Bad Things

by Michael Marshall

  “So I put a sadness on her.”

  “What’s a ‘sadness,’ Carol?”

  “What it sounds like,” she said.

  “In words of one syllable?”

  “Getting up and not being happy. Not being able to see the point. Looking around at the things you’re supposed to value and supposed to care about and not being able to remember a single reason why.”

  I recalled how Bill had described Jenny in the months before she left town. “You mean, depressed.”

  “No. It’s real. It’s something you can do.”

  I shook my head, pointless though that was in the darkness. “Carol, this just sounds like nonsense. Please tell me. What did you actually do to Jenny?”

  “I’m telling you, John. I didn’t actually do anything. I went to someone who could.”

  “Who?”

  “Brooke.”

  “Brooke Robertson? And she did what?”

  “She directed it. At Jenny.”

  “Are you saying Brooke is a witch?”

  “Not her. You’re not from around here, John. You wouldn’t understand how it works.”

  “Oh, screw this, Carol.”

  She spoke in a strange, singsong voice. “I went to Brooke. I paid the fee. I gave her the things you need. She did what I asked. It . . .” She ran out of words, and started crying again, hard.

  “It what, Carol?”

  “It went wrong.”

  “Mommy?” Tyler had become discomforted by the sound of his mother being upset. I had, too, but I couldn’t stop.

  “What are you—”

  “It was just supposed to be a sadness."

  “Carol . . .”

  “Listen, you asshole. You asked, so fucking listen. Didn’t you feel anything?”

  “When?”

  “The day that it happened. Didn’t you?”

  I stood up and walked away, but I didn’t have anywhere to go— and whatever Carol was doing, I didn’t think she was lying to me.

  I turned back toward her.

  “Tell me.”

  CHAPTER 38

  She said she had felt uneasy since lunchtime that day, but put it down to tiredness, Tyler’s continual crying in the night, an oncoming stomach upset. She said I’d made her a sandwich—which I did not recall, though I remembered everything that had gone into Scott’s sandwich—and she had left most of it, blaming its dry, stale taste on the way she felt.

  Afterward I had gone back to my study, and she took the baby outside, hoping fresh air might make her feel better and maybe help the little guy sleep. He grizzled for a time, but slowly his crying softened, and then from nowhere she realized he wasn’t making noises anymore and his eyes were shut and all was good.

  So she sat looking down toward the lake, idly wondering—not for the first time—why it was called Murdo Pond. She was a Roslyn girl, a town only twenty miles distant, but around here that was far enough for things to be a mystery and remain that way. Gradually she started to feel her own breathing growing more measured, her eyelids getting heavy. She thought that, for a few moments, she might even have drifted off to sleep, but she wasn’t sure.

  If she had, it would have explained why the light looked altered, the sun’s change in position causing it to fall in slightly different ways. The breeze had died, too, and a heavy stillness came over everything.

  She began to feel hot, clammy, but the one piece of advice her mother had passed down was “ ‘Never wake a sleeping baby,’ and if that isn’t in the Bible, it should be.” She heard gentle rustling in the trees over on the left, where the ornamental paths and the remains of the settlers’ cabin lay, but it wasn’t reaching where she sat; nor was the breeze which must have been moving over the water of the pond, causing the long ripples across its surface. There was an odd smell from somewhere. Perspiration began to stand out on her brow, and even her insides began to feel warm, as if her kidneys or liver were overheating, something at her core running too fast. I hope I'm not about to throw up, she thought.

  And that’s when I had said, from the deck: “Where’s Scott?”

  Our memories of what happened next were different. She believed the air had become yet more still as I hurried along the paths at the start of the woods. She says I called out when I saw Scott at the end of the jetty looking out into the pond, though I don’t think I did. She heard something, anyway, or perhaps felt it, some jagged sound of urgency and danger, and assumed it was me.

  When we were down at the base of the jetty she remembered being compelled to turn and look back, by the expression on the boy’s face, as he stared past me up toward the house and woods—and seeing nothing. By which she meant . . . that nothing was there. As if the power had gone down, everywhere and for good. No sense, or reason, none of the intangible and unconscious ties that bind the world together. The sound of no voice, shouting so loud as to drown out everything else. She could see trees, the bottom of our lawn, the boat dock, slivers of the house, the sky. But none of those things seemed to mean anything, to be connected to one another or to her. In that instant she saw everything in creation as a jumble of refuse, strewn upon the abandoned earth like a midnight rockfall discovered the next morning: meaningless, silent, dead. This was what she saw in Scott’s face, an utter horror of everything, the expression of a child who had seen his parents suddenly become eerie strangers and the world flipped into a reeking void populated only by faceless monsters.

  Then Scott had shouted in denial, called my name as if to save me, and it was all done.

  I recognized something of the feeling she’d described, from when I’d stood at the jetty on my first afternoon back in Black Ridge. But I knew her talking was precarious, and didn’t say anything to derail her.

