by Keith Rosson
Some time later he saw a building. A long sort of warehouse, pale green with a corrugated white roof. He walked to the tree line and came to another fence, and he cupped his hands with the sleeves of his jacket and stepped under the wire. The ground went from soft pine needles to dead, almost white grass gone hoary with frost. Leaning against the building were nail-shot pieces of lumber, a stack of bald tires, a blue metal door riddled with bullet holes. He walked around the side of the building and there was a small white truck with a canopy, the gray sky reflecting off the windshield. He saw a small cross hanging from the rearview mirror, beaded seat covers and an empty gun rack. Beyond the truck lay a two-lane road.
The wind had quieted. The day was still; his footfalls on the gravel seemed shockingly loud. When he came to the rear of the truck something lunged at him from the open canopy and Sandoval lashed out. He let out a clotted, guttural scream and his hand connected with something hard. A dog. He’d struck it in the head. A spotted, sallow mutt with yellow teeth, it yelped and retreated further into the canopy near the cab of the truck. Sandoval stood there and started crying. The dog’s tail began to wag and it approached him again with its head tucked down and for a while Sandoval petted it. Then he started walking the shoulder of the road where the asphalt met the gravel and the dead weeds. No one ever came out of the warehouse.
For a long time the road was empty. He stopped crying. His nose began to run and he wiped it with the sleeve of Marnie’s jacket. When a few cars began to appear, he stepped further into the weeds to let them pass. Farmland and forest, and he saw on the horizon a blue hazy mountain whose top was obscured by distance and weather. Closer were fields gone pale with cold and sometimes the skeletal remains of old buildings fallen to misuse. Walking warmed him. The chemical taste in his mouth was terrible and he continually spat in the grass. Then he remembered the gum in his pocket. Chewing it, the taste flooded his mouth.
Eventually a black truck, a big one, passed him and then slowed and pulled onto the shoulder ahead. He paused, his heart pinballing in his chest with a sudden terror—the image of the waxen man’s mouth opening through its sheen of flesh—and then he walked up to the passenger side. The man had rolled the window down. He was Latino, young, with a little black goatee over a double chin, his hair close-cropped. “Need a ride?”
“You bet,” Sandoval said. His voice was glottal, rusted.
“I’m just going to town,” the man said.
“Okay,” Sandoval said, and hoisted himself in.
He had never felt a warmth in his life like the heater that blew on his legs, his hands. The man lifted a plastic bottle from between his thighs and spat tobacco juice into it. It didn’t take long for Sandoval’s scent to fill the cab, and the man rolled down his window halfway but didn’t say anything about it. “You work over at Western there?” he asked.
“What’s that?”
The man lifted his chin toward the rearview mirror. “You work over at Western Meats? The plant? My friend, he works the stunner there.”
“No,” Sandoval said.
“Bettencourt Ranch?”
“Not me.” He looked down at his palms, the filth caked in his pants. “I’m just passing through.”
“That sounds about right, I guess,” the man said, and then spit more tobacco juice into his bottle.
They came to a small town and the man surprised him by not dropping him off immediately at the nearest curb but instead took him to a small grocery store and pulled into the parking lot. Sandoval’s smell was significantly pronounced by then and he felt bad for the man. With a grimace the driver rose up and dug into his back pocket and took out his wallet. He held out some folded bills between two fingers. Sandoval was about to reject it but then realized his own wallet was gone. Abandoned somewhere, lost. He took the money and said, “I lost my wallet.”
“Okay.”
“I mean, I really did,” Sandoval said.
“I believe you. Straight up, man.”
Sandoval looked down at the money. Two twenties and a ten. He felt himself threatening to come undone again. “How am I going to pay you back?”
When he smiled, the man’s teeth were small and white inside his little goatee. “You just get yourself fixed up, man. They got groceries in there, some shirts and sweatpants and stuff. It’s all cheap crap, but it’s clean.”
