by M. Verano
Okay I am pretty sure the other flies ate it but I don’t want to think about that.
MONDAY, JUNE 8, 10:15 P.M.
Chloe came over today. Logan is still in the hospital for observation, and Mom is with him. I guess I just wasn’t thrilled about being alone in the house, so I invited her over, supposedly to celebrate the beginning of summer vacation. I don’t think I managed to look convincingly celebratory.
Even with her there, I found I didn’t really want to be inside. It feels oppressive. So we sat on the porch, watching the cottonwood fluff drift around the neighborhood. I still can’t get over how weird it is—not just a bit of fluff here and there, but sheets of it on every flat surface, laid out like quilt batting. It’s hard to get used to.
After a bit, Chloe got bored and decided she wanted to harass Raph. I told her I didn’t think that was a great idea.
“Why?” she said. “I thought you guys hung out. Wasn’t your mom, like, planning your nuptials?”
“Yeah,” I said, thinking awkwardly of my last meeting with him, in that darkened apartment filled with boxes. “Pretty sure the wedding is off.” I told her about Raph’s strange behavior and his sinister warnings, but I don’t think she really got the full extent of it. Somehow, when I speak, people always hear what they want to hear. I had hardly finished the story before she was bounding down the porch stairs toward his door.
“What are you doing?”
“Going to see Raph.”
“But—”
“The way I see it,” she said over her shoulder, “there are two possibilities. Either that last time was a fluke, and he’s fine now, and so it can’t do any harm to see him.”
“Or?”
“Or . . . he’s not okay. He’s got some kind of problems. In which case it’s basically a good deed to check up on him, isn’t it?”
I turned this over in my head. There was certainly a logic to her words, but still . . . I remembered his face last time, when he had told me to stay away from him. As if he was . . . not exactly threatening me. Warning me, maybe. But I still couldn’t make any sense of it. What could he possibly be warning me about? Did he think *he* had caused Logan’s seizures? Or all the other weird stuff in the house? That seemed unlikely. I don’t know why, but I was pretty sure that if there was something up with the house, it was something dead or supernatural causing it. Not a perfectly healthy college boy (a.k.a. a semi-healthy ex–college boy). Still, it seemed rude to intrude on him again, after he had been so anxious around me last time. On the other hand, I *was* curious about what was going on with him. I hesitated a moment longer, then followed Chloe to his door.
Chloe knocked confidently, and Raph opened it almost immediately with a smile on his face, as if he had been expecting us. Or expecting someone. His smile fell a bit when he saw us, and he ran a hand through his hair. “Oh,” he said. “You guys. What’s up?”
I expected Chloe to speak, but she seemed unaccountably tongue-tied, given her boldness only minutes earlier.
“We just, you know, wanted to say hi,” I tried, smiling nervously. “And check in on—I mean, see how you’re doing. I mean, say how are you. How are you?” Ugh, will I ever not babble like an idiot in front of this boy?
Raph nodded knowingly. “So this is what, a welfare check? Want to see if I’ve started carving the names of demons into all the walls of my apartment?”
“Oh my God,” said Chloe, finding her voice. “Have you? That would be so metal.”
Raph stepped aside and extended an arm, inviting us in. Chloe went in first and spun around, taking in all the walls. “Oh,” she said, sounding disappointed. I followed her and saw what she saw: totally normal walls, nothing spooky carved into them at all. What’s more, the place looked really different from the last time I had been there. For one thing, the curtains and blinds were open, and the sun was shining in. Also, all the boxes were gone, and the surfaces all around the apartment were neat and clear.
“What happened to all the boxes?” I asked. For a moment, I flashed back to my last session with Dr. Clyde, and was struck with a cold panic that I had imagined my whole last interaction with Raph. But no, I had taken that weird pamphlet back with me, and even shown it to Chloe. I couldn’t have just made all that up. In any case, Raph dissipated my fears with his next comment.
“Gone,” he said. “We took them back to the library.”
“We?” said Chloe.
“I did,” he said, blushing a little. “I mean, someone helped me. A friend helped me. It was a lot of boxes.”
“You have a friend?” said Chloe incredulously, which seemed kind of mean. But it was true that I had never seen anyone come to visit Raph, other than his mom and the delivery drivers. Raph’s expression showed that he felt the slight, but he didn’t respond to it.
“The place is a lot clearer now, isn’t it? It was . . .” He laughed awkwardly. “It was annoying, having all those boxes everywhere.”
