Amity

by Micol Ostow

  I HELD IT OUT TO HER, AND JULES GRABBED AT IT, desperate. She caught the slime-streaked blade and wrapped her hands around it. She kicked and coughed and I pulled, throwing my whole body into it.

  Jules squawked my name once, twice, then disappeared under again, her fingers pressing hard into the metal, turning white.

  There was a pull on the other end of the shovel, like someone had Jules by the legs and wasn’t going to let her back up on the dock, back up to me.

  Amity. I could feel her power in the air all around us. The static in my head was louder now and, for a minute, I thought about just letting go—just leaving the shovel to sink, and Jules along with it.

  For whatever reason, Amity wanted her gone. I thought that was enough for me.

  I uncurled my fingers and let the shovel go a little bit slack.

  With one hand, Jules slapped at the water, fingers waving panicky now, bubbles rising from where her hair streamed out like a big, gaping wound.

  Jules. This was Jules in the water, underwater, drowning. The one thing—person, I reminded myself, person, not thing—I couldn’t let Amity take.

  I grunted, trying to concentrate and push through that buzz, bracing myself. I slid forward as far as I could, thinking I was for sure following Jules into the water any minute.

  Of course, if I did, whatever was wrapped around her legs would welcome me. Would help me back to shore. What Amity wanted from me was different.

  Maybe there was a reason Jules was being held under, being held back, you know? Like a good reason Amity wanted her, in that different way, I mean. Wanted to destroy her.

  That buzz inside, it burned at me, saying maybe Jules was supposed to stay under, was supposed to be buried. Supposed to be part of the Concord, of Amity, that way.

  Her fingers twitched against the shovel and I blinked. A bottle rocket exploded in my temples.

  I shook my head and opened my eyes, breathing hard.

  Jules.

  This was Jules. In the water. The one thing—person!—I couldn’t let Amity take.

  I flexed my elbows, yanking her back with all of my strength, everything I had in me.

  HER ARMS BROKE THE SURFACE FIRST, white as bone, and then her face, turned up to the sky and gasping huge swallows of air. Her T-shirt clung and her shorts were soaked, sagging low as I pulled her over the edge of the dock. Once we were safe—steady, I mean—she flopped over, barely looking me in the eye.

  She looked worn-out. Dead, almost, like something dragged back from beyond. The sun disappeared behind a cloud, and I thought, again, how maybe she was meant to be drowned. That buzz sparked behind my ears, the corners of my mouth wanting to jerk up again, wanting to grin.

  She coughed. “Something was pulling on me,” she said. “Something was keeping me under there.” Her voice was flat.

  “Come on.” I gave her my most blank, most not-real face. I didn’t usually do that with Jules, but the static, it was pounding now. It felt like that blank look was all I could handle. “That’s nuts. Like what?”

  Her face tensed like she knew I was bullshitting her. “You didn’t come after me. Not right away.”

  I couldn’t think of what to say to that. I mean, I pulled her up, right? Eventually? I didn’t let Amity take her.

  After a second, Jules started to cry, big heaving sobs that made her whole body shake. “You didn’t come after me,” she mumbled again, her voice thick.

  Usually Jules’s crying just breaks me in half. But right now anger flared red behind my eyes. I pulled her back up finally. Even though Amity wanted her. And here she was, still whining.

  I hated her for a moment.

  I was thinking I should have maybe let her go.

  Ignoring her sniveling, I picked up the shovel and walked back up the hill to the house.

  Back to Amity.

  NOW

  DAY 16

  LUKE HAD TAKEN to sleeping in the basement.

  By our third week at Amity, this had become his regular practice. Mom and Dad didn’t comment on it—at least, not to me. I was too fragile for their nervous speculations, of course.

  I had my own opinions on the phenomenon, nonetheless. It seemed an odd choice, given how dank the basement was, smelling like mold and sharp, overripe mildew. But Luke insisted it was the only place in the house that ever felt warm at night, and that point was hard to argue.

