck inside because if we went outside his feet would get wet. He will happily stand in a puddle or chest deep in a fishpond, but wet grass on his paws is an abomination. Dogs, man. Dogs.
I was spending a rare day at the house, not going into town. It was weird to find that I was missing it. Not just getting away from my grandmother’s house, but seeing the people. I liked the Goth barista. I liked the waitress at the diner who called me ladybug. There are very few people who can use a pet name on me, but Southern waitresses can get away with it every time.
Frank at the dump saw so much of me these days that I was close to writing him into my will. Mind you, emptying two truckloads of dead doll parts together is a bonding experience. (There was still at least three loads left. I had to take a break. You can only be shoulder deep in those things for so long before it starts to take an emotional toll.)
Anyway, he had stared into the bed of the truck yesterday and scratched up under his ball cap and said, “Oh my. That’s… that’s a thing right there, ain’t it?”
I agreed that it was.
There was something viscerally satisfying about chucking the dolls into the trash compactor. Is that wrong? Probably that’s wrong. Still, these days I was taking entertainment where I could.
I’d asked Frank if he knew of any weird stones in the woods. He scratched under his baseball cap.
“Stones? I mean, there’s one shaped like a”—he remembered suddenly that he was talking to a woman young enough to be his daughter and his eyes slid away—“a real funny one out behind the Rolling Goat Farm. Kids go spray paint swears on it sometimes. Drives Madeline nuts. She’s the goat farmer.”
This did not seem like the sort of stones I was pretending didn’t exist.
Back home, Bongo whined to let me know that he was extremely bored.
I went outside to check the shed, since the weather was nice. It contained a selection of old tools. No books and, thankfully, no dolls.
I went back inside and Bongo inserted his nose under my elbow and flipped it up to indicate that he was dying of sorrow. I gave in and put a leash on him.
“Okay,” I said, “but we’re not going anywhere near those creepy rocks, okay?”
Bongo cocked an ear back at me, which means that I made a noise, not that he has any idea what I’ve said.
We went out for a short walk. I went down the road instead of behind the house, and that seemed acceptable. Tomas was leaning over the hood of a car and waved at me. I waved back.
This was nice. It was pleasant. You could imagine living in Pondsboro and learning people’s names and actually knowing a little bit about their lives. I didn’t have that in Pittsburgh.
A semi came screaming around a bend in the road, interrupting my thoughts and reminding me suddenly of why walking by the side of the road on a country lane was best reserved for historical romance and Led Zeppelin songs. The blast of wind blew my hair back and flung grit into our faces.
I crossed the road and went back into the woods. I could still see my grandmother’s backyard through the trees. We’d gotten about fifty yards away, all told.
“Fine…,” I said. Bongo took off happily through the soggy leaves, running back and forth on the end of his leash.
Were we on private property? Oh, probably. There weren’t any signs about it, though, or fences, so usually people don’t care as long as you aren’t shooting things or wrecking the place. We passed a NO HUNTING sign, but deer season was over, and if we got shot, somebody would have to explain their poaching.
Also I was wearing a purple hoodie and most deer aren’t purple.
I had a vague sense that the hill with the stones was off to the left. I tried to keep right, but Bongo wasn’t that interested in linear directions, and then we ran into a clearing that did have a fence around it, and a couple of shaggy cows gazing at us with vague benevolence.
I said, “Hi, cows.” I am like that. The cows did not say anything.
We walked along the fence line. I tried to stay a little inside the trees, in case there was a farmer out with the cows. It wasn’t so much that I thought I was doing something wrong, but I didn’t want to have to talk to somebody and have that conversation—“This here’s private property; you want to go back t’ the road”—and then even if they weren’t mad, I’d be left feeling horribly awkward about it all.
We went along the fence until we ran out of fence and cows and pasture, then kept going. Now it was all just scruffy pine and dead leaves. Junk pine, as my aunt would say, the stuff you get a decade or so after logging. Not very botanically interesting, not much of an understory, just the occasional Christmas fern and scruffy little clumps of sedge.
“Sedges have edges,” I told Bongo. He flicked an ear back at me, unimpressed with my botanical identification skills.
I listened to woodpeckers knocking on the trees. One made a high-pitched supervillain cackle. A crow called somewhere and another one replied.
Bongo bounced around, his nose working, occasionally demanding that we halt so that he could get a thorough sniff of a particularly good dead leaf. One good leaf led to another and he wrapped his leash behind my legs so I had to do a little pirouette to unwind myself, and that’s when I saw it.
There was something hanging in the trees.
It hung by hea
vy ropes. My first wild thought was that it was a person—some kind of trapeze artist—and then that someone had been crucified. Or lynched.
Bongo let out a thin, frightened whine.
My eyes traveled slowly upward. It was naked and split in half and it had hooves.
It was a deer.
I felt a stab of relief—it’s only a deer it’s not a person nobody’s been crucified or lynched or murdered it’s just a deer some hunter probably hung it up to clean it—but the feeling vanished almost as soon as it had begun.
The deer wasn’t hung up like a hunter was cleaning it. It was split open from the rib cage downward, and the hind legs gaped obscenely wide. The guts were missing.
The front legs stuck out straight to the sides, with a rope at each ankle. The hooves dangled like limp hands, and black rags fluttered from each “wrist.”
It did not exactly have a head.
The deer’s own head was missing. There was a skull where the head should be, some kind of large animal skull, but it was turned upside down. The skull was clean white bone. Because of the angle, it looked as if the deer had no neck, but a dreadfully misshapen head with teeth jutting from the top.
The empty eyes stared at me. Someone had run ties through the severed neck and lashed them into the sockets.
The ropes creaked as the monstrous thing swayed.
Stones were hung from the rib cage, tied with twine. They knocked together like a grisly wind chime. Two of the stones had holes in the middle.
Stones with holes are called hagstones, I thought. (That is true, incidentally. It is also possibly the most useless thing I’ve ever thought in a crisis.)
I stared at the thing for probably half a minute.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t look away. I wanted very much to look away. But I stared because if I could find something—a seam, a tag that said it was a Halloween decoration, a video camera, even a goddamn artist statement nailed to the tree—then it wasn’t real.
I wanted so very much for it not to be real.
The Twisted Ones Page 10