  “Brooke did what I asked, and a bad thing came,” she said again. “But it didn’t go away. It stayed around. It was what made you start to drink, what kept pulling you down to that fucking lake.”

  “No.” Much though I might have been happy for the blame to go elsewhere, I knew whose fault those things had been. “That was just—”

  “I know you think it was you,” she interrupted. “But you never drank before—why start then?”

  “My son had just died.”

  “So? Is that how you handled your mom dropping dead of a heart attack, two days before Christmas? Did you grab a bottle in Iraq every time a guy you knew got blown to pieces by some asshole with a rusty claymore?”

  “No,” I said, not wanting to add that on those occasions, my actions had not been exaggerated by carefully concealed feelings of guilt. “But—”

  “Everything started being wrong. That’s why I kept pushing you to sell the place. I knew we needed to get out. That’s why I left—I couldn’t wait any longer for you to get the message. I needed us out of that house before anything else happened.”

  “You wanted out of everything,” I said, only then realizing how much it had hurt. I’d been so consumed by knowing her actions were reasonable, that my drinking and distance and uselessness were sufficient cause to convict, that I hadn’t allowed myself to hate her for the abandonment.

  “No. I just wanted to be somewhere else before it was too late.”

  “Carol, Scott just d—”

  “No, he didn't. Scott was killed.”

  “Oh, Carol, by what?”

  “One of the things that live out there.”

  She jerked her head backward, presumably indicating the forest that surrounded the boarded-up house. “They’ve always been here. Across America, Europe, caves in Afghanistan. I have researched so much into this, John. You have no idea. Every culture has a different word for them. They’re everything about a place except the concrete and physical. They’re the spirits we’ve feared and make sacrifice to, the things we’ve always known live between us. They’re what magicians encountered when they thought they were summoning the devil. They’re everywhere, but they’re most powerful in the wild, which is why the wild scares us. We started living in towns
in the first place to try to swamp them with numbers, to blanket them with noise and light, but even in cities we feel lost and empty and sad and it’s because they're still there—behind the buildings and underneath our streets and living in the parks. We cut down the forests and we gouge holes in the earth to make it harder for them to hide—but they can still get inside us. They still ruin everything.”

  She started to cry again, soundlessly.

  “Carol,” I said. I felt terribly sad for her, and knew I should have been better at keeping in contact, before this mania had time to get such a hold.

  “It’s with me all the time now,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “Sometimes I can hear it walking around us. Waiting outside the house.”

  “In Renton? But how would that—”

  “They crawl inside, find carriers. That’s why you haven’t felt it. You may just have been running away from everything, but actually you did the right thing. I didn’t get far enough, and now I can’t.”

  “Why?” I said, though I was reminded of something Ellen had started to tell me in the coffee shop, about how there were some things you could not get away from.

  “I’m dirty inside. Everything I touch turns to shit. I don’t trust anything. I can’t . . . I can’t even believe that I’ve locked a door properly.”

  She broke down then, fully. Unable to speak coherently, barely able to breathe.

  I shuffled over in the dark, knelt down and put my arms around her shoulders, let her sob into my neck. She felt bony and hot and not like any woman I had ever held. She was saying that she had set this thing on Jenny, and that it had gleefully overstepped its bounds—and instead hurt the thing which had mattered most to the man who had mattered most to the other woman at the time. That she hadn’t meant to, but that it was her. That she had done it.

  “What do you think you did, Carol?”

  She looked up at me, her face so pulled by grief that it was barely recognizable.

  “I killed Scott.”

  Nothing I said seemed to get through. In the end I stood up and left her to it. She had wrapped her arms around her knees and was rocking back and forth in a tight ball, whispering to herself.

  I went over to where Tyler was, and squatted down. I could hear him shifting away as I approached, and sparked the lighter so he could see my face.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “My mommy’s sad.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s just sad,” I said. “Sometimes that’s how it is. Will you stay and look after her?”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I need to look around.”

  “But it’s too dark.”

  “I know. But I used to live here. You . . . you did, too. You won’t remember.”

  “Mommy said I did. I was very smaller.”

  “That’s right. Much smaller.” Looking down at this face, at the face of someone who should have been my boy, was making me feel dead. “Give your mom a hug now, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I started by confirming which room we were in. I’d assumed it was the main living area, and I’d been correct. The much-vaunted cathedral ceiling towered over where we’d been sitting. I believed Carol when she said she’d already checked out the building, but I knew she must have done it with a child in tow, and I thought there was no harm in me looking again.

  I didn’t know what to think about what Carol had said, and I didn’t know how much longer we were going to be left here. I just wanted to be doing. I needed to do something other than deal with the fact I was in a house where I used to live, with a boy who was half mine and a woman I had loved but now barely recognized—and who was either crazy or telling me things I found hard to fit into the world.

  I started by tracing my way around all the walls along the front of the building. I moved quickly and did not linger in any room, especially not my study. Every window was sealed tight, as I knew seeing it from the outside on the first day I’d been in Black Ridge. I was soon back in the main area.

