by M. Verano
I wanted to know how it started. A cigarette butt? A campfire? But Arthur says it’s not that simple, it could be almost anything. Sometimes it starts with a lightning strike. Sometimes the farm machinery shoots off a spark from metal rubbing metal. And that’s all it takes. The next thing you know, the fields are blazing.
TUESDAY, JUNE 2, 8:27 P.M.
So all week I’ve been looking forward—if you can call it that—to my session with Dr. Clyde so I could show her this new evidence. I figured, there was no way she could deflect this, no way she could argue that everything in the house was just a symptom of my own psychological distress.
Guess I have a lot to learn about psychiatrists.
I didn’t even wait for her to ask me how my week went, or if there was anything I needed to talk about. I took out the letter right away and handed it to her without a word. She tried to ask me a lot of questions before she even looked at it—trying to regain control of the session, I guess. But I was insistent. I just kept telling her to read it. Finally she did.
“Okay,” she said when she was done. “Do you want to tell me something about this?”
“It’s Logan. Don’t you see? He’s doing it again. Only it’s even worse now. Look at those words, look at—”
But Dr. Clyde wouldn’t listen. She just kept trying to get me to calm down, to sit down. Eventually I did. “Paige,” she said once I had stopped ranting, “we need to talk about this. I’m growing increasingly concerned about you.”
That took me by surprise.
“About me?” I said. “But I’m showing you . . . it’s not me, it’s Logan! Or really . . . I don’t think it’s Logan, either. This isn’t like him. Something has gotten inside of him. Something is making him do this. It’s possessed him the same way it possessed my phone, the way it moves stuff around in our kitchen, making us all think the others are crazy . . . or that we are.” Dr. Clyde didn’t say anything, just looked at me with big, serious eyes. “That’s what you think, isn’t it?” I said. “You think I’m nuts.” I couldn’t help laughing a little to myself, though there wasn’t any humor in it. “Of course, that’s what people pay shrinks for, isn’t it? To tell us that we’re nuts. That’s your training. How are you ever going to see anything else? But think about it, Dr. Clyde—how can this be about me? *Logan* did this, not me. How can that make me crazy?”
Dr. Clyde hesitated a long time before answering. “Paige,” she said at last, “no one is calling you crazy. But it’s clear you have been under a lot of stress lately, and there are latent issues you aren’t ready to deal with. Do you know anything about repression?”
I stared blankly at her, though rage was building in my chest.
She starts to explain repression to me, speaking slowly as if I’d never heard of the concept. She explains that repression is when we have thoughts or feelings that we think we’re not supposed to. The thoughts cause guilt and shame, so we protect ourselves by pushing those thoughts down into our unconscious so we don’t have to deal the them. We try to keep only happy, positive thoughts in our heads. But it doesn’t work for long. You can push the scary stuff down, you can hide it, but you can’t make it go away—not like that, anyway. And the more you push it down, the harder it pushes back. It starts coming up again, burbling to the surface, but in different ways. Then she says, “Sometimes we see very strange behaviors manifesting themselves. Stuff that doesn’t seem to make any sense at all. But when you look at it at the level of the unconscious, it all starts to make sense. The unconscious has its own logic, and it can’t be denied.”
That last part got to me. I hated the way she could say things so clearly without ever really saying them at all. I had to pin her down. “You’re saying that’s what’s going on with Logan?” I asked. “That it’s not a haunting or a spirit possession or whatever . . . that it’s his own mind doing this to him?”
Again, Dr. Clyde didn’t speak for a long moment. “Paige,” she said at last, “I understand your concern for your brother. But remember what we talked about last week—about using him to hide from your own issues. I want you to think, Paige. Think hard about where this letter came from.”
“What do you mean? I told you, I got it out of his bag. I read it at school, and then—” But then something clicked. She never said anything, but I looked into her face and read everything there I needed to know. “You think it was me,” I said, reeling from the shock. “You think I crossed out these words. Hell, maybe you think I wrote them in the first place.”
“Paige,” she said, “I want you to think about where all this negative energy is coming from. The animosity you feel toward your brother. Is it because you see your father in him? Does it have to do with your mother’s new boyfriend? Acknowledging those feelings and working through them is the only way you’re going to—”
But I didn’t stay to hear the end of her psychobabble. I had to get out of there.
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3, 12:05 A.M.
Dr. Clyde has gotten under my skin. Now that she has put this idea in my head, I can’t stop wondering if she’s right. What if it’s all in my head? I guess that’s what I wanted to hear from the beginning, right? That I had some kind of mental issue that was causing all this, and it could be diagnosed and treated and cured. But I didn’t expect it to be like this . . . I always thought of mental illness as like other kinds of illness. Like, you’re this complete, whole, normal person, but then cancer or the flu or an infection comes along and messes you up, but you’re still you. I guess I pictured mental stuff the same way. Like a film that is covering your normal brain, making you see things funny, and you just need someone to scrape it away to be all right again.
