by Cara Martin
Waiting for me to recover, John says, “Drag him behind the carriage house in a minute — you don’t have to lift him.” John cocks his head to indicate the shed approximately fifty feet behind us. “It’s where they used to store horse-drawn buggies.”
The house is older than I thought. Deserted for decades at least.
“We have to get away from this place,” I say, urgency cinching my throat. “Whoever did this can’t be far. And now they have a gun.” Two, if it was Matthew or Mark who committed the murder.
“No one’s leaving. The van’s toast, and it’s a long way back to the main road.” John scratches distractedly at one of his arms. “I’m not going to prison for a job that didn’t pay off. We’re all staying right here and waiting for cellphone service to be restored.” He aims the gun momentarily at my heart, quickly shifting its focus to somewhere past me. “Doesn’t make sense to be out in the open, anyway. We can protect ourselves from inside the house if we have to. Someone could just pick us off one right after the other if we ran.”
They could open fire on us right now if they wanted to, and I stare into the blackness of the woods, imagining that I feel something stare back. A hollow space forms in my skull. A cold spot of ugly questions.
“Take him already so that we can get back inside,” John snaps. “I don’t plan on anyone else dying out here tonight.”
Bending close to the ground, I hook my hands under the body’s armpits, tugging it along with me as I shuffle back to the shed. John follows, three steps behind with his gun in the air. The grass is long and wet. I have to keep staring behind me to avoid tripping.
The weight of the body tugs at my stomach, my eyes skittering away from the ski mask, which has become a mask of death. Fifty feet seems like an eternity. When I release the body, my hands feel contaminated with a sin I didn’t commit.
“You can wash them inside,” John says as I stare at my fingers. He centers the gun on me again. “Keep it together. We’ll get through this if everyone keeps their heads.”
An unsettling laugh seeps out from under my breath. My neck whips around, my head playing mind games with me, intent on bending me out of shape. “Do you smell cigarette smoke?”
My dad never gave up the habit. Not while I knew him. Most of his friends were chain-smokers too. One of the kidnappers must be also; the smell is unmistakable.
John turns his nose up to sniff the air, but his nostrils are covered by the mask. “I don’t smell anything.”
With my nostrils clogged by gauze and blood, I shouldn’t be able to pick up anything either. But the gritty smell deepens, sinking into my pores. I jump in my skin, someone suddenly standing by my side. A partial shoulder and blurred grimy denim leg dissolve into nothing when I turn to look at the figure straight on. My father’s shoulder in one of the old concert tour T-shirts from his youth, cities and tour dates running down the back. I catch the briefest glimpse of the numbers and letters before they fade into oblivion.
“Stop it,” John warns, his eyes following mine. “No tricks.”
“I’m not —” I shake my head, cutting myself short. There was never anyone there. We’re alone behind the carriage house with the bloody body of Matthew or Mark, and the only thing that matters is making it out of this place in one piece with Tanvi.
John motions for me to walk ahead of him, leaving his back unprotected as we trudge to the house. The quiet is an enemy. It watches and listens as we leave the charred remains of the van behind us and then bolt up the loose porch steps.
The house absorbs our presence. Inside the living room, Luke jumps up from his chair. The rest of the scene is unchanged — Tanvi and Cal slump on the floor with their hands bound behind their backs and their lips duct-taped shut. Lauren lies coiled in the fetal position, eyes closed and face half-buried in the pillow Mark hurled at her before dying or disappearing into the night.
John thrusts his gun into my ribs, pulling me close as Luke stands on my other side, his posture as rigid as a mannequin’s. “You won’t be doing your friends any good by telling them what you saw out there,” John whispers. “They’ll only panic. Someone could get hurt.”
“What about Matthew?” Luke asks John, his voice hushed.
“No trace of him. Mark’s down. Tucked out of sight, behind the outbuilding.” John hesitates, selecting his words and tone carefully. “We need to stay the course. Keep alert through the night and work out a way to organize new transport.”
