by Micol Ostow
I regretted the suggestion almost instantly, the insistent rattle of the boathouse door creeping again, stomping along my rib cage.
(go away)
As though she could hear the banging herself, Ro swallowed hard. That greenish tint rushed back into her cheeks.
“Maybe in a bit.” She fingered at her handbag, a fringed, tribal-looking satchel bursting with clumps of folded-up paper and a plastic water bottle, half-empty, peeking out at an angle. She took a quick sip from the bottle and stuffed it back into the bag. “Why don’t you show me the house?”
“Or I could always take you to your room,” I offered quickly. “If you want to lie down? The house will still be here when you wake up.”
Her eyes darted back and forth, like a small animal’s. I thought back to that rust-colored flip of a tail I’d seen out my window last night. “Once I lie down, there’s no telling when I’ll be up again.” She forced a short laugh, setting her bag on the table and patting it as if it were a household pet, some living, breathing familiar. “I’ll leave this here. Why don’t you show me around now, while I’m still at least semi-alert?”
In fact, she seemed acutely alert, almost like she was poised for an unexpected catastrophe.
I could relate.
“Sure,” I said. “Let’s go.”
RO NOTICED the dining room wall right away. The hollow nail holes Luke made left the wall looking scarred. Her eyebrows twitched as we passed through the room, but she remained silent. She had been likewise still when I’d pointed out the door to the cellar on our way out of the kitchen. “Basement,” I mumbled. “Boring.”
Now, still eyeing the wall warily, Ro took a deep breath, the large, colorful beads of her necklace rolling against her freckled skin. “You burned the sage down there?”
I flushed, somehow ashamed, despite the suggestion—the order, really—having come from Ro herself in the first place. “In the corners,” I confirmed. “Or as close to the corners as I could get. It’s kind of a maze down there.”
She rapped against the wall, just beneath one thick web of cracks left by Luke’s hammer. Again, that round, hollow sound drifted toward us, the noise that had so puzzled my mother earlier.
“Yes,” she said. “I see.”
As we passed through the doorway toward the staircase, she ran a finger along the plaster archway. “Amity is an old house, Gwen.”
I nodded. “A hundred years, at least. A thousand. A million. I don’t know, exactly. Old. It’s been around—in one form or another—forever.” The realtor must have told us as much; how else would I know?
“Forever. Yes, that sounds right.”
One hand steady along the banister, Ro led the way upstairs. Her color was still off, uneasy, but her gait was sure, steady in the way I thought my aunt herself intrinsically was. Usually.
“The drive down was … Well. The roads around here are unreliable.” Ro’s words floated past her shoulder, toward me. “Did you all notice? Was it like that for you yesterday? When you came down?”
“What do you mean?”
“Lots of roadblocks and detours, the closer I got to Concord,” she said. “Roads that didn’t show up on any maps. The directions your mom gave were practically useless. I had to reorient myself every five miles or so. Very unsettling.”
I shrugged, even though she was walking in front of me, and couldn’t see it. “I didn’t notice. Nobody mentioned anything like that.” Not to me.
(they wouldn’t)
“Right, and”—Ro seemed to be talking to herself as much as to me now—“I’m you’re first visitor. And you just moved, don’t know the area. You haven’t met the neighbors yet, I’m assuming.”
“Neighbors? We’re out in the wilderness.” The house sat alone on a hill, after all.
Ro’s spine stiffened briefly, her fingers tensing against the banister. At the landing, she turned to me, her features arranged too cautiously to be entirely sincere. “Well, I hope you’re not too isolated out here. It’d be nice if you could make some friends.”
Nice. Because relationships were hard for me, connections were sometimes difficult, due to my
(hysterical)
sensitive nature, which so many of my peers found off-putting.
I stood beside Ro at the top of the staircase, taking in the twists of the house from above. It felt less surreal to see the sharp, unexpected angles of Amity from this vantage point, a little calmer.
“Have you tried the phone yet?” she asked.
