The Invited (ARC)

by Jennifer McMahon

  Now, she blinked in the dark. Her head felt heavy, her thoughts slow. She’d gone to bed in the trailer next to Nate. It had been raining out, absolutely pouring, and the roof was leaking again. They’d put cooking pots and bowls around to catch the drips, and Helen had tossed and turned while listening to the percussion of water hitting metal pots, empty tin cans, plastic bowls. That, combined with the rain pounding down on the metal roof, created a taunting, angry symphony of rain, with the occasional rumble of thunder thrown in. She hadn’t been able to sleep, so she got up, went into the kitchen, and read Communicating with the Spirit World again. She’d been through it several times but kept going back to it.

  At one a.m., Helen gave up on the idea of going back to bed, slipped on her sneakers and a sweatshirt, and headed down to the bog. Back at the beginning of the summer, she wouldn’t have dared go out walking through the woods at night and would have jumped at every noise. But she’d grown more comfortable with her surroundings, with the nighttime noises. She was nervous still, yes, but the feeling of being drawn to Hattie overpowered that fear. And she had this sense, irrational as it may be, that Hattie wouldn’t let anything bad happen to her. Hattie would protect her.

  The rain had let up from the downpour to fine sprinkles. She made her way across the yard, feet squishing in puddles as she left the shadowy house and trailer behind. She descended the path through the little stretch of woods, listening to the noises around her: raindrops on leaves, frogs calling, a splash for the bog. The path opened up and the bog came into view. There was a pale mist over the water that seemed to waver and shift as if it were trying to take form.

  “Hattie?” she called quietly. The only answer she received was the dull croaking of a lone frog. She stood watching the water, thinking about what might be underneath. The rain picked up, soaking through her sweatshirt. She went back up to the unfinished house. She sat on the floor, beside the mantel, waiting, hoping. But nothing had happened. And she’d fallen asleep.

  She sat up now, stretched. It was still raining. Helen could hear it upstairs, hitting the roof of the new house, the roof that had been covered in tar paper roofing material but had not yet been shingled.

  (Because you haven’t found roofing materials. You’ve been going off to get haunted bricks and a mantel, to learn about Hattie and her family, instead of bringing home something you actually need to finish your house.)

  She heard Nate’s voice in her head: I’m worried about you, Helen.

  She looked at the mantel—her latest victory. They’d placed it inside on the floor, wrapped up in a tarp to keep it protected until the walls were done and they could hang it. She peeled back the tarp now and looked at it.

  She had been right—it was perfect. It was the missing piece their living room needed, another way to give their new house a sense of history.

  “But we don’t need a mantel,” Nate had said when he’d first seen it. He walked away from the mantel in the back of the truck and looked in the cab. “Where’s the deer food?”

  “Shit, I’m sorry. I forgot it.”

  He sighed, rubbed his face. “What are we going to do with a mantel? We don’t have a fireplace.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” Helen said. “Maybe we should have one built—put a big brick chimney right in the center of the house. That would make it more of an authentic saltbox design and add thermal mass—”

  “Helen, that’s not part of the plans! That is not a do-it-yourself project—do you have any idea how much a skilled mason costs? As it is, we’re over budget!”

  “Okay, okay,” Helen said. “So we go with the woodstove and metal chimney for now. Maybe later, we can talk about a real brick chimney? For now, we put the mantel on the wall behind the woodstove.”

  Nate squinted, trying to visualize it, and shook his head.

  “But the stovepipe will run in front of it. It’ll look weird.”

  “Maybe we can run the pipe out the back of the stove, through the wall, then run the metal chimney up behind the living room wall,” Helen suggested. “That would look better anyway, right? Instead of a shiny metal chimney running straight up to the ceiling?”

  Nate blinked at her. “I don’t know, Helen. I’d have to look at the plans, see what might work. It might involve rethinking the pantry behind that wall. I don’t think we want warm stovepipe running through the pantry, do we? We’d lose storage space, and that heat would be wasted. It wasn’t part of the original design.” He gave a frustrated sigh.

