Ill Will

by Dan Chaon

  —

  That night, she dreamed about the morning when they discovered the bodies.

  They were asleep in the camper, and she was a little hungover. Dustin was next to her, and she could feel his damp mouth against the side of her arm, and at first she thought the sound was a bird or a dog that had been hit by a car. Shrill, almost mechanical shrieks.

  And then she realized it was Wave’s voice. She sat up and Dustin cried, “What? What?” and she went running toward the sound that Wave was making. This awful, high, rasping eeeeeeee sound, repeating over and over.

  Being murdered? Raped? Tortured?  No matter what happened between them afterward, she would always remember this: My sister was screaming and I ran to save her. It was a deep, deep instinct, maybe it was what soldiers got when they were in battle, but she was going to kill whatever was hurting her sister, that was all she knew.

  She saw Aunt Colleen dead on the porch, and she heard Dustin call out. “Mommy!” he screamed, and she was aware that he was on his knees, shaking his mother and trying to revive her, but Kate kept running forward. Maybe she would be able to get the shotgun out of the hall closet, she thought, and she saw Uncle Dave in the living room, dead, and she thought, oh my God they are raping Wave—she had a picture in her mind of Charles Manson and his followers, killing people and writing words with their blood on the walls, and she thought about turning back, she pressed herself to the wall and held her breath, listening for the sound of mean male voices.

  And she saw her sister standing in the kitchen doorway.

  Just standing there. No one was near her, and Kate took a step closer.

  “Wave,” she whispered. But her sister didn’t turn. “Are they gone? Did they hurt you?”

  The murderers were gone, apparently. If they hadn’t killed Wave by this point, they probably weren’t going to.

  “Did you see who did it?” Kate said. She tried to put her arms around Wave, but it was like Wave was possessed. She went rigid and thrashed, and her eyes were blank.

  But Kate held her tightly. She could see now what Wave was looking at. Their mother was dead under the kitchen table. Their dad was sitting on the floor, leaned against the counter. She could tell it was him because of his hands and his haircut. His face was just a hole.

  Whatever creature was possessing Wave, it wouldn’t leave even when Kate shook her and shook her, and then Kate had to walk across the kitchen, she had to walk barefoot through her parents’ blood so that she could get to the phone and dial 911.

  —

  By the time she’d gotten Wave to stop screaming, the police had arrived. She put her hands over Wave’s eyes and pressed as close as she could against Wave’s back, and she told her that they were going to walk out.

  “I can’t,” Wave said. “I can’t move, I can’t move!” And Kate put her mouth close to Wave’s ear. She pressed her palms tightly over Wave’s eyes.

  “You can’t see it,” she said. “It’s not there. Just walk with me; I’ll lead you.”

  And she had guided Wave out of the house, away from the murder scene. Little tiny steps.

  She startled as the journalist snapped the picture as they left the house. She took her hands off Wave’s eyes.  The picture that would be in all the papers.

  What was the photographer even doing there?

  Just a bit of luck, as it turned out later. He was working on a piece about western Nebraska for National Geographic, and he happened to be doing a ride-along with the county sheriff when the call came in.

  —

  And then she woke up.

  Dusty was breathing thickly against the side of her arm and she was in Grandma Brody’s house, sleeping next to him on his dead mother’s childhood bed.

  Fuck, she thought.

  Wave was already awake. She was downstairs, sitting at the kitchen table, eating a bowl of oatmeal, and when Kate came in, Wave looked up and said nothing.

  “The bus is going to stop right out there by the mailbox,” Grandma Brody was saying. “First thing on Monday morning. I made all the arrangements. I talked to the principal, and he knows all about what happened to you three.”

  The old woman looked up and saw Kate. “Oh,” she said. “Katelynn! I’m glad you’re up. I was just telling your sister. I think it would be good if you three could start school on Monday morning. You’ve missed a lot already, and I think you need to get settled in right away.”

  She sat down next to Wave, but Wave didn’t look at her. Oh, come on, she thought. “Stop it,” she whispered into Wave’s ear, and Wave glanced at her dully.