I sucked in my breath. “No,” I said shortly. “Why?” There would be check-ins, updates with the doctors at some point, but not yet. And I was
(slept like the DEAD!)
fine right now.
Wasn’t I?
I squeezed my hands into tight fists, dug my fingernails into the healthy, unmarked flesh of my palms.
I was fine.
I am fine. I am.
“Oh, it’s nothing, really,” Ro said, speaking slowly, thoughtfully. “Just that I tried to call yesterday, to see how things were going. But I kept getting a busy signal, like there was something wrong with the line. I wasn’t sure if the problems were on my end, or on yours.”
“Huh.” Had I used the phone yesterday? Had anyone? Had it rung at all? I wasn’t sure. “Maybe the phone service isn’t hooked up yet. Sometimes things take longer than you expect, I guess especially, you know, out here in no-man’s-land.”
“Right.” Ro shrugged. “But, still. I thought your parents made a point of getting those things taken care of,” she said. “For … your …”
(slept like the dead)
“I’m fine,” I insisted. Fine.
Her eyes darted toward my palms, then back to my eyes.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m glad.” She tilted her head. “But you could tell me if you weren’t, you know. You can always tell me.”
“I know.” I swallowed. My hands pulsed, unseen, throbbing with a ghosted tinge of pain. I shoved them into my back pockets. “But I’m okay. I promise. Come on. I’ll show you the rest of the place.”
THE SECOND STORY BEHAVED ITSELF for Aunt Ro. The bathroom Luke and I shared betrayed none of the eerie images I’d seen last night, though the mirror was still cracked jaggedly through the middle. If Ro noticed, she didn’t mention it. The bedrooms, though still storing pockets of unexpectedly cold air, were unremarkable. Ro commented on the closet space and the original detailing of the claw-foot tub, but beyond that, she was subdued.
As we wound our way to the third floor, a familiar sense of vertigo crept over me. The dimensions of the stairwell seemed to morph and shift the way space had expanded and folded over for me down in the basement. I was woozy as we approached the third-floor landing, and—though it may have been my imagination—Ro appeared to teeter, too. At the top of the staircase, I grabbed the knob of the banister and shut my eyes, willing the floor to steady beneath me. When I opened them again, I painted as bright an expression on my face as possible.
“So. Ta-da.” I pretended to curtsy, ignoring the dizziness.
“That was a climb.” Ro’s face was pale, her upper lip beaded with sweat.
I nodded and winced. “I know, sorry. There’s not even much to see up here anyway.” The sewing room was behind me, and I gestured to it. “This is the only room we’ve really used, and just for storage, you know. Stuff we won’t need to unpack for a while.”
Ro pressed her eyes shut tightly and swayed, leaning against the wall for support.
I moved toward her, tentative. “Do you need to sit down? Are you sure you don’t want to rest for a little?” She clearly wasn’t quite herself.
Roadblocks, detours, useless directions … the phone line being so finicky. It had to be coincidence, all of it. Bizarre, but completely random.
Didn’t it?
Ro raised a hand to her mouth. She whispered something, a string of softly breathed syllables I shouldn’t have even been able to make out.
Except they’d come
from my own lips, too.
“She was shot in the head.”
My blood ran cold.
NOW I FELT MORE THAN DIZZY, more than faint. Now I felt as though the floor were slipping out from underneath me, as though Amity’s very foundations were crumbling to dust, to ashes, to a gray, papery silt.
Maybe I’d heard her wrong. Maybe the voice had come from inside my
(crazy)
head.
“Did you say something, Aunt Ro?” I was quiet, almost as though I didn’t actually want her to answer.
Almost.
She whirled to face me, her eyes bloodshot, lined red like road maps. “This house is old, Gwen,” she said. Her voice was strained and hoarse. “Very old. It has …” She seemed to be struggling for just the right words. “… history.”
She put a hand on my shoulder. “You’re telling me you’re feeling good these days? Because I promise, it would be okay if you weren’t.” Her eyes searched mine. “Your parents, they think the country will be so relaxing, therapeutic.… I’ve heard all of their arguments for moving out here. But being so isolated, it’s not for everyone.”