  “The mantel’s over a hundred years old, Nate. And it’s solid maple,” she said. “I got a great deal on it. Once I clean it up, you’ll see just how beautiful it is.”

  “I just wish you’d checked with me,” he said. “A mantel isn’t in the plans. Or in the budget.”

  “It was seventy-five bucks, Nate.” Her voice came out a little sharper than she’d meant.

  “But now that’s seventy-five dollars we don’t have for other materials, things we really need, like roofing materials.” His voice was slightly raised. “I thought that’s what you were doing today. Going to check out a lead on old metal roofing.”

  She’d looked away, took in a breath, told herself to be calm. Just one more little white lie. “It didn’t work out. It was in rougher shape than the ad described.”

  He looked at her quizzically. Could he tell she was lying?

  When had it gotten so easy, lying to her husband? She would have never considered lying to him back in Connecticut. Back then, they’d told each other everything. It was only a few months ago, but it felt like lifetimes.

  She looked at him then, his full beard, his tired eyes, and thought how different this man was from the man she’d been married to back in Connecticut—how different everything was.

  “I’m sorry, Nate. If I don’t find anything that’ll work soon, we’ll just go ahead and order the shingles you want from the home center.”

  Nate nodded, still frowning at the mantel.

  “Nate, can’t we just bring the mantel in, put it against the wall, and see how it looks?” she asked. “Please?”

  “Fine,” he said, and she got that little ping of satisfaction she got when she’d won a round.

  Nate had agreed it did look great in the house, done some figuring, and decided they could put the stovepipe behind the stove, go straight into the wall, and then run the chimney up through the pantry so the mantel would not be obscured. They laid the mantel out on a tarp and Helen had cleaned it up, used some lemon polish on it, rubbed at the scuffed and scratched places, trying to imagine all the mantel must have seen: the years of Christmases, birthdays, celebrations; the coming of television, the decline of the farm, the fights, the murder and suicide.

  . . .

  Now, tonight, the mantel seemed to shine, to almost glow, in the dark of the empty house.

  But the house was not empty. Helen understood that.

  She held perfectly still and waited, listening. She heard footsteps on the plywood subfloor, felt the air grow colder around her. Her skin prickled. Keeping her eyes fixed on the mantel, she stared without blinking until her eyes teared, until a figure moved into view, came to stand beside her. Helen raised her eyes slowly.

  The woman was wearing jeans, dark hair cut in a bouncy bob, the front of her pink sweater soaked with dark red bloodstains. Helen could smell gunpowder and the rich iron scent of fresh blood.

  This isn’t real, Helen thought. I’m dreaming it.

  She closed her eyes tight, opened them wide, and the woman was still there. Helen could see the box of nails Nate had left on the floor beside the mantel. And there was his hammer. There was an unused roll of fiberglass insulation.

  This was no dream.

  “Where are the children?” the woman asked, looking around, eyes frantic. She seemed to be speaking loudly, shouting even, yet Helen could barely hear her; her words came out li
ke a cicada buzz. Then she looked down at her front, reached a hand up to touch the bullet hole, and started to scream. It was the most anguished, high-pitched keening sound Helen had ever heard.

  “Please,” Helen said, trying to raise her head but finding it too heavy. “It’s all right.”

  But as soon as she spoke, the woman faded like a gust of smoke being blown by a sharp wind.

  She was gone.

  But the sound remained.

  Outside, the screaming went on and on.

  It was the same sound Helen had heard that first night. The sound Nate had insisted was a fisher or a fox.

  Helen curled herself tight into a ball, put her hands over her ears, tried to silence the screams.

  CHAPTER 27

  Ann Whitcomb Gray

  S MAY 23, 1980

  Miss Vera with her blue hair in a tight perm comes every Friday at three, asks me to read the tea leaves, the cards, to gaze into my scrying bowl and see what the future holds for her, to see if she has any messages from the beyond.

  “What do you see, Ann?” she asks. “What do the spirits show you?”

