The Keeper

by Langan, Sarah,

  On Tuesday evening, Susan Marley opened her eyes.

  She was trapped inside something very dark and underground like the basement she had lived in long ago. It was so small that she could hardly move her arms. She heard a rapid patter, like knocking, and when she forced her way through the lid above her, a deluge of wet, grainy matter surrounded her. Mud. It filled up the box and she swam, not needing to hold her breath, not breathing, until she reached the top.

  When she was out, she stood atop Iroquois Hill, among gravestones, one of them her own. Her feet sank down into wet dirt. She felt something on her neck, her thighs, and the insides of her elbows. It was like blood only not blood. Darker, no pulse. She touched her breasts with her fingers, and they were as cold as the rain.

  She could see the town down there, all of it. There were lights glowing in the valley below and she could see each person in each house or apartment or trailer. Some made love, some slept. Some drank black coffee before leaving for night shifts at the hospital or the toll plaza on I–95 or else they stayed awake because they were afraid of what they might find waiting for them in their dreams.

  She descended from the hill and traveled home. If it had been a clear night, someone might have seen her muddy silhouette striding into town. Jerome Donally, who was pilfering Oh Henry! bars at the Puff-N-Stop, or Amity Jorgenson, who was sitting outside her sister’s trailer and wondering if this relentless rain would ever end, or anyone else that night might have seen her slumped shoulders and the way her eyes shone, like a cat’s in the dark. But they only felt her in their hearts or their bowels or their stomachs. They only knew she was coming.

  It happened on the sixth night of rain. Georgia was giving Chuck Brann a trim. He liked it to be cut dry so that there wasn’t any extra cost and he always asked for Georgia, because she smelled like sweet musk. Georgia felt it like a knife running inside her, coming up from the bottom and twisting between her legs. She dropped the razor to the floor, where it buzzed in little circles on the tile like a cockroach.

  Paul was shaving with a dry razor and hand mirror in the quiet of his study. He felt her presence inside him. He almost called out her name. He knew it was she, no question. He did not look into the mirror in front of him, for fear of seeing her face. So he ran out into the rain, leaving her behind.

  Bobby didn’t know. But he felt uneasy. He went into his yard and tried to let the rain wash this feeling from him, but it didn’t. Back in the house he found Margaret sitting in the dark kitchen. “Hey, dollface,” he whispered. “I think I’m scared of the rain,” she told him. The skin by her lips was very chapped and her eyes were sunken deep. He gave her the kind of warm, comforting hug that only a big brother can give.

  Mary was sipping her wine, eyes closed. She could hear voices in the house, memories. There were good ones, but she did not remember those. She knocked the glass over, and thick, sugary wine spilled onto the table. It made her cry. Stupid to make her cry. Just sponge it up. She let it drip onto the floor, the sound in rhythm with the fall of the rain. And when it happened, she felt nothing. She was so inside her own cold grief that it was as if she had understood all along how things would be.

  Liz was waiting to cry. She was looking through the old photo album, trying to make herself feel. Susan in her Sunday dress, Susan with the big black bruises, Susan with the meanness swallowed down and digested so it was all over her body like embalming fluid. And when it happened, Liz felt it worse than anyone else. It crept inside her slowly like a bitter cold, working its way though her extremities and to her center. A voice inside her said: “You,” and then it was gone. And she told herself it had never happened. That the voice was a form of grief. That it was not saying that it should have been Liz, it should always have been Liz.

  Other people felt shivers or just a sadness so fleeting that they did not remember it in the morning. They slept fitfully that night, saying nothing.

  PART THREE

  THEY COME BACK

  TWENTY

  The Place Where Gravity Bends

  She walked down Iroquois Hill and into the valley. In the hallway of her old apartment, bloody footprints formed the pattern of a widening spiral. Rossoff’s door was shut tight, and a blue eye peeped through the keyhole at her. A man’s breath churned, and she could smell his fear. She slowly dragged her hand down the side of the door so that she could feel his warmth through the wood, the way his heart beat faster. His nose began to bleed, and he backed away. She started up the stairs.

