by Micol Ostow
We had to get out of that room. The stink was making me swoon.
“It’s not blood, Abel.” A fresh wave of dizziness hit me as I forced the words out. “I told you. It’s an old house; the plumbing is funky. Probably the pipes are half rotted out—” I tripped on that word rotted, because, man, that was exactly what the room smelled like.
“That’s probably why we could even afford this place. Why it was so cheap. I bet the pipes are nothing but mold and rust.” And, man, oh man, why did that image make me think of a human being, a human body, all blood and guts, veins and insides? Why did it make me think of that yawning mouth, those eyeless sockets, all peering out at me from the window?
Why would mold, and rust, and rot suggest bodies—I caught myself. “It’s not blood, Abel. Jesus. Quit being such a baby. Just brush your teeth in the kitchen sink. And forget about it.” That’s what I was going to do anyway.
Rusty pipes. That was all it was. Nothing to be afraid of.
Not for me.
NOW
DAY 6
THE AIR AROUND AMITY WAS UNRELIABLE. By day, the August heat shimmered off the surface of the Concord River. But at night, chill slithered down over us, so dense it seemed to streak the walls. Country living, Mom said, though I didn’t think she really believed that.
At night, Luke would wander the house draped under a ratty afghan he said he’d found in the cellar. Mom muttered something about fleas, prompting Dad to fiddle with the thermostat mounted on the living room wall.
It made no difference. “Broken,” Dad decided. “Part of why the place was so cheap.”
Luke pointed out the fireplace in the living room. Why not?
Why not mainly had to do with our family being totally and completely unprepared for rural life; my parents had fallen in love with Amity, but hadn’t considered where, exactly, we were moving to. We hadn’t bought any firewood. It was August, after all. So fireplace or no, there was nothing to burn.
“There’s an ax,” Luke had said. “Outside. And a woodpile. All we need to do is split the logs.”
“Is that all?” I tried to keep my voice light.
Mom made some clucking sounds about axes being dangerous, which I had to agree with. But Luke was determined, and that seemed to be the end of that.
If not the end of the bitter, frigid nights.
DAYTIME AT AMITY, THOUGH … daytime was a completely different story.
Daytime at Amity, at least that first week of August, was stagnant, lulling me into a state of suspended animation, unable to focus on more than the most distilled, deliberate thought for any real length of time. In the heat, my mind felt slippery and loose, my breath—so vivid and sharp in the chill of the deep night—a shallow pull that never seemed to quite slide down past the lump always expanding in my throat.
I thought that daytime at Amity was starting to make me crazy.
By my sixth day, I had to do something about it. Beautiful as the view was from our back porch, I needed to do something other than sit out there, motionless, baking in the sun. It felt, out there, like my brain was melting, like my skin was deteriorating from the heat, separating from my bones. It felt, out there, like I was deteriorating. Pulling apart, repelling, like oil and water.
I couldn’t let that happen. Couldn’t fall apart.
Not again.
IT WAS A RIVER, AFTER ALL, so swimming seemed like a logical antidote to the suffocating heat. So logical I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it sooner. The heat truly was affecting my reason.
The boathouse had become Luke’s domain; he disappeared into it for hours at a time. He was cleaning it out, he said, clearing up refuse left in the previous owners’ wake, and suggested the rest of us keep our distance until he’d finished.
Recalling the ominous shotgun sound of the boathouse doors our first night at Amity,
(she was shot in the head)
I was happy to oblige. Luke claimed the rickety shed held a leaky old rowboat he’d never trust to stay afloat, much less propel a person from one point to another. But more promising to me just then; it had a dock, solid looking enough despite the mossy undergrowth of algae clinging to its pilings.
Swimming it was, then.
