Marny shook his head and waved the paper again.
Mr. Condon took it from him. His dark gray eyes moved over the words several times. He glanced at Marny, then back at the paper, then at Marny again. “Do ya believe this?”
Sweat began to soak through Marny’s shirt, sticking it to his chest and back. He barely noticed. “I have to do something. The car.”
The tone of Marny’s voice and the sweat leaking from his pores must have been enough to convince Mr. Condon. “What kind was it? Make and model? I’ll call Petey.”
Petey—Pete Morsey—was a local cop. Mr. Condon always kept track of who was working what shift in case he needed to call in a gas thief or some other criminal who happened upon Condon’s Gas ’n Go with malicious intent. In the two years Marny had worked there, no cop had ever been called.
Marny’s mind went blank. He tried to picture the car in his head, but all he could see was the girl’s face—her sad mouth, those penetrating eyes—and the hurried writing on the crumpled piece of paper—HE’S GOING TO KILL ME.
Mr. Condon put a hand on Marny’s shoulder. “Mahny, come on, son. Think.”
Finally it came to him. “It was, uh, a Taurus, light blue, nineties.” Like the temperature outside.
“Did ya recognize the driver?”
Marny shook his head. “I don’t think he’s local. I have to go after them.”
Time was running out. If he didn’t leave now, he’d have no chance of catching up to the car. The garage sat on a stretch of State Road 137 where, heading north, there were no turnoffs for a good five miles. If he left now, he still had time to at least see where the car was headed.
“I’m callin’ Petey,” Mr. Condon said. “You stay put, ya hear? Let Petey handle this.” He headed for the office and the phone.
In the rear of the garage Mr. Condon kept a fully restored 1976 Chevy Nova. He’d bought it ten years earlier at an auction for next to nothing and put more than it was worth into it to get it back to mint condition. The keys were hanging on a nail above the tool table. Marny opted for the horsepower of the Nova over the fuel efficiency of his own 1990s model Subaru.
He got in, shoved the key into the ignition, and turned it. The engine growled to life and snorted like a hopped-up thoroughbred. A clear path led to the bay door and out of the garage, and with his foot on the gas Marny put down some rubber finding it. Behind him Mr. Condon shouted something, but Marny was already too far away and couldn’t hear him over the engine.
State Road 137 was a long stretch of asphalt that shot fairly straight through a forest of white pine, hemlock, and spruce. Leaving Mr. Condon and the garage behind, Marny pushed the Nova down the road with one thing now on his mind: the curse. There was a pretty good chance that if he got involved in the girl’s plight, things would not turn out well. Nothing positive came from anything he did. The thought made his palms sweat and the steering wheel slick.
But then the girl’s face was there again, hovering in his mind like a ghost, beckoning to him, and despite his history of twenty-six years of hurt and frustration and despair, despite his own self-esteem issues, despite the curse, he felt urged, pushed … chosen. This was a call to action, something he’d never felt before.
Rounding a slight curve to the right, going much faster than the posted speed limit, he noticed the light blue Taurus up ahead a good half mile. Marny took his foot off the accelerator and let the Nova slow. His heart rate went the opposite direction. There was no turning back now, and suddenly his mind went blank. Now what? He was no match for the hulk of muscle and fat behind the wheel of that Taurus. And the driver didn’t look like a man who could be reasoned with.
After another mile the Taurus’s brake lights illuminated, and the car turned right. Marny didn’t remember any road there. As he drew nearer, he found it was not a paved road at all but an unmarked gravel lane. In his twenty years of living in Thomason, Maine, he’d never before noticed it. It was only wide enough for one vehicle, and at first Marny thought it must be a driveway. Maybe someone recently purchased some land back in the forest and laid this path as a throughway. But the lane didn’t look new; it had two worn ruts where the gravel had been kicked away by years of tires traveling it. On either side the forest encroached with creepy curiosity and formed an almost complete canopy above. Slowly he drove the Nova down the lane, around a couple bends until it came to a fork.