  The people in this town were like strange and varied songs, and she knew each tune by heart. When they were lost or sad, they thought of her. Though they did not know it, in their hours of desperation, it was her name they called. In her apartment, her bare feet sank into the green shag carpet. Her blue dress brushed against the tops of her bruised shins. In a line from her neck down to the V between her legs were black plastic stitches, and she walked slowly to keep from tearing her lifeless skin.

  She stepped through the cigarette ashes that speckled the air, and looked at the paper mill out her window. It was silent for now, but would not remain that way. Then she turned. In the mirrors, she did not see her own reflection. Instead she saw the familiar and foreign faces of this town. Dark things. Lost things. Buried things. Ugly things. They watched her, trapped inside the glass. They banged hard, clamoring to be let out. She felt them banging from inside the mirrors; she felt them banging from inside her own body.

  The things in the mirrors encroached. Their motley songs howled all at once, vying to be heard, and the sound was a discordant buzzing. It was the sound of madness, but she was accustomed to that.

  They pushed at each other: a furry black spider with pale blue eyes; a woman holding the half-smoked Parliament that had been extinguished on her teenage son’s soft flesh; a dapper William Prentice wearing a three-piece suit. He smiled a crocodile smile, while his hands clasped behind his back dripped blood. There were thousands of them. She lifted her hands and smashed the first mirror. Slivers of glass shattered in a circle around her fists. Her fingers bled black blood. She smashed the next mirror. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the last.

  Out from the broken mirrors came a procession of things, all half formed. River creatures whose livers were riddled with holes. They moved in weaving circles. Men with burnt skin and black lungs who’d once worked at the mill. An infant wrapped in a plastic Hefty bag. It was too young to breathe and yet, somehow, it squalled. A yipping dog named Benji that had been mowed down by Douglas Boucher’s snowplow a week before. A six-year-old girl whose pigtails were tied with yarn. “Mother, may I?” the little girl asked. Ted Marley five years dead. He held a spade in his hand, and remembered the stars in the sky. An army of them crawled out of the apartment and down the steps. As the dawn broke early Wednesday morning, they slithered quietly, unseen, to the places where they belonged.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Mold

  You’ve gotta do it.

  There was a smell coming from the basement. These long days of rain had made everything wet and musty, and Mary Marley listened to drops plink in rapid succession against the metal drainpipe outside her kitchen window. It was around noon on Wednesday, the sixth straight day of rain, and the room was dark. The chair Mary was sitting on was speckled with clumpy white dust, and she mistook it for moist paint chips, some leak she wasn’t aware of, until she remembered the baking.

  She had baked a great deal over these last few days. Her manager at Shaws had not charged her for groceries this week. A bereavement gift, like a mourning rate at the airport. Every parent who has a daughter die should get exactly thirty dollars and seventy-six cents worth of flour, imitation vanilla extract, butter, chocolate chips, and Crisco for free. That makes everything better.

  This morning, Bobby Fullbright knocked on her back door and asked if he could take Liz to school. She told him that Liz was sleeping; he should go ahead without her. She probably wouldn’t want to face the world for another week or s
o. He asked if he could visit with her anyway. Against her better judgment (boys should never call on young ladies in their bedrooms unchaperoned), she told him yes, mostly because she did not have the energy to say no. She had not slept well since Susan’s death and her thoughts were increasingly difficult to string together. They were names disjointed from their faces that fluttered like the thin wings of moths in a somnambulist’s dream.

  Ten minutes after Bobby arrived, he and Liz were walking arm-in-arm down the stairs together. Mary felt a tinge of envy when they left, although she could not locate which child her envy was focused on.

