To Break a Covenant

by Alison Ames

  “Well, the out-of-town people are the ones who spend the most time near the mine, but I don’t know,” I said. “I think most of us feel something. But I don’t know how strong it is, or how much anyone notices it anymore.”

  “Like living next to a waterfall,” she said.

  “Uh, sure.”

  She laughed. “Constant sound becomes a baseline, becomes no sound. Maybe people who live in the Basin don’t realize how wrong it feels unless they leave.”

  I thought about the way it felt in the clearing, the perfect silence that fell in my head when I stepped inside it. I thought about the dark circles under Fish’s worried eyes. “Yeah,” I said after a moment. “Or until it gets worse.”

  My eyes fell on the clock and I yelped.

  “Can I put you on hold?” I jumped up. “I’m so sorry, I work at the radio station; I need to queue up the—”

  “Just call me back,” she said, but nicely. “I need to make some coffee anyway.”

  I queued up a solid hour of music and commercials. I didn’t know how long we’d be on the phone, but I didn’t want to cut her off if she got into a groove. As I was sitting back down, Javi, one of the interns, popped his head into the booth.

  “Coffee?”

  I looked at the cup I already had, then at him, and said, “Absolutely.” When he returned with an MBCR mug, I had the receiver pressed to my ear again. I mouthed Thank you at him and then flipped the on-air switch.

  “Okay,” I said when Nadia picked up. “You have my undivided attention.”

  “Well, thank you for that,” she said dryly. She sounded almost like a teacher: Her tone reminded me she was doing me a favor, but somehow still conveyed that she wanted to help. “I went back and found my notes from when we were filming, but they’re not very detailed. What are you looking for?”

  “The one tape we saw, Mellie was talking about the mine telling Sidney to hurt her. And then she said it told her—”

  “The same thing,” she finished. “Yeah. The doctor asked if she meant it wanted her to hurt another person or herself, and she said, ‘Both.’”

  “Oh boy,” I said quietly, thoughts flashing to Carlisle once more. “Did she ever say how long it took? Like, from the first time Sidney went into the mine to the time he started acting strange?”

  “Not precisely, but the mine wasn’t even running for a full year before the explosion, so I’d wager it happened kind of quick. She was also just dealing with life as a newly married housewife, so I think it might have slipped her notice a little longer than it should have.”

  “Why did she start wanting to go down there? Did she ever actually go in?” I asked.

  “No. She just started thinking about it more and more, and then she started dreaming about it. During one of the later sessions she told the doctor it called to her. So he asks what she means by that, and she says she wants to go into the mine. It consumes her, how badly she wants to go in. She’s never been in, of course, but she can see it when she closes her eyes. She says—”

  A rustling of pages.

  “She says it holds her ‘in its mouth, like a lion with a mouse,’ and it’s still deciding whether or not to bite down.”

  I shuddered hard. I took a too-large gulp of coffee and burned my mouth, but it melted some of the chill I felt. “Did you go into the mine when you were here?”

  “No,” she said.

  “So you came after Grave Encounters.”

  “I heard about that girl.” The words were laced with bitterness. “That should have kept me the fuck away, but nooo. Nadia has to go where the ghosts are. Nadia has to win an Emmy. God, I was the worst.” She sighed and circled back to my question, turning it on me. “Have you been down there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What does it look like? Just tunnels, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So even if it was allowed, it wouldn’t be worth much to go down there. Small space, hard to light, nothing visually interesting…. We didn’t complain. Not when there were so many abandoned buildings to traipse around in.”

  “But you said you could feel something—”

  “Oh, of course I could. You don’t have to be in the mine to feel it. It permeates the whole Basin, Clem. It’s stronger in the old half, practically immobilizing near the mine, but it’s everywhere.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So Mellie—”

  “There are ten sessions. An hour each. The first one is mostly crying and introductions, but the rest are solid. The one that you heard was the ninth, I think. Close to the end.”

  “And what about her dreams?”

  “What about them?”

  “How often did she have them? What were they like?”

  Rustling again.

  “Every night, eventually,” she said. “Sometimes Sidney was there, sometimes just her.”

  “What happened in the dreams?”