Luke’s left knee vibrates through his black pants. “Man, Matthew’s no killer. Why would he do this?”
One mystery solved. The body was Mark’s. Matthew is MIA.
“Not in front of him,” John admonishes with an irate sideways glance. “Secure his hands again.”
“I need water,” I remind him. Death clings hotly to my palms. “And a bathroom.” Before I’m sick. My gut’s twisting and churning, the memory of the tree-hanging body shadow dancing in my head. I cock my head to indicate the other hostages. “They’ll need something to drink too.” My eyes linger on Tanvi. The familiar curve of her lips and the dramatic arc of her cheeks weigh me down like an anchor.
“One thing at a time,” John tells me before turning to Luke. “Take him up to the bathroom. Bring a bottle of water. I’ll watch the others.”
Luke hands me water, then plucks the nearest lantern from the floor, the gun never leaving his grasp. “Better make this quick,” he says as we head into the hallway and close in on the staircase. Sharp, slender pieces of wood poke out of the bottom step at acute angles, threatening to stab anyone in their orbit. Half of the bottom step has rotted away. The remaining half wobbles and groans when I place my weight on the wood. My stomach lurches along with it. I instinctively reach for the banister. It quivers under my hand, like someone not used to being touched, but then holds its ground.
The rest of the steps feel sturdier than the first. I climb them gingerly, half-expecting the staircase to dissolve into dust, taking me with it. Ascending into darkness with the majority of the lantern light illuminating the steps behind me, the back of my neck prickles.
“It’s the first door at the top,” Luke declares. “And it’s as nasty as the rest of this place.”
Reaching the second floor, I spy the doorway of the nearest room. It’s ajar, the darkness within dimmer than the rest of the corridor.
“Go on,” Luke says impatiently.
Stepping forward, I stretch out my hand, pushing the door open wide. Something scurries along the decomposing floorboards, disappearing into a gaping hole next to the toilet. Several fragments of drywall have torn away from the walls. The toilet lid has been left down, and the walls sport green peach fuzz — a hundred and something year old wall in a freakish state of adolescence.
Closer to me, a wall-mounted porcelain sink juts out of the wall, promising running water that it can’t deliver. My nausea subsides as I hesitate in the doorway, my eyes scanning to locate the source of the swishing noise tickling my ears. Could have been a mouse diving into the hole. Could have been almost anything. This hulk of a house has given up trying to keep wild things out. Anything and anybody is welcome.
I snap like a twig without seeing it coming. My composure sloughs away from my skin and bones, gathering on the floor along with the drywall and then scurrying into the shadows of the shittiest room I’ve ever seen.
No higher reasoning involved. It just happens. I lose it. My body twists, the floor complaining underfoot. My right hand smashes the water bottle into Luke’s eye, my left belting him in the Adam’s apple, stealing his breath.
He wheezes and rasps, his windpipe gasping for oxygen. Lunging low, he drops the lantern. It clatters on the floor. Arms grab me around both legs, his head connecting with my chest. The force tackles me to the ground. I collapse against the toilet, my shoulder banging it hard on the way down. I barely feel it. Barbed wire puzzle pieces in my stoma
ch shudder and shift, reopening wounds and erasing everything else. Mark’s dripping body. The kidnapping. Mom crying at the hospital, promising Natalya and me she was done with my dad. Tanvi’s hands sly and playful on my waist, itching to make me laugh and give away our hide and seek spot behind the open bedroom door to her friends. Gone, gone, gone, gone.
Straightening slowly, Luke raises his weapon. “Motherfucking asshole,” he says hoarsely. The gun barrel lines up with my frontal lobe. “Why’d you do that? You looking to get yourself shot?”
The lantern has rolled against the wall, beneath the sink. It lies on its side next to the crumpled, leaking water bottle.
“What’s going on up there?” John roars from downstairs.