  I had resigned myself to involuntarily waking at 3:14 most mornings, regardless of how soundly I was—or wasn’t—sleeping. I wondered whether Luke dreamed of shotguns, too.

  He was sleeping later and later, and after a few nights of his basement hibernations, my curiosity

  (killed the cat)

  overrode my unpleasant suspicions about the basement, about what it contained, and how it might be working its will on my brother.

  Working its will, Gwen? Its will?

  Don’t be

  (insane)

  silly.

  It was a room. In a house. It couldn’t feel, couldn’t emote, and it certainly couldn’t commune with the living. It had no will to speak of. Houses did not work that way.

  But what about the waking dreams? my inner voice persisted, pressing. What about the images, the slow, languid, abstract reveals of Amity’s history? Of her power?

  What about the red room?

  If my waking dreams held any truth, this “red room” existed. It had strength. And it was underground, tucked within the walls, just behind my brother’s makeshift bedroom.

  IT WAS AFTER LUNCHTIME when I found myself at the entrance to the cellar, wavering. Luke had brushed past me an hour earlier, unwashed, hair uncombed, his clothing wrinkled and strewn with lint, muttering something about firewood. A saggy plastic garbage bag like the one I’d seen in the cellar the other day was slung carelessly over his shoulder.

  Did we need more firewood?

  Maybe.

  Or maybe … maybe … Luke needed more time with the ax.

  Like so many other unbidden thoughts, I pushed the idea as far from my mind as I could. I had grown more adept at doing so since arriving at Amity.

  I’d had to learn, to adapt—in order to stay

  (alive)

  sane.

  THE CELLAR DOOR CREAKED as I pushed it open, the sound like a yawn, a stirring. I felt small, vulnerable as I ventured downstairs.

  Luke had set a few rusted table lamps strategically along the walls. In the orange-tinted light, I could see more vividly the boxes we’d stowed here, those containing our least essential belongings. There was nothing appealing about venturing further downstairs. To me, basements were shadowy spaces of containment, concealment. And I’ve always had enough shadowy spaces of my own.

  But there was the curiosity.

  The first thing to hit me as I descended was the smell: acrid, watery, like a carpet of moss. Luke was right about one thing: it was warmer down here; through the walls I could hear the occasional whirring of machinery as the boiler and other piping chugged away.

  But the warmth and the odor together formed something beyond the sum of their parts. Stepping into the basement was like stepping into a swampland on solid ground.

  And Luke chose to sleep down here?

  The grungy, threadbare couch that I recognized from before had been dragged against the far wall, against those smooth, round, egg-like stones. It was a jaundiced shade of chartreuse, except in the places where the pilling fabric had completely worn through, spewing clouds of dirt-clotted cotton batting from frayed seams. A fringed wool blanket lay in a heap over one sunken arm, and a dented-in pillow was tossed carelessly at the other, confirming that indeed, impossibly, this was where my brother was now spending his nights.

  To one side of the couch was a flimsy folding card table, and on that an ancient television set manufactured, I guessed, sometime well before the age of Technicolor. I couldn’t imagine it even worked, but its nearness to the couch suggested that, indeed, my brother had been making use of it.

  I
inhaled, shuddering, and the heady scent of rot, of spoil, filled my lungs, oily and viscous enough to almost taste. I heard scurrying from a corner, and closed my eyes, flashing briefly to images from my recent dreams.

  I didn’t want to be dramatic, or hysterical. But in that moment, the rattling, the rustling—it sounded like rolling

  (bones)

  marbles?

  Matchsticks?

  Some other form of child’s play?

  It had been eons, ages, life spans past since Luke or I played with toys like those. So who was causing the rustling sound?

  Fingers skated across my waist, and there was a swift, tight pinch, a twist of my skin that brought hot tears to my eyes.

  I wasn’t alone in Amity. Or in my own head.

  Who is sharing my space?

  (Whose bones were buried in this basement, Gwen?)

  The sensation, those snaking fingertips, they dissipated, leaving me to the echoes of my harsh breathing. My side throbbed dully in their wake. I bit back the urge to shriek.