“Thank you,” Sandoval said. He’d run out of room inside himself to say or do anything more. He stepped out to a sunny, heatless day and shut the passenger door.
•
He bought a turkey sandwich and an oily basket of French fries from the small deli. Sneering through the panic that seized him in the tiny cement bathroom, he threw his soiled pants and boxers in the garbage can, put on both pairs of sweatpants that he’d bought. He drank cold water from the bathroom faucet, hunched over and gasping until his stomach ached, and then willed himself to look in the mirror. Of course nothing resided there, no small figure against the doorway. Just his own face peering back, haunted and worn and still a little crazed. He washed his hands carefully. Back in the store he bought a bag of chocolate chip cookies and got ten dollars in quarters. The cold knifed through the sweatpants as he found a pair of payphones outside. Dani was home.
“Hey,” he said. The question was, what was real and what wasn’t? What was true and what wasn’t? “I need you to come get me. Okay? Something happened.”
“Oh, Jesus,” she said, irritation and worry in equal measure.
“Something bad, Dani. Please.”
“Where are you?”
Sandoval asked her to hold on. He put the receiver on top of the phone and ran quickly into the store.
He had to ask the clerk what town he was in.
•
The clerk called the deacon at the Presbyterian church down the street, who gave Sandoval a bed in the church’s basement for the two nights it took for Dani to drive to Saber Valley, Montana to pick him up, seething and furious, in her roommate’s VW Vanagon. In that time, doing odd jobs for the deacon and sleeping on a cot in the pitch-black supply closet, a great and ceaseless slideshow of memories had begun—and not stopped—playing in his mind. It was an endless procession, but with it came a willingness, an ability to see that something truly amazing had happened to him. This, if nothing else, was the root of what made him him: this unflinching resilience. To view hardship—and grave errors—as opportunities. The darkness helped, laying there in the basement closet, daring something to happen. Daring the darkness to form some mouthless golem.
Dani pulled into the church parking lot in the brittle light of afternoon and was greeted by a skinny, bruised, strung-out-looking Sandoval, a Sandoval who wore a pair of hand-me-down denim cords and held a sagging plastic bag full of canned soup and folded sweatpants. He gave the deacon and the deacon’s wife a hug. During his two nights in the dark, he had concocted a plan.
“What in the fuck,” Dani hissed when they got into the van.
“Baby, please,” Sandoval said. He set the bag down on the floorboards and hoisted a shoe onto the dashboard of the Vanagon, which was littered with bundles of the roommate’s sage. “I have this figured out. I’ll tell you everything, let’s just get going back on the road, okay?”
“I’m fucking exhausted, Mark. I’ve driven for two days to get here—”
“Dani,” he said, scrubbing his face, feeling the answers leap inside him like some young colt testing the give of a fence. The solution was right there. The solution quelled all, quashed the cavalcade of regret about Marnie, about school, about Julian and his threat of beheading. “I’ll drive if you want. I’ll drive the whole way to DC. But let’s just get started, okay?”
Dani sighed. “Jesus. You are such an asshole.” She looked amazing. “I thought you were going to get clean.”
“I am clean.”
She laughed.
“I am. And l
isten, I have a plan.”
“Oh, perfect.” She held out a hand game-show style, showcasing Sandoval where he sat in the passenger seat. He saw that she’d pierced both of her wrists. “Your plans,” she said, “got you wearing someone else’s pants outside of a church in Dog Dick, Montana, holding a sack of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle soup. You can’t even ride the Greyhound without fucking up. Don’t tell me your plans, Mark.”
And Sandoval laughed. He was that free. He was that sure.
“This one’s different,” he said, and set the sack of soup cans behind his seat so he could stretch his legs. “Seriously. You know why?”
“No, you ass. Why?”
“Because this one’s going to make us rich.”