I FOUND LUKE AROUND THE SIDE OF THE HOUSE, framed neatly between the two half-moon eyes of Amity’s attic windows. He hovered over the base of a thick tree trunk, contemplating an ax buried in the worn, ringed surface of the wood. The ax itself was unremarkable, embedded maybe a quarter inch deep into the tree trunk, blade scarred with rust. The look on my brother’s face was more unsettling than anything else about the scene. Beside him, Murray stood, hackles on edge, a low growl caught in his throat.
Something about the glaze to Luke’s eyes made me wonder how long he’d been standing out there, in that very position. Too long, I thought. My typically easy, good-natured brother looked two-dimensional and sepia toned in the unrelenting afternoon light.
The heat, I told myself.
“What are you doing?” I asked, hating the lilt in my voice.
He twitched like I’d startled him. Taking me in, he stepped back from the ax, as if deliberately distancing himself. “Gwen. Sorry. I didn’t see you come up.”
“Clearly,” I said, glad just then that the ax was firmly lodged in the tree trunk, and not swinging from my brother’s hands. “So?”
He stretched. “Firewood. Like we talked about.”
I almost laughed. “Like we talked about. Yeah, we talked about it. But I thought we all voted that idea down.” It occurred to me to bring up the dining room, the twisted, ruined nails, and that deep, hollow echo from within the walls … and then it occurred to me not to.
Then I did laugh, nervously. Luke didn’t notice, which was unusual for him. He raised his hand up, shielding his eyes from the sun, and nodded toward a stack of wood resting alongside the wall of the house. “We’ve got too much now to let it go to waste. It’s nice and dry; should burn well. Really, I just need to split it.”
“Really.” I choked back a
(hysterical)
strangled sound and pushed the echoes from my head, denied that clipped, portentous slam-click-BANG that flared in my ears, my throat, my chest,
(she was shot in the head)
as I envisioned blade splitting grain, slicing and paring with keen, brutal precision.
Finally, he looked truly, directly at me. His eyes were narrow slits. “Yeah,” he said, curt. “That’s all.”
Murray whimpered and curled himself into a tight ball beside the woodpile. “Great, okay. If you think so.” I tried to sound casual.
“The house is freezing at night,” he said shortly. “We need to do something about it.”
I shivered, wanting to change the subject. I remembered, suddenly, what I had come outside for in the first place.
“I’m going for a swim. Do you want to come? The wood will still be here when we get back.”
Luke didn’t register that I’d spoken at all. Again, his gaze had fixed on the handle of the ax, and the fault line in the tree trunk’s base where the blade had penetrated.
“No thanks,” he said finally, the words oozing from his mouth.
I struggled to keep my voice even. “You’re not going to start with this now, though? Right? You’ll pass out from sunstroke.”
“What?” He shook his head. He sounded confused, fuzzy.
“You’ll wait before you even pick up that ax,” I clarified. “Right?” Murray made a snuffling sound, as though agreeing with me, and shifted the fold of his front paws.
Luke shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Come down to the dock if you change your mind,” I said lamely.
“Maybe. I guess.” Luke scratched at his chin. He was looking at the ax, again. “The blade needs to be sharpened,” he decided. “Yeah.”
Murray jumped up and darted behind me, ears flattened against his head. Luke stepped forward and curled a fist around the handle of the ax, and Murray yelped
as though my brother had grabbed him by the tail.
“Oh, um, Luke, that’s—”
That’s a bad idea. I flinched instinctively. Luke didn’t notice. He pumped the ax handle once or twice, his elbow clenching, his face contorted.
It’s not going to come out, I hoped. It won’t.
I reached a hand out to Luke, and felt a—a twinge, some sort of internal charge, like my organs had been electrocuted.
Luke grunted. He braced his legs and yanked. The electric sensation danced down my spine. The ax blade wavered in the wood, then rocked, finally dislodging.
With one arm, Luke swung it wide, arcing the ax broadly over his shoulder. My teeth clamped together with the force of a door slamming. I tottered backward, tripping over a shivering Murray.
“Are you crazy?” I rasped. “What if that thing went flying? You could have killed someone.”
You could have killed me.
