The Keeper

by Langan, Sarah,

  “Yeah, well, it’s hard to tell.”

  “It is hard to tell,” he said with his jaw clenched, and she could see that he had decided to be annoyed with her. When people are uncomfortable, they get mad at you. Liz had seen this before. Yes, he would probably break up with her now. She could see it coming.

  He pulled out of the driveway and turned right on Chestnut Street. “Susan’s is the other way,” she said.

  “Really?” he asked, still driving. He clenched his jaw so tightly she thought he might dislocate it.

  “Do you want to turn around?”

  He didn’t answer, kept driving.

  The snow had melted by about a foot, and every time the Explorer made a turn, she could hear the sound of sloshing water. There were a few workmen clearing out the gutters on Nudd Street. They did that every year though it never seemed to help. The roads always flooded.

  “Well?” she asked.

  They were at the top of the hill now, near the woods where they sometimes turned off the headlights and made love. She squinted and looked out the window, thinking that perhaps Susan was out there. Susan was waiting for her, in the dark.

  He stopped the car and pulled the keys from the ignition.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  Bobby leaned back. His jaw unclenched. He did not seem angry, but sad. “Remember the first time we came here? I told you I’d done it before with Andrea Jorgenson but I lied. You knew, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, I knew.” No, she thought, he would not leave her. He was Bobby, the guy who had defended her under the bridge. The guy who called every night, and even though she never told him about the fights she had with her mother, he would sometimes ask, when she was feeling very low and talking softly about nothing, “How are you holding up?”

  She touched his outstretched arm and he flinched. “Don’t treat me like that,” he said.

  “Like what?”

  “Like the enemy. Like your mother,” he told her.

  “I don’t.”

  “You do. Like you hate me.”

  “That’s stupid. I don’t. And I don’t hate my mother.”

  He winced. “I’m not stupid. I know you’re different, that things are weird. I mean, you tried to tell me that Susan was a photographer for House and Garden magazine and that’s why she’s always wandering around, she’s trying to see in people’s houses. She doesn’t talk, Liz! I mean, she doesn’t even talk and you try to pretend she’s normal. Like I don’t know about her. Everybody knows there’s something wrong with her. Even my mom has nightmares about her! You tell me these lies and I guess you’re trying to make a joke but sometimes I think you want me to believe it.” Then he turned to her, yelling now, as if this last part was what really galled him, this last part had sent him over the edge, “And when I asked you what was wrong at school today you told me it was the Mormons. You were talking about the stupid Mormons, Liz! Why were you talking about the Mormons?”

  “The Mormons?” she asked. She couldn’t help it. She knew how angry he’d get. She giggled.

  He narrowed his eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said, still giggling. “I really am. But you just went totally nuclear. It’s like you were possessed.”

  “I’m serious,” he growled. And once again, because his behavior was so out of character, it kept her laughing.

  “Come on, Bobby.” She lowered her voice in an attempt at seriousness. “I’m not laughing at you, I’m laughing with you.”

  He did not look happy. Not exactly mad, closer to embarrassed. She stopped laughing. She wasn’t being very nice. Probably she was being a little mean. The kind of mean that other kids had been to him not too long ago. The way you treat a tool.

  “Hey,” she said. “You okay? I didn’t mean to make fun of you. Really. I’m just upset.”

  He smiled a strained smile like he was trying to prove his feelings weren’t hurt. “That’s all right. You weren’t laughing at me, you were laughing with me.”

  “Really, Bobby. I’m sorry.”

  “Fine.”

  She shimmied across the seat and into the crook of his arm. After a while, he cupped her shoulder. “Something happened last night. And then maybe today, too. I guess I’m upset.”

  “Tell me,” he said.