4
ghosts of the álagablettur
“I asked Alfredo, who had spent a significant amount of time in the house on Montavilla Street as a young boy, who had long been witness to its ever-changing list of horrors, if he’d ever been afraid while inside the rooms, inside the mansion with the red door. ‘Oh no, senor,’ said Alfredo, ‘they meant me no harm in there.’ He touched the crucifix that lay at his throat and drew hard on his cigarette, gazing out at the dusky streets of Mexico City below us. ‘Sad and lonely is different than evil and bad, si?’”
—Mark Sandoval, The House With the Red Door
1
Sandoval wore long sleeves to hide his scars. He drank a Coke, hunched low to the table. This was his attempt at being clandestine, though it still felt to me like everyone knew who we were. How could they not? Our singularity—or at least our Americanness—probably flared like neon whenever we went into town. The stupid bikes didn’t help.
I ordered some dark stout called Svartur Hundur. Black Dog. My Icelandic was improving, if nothing else. I figured if I was going to be riddled with headaches anyway, and since I’d sent myself to another country in a potentially lethal case of problem avoidance, then screw it. I’d already run away from home like some petulant kid; I might as well get a little buzzed. Sandoval had been reluctant to come out, immersed as he was in his apparent goal of losing his mind, but he’d finally capitulated.
It was our first night away from the farm since the “magical” shit had been discovered ten days before. Usually by now I’d be asleep in my tent and Sandoval would be skulking the fields with his night vision goggles, petitioning unseen things to speak to him. It felt weird, being nighttime like it was, sitting in a place with people in it that weren’t the Hauksdóttirs.
The place was a coffee shop that doubled as a bar at night. I hadn’t even caught the name of the place, but there was a coffee cup painted on the window outside, and a neon sign for an Icelandic beer hummed in the steamy window. The front of the place was a weathered, splintered pastiche of shingles painted an ebullient orange. Strings of hanging Christmas lights hung from the ceiling, candles wavered on tabletops. Handsome, fair-haired clusters of people leaned toward each other, yelling over their own din. Bicycles leaned in a row out front. Karla had told us it was her favorite place to drink (her face had taken on the wistful look of a mother remembering the heady days when she could go out drinking with impunity) and had drawn us a map, signaling our destination with an ink drawing of a foamy mug of beer.
Two weeks since we’d arrived and this was all I knew for sure:
One, Sandoval had charmingly but resolutely lost his mind.
And two, the tumor seemed static. Not better, but not worse. (I knew this wasn’t true, but it was what I’d decided.) I’d had no bouts of inertia since leaving Camp Carroll. The headaches were sometimes bad, sometimes more manageable. Every morning I lay in my tent and tried to feel it inside me, tried to feel the cells multiplying, and I kept thinking: If I hadn’t been told, I’d have never known. Nothing would’ve been different at all.
I’d avoided doing a web search on any of the terms.
Fear stilled my hands from doing that, every day.
“It’d be just the way of the world,” Sandoval said now, spinning his Coke can, “that something happens while we’re gone. That’d be just perfect.”
“Dude, a couple drinks,” I said. “Then we’ll head back. You have to slough stuff off a bit, man. Chill.”
“This is work,” Sandoval said, eyeing me. “We have a job. There’s an active search going on.”
Except we didn’t have an active search. We had Karla’s blurred footage and a pile of bedazzled horse turds that Sandoval had spent a small fortune on sending to a lab in Atlanta, Georgia, to get tested. We had his slow-burn tumble into the land of mania.
His sobriety seemed to have sharpened the whole thing into an obsession for him. Gone was the drunk, leering guy I remembered from the airport, the hotel. A pile of scat had undone him. He’d tipped over the edge. He managed maybe three hours of sleep a night, as far as I could tell, and spent the rest of the time walking through the woods in the dark with his goggles on, one hand holding an EVP recorder, the other pushing branches away. I could sometimes hear him talking out there when the wind blew in the right direction. I’m not here to hurt you. Even then his voice was thin and ghostly; he’d gone deeper and deeper into the woods around the Hauksdóttir house as time progressed.
