The Binding

by Nicholas Wolff

  “What does she do?”

  “Do?”

  “Is she trying to . . . tell you something?”

  “Tell me something? Like what?”

  “Like anything. Like warning you or . . . asking for help.”

  Zuela clucked, swirling the wine in her glass. “No, baby. They’re just memories, things we did together. Why? Who’s coming to you?”

  Ramona ran her fingernail along the chrome edge of the table where it met the top. “A student. A friend of mine. She was murdered.”

  Zuela drew in a breath. “And she’s coming to see you in dreams?”

  “Yes,” Ramona said, blinking. She couldn’t hold it in any longer. Zuela’s eyes were getting bigger as she watched Ramona, and a look of fear twitched across her face. “And I think . . . outside my dreams, too.”

  Ramona looked over and saw that questions of pregnancy and lesbian affairs had been wiped clean away from Zuela’s mind.

  “You’re serious?”

  “Yes.”

  Zuela’s face was now contorted into a kind of avid horror. “Well, you better tell her to stay away from you.”

  Don’t you think I tried that? Ramona thought. Why do you think I haven’t slept in three nights?

  “I can’t control—”

  Zuela’s hand closed over Ramona’s wrist with shocking strength. “You don’t mess around with this stuff. If this is really happening, you . . . tell . . . her . . . to go away. Do you hear me, Ramona?”

  Ramona looked at her. She felt something give way in her. “What if she won’t?” she whispered.

  Zuela shot up straight out of the chair. “What does this friend of yours tell you in these dreams?” she asked loudly.

  “She asks me to help her. I . . . I don’t think she knows that she’s dead.” She looked up at Zuela. “Other times, she’s different.”

  “Different how?”

  Ramona closed her eyes. The sleep man was coming for her. She couldn’t hold out any longer. Her head felt as heavy as a boulder.

  “Ramona!”

  Ramona snapped her head up and focused on Zuela. “Her eyes are black. And I can feel . . .”

  “What?”

  “That she wants me dead, too.”

  Zuela reached down and put both her palms on the flat of the table. Her eyes were closed suddenly, the lids trembling. Her lips seemed to mumble something. She looked as if she were ready to collapse.

  Oh God, why did I tell her? Ramona thought.

  Zuela seemed to be gathering her strength. The cords on her wrists stood out as her body weight pressed onto them. Finally, she opened her eyes. “Hold on. You hold on right there,” she said in a husky voice.

  Zuela turned and dashed out of the room. Ramona watched her go, a question on her lips. She heard a closet door slam, and thirty seconds later Zuela was back, holding a thick, fraying paperback book in her hand. “Maybe it’s in here, Ramona. Maybe it says something.” There was a look of crazy hopefulness in her eyes.

  Ramona read the title: The Dream Book. The old paperback that had told them that cousin Stacy was going to have twins that time she dreamt of seeing a waterfall, and that Marcella shouldn’t take the plane to France, the one that nearly crashed. It was like a second Bible in the Best family.

  Ramona slumped back in her chair. She stared at Zuela, her lids half lowered. “The Dream Book? Are you kidding me, Zuela? This is not going to be in there. They don’t have a section on the undead. Do you understand me? I saw her when she was supposed to be dead . . .”

  The vision of Margaret Post beckoning her on the quad came back to Ramona and her throat closed. She felt as if she couldn’t breathe.

  Zuela, meanwhile, was hyperventilating. “Your great-aunt Madame Susu saw the dead after they passed on.”

  Ramona had heard about Madame Susu.

  “They found Susu hanging from the mulberry tree in their backyard,” Zuela continued.

  “She was an alcoholic,” Ramona said.

  Zuela looked so fearful that Ramona got up suddenly and put her arm around her.

  “She drank to get those things out of her head, Mona. But they made her make that noose and they made her put her head through it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Zuela was shivering through her print dress. “Susu couldn’t tie a noose. She was a homebody. The knot on the thing was some kind of sailor’s knot. No one in the family had ever seen her tie anything like that.”