  For a moment, but only a moment, she was annoyed. Because there was an implicit agreement here. A give and a take with which she was not sure she wanted to be involved. And then it was gone. This was Bobby, after all. She told him everything: her dream, the blood in the snow, the thing that had chased her in the woods, trying to talk to her mother about it tonight, and then finally, she showed him her throat. She thought this would the hardest part—like he’d see it, and know that something really was wrong with her. But it turned out to be a relief. He was someone who cared, and wanted to believe her. Still, she didn’t tell him about what Susan had said: You. It should have been you. That was between her and her dream.

  Very gently, he traced the edges of her neck with the tips of his fingers. It made her feel safe in a way she had not expected. When he did stuff like this, it was clear to her that one day he’d be a doctor.

  “It’s crazy, right?”

  “Which part—does this hurt?”

  “No. It faded a lot since this morning, but I think you can still make out the hands. All of it’s crazy. Every part. Or maybe I’m crazy.”

  “Could you have done this to yourself in your sleep?” He let go and looked at her.

  “I guess. In a way, I hope so.”

  “Yeah. But you think she did it. She got inside your dream.” She couldn’t see his expression in the dark, just his shining eyes.

  Liz nodded. “I’ve dreamed about her before. But lately the dreams are more vivid. Last night felt so real. And then today—there was definitely something in the woods with me. Maybe it was something left over from the dream, or some kind of wild animal, or maybe it was Susan. I don’t know. But something chased me…”

  Bobby sat back, and she wasn’t sure whether he was just considering everything she was saying, or deciding whether he should start fitting her for a straitjacket. She decided, for once, to be optimistic.

  “When we were kids we used to play memory, you know, with a deck of cards all turned down? She could go through the whole deck without losing a turn. She’d go from card to card all in a row and find its match…Anyway, she’s getting stronger. Next time I dream about her, I’m afraid my nightmare will follow me into the real world. Or worse, I won’t wake up at all.”

  He squinted his eyes. “So why do you want to see her?”

  Liz looked out the window. The rain pounded against the roof of the truck like someone wanted to be let in. “I need to know.” Then she sighed. “I wish she didn’t hate me. We used to get along. When we were kids. I loved her, I think…I still do.”

  Bobby spoke softly. “She’s sick, Liz. Whatever else is happening, she’s sick. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “I guess. Do you ever dream about her?”

  “Yeah. They’ve been getting worse for me, too.”

  She hadn’t expected him to say this. This was Bobby, after all. The boy whose family played Monopoly together on Sunday nights. “I didn’t know you dreamed about her.”

  “I thought it would upset you.”

  “It does, actually. I think it makes me mad at her. What do you dream?”

  “I can’t really remember,” he said. “All I remember is her, you know?”

  She touched her throat with her fingers. “Bobby, something’s gone wrong since the mill closed. Can you feel it?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. I can.”

  “I’m scared.”

  She felt his arm around her. “Me, too.”

  “Then you believe me?”

  “Yeah, I do. It might not be exactly what you think, but I believe you.”

  She closed her eyes and tried to make the lump in her throat go away. They listened to the rain patter against the windshield. “I wi
sh we didn’t live in Bedford.”

  He nudged her. “Wait till college. Everything’s better in college. You only have to come home for Christmas and you can eat pizza three times a day.”

  The lump in her throat burst and came out as a giggle, quickly followed by a snort.

  “Gross,” he said.

  “Um. At least I don’t eat the old whoopee pies I find in my glove compartment, Bobby Fullbright.”

  He smiled. They both laughed a little, and felt some of the pressure of the day release.

  “Do you still like me?” she asked.

  “I love you.” This was the first time he had ever told her this, and it made her feel so good that for a moment everything was right with the world.

  “I love you, too, Bobby.”

  Before heading to Susan’s, they made love in the back of his car, and he had his second Lucky of the night while whispering sweet nothings in a Frenchman’s accent.

  The south side of town where Susan lived stank of the mill. The wind had carried it there for almost one hundred years, and it had gotten into the dirt, the trees, the water, and the wood of the houses. If you lived there, Liz imagined, you could probably scrape the sulfur out of your pores.