“What were you doing with them?” I asked.
“Just . . . research,” he said.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” said Chloe.
“No,” he said.
“Oh,” she said. “Sorry.”
“No,” he said. “It’s a good thing. I mean, it’s . . . sometimes, when you’re doing research, you’re trying to prove something. A hypothesis. But if you don’t find evidence, that’s good too. Sometimes even better.”
Chloe and I exchanged a glance. It would be an exaggeration to say Raph was acting *normal*—he was still talking in riddles and not making a hell of a lot of sense, for one. But at least he seemed . . . happy. And his apartment certainly looked more normal. All in all, the signs pointed to an improvement in his mental health. So why did I feel so edgy?
“But it still means you were wrong, doesn’t it?” said Chloe.
“Yeah,” said Raph. “But sometimes wrong is exactly what you want to be.” And he let out a slightly unhinged giggle.
“You were researching Pronoica,” said Chloe.
She had hardly said the words before Raph’s expression shifted. The happiness and relief exchanged for a flash of that haunted look I had seen on his face last time we spoke. “How did you know about that?” he asked sharply.
“I’m sorry,” I said, shooting daggers at Chloe for selling me out. “That was me. I happened to pick up one of the pamphlets you had lying around last time and I showed it to her.”
Raph knitted his brows and his face darkened again. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he said, and I was revisited by the chill I had felt during our previous conversation. But he seemed to catch himself and he relaxed his face as he said, “I mean, all that stuff belongs to the library. You can’t just walk off with it.”
I told him I’d bring it back, but he seemed more interested in Chloe now. “What do you know about Pronoica?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Not much. Just that it was some kooky cult, basically. Except, it wasn’t even real . . . The whole thing was done through the mail, right? My grandpa told me once that the reason the post office in this town is so big is because of Pronoica. That guy, Frank Williamson—they called him the Mail Order Messiah. He used to take out advertisements in the backs of magazines, promising power and enlightenment to any sucker who sent him ten dollars.”
“And people fell for that?” I asked.
Raph shifted his gaze away from us. “You sure they were suckers?”
I couldn’t help laughing. “What, so you’re saying Williamson sent people supernatural powers through the mail?”
Raph rubbed his knuckles against his scalp thoughtfully. “You guys want some tea? My mom just brought me a new teakettle, and now I drink tea constantly.” Without waiting for our answer, he ran the kettle under the kitchen tap. It did not escape my notice that he’d changed the subject again. Chloe looked like she was going to ask him more about Pronoica, but I shot her a warning glance. We let him chatter on about tea varieties for the rest of our visit.
<
br /> TUESDAY, JUNE 9, 9:25 A.M.
God, my eyes are waiting killing me. How do people live like this? It’s worse than allergies. Worse for than that sandstorm, even. I woke up this you morning and my eyes were *stinging* and I couldn’t figure out why. My to throat was burning too, so I thought, am I getting a recognize cold? Strep? Then I looked out my windows as I was getting dressed, and the light looked . . . weird. Kind of golden, like a sunset, even though it was nine that in the morning.
Arthur stopped by for lunch and invisible told us about the fires—all this golden haze means that somewhere out there, the fields though and forests are burning.
“Out there?” I asked. “What about the town? Will it . . . ?”
The rest of the thought is too powerful scary to finish, but Arthur smiled and shook his presence head. “No, they’re really far away now,” he said. “Hundreds of miles, in fact, but the wind is so strong, it sweeps the ash and debris over to us they. But there’s no danger here. Not now, anyway.”
I want to are 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 pregnant strike. Sometimes the farm machinery with shoots off a spark from spiritual metal rubbing metal. And that’s all it takes. The next thing you know, the fields are blazing power.
TUESDAY, JUNE 9, 3:46 P.M.
Another session with Dr. Clyde today. A weird one. I told her about Logan’s most recent seizure, again forgetting that she must already know. I wanted to challenge her on that—obviously the seizures are in his head, not in mine. So why should she assume I’m making up all the other stuff? But I didn’t really make any headway there. She just kept asking me how I felt about it, and when I said I was worried, she seemed dissatisfied, and asked the same thing again in a different way. Like she wants a different answer. But what? It’s almost like she wants me to say I hate Logan or something, which is NOT true. But even if it were . . . it’s not like I can give him seizures. Can I? No, that’s crazy. Even by the standards of someone who thinks she lives in a haunted house, that’s nuts.