  “Did you tell that to the police? What did they say?”

  “Of course we told the police,” Zuela said. “But they didn’t do a damn thing.”

  Ramona stepped back and looked her aunt full in the face. “Why didn’t you ever tell me that?”

  “For what, Ramona? For what possible reason would I tell you that?”

  Ramona stood there on the kitchen linoleum, her arms around her aunt. She felt hope draining away, out of the room, and darkness replacing it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Nat met John Bailey at the Coat and Arms, a faded tavern just off State Street. There were four or five guys at the bar, a few wearing tan Carhartt jackets speckled here and there with amoeba-shaped blobs of cement. Nat nodded at the bartender—he recognized him, Frank Riordan, a typical Northam wastrel from high school—then walked along the long rib-high gleam of the bar. John, down near the end, leaned back, raising his hand.

  The Bruins were on the two TVs at each end of the bar—not even flat screens, as the Coat and Arms was a hole-in-the-wall that time had passed by. Nat caught the score—3-1, Rangers—as he sat down. Groans echoed from the back of the place as a Rangers forward broke toward the Boston goal alone.

  “I’ll have a Stella, Frank,” Nat said.

  John gave him a look. John only drank domestic in bars—in this case, Pabst Blue Ribbon. A point of pride and cheapness.

  “And I now call the meeting of the Northam Zombie Club to order,” Nat said in a low voice. “Hear, hear. First order of business: getting sideways.”

  He’d called John before and told him the basics of the nzombe paper by Professor Zimmerman, summarizing the basic points. John’s reaction had been one of disbelief tinged by unease. Now his friend looked quickly down the bar. Frank was pouring the Stella at the other end. The nearest drinker was a no-necked off-duty cop (Nat could see the gun under the hem of his stiff leather jacket) three stools away. John’s paranoia seemed to fade, and he gave Nat a smile.

  “How’s Charlie?” Nat said.

  John made a face. “Okay. The boy keeps to himself these days.”

  “What about the morgue?”

  “They turned the place upside down. No bodies yet. We’re trying to get them to keep it quiet, but how long can that last? Two bodies go missing, people are going to talk.”

  “Maybe they can paint it as incompetence.”

  “Maybe.”

  “But hey,” John said, “look at the bright side. Since this thing started? At least we’re seeing a lot more of each other.”

  “Yeah,” Nat said. “Silver linings, pal.”

  Nat began to laugh and John took it up. Soon they were giggling like two maniacs. John slapped Nat on the back.

  Frank came up with the drink, looking at them quizzically. Nat couldn’t speak, the laughter now edged with craziness. He motioned for Frank to put the beer down and tossed a ten-dollar bill at him.

  “You guys get started a little earlier today?” Frank said, leaning on the bar.

  “Yeah,” John said. “Yeah, Frank. You see, we’re here to remember . . .”

  Frank grimaced.

  “. . . some people who recently passed,” Nat finished.

  They both cracked up.

  “An Irish wake, huh?” Frank said.

  “Something like that,” John said.
>
  Frank knocked on the bar with his knuckles. “Sorry for your troubles, boys.”

  “Oh, you don’t know the half of it,” Nat said, and heard John break out again.

  Frank drifted away, frowning at Nat. Nat only nodded back at him, a manic smile remaining on his face.

  John gave him a look. Nat shook his head, and they both began to breathe out the last of the hysterical laughter.

  “I needed that,” Nat said.

  “Fuckin’ A right.”

  They sat there and watched the rest of the Bruins’ third period, saying nothing. It was good to sit here, like old times, Nat thought. It was good to pretend. Why had he been so hard on his delusional patients all those years? Pretending was highly effective. Those missing bodies and the gutted coed outside the Wartham walls? Never happened. Figments of his imagination.

  Just forget them. It was wonderful. But it couldn’t last.

  “What are we gonna do, Nat?”