  I gaze into the black water of the bowl, concentrate, furrow my brow and let my eyes go glassy by not blinking.

  “Is my darling Alan trying to reach us?” she asks.

  “Oh yes,” I say, peering into the bowl as if Alan were a goldfish circling in the murky water. “He’s calling from the Great Beyond. He wants you to know how much he loves you and that he’s okay.”

  I don’t really see any of this, of course, but I’ve learned to tell the ladies of Elsbury what they most want to hear. Especially the old, the lonely. Poor Miss Vera with her humped back, her swollen arthritic fingers. The diamond engagement ring and white gold wedding band that rattle around, loose now, clearly fitted for a plumper, younger finger. And though I don’t see any spirits of the present, I can clearly picture the past: Vera as a young woman on the altar, beautiful and happy with Alan by her side. He slips the ring on her finger, takes her in his arms and kisses her, and that kiss transcends time and space, fills the air in this room now, nearly sixty years later. The kiss that came before everything else: four children, the oldest of whom would die in a car wreck; before Vera’s breast cancer, which she survived; and before Alan’s lung cancer, which he did not. Two packs a day for sixty years will get you in the end.

  “He’s here now,” I say, gazing into the cut crystal bowl filled with water and black dye—a few drops of RIT poured from a bottle.

  “What does he say?” the old woman asks. “Does he have a message for me?”

  I squint down into the bowl and am startled by what I see. It’s not Alan’s face looking back at me (real or imagined), nor is it my own reflection.

  It’s her again. The woman. She’s come back to me, this woman from my dreams, from my nightmares. Sometimes I think she’s just a part of me: my dark side, the place all my powers come from. She’s the one who gives me my visions, whatever knowledge I may have, I understand that. My spirit guide. She’s so familiar to me, with a face that isn’t my mother’s but has certain similarities. She has the same eyes as my mother, but a longer face; same dark curly hair, but kept long, not cut short like my mother’s. And this woman wears a necklace, a strange design with a circle, triangle, square, and circle, with an eye in the center. I’ve been dreaming of her since I was a little girl. Since before my mother was killed in the fire, before my father remarried and carted my brother, Mark, and me off to Springfield to start another life with his new wife, Margaret, whom we were made to call “Mother,” and soon our new flock of half siblings, all blond and blue-eyed and freckled like their mother. They pretended to love us for Father’s sake but were always slightly suspicious of our dark hair and eyes, of the tragedy we wore on our sleeves.

  The woman from my dreams is speaking now, trying to tell me something, but I can’t hear the words. I pull my face closer to the bowl. I can smell the alkaline scent of the black dye. My breath is making the water ripple slightly, distorting her image.

  The woman in the water speaks urgently, though without sound. Her eyes bore into mine. She’s got something in her hands, something I can’t make out at first; then the image clarifies, the object comes into view.

  It’s a gun. A handgun. Small and silver, like the one Sam owns.

  Sweet Melissa. That’s what he calls his gun. Silly, to name a gun and to name it something you might call a lover. It gives a strange power to the object, imbues the cold metal with warmth, with emotion.

  Sam is out plowing the fields now, but he’ll be home by suppertime. If Miss Vera pays me well, we’ll have a nice roast tonight. No pasta primavera with Alfredo or Cajun rice and beans—giving a dish a fancy name doesn’t make it fill your belly more or disguise that it’s a cheap meal, that we couldn’t afford better.

  No money for meat, but there’s always money for Sam’s bourbon. He sees to that.

  He isn’t a bad man, Sam. Just a man who’s run out of luck. Out of choices. Last year, we sold off thirty acres to pay the back taxes. Now we’re underwater again.

  I hear Sam’s voice, clear as a church bell in my mind (though I know he’s out plowing the east fields, getting ready to plant the corn).

  Finished, he says.

  We’re all finished.

  I glance down and see my own reflection in the rippling water, but there’s blood on my chest, blooming like a flower.

  I gasp, totter backward, nearly falling out of my chair.