  “Stop what?” Wave said, gazing back down at her oatmeal. Grandma Brody stood at the filthy old oven, stirring a pot. There was a clock in the shape of a cat on the wall. The cat’s tail was the pendulum, and its googly cartoon eyes moved back and forth with each tick. It grinned and looked down.

  —

  After the murders, Dustin came to her.

  They had spent hours and hours in the police station, and then afterward they had been “sequestered” at the house of one of the town’s councilmen. Kate and Wave had wanted to stay over with one of their friends, but the police said it was out of the question.

  Instead, they were in a part of town that Kate had never really visited. The councilman had a house in the hills above St. Bonaventure, in the very richest part, and when Kate went out to have a cigarette she saw that they had an actual built-in swimming pool in their backyard, which—in Nebraska—seemed like an insane extravagance. How many months of the year was it even usable?

  There was a “patio” and a high fence around it, and Kate rummaged through her purse until she found a half-empty pack of Merit Ultra Light 100s. The pool emanated a chlorinated glow.

  She was reclining in one of the deck chairs when she heard the sliding glass door open and Dustin came out. He came over and sat down cross-legged next to her. He was barefoot, wearing pajamas that someone must have given him, a man’s pajamas that were too big for him.

  She took a drag on her cigarette. She saw, from the way it wobbled, that her hands were shaking, but whatever she should be thinking about she was carefully unthinking.

  “I,” Dustin said. “I need to talk to somebody.”

  “Yeah?” Kate said. She breathed some smoke and watched it dissipate, and she stared at her feet, she stared at the blue water.

  “I think Rusty killed them,” he said. “I’m pretty sure about it.”

  —

  Dustin was the last to awaken that first morning at Grandma Brody’s. He came down sleepily, wearing those creepy men’s pajamas, and Grandma Brody said, “Well, it’s about time you got up, Dusty! You’re sleeping your day away!”

  Kate and Wave watched as Dustin ate his oatmeal. First, he moved his fingers above the bowl, as if he were pretending to sculpt something. Then he took a spoonful of oatmeal. Then he lifted the empty spoon to his mouth and pretended to eat something off it. He was playing some imaginary game in his head, Kate figured, but it was freaky, nevertheless. It made her uncomfortable.

  He might be sick, she thought. He might be having a mental breakdown.

  She glanced at Wave, to see if Wave was seeing what she was seeing. But Wave’s face was hooded. She seemed to be observing Dustin with a kind of irritated boredom. Almost impatient.

  Dustin wiggled his fingers over his bowl of oatmeal again, and they both observed him. “I’m nervous about him,” Kate whispered to Wave.  “Do you think he’s all right?” Wave gave her a stern, eagle-like look, but she didn’t say anything.

  “Please,” Kate whispered, her lips close to Wave’s ear. “Don’t do this.”

  The cat clock grinned. The dirty curtains on the window above the sink stirred and billowed. There was a shelf of salt-and-pepper-shaker knickknacks, and she could see a boy skunk with an S on his belly kissing a girl skunk with a P on her belly, and they both leered suggestively.

  And then Grandma Brody told them that she was going to be reading her
Bible and that they should go outside and play.

  —

  The night after the murders, the night they spent at the house with the swimming pool, Dustin told her about the things that Rusty had done. They were sitting side by side with their legs dangling in the water, and she put her arm around him because he was crying. Once in a while she turned her head to blow her cigarette smoke away from his face.

  He told her that Rusty did drugs—which of course she knew—and that Rusty once pressured him into doing LSD—which she hadn’t known, and which shocked her a little. She had never heard of a kid as young as thirteen doing LSD.

  He told her that Rusty and some other people had tied a boy’s hands behind his back and drowned him in an irrigation canal. It was a gang called the Gibbeners, he said.

  “Did he tell you this?” she said. She didn’t completely believe it, but she didn’t want to sound skeptical. His back was shuddering underneath her arm, and she rubbed her palm in the space between his shoulder blades. “Maybe he was just bullshitting you.”

