I’m leaving this journal—with this page open—on your laptop, right where you’ll see it. Use it, please. Use my notes, use the drafts, do whatever you need to do, but please…work on the book. Finish this, so you can come home.
In case I don’t see you later today, one last thing:
I know this is day three since you sat on the Throne, so…if you fall victim to the supernatural powers of the Witch’s curse, know how much I do love you, how proud I am of your work, and how grateful I am you were in the woods that night we met…to save me from the ghost.
Otherwise, I’ll see you back at the Manse.
CHAPTER NINETEEN | OCTOBER 30
Day 156. It’s past midnight, I think. The house is full of nighttime noises: the clanking of pipes, creaking of floors, moaning of elderly appliances.
Juliet is asleep on the couch, the TV flashing over her sweet face. I am afraid to turn it off, afraid the sudden and complete darkness might wake her. I sit next to her on the couch in our warm nest of blankets, watching the flashing lights of the television and listening to the nighttime noises.
Occasionally, tired of sitting, my legs cramped and restless, I stand up, stretch, walk the circuit through the kitchen, around the front hall, through the dining room, and back to the TV room.
I am the ghost now.
At the top of the stairs, Lydia’s lights are still on in her room. I can see the slice of light beneath her closed door. She and I have not exchanged a single word in two days beyond the screaming match when I got home.
By the time I landed in St. Louis, Mom and Dad had found her and brought her home. She wasn’t far. She’d walked the county highway four miles into Chandlerville and was at the park there, but she hadn’t told anyone where she was. Didn’t plan on telling anyone. She was going to sneak back in the house late at night.
“I needed to get the hell away from everyone!” she screamed at me when I asked her why she would worry her grandparents like that, worry me like that.
“I was terrified. You can’t do that to me, Lydia.”
“You were the one who left. You’ve been gone for three days.”
“I was...taking care of things.”
“Right. Back in that God-awful town where Dad died. You think it will bring him back?”
“Of course not, but…”
She had walked out then. Stomped upstairs. Slammed the door to her room. My stomach clenched so tightly, I bent over in pain.
My parents didn’t want to leave, but I mirrored my own daughter’s performance, venting my anger on them and finally, when they wouldn’t go, turning my back on them, escaping to my own room and slamming the door.
I heard them leaving, their car tires crunching on the driveway. Then a knock on my door. Juliet wanting me to watch TV with her. I threw my arms around her and squeezed her tightly.
“I’m sorry, Jules. I’m sorry about all this fighting.”
We go downstairs, microwave popcorn, and curl up under the blanket on the couch. I let her pick the show. Cupcake Wars. Of course.
So here I am, back in my haunted house.
I close my eyes. An image appears in my mind. A wooded scene.
He went by his first name only: Bartholomew. He lived in a cabin he’d built himself on a piece of wooded land he’d inherited from his parents in northwest Minnesota, only a few miles from the North Dakota border. He collected a following by inviting people into his hut and intoxicating them with the smoke from a type of tobacco he grew himself and offering them escape to a parallel universe, the better alternative to the one in which they had become trapped.
According to this man, any one of us can become lost in a mistaken universe, a pale copy of our true place in the infinite. He could correct this mistake. He claimed that after each person left his cabin, he or she entered a corrected course, the correct parallel universe in which he or she had meant to always occupy.
At the time that George and I visited him, Bartholomew had over three thousand people waiting to enter his cabin. The cabin stood on a small hill cleared of trees, and the people stood in line all the way down the hill and back to the woods where they camped.
Bartholomew would invite two or three people per day inside the cabin, one at a time. The rest of the daylight hours, he sat on top of its flat roof, cross-legged, chin lifted to the weather, cold or rain or snow, and meditate for hours, occasionally opening his eyes wide and speaking—sometimes one word, sometimes thousands—to followers who sat there for days in waiting for these orations.
George camped at the cabin that entire summer. Calvin and I took turns driving up to stay a few days at a time with him.
At the end of July, I drove up and found Calvin still there.
“I couldn’t leave yet,” he told me. “It’s almost his turn.”
Indeed, George was camped now only twenty feet from the cabin, and we spent most of that day watching Bartholomew sit on the roof before coming down to invite people in. The next day, George entered the cabin.
George wanted us all to go in together, but no.
“You have separate courses,” Bartholomew told us when, after three months of waiting, George finally approached his cabin. “Yes, those courses intertwine, but they are still separate. Each person must find his own course.”
George went first and emerged three hours later, pupils dilated, goofy smile plastered to his face. I left him with Calvin while I took my turn, which may have been the shortest conference in Bartholomew’s history.
The inside of the cabin was tidy and bare, with a dirt floor and a fire pit in the center flanked by two woven grass rugs. Bartholomew sat on one. I lowered myself to the other. Quickly, as I settled myself, I surveyed the interior, keeping mental notes to help in George’s investigation. But there was nothing but shadows jumping on the walls, the fire, and Bartholomew.
Smoke drifted up to the ceiling, some of it escaping through a hole in the roof. No wonder he sat outside part of the day. I imagined the interior became intolerable with smoke in the few hours of his consultations.
