It seems so right.
There aren’t any other choices.
Becky’s chained in the basement. My mother’s a dry and withering husk, and my grandfather’s a living corpse who drags himself around his rooms by his heels, looking for a woman who tumbled down the stairs two years ago.
I say it again. “The only person who could have done this is my father.”
The words seem more grounded this time. They seem real—and as they solidify into something of substance, I will myself to move. My hand sweeps across the kitchen counter, throwing everything away in the yellow wastebasket under the sink.
Then I walk down the hallway to my mother’s bedroom and quietly push open the door.
There she is, under her blanket, hiding in the dark so she doesn’t have to face the day. More than anything, I want to go to her and hug her and tell her that everything’s going to be okay, but I know she won’t hear me. She’ll just ask for a cigarette and let it fester between her yellowing fingers until it burns her skin.
Instead, I back out of her bedroom and gently click the door closed.
My chest starts to burn again—fear or stress or anger fueling the flame like it always does.
Freaking pills. Goddamned freaking pills.
As I start back down the hallway, my sneakers creak against the hardwood floor. From somewhere beneath me, I hear the beginnings of thick, phlegmy laugher, but I force myself not to listen. I’m not concerned with Not-Becky.
I’m concerned with the garage.
What’s inside my father’s workshop? What’s so damn important that he hides there all night long, leaving me alone to handle our miserable excuse of a family?
I go out the back door, pushing the screen open so hard that it hits the railing. Halfway down the stairs, I almost fall, because one of the steps is loose. A coffee can filled with cigarette butts that’s sitting on the stairs topples over, rolling onto the cracked pavement of the driveway.
I leave the butts lying there as I tighten my face and push ahead.
As I edge closer, a chill whips up in the air and swirls around me like the questions swirling in my head. I start to shake. Wave after wave of icy tendrils lash out at me, causing my skin to tingle and making me feel alive and scared and alone, all at the same time.
I have to see what’s inside my father’s garage. He’s never locked it or forbidden me to enter. It’s more that he’s placed an invisible unwelcome sign over the door. This is his place. It’s where he can hide and do whatever he wants and not have to think about my mother or Becky or my grandfather.
Or even me.
A few more steps down the driveway, and I stop to look both ways to see if any of our neighbors are in their backyards watching me—but there’s nobody there to see me commit the unthinkable sin of believing that my father’s somehow evil.
I continue on.
At the door to the garage—not the one that my father hasn’t lifted in years to put his car inside, but the other door to the right that he uses to get into his workshop—I pause. I’m not sure why, but I feel like I’m betraying something sacred by going into his space.
Still, I have to. If what I suspect is true, he’s betrayed us all for years.
I touch the knob on the door, tentatively caressing the rusted metal. That knob has probably been there since my great-grandfather first bought this house. It’s seen my grandfather grow up here and start a family of his own. It’s seen my own father as a little boy, a teenager, and an adult with a wife and children.
If it could speak, the knob would probably be wise beyond its years.
The knob probably knows things—dark things—things that might fit into the puzzle that’s being pieced together in my mind. Unfortunately, now isn’t the time to reminisce. Now is the time for finally doing something.
I take a deep breath and twist. At first, I think my father’s locked the door, because it doesn’t seem to turn. After a moment, it slowly gives way, and I push inward into the darkness of my dad’s lair.
The windows haven’t been cleaned in years. Any light that manages to creep its way through the grime and dirt is brown and muted. From memory, I know there’s a switch somewhere on the wall to my right.
I find it and turn it on. Only then are my eyes assaulted by what I find.
42
THE GARAGE IS filled with upside down crosses. Every type of wood, every color, is represented. There are big ones and small ones. Some are adorned with crude shapes of a man, carved out of wood or sculpted out of screws and nails and held together with wire and drippy white glue.
In the center of the garage is a stepstool next to a huge crucifix, almost like the anchor of a great ship. I can tell that he still hasn’t finished it, because some of the wood needs to be sanded and polished. I can picture my dad working late into the night, a cigarette growing out of his mouth, as he grunts and sweats to will it into being.
The crucifix reaches almost to the ceiling and is tied to one of the heavy wooden rafters by thick rope. The excess of the knotted cord drapes from the ceiling to the floor. On the cross is the suggestion of a life-sized figure made out of blocky wood, with its legs crossed and its arms outstretched, but like everything else in the garage, the figure is pointing downward.
Something about it makes my throat tighten and my inner fire burn.
I remember one Sunday morning a long time ago, before everything changed, and Becky and I were still kids. Creepy Father Tim had finished his service, and everyone was outside the church exchanging pleasantries. My mother was clutching her rosary beads in her hands as she talked to the Father. A tiny cross had draped over her knuckles and was dangling upside down.
Becky pulled at my mother’s hand. “Mommy, your cross is upside down,” she said. She really hadn’t meant anything by it, but Father Tim smiled a toothy, shark-like grin, as though she had cut herself in the ocean and he smelled blood.
“Do you know who Satan is?” he asked her. My parents were right there and my grandparents, too. We both looked at their faces. My mother was a little taken aback by his question. My father was stoic. It was my grandfather who said something.
