Two entire lifetimes seemingly reduced to a neglected shell of a building, some broken furniture and a row of trash bags, as if nothing else remained of either of them.
I looked up at the back of the house and the darkness on the other side of the smudged windowpanes on the second floor. The sensation of someone watching me from just beyond the swathe of shadows rattled my already frayed nerves. “Bernard,” I whispered. “Are you here?”
The trees, stirred by a momentary breeze, answered for him.
Small windows along the foundation of the house reminded me of the cellar in New Bedford where he had hanged himself. But this was his home, a place of history, so what had Bernard conjured here, in this house where he’d once claimed the Devil sometimes spoke to him? What demons had he summoned and brought to life here? And why? Why had he done it in the first place? Why had he listened when evil beckoned—even if it had come from within him—why had he chosen to embrace it?
I moved to the edge of the patio and crouched down; eyes fixed on the old chaise lounge, its canvas backing tattered and soiled. What had I seen and experienced here, incidents my mind had relegated to hazy spirits that haunted me from the shadows even now? How had they blinded me, stolen my vision and left a void where their memory should have existed instead? Or had I given it away, buried the knowledge so deeply myself that it no longer seemed real?
If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out.
Just as a lie, told countless times in one’s own mind eventually becomes memory rather than fantasy, blurring the line between that which was imagined and that which actually took place, could the same be true of real experiences? If one pretended a literal occurrence never happened with enough passion and over a sufficient amount of time, did it eventually cease to exist in the conscious mind? Did it too blur the lines between the imaginary and the actual? Even as I reached for the decaying chaise lounge, I knew the answer to those questions was yes.
On particularly warm and sunny days the chaise lounge was always moved to the center of the backyard, where Bernard’s mother could lay out and sunbathe, the house blocking any view from the road and the trees in back forming a barrier between her and the houses beyond. How many times had I seen her stretched out under summer sun, skin browned and glistening with tanning lotion, head back, eyes closed, chin tilted toward the sky, soft blonde hair contrasting with the gaudy flowery pattern on the padded pillow of the chaise lounge, Jackie-O sunglasses and a fluffy white beach towel resting next to a portable radio on the grass, playing disco tunes always a bit louder than necessary? How many times had I watched her breasts, barely contained in a bright bikini top, rise and fall, her legs outstretched, toes pointed like a prone ballerina while the sun caught the gold bracelet adorning her ankle? How many times had I touched myself and thought of her—my friend’s mother, for Christ’s sake—how many times?
In those years before she’d become sick she was beautiful, but not like everyone else’s mom. Linda was different. She was still a parent, but younger, sexier, more like us than other adults. She’d possessed an impish quality, with expressive light blue eyes, a tiny nose and thin though shapely lips, dyed blonde hair that she kept relatively short in length but that was thick and always a bit wild, as if she’d not quite had the time to style it properly, and a deep, bawdy laugh that sounded implausibly obscene coming from such an otherwise delicate woman. So delicate, in fact, that she often seemed practiced, studied in the ways of carrying oneself in an unquestionably female, unmistakably sexual, undeniably alluring manner. In a boring town like Potter’s Cove, she was the most glamorous being any of us had ever laid eyes on. A misplaced movie starlet banished with her bastard son to the ends of the Earth, sentenced to a life of boredom and loneliness in a place where but for those who ridiculed her, the only attention a woman like Linda Moore was paid was at local bars after dark. I’d once heard my mother talking on the telephone with a friend about her, about how she had gone from her native New Bedford to New York City, where she had become involved with some shady characters. Underworld types who liked to have a woman like Linda on their arms and in their beds. But there had been a murder, so the story went, a mob hit where she had been caught in the middle of a bad situation and fled. She had returned home pregnant, with a drinking problem and a bad reputation, and ended up in Potter’s Cove. Most felt her stay would be temporary, that a party girl without a party would quickly tire of life outside the fast lane and eventually return to it. And in a sense, she did, albeit a small town version. Under more typical circumstances, she was the kind of girl who left the area and went on to bigger things in more sensational locales. But instead she’d become a scandalous woman the older townies spoke about softly, sometimes in outright whispers, hands raised to cover their mouths and eyes cast askance; a woman most grown men and teenage boys alike fantasized about, and a woman Bernard worshipped.
I stood up and stepped back, away from the house, and again watched the upstairs windows for a time. The sense that someone was watching me surfaced a second time, though I had the impression whoever or whatever it was had now moved to some point behind me—perhaps the trees just beyond the fence. I ignored the feeling and without looking back walked slowly around to the side of the house from which I’d come. As I closed the gate I glanced at the backyard, gradually lifting my eyes to the still gently swaying trees.
Satisfied that no one was there, I crossed to the front of the house. The front door, a door we had always been told to knock on once and then feel free to enter through, drew my attention. It was an odd thing, to simply knock once then walk into someone else’s home, not to mention a practice foreign to me and in direct opposition to the more formal rules of etiquette my mother had taught and insisted I adhere to. But it was Linda’s rule. And that was another thing. Calling an adult, particularly a friend’s mother, by their first name was not done and considered disrespectful. But again, it was Linda’s rule. So, when visiting, I’d knock once on the front door then enter, and whenever in her company I’d address her simply as Linda, just like everyone else.