  Dustin wiped his eye roughly. “It wasn’t just that,” he said. “It was a lot of things.”

  He told her that Rusty said his real mother was a part of a Satanic cult, and that she had slept with a demon, and that Rusty said he was, himself, half demon. Rusty said that the cult had made his mother go to prison and they had her sacrificed there.

  “He told me that, too,” Kate said. “I don’t believe it. He’s such a liar.”

  “But sometimes there’s a grain of truth in what they say, you know,” Dustin said solemnly. Grain of truth? Kate thought. Was that something he’d read somewhere? “Some stuff is a lie. But maybe some stuff is true, too. Like—how his foster family before us died in a fire? And how he said that a cult did it? But I think it was actually him.”

  Dustin said that one time, when he was eight, Rusty tried to talk him into burning the house down. Rusty wanted to shoot Dave and Colleen and set the house on fire and take off in the truck.

  “Are you serious?” Kate said. “Why didn’t you tell?”

  “He would just say I was lying,” Dustin said dully. “And then he would kill me.”

  “God,” Kate said, and kissed the side of Dustin’s head. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

  But did she believe it? Could it be that Rusty was, like, really a psycho? It would make so much sense. All the things he had told her, which she thought were just fake stories to impress her.

  There was one time—this was when she and Rusty were together, and they were sitting on the couch at her house, watching a video of the movie Friday the 13th, and he had his legs spread wide and his arm draped across the back of the sofa so that his fingers touched her hair, and her parents came in, along with Dave and Colleen, and Rusty looked at her sidelong and whispered.

  “You know they all have sex together, don’t you?” he said. He grinned and narrowed his eyes, in a way that she found devastating at the time.

  “Shut up,” she said. “You’re so gross.”

  “They’re part of the same cult that my mom was part of,” he said. “The Order of Dog Blood. Why else do you think they adopted me?”

  She stared at the TV. A boy was having an arrow pushed through him by someone who was hiding under the bed.

  “I don’t know why anyone would adopt you,” she said. “You’re such an ugly baby.”

  And he grinned more broadly. “They screw in all kinds of crazy ways,” he said. “Brother touching brother. Sister touching sister. Sisters and brothers touching brothers and sisters they shouldn’t be touching. And the stuff Uncle Dave does with his hook—it’s unimaginable!”

  She laughed. “Shut up!” she said. “You’re making me nauseated.”

  —

  This memory came to her as she and Dustin were sitting there in the backyard of the St. Bonaventure councilman. Their legs made soft sluicing sounds in the water of the pool, but Dustin had grown very still.

  “He does,” Dustin said. “He did…stuff to me.”

  She heard her legs moving nervously through the water and she made them stop.

  “Like…” Dustin said. “Sex stuff.”

  “What do you mean?” she said. She felt Dustin’s back muscles tighten, and her own spine stiffened in alarm. “What kind of stuff?”

  “Not for a while,” Dustin said softly. “Not since I was…nine or ten, maybe.”

  He looked down, and the pool lights glinted off his glasses. “He would get into bed with me,” he said. “And he would, like, rub his”

  Kate felt her hair tingle.

  “Against my stomach sometimes,” Dustin said. He put his hand over his belly button. “Or, like, my back. You know. The place where your butt starts?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  She took her cigarette out of her mouth and gritted her teeth behind her closed lips. She knew exactly what Dustin was talking about, because it was one of Rusty’s favorite moves—one of the things that originally made him seem kinky and exotic and experienced.  He’d push his cock back and forth against your belly button, or slide it along the crack of your ass, and at first she thought: This is wild!

  But then he just, like, spooged on her skin, and at first the cum was warm, almost hot, but it cooled off very fast, and shortly it was like gross gelatin drying on you. She had to look around to find her panties to wipe it off.

  And meanwhile, as she was cleaning his sperm off her body, he had fallen asleep.

  He was a child molester. Basically a rapist.