Marny stopped the Nova and got out, walked up to the Y and listened. Over the gruff hum of the Nova’s engine he could hear nothing but the steady chirp of crickets and the loud, irregular buzz of cicadas. His watch said it was nearing noon, but in the forest it was more like dusk, as if time had slipped away and seven hours had somehow been lost in the matrix of the universe. It was decision time. His instinct told him that based on his past record, it didn’t matter which path he took, it would be the wrong one. He thought of Robert Frost’s poem and the road less traveled, but both of these options appeared less traveled. He thought about doing eeny meeny miny mo, but it seemed too juvenile. Flipping a coin would be appropriate, but he didn’t have a coin on him.
And that’s when he noticed the tire track in the gravel that split to the left. It was subtle and shallow and he’d almost overlooked it, but now that he saw it, it flashed at him like a neon sign in the middle of a Maine forest. So left it was.
The lane wove through the forest for another half mile before ending at a clearing. Marny stopped the Nova short of getting a full view of the area, shut off the engine, and walked the rest of the way. Staying to the far left of the lane, hiding among the undergrowth and pine trunks, he got his first view of the clearing. In the center stood a large house.
Chapter 3
THE HOUSE WAS no monument to architectural genius.
A two-story box with a wide front porch, clapboard siding, and rusted metal roof, its paint was peeling in places. One of the first-story windows along the side of the house had been broken and was now covered with a sheet of plywood. The porch sagged on one end because the brick foundation beneath it had crumbled under the weight. The grass in the clearing was patchy and knee-high.
At the far side of the house sat the Taurus, engine still ticking.
The heat wasn’t as intense here in the forest as it had been at the Gas ’n Go, but it was still hotter than Mainers are used to. But despite the heat the windows of the house were all shut. Marny stood statue-still for a minute, listening, but all he heard were the natural sounds of the forest and the unnatural tick of cooling metal.
Carefully, making as little noise as possible, he picked his way along, circling the house, staying a good ten feet behind the tree line and concealed in the shadows of the heavy pine branches. Once he thought he saw movement in a window, but it was either the reflection of a cloud moving overhead or a bird passing by. When he came full circle, he thought about pulling out his phone and calling the police, letting Pete handle the whole thing like Mr. Condon said, but there was no reception. Wireless service was spotty in this part of Maine, nothing out of the ordinary for a state that was 90 percent forest and had only forty-one residents per square mile.
After a minute or so of arguing with himself—one side making the point that since he now knew where the house was he could just drive to a landline and call Pete, let someone with a gun and more courage than he had handle matters; the other side contending that if he left, that gorilla might kill the girl while he was gone—Marny made up his mind.
For reasons he didn’t understand, he decided to stay. He supposed it had something to do with the girl’s eyes and that scribbled note HE’S GOING TO KILL ME. It brought something out in him that he’d never felt before.
The best thing to do, he decided, was to get a closer look at the house, peer into a few windows, and get a feel for the layout. And maybe he’d see the girl again. Maybe the gorilla would be grooming himself or preoccupied with eating metal, and Marny could slip in undetected and rescue the girl.
Heart in his throat and blo
od thumping in his arteries, he stepped from the tree line into the clearing and bolted for the house. Once there, he squatted next to the concrete foundation and wiped sweat from his eyes. Knees bent, staying low to the ground, he positioned himself under a side window and slowly stood so just his eyes cleared the sill. There was a large living room, sparsely furnished with a blanket-covered sofa and two wooden ladder-back chairs. No carpet, no window treatments, no pictures, no personality whatsoever. And no girl or gorilla.
Moving to the next window, he found more emptiness. This one looked into what should have been a dining room but had no furniture at all. Nothing to say anyone lived there, nothing that called the place a home.
Around the back of the house were two windows looking into the kitchen and a pair of metal cellar doors, the kind that swung up and out. The kitchen was empty, but at least there were signs of life. The sink was full of dirty dishes, and a trash can overflowed. So the first floor was unoccupied; they must be on the second floor.
Marny knelt by the cellar doors. This was the best way to gain entry to the house unnoticed. Carefully and slowly, so as not to make a sound, he raised one door. Surprisingly, it opened with only a low moan. The other one did as well. Eight concrete steps descended to a wooden door. Down the steps he went, and he rested his hand on the door latch. The metal was cool, a stark contrast to his sweaty palm. He could feel his heart beating through his hand and into the steel handle. He was about to try depressing the latch when a memory made him pause.
