Inside, the place felt more like the cold, stark halls of a hospital than a museum. It wasn’t a particularly upmarket affair. Esther had been expecting wooden floors and dark walls and bloodred hearts suspended in glass jars. The reality was much more clinical: green linoleum floor, white walls, plastic shelving, and monochromatic tissue specimens, all turned an unappealing shade of pus-yellow thanks to the preservation process. Each sample was preserved in formalin, encased in clear glass rectangles, and stacked on the shelves like morbid figurines.
Esther and Jonah walked quietly around the place, stopping every now and then at the more disturbing displays: an arthritic hand, curled in on itself like a dead spider; a lung as black as pitch, taken from a coal miner in the early twentieth century; a gangrenous leg, the flesh rotten and buckling from ankle to kneecap; a uterus with a tumor growing its own teeth and hair.
And everywhere, everywhere, signs of Death. His handiwork on every muscle fiber, every shard of bone, every cell born and grown only to die by his hand in the end. The shadow of him was on everything in the building. Esther shook her head at the destruction of it all, at the incomprehensible scale of it.
Each one of them had once been a human being. The aggregate of all their happiness and sadness had been immense. The memories they’d held in their collective heads could have overloaded all the servers in the world. That severed foot used to be a living, breathing, walking, real human with thoughts and memories and emotions. That slice of brain had once stored the cumulative thoughts acquired over decades that had made the donor the person they’d been.
So much work for nothing. That a living thing should be there and then gone just seemed so impossible. So impractical. So . . . wasteful, somehow.
Because where did it all go, in the end? Esther understood the first law of thermodynamics, that nothing was created or destroyed and all the little bits and pieces that made up a human would be redistributed elsewhere when they died, but where did the memory go? The joy? The talent? The suffering? The love?
If the answer was “nowhere,” then why the hell did we even bother? What was the point of these fleshy globs of consciousness that ate and drank and loved and rose from cobbled-together bits of the universe?
“I think I’m gonna puke,” Jonah said, gagging at the aforementioned uterus when they were about halfway through the collection.
“Why don’t we get out of here and get something to eat? How about Taco the Town?” she said, pointing to a severed foot with a huge plantar wart growing like a cauliflower out of the sole, which looked strangely reminiscent of the quality of food available at the taco truck.
Jonah looked at it, then vomited on the floor in the middle of the hall, bits of his budget oat breakfast splattering on the formalin-encased remains of the diseased dead people. Esther sat him down and ran to fetch him water, like he’d done for her when she’d been sick. And that’s how, on a Sunday afternoon in early December, they were banned forever from the Museum of Human Disease.
25
17/50: DOLLS
IN THE week before Christmas, the world grew as bitter and gloomy as Eugene’s fitful nightmares. The last of the leaves dropped away from the trees, the cold came in blankets to settle over the town, and Esther and Jonah continued their search for Death, despite the ever increasing pressure from school to STUDY HARD AND DO WELL OR YOUR LIFE IS GOING TO SUCK SERIOUSLY YOU GUYS WE’RE NOT EVEN JOKING WITH THIS.
The four of them met on Sunday—Christmas Eve—at Hephzibah’s house, partly because she had the creepy dolls they needed to film 17/50, but mostly because her house was the nicest, and her parents spoke softly to each other, and one of her grandmothers always brought around freshly rolled rum balls on Christmas Eve which were strong enough (when they’d been in elementary school anyway) to get them halfway tipsy. The other grandmother brought over latkes topped with applesauce in an attempt to out-grandma the other grandmother, so the real winner was their stomachs.
It always felt like Christmas was supposed to feel at Hephzibah’s: warm and fragrant and festive and distinctly Middle Eastern (the baby Jesus was from there after all). The Hadids, half Christian, half Jewish, were big believers in Chrismukkah, and decorated accordingly.
For the decade before her birth, Heph’s parents had been foreign correspondents and lived in half a dozen cities. Their house was a catalogue of where they’d been in the world: handwoven Afghan carpets covered the floor, heavy Balinese chairs with intricately carved backs sat in the dining room, and the lounges were Scandinavian, their minimalist design clashing with the Japanese room divider and all the Peruvian pottery scattered about the place.
Hephzibah had been born in Jerusalem but spent the first few years of her life pinballing between Paris, Rome and Moscow, and had even done her first year of school in New Delhi before her parents came to the United States and decided to settle down. They still travelled for work sometimes, mostly to Mexico or Canada, and Daniel, Heph’s dad, had even covered the early days of the Syrian Civil War until journalists became afraid to go there, but mostly they worked from home.
The four of them filmed 17/50 after dinner, when the night was dark and cold and the basement where Hephzibah kept her childhood toys was appropriately horror-movie-esque. The toys had been moved down here at Esther’s request sometime in late elementary school, when she’d started sleeping over at Heph’s and found herself quite unable to close her eyes in the same room as dolls that were clearly created for the main purpose of becoming receptacles for demonic possession and little more.