  She felt the slow realization bloom in her stomach and then branch outward to her limbs.

  Maybe he was even thinking about little kids—about Dustin—when he was doing that stuff to her.

  It made a shudder of revulsion go through her. Who could do something like that to a kid? And she had let someone like that—a pervert—put his dick in her?

  Her face grew warm. Blushing, blood rushing to her cheeks, whatever. Her eyes were staring so hard they felt tingly. Slow realization: It made your mind feel like it was moving. People said things like “my thoughts were reeling,” or “my head was spinning,” but up until this moment she hadn’t understood that it wasn’t just a metaphor. It was an actual physical sensation.

  Her brain wasn’t traveling as fast as “spinning” or “reeling.” It was more like a bobbing.

  As if it had detached and was now turning in a slow current.

  So many things were clicking into place.

  —

  And now they stood outside Grandma Brody’s house on a Saturday morning in September and nobody was sure what to do. Their parents were gone. The trial was over. All the little pleasures they had been anticipating about their senior year of high school had been taken away.

  Their whole lives turned to ash, and she looked over at the garage, which lurched to one side and seemed to peer at her.  She thought of the dead Studebaker inside it.

  They were so far outside of town that they couldn’t even see houses. Just prairie, rolling slopes of it, and Dustin went wandering along the dirt road, looking for rocks. She and Wave stood there watching him.

  Kate sat down in the grass by the front porch and lit a cigarette. “This is bullshit,” she said. “We can’t watch TV while she’s reading her Bible?”

  She waited for Wave to agree with her, but Wave said nothing. She folded her arms over her chest and sat down on the steps in front of the house, staring out at the mailbox, which sat on a post along the dirt road. Dead apple tree, still puzzled that it had been planted in this barren place.

  “And did she really say, ‘go outside and play’?!” Kate said. Trying again. “What are we supposed to do?  Jump rope?”

  “Mm,” Wave said.

  Kate had been pulling up blades of grass and forming them into a little bowl, which she put her cigarette out in.

  “I wish we had our car,” Kate said.

  “Yeah,” Wave said.

  Kate looked at her pack of cigarett
es. She had ten left, and she considered before lighting another one. “I don’t even know how I’m going to get cigarettes,” she said. “I don’t even know how far out of town are we?”

  Kate blew smoke into the morning air.  She suddenly wondered if Grandma Brody would be against smoking? She wondered if she had a Chiclet or something in her purse?

  “Do you have any gum?” she said, and Wave gave her a look.

  “What?” Kate said. “Are you mad at me? Or do you just not want to talk?”

  Wave shrugged.

  And so then they were silent. Dustin was crawling along the berm of the dirt road on his hands and knees, and Kate kept an eye out lest a semi come along; he would never notice it until he was flattened like roadkill. Fuck, she thought.  What is he looking for?  Rocks? Really?

  But he was very engaged. Talking to himself, it looked like. He picked up a stone and sat up on his knees and held it up to the light, tilting it and giving it careful consideration.

  “I hope that’s a fucking diamond he’s got,” Kate said, and Wave looked over at her.

  “What?” Wave said. She’d been lost in her own thoughts; she wasn’t even looking at Dustin.

  “Nothing,” Kate said, and she hated that she had said something funny that no one would ever laugh at. Things were going bad between them, she thought.

  She blew smoke from her cigarette and put it out in the grass house she had made. Now there were four cigarette butts, like four little people, twisted into poses of decease.

  —

  “I don’t have any proof,” Dustin had said. It was probably long past midnight, but the two of them were still sitting by the pool on the night after the murders, talking. “It’s just a feeling. So I don’t know whether I should, like, say something to the police?  Or”

  And Kate had considered for a long time and very thoughtfully. She had started writing things down in a notebook.

  Proof that Rusty is the killer

  1. He had once tried to get Dustin to burn their house down. His previous foster family had died in a fire, too. Coincidence? Not likely!

  2. He had killed baby rabbits in front of Dustin: sick and without mercy.