Authors: Micol Ostow
Abruptly, Murray’s whining stopped. He caught sight of me at the same time I did him, cocking his head in my direction and pawing insistently at the ground.
“What is it, boy?” I wiped the sheen of sweat from my upper lip. “What are you so upset ab—”
I saw.
IT WAS A BIRD
, a heron, I thought, although I was no expert. Several feet long with a slim, pointed beak. Slender, willowy tree-branch legs. It must have been quite majestic once.
Before it was killed.
It
had
been killed, sometime recently from the looks of it. It lay on one side, talons jutting stiffly out, split open at the breastbone. Gore streaked its underside like a grotesque bib, twig-like bones peeking through the slippery mess. Its eyes were empty, bloody sockets, gazing blankly, screaming a silent accusation at me.
Murray pawed at it, sending it into a logroll downhill, trailing bright strings of viscera in its wake.
I raced to the river and vomited.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING DOWN HERE?”
I was hunched by the edge of the river, Ro crouched beside me with a hand on my back, when we heard Luke’s voice from above. I wiped a line of spit from my chin, splashed some river water on my face, and straightened to find him staring at us.
I fought the urge to flinch. Had
Luke
killed the bird? Killed it … and torn it apart?
My stomach gurgled again. Looking into his face and finding nothing there but pure, sharp anger, I thought it seemed possible. Probable, even, though to what end I couldn’t say.
Best not to ask.
Luke shifted, regarding Ro. “Forgot you were coming.” He scowled at her.
“Oh?” She didn’t move to greet him. The heady, rotten-fruit smell of the bird lingered in the air.
“Murray was outside.” I pushed my hair out of my eyes self-consciously. “We came to get him. Ro hadn’t seen the river yet.”
Luke smirked. “Well, here it is.” He swept his arm toward the Concord, and the puddle of pale froth that was my vomit. Shame licked at my cheeks.
“And here
he
is.” He pointed to Murray, who now cowered
at Ro’s side, giving my brother a wide berth. “Take him away, would you? He’s in the way.”
In the way of
what? I didn’t ask, just nodded and slapped at my thigh. “Come on, Murray.”
The dog gave me a baleful look, slinking to me in slow motion. His ears remained flattened against his head, and his teeth were ever-so-slightly bared.
Luke didn’t appear to notice.
“Your mother says you’ve been digging up the boathouse floor,” Ro said. Her voice was broken glass, a rusty chain turning slowly on an ancient, twisted gear.
“It was all rotted out,” Luke said. He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “I’m rebuilding. People who lived here before, they kept a junker boat out here. We could fix it up, you never know.” His lips moved independent of the rest of his face, telling a different story from the rest of his body.
“You never know,” Ro agreed. “Found anything interesting in there?”
Interesting
. The word filled my head with crashing waves.
Luke squinted. “Oh, sure. Lots of stuff.”
“Such as?”
Luke shrugged, those churning waves coming over me again, tossing me against the invisible pilings of an imaginary pier. He glanced at the boathouse, then turned back to me, heat rushing between us like a missile.
“Old things.”
LUKE WAS FINISHED TALKING TO US
, so he turned and wandered away. Ro, Murray, and I made our way back up the hill, toward the house, with near-perfect synchronicity.
Ro paused and reached for my hand, giving it a squeeze.
“Gwen,” she said, her tone strained. “Maybe you should stay away from the boathouse. Stay away from Luke when he’s down there, I mean.”
My stomach clenched.
Or else what?
I thought wildly.
What?
He keeps things in there
, a voice whispered, light as the breeze against my cheek.
He finds things. Deadly things
.
I whipped my head around, but saw nothing.
“Are you all right?” Ro asked, her eyes tracking the direction the voice had come from.
“I thought …” I pulled away, withdrew my hand from her grip. “It’s fine,” I said. “It’s nothing. I’ll stay away from the boathouse. I promise.”
I didn’t ask why. I had an idea that I’d find out what Ro meant soon enough.