  They got out of the car. The house was old and dilapidated. A shutter flapped in the wind, and there was graffiti along the sidewalk that in the dark she could not make out. She rang the front bell. Bobby wrestled in vain with the umbrella, but it turned inside out and they both got wet. “It’s okay,” he told her when he saw that she was so frightened she was shaking.

  She nodded and twisted the knob. The door opened. They stepped into a small vestibule at the foot of a narrow, wooden staircase. The place stank like rotten eggs. In the dark she could make out a figure, maybe a person, sitting on the floor. “Suze?” she asked. No answer. Bobby flicked a switch that lit up the stairway. Liz gasped. Bobby pulled her back outside and into the rain.

  When they came into the house again, they saw the same thing. A naked woman, her back pressed up against the foot of the stairs. Blood. Eyes open, but unseeing.

  Liz looked down. Her feet were inside a puddle of blood. She jumped back, and her shoes left wet, circular tracks on the floor. “Oh,” she said. She tried to wipe the blood from her Keds by scraping them against the walls and stairs, but instead she smeared everything she touched with red. “Oh!” She moved quickly, her body jerking, and then covered her face with her hands. “Get it off! Get it off!”

  Something grabbed her.

  Who grabbed her? It was the thing in the woods! It was her Father! It was Susan!

  She screamed. Someone was speaking but she couldn’t make out the words. Bobby. His mouth was moving. He was trying to tell her something. He repeated himself a few times. “I found a pulse on her thigh,” he was saying. “She’s alive.”

  She pushed away from him, opened the screen door, leaned outside, and vomited steamed broccoli and eight postdinner Keebler E. L. Fudge cookies onto a melting snowdrift. He held her shoulders. “We have to call for an ambulance,” he said. “Do you know CPR? She’s not breathing.”

  Liz didn’t answer.

  He shook her. “Do you know CPR?” She didn’t answer. “I’m going to call upstairs,” he said, leaping over the body and up the steps.

  Liz looked at her sister. Blood trickled down the side of her face. It was exactly how Susan had looked in her dream. The room was very bright suddenly, and she heard the low buzzing of a fly. Her hand hovered near Susan’s cheek. She wanted to touch her. But then, no, she couldn’t. No, she didn’t want to. Because even though Susan’s eyes were blank and unblinking, even though the floor was red, she could feel Susan right now. She could feel Susan watching her.

  She took a deep breath and stepped over the body and up the stairs. “Let’s go,” she said to Bobby, whose wide eyes were focused on the squalor of Susan’s apartment. There was a pizza box and some cans of Budweiser atop a small kitchen table. An unmade bed, sunken at the middle. There were about six mirrors, and Liz could see an infinite number of herself inside them. There was something else in those mirrors. Something she’d see if she looked closely enough. There were faces in those mirrors.

  She pulled on his hand, and led him to the door. “Please, let’s get out of here.”

  Once out of the apartment, Bobby recovered. He raced down the stairs, calling out to her, “I’ve never done this before, but when I called nine-one-one the guy said I should try.” Then he put his mouth over Susan’s and breathed. Susan’s chest rose and fell. Up and down. Up and down. On the floor, a stain of blood grew larger.

  She inched in closer to Bobby, and when she did her shoes squeaked. Blood. Sticky blood. The room skidded to the left, and then to the right. Sparks filled the air, and then there was darkness.

  Liz Marley fainted.

  THIRTEEN

  Wraith (Paul’s Flight)

  The car was parked by the side of the road, its hazards flashing. Like a man so unaccustomed to crying that when he does so the result is an awkward fusillade of misdirected emotion, Paul hadn’t communicated with his subconscious for so long that it was angry with him, and his first dream in a decade was horrific.

  In the dream he was a different man. A sober man. The very model of a model citizen. A man who wore a shirt and tie to the corner store. A man who tucked his kids into bed at night. The dream went back in time, to the day of the protest, only this time he didn’t go to Montie’s. This time he showed up. He brought a megaphone and gave the speech he’d written instead of setting fire to it the night before. He’d lamented the crimes Clott had committed against the people of Bedford; low wages and polluted water. Busted unions and generations of men with broken backs. Then the people of Bedford had followed him. Together they’d marched to the mill. This time Georgia O’Brian had smiled at him with pride, and he’d known right then that there was more of his life to be lived.