  “Carol—how many of them are there?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Carol, I need to know.”

  Her voice floated to me out of the dark, muffled by her arms. “You really don’t get it, do you?”

  I went back feeling my way along the walls. My point had been that yes, I could break the glass of one of these windows, and then try kicking out the boards. But they’d been nailed on hard, and it could take a while and make a lot of noise. If there were people with weapons outside, I’d get shot. I had no idea how many people had taken me in the parking lot. Carol had said two guys had come for them in Renton, but that didn’t mean that’s all there was.

  It randomly struck me that without my phone I couldn’t receive a call from the two guys looking for Kyle and Becki, and realized it would have made sense to have got one of their numbers, had I not been too preoccupied with hiding the fact I was half convinced they were going to drop me right there in the road. Wasn’t anything I could do about that now. About that or much else.

  Everything was pretty fucked up.

  I’d gone almost the whole way around the ground level, moving more quickly as I realized what a waste of time it was, when I remembered something I’d noticed from the outside, on my first visit to the house after coming up to Black Ridge.

  I left the outside wall and felt my way across the middle toward the side of the house that faced the driveway. This took me through the area I’d once thought of as Scott’s domain, the nonspace in the hall he used to colonize. I was glad it was dark. In the weeks in which we’d remained in the house after he died, I’d gone to some trouble to avoid passing through here. I didn’t want to be able to see it now.

  “Carol, I’m going to go try something.”

  There was no reply.

  I went down the stairs to the lower level. It can’t actually have been darker down there, but it seemed so. I felt my way past the room that had served as Carol’s office, then one that had been earmarked as a den for the boys when they got big enough, and took a left off the corridor into the utility area.

  I knew this had been emptied and swept and scrubbed before we left, but when I lit my lighter I still expected to see what I’d recalled on my first visit, shelves stacked with slices of life.

  I let it go out again and saw something else, however—a very faint sliver of light, coming from the corner of the window in the small storage area at the end of the utility room. It would still take a while, but at least this window had been started from the outside.

  I navigated my way back up to the main room.

  “I’m going to try to make a way out,” I told Carol.

  “Rah rah for you.”

  “Carol . . .”

  Truth was I didn’t feel I had much to say to her. With every minute that passed, the things she’d told me sank in a little further, and while that didn’t mean I believed she’d done anything that had caused Scott to die . . . I didn’t know what I felt for her, or about her.

  I went back downstairs.

  I took off my jacket and wrapped it around my arm. Planted my feet and jabbed my elbow into the bottom of the windowpane. Nothing happened the first time, but on the second it broke. I froze, putting my head close to the window and listening for sounds outside. I could hear the wind, but nothing more.

  I tapped my elbow again a couple of times higher up the pane, using my foot to sweep the fallen glass to one side. Even in the dark I felt as if I could almost see the fresher air seeping into the room. I realized I had no idea what time it was, but from the shade of the line of light at the bottom of the window, I guessed it was getting dark.

  I couldn’t see where the nails had been banged into the frame, so I just rapped my elbow around at regular intervals. Not much happened in the way of movement. I couldn’t remember, hadn’t noticed when I’d been outside, whether it had been secured with nails or screws. If it was the latter
then the boards weren’t going anywhere without being broken.

  I grabbed hold of the frame on either side and placed my heel into the bottom corner. I pushed against it. I thought it gave, a little.

  There was still no noise from the outside apart from something that sounded like rain.

  I kept pushing with my foot, methodically.

  CHAPTER 39

  Finally, just when she believed her head was going to burst, when she felt like she was actually going to go nuts, Becki caught sight of somewhere she recognized.

  She didn’t know how long she’d been running, lost in the streets and the rain. Couldn’t understand how it had even happened. Okay, the roads were at weird angles to one another, like no one had a ruler when they built this place and just slashed out a design with a knife, but it was a small town, hardly bigger than Marion Beach. She’d driven up and down it the night before and she knew what a sorry-ass little place it was and more or less how it fitted together.

  So how the hell couldn’t she find her way?

  How come every turn she took seemed to lead her down a street of houses that looked exactly the same as the one she’d just left, but somehow wasn’t? She was wasted, she knew that, exhausted and freaked out like never before in her life, and maybe the dead woman on the bed and the psycho maid had been a little too much—but it seemed like once you were tangled in this place, it didn’t want you to get out again.

  Plus now John was gone.

  The one guy who’d had her back through all the crap of the last week had disappeared. She didn’t know for sure, but she feared that the white truck she’d seen hammering out of the bank parking lot might have had something to do with that.

  She’d tried calling his cell phone, had tried again about every ten minutes since, but there was no reply and that scared her even more. Except for last night, when she gathered he’d had shit to deal with, John always answered when she called. He was always there. For her, for her dad, for whoever. If he wasn’t there now, it could only mean bad things.