RO SAID SHE WAS GOING TO TAKE A NAP
before dinner, and when she stretched her slender arms up, I felt exhaustion clutch me, skating the length of my body. I said I thought that sounded like a good idea, ignoring the inverted V that my words knit into Mom’s forehead.
The doctors had explained that excessive sleep and sluggishness were telltale signs of depression.
But there was certainly no harm in an innocent afternoon rest.
I wasn’t the one digging through the boathouse floor, after all. Yet Luke’s behavior was above reproach. Luke wasn’t the crazy one.
Only the one to be avoided, evidently.
“I left your bags in Luke’s bedroom,” Mom said to Ro, nodding in the general direction of the staircase. “The sheets are clean.”
“Luke’s bedroom? Oh no. I don’t want to put him out,” Ro protested.
“You won’t,” I said. “He sleeps in the basement now.”
“Ah.” She pursed her lips. “Siesta, then, shall we? Come get me when you wake up, Gwen, so we can gossip.”
“I don’t have anything to gossip about. No stories.” Nothing light or easy anyway.
“I doubt that.”
“Really,” I insisted.
It
wasn’t
exactly the truth, but it was what my mother wanted to hear. Her worry lines relaxed a fraction.
Aunt Ro gave a halfhearted smile. “Okay, then,” she said. “You can do the listening.”
I’D THOUGHT I WAS BONE-TIRED
, but once I was in bed, sleep was reluctant to come. The sunlit patterns on the walls seemed wrong. Uneasy, as though Amity were only meant to exist in the dark. Though my windows were open, the blinds were drawn, and a steady breeze flapped them against the window frames in rhythmic time, a watered-down, daylight version of the boathouse door.
When I closed my eyes, the heron appeared, gaping, bloodied eye sockets yawning open, threatening to swallow me, to surround the whole house and devour us, eat us alive.
When I closed my eyes, the girl from the mirror—from the woods, from my nightmares—revealed herself, purplish clots of blood trickling down her shoulders, shiny and freshly let.
Old things
, she hissed as a beetle waved a spindly tentacle from the corner of one unfocused eye.
Behind my eyelids, the Concord River rushed red.
Then, through the haze, I heard my name, sharp and shrill.
MY FIRST THOUGHT
was that I’d imagined the sound of my name, that plaintive, earnest call. The air felt still as an underground grotto, still as the cellar of Amity could be.
Then it came again, louder, more urgent:
“Gwen!”
—and beyond it, my mother’s rapid-fire footsteps slammed against the stairs.
Luke’s room
. It was where the voice had come from, where my mother was headed now. It was where Aunt Ro was staying.
I flew from my bed, through the bathroom, and toward my aunt.
“STOP SCREAMING!”
My mother’s voice rang out with anger. “What on
earth
, Ro?” She grabbed her sister by the shoulders and shook hard. Ro pushed at Mom’s arms wildly, pulling free, sitting up straight in bed.
“Are you
insane
?” Mom demanded, flinching when she realized her word choice. It sliced at me, making my shoulders hunch.
“You have to calm down. You
know
Gwen’s prone to …” She paused, groping for the word that was always,
always
, on the tip of my tongue, on the edge of my brain, dancing at the periphery of my existence. “…
hysteria
.”
Hysteria
. The sounds, the syllables, they rushed inside my head. The rotted-fruit smell from outside, from before, filled my nostrils, making me want to swoon.
“What happened, Ro? What did you need?” Mom sat at the end of the bed, smoothing out the covers around her.
“I
needed
to talk to Gwen,” Ro said. “I apologize for yelling.” She bit her lip. “No, never mind. I take that back, Ell.
Of course
I yelled.”
She took a deep breath. “It’s this house,” she said. “Don’t you feel it?”
Dimly, the static-charge sensation began to gather inside me.
“You
do
. I know you do.” Ro was talking to me.
She sighed. “Ellen, this house is …
poisoned
. I don’t think it’s good for Luke. And it’s tearing Gwen apart.”
I closed my eyes.
The heron. The mirror-girl. The bloody river
.
The shotgun
.
“What do you see, Gwen?” Ro asked softly, making me start.