Luke kicks roughly at my shoe. “Get up.”
I shake my head. No, I’m not looking to get shot. No, I can’t get up. I’m a pile of broken glass.
Luke takes a step back, into the hallway. “He fell!” Luke shouts, voice cracking. “But it’s cool. We’re all right.”
“Now get yourself up,” Luke tells me. “And don’t try that shit again or I’ll take out your kneecap. I don’t want to kill you, but that doesn’t mean I won’t hurt you.”
The words whiz by my ears without landing. The swishing too — whatever furry thing is indiscriminate enough to pick this hellhole as its motel room. Something small and fast brushes by me in the dark, and revulsion must be primal because I automatically stagger to my feet.
Luke reaches for the lantern, stepping back fast. “Get your water.”
I stare at Luke, not wanting to bend again. If I do, the pain will howl.
Then I think of Tanvi a floor below me. The way our eyes used to find each other in a crowd of friends or group of strangers. Suddenly, no matter where we’d been the moment before, we’d exist in the same mental space from across the room.
I imagine her eyes on me now, in this shitty nightmare of a bathroom where Luke’s ready to take out my kneecap in retribution, and I do it. I bend and pick up the bottle, careful to preserve what’s left inside. Just enough to wet my hands over the sink. I dry them on my jeans and plead, “Don’t take what I did out on anyone else, okay? They didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“You think I’m some kind of monster?” Luke’s eyes disappear behind the lantern light, twin black craters. “You think I’m gonna — what — go down there and beat on one of the girls?” His voice bounds downhill. “I’m not a monster. I’m just doing what I have to do here.”
I bob my head like I believe him. With his ski mask still fixed in place, there’s no visible evidence of the punch to the neck I delivered, but Luke’s left eye is bloodshot and a long, spidery cut stares out from underneath his lower lid where the plastic bottle crunched open.
We eye each other up in the dingy shadows, whatever’s rustling around in here with us tugging at my peripheral vision. Luke’s taller than me but with a similar build. In the moment he’s stronger than me — relatively undamaged — but either of us will do what we have to. Anybody looking to get in the way of that should think twice.
“That body outside was bloody,” I tell him, my voice revealing more fear than I mean to. “Its fingers and eyes, even, but there were no bullet holes.”
Beyond the bathroom, something thuds. A solid object dropped onto wood floor or hurled against an upstairs wall. Luke flinches, glancing swiftly behind him into the dark corridor and then back at me. “Get out there,” Luke commands, slipping further into the bathroom to switch places with me.
I inch out into darkness, my eyes on my feet so I won’t flip over any surprises. If there’s something else in the house, it’s bigger than what we spotted in the bathroom. When I hear the thud again it’s closer, and it reminds me of our old apartment. The walls and floors were as thin as two-ply tissue. You could hear every step from next door or upstairs. Cupboards slamming. Toilets flushing. And repetitive unidentified noises like these.
Lantern light spills from behind me as Luke trails me into the hall. Something drags across the floor. Stops. Is propelled vigorously forward again. I freeze. Listen for what direction the sound is coming from, my eyes scouring the corridor. Four closed doorways, not counting the open bathroom. Paint, or maybe wallpaper — so intricately cracked from ceiling to floor that it reminds me of henna tattoos — lines the slowly disintegrating walls.
“What’s the racket?” John shouts from the ground floor.
Luke’s lips part to answer, his reply existing only in my gaze and the part of his mind that’s shifted its focus to the ceiling. He holds the lantern higher, his other hand acting in synchronization, raising the gun.
I follow the direction of the light, shivering in the fast-disappearing heat. My body knows what’s happening before I do. I’ve heard this sound before, in places it had no right to be. My bedroom. Tanvi’s. Keion’s car.
The hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stand to their full height, like corn stalks ready to be harvested. Above us, halfway down the hallway, an old hairbrush clings to the ceiling as if suspended by strings. The silver brush handle fishtails a little as it glints light back to us, the sound of its movement like a coin twirling on a tabletop. My breath lights up the air too, turning it smoky white the way everyone’s breath looks come Tealing winter.
Luke yanks the lantern away from the brush, shining it at the far end of the corridor. The noise amplifies, the brush jiggling agitatedly against the ceiling, defying gravity. “You see that?” Luke asks.
I peer at the empty scrap of hallway where he’s focused the light. The walls aren’t like henna tattoos after all. More like hundreds of swirling, intersecting scars that will never heal, or a state road map that won’t lead you home.
“Someone was right there,” Luke adds, his voice thin and cold like ice coiled around an electrical wire. “Looked like an old white woman in a nightgown.”
But no one’s there now, and I don’t want to see what he’s talking about.
John hollers up from the first floor again, and Luke shouts back, “We’re coming down.” We turn together, our steps frantic but not fast enough. Unmoored, the hairbrush skates rapidly along the ceiling, closing in on us.
My breath curls up deep in my lungs and stays there, not wanting to meet the air. Dense blackness spreads out ahead of me — I might as well be in deep space — and my hand reaching for the banister is an act of faith. Despite every crazy thing that’s happened in the past few minutes, it must still be there.
Something drops from overhead, narrowly missing me. It strikes the top step forcefully instead, then the second and the third, clattering halfway down the staircase like an angry Slinky. Luke shines the lantern over my shoulder. We stare at the antique hairbrush lying deceptively lifeless in the middle of the staircase.
“Run,” Luke says into my ear. My right hand lands safely on the banister. The temperature’s plunged in the last thirty seconds, and for a moment I understand what Lauren meant with a clarity that chafes at my skull like coarse wool. I’m not the same person who walked out the front door with John minutes ago. I don’t know who I am now. Everything’s changed; it’s changing still. Being rewritten by something stronger than what I can see and touch.
What it wants is anyone’s guess.
Holding tight to the banister, I careen down the steps, the pain in my gut momentarily forgotten and Luke a hair’s breadth behind me.
13
SITTING ON THE FLOOR next to Cal with my hands still untied, I watch John and Luke hover in the living room doorway, their faces strained and their voices trampling each other’s sentences. The finer points of their argument remain indecipherable, sinking into the shadows. John makes sure of that, subduing Luke time and again.
Luke motions repeatedly in the general vicinity of the staircase, John’s gaze flickering intermittently in my direction.
“One of them is dead,” I whisper,
Cal staring straight ahead, pretending my lips haven’t moved. “The other’s missing.”
Cal’s eyes bulge, teeming with questions I don’t have answers for. His gaze flies to Tanvi. She stares back at us with the concentration of a hawk, trying to tune in to our wavelength from across a physical divide. Seeing her sitting cross-legged, with Lauren’s feet nestled in her lap as Lauren sleeps on peacefully — more peacefully than you’d expect would be possible in a place like this — I notice one of Tanvi’s knees is skinned. Her long hair is knotting at the back.
I shift my stare to John and Luke, their arms jerking and spines held taut, their guns skittish extensions of their right hands. Their control over the situation is fading fast, and they know it.
“Something’s wrong with this house,” I continue, careful not to look at Cal. “Upstairs.”
It hurts to talk, and I don’t know how to explain without sounding like a straitjacket candidate. I need more tramadol. I need to lie down. Rest. Just for a few minutes. Until I can regain some of my strength. Slowly, I ease my back nearer to the floor, straightening my legs out in front of me. An old memory I didn’t realize I’d forgotten washes to the surface as pain bullets through me like a tearing seam, my spine meeting solid ground.
My grandmother and her white candles. Years ago, she used to suffer from migraines. Her prescription would dull the pain, but never annihilate it. For that she used a white candle, letting it burn down to nothing as she chanted:
Pain take flight and disappear,
Sickness lay down misery and hear,
My plea to energy and light,