  (Whose bones?)

  Another beat, another low, jagged breath, another flicker—

  And then.

  There was a gentle tap on my shoulder, a soft exhale on my cheek.

  I turned to follow it, but I was still alone.

  Wasn’t I?

  “THIS IS WHERE IT COMES FROM.”

  I heard the words, but there was no one beside me.

  “This is where it happened. Where it always will happen.”

  Yes, I thought. Of course. Of course I’d heard the sounds, the indications of Amity’s power.

  The bones. The bones, and the bodies. Clattering, clanking. Creaking.

  The banging of the shotgun.

  The shrieking, the shouts and screams.

  Angry, gnarled phantom fingers, grabbing and prying at my flesh.

  The room flickered like a projection in the midst of readjustment. I could sense the shift in the atmosphere, the charging of particles. I could see, quite clearly, a hazy crimson curtain pass over the underground space, could make out the glimmer of a scarlet glow from beneath a crack in the wall, where stone met earthen floor.

  “There.”

  The phantom voice was ragged. My heart rattled against my ribs. From under the wall’s crack, the fault line, a slip, a scrap of paper peeked out at me. I moved toward it, tugged at it, tried to pry it free. The stone above it jiggled, showering a small dust storm down.

  I leaned forward and sneezed, pulling the stone loose. Through the gaping space it left behind, I saw the corner of … something. Some kind of folder? A binder, three-ring style?

  “Yes.” Yes, the voice was saying; yes, there was something there; and, yes, I was meant to find it. To unearth it. With only the slightest hesitation, I set about loosening the stones on either side of the fresh opening, sifting, raking at the dirt with my fingers until the object was clear to me.

  It was a binder. Overstuffed, caked with dirt and moldy stains.

  “This is where it begins. This is where it happens. This is where it always will happen.”

  Always, I thought, my gorge rising.

  I fished the binder out.

  IT SEEMED LIKE A SCRAPBOOK, filthy white plastic, cracked at the corners and covered in mud. It reeked of decay, of the particular dead-body rot I’d come to know from my dreams.

  Opening the book sent a frisson through me, an electrical charge that I felt in a tight band across my forehead. It was filled with irregular bunches of papers, some yellowed with age, some crisp, folded-over, choice phrases traced in alarmred, accusing underline. Hole-punched newspaper articles, blurred and worn and fraying, and other clips, photo album pages with clear laminate skins curling up at the edges.

  Memigassett, I read. Burial rituals. Nexus of power.

  It was documentation, I realized, of all I’d seen in my waking dreams.

  But where had it come from?

  (the red room)

  The thought was there, then gone again. But, yes, that was what lay beyond the stone barriers of Amity’s basement. The red room. That was what I had seen, at night, time and time again.

  “Yes.”

  Still the voice remained disembodied, though I felt breath against my shoulder, sensed the ruffle of air, of an arm’s reach around and past me.

  The scrapbook pages ruffled—on their own?

  No, not on their own, Gwen, I knew. You are not alone in Amity.

  A headline, bold and dark as a gunshot: THE CONCORD RUNS RED AGAIN: FAMILY SLAUGHTERED AT AMITY.

  The date was ten years past. There was a picture, too. Blurry and unreliable, but chilling nonetheless.

  It was a photograph of a boy just about Luke’s age. It wasn’t Luke—that I could see, that my poisoned, addled mind knew incontrovertibly—but this boy’s eyes held the same dead, flat haunting look that my brother’s had of late.

  (this is where it always happens)

  There was a sticky note superimposed toward the bottom of the clip. I recognized the handwriting, identified the green, rounded script as Aunt Ro’s. Curse? she’d written. Ten-year cycle?

  Land = danger?

  Had she brought this information with her on her visit? She must have. How it had ended up in this scrapbook, hidden inside the red room, I couldn’t say for certain.

  But I thought it had to do with Luke.

  “Yes.”

  Another breath, another sigh, another turn of the page. More pleading missives from Ro addressed to my mother but never delivered, clearly. And over that, something else, something that sent shock waves through my bones, that made my toes tighten and flex.