Sometimes I’d just find him standing there in a copse of trees, his face still and almost rapturous.
I’d asked Karla a few days before: “Are the woods around here the álagablettur?”
She’d been shrewd with her answer. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean, when Sandoval goes out there at night,” and I’d motioned out the windows of the kitchen, “is he in danger?”
“No more than anyone else.”
She’d seen the look on my face and softened. “There might be things out there that he would see. But they can’t hurt him. The real danger is north. The woods up north near the base.”
Part of me wanted to fall into this rapture, too, just so we were all on the same page.
I resisted the urge to email Ellis and say, My boss has been sent adrift by a pile of horseshit with junk jewelry packed inside it. You believe that? He’s not a pop culturist or an anthropologist.
He’s just unhinged.
But I had yet to email Ellis, of course. Or Don Whitmer. Or my sister, or my mother. I hadn’t checked my emails in days.
What could I have said? If I told them a little, I’d have to tell them everything.
Now I leaned back in my chair and said, “Look, Mark. We’re here. Let’s just enjoy it.”
Sandoval shrugged, sipped his Coke. Still hunched over like what I imagined a new convict would look like at his first trip to the prison cafeteria. Guarded, suspicious. He’d lost a significant amount of weight and his beard was coming in. Half the time I’d have dinner with Karla and the kids and Sandoval would beg off, deciding to walk the perimeter instead. It really was a beautiful, rich landscape, that farm and forest, and it was filled with absolutely nothing that Sandoval needed. Yet still he walked along it every night.
“Remind me to check the eastern cameras before we crash, I think I need to nudge one of them a bit.”
“Try to enjoy yourself.”
“I am, Brian. This is me enjoying myself.”
I drained my glass. I was still unused to the empty slot in my mouth where that tooth had been.
“I’m gonna grab another. You want one?”
“Seriously, Brian. One more and we’re out of here, okay? We need to move those cameras.”
It wasn’t the first time that I’d mused on the fact that he really had become a ghost hunter. Someone so adamant at chasing shadows. I’d told him about the soldiers who’d died on the property, and that too had emboldened him. I’d listen to him play back his EVP recordings in his tent, his own voice forlorn as it asked if anyone was there, if they had anything to say, if they wanted to let him know anything.
A
nd those long swaths of utter silence between his questions.
Some mornings I woke up embarrassed to be where I was. Hunting a unicorn? Paid off by some deluded rich guy to be his yes man? Those mornings I woke to a fine crust of new snow on the ground outside my tent, convinced entirely that Sandoval had grown damaged in some intrinsic way.
He’d insisted that we weren’t leaving any time soon. We’d run our full tenure in Hvíldarland.
I’d made a mistake.
I walked to the bar and leaned over the empty seat between two men. I set my glass down on the bar top, tried to catch the bartender’s eye. One of the men half-turned to me, lifted his lip in a sneer. The type of guy that was pretty common in Kjálkabein: stocky and red-faced, with big, work-roughened hands and a heavy, formless jacket. Nose squashed as a root vegetable. Worked the docks in Kjálkabein, maybe, or busted ass at one of the automotive shops scattered along Road Seven. Catch a guy like this in the right mood and he could be friendly and generous with his time. This wasn’t the right mood.
“Vandamál?” Problem?
“No, sorry,” I answered in English. “I just wanted to order a beer.”
He said something over me to the man next to him—Icelandic and clipped, something lost in the din—and his friend muttered something back without looking at us. The first guy turned back to me and said in English, “Why don’t you back up, okay? Before you piss me off.”
I stepped back. “Like I said, sorry.”
“You fucking Americans. You come in here.” He gestured at my glass with a reddened hand. “Do this shit, when my friend and I were having a conversation.”
I held up my hands. “Hey, sorry to bother you.”
I started to turn, head back to our table to gather my coat, when a hand fell on my arm. My heart leapt—the grip was strong—and then a voice rattled behind me: “What’s up, my man?”