  “What is it?” Vera asks. “Is it my Alan?”

  “Yes,” I say, sitting up, collecting myself, looking back down at the front of my sweater, which is clean, spotless.

  “He came to me with such force, it caught me off guard,” I tell her. “He really loves you. He misses that cake you used to make.”

  A guess on my part, but I’m good at this, and the smile on Vera’s face shows I’ve got it right again.

  “Oh!” she cries. “The brown sugar cake! Heavens, yes! I haven’t made that in ages! I think I’ll go home and make some this afternoon.”

  “He’d like that,” I tell her, daring another look down at my bowl. I see only my own dim reflection. “He’s smiling at you. Can you feel him smiling down at you?”

  “Yes,” she says. “Yes, I can.”

  She reaches into her patent leather purse, pulls out forty dollars and passes it to me. Then she grabs another ten and slips it into my hand. “Thank you, Ann,” she says, her hand dry and powdery in my own. “This means so much to me.”

  And at moments like this, I think, Is it so wrong, what I do? Lying, pretending, inventing small fictions based on little flashes I may or may not receive? I see how happy I make Miss Vera, the spring in her step as she hurries out the door to make her cake, and I think, I am doing good work. I am shining a positive light on the world.

  . . .

  I’m busy making dinner in the kitchen when Sam comes in later.

  “Daddy,” the children chirp, crowding him like hungry birds. I see that even though it’s not yet five, Sam’s been drinking. He totters on his feet, leaning this way and that, trying to correct his balance, to remain upright. He’s got a bottle stashed in the barn. One in the workshop, too. They’re all over, so he’ll never be thirsty.

  “Don’t pester your father,” I tell the children. “He’s been working all day. Go on in the living room. I’ll call you when supper’s ready.”

  They mind so well, my children.

  They’ve learned.

  Learned to be a little fearful of their daddy, to keep their distance when he’s drinking.

  Once they’ve left, I look him in the eye. “Everything okay?” I ask. I hate how timid my voice sounds. How quickly I turn into a little mouse around him.

  And he laughs. He laughs a bitter, mirthless laugh, and his hot bourbon-fueled breath fills the kitchen
, turns the air into a dangerous, combustible thing. All we’d need is a match and we’d all go up with a bang.

  He staggers out of the kitchen, bumping against a chair, hitting the wall as he careens around the corner toward our bedroom. I hear him in there opening drawers. Maybe he’s putting on his pajamas. Maybe he’s tired and sick and sick and tired and just wants to lie down, wants the day to be over, mercifully over.

  But then I hear his footsteps move into the living room.

  And Jason, he says, “Daddy, what’re you doing with Sweet Melissa?”

  And there’s that laugh again, that empty haunting laugh that fills the hall as I start to run, run from the kitchen toward the living room, over the carpet; I’m going faster than I ever have in my life, past the door to the cellar, the bedrooms, the bathroom with the leaking faucet, and into the living room, where Sam is standing by the mantel, holding his little silver pistol. His laugh turns into a hum, a little song, and at last I can make out the words:

  “Finished,” he says. “We’re all finished.”

  I step toward him, hands outstretched. “Sam,” I say. “My darling.”

  And he raises the gun and fires.

  CHAPTER 28

  Olive

  S AUGUST 23, 2015

  “Dad,” Olive said through the dust mask she was wearing. They were tearing down the old plaster and lath wall in her bedroom, and the air was thick with dust. It was funny, because she’d spent all day yesterday helping Helen and Nate finish putting up new drywall in their house. Today, they were starting the process of taping and compounding. And here she was, tearing down an old, perfectly good wall. It was the one they’d thought they were keeping, but Daddy insisted they redo it anyway—that it would look funny to have smooth, new drywall on three walls and bumpy old plaster on the other. She’d told him it was fine, preferable even, to keep the old wall (she even suggested accentuating the difference by painting it a different color), but he insisted. “Your mama always says ‘No point doing a job if you’re not going to do it right.’ ”