The countless times I had walked in and caught Bernard’s mother in some state of undress trickled through my mind, images of flirting ghosts and sneering demons blurring one into the next to form a single spectral whirlwind. So often when I stopped by she just happened to be scantily or sexily clad, or was changing or had just stepped out of the shower, a skimpy towel somehow managing to cover all the right spots, though just barely, except for those occasions when it slipped or fell completely away to reveal a quick flash of nipple, buttock or pubic hair as she nonchalantly climbed the stairs or pranced into her bedroom. In those days, I’d often wondered if she did the same thing when Bernard’s other friends came to the house.
Bernard’s in his room, sugar. Go on up and see him.
All these years later, I had no doubt that she had.
* * *
I stared at the house, called on all the recollections and mysteries it held within its slowly dying walls, summoned them from its bowels to the light of day, to the sidewalk where I now stood. And like the slow rise of blood from an exceptionally deep wound, they came. Slow and seeping at first, and then, as I held the wound open wider still, it gushed, this blood of memories and secrets, leaking from the windows, dripping across the walls, bubbling from cracks in the foundation, frothing and swelling free like waves crashing shoreline, determined to knock me over and drag me under.
And down I went.
The house opened before me like a parting curtain, a yawning mouth vomiting forth the past like the repellent thing that it was.
Knock once and enter.
Just beyond the front door, the staircase at the head of the small entranceway came into focus, the living room to the left, a small closet to the right, the smell of cigarettes, booze, and Linda’s perfume in the air as always. Barely audible sounds of the television in the other room turned down low lingered in my ear even when the stairs began to creak as I climbed them, sh
ifting with each hesitant step.
The door opening—no—already open on the bedroom just to the right of the stairs. Linda’s room, where the bed sat against the back wall, mismatched nightstands on either side of the headboard cluttered with overflowing ashtrays and empty liquor bottles, garments stuffed into plastic clothesbaskets and strewn about the room as if thrown or dropped there, an ironing board against one wall, a dressing table with mirror and closet against another. Lipsticks and makeup, small bottles of polish and colognes and body sprays, tins of soap and powder rattling, clicking one against the other until it all faded to black.
* * *
The house watched me now, offering nothing.
While I glared back, the ghosts led my thoughts to the cemetery instead. I hadn’t been there in quite some time, even in my mind. Bernard’s mother and my parents had been buried in the same one, and while I often felt guilty for not tending more consistent attention to my mother’s so-called final resting place, I knew she would have understood. “It’s only our bodies there anyway,” she’d once assured me, eyes blinking tranquilly, telling me everything, and nothing at all. “I’ll be in Heaven with Daddy by then.”
She’d always referred to my father as “Daddy,” as if sweetening his moniker might make his absence more tolerable, the void somehow more human once assigned an innocent and childlike title. But he remained a stranger to me, a character in other peoples’ stories, a smiling and gentle-looking man in faded photographs, a name chiseled into granite. At least I’d had that much; Bernard knew virtually nothing about his father, though I’d never been quite sure which experience was preferable. His mother had rarely spoken about the subject, and it wasn’t until I’d become an adult that her reasons began to make sense. Although Bernard and I never discussed it and I had no way to know for sure, I believed Linda had never told him who his father was because she hadn’t been certain herself.
Visions of the cemetery scurried about, reached for me, revealed Linda sitting atop her headstone, laughing while Bernard crouched before her, digging furiously with fingers raw and bleeding, flinging soil across the flowers decorating her grave.
The demons were at play but the house fell silent.
For now, the ghosts had stopped talking.
CHAPTER 12
In a matter of weeks the public beach would be packed with tourists and locals alike, though for now, but for the steady toll of waves lapping the shore and the occasional cackle of a soaring gull, the area remained quiet. I seldom went to the beach during the summer season, preferring instead to come in the quiet months when it was an entirely different experience. Although I harbored a rather primitive fear of the ocean, I’d been coming to this beach since childhood, and it had figured into many seminal points during my life. I remembered coming here the day Rick was released from prison, in fact, just one of numerous memories of this place, so despite my inherent uneasiness, I also found an ironic sense of comfort in the waves, in the majestic and familiar power of it all.
I drove carefully along the dirt lot, my old car throttled by purposely uneven terrain designed to prevent people from speeding, and parked near a row of stump-like wooden posts connected with heavy rope that separated the sand from the parking lot. Mine was the only car in the lot, but further down the beach, near a stone jetty that stabbed quite a distance into the ocean, I noticed a young woman in a windbreaker playing with a black lab. I wondered if she knew about the body that had been found.
On the seat next to me was a hardback composition notebook I’d picked up a few days earlier. I had begun to transfer my thoughts, memories and dreams to paper in the hopes of perhaps better sorting through them, and decided to consult my notes one more time before making a definite move. The nightmare still haunted me, but not as frequently, and thankfully, there had been no more hallucinations or visions—no more women, no more little boys—only a continued sense of dread and the persistent flicker of memories both recent and distant I found impossible to shake.