There was one other time he’d tried to play the hero, one other person he’d tried to rescue, and it hadn’t ended well at all. An image of his mom’s face materialized in his mind. Marny had her mouth and nose, and the few times he’d heard her laugh he realized they shared that too.
When Marny was five, Janie Toogood had remarried. Marny was sure that at the time she thought she was doing the right thing. He needed a father, and she needed a husband. They both needed the extra income. Janie’s job as a clerk at Cudworth’s Hardware just didn’t bring in enough to support the two of them.
Janie didn’t introduce Marny to Karl Gunnison until they were engaged and a week from being married. The first time Marny met him, Karl called Marny “Buster” (but in his Maine accent it came out “Bustah”), punched him in the arm hard enough that it hurt, and told him he was going to be his new dad; what did he think of that? Marny didn’t think anything of it. He’d never had an old dad, didn’t even know what a dad did.
That first year he found out quickly what a dad did: went to work during the day and spent the evening sitting in his chair in front of the TV throwing down Pabst after Pabst.
The introduction of Karl Gunnison into their lives was the beginning of a whole new world of trouble for Marny and Janie, trouble that ended in tragedy sixteen years later.
Marny pushed the memory from his mind. Everyone deserved a second chance to be a hero.
Again he almost abandoned the plan and ran for the Nova. He didn’t have to get involved. He could pretend he never found the note, never even saw the girl or the gorilla or the Taurus. Never went to work that day. He could go on with life as it was and pretend none of this ever happened.
But it was happening. He had gone to work and seen the gorilla and the girl and found the note—HE’S GOING TO KILL ME. He did follow the Taurus and find the house.
The house where the girl was.
The girl with the eyes that kept haunting him, pleading for him to intervene and do something, anything.
Maybe this was his chance for redemption.
Then again, maybe this would go the same way the rest of his life had gone, and both she and he would wish he’d never gotten out of bed that morning.
Swallowing past the lump in his throat, he was just about to squeeze the latch when he heard the crunch of dry grass behind him. Before he could swing around, something hit him in the back of the head. He momentarily blacked out, came to, and found he was leaning against the wooden door and sliding down. His legs buckled. He faded in and out, and the concrete stairs melted before him.
Then everything went black.
Chapter 4
THE LAND BETWEEN sleep and wakefulness is a plot of unsteady ground.
But somewhere between those two worlds Marny gained some form of awareness, enough to realize he had been dreaming of Karl Gunnison. He tried to open his eyes, to break the surface of consciousness, but found the throbbing in his head pulling him back into sleep. He was back in the living room of his old home. He touched the sofa, the coarse fabric, drew in a breath. It was as if time had folded and he had somehow passed from this decade to that one unscathed. Everything was exactly as he remembered it, even the floor lamp with the shade that was slightly off-balance and leaned to one side.
Footsteps behind him broke the silence of the room and his memories. They were coming from the kitchen. He spun around and found Karl standing in the doorway, Pabst in one hand, bag of chips in the other. Big boned and thick chested, he appeared larger than he was. With his bushy beard and bald head, beady eyes and thick accent, he was every bit the forklift driver at Waldron’s Seafood. For some reason the sight of him after five years and after what happened between them didn’t surprise Marny as it should have.
Karl was wearing his Carhart bibs and yellow-stained white T-shirt. “What ya doin’ here, Bustah?”
Marny said nothing.
“Ya deaf?” Karl held the can to his mouth and took a long swig. “Where’s ya mother? Ya dirty lobstah. How dare ya come ’round here again.”
Though he’d been born and raised in Maine, and though he’d worked at a seafood supplier for most of his adult life, Karl Gunnison hated lobsters. Said they were dirty scavengers who lived on the bottom of the ocean cleaning up nature’s waste. Of course, the language he used to describe his hatred for Maine’s number-one crustacean was a bit more colorful.