  Soon after they were gone, she noticed the smell. At first it was just a kind of moldiness like the underside of a mushroom, and then it was thicker, like rotting. It came from the basement, and while she knew she should check on it, she saw no need to hurry. Nothing could be done until the rain ended. So she opened some windows and the drapes puffed outward. The wind circled the house in gasps. It reminded her of the way Susan used to play ghost when she was six, hiding inside the drapes, whispering ooh, ooh, at Mary, making the baby giggle. And then she thought about the way they used to bake cookies together. How Susan refused to lick the beaters or the bowl, would have none of the batter, only the first cookie that came out of the oven. Neat little thing.

  To escape the smell, Mary went to Shaws and bought groceries. As she drove, all she could hear was the swishing of water under her tires and the voices of things that had happened a long time ago. The river underneath the bridge had swelled almost as high as the street. Workmen dressed in green plastic slickers from Corpus Christi had already been recruited to jetty the side of the river with bags of sand, Lord knows why. They’d never be able to keep the river from flooding or mobile homes from sinking into the mud.

  On her drive Mary spotted several cars with chains secured to their tires for traction. Packed to the brim, they sped through the valley and across the bridge to the highway. At Shaws she heard that Theo Adams, the manager of the People’s Heritage Bank, along with his wife, Lois, had fled for Waterville without advising anyone of their departure. The bank, along with the Chop Mop Shop and most other stores in town, was closed. Some people, Mary guessed, had gone on vacation or else found jobs in other towns. But still, it was a strange time to leave, and with such haste. Most of the families on her block; the Murdocks, the Kellys, the Gustavsons, and the Brennans, were gone.

  Before going home, Mary stopped by the high school and parked her car twenty feet south of the lot. She sometimes did this when she was nervous or tired, an involuntary act. Years ago, when both her girls had been in school, she had gone there with plans to take the children and never come home. But these days, there was no design to her visits, just the shadow of what she had once intended still looming close. She sometimes pretended that she was a young woman again with that same choice ahead of her. She sometimes pretended, while watching that school, that both girls, their fates not yet determined, were inside. She did not imagine taking them away from Bedford. Instead she imagined that moment, sitting in the car, trapped in time, with the choice and its repercussions still ahead of her.

  She had watched the building today, thinking about how one daughter, let’s be honest now, her favorite daughter for no good reason except that the sound of her laughter had been the only thing that had made living in that house tolerable, was warm and safe. One daughter, her favorite daughter, in whom she had intentionally bred no love for Bedford nor loyalty to family, would survive. One child was sitting at a desk, and the other was buried in a pine box less than a mile away.

  Then Mary went home, unloaded her car, and baked. Now she sat, overlooking the mess she had created in the kitchen. Flour and sugar speckled the floor and her jeans. Cookies, some of them almost raw, were stuck to the counters, spotting grease into paper towels or through cooling racks. Waffles were stacked and Zip-locked in the freezer. On the table was a three-layer chocolate rum cake, Lord knows why, a death-day cake maybe.

  The phone rang. It had been ringing all morning. She didn’t answer it. Probably that gossipy nitwit April Willow wanting to bring over a vegan casserole or tofu or some other useless thing. She let it ring. It felt good to let it ring.

  Mary poured herself a glass of Gallo Zinfandel. The clock read two-thirty. The smells of baking did not obliterate the other smell, as she had intended. It was rotten like spoiled eggs and she lifted a dish towel over her nose to filter the stench. She did not want to go down there now, see that old stuff, the clothes, how Susan had lived during those last few years; amid the sound of the boiler, able to hear the footsteps of everyone else in the house.

  You’ve gotta do it, there’s nobody else. You can’t ask any of your buddies from Corpus Christi. They’d get their pretty Ferragamo pumps all wet. You’ve gotta do it. She had been thinking this all morning.

  She took another swig of Zinfandel, and headed for the basement.

  As she climbed down, the smell grew stronger. It reminded her of meat that has gone rancid in a broken freezer. When she got to the bottom of the basement steps, she found herself breathing through the collar of her turtleneck. She’d been down here only a few days ago, so how could anything smell this bad this fast?