But what Dr. Clyde is suggesting . . . what if this isn’t an illness that happened to me? What if this is all the “me” there is? And I do things I don’t remember, and I . . . *feel* things I don’t even recognize. Maybe my whole life, I’ve had something inside of me . . . something crazy, something wrong, something bad . . . and I kept it hidden from everyone. Even myself. What if the normal me, the sane me that I think I know, that everyone around me knows—what if that’s the film? And what if something in my life—the divorce, or living in this house, or my sessions with Dr. Clyde—is now scraping it away?
I don’t know if I want to see what’s underneath.
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3, 3:55 P.M.
I woke up this morning to find the yards in our neighborhood under a blanket of snow. It’s June! Even in Idaho, that seemed excessive. There was something odd about it, though. It covered the neighborhood, but not the fields behind the house, which are still green. And it doesn’t sparkle.
Turns out it’s not snow but cottonwood fluff. Arthur explained, and said it’s like this every year. You have to watch out for it because it ignites so easily. Ash from a cigarette butt could wind up setting the whole town aflame. Especially with the dry weather we’ve had lately.
It’s weird, though. Where did it all come from so suddenly? I never even knew we had cottonwood trees, and then one day there is this fluffy white stuff all over everything. I touched it and it stuck all over my fingers and clothes. Gross, but also kind of cool.
Bug update: I’m still unsettled about the spiders I saw in Logan’s room. Let’s hope they are just a fluke in Logan’s room, and not under every piece of furniture in this house. In any case, I am not checking under the others, science be damned.
The flies I was keeping in that jar seemed to have finally kicked it. They’re all lying feet up on the bottom of the jar. The ones downstairs are still going strong, so I guess that at least tells me these flies do need food to survive. I hadn’t fed them in ages. (Don’t tell Mom. It was really more accident than any deliberate plan to torture them.)
I feel slightly bad, but mostly good that these flies follow natural laws and aren’t superhuman. Superfly? Wait, no, that means something different.
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3, 4:07 P.M.
Uhhhh, scratch that! I picked up the jar to toss it in the t
rash, and suddenly they all started buzzing around again. That’s . . . freaky.
Now I’m not sure what to do with them. Guess I’ll leave them on the desk and keep staring at them in horror studying them?
FRIDAY, JUNE 5, 5:30 A.M.
Logan had another seizure tonight.
I don’t understand it. I thought he was doing better. We did everything Dr. Clyde said—stopped the Ritalin, took away his video games . . . Shouldn’t he be better now? But then again, did I really think he was better? For a while he seemed to be sleeping a bit, but lately I’ve seen him up in the middle of the night plenty of times. And those letters . . . I don’t know what to think anymore. Dr. Clyde had me half-convinced that I crossed out all those words to create that message. But if it really was Logan all along . . .
And I can’t even tell if this is just a medical issue, or if it’s something more. Something . . . different. But what would that even be?
I was lying in bed tonight, listening to the usual shrieks and howls of the wind blowing through the house, and then suddenly the wind died and it was eerily silent in the house.
I looked at my clock and it was a little after 3 a.m. I lay in bed for a while, trying to figure out what was bothering me—if it was a dreaming or waking sensation—and then I realized . . . it felt like the whole house was moving. Or . . . swaying. Almost like it was dancing. The only thing I’d ever experienced that was similar was earthquakes back in California, but Idaho doesn’t get earthquakes. And this felt different, anyway. More rhythmic.
After a bit, the rocking stopped, but I couldn’t go back to sleep. I could feel the vibrations from Logan’s room building in my bones, and I decided to check on him. I got out of bed and went to his room, but his bed was empty. I stood in the center of the room for a while in the uncanny stillness of the night, trying not to look at those strange symbols in the walls, trying to ignore the building tension emanating from the room itself. The sound was even worse now. I could feel it creeping through my whole body, making my bones and organs vibrate painfully. And in my head . . . what had once sounded kind of like a person screaming now sounded like an army of voices, some talking, some babbling, some crying and moaning in agony. No one else had ever confessed to hearing it, but even so—was it any wonder Logan had trouble sleeping in here?
I left the room to go look for him, sure that I would find him parked in front of the TV again, but he wasn’t. Instead I found him in the kitchen. There was bread laid out on the counter, and jars of peanut butter and jelly. And Logan was twitching on the floor.
I screamed and Mom came running. A couple of minutes later, Arthur was there too. I looked at him strangely, and Mom made some comment about her not wanting him to drive all the way home so late at night. At the time, I was too distracted by Logan to make much of it, but I guess this means Mom has taken their relationship to the next level. Ew. Can’t wait to see what Dr. Clyde makes of that.
Anyway, Mom called 911 and an ambulance came and took them both to the hospital, leaving me alone with Arthur. Arthur seemed pretty spooked, but I could tell he wanted to reassure me. He was like, wow, that was . . . something. But don’t worry, your brother is in good hands now. The doctors will look after him, and he’ll be fine. I just nodded mutely.
Arthur said, “You should go back to bed,” and I nodded, but I didn’t move. As if sleep were even a remote possibility. Arthur caught on quick. “You’re not going back to bed, are you?” I shook my head. “You want some coffee?” He waited for another nod, then put the pot on.