  Nat moved his Stella a few inches across the bar. “Do you want to tell your boss?” he said finally.

  John’s eyes boggled. “Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? Tell them what? That a ring of zombies is stealing bodies and killing people all over town? I’m not sure even I believe that. I’m not sure what I believe is happening out there.”

  Of course, if Nat went to his own boss, Dr. Albini, and said the same thing, he’d be under review immediately. No talk of zombies and the undead could enter the pristine halls of Mass Memorial or the entire enterprise would collapse. The administration would bury him so deep that he’d never practice again.

  And so what if Becca Prescott was slowly losing her mind at the same time that a murderer was on the prowl and a few bodies had gone missing from the morgue? What did it really add up to?

  John leaned back. “Maybe someone wants us to believe that something strange, something . . . occult is happening. Have you thought of that? Maybe someone wants it to look like zombies.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  John shook his head.

  “I think we have to tell someone,” Nat said. “We have a responsibility.”

  John shot him a dubious look. “You don’t work for the city, Nat. Say I went to Trotter”—James Trotter, Northam’s chief of police—“and laid it out for him. We’re talking about Northam, Mass., here. You think the town fathers are going to be up for an investigation into the undead? With the tourist season coming up in a few months? And can you imagine that phone call to the president of Wartham? ‘Hey, Wingate, yeah, James Trotter here, we’re putting together a press release letting people know that fucking zombies are wandering all over the city and that one of them probably killed your student. Sorry about all that.’ Not hardly, I don’t think. Wartham pays half the tax revenue in Northam, John, and they sell themselves as a safe little college in the Berkshires. The Internet and the Globe are already all over the story, and this would make things a hundred times worse. It’s not going to happen.”

  “If there are more bodies, it’ll happen,” Nat said. “Serial killer or whatever, the town will have to decide which way it wants to play it . . .”

  “It’s only a serial killer if he uses the same methods. We only have one dead girl here so far. Prescott hung himself. Godwin was killed in a car accident. That’s not enough to go to anyone with.”

  John looked at him, and there were dark circles under his eyes. His eyes looked sick, and they caught Nat’s and stayed there.

  “There’s one more thing,” John said.

  “What?”

  “Charlie.”

  “What about him?”

  “If I go public and say zombies have come to Northam, Leah will go straight to a judge and say I’m wrong in the head. They’ll give her Charlie. And that would be . . . that would be the end for me.”

  “You’re right.” Nat felt like the thing, the evil thing, was in the room, hanging like dank humidity in the air. There was no hiding from it. It was part of their lives now.

  The horn sounded to end the game. Boston had lost. Two drinkers filed out the door, waving at Frank the bartender.

  “So, you been over to Becca’s house?” John said.

  Nat looked down at the bar. “Yeah.”

  John took in some of his Pabst Blue Ribbon, held it in his mouth contemplatively, then swallowed. “You’re spending some time with this girl, huh?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  John looked at him, his eyes unreadable in the gloom of the bar. Suddenly, he let out a short gust of laughter. “Frank!” he called out suddenly.

  Nat looked at him. “What are you up to?”

  Frank came loping down the rubber mats behind the bar, then raised his chin at John.

  “Two shots, my man,” John said. “Your finest tequila.”

  Frank frowned, which was his way of showing he was impressed, then turned to his rack and studied it. He tapped his front teeth with his index finger, then chose a square bottle and brought it back to them.

  “You guys are doing it right,” Frank said. “Respect.”

  “Damn right,” Nat said. “And one for you.”

  John snickered. “Yeah, let’s do it.”

  Frank slid three shot glasses onto the bar and poured the tequila in. All three of them picked up the glasses, held them in the light, judging the color of the amber liquid.

  “Eighty-five bucks a bottle,” Frank said. “Now who are we toasting?”

  Nat looked at John. “I don’t know. Who are we toasting?”

  “You, brother,” John said. He turned to Frank. “My friend has fallen in love.”