“It’s quiet,” I said.
Quiet out here in the country, that was.
Inside my mind was a different matter entirely. But even with Ro’s gaze so imploring, I couldn’t admit that.
I had heard my parents’ arguments, too. I was the argument.
But I was better now. I was.
Because I had to be.
Whatever Aunt Ro’s suspicions were—however they might have collided with my own nightmares, my own
(insane)
fears—I needed them to be misguided. Mistaken.
I didn’t want to hear any more about Ro’s intuitions. Not right now.
Not when it came to me, or to Amity.
RO PAUSED at the door to the sewing room.
I tried not to wonder why, gathering bravado and pushing past her, into the room. I moved—one foot, then the other—and then I was fully inside, just past the threshold. I felt a surge, a twinge of something active and electric, as I stepped in. The air around me seemed to shimmer.
Then I heard the buzzing.
“Gwen?” Ro’s voice wobbled, and when I pivoted to look back at her, her eyes were wide and bright, her skin a dull, ashy shade, runny and clammy like something soft left out for too long in the sun.
“Aren’t you coming in?” I asked.
The buzzing was louder now, more insistent. I brushed a hand at my ear to no effect. The hum swelled, almost soothing me, lulling me.
“Gwen …,” Ro said, her voice watery, unlike anything I’d ever heard from her lips before. “Gwen, I think you should come out of there.”
“There’s a beautiful view of the river from the window,” I insisted, even as the buzzing deepened, twisted, thickened. I moved toward it, waving to her.
Why did it seem so vital, so crucial, that Aunt Ro come inside with me? So urgent that she view the Concord River through Amity’s windows, through her heavy-framed eyes?
The buzzing was loud as ever by now, and I felt the flicker of tiny beats, tiny bristles against my face.
“Gwen,” Ro repeated. She seemed to be almost shrieking, her face stretched into a death mask, rubbery with fear. “Come back out of the room. Now.”
I squinted. “What’s wrong?” She looked sick, but it still wasn’t enough to move me—to remove me—from the room.
And were those … wings I felt fluttering at my cheeks? The humming, the buzz, was deafening now, Ro’s eyes wide and wild.
I teetered, blinking. The sound, the sensation … everything seemed to be multiplying, threatening to fill my nose, my mouth, my ears … but I welcomed it.
Then Aunt Ro’s hand clamped around my wrist, viselike, tugging at me. I could almost feel the vacuum-sealed air pop open like a black hole that had suddenly been uncorked.
I opened my mouth wide, to protest, and felt the swarm of insects—hornets? bees? horseflies?—rush inside, choking me off, stifling my cries.
Aunt Ro’s grip tightened, and I was
(falling falling falling)
humming from the inside now, from within and from beneath, from my secret, hidden core.
And then the buzzing silenced, and darkness came down.
“IT DOESN’T MAKE ANY SENSE.”
I opened my eyes to the sight of thick, rough-hewn beams overhead—the living room ceiling, if not original to Amity’s construction, then at least several centuries old. At the very least.
I was on the sofa, stretched on my back, what felt like a pillow propped beneath my head and smelling vaguely of mildew. I swallowed and felt a tightness in my throat, raw and scratchy, and recalled the buzzing of the sewing room, that silent scream, the patter of wings and the creeping cloud of darkness that swarmed around me before blackness came in full.
My mother’s voice, slightly muffled. That was what I was hearing. It was coming from the kitchen.
“I’m sorry about the … were they flies?”
Flies. Yes, in the sewing room. They could have been flies.
I pawed at my neck, pressed my fingers against my throat, searching, trying to ascertain any bites or stings, any telltale swelling. But I could feel nothing but the prickle of goose bumps on my skin.
Ro’s voice: a mumble, a low stream of minor chords. Sounds wove in and out from the kitchen, like a radio intermittently losing frequency.
“The window’s been open. Who knows how long the realtor left it that way. Could’ve been all spring, all damn summer. Maybe there was a nest in there, in a closet or a corner or something.” My father now, gruff and unyielding.