Luke turned to look at me blankly. “But I didn’t,” he said, toneless. “You’re fine.”
I didn’t feel fine. Not at all.
I untangled myself from Murray, patting him reassuringly. Now I was eager to make space between myself and my brother. “Anyway, I’m going. Swimming.”
Luke didn’t answer. He was preoccupied again, toying with the ax, turning it from side to side.
“This needs to be sharpened,” he mumbled.
“It looks plenty sharp to me.”
Luke ignored me. I headed back inside the house, Murray close at my heels.
IT DIDN’T TAKE ME LONG TO CHANGE INTO MY SWIMSUIT, eager as I was to shake off my exchange with Luke outside.
As usual, once I was inside, it was easier to shrug off my own jerky, birdlike timidity, easy to see my own trembling responses as an overreaction. As what the doctors might call a heightened state, hysteria.
For axes to make me jumpy was fine—it probably wasn’t all that unusual as far as human behavior went—but, I’d brought more than my fair share of
(crazy)
swirling, nervous energy to that conversation by the woodpile.
A swim would do me good, clear my head.
Mom told me that most of the beach towels were still packed away, piled in the boxes cluttering up the third-floor sewing room. No one had ventured inside it since Ro’s visit, but my father insisted it’d been purged of any infestation. I had no memory of being stung and Ro’s hushed good-bye felt like little more than a waking dream. I took the spiral staircase two steps at a time, the prospect of that first, crisp slice through the river driving me up and around, up and around.
Up and around.
Up. And around.
Up.
And around.
And around.
The heat rose with me. By the time I reached the third-story landing, clinging to the banister, the blood pounded against my temples, pulsing waves of vivid red that radiated down my spine. I could feel my heartbeat in my fingertips, in the curve of my lower belly, under the soft padding of my toes.
I could feel her. Amity.
I wasn’t alone at the top of the staircase. Amity was with me, enveloping every open space, every cell of my self. And she was playing tricks on me.
All at once, Amity’s staircase was like a hall of mirrors. My heartbeat, the rhythm of my breathing, the shadowy atmosphere dancing across my bare, exposed thighs—they all knew it to be true, even as my mind insisted it couldn’t possibly be.
Amity was like a fun house—all odd, cockeyed angles and unexpected edges. It stood only three stories high (not including that cavernous cellar), but as I wound my way up the staircase, it suddenly seemed to go on forever, narrowing to an infinite horizon with each step I climbed.
Amity was playing tricks on me.
But, no. That was hysteria, again. A heightened state brought on by lack of oxygen, by taking the twisting, rickety staircase too quickly. It had to be.
What would happen if I were to retreat, shrieking, back down the staircase, thrash wildly through the house, calling for my mother, insisting there was something outright wrong, sentient, aware …
… something outright evil about this place?
What then?
Well. I knew what then, didn’t I?
Then came the doctors, soft-spoken and sympathetic, pens tapping at notebooks, nods and murmurs and unconvincing reassurances. Then came hushed conferences with my mother and father, concerned glances, prescription pads. Then came pills: flat tablets and chubby capsules, bitter aftertaste and chalky residue.
Then came the fitful place between wake and dream, where I was never quite lucid, never quite sure even of my physical presence. Never quite sure where my own thoughts ended and everything else began.
Then came hospitals. Treatments, therapies, needles … and the crushing, overwhelming futility of trying to assert my own jagged, fractured perspective. The futility of trying to convince people.
That was the reason that Amity couldn’t be aware, couldn’t be involved, invested in me.
Couldn’t be alive.
That just wasn’t the way things worked.
THE ONLY CHOICE, THEN, WAS TO DENY; to squeeze my eyes shut and insist, insist to myself that the twisted, menacing proportions of the third floor, of Amity, were not some slick, calibrated trick of the paranormal, but only a glitch, a hiccup, of my own mind. To insist against the whispers rustling in my ear, so ominously similar to Ro’s twilight-state farewell.