Jonah made her stand surrounded by the dolls for five minutes with the lights off. Esther almost started hyperventilating at first, thinking of all the dolls she’d seen in movies that came to life and tore out people’s jugulars, but the longer she spent with them, the slower her breathing became. They didn’t move. They didn’t blink. They didn’t reach out with their creepy little porcelain fingers to gouge her eyes out when she wasn’t looking.
In the end, when the five minutes was up, she felt sorry for them. Little girls, frozen in time and left alone in the dark, smiles painted on their still faces. Esther was the one who’d condemned them to this cage years ago, just as Death had been the one who’d condemned her family to live in fear.
When Jonah flicked the light on, she carried each of them, one by one, back up to the world above.
• • •
ESTHER AND EUGENE spent Christmas morning at Lilac Hill. It was not a good day. Reginald had fallen the night before—a bout of syncope—and today he was in pain and couldn’t remember why. It was a terrible thing to see. Like when babies or animals were sick and you couldn’t explain to them what was happening, so they cried and cried and it made you want to cry too because there was nothing you could do, nothing at all. There was a bruise, the nurses told them, from his hip to his armpit, splashed down his side like a watercolor storm cloud, and he had difficulty breathing or sitting up or moving too much. Four broken ribs, they said.
Reg’s hands shook so violently that he couldn’t feed himself; Eugene had to do it. He choked on his food because the disease was eating away his ability to swallow and he cried most of the time his grandchildren were there, though he didn’t seem to notice their presence or recognize who they were. Eugene sat and glowered out the window for most of the visit, looking how Esther felt. Like, if she met Death in a dark alleyway, she would take no prisoners.
These are the things she remembered about Reg that day:
- The story Rosemary had told her, that when she and Eugene were babies, Reg would come by unannounced almost every day to see them. The way he’d pick them up from their cribs and wake them even when they were sleeping just so he could read to them or play with them or take them for a walk through the garden to see the birds and the flowers and the trees.
- The way he loved Johnny Cash, and would sing “I Walk the Line” to Florence Solar on a regular basis, ev
en though he couldn’t hold a tune.
- The way, whenever Esther wanted to run away from home, she’d call her grandfather, and he’d come and pick her up and pretend he was helping her escape great tyranny. The way they’d sneak out together like spies, even though Peter and Rosemary knew very well he was there, and go back to Reg’s and Florence’s house for fish sticks, Esther’s favorite food as a child.
Before they left, the nurses pulled them aside and informed them that his hallucinations had worsened, that he scared the other patients when he told them that Death was there with them, that he visited him once to play chess, that his time was very close to being near.
“Death comes here?” Esther asked. “Have you seen him?”
The nurse looked at her like she was crazy, then explained again that Lewy body dementia caused recurrent visual hallucinations, and that nothing of what Reginald said should be believed. Eugene raised his eyebrows and looked at his sister.
“She means now that he’s sick,” she said when the nurse was gone.
“No, she means ever.”
“You’re not allowed to believe in demons and not Death,” she reminded him.
Eugene turned to stare out the window again. “Again: I believe what I can see.”
• • •
WHEN THEY GOT HOME, there were no presents to be opened; there was no tree and no decorations, unless you counted the ones permanently set up downstairs. Esther sat at the top of the basement stairs and listened to the Christmas carols jingling from the record player and wondered if she should tell Peter that his father was coming undone at the seams. Would it make a difference? Would he be any more inclined to unstick himself from the basement and venture outside, or would the imminence of his father’s death only drive him further underground?
Jonah snuck into her room sometime after midnight, his lip busted.
“Let me call the police,” she said as she pressed the sleeve of her sweatshirt to his mouth, but Jonah shook his head.
“If we get taken by the state, they’ll split us up. I might never see her again,” he said. “Tell me a story. That’s what I need right now.”
And so, with his head in her lap, her fingers in his hair, her sleeve pressed to the split at his lip, Esther told Jonah about the third time her grandfather met Death.
26
THE BOWEN SISTERS
ON THE morning of September 30, 1988, Christina and Michelle Bowen, seven and nine years old respectively, were waiting at the school bus stop only two hundred yards from their home when a man in a mint Cadillac Calais pulled over and told them the bus had a flat tire and wasn’t coming and he could give them a lift if they’d like. They accepted—the man didn’t look like a stranger, not the ones their mom had told them about, the kind that offered candy and had a cute puppy to lure them into an unmarked van. Besides, his car was nice and clean, and all the windows were rolled down, and he wasn’t wearing a long dark coat, which was what the girls assumed all strangers wore.
The Bowen sisters climbing into the Cadillac Calais was witnessed by a neighbor, who thought nothing of it because the girls went willingly. They were seen alive only once more, half an hour later, by a gas station attendant as the man driving filled up his car. By this time they were miles away from the school and both girls were in the back seat crying, but the attendant assumed that the man was their father and thought nothing of it.
They were reported missing in the afternoon when the siblings failed to return from school, right around the time that an anonymous tip came through to the police station that a strange man had been seen dumping trash in a dry creek bed on the outskirts of town. The person assigned to investigate was homicide detective Reginald Solar, who normally wouldn’t have covered such things, but his shift was over and he lived near the dump site and everyone was far too busy with the missing Bowen children to pay some trash-dumping miscreant too much attention. So Reg clocked out for the day, sure that the Bowen girls would be discovered at a friend’s house, and went to Little Creek to see what could be done about the illegal dumping.