  Leaks in the foundation had left about an inch of water across the brown-tiled floor. Along the ceiling was a mass of pipes coated in so many layers of plaster insulation that it bunched in places like elaborate papier-mâché. As she walked into Susan’s bedroom, the stench overwhelmed her and her eyes teared up. Could mold make this smell? A sick animal? She moaned aloud: a skunk. It had to be a skunk that got scared and sprayed the whole damn place before it died.

  When she looked around Susan’s old room, what she saw made her stand very still. The room was bright, lit by a black and blue striped ceramic lamp on the old dresser. The bed was made, eyelet sheets folded under the quilt she had packed away in the crawl space five years before. She closed her eyes. Opened them again. But the quilt, the lamp, Susan’s old sweaters folded on top of the bed, did not go away.

  Liz. It had to be Liz, using this place for herself and Bobby. But no, Mary had been here Friday, and there had been only the dusty bed frame, the old mattress. “Who’s here?” she called. “My husband’s upstairs and I called the police.”

  No answer. She considered doing just that. But whoever had been down here seemed to be gone. She’d call, and Danny Willow would think she was some kind of jittery wreck having hallucinations after her daughter’s death. Or worse, he’d come inside the house and see the kitchen, the baking. No, she couldn’t call anyone. And maybe this was the way she had left things, maybe she really was imagining.

  “My husband’s got a gun,” she called.

  Just then, the closet door opened and a monster stepped out of it. A lifeless thing, gaunt and pale. A thing so terrible that Mary’s heart stopped and she cursed God. It wore the dress Mary had given it, high collared and refined. But the buttons had all been torn, so that Mary could see black stitching knots along its throat and down its chest. Its skin was sewn together in a sloppy but functional manner, the way you might thread stuffed veal before placing it in the oven.

  Mary leaned against a wall, but there wasn’t a wall to lean against. She stumbled backward and fell into the dirty water. It surrounded her thighs and splashed against her face. The monster watched her. The monstrous thing; she knew its face.

  This wasn’t happening, Mary decided. She was dreaming. She was back home in Corpus Christi, still the apple of her tyrannical father’s eye. Or maybe she and her girls were driving the old Buick with all the windows rolled down, heading across the bridge and out of town. This life she’d lived the last fifteen years, it was the path not taken. It was the nightmare from which she would soon wake.

  The boiler kicked, and the water churned. The monster approached, and something inside Mary died. She heard, or maybe just imagined, a snapping sound. She heard her sanity break, like a record needle that skips, and is returned to the wrong g
roove: All was well. All was fine. All was lovely. Where’s the wine?

  Mary closed her eyes. Opened them. Looked down at her hands, at the ceiling. When she looked back at the closet, the monster was gone. Mary smiled widely. “My lovely,” she said.

  In place of the monster stood a little girl of about six years of age. She wore pigtails tied with thick blue yarn, and a blue dress bordered with white lace. A darling girl.

  “Where am I?” the little girl asked. Her voice was flat and without inflection. Cold.

  Mary smiled. All was well. All was fine. All was lovely. A box made out of pine.

  “Sweetie,” Mary said. The little girl’s eyes were cornflower blue. The boiler roared, and shallow whirlpools rushed across the floor. Mary crawled through the icy water. She leaned in close to the girl. So close that she could smell the child’s sour breath, feel the moisture of it collect on her cheek. “Don’t you look pretty, my Little Miss Muffett,” she said.

  The girl cocked her head, and Mary was reminded of a young Susan who had held her one-year-old sister in her arms. She hopped up onto the edge of the bed and sat. Her legs were too short to reach the ground, and her wet shoes dripped water.

  “I’ve got no place to go,” the little girl said. She smiled at Mary, and her teeth were spotted with specks of red.

  “I’m so sorry,” Mary said, and began to cry. She tried to stop. She’d never cried over Ted’s death, or even at the funeral this week. But that was fine and well. That was right and good. This was just a dream, and she was not really in hell.