  “Look, I can’t—do you want me to just send you these? I certainly don’t need them. Honestly, it’ll be good to get them out of my apartment.”

  “I guess,” I said, taken aback. “I’ll give you my address, that’s probably best—”

  “I’m sorry, I’m just—I have things to do, and I don’t want to rehash this whole—”

  “No, I understand—”

  “I dreamed about the mine, too,” she said abruptly.

  I snapped my mouth shut, waiting.

  “For almost six months after we shot the episode. That’s why I quit the show.” She took a deep breath and let it out, and I heard the clunk of a refrigerator door shutting. “I’ve been to a lot of places, you have to understand. A lot of very fucked-up places with very fucked-up energy. And none of them affected me like Moon Basin did.”

  I kept quiet, afraid to break the spell.

  “The only place I’ve felt anything like it was this little house in the middle of Missouri. It was built on the edge of a river, this little tiny house. Red shutters on the windows. The woman who lived there, she, um.”

  She cleared her throat.

  “She drowned her kids in the river, but she did it—she sort of hung them, I guess—hanged them, I mean—she put ropes around their necks and pushed them into the water and the current pulled the ropes tight. I don’t even know if drowning is the right word.”

  A weak, watery laugh, and I could tell she was on the verge of tears.

  “That house made me feel completely unhinged. It made me feel like I could understand a woman who would do that.” She took a deep breath. “But Moon Basin made me feel like I could be a woman who would do that.”

  I was so cold with dread I was almost numb. I could almost see those kids, still and blue under the water as the shutters banged in the breeze. I wondered if their mother’s face had gone slack and dead when she killed them. I wondered if she had smiled. I hadn’t responded to Nadia for almost a full minute, but I couldn’t seem to draw enough breath to form words. I hoped fervently that I’d never know what it was like to feel capable of something like that.

  “I left my fiancé,” Nadia said. “I quit the show. I started drinking, like, heavily. It was … it was a rough time. When I heard the tapes of Mellie saying she felt like it was whispering to her, I—it struck a horrible chord.” Her voice was trembling, but she kept speaking. “It sounded so much like what I was experiencing. Everything she said. I never dreamed about her husband, but I—” She made a muffled choking sound. “I dreamed about her. About Mellie.”

  I was clutching the receiver so tightly my hand ached.

  “Almost every night. And it felt so real. She was always dripping wet. She said Sidney was always on fire when he visited her, kind of smoldering … so I guess it makes sense that she would be wet. She would try to talk to me, but I could never understand her.”

  I let out the breath I’d been holding. “I am so sorry. I can’t imagine.”

  “You won’t have to,” she said, so quietly I thought I’d misheard her.

  “What?”


  “I’ll mail you these tapes, okay? I have to go.”

  “Okay, um, thank you—”

  I was cut off by the dial tone. I replaced the receiver in the cradle, watching as the blood slowly crept back into my whitened knuckles. I flexed my hand a few times. I hadn’t moved for the entirety of our conversation. My coffee was cold. I pushed it away from me; I didn’t need my thoughts moving any faster than they were.

  I was nearing the end of my set when the little red call light blinked on the studio phone.

  “Moon Basin Community Radio,” I said into the mouthpiece. My voice was tinny.

  “… there?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, one eye still on the tables. “Could you repeat that?”

  This time there wasn’t even a hint of a word, just a crackling hiss.

  “Hello? Nadia?”

  The hiss narrowed and sharpened until it sounded almost like someone breathing.

  “Look, we have star-six-nine,” I said, trying to sound unflappable, channeling Nina. “What do you want?”

  The breathing deepened, grew harsher, became panting.

  “Okay, fuck this,” I said, and slammed the phone down. A commercial was playing, and I busied myself queuing up the next song as I tried to ignore the fact that I was shaking. It hadn’t sounded like perv breathing, as terrible as that would have been. It sounded more like animal breathing. Like something with teeth and claws hunting, tasting the air, looking for weakness. I shuddered and put the needle down, twisting the knob just as the last words of the commercial floated out over the air. Soft guitar spilled over into the world, obliterating some of my fear, and I closed my eyes for a moment and listened. When I opened them again, the red light was blinking.

