by Chuck Wendig
Debbie looks up. New fear glints in her eye, electric and alive—she’s now more afraid of the consequences of not speaking up. Good. Spill it, Deb.
“I . . . I know it’s not right, what I did.”
“Go on.”
“The arrangement Mark and I had—it’s off the books, okay?”
“Yep, waaaaaay off the books. What arrangement?”
Debbie sighs. Tears glint in her eyes. “C’mon, I’ll show you.”
Out comes the key ring and she finds the one that corresponds to the padlock. She pops the lock and it drops against the cement, thud. The door swings open and what awaits is a basement that is nearly the mirror image of this one, with one chief difference—
“It’s the HVAC system,” Debbie says, pointing to a monstrous furnace sitting against the back wall.
Miriam’s guts clench. Mark was burning stuff in here. Evidence. Bodies. Debbie helped.
This is why Mark died, isn’t it? With the somberness of a confessional priest she says, “Debbie, tell me about the furnace.”
“Mark maintained it.”
“Okay.”
“I know that’s not right.”
“Okay.”
“It’s an oil furnace—I know, I know, global warming.” Her voice almost breaks. “He said he knew a little bit about these things, about how to change the filter and do the dampers and I . . . I don’t even understand it, but he did the maintenance on it, and I only have the one system in here for two houses.” Her eyes shine now and she blinks back tears. “It’s not up to code, I know.”
“Oh . . . o . . . kay.”
“Am I in trouble?”
“For what?”
“For just having one system. In two houses. For the code.”
“What fucking code?”
“The building code.”
“Debbie,” Miriam hisses, “I don’t give a dildo about building codes! Is this what you were hiding?”
“Yes,” Debbie says, somehow both penitent and reverent, as if this confession has cleared the baggage of sin from her wayward soul. “Of course.”
“Jesus tits,” Miriam says with her jaw so tight, she’s afraid it might freeze that way. “Debbie, nobody, and I mean nobody in the whole wide stupid world, cares about building codes or, or, or your HVAC bullshit. Did Mark do anything with the furnace? Anything untoward?”
“Like, sex?”
“What? Sex? Nobody has sex with furnaces. That’s not even a thing. I mean did he have bodies down here or ever a strange smell or—”
Hold up.
What’s that?
“What’s that?”
Debbie follows Miriam’s finger. There, on a set of metal shelves—similar to the ones in the other side—sits a lock box.
“It’s a box.”
It’s a door. It’s a box. “I see that. What’s in it?”
“I don’t know; it’s Mark’s.”
“Open it.”
“I said it’s Mark’s. I don’t have the key.”
Miriam growls, “Fine, I’ll open it.” She storms over, finds another padlock on it—this one is tiny, like a padlock an elf might use to hide his stash of precious tree cookies—and she takes the flimsy metal box and slams it again and again padlock-side first against the metal shelf.
With each hit, Debbie cries out, startled.
Takes ten tries, but the padlock pops off like a broken tooth from a ruined jaw. When it does, the box opens in Miriam’s hand.
Photographs spill out.
Miriam doesn’t have to pick them up to see the faces of girls, teenagers, staring up at her. They’re not nude. They’re not sexual. Some look like yearbook shots cut out. Others look like photographs taken from between hedgerows or behind trees—they contain that green blur of intruding foliage.
“I don’t know what those are,” Debbie says. Way she says it tells Miriam it’s true—she isn’t nervous about it. Bewildered, maybe.
Just in case, she sets down the box and reaches out and touches her. Debbie isn’t paying attention and fails to flinch away. Miriam brushes her fingers against Debbie’s cheek and then—
THIRTEEN
DEBBIE DOES DEADTOWN
The clot of store-brand mac and cheese lodges inside Debbie’s throat like a golf ball in a pool filter, and she shudders and makes four sounds—Hkk! Hkkaaa! Rrrk! Urrr!—before her lips go purple and she sees her son sitting across from her at the kitchen table, his skull blown open but a warm smile on his face as he opens his arms to welcome her, and then Debbie faceplants, dead.