“Go on,” he urged Becky, almost proud. “You can tell Father Tim.”
My sister, all red hair and freckles, puffed out her chest like she knew the answer to a particularly difficult math problem written on a blackboard. “He was one of God’s favorites,” she said to Father Tim, her eyes bright with wonder. Even then, Becky saw creepy Father Tim as an extension of God. I never did. I don’t know why. To me, he was just a scary man in black.
“That’s right,” he said to her. “And what happened to him?”
She sucked in her lip. “He disagreed with God,” Becky said, her voice lowering to a whisper. “He disagreed, so God sent him away and turned him into the Devil.”
“The Devil,” my grandfather echoed.
“Very good, Rebecca,” Father Tim said to her. “That’s exactly right.” He bent over her like a big black spider about to trap a fly in its web. He scared me, and I shrank back from him. “An upside down cross is a symbol for people who worship the Devil,” he said.
I was holding my father’s hand, and he squeezed it so tightly that I pulled away from him and wrapped my arms around my grandfather’s leg instead. “It’s the sign of someone who has lost faith.”
My sister brooded for a moment, sticking two fingers in her mouth and sucking on them. Finally, she pulled her fingers out of her mouth, looked up at my mother with her upended rosary wrapped around her hand, and asked, “Mommy, have you lost faith?”
My mother got all flustered, and her face turned red. She shooed Becky away, telling her to go play with her friends. I stayed there, hugging my grandfather’s leg.
I remember my quiet father shaking his head and saying, “With all du
e respect, Father, an upside down cross does not represent the Devil. It pays homage to Peter, one of the first twelve chosen by Jesus to be a disciple. He was crucified upside down by Nero.”
Father Tim sort of chuckled, clapped his hand on my father’s back, and left us to greet some of the other parishioners. He completely dismissed what my dad had to say.
I remember my father grumbling something under his breath. He turned to me and reached out his hand. I took it, and he picked me up in his arms. “Peter was a fisherman,” he said, his nicotine breath tickling my nose. “He fished on the Sea of Galilee.”
“What’s a sea?” I asked him. “Is it like the reservoir?”
“Something like,” he said to me.
I smiled and imagined my father fishing the reservoir, as reverent and holy as Saint Peter because he was doing the divine work of God.
My grandfather snorted, and we both looked at him. “I don’t know where you get your special brand of horseshit,” he snapped at my father. Then he fixed his eyes on mine. “An upside down cross is the sign of Lucifer,” he said to me in a coarse voice. “Lucifer—God’s angel—and don’t you forget it, Jack.”
I looked from my father to my grandfather. They were both angry, but I didn’t know why. “Wha . . . What’s horseshit?” I asked, but by then my grandfather had taken my grandmother by the arm and hobbled away.
I remember that morning like it was yesterday. It’s still clear in my mind—a loose piece of the past too stubborn to melt into oblivion. Some memories are like that. They stick to you like flypaper, and you never know why.
As I stand in my father’s workshop, replaying that moment in my mind, a question comes to me. Is the forest of upside down crucifixes the sign of Saint Peter who was crucified by Nero, or do they symbolize Lucifer—the fallen one? I suppose the answer all comes down to a matter of belief. I can believe that my father is good and righteous and devout, or I can believe he’s doing Lucifer’s bidding.
I shake my head, trying to make my thoughts stop spinning faster and faster like a killer tornado. Nothing about what’s happening is making sense. Nothing that’s happening to the people in my life is fitting together into anything other than a Salvador Dali painting—all messed up, drippy, and insane. The upside down crosses, Annie and her dad almost overdosing on the same medication that my mother and Becky take, the sugar, the lit candle that smelled like baked apple pie—the same apple pie that Annie imagined was left at her door. Four and twenty blackbirds—all of it.
I can’t puzzle everything together. There are still missing pieces, and if I can’t find them and fit them into the picture in my head, I might actually go insane.
My eyes fall on a Bible marked and opened on my father’s workbench. He worships that book. He reads it and quotes it and tries to live his life as best he can by it. I can’t imagine that he’s been broken by it, too.
I tighten my face and take a few steps until I’m in front of his book. There are dozens of pieces of paper sticking out of it, most likely marking his favorite passages—the ones he recites at dinner—the ones he repeats on his knees when he prays.
I reach down and flip through the pages, feeling almost guilty for touching his holy relic.
The first passage I stop at is from St. Luke 8:30. It says, “And Jesus asked him, ‘What is your name?’ And he said, ‘Legion.’”
Legion.
That’s what Not-Becky called itself when I gave my sister the Hydrox cookies.
I turn the pages to another marked section, put my finger beneath the words, and slowly read them. My lips move, but no sound comes out. This one is from St. Mark 5:4-20. Some of the words don’t make sense to me, but five of them leap off the page like they’ve been magnified a thousand times over. “Bound with shackles and chains.”
I pull my finger away like it’s been burned. Shackles and chains—just like Becky.
The passage goes on further. I’m almost afraid to read it, but I do, anyway. “. . . and the chains had been torn apart by him and the shackles broken in pieces, and no one was strong enough to subdue him. Constantly, night and day, he was screaming among the tombs and in the mountains . . .”