Against the distant, faint buzz of insects, swarming, invisible, just above the surface of my skin.
It’s only a hallway, Gwen, I insisted.
Only a house.
THE SEWING ROOM WAS DUSTY, strung with cobwebs and speckled with particles that drifted in and out of the sunlight, a prism of neglect. But nothing about the room was particularly otherworldly. The buzzing sound had stopped.
Thankfully, it took only a quick scan of the boxes to locate the one labeled BEACH TOWELS in my mother’s neat, efficient scrawl. After a brief tussle with a length of packing tape, I fished one out, a swath of vivid Day-Glo stripes that defied the darker murmurings of my mind.
Thank goodness.
Vaguely calmed, I slung the towel over my shoulder and moved closer to the large, multi-paned picture window on the far wall of the room. The view truly was a portrait: bold, verdant foliage rioting against the cloudless sky. The river beckoned to me.
But …
I blinked and leaned closer to the smudged glass. The wind must be rustling the trees, I told myself. Surely that’s all that’s out there.
It was the first, the best explanation. The sensible, reasonable, rational explanation.
But it wasn’t the right one.
That’s not the wind, Gwen.
There was someone out there. Down by the boathouse. A young girl, maybe ten years old, a blur in faded jeans and a wild, thick ponytail that danced back and forth over her shoulders as she moved. Who was she?
I sighed.
Slowly, like an unexpected kiss, I felt a firm hand slip around my waist. The gesture was soothing, reassuring. Comforting.
And then there was my mother, the scent of her freesia hand lotion enveloping me, and her breath on my cheek. “What are you looking at, Gwen?” she asked.
“There’s … Did you see someone out there?” I pointed to the spot where I’d seen the girl only seconds before, but she’d vanished in the split second I’d let my attention wander.
“I saw your brother outside with the ax. It looks like he’s really planning to cut some firewood. Why do I feel like that’s something I should discourage?”
I didn’t want to think about Luke, about the ax. The girl’s image had grounded me, and I wanted to cling to that.
“Never mind,” I said, shrugging. I turned from the window at last …
… and stopped, stock-still.
My mother stood in the doorway of the sewing room.
My mother stood, head cocked slightly, looking quizzical, in the doorway of the sewin
g room.
She wasn’t directly behind me, although I’d felt her breath on the nape of my neck, and sensed her skin by its smell …
… and felt her arm at my waist.
She hadn’t been behind me at all.
She’d been standing in the doorway of the sewing room. My mother had been standing, not behind me, but in the doorway of the sewing room.
She’d been standing in the doorway of the sewing room this whole time.
TEN YEARS EARLIER
DAY 8
SUNDAY WAS PRETTY QUIET, for a change.
Mom went to church, like usual. She’d always been pretty into religion and stuff; I guess her family was like that when she was growing up, I mean. We didn’t see her family too much—they were settled further up the coast, and I guess they weren’t too fond of Dad, which I couldn’t exactly blame them for.
So it was Sunday, and it was quiet. Mom was at Mass, and Jules was somewhere in the house watching Abel, and Dad was down by the boathouse, working on this beat-up Leeward, a day sailer he scavenged as soon as he’d signed the papers on Amity. He’d always wanted to have a boat, he’d said. Always. It was the first any of us were hearing about this lifelong dream.
The thing was a real clunker anyway—you could see just from looking at it; it was old enough that it was wood, not fiberglass, and no joke, that wood had seen better days. You didn’t have to know anything about boats to know that it would be a long time before this one was ready to test its sea legs again. Even in the hands of someone who knew what he was doing, and that wasn’t really Dad. Okay, he was mechanical—always real hands-on at the dealership—but boats were never his specialty.
But it kept him busy, so I wasn’t complaining.
Honestly, it was actually starting to feel maybe a little too quiet around the house. Boring. And if there’s one thing I hate, it’s being bored. I’m not real good with boredom. That was one thing the counselors downstate would say, over and over, and as far as that went, I had to agree with them.