FOURTEEN
YOU’RE ALL I WANT, MY FANTASY
Debbie looks at Miriam’s hand like it’s a moth, and she bats at it.
“Sorry,” Miriam says. Her sadness for Debbie finally outweighs her disdain. Debbie dies choking on a glob of mac and cheese. It happens in six years. Right before Thanksgiving. Sad and alone and seeing her dead son as she goes. But at least there are no secrets there. Death exposes secrets, she finds. Whatever you thought would stay hidden somehow comes out in those moments—either in how you go or in what you say when you do. Debbie had none. Debbie had—and has, by the looks of it—nothing. Poor fucking Debbie.
Miriam clears the image out of her mind and looks down again at the photos. Here comes Grosky now, hurrying down the steps and calling out her name before seeing them through the secondary doorway connecting the two basements.
“What’s going on?” he asks, and because she’s a judgmental shitbird, Miriam expects him to be out of breath but he’s totally not. “I heard banging and . . .” His eyes drift downward to the photos. “Whoa.”
“Mark had access to the whole basement,” Miriam explains. “This was a box of his.” She begins to scoop up the photos. The ones she turns over are more of the same: teen girls. Dozens of them. All different. No duplicates. “Some boys collect baseball cards. Mark had a different collection.”
Debbie says, “I didn’t know nothing about any of this. I swear.”
“We know,” Miriam says. To Grosky: “Find anything?”
“Yeah. Maybe. We’ll see.”
They leave Debbie behind, telling her someone will be in touch, even though nobody will.
FIFTEEN
FUTURE DEAD GIRLS
They spend the next day at the Best Western, going over a list Grosky found on Mark Daley’s laptop. No printer was connected, so Grosky snapped a pic with his phone.
It’s a list of addresses. No names.
Miriam watches shitty nighttime—and then daytime—TV as Grosky runs background checks on all the addresses. She asks him if this is some kind of FBI privilege he should have had revoked, and he just laughs, tells her, “No, anybody can do background checks on other people, long as you know the right websites and pay the money.”
By noon the next day, she’s asleep again. He wakes her.
“The addresses match,” he says.
“Wuzza? Huh?” Her mouth is tacky with night-spit.
“The addresses. They belong to the girls.” He sits down on the edge on the bed, which irritates her. “Each of the addresses belongs to people who are parents, who have kids in school. A good number of them I was able to pull up through Instagram or Facebook because kids post selfies all the time, and they leave a pretty wide digital trail. Wasn’t hard to match up a good number of these addresses to these girls.”
She sits up against the pillow, blinking sleep from her eyes. “They dead?”
“Not a one of them. All alive. Three of them go to school with his daughter, Patty, and his son, Jason. And one of them—” He pulls a photo of a young girl who looks like a millennial version of Marcia from the Brady Bunch. “One of them is his daughter. This is Patty.”
“He had a photo of his own daughter in a locked box with other photos of similarly aged girls.”
“Uh-huh. Some of the photos looked like they were taken at the DuBois Mall, from behind planters or pillars.”
“He took some of the photos himself.”
“Seems to be, though no way to confirm.”
She blinks. “He was going to hurt those girls. Maybe kill them.”
“We don’t know that, but a guy takes photos of girls like this, in this way, with a repeated pattern, it’s a good bet he was at least thinking about doing something nasty.”
“Wren killed him to stop him.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know me. And I know that all this feels like me.”
“It’s a stretch.”
“Only if you don’t understand what it’s like. And I understand.”
He shrugs it off. “What’s next?”
“We wait. We watch. We find her.”
PART THREE
* * *
TRESPASSERS
SIXTEEN
HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS, PROBABLY IN A BOX OR MAYBE A JAR
Miriam goes home.
Home-home. The house on Dark Hollow Road. She tells Grosky no reason to spend money on crap-ass dick-suck hotels when they can just install themselves in a house that she owns. One of two houses, in fact. This one, the Pennsylvania house.
The house of her youth.
(The house where everything went to shit.)