  I picked up the phone and put it to my ear, holding my breath. There was only the hiss of an open line on the other end. I pressed the receiver harder against my ear, trying to listen past the ocean of my own pulse, and I heard breathing. That same ragged, hungry breathing. I slapped the button in the phone’s cradle, ending the call, and then I left the receiver off the hook.

  At the end of the set, I wound the fader down to zero and then clicked the machine off. I took my mug to the kitchen and washed it, then poked my head into Javi’s little closet-office. “I’m out of here, Javi,” I said.

  He yanked something out of the crate of records he was sorting through and waved at me. I almost told him not to answer the phone but stopped myself. It was his job, and I was being paranoid. I felt around in my pockets, making sure I had my keys, and then I lunged back into the studio and grabbed for the phone. I threw it onto the hook and leaped away like I’d been burned, pulling the door to the booth shut behind me as I trotted out of the studio. I looked back—I shouldn’t have, but I did—and the little red light was blinking.

  “Nope,” I muttered, and slammed out of the station.

  My thoughts kept spinning back to Nadia as I walked home, her words looping in my mind. You won’t have to. Was it a warning? A promise? A chill crawled down my spine. I don’t think she was wrong, she’d said of Mellie Harington. I was having the same thought about Nadia and it scared me badly.

  My mother was home when I got there, rummaging through the fridge. It was one of the rare moments when we were both awake at the same time, and I was going to have to ruin it.

  “Mom,” I said carefully. “Did you know Mellie Harington?”

  She backed out of the fridge holding a pie tin and a jar of artichoke hearts, turning to me and closing it with her hip.

  “Not really,” she said, sitting down. “I knew of her. Saw her around and such. Why?”

  “No reason,” I said. “Nina found some tapes of her at the motel and we just wondered who here even knew her.”

  “Maybe one of the other miners’ wives,” she mused. “None of them would really speak to her, but you never know. Maybe one of them softened.”

  “When you saw her, did she seem … sane?”

  She fished an artichoke heart out of the jar and ate it. “She seemed harried. Like she was being followed, always looking over her shoulder, hearing something coming.”

  I didn’t know I was going to say it until I did. It climbed up my throat and forced its way past my lips and fell flat onto the table, raw and glistening: “Why did you go into the mine after Dad died?”

  She looked at me. “What? Why?”

  I sat down across from her. “What was it like in your head? How did you feel?”

  She opened her mouth and closed it again, at a loss. Her eyebrows furrowed as she looked at me.

  “Mom,” I said quietly. “Please.”

  She sighed and stabbed her fork into the pie tin, lifting a bite to her mouth before answering around it.

  “Foggy,” she said. “I felt foggy. I was doing a nephrectomy when they told me Thomas had been killed. Over the intercom, so I was still sterile, so I finished the procedure. But it was as if my mind had floated away from me. My body was down below me working, but my mind was getting further and further away. The light kept flashing off the instruments, and every time it did I heard something in my head. Not a word, but not—I don’t know. Maybe I felt it more than heard it. It just kept repeating, like a heartbeat.”

  Her eyes misted.

  “I went to the morgue to identify him, and he was barely recognizable, and I was so far above my body. I could see myself down there crying, and I could feel that I was crying, and the fog in my head got louder and louder until there was just a perfect, empty blank.”

  She paused, tears rolling down her cheeks.

  “The next thing I knew, I was on a stretcher.”

  I put my hand on hers, the one that wasn’t holding a fork. “What about after?” I asked, hating myself for putting her through this.

  “What about it?”

  “Was there ever anything … paranormal, I guess? Did you see anything, or hear things again, or—?”

  She looked like a statue for a moment, her gaze fixed on me, calm and sad. Then she tipped her head to the side. “Is that happening to you?”

  A wave of despair and exhaustion swept over me. “Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know. We went into the mine last weekend.”

  She rocked back slightly in her chair, but her voice was even as she said, “Why would you do that?”

  “Piper’s dad,” I said. He’d looked so hopeful. A tear spilled down my cheek. “He asked if we wanted to go.”

  “He’s the one working for the town council,” she realized. “Why would he bring you down there?”