“You know he’s going to be okay, right? The doctors will look after him, and they’ll figure out what’s going on.” I didn’t respond. I appreciated his efforts to make me feel better, but I didn’t have it in me to play along. Arthur sat down in the chair opposite me. “You know,” he said, “I’ve got a cousin with epilepsy. It’s scary, but it’s not that big a deal, really. He just has to take some precautions, some medication . . . but he’s fine, he’s still the same guy.”
“This is different,” I said without thinking. I hadn’t really meant to spill the beans to Arthur. He’s a nice guy, but I figured he didn’t need to know all the grotesque details of our life here. Anyway, I expected him to brush it off the way most people have—like Mom and Dad and Dr. Clyde. To tell me, sure, it feels different to you, because you’re so close to the situation, but you’re just a kid, you don’t understand, blah blah. But he didn’t.
“Different how?”
“This isn’t epilepsy.”
“Well,” he said, “I guess we can’t know anything for sure yet. Sometimes there are other causes for seizures, but the doctors will—”
“The doctors won’t be able to fix this.” Arthur didn’t say anything, he just looked at me. I decided to give it my best shot and explain myself. “There’s something really wrong,” I said, speaking carefully, not sure how much I was ready to reveal. “Not with Logan. With something else.” Still, Arthur didn’t speak, but his open expression seemed to urge me to go on. Not like Dr. Clyde’s silences, where I always seemed to be able to read what she wanted or expected me to say. Like he was really listening. “I think it’s the house.”
“The house?” he said. “This house?”
“You haven’t noticed anything?”
“Well, it’s old. Kind of. Old for white people. If you come down to the reservation someday, I can show you stuff with a lot more history than this house.”
“Is any of that stuff . . . haunted?” Immediately I felt dumb for using the word. “I mean,” I tried again, “do you think any of that old stuff ever”—I reached for a phrase I’d heard my mom use—“accrues energy?”
“Energy,” he repeated with a frown. I don’t think I’d ever seen him frown before, but it seemed more thoughtful than disapproving. “Yeah,” he said, “I think I know what you mean. But I wouldn’t say haunted. The tradition I was raised with says that the spirits of our ancestors are with us all the time, everywhere—but it’s nothing to be afraid of. They watch over us and protect us. It can be a great comfort to know that our loved ones never truly leave us.”
And now I definitely know what he and my mom have in common. How is it so easy for everyone to believe in happy, peaceful hauntings? I’m sick of people trying to reassure me that I have nothing to fear from the dead. It’s all very well to *say* that the dead bear us no ill will, but that’s not always what it looks like.
I decided to try to get Arthur to see this point. “What if some of these spirits aren’t so nice?” I asked him. “What if they don’t seem protective? What if they seem . . . threatening?” And so, as we finished our cups of coffee, and he poured us more, I let loose with all the little things that I had noticed since we moved in. By the time I finished, it was starting to get light out, and I could hear birds.
Arthur was quiet for a moment, staring down into his coffee. “I’ve heard some stories,” he said at last. “Unfriendly spirits, some people say. Other people call them demons. I had a cousin—a different cousin—who went through something similar with her whole family. They live up on Sundown Heights, and everyone says there are spirits up there. The spirits live on the hillside and pass from house to house, if people give them a chance to come in. They say you have to close your curtains at night or they’ll watch you through the window. Don’t cry at night or they’ll hear you and come in. And if you eat with the windows open, they’ll come in for the food and when they can’t get it, they wreak all kinds of havoc. She told me one night she looked out the kitchen window and saw a little girl’s hand in a frilly white glove, just sticking out of the dirt.”
“Jesus. Was she scared?”
“What do you think? Her first instinct was to burn the whole place down and never look back. People used to do that more in the old days—a good burn will purify a place like nothing else. You come back next year to find mushrooms and berries instead of creepy undead babies. But we don’t have enough land anymore to just walk away from a fire, so instead
my grandfather came over to do a cleansing.”
“Did that work?”
“Sure it did. He’s a tribal elder, and when he speaks, everyone listens. Even the dead.” I didn’t say anything, but the look on my face must have spoken volumes. “Do you want me to see if he’ll come?”
I couldn’t speak or even nod at this offer, but tears of relief rolled down my cheeks.
SATURDAY, JUNE 6, 10:33 A.M.
These flies are really freaking me out, man. I’ll be so sure they are all dead, and then I come back from brunch an hour later and they are flying around like nothing’s the matter.
They look pretty healthy now. I kind of have another experiment in mind, though. Hmm, let’s see how this goes.
Okay, that . . . did not make me feel any better. Basically, I took one of the flies out of the jar and wacked the hell out of it with my history textbook. Then I put it back in the jar. I know, that’s weird, but I wanted to see if it would come back to life.
It did not. The other flies, however, immediately landed on the bottom of the jar and are now standing in a circle around it. What is this, an insect funeral? This is too strange.
SATURDAY, JUNE 6, 10:49 A.M.
Left to take a shower, and when I got back, the dead fly was gone. I can’t figure out what happened to it.
Did it regenerate and come back to life? To be honest, I’m not totally sure how many flies were in the jar in the first place, so I’m not sure if it’s flying around now or not. But I don’t think so. I really don’t know what the hell happened.