  Frank made a face at Nat—like, Salut—and the three men brought the shot glasses to their lips and tilted them back.

  Nat slammed his shot glass down on the bar. “Another.”

  They did another.

  Frank tapped the bar. “That last one was on me, gentlemen.” He put the tequila bottle back up on the rack and wandered down toward the other end of the bar, where a man in a green down jacket had his hand raised for another drink.

  Nat felt the buzz surging up his spinal column, dividing into two, then seeping warmly into his brain.

  “What was that all about?”

  The corner of John’s lips started to curl. “I was just thinking . . .”

  “I warned you about that.”

  John shrugged. “I know, I know. But what I was thinking was, you finally took the fucking plunge, buddy. Fell in love and all that, the whole shebang.”

  “We’re not dating, dude,” Nat said. “She’s nineteen.”

  John pulled back, spread his arms wide. “Hell, I know. But you’re crazy for her, and that’s my point. Don’t you see it?”

  “No!” Nat said. “No, I don’t!”

  “It’s beautiful. Sick but beautiful.”

  Okay, we’re drunk, Nat thought. We are scudded for sure. “I don’t see it,” he said fuzzily.

  John leaned in and whispered, “You fucked me again, Thayer.”

  “How?” Nat said, bewildered. He looked around the bar, raising his arms up in an appeal. “Somebody tell me how!”

  John’s voice was lower, right in his ear. “For your first love affair, you chose a dead girl.” John leaned back. “You see what I’m saying? I mean, how long can it last?”

  Nat’s friend was watching him, his lips twitching, a kind of madness in his eyes.

  Nat thought about it. Something tickled his throat, and a spurt of laughter escaped his lips. Then another.

  “You know what?” he said, his hand over his mouth.

  “What?”

  Nat dropped the hand. “I think you’re right.”

  The hysteria came back up his throat. John opened his mouth wide and lost it, too. They were roaring now, pounding the bar, and out of the corner of his eyes,
Nat saw the off-duty cop turn slowly to stare at them. He didn’t care. The people here were just dummies, phantoms, backdrop. John slapped him on the back, forming the words a dead girl with his lips, and a fresh gust of horse laughter ripped through them.

  But as Nat heard himself, he realized their laughter was different now. He looked down the bar and saw Frank looking at them strangely. His hand stopped polishing a glass, hanging there in midair with the cloth still grasped lightly in his fingers.

  Their laughter bounced off the mirror behind the bar and the dark-stained oak walls shining red in the filthy lights and came back to Nat. And it sounded mad, convulsive, sinister.

  This is how people sound in the fucking Iso cell at Mass Memorial, he thought. What is happening here?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Back in my old bedroom, Ramona thought. She could hear music coming from Zuela’s part of the house. Her aunt watched those crazy Nigerian DVDs that people sold on the street. Nollywood love stories. They were low-budget crap and the stories were just absurd, but Zuela swore by them.

  Her eyes began to feel heavy, and Ramona laid her cheek on the pillow. I’ll just close my eyes for one minute, she thought. What harm can there be in that? No harm at all.

  Ramona felt herself immediately slip into a dream. It was as if it had been waiting for her, patiently waiting behind her eyes to whisk her away. A movie on pause. A movie she’d never seen before.

  She was floating. Below her were the headlights of cars. She knew the highway was 95 and that she was floating north.

  It was all so real. Every detail—the cool wind on her face, the distant honking of cars—as real as life itself. She could smell, faintly, car exhaust and brackish salt water at the same time. She moved effortlessly and picked out the faint line of waves breaking. She was heading back to Massachusetts. Back to Northam.

  Please don’t show me Margaret, she thought. I don’t want to see her.

  Soon she recognized the mountains that surrounded this corner of Massachusetts, seen from above now as if lit by a full moon, the little towns ringed around their feet looking lonely against the massive black bulk of the Berkshires. The hills had always been friendly, but now they sucked in the light and they seemed ready to roll over on the towns and crush them beneath rocks and darkness.