This house, Evelyn had been leasing to her wayward brother, Jack, until Miriam had him kicked out. Now she’s got the house opened anew. This house of odd angles. Of cobwebs clinging to the corners like recalcitrant ghosts. Of that smell of mildew and wood dust and the faint perfume of her mother still lingering in the air like an improbable memory. She finds a dead mouse in the kitchen. A pile of dead carpenter ants in the sink. A dead bird outside, near the living room window, the glass cracked where the bird must have flown into it, aggressively chasing its own dumb reflection. Nicely done, killer.
They set up shop there for a month.
Grosky stays in her mother’s old room, pecking away at his book, keeping an eye on police scanners for Wren. Miriam stays downstairs, on the couch, swaddled in dusty old crocheted afghans like a colorful mummy.
Nothing worth a good goddamn happens.
Miriam haunts the house at night and sleeps during the day. She sometimes takes Grosky’s car and trolls the highways, expecting . . . what, exactly? That she’ll pass by some old bus stop or driveway and see Wren standing there, waving?
Sometimes, the Trespasser is there. Just as she haunts the house, the Trespasser haunts her head. But not like he usually does. The motherfucker never shows up right in her face—no twisted set pieces, no drawn-out roleplaying dioramas of nightmare fuel where her snatch is sewn up or her eyes are plucked out so blackbirds can be stuffed in the holes. The Trespasser is only there in glimpses now. Pass by a painting in the hallway and she can see his reflection—sometimes he’s Louis, sometimes he’s Ben Hodge. She’s seen him standing outside on the lawn as she walks past a window. He’s been in the woods. He’s been in the rearview mirror of the car. Never says a word.
Often, though, he’s smiling.
Like he knows something she doesn’t.
That curdles her blood, like vinegar in milk.
She stops drinking. No wine, no booze. Just to be sure what’s real and what’s not. Her body rejects her rejection, and for days she feels headachy and shaky, so she switches to coffee, and it works. Coffee is the blunderbuss that blasts away the fog of withdrawal. It also wires her. Eyes wide. Fingers vibrating such that it feels like she could reach into the walls and pull apart the very molecules of reality. It keeps her alert. Hypervigilant. Persistently in a fight-or-flight-but-really-probably-fight mode. Good. She needs it.
It helps her, too, find birds out there in the woods, beyond the house. Sparrows and turtledoves and catbirds with their mocking mewls. Titmice (teehee) and nuthatches (ha-ha) and woodpeckers (okay who the fuck decided to name all these birds it’s getting embarrassing). She finds vultures wheeling in the sky. Hawks perched on the hunt. Owls silently stalking the dark.
It feels like progress but it isn’t progress. It’s just killing time. A hobby. All while nothing happens.
Nothing until the first Tuesday in October.
Then everything goes to shit.
SEVENTEEN
THAT TUESDAY
On that Tuesday, a dead body turns up in Schuylkill County. A white supremacist biker who goes by the inauspicious name of Tuggy Bear is found with a gunshot through his heart and a nasty bite from a chainsaw running across his face, starting at the lower left jaw and ending above his right eye. Grosky says it doesn’t sound like something a young girl could manage, but Miriam says, “Fuck you, dude, you have no idea what we ‘girls’ can do. We wanna kill a man with a chainsaw, we kill a man with a chainsaw.” She doesn’t tell him that on the chase to find Mary Stitch, she ended the life of a wild-eyed meth-cook by the name of Johnny Tratez by knocking him into his own spinning chainsaw blade.
Together, she and Grosky—who’s now sporting a patchy writer beard, which she figures is the result of him being a lazy-ass more than a literary up-and-comer—look at the map they’ve got taped to the living room wall. He’s got red Sharpie dots where the last five were killed, and it shows a clear progression across the state from east to west—Easton, PA, to Wilkes-Barre, to Williamsport, to Lock Haven, to Falls Creek where they found potential future rapist or killer Mark Daley punctured like a pincushion.