  “He wanted to spend time with Piper,” I said as my chest hitched. “Bond with us.”

  She put both hands flat on the table and looked at me. I could tell she was chewing on the inside of her cheek. “I remember being your age. It’s easy to talk yourself into things.”

  “I’m not talking myself into having nightmares every single night,” I said. “And Mr. Wharton’s a grown man, he isn’t talking himself into—into whatever’s going on with him. It’s coming from somewhere.”

  “Clem—”

  “It happened to you!” I cried. “You can’t tell me it’s a coincidence that you got hurt in the mine.”

  “Of course it was,” she said. “I had a—a nervous episode, a grief-induced blackout. I could have ended up anywhere.”

  I thought about what Nina had said about everyone in town suddenly deciding to believe. My mom had done the opposite. Her resistance to the idea felt like a physical presence in the room, and I couldn’t find a way around it.

  I lifted my head and forced a smile. “You’re probably right. Sorry to dredge up all that old stuff.”

  Her smile was just as forced, and she didn’t say anything as I got up from the table.

  I wandered into my room, rolling across my bed to the little shelf of tiny animals in the corner. I picked up a quartz rabbit, turning it in the dim light coming in from the hallway. I felt around on the windowsill, found a lighter, and flicked the flame over my favorite candle.
The light danced over the animals, making them look a little bit like they were shifting in place. I pushed them around: turtle, kangaroo, Pomeranian. The ones from when I was small were ceramic, painted, with eyes and mouths and little delicate accents. The ones from more recently were stone, rougher-hewn. A frog made of dark-red jasper huddled next to a jade dragon and a small agate mouse. I hadn’t gotten a new one in years. My mom used to bring them to me when she visited her mother. Every time she got back, I’d run to her as soon as the door opened and she’d kneel, unclasping her hands to reveal the newest pet she’d chosen for me.

  The candle flickered and the rabbit’s ears twitched. I had a sudden urge to hug my mom, hold her to me and tell her I loved her. I wanted to tell her I was sorry for what she’d been through, and that I was proud of her, and that I trusted her. I rolled off my bed and walked out into the hallway. The kitchen light was off. I pushed open her bedroom door just slightly, to see if I could hear the white-noise hum of her fan. She wasn’t there. She’d left for work. I nodded to myself, kept nodding as I went back into my room, and when my cheek hit the pillow I felt that I was crying. I thought, I forgot to call Nina, and then I was asleep.

  In the dark moonless middle of the night I woke to water dripping on me. The first drop hit my eyelid; I opened my eyes and shifted slightly, and the second one hit my forehead.

  “Shit,” I murmured, rolling toward my side table to turn on the lamp. The trailer didn’t usually leak, but there was a first time for everything. I was reaching, my fingers fumbling under the shade, when a hand grabbed my wrist.

  A scream died in my throat as I tried to make out who was holding me. I could smell the metallic, mineral tang of water. I knew who it was but I didn’t want to, I wanted to be wrong, even though the fingers on my wrist were slimy and swollen with damp. I squinted into the black, hoping against hope, and then her face swam down out of the darkness toward me.

  This time the scream came out, full-fledged, and I tried to yank my arm out of her grip but she was too strong. Her eyes were gone, clouded and fish nibbled. Her makeup ran down her cheeks. She opened her mouth and a tide of murky water spilled out, the cold of it shocking as it hit me. A whistling, reedy sound came from her throat, and as her mouth stretched wider, I saw something scrabbling there in the darkness at the end of her tongue. I pedaled my feet, shoving myself backward toward the head of the bed, bunching the wet bedclothes away from me. I couldn’t make a sound, transfixed by her mangled eyes, and as she leaned closer I smelled the flat metal smell of the river, and I realized it was coming from her lungs, where it had pooled when she died. The scrabbling thing made a rustling, clicking sound, and I could see one bristly leg searching for purchase on her tongue and her mouth yawned, her jaw crunching as it dislocated. She was going to swallow me whole, put those horrible unhinged jaws around my head and bite, holding me there while the scrabbling thing climbed from her throat and forced its way between my lips, between my teeth, until it settled on my tongue and gorged itself on my blood and I suffocated in the yawning, fetid cavern of her mouth.