“Ro, that’s enough—”
The static crackled, tunneling through me and exploding, firing underneath my skin.
“It’s
not
enough, Ellen, not remotely. There’s something wrong with this place. It’s been there since day one, and you can’t ignore it! Why do you think she called me? You have to stop pretending. You
have
to. Even if you’re scared, even if you don’t understand. Be honest: Gwen is different, and this place … it’s dangerous.”
“Dangerous to Gwen.” My mother sniffed, her face stony.
“Dangerous to
all
of you,” Ro corrected. “How much do you know about this house? The realtor must’ve given you some of the history, right? She must have told you why it was so underpriced?” She flushed. “I wanted to say something. I was going to tell you last time. I brought papers, things I’d found.”
The scrapbook
. Ro’s handwriting. Pages stashed away in Luke’s secret cache. She had wanted to warn us.
Now her skin blazed fiery. “The papers I brought … disappeared. And then, well … I had to leave.”
Not disappeared
, I thought.
They were hidden. By Luke
.
By Amity
.
She wanted me to know the truth only on her own terms. And Amity got what she wanted.
Mom faltered. “The realtor mentioned … structural issues. She said there might be some costs later on.” Mom was lying, I thought. Or at least holding something back.
Ro snorted. “Structural issues. Try an entire underground dugout. It housed accused refugees during the Salem witch trials. And later, this place was an asylum. One of the doctors on staff went crazy, began doing medical experiments, torturing some of the clinically insane patients in secret down there.”
The bones. The whispers. The messages, the scrawls on the mirror, the echoes of a long-ago shotgun
. The forces, building around me.
Building inside me, boiling to a fever pitch.
“All houses have histories,” my mother said, her voice lower now, shaky. “It wasn’t a reason not to buy. The witch trials were hundreds of years ago! This house didn’t even exist then.”
“It’s not about the house
, Ellen. It’s more than that. This site, it’s rotted. People think it’s cursed. People think it’s
evil
.”
That seemed to snap my mother back to the concrete, to reason and rationale. “I can’t, Ro.” She waved a hand and gathered a hank of hair from her face, raising her chin defiantly, eyes flashing. “You have to stop. That’s ridiculous.”
“It’s not.” Ro stood. “I wish it were. Are you deliberately avoiding the truth? Do you know how many people have died in this place? It wasn’t just the witches, or the mental patients.
Do you know what happened to the last family who lived here?
”
The buzz gathered, pressing against my skull like a vise. Above us, Luke’s light fixture flickered, rattling like a pot lid under steam pressure.
“I’ll show you.” Hands on her hips, Ro’s eyes darted across the room. “I brought more books about it. The Concord Library lost their records in a flood—what a surprise—but the information’s still out there. When Gwen called, I dug it up again. Where did you put my bags?”
Confused, my mother glanced at the bed. “I left everything there. On the floor by the nightstand.”
The space was empty now. Fear licked at me, scratched at my ankles, trailing jagged claw marks along the tops of my bare feet.
“You must have moved them,” my mother said.
“Of course I didn’t,” Ro replied. “Why would I?” She folded her arms. “I was going to show you. Well, first, I was going to show Gwen. I knew she’d believe me. Though I have a feeling she knows enough about things as it is.”
The room shrunk in, grew dimmer, and Ro’s voice unraveled at half tempo.
I
unraveled, a fiber-optic spiderweb draping me in a shimmering net. Overhead, the light blacked out, then switched back on more weakly, soaking us in an eerie, alien glow.
“Maybe Luke moved them. Maybe he put them in the closet,” my mother offered.
Ro shot her a look. “When was the last time Luke came up here?”
My mother said nothing. Her skin was sallow but for two bright splotches of pink high in her cheeks.
“Fine,” Ro conceded, doubtful. “I’m telling you, I didn’t
move them. But if it will satisfy you, I’ll check the closet right now.”
The room washed red. Pain twitched, then exploded at the base of my skull.
(she was shot in the HEAD THE HEAD THE HEAD)
Don’t go in there
—I tried to form words but they clung to my tongue.
Ro stepped into the closet.