I flipped open the notebook, eyed my latest list of options and drew a line through the first, Nightmares, then the second, Hauntings. My pen hesitated at the third, Abandoned Factory, then the fourth, Photograph of Mystery Woman. I skipped over both, moved to the fifth, Memories and Questions. Beneath that I’d written down the most disturbing or curious memories that had come to me of late and followed them with questions.
So many goddamn questions.
Of course the discovery of the young woman’s body changed everything. I had no choice but to continue to force myself to remember the darkest corners of the past, but if I ever hoped to know who Bernard had really been, simple memory would not be enough. To fill in the blank spaces, to know for sure what he had done, and what he hadn’t, I’d need to reconstruct a history of sorts. Bernard’s history.
Somewhere in the distance the black lab barked. I looked up, saw the woman throw a tennis ball. The dog bolted after it along the sand, retrieved it then gleefully galloped back to her. It suddenly occurred to me that had I been so inclined, it would have been ridiculously easy to step from my car, walk across the deserted beach and slaughter this woman. Strobe-like flashes of her covered in blood blinked across my eyes, vanishing quickly. Similar thoughts had almost certainly coursed through Bernard’s mind as well, but allowing even the faint beginnings of the evil he had called upon and held so close to seep into my own head was wildly unsettling. I pushed it all away and focused on the woman instead. She crouched down, took the lab’s head in her hands and kissed his nose. The dog licked her face, his tail wagging. We were so vulnerable, all of us so ripe for the picking without even realizing it, and there wasn’t a fucking thing we could do about it. I closed the notebook, tossed it into the backseat.
The day had slipped away. It was nearly four o’clock.
* * *
Brannigan’s was surprisingly busy for a late afternoon weekday. One of the older establishments in town, over the years it had undergone a series of incarnations and varied themes but had essentially remained a sports pub with an attached dining area. It had been a townie watering hole for years, a place to go and have some beers, shoot some pool or play pinball, order a pizza or a wide range of appetizers from the menu and eat them right at the bar or in the darkened booths that lined the back wall, and a place where for the most part, everyone knew one another. But just like those who had come before us, and those who followed, the older we got the less we frequented the bar and opted for the dining area instead. Although I still occasionally stopped in for a beer or two, the bar always had and always would pander to a predominantly younger crowd, and the farther I crept into my thirties the less tolerance I had for the language, music, fashion, and overall attitude of those ten years or so my junior.
I entered through the side door, which led directly to the dining room. It took several seconds for my eyes to adjust to the dim lighting, as both the dining area and bar were always annoyingly darker than seemed necessary, but after scanning the room I could locate neither Donald nor Rick.
“Hi, Alan.”
I turned, saw a waitress fly by, a large tray of entrees balanced on her shoulder. “Hey, how’s it going?” I muttered, unable to remember her name but recognizing her as a local I’d gone to high school with and who had worked there for years. I wasn’t sure she even heard my response, as she’d already slipped between the tables and been absorbed into the noise, so I followed the wall to an archway with double swinging half-doors and moved into the bar. It was packed. All three of the pool tables were in use, and against one wall people were huddled around the pinball machines, the bells and electronic noises barely audible over the strains of a Stevie Ray Vaughn tune playing on the jukebox. The televisions mounted above either corner of the bar normally featured sporting events, but both were tuned to newscasts, neither of which could be heard.
As I walked slowly through the crowd it became apparent that nearly everyone was discussing the discovery of the dead body.
At t
he far end of the room, I found Rick and Donald sitting in the last of a row of booths. It was even darker there in the corner, a candle in the center of the table and encased in tinted glass providing minimal flickering light.
I slid in next to Donald, who was absently playing with a thin red straw floating in his drink. He stopped long enough to acknowledge me with a slight nod. Across from us, Rick sat clutching a bottle of cola with both hands, his expression darker than usual. “Heard the latest?”
“I haven’t seen the news since this morning,” I told him. “They found a body, it’s a woman, and she’s been dead for weeks. That’s all I know.”
Donald spoke without looking at me. “They’ve identified her.”
“Twenty-two years old, single mother from New Bedford,” Rick said. “Been missing almost two months.”
I looked back across the room, hoping to locate a waitress. The throng of patrons reminded me of the days in our early twenties when we’d come here, so full of life, young and strong and together, still so certain we were indestructible. All the time in the world, we’d thought then. Downing drinks, smoking cigarettes and eating whatever the hell we pleased without giving any of it another thought. Until that moment I hadn’t realized just how much I missed feeling like that, so enthusiastically alive.
“Remember when we used to come here before I got married?” I asked.
Rick stared at me like I’d spoken Mandarin, but Donald allowed the slightest quiver of a smile and nodded. “Can you believe we actually once found this place fun?”
I caught the attention of a waitress near the bar. When she got to us I ordered a beer then turned back to the table. “Those were good days,” I said. “Weren’t they?”
The Bleeding Season Page 14