To Karl, Marny was a scavenger too. The big man cursed and walked toward him. He was headed for his favorite chair, where he’d spend the rest of the evening being served beer after beer by Janie, his wife, his servant.
Marny stood his ground, fully expecting Karl to pass right through him like an apparition. After all, he wasn’t real, right? He was a figment of Marny’s imagination, a trick of the neural connectors in his brain.
Karl came and stood before Marny, inches away, so close Marny could smell the beer on the breath from his nostrils. He was an inch or two shorter than Marny, but much wider and thicker. Draining the rest of the beer from the can, Karl shook it and, keeping his eyes on Marny, turned his head slightly and said, “Janie! Bring me another beer, will ya?”
Marny said nothing, did nothing. He knew how this all ended. It was impossible for Karl to be real, but still every muscle in Marny’s body grew so taut it quivered.
Karl narrowed his eyes and belched loudly. The breath that wafted over Marny’s face almost made him gag. “Outa my way, Bustah.”
Marny wasn’t moving. But when Karl shoved him hard enough that he lost his balance and almost went down, he had to rethink this reality. If Karl was real enough to walk through time and bully Marny once again, what else was he capable of?
Karl laughed and shook his head, sat in his chair. “Janie! My beer, I’m waitin’.”
From the second floor Marny heard a voice he’d not heard in five years but longed to hear every day. “Just a minute.”
“I ain’t got a minute. The game’s about ta start.”
Every cell in Marny wanted to walk up to Karl Gunnison and knock him in the back of the head. Maybe grab a lamp and bust it over his skull. But every molecule in him wanted to climb the stairs to the second floor and see his mom. Dream or no dream, reality or fantasy, she was there, and he had a chance to see her again. He hadn’t dreamed of her since her death, and her image, the sound of her voice, the feel of her motherly touch had begun to fade.
He crossed the living room and stood at the bottom of the staircase. It ascended in front of him like
a ladder into another dimension. From his chair across the room Karl glared at Marny.
“Ya better stay put, Bustah. She needs ta learn ta obey.” He shook his head and looked away. “Sheesh, it’s like trainin’ dogs, livin’ with the two a’ ya.”
Anger flared inside Marny like an oxygen-fed fire. He’d only stood up to Karl once; it was time to do so again. Besides, this was nothing more than a dream; what could happen?
“Shut up,” he said through clenched teeth. “Don’t you talk about my mother that way.”
Karl grabbed his empty beer can and stood. “Or what? Ya gonna do somethin’ ’bout it? Ya little good-fah-nothin’.”
“You’re a piece of garbage,” Marny said and meant every word. He hated Karl Gunnison. Hated the fact that his mother had married him. Had substituted him, a beer-drinking chauvinist pig, for the father Marny had never known, but who sounded like he’d been a gem of a man. He hated that Karl was here in his life again, climbing out of his mind and still bullying him from the grave.
Karl grunted, cursed loudly, and threw the can at Marny. Marny flinched, but the can hit its mark and got him on the shoulder. It too was real.
Mom called from the second floor. “Marny, is that you? You home already?”
Marny put one foot on the bottom stair and was stopped by Karl’s voice, low and thick.
“Ya go up those stairs and I’ll kill ya, hear?”
“Marny?” Mom again. “We need to talk.”
Her voice bewitched him, like a prize bass tricked by a well-crafted lure. He knew she wasn’t there. She’d been dead some five years. But if her mirage was as real as the one of Karl, he’d play along just to see her one more time. He went to the second step.
Karl mimicked his move and took one step closer to him. “Bustah, I’m warnin’ ya. Not one more step.” He raised his voice. “Janie, my beer.”
At once Marny moved and, skipping the bottom step altogether, took the staircase two steps at a time. Karl roared and was at the base of the steps in no time, but Marny was already more than halfway up. At the top the stairs suddenly disappeared from beneath his feet. They slanted downward as one, as if on hinges, and became a sliding board. Marny’s feet went out from under him, and he slid back down toward the raging Karl. Karl’s eyes were like fire and his mouth hung open like a steel trap ready to spring. Marny groped at the banister, tried to find purchase. A little over halfway down he caught one of the rungs and stopped his descent.
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