In the corners, the dirt floor was disturbed as if recently dug up. Is that where he hid his drugs?
Bartholomew did not speak. My foot tapped in impatience. Was I supposed to tell him my problems? My reasons for wanting to escape my current existence? Because at the time, I had no such desire. Julie was almost through her first year of kindergarten, Lydia the seventh grade. I was just beginning to feel a bit of release of the never-ending mind-grip of caring for small children. Always one part of my mind on the two of them: are they safe? have they eaten? do either of them need to potty? nap? Remember to cut their grapes in half, apply sunscreen every four hours, I can’t see them, where are they?
But this endless cycle of checklists and needs and demands was gradually being taken over by two autonomous school-age children who could explore our yard by themselves, visit the bathroom without assistance, or even fix their own snacks. I could read a book or sit and think occasionally without someone needing something from me right that instant.
I had no interest in entering any parallel dimension. Things were starting to look up in this one.
I think Bartholomew sensed this. When we faced each other over his fire, he stared at me with obvious indignation. His lips were pressed together in a snarl. The fire glowed in his eyes. He knew I was an imposter. He did not speak, just continued to glare at me until I stood and walked out of there.
I wake with a start. On the television, a boy in thick-framed glasses holds at arms’ length a cupcake topped with sparklers. Three other kids laugh and point at him.
There is no forest, no cabin. I’ve dreamt it all. Juliet is asleep, heavy and warm in the crook of my arm, which is numb.
Then I hear it again.
Thunk.
The noise that woke me.
Thunk.
Coming from the basement.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Thunk.
Moaning. Low and pitiful.
&nbs
p; My heart is beating slow and deep, as if pumping cold mud through my veins.
The moaning cuts off abruptly. It becomes a sob, then choking. A hideous, wet purging noise.
I jump from the couch and sprint to the kitchen.
The door under the stairs is open. The light is on.
My legs are shaking as I lean on the wall and force myself down the steps.
Lydia.
She is hunched on the floor beneath the workbench, vomiting into a box. As a stand on the bottom step, she falls back, eyes closed, against the wall. Her feet slip out from under her. She begins to cry.
I kneel and hold her face in my hands. She refuses to look at me. She squeezes her eyes shut, crying, her face red and twisted in agony.
“Are you sick?” I touch the back of my wrist to her clammy, cool forehead.
She jerks away from me and curls into a ball on the dirt floor. I take off my sweatshirt and wad it up and place it under her head, and she lets me. The sour acidic smell of vomit wafts from the box.
I look down at my daughter, curled up and trembling on the cold dirt floor. Next to her is George’s flask. I pick it up. It’s the one he had in Portico.
“Where did you get this?”
She flinches but doesn’t answer. I want to throw the flask across the room into the darkness far away from us. I want to scream at her for being such an idiot. I want to hold her tightly to me.
I kneel next to her and hold the flask in front of her face. Her eyes are still squeezed shut.
"Where did you get this?"
She turns away. I slosh the remaining vodka around a bit, in case she wants to pretend she doesn’t know what I’m talking about.
“Was it in his office? Did you see his phone?”
She blinks, confused. Her eyes won’t focus.
“His phone!” I shout at her. “Was it with the rest of this things?”
“No!” She shouts back at me, then buried her face in her shirt.
“Why are you down here?”
“It was almost gone,” she says, her voice muffled by her shirt. “He kept more under the workbench. That’s where he always hid them.”
I look beneath the workbench. In a box are three bottles of Stoli vodka, one only half full. Behind me, Lydia gags, hunches over the box again and heaves.
“What’s wrong with Lydia?” I spin around to find Juliet at the bottom of the steps, rubbing her eyes.
"She’s all right. Go back upstairs. I’ll be right there."
She ignores me. "Liddy, are you sick?"
"She's fine, honey.”
“No, she’s not.”
“Go upstairs."
"No!"
She doesn’t just shout; she screams the word. So loudly that Lydia lifts her head, panting, and squints at her little sister.
Juliet begins to cry.
What am I doing? Pretending even now that everything is okay? Is this our new normal?
I hold out my arms. Juliet falls into them. Lydia heaves and vomits into the box again.
I choke on my tears. I am lost in the woods. I have no backup. No one is coming to get me and take me home, put me to bed. Metaphorically speaking. George’s dead, and there’s no coming back from that. I clutch my crying daughters to me and we all wail.
We almost separated that summer, George and me. In fact, we were technically separated for those three months: I was at home with the girls while he camped out in Minnesota, waiting his turn with Bartholomew.
“Let him stay until he sobers up,” said Calvin when, after my meeting in the cabin, I returned to find George had promptly passed out in this tent. “He can find his way home.”
“Why do you think he becomes obsessed with these people? With their elaborate fantasies?”
“Does it matter? What good reason is there to leave you for months so he can get high in a tent? It’s not right.” Calvin ran his hands through his thick hair, a gesture I’d seen him do a million times since the night I met him. Halloween night, all those years ago.