But this newest death breaks the pattern. If Wren—and Miriam thinks that it is Wren—continued with the pattern, she should hew closer west, maybe near Pittsburgh. The death of Tuggy Bear (aka Donald Tuggins) is in Pottsville, which is back east. Closer to where it all began.
Grosky says, “Isn’t her.”
Miriam says, “I think it is.”
“Tuggins was a career criminal. The other five weren’t, outside a few misdemeanors.”
“What’d Tuggins do?”
“What didn’t he do? Guy’s got a rap sheet with more pages than the King James Bible, and almost as nasty. He ran with a biker gang, the Devil Kings, and they sold both meth and that new synthetic heroin that’s going around. He’s a driver, a leg-breaker, an all-around poison pill. And likely one who got got by one of his own—that’s how these things usually go.”
“When people like me are involved, how things ‘usually go’ ain’t how they end up actually happening.”
Grosky scratched his beard. “People like you?”
She taps her head. “Uh-huh. Mind-readers. Fate-breakers.” Head cases.
“You think Wren is like you now.”
“Maybe. It makes sense.”
Anybody who manifests some cursed power or another gets there through trauma. Mary Stitch told her that. Even Eleanor Caldecott said it: Power and wisdom are born of trauma. And Miriam tends to have a ripple effect. First Ashley. And now Wren. Lauren Martin dragged to her own drowning by the wretched witch Eleanor Caldecott—that would tweak anybody’s gourd.
Miriam’s left to wonder, what’s driving Wren? What cursed power is bleeding from her broken brain? Can she see death, like Miriam can?
She feels grotesquely responsible. I entered her life and ripped her apart like a Kleenex. Sure, Miriam also saved her life. But to what end? She saved her just to damn her. Just as Miriam was herself saved, in a way. Maybe better to die than to be this. Her heartbeat spikes and she quickly has to shove these dark thoughts away, lest that old specter rise again: the one that sings songs of ending it all to be spared the curse. A curse she hates.
Or maybe a curse she hates to love.
“This is her work,” Miriam says, throwing on a hoodie over her T-shirt and grabbing Grosky’s keys off the counter. “She’s nearby.”
“Where are you going?”
“Out” is all she says. Grosky would want to come. She can’t have him along. This is her cross to bear, she decides.
She feels energized. Wren is close, she can feel it: a gossamer spider thread undulating in the wind. If only she could reach out and grab it. But she’s guideless—she drives the hour to Pottsville, then h
as no idea what to do next. Pottsville has the earmarks of an old coal town that got too big for its britches. All the white brick, red brick, brown brick. Rust on metal. Cracks in sidewalks.
All around, too, she spies graffiti: FUCK THE COPS. The number 88. A swastika. The anarchist’s brutal A. Most of it has been painted over with white, then painted over with new graffiti, the ongoing war of the artist versus the authority, the vandal versus the censor.
She drives around and around, not knowing what she’s looking for. The crime scene was at a biker bar on the north side of town, and she drives there but there’s still a cop car in the lot, and she figures if Wren’s on camera and Wren looks like Miriam, maybe it’s not the hottest idea to go waltzing in. Her normal pluck would have her doing exactly that, but things feel more fragile, more precious, like there’s somehow more at stake that she fails to truly understand. That deserves the thing she’s very bad at:
Caution.
So, instead, she parks the car a few miles away in the lot of some old defunct strip mall, and she screams and punches the steering wheel and cries.
(And eventually asks herself, Am I drinking too much coffee? It feels like all her particles will soon dissociate and she’ll turn into vapor.)
(So, yeah, maybe she’s drinking too much coffee.)
Her phone rings and she jumps. Her thumb is faster than her eyeballs. She answers it, thinking it’s Grosky.
But across the caller ID screen she sees one name:
Louis.
Shit shit shit shit.
She gets it together, then brings the phone to her ear. Way too chirpily she says, “Hey, you.” Stupid. She immediately injects a darker attitude: “What?” Damnit that’s not right, either. “Uh.”
“Miriam,” Louis says, the softness of his voice betrayed by the urgency of its tone. “We need to talk.”