Or in the basement, I think. Not-Becky screams in her tomb in the basement.
My hand moves on its own, an independent part of my body. I’m only a spectator as I watch my fingers reach for the edges of the pages and turn them over. My eyes fall on a third passage. I don’t notice where it’s from, because all I see are words circled in red, and I pray the red isn’t blood. They say, “I command thee, in the name of Jesus Christ, to go out from her.”
I read the sentence again and again.
I command thee, in the name of Jesus Christ, to go out from her.
I command thee, in the name of Jesus Christ, to go out from her.
I command thee, in the name of Jesus Christ, to go out from her.
Suddenly, the door to the garage bangs open, and one of the panes of glass shatters. Becky is standing there, her chains broken and the manacles bloodied around her wrists. Her eyes are filled with evil. It isn’t my sister at all. It’s Not-Becky, and it’s laughing.
It’s laughing and gasping, and saliva is dripping from its mouth. Its lips are shredded where it’s bitten itself, and blood is pouring down its chin.
“Do you like my redecorating?” It giggles hysterically. “Crosses always look so much better upside down.” In a flash, Not-Becky disappears from the doorway.
I run, only to catch a glimpse of it as it bounds up the back porch and through the screened door into the house.
43
MY BLOOD RUNS cold in my veins. I stand there holding the frame of the door, trying to comprehend what just happened.
I play it back in my mind in slow motion. Not-Becky hurdled across the backyard like a crazed animal. At one point, its arms reached to the ground as it grabbed handfuls of straw-like turf for purchase, to propel itself forward. When it reached the back stairs, it scrambled up them, lizard-like, and disappeared out of sight.
The image burned into my brain is so unreal, but the pounding in my chest is telling me that it’s very real, after all.
Not-Becky’s chains are broken. It’s out, and now that thing—that creature—is alone in the house with my mother and my grandfather. How many days has it been free to roam with them? How many times has Not-Becky tormented them even more than they’ve been tormented by their own illnesses?
The thought is almost too much to bear, and all I want to do is run after it into the house and confront it. The problem is that I can’t seem to will my feet to move. I stare at my sneakers, silently willing them to take the first step.
Move forward, I think. Be a man—but I simply can’t. I’m hobbled by fear.
It’s slow going. I put one foot in front of the other—carefully, cautiously—until somewhere along the way, the glue that’s binding me gives way, and I find myself sprinting across the yard to the back porch, to where Not-Becky disappeared into the house.
I stop at the bottom step. From inside, I hear crazed laughter. It’s the sort of laugh track corn you hear inside a cheesy funhouse. There are gut-wrenching howls and clown-like hoots that sound like they’re coming from a giant painted mouth filled with sharp fangs. They spill out through the tiny holes in the screened door. It’s the laughter of a lunatic. It’s the mirth of murder.
How many times has she been loose?
Is Not-Becky the murderer?
The thought is ludicrous. The murders have been happening in Apple for sixty years.
I stand at the bottom of the steps with my hand on the railing and wish someone, anyone, could tell me what to do, but there’s no one to help me.
I blink my eyes, and my heart skips a beat. I’m sure when my father left for work this morning all the crosses in his workshop were upright. It wa
s Not-Becky who rearranged his collection, making them an obscenity. The thing is, my father doesn’t think that upside down crosses are an obscenity. He thinks they’re a symbol of Saint Peter who was crucified upside down by Nero. He thinks they’re a symbol of one of the original disciples of Jesus.
So why did Not-Becky turn all his crosses upside down?
I hear creepy Father Tim’s voice from that Sunday so long ago. “. . . an upside down cross is a symbol for people who worship the Devil. It’s the sign of someone who has lost faith.”
My father hasn’t lost faith. He’s desperately trying to use his faith to make sense of Becky’s condition. He thinks she’s possessed. Building the crucifixes only serves to confirm his religious convictions.
Another puzzle piece falls into place, and with it, another question. Is this a subconscious message from my sister, like when she tried to warn me about Mrs. Berg by saying she was cold and all wrapped and packaged?
Is Becky trying to tell me that someone has lost faith?
The question stops me in my tracks. Has someone lost faith?
I certainly have, but I never had faith to begin with. I’ve spent my entire life going through the motions for the sake of my family. I’ve sat on hard pews for countless Sunday mornings at church. My family has grasped hands around our kitchen table for as long as I can remember, as my father recites memorized words out of his book—but all those things have meant nothing to me.
They’ve only washed up against my atheism like the ocean against a stony cliff.
I’ve never had faith. No—it can’t be me.
Is it my mother? Has she lost faith? I can’t really say. She’s been hidden behind her depression for so long, I wouldn’t be able to tell. Besides, before Margo Freeman was killed and Not-Becky appeared, my mother was about as faithful as they come.
It can’t be her, either.
Who else is there?
I hear cackling again from inside the house, so I dash up the steps and throw open the screen door. As soon as the doorframe bangs against the porch railing, the maniacal laughter stops. It’s as though someone’s lifted the needle off of an old-fashioned record player.
Bloody Bloody Apple Page 19