It was early fall and the river had dried up from years on end without rain, leaving only a wide expanse of sand and trees and scrub. From the bridge, Reginald couldn’t see any sign of the garbage, so he parked his car, a secondhand Toyota Cressida, on the roadside and scaled down the steep riverbank in his suit. It was late afternoon—crickets were chirping and a breeze pulled through the carved-out canyon, not quite cool enough to stop a bead of sweat from slipping down Reg’s spine. He took off his suit jacket and folded it over his arm. The place smelled at once of campfires and tree sap and stagnant water that boiled up from the underground stream and found itself with nowhere to go but to sit and grow putrid.
There was a difference between good detectives and born detectives, Reginald once told Esther. Good detectives were the ones who took in what they heard and saw and smelled. Born detectives did this too, but they had another sense, something in the gut or the soul that guided them even when their senses couldn’t. Reginald stopped and listened to the silence, his eyes watering. He knew, without knowing how he knew, without having even seen them yet, that the Bowen sisters were there in that riverbed. He couldn’t explain it, except to say that dead bodies had a sound, a kind of ominous buzzing silence that he felt in his teeth and the lining of his stomach when he was close to one.
That’s when he saw the footprints in the sand, two and sometimes three sets of them. There were scuffles between the three, and whoever belonged to the smallest set had refused to walk and so had been dragged for a time. Reg followed the footprints without obscuring them and put on gloves to pick up the trinkets he found along the way: a locket, the clasp snapped open as though it had been snatched from a neck; a child’s hat; a copy of A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein; a backpack with the name Christina emblazoned across the pocket in glittery gold letters.
And then, what he knew he would find from the moment he looked out at the riverbed from his car on the bridge, not because he could see them, but because he could feel them, the echo of their lives: the Bowen sisters, both naked and facedown in the sand. They were ten feet apart, the elder girl with her arm outstretched toward her sister.
Esther didn’t go into the details of what had been done to them, a courtesy she wished her grandfather had extended to her. All she said was that their hair had been brushed, and their school clothes neatly folded beside them, and their socks tucked into their shiny black shoes. To look at them from that angle, there were no signs of violence. That’s not to say they could be mistaken for sleeping—far from it. Their chests didn’t rise with breath, and their faces had been pushed into the sand.
Reginald stood frozen for some time, just staring, until his body betrayed him. He dropped to his knees, vomited twice, and felt hot tears streak down his cheeks. And then, with his blood pounding through his body in revulsion and horror, he caught the movement of a shadow out of the corner of his eye. He quickly drew his weapon and pointed it at the man, who was dressed in a dark coat and black hat and was sitting on a piece of bone white driftwood, staring at the dead children. The man, her grandfather was shocked to see, was none other than Jack Horowitz.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” Reg said to him.
“Why do you think I am here?” he replied.
“Horowitz, I’m going to need you to put your hands in the air.”
“I must ask you, at this precise moment, not to be an idiot.”
“You’re at the scene of the crime. I have to take you in.”
“I have been at the scene of many crimes today, Reg. Too many. I am not in the mood for humans at the moment.”
Reginald Solar didn’t lower his gun. It hadn’t escaped him that Horowitz, now thirteen years older than when he first met him, hadn’t aged a day.
“Do you really believe I killed them?” said Horowitz, looking up with big
eyes framed with black lashes. There, in the afternoon sun, his scars were worse than ever—they bubbled beneath the surface, distorting his features. You might think his parboiled skin made him monstrous, but it had the opposite effect. Most found him to be a sympathetic figure, felt sorry for him, felt a need to protect and follow him when he asked. It would make the former private, in the decades to come, a very successful Reaper.
Reginald did not believe that Jack Horowitz had killed the children. He thought it very fucking strange indeed that Jack Horowitz was here in this dry creek bed and staring at their bodies, but no, he did not believe he had killed them. So this was what he did: he holstered his weapon, called for backup, and sat down on the driftwood next to his sort-of friend, the Man Who Was Now Death, and he too stared at the little blond girls who lay facedown in the sand.
“Fuck me,” said Reginald after a moment, partly because of the horror of the scene before him, but partly because, for the first time, he found himself genuinely believing that Horowitz was who he said he was. Horowitz was Death incarnate—why else would he be here? Reg pulled off his hat and wiped away several hard-wrung tears. “Fuck me. How long have you been here?”
“Since it happened. I find myself quite unable to move.”
“What?”
“I believe I am suffering a panic attack.”
Reg looked Horowitz up and down. He was sitting quite rigidly on the driftwood, hands balled into fists on his knees, but apart from that he exhibited no signs of distress. “Are you sure?”
“Oh yes. My heart is beating rapidly, I am short of breath, my limbs are numb, and I feel very much like I am about to die of a heart attack, which I know for a fact to be incorrect. I am not on my own list, you see.”
A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares Page 18