We had a connection that night, something I had not felt before. Not romance book destiny or magical circumstance, but real-life understanding of each other. I knew I would see Calvin Drake after that night. I knew it.
But he had walked into the clinic on the night George and the others had found me and said he didn’t know me. It was the biggest mystery of my life. I had never had the courage to ask him why, and he had never, in two decades of being my brother-in-law, offered any explanation.
The unspoken words magnified, binding us like glue, attracting us toward each other at every family celebration, every Christmas, Thanksgiving, or birthday. Every milestone of my adult life, Calvin Drake was there, knowing me, keeping this secret with me.
Or maybe I imagined it all. Twenty years of…what? Longing? No, more like nostalgia. The same kind of bittersweet wishing that makes us want to go back and relive our lives, knowing what we know now.
After George’s meeting with Bartholomew, Calvin helped me carry my husband to the car and we said goodbye, like we always did, polite, brother and sister, with all of it left unsaid.
George slept the entire drive home while I practiced my speech. I had been envisioning my life without him all summer.
At home, I tucked him into our bed, even though he was filthy. The girls came home from my parents’, and we spent the rest of the afternoon in the yard. School would be starting the following week. With them in school all day, I could get a job. I could send them to after-school programs. It would work. Plenty of mothers made it work.
I grilled hamburgers for the girls. We ate on the back porch. Juliet sat in the porch swing, kicking her legs while she ate around the edges of her hamburger. Back then, she still ate a hamburger all around the edges, in a circle, making a smaller and smaller circle until she got to the middle.
As soon as we were eating, George appeared. He had showered and trimmed his beard. His hair was damp. He wore a clean t-shirt and shorts.
“Daddy!” The girls swarmed him. Dragging them along, he made his way to me, pulled me into an embrace.
“Thank you,” he murmured in my ear.
Surprised, I pulled back.
“No one else would have dragged me out of there, Thea. Not my friends, definitely not my mother. Not even my brother.”
“Calvin was there checking on you. He helped me get you to the car.”
“But he would have left me there, right?”
My silence is the answer.
“No one on this earth but you. Don’t think I don’t know that.”
The girls released him, and he took my hand. I looked out across the yard. We’d been in the Manse over five years by then, and it felt like us, like the place we belonged after searching for so long.
“I wanted you to know, if the situation were reversed, I’d come get you. No matter what.”
“You think I would find myself in that situation? So out of it, that I couldn’t find my way home?”
And then I remembered…of course I would find myself in that situation. I was in that exact situation on the day George and I met: intoxicated and lost in the woods, unable to find my way home.
“I know you can take care of yourself.”
“Then you are the only person on the planet who thinks so.”
“I’ve always thought so, since the day I met you.”
“You mean the day you rescued me.”
“The day I found you in the woods, chasing a ghost. You didn’t need rescued. You weren’t even scared.”
“I hate to break this to you, but I was terrified.”
“Still. You were out there.”
George wrapped his arms around me. I struggled, but he held on tight.
“It’s a good thing to have, you know. Someone to come get you.”
“What did Bartholomew say to you in that tent?”
“Nothing I didn’t already know.”
We survive.
At some point, we drag ourselves back up to
the living room and fall asleep on the couch in front of the flashing television. It’s still on when I wake up, an infomercial for a device that, via tiny electrical pulses, burns fat cells from your midsection. Sold in installments of $19.99 to people desperate to believe such nonsense is possible.
Okay, George. I’ll help you. One last time.
I wake the girls. “Come on,” I tell them. “We’re going up to Dad’s office.”
“What time is it?” asks Juliet. Lydia merely groans. But they both follow me upstairs and into the tower.
The door swings open smoothly, silently, and I enter the cold office. Lydia, wrapped in a quilt, grimaces in the bright sunlight. I step forward. The girls hang back.
“What are we doing?” asks Juliet.
“Looking around.”
“At Daddy’s stuff?”
“I’m going to bed,” says Lydia.
“No, you’re not.”
“You can’t stop me.”
“No, but I can come up to your room and run the vacuum while simultaneously asking you questions about school and all of your friends until you come back in here.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Juliet grin.
“Start looking.”
“For what?”
“Something to do with Allerton.”
“What’s Allerton?”
“I don’t know exactly. That’s why we’re looking.”
We find papers, photos, cigars. Old essays he graded and never returned to students. A photo album filled with Mitch’s creations: artificial ghosts, fairies, spirit lights.
Alcohol. We find bottles behind books, inside a pillow on the chair by the fireplace, and beneath a false bottom in the desk drawer.
The blue bag. Still in the center of his desk, the police bag with his belongings.
A flash of red catches my eye. I swipe away the bag, and there, underneath is my journal.
With a trembling hand, I pick it up and flip through the pages.
May 28 ...I want to go home…
May 30 ...You’re acting so strangely…
June 1...Sosie Powell called…
June 1…Allerton…
I slap the notebook closed. Lydia and Juliet both look up.
The Witch's Throne (Thea Drake Mystery Book 1) (Thea Drake Mysteries) Page 21