Ro’s voice rose. “Did you find a nest, Hal? When you were up there? Was the window open?”
There was a banging sound like a knock, or a fist against the surface of a table, and then my father rumbled again, angry and indistinct, that imaginary radio dial shuffling wildly for a moment. Amity’s angles were playing tricks on me again. On all of us.
“… could have opened it and closed it a hundred times just yesterday!” I heard the sound of a chair scraping against the floor, imagined my mother rising to pace the kitchen the way she did when she was anxious. “But I don’t see why you should have to leave over this. Flies? It’s ridiculous.”
“Insane,” my father thundered.
(crazy)
My throat lurched. The blood pounded in my ears.
A mumble from Ro. “—didn’t see … the stings.”
“She’s fine!” my mother shrieked, making my shoulders clench. “There are no marks on her! Or, she was fine, until something you said got her so upset.”
“Let her leave.” My father, again.
A door slammed distantly, tinny and thin. It was the screen door off the kitchen. Footsteps grew stronger, drew closer, until Luke’s profile passed swiftly by the living room doorway. His hands were curled around something I couldn’t make out, and he didn’t glance my way. Murray ambled eagerly after him, a whiff of mossy earth, sulfuric and sour, carrying past me in his wake.
There was a ruffle, a scrabbling sound now, slightly frantic, from the kitchen. Aunt Ro: “… leave something for Gwen—”
“—you’ve done enough.” An emphatic cough from my father. Another bang, a clap, more like a palm slapped flat against a surface.
Another scraping sound, another chair pushing back from the table. Aunt Ro this time, I thought. “Never mind, I—I guess I didn’t bring it with me, after all.”
“Ro—” I could picture my mother reaching out, her slim, white arm stretching toward her sister, her forehead creased in concern. “This is all getting bl—”
“—I’ll come back soon,” Ro said shortly. There was a small hitch in her voice. “But I can’t stay tonight. I’m just going to say good-bye to the kids. Then I’m off.”
My throat tightened again, swelling hot, tender beneath my fingertips. Faintly, I heard a buzz—just one, simple and razor sharp. I gagged, tri
ed to whisper. Tried to call out, vainly.
I couldn’t. The air in Amity was heavy, weighing me down and closing me off, cell by cell.
The darkness came, again.
BUT DOWN IN THE WELL-DEEP BLACK, tucked in some imaginary middle space, Ro’s voice came to me. It was warm and slow, like honey. As she spoke, her hair swung against me, brushing my cheek, cocooning me in a silky curtain, reaching me, somehow, even through Amity’s murky fog.
“I’m going, Gwen, but I’m here for you.” Her words cut channels through the inky distance, tugged at me in my haze.
“You’ll let me know if you need anything. Just call for me, and I’ll come.”
She squeezed my hand.
Through the darkness, I tried to squeeze back.
Moments later, I heard her engine turn over in the driveway, then growl and fade away. My breath came more easily now, improving in slight but steady half measures. The darkness began to lift, to recede.
Of course, it was too late—my breath, the light. I’d lost the chance to say good-bye to Ro.
She was shot in the head, I thought.
She was.
TEN YEARS EARLIER
DAY 3
I LIED ABOUT GOING STRAIGHT HOME EMPTY-HANDED from that shop, our second day at Amity, I mean.
I didn’t end up buying anything that would keep the boathouse door closed, that part was the truth, yeah. But another truth was how I hated—always hate—to disappoint Jules. So I didn’t come home completely flat-out, bottoms-up empty-handed. Not completely.
I did bring her something back. Just a little dumb nothing piece of junk from a run-down convenience store, no big deal. But that afternoon when I went to give it to her, thinking it would make her smile, or whatever, she and Mom were all caught up putting contact paper on the cabinet shelves. That took about thirty years or so, and then it was more crappy pizza with the slimy canned mushrooms on top that no one likes except Dad, and another night of reading, stuffed up and wrapped like a mummy in my sleeping bag, listening to the firecracker banging from outside, from down by the river.