  Heavy, dark, angry scrawls, the impression of the pen nearly bursting through the paper.

  NSIZEGW. The lettering peaked into jagged points, accusing arrows.

  The handwriting was Luke’s. But a mad Luke, a Luke not in his right mind.

  “Eyes,” I heard. “It means eyes.”

  Eyes, yes: below the lettering, Luke had sketched a side view of Amity herself, her winking side windows peering out, searching, surveying the landscape … like eyes.

  And beneath that: 3:14.

  IT WAS THE FRANTIC SHRIEK OF THE TEAKETTLE that pulled me back to the present, startling me from the siren-lit shadows of the cellar. Without thinking, I dropped the scrapbook

  (where did it come from?)

  and rushed upstairs.

  It took me a full moment, a complete breath in and out again, to realize the kitchen floor was wet.

  Wet and warm, a puddle pooling out from the center of the room where Luke stood, a stream spouting from the mouth of the silenced kettle he now held in his hands. It splashed at the tops of his feet, flushing the skin a raw, protesting red.

  I screamed.

  Immediately, my mother appeared. “Luke!” She wrestled the kettle from him on impulse, then realized how utterly white-hot it was. She dropped it to the floor with a loud clang, shrieking herself.

  “I’ll get something,” I said, shock giving way to action. I raced to the freezer to pull out something, anything at all.

  Luke seemed numb as Mom walked him to the kitchen table, pulling out a chair for him to sit on, and another on which she propped his scalded legs. He blinked as I draped a bag of frozen peas across one, and a supermarket-sticky broccoli blend on the other, but didn’t say anything.

  And he didn’t seem to feel any pain.

  “What were you doing, Luke? What happened?” Mom asked, her voice uneven. I imagined my own history of skittish, unexplainable behavior had increased her sensitivity. But she didn’t expect this sort of thing from Luke, obviously.

  The only sound in the room was the intermittent pulse of the last remaining drops from the kettle, and my own confused, labored breathing. Finally, Luke tilted his head. He bent forward, retrieving the bag of broccoli from his leg and examining it with curiosity. Where the bag had been, his skin was raw, pink, and puffy.

  His gaze skated over me, past me, and beyond, not ta
king me in—not taking anything in. “I really should go. Too much to do. Shovel’s in the boathouse.”

  Mom’s mouth dropped open. I frowned.

  (where did the scrapbook come from?)

  (shovel’s in the boathouse)

  (this is where it happens, Gwen)

  He stood, letting the frozen vegetables splat wetly against the floor.

  He left the room without another word.

  MY MOTHER DIDN’T MEET MY EYES as she rose and replaced the vegetables in the freezer. I wondered if she, too, had been disturbed in her sleep by visions or unsolicited visits from the shadows and ciphers that clung to Amity’s dank, rotted corners.

  I wondered what she would say if I showed her the scrapbook I’d found.

  Or the passage to the red room.

  I wondered, but knew better than to ask.

  Instead, I called Aunt Ro.

  TEN YEARS EARLIER

  DAY 17

  BY MY THIRD WEEK IN AMITY, MY DREAMS WERE ALL REGULAR ENOUGH that they didn’t feel so much like dreams anymore. They were more like some kind of streaky, heavy trip, one that lasts way too long.

  They were actually sort of fun.

  I learned to expect them. And from there it got so I was like maybe even craving them. Like whatever was happening in the dreams, whatever energy I was pulling from the house, I mean, it was building me up.

  Something was happening to me in those dreams. Something powerful. Powerful, and dangerous.

  Amity was showing me—she was telling me—because she was trying to rile me up, like. Showing me, like I say, my father’s true nature.

  My father’s true nature, and my own.

  SO IT WAS NIGHT—THE DEAD Of NIGHT, LIKE THEY SAY—AND JULES WAS THERE, BUT NOT THERE.

  This was the not-real Jules, but she was still almost more real to me than life awake. I sensed her, strong like a hurricane even, before I actually saw her.