  But as he walked the sky became dark. Suddenly he was alone. Even Georgia was gone. The street was empty, and rain began to fall. He looked toward the mill, and there was Susan. She beckoned him. She was dressed like a hooker; leather miniskirt and tank top on a cold winter day. Against his will, his body announced pleasure at the sight of her. There was a buzzing sound, too. Like bees, only intelligent, somehow. Human, somehow.

  The worst part came when she grinned at him. Her lips spread across her face. Wide. Wider still. So wide it must have hurt, and he wanted to tell her to stop. And then her lips split open. A deluge of blood ran down her chin like foam from a rabid dog, and still, she smiled. Her split lips made a hole that revealed her small, white teeth. Behind her the mill started to burn. Smoke poured into the sky. She tipped a bottle of scotch in his direction, and he licked his lips. Suddenly he really needed a drink.

  She walked toward him. Her head had been shaved bald. Her skin hung loose off her bones, and black blood trickled from the orifices of her body: her nose, her ears, her eyes. She opened her mouth to speak, and black slime came oozing out. “I’ll come for you, Paul. When I’m dead,” she gurgled.

  The buzzing got louder, and it was the sound of screams.

  Out of self-preservation, he woke himself up. When he opened his eyes, he did not remember his dream, nor did he realize that because of the act he’d committed with her, Susan had found a way inside him, just as she’d found a way inside the rest of Bedford.

  There was a divider in the road that separated north and south. In the middle of it were pine trees whose branches were pushed parallel to the ground by the wind. The car was parked halfway over the right-hand lane and halfway up a curb that led to some woods. He laid his head back.

  After he left Susan’s, he had taken a drive. And then he’d decided to go to Canada where it probably wasn’t raining and then, somehow, a truck had almost pushed him off the road and he’d remembered that he couldn’t see anything—the short, white, painted lines—because he didn’t have his windshield wipers turned on. He’d pulled over and now he was here.r />
  She was fine. He had not gone to her apartment and none of this had happened. He’d been too drunk to find his way home and wound up passed out on the interstate. The whole thing was a dream and it seemed real because he was so drunk and dreams are always close to real when you drink. He would go home and fix himself a drink, and later he’d stop by her tidy apartment where right now she was sitting down to a big steak dinner with spinach and mashed potatoes on the side. He’d tell her how sorry he was for not having checked up on her more often and he’d bring her some flowers because she loved lilacs and oh, Jesus, she was dead. The woman whose blood, the other blood, he’d tasted on his tongue was dead.

  He should have called the police. Any moron knows that. That’s what you’re supposed to do. Someone dies, you call the police. You don’t leave them alone to collect flies because then they think it wasn’t an accident. They blame you even if you try to explain that you got scared like some half-wit set loose from the asylum in Waterville and oh, buddy, you’re losin’ it.

  He took a deep breath and rolled down his window for some air. It was cold on his face and he could feel his skin tighten. He closed his eyes and there she was in his mind, soaking the floor in blood. Funny that people still bleed when they’re dead.

  He heard honking. The Buick tipped back and forth over the curb and he remembered where he was. He looked behind him on the road and saw a pair of headlights in the dark. High up, maybe a truck. It shifted left and passed him with a long and thunderous whine of its horn.

  He opened the glove compartment and pulled out a map of Maine. Ten o’clock. He imagined what other people were doing tonight. Georgia on a date with some shit kicker who spit-shined his vinyl shoes; his wife scrubbing the grout off the bathroom tiles; Thursday night happy hour, throngs of yuppies in suits and ties in some rich commuter city, bitching about the nine-to-five grind. He located where Canada would be, the blank nothing anywhere north of Maine, with his finger.

  He wished, not for the first time, that he was a different man.