I tried to shore up my position by telling her about Arthur and how I had told the whole story to him, a real, responsible adult, and he had believed me. At least, he seemed to. But that took Dr. Clyde off in a whole other direction. She wanted to know how I felt about learning Arthur was spending the night. I was like, I think we have a bigger issue on our hands here . . . ? But she didn’t want to let it go. Shrinks, man—they have a one-track mind.
So then I brought up Raph, I’m not sure why. I guess for another example of inexplicable stuff going on in the house that can’t possibly be my fault, or my imagination. But that’s when things got weird. I had mentioned him to her a couple of times before, but just as “the cute boy who lives downstairs.” I mean, she asked me about boys directly during our first session, and it’s not like I have anything else going on. So I mentioned him, but she didn’t seem terribly interested, and it’s not like I really wanted to talk about it either.
Anyway, I mentioned him again this time. I think I said, “Raph is acting weird too,” and I was about to go into his sort of odd behavior the last couple of times I saw him, though I figured she wouldn’t make much of it. He’s been weird but not, like, supernaturally weird. But I didn’t even get to tell her anything more because she stopped me there.
“Who?” she said.
I said, “Raph, the guy who lives downstairs. His mom is—”
“That’s the college boy you mentioned?”
“Yeah, he lives in—”
“And you say he’s behaving strangely?”
“Well, kind of, but I don’t have much to—”
And that’s when Dr. Clyde interrupted me again, to ask exactly what Raph had done. Which was weird, because she never interrupts. Talking to a shrink isn’t like chatting with a friend or your mom or whatever. Their whole point is to let you keep talking forever and ever and ever, in hopes that you’ll stumble into something interesting. Or revealing. Or I guess if I want to be cynical, maybe they let you talk and talk because it kills the time and runs down the hour, so they get paid without doing any actual work. But either way, I had definitely noticed that Dr. Clyde only ever talked if I’ve been silent for a good long pause. Usually at least a few seconds, sometimes maybe a whole minute. And she definitely never interrupted. So why was she doing it now? What had I said to get her so worked up? Nothing, really. Nothing except . . .
“Do you know Raph?” I said.
Dr. Clyde was silent a moment. Then she said, “No, I don’t. But even if I did, Paige, you know the rules about confidentiality. Of course I couldn’t tell you.”
“That’s a yes, isn’t it?”
“No. That’s a no.”
“What do you know about him?”
“I don’t know anything, Paige. I’m only responding to what you’re saying, what you’ve told me, and what I notice in your body language. But I think . . . I’m going to advise you to stay away from this young man.”
“But you don’t even know him.”
“It’s for your own good. Stay away from him, Paige. Trust me.”
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 10, 2:57 P.M.
I was so disturbed by what Dr. Clyde said yesterday that I completely forgot Arthur’s grandfather was coming by today. Luckily, he texted me when they were on their way, so I was able to clean up a bit and not be completely taken by surprise. I checked the cupboards for any cookies I could serve with tea, but honestly, I had no freaking idea how one is supposed to entertain a tribal elder.
The other thing that was weird was that Mom didn’t know. I never mentioned it to her, but I guess I assumed Arthur would tell her. He apparently didn’t—maybe he assumed the same thing of me—so I had to fill her in quickly as their car pulled up. I’m guessing a lot of moms in the world would have trouble with the idea of some old man coming to their house to recite mumbo jumbo, but since Mom is basically the queen of mumbo jumbo herself, she took it pretty well.
I watched out the window as the old man eased out of the car with some help from Arthur. He was wearing jeans and an orange fleece jacket, and he had long white hair with a cropped ponytail on the crown of his head. As he made his way toward the house, two little kids hopped out of the backseat and started chasing each other up and down the porch stairs.
“Quit it, guys,” said Arthur over his shoulder as I met him at the front door, trying to clear a path through the slowly circling flies for them to walk through. “More cousins,” he said to me. “I hope you don’t mind. Pops likes to bring the little ones along to these things.”
I nodded, but Pops apparently thought it needed more explanation. “The rituals are in danger of being forgotten,” he said, his breath still coming a little heavy from the exertion of the stairs. “Ours is mostly an oral tradition, which means we need to be in the same place, repeating the same words together, or it will be lost.”
Arthur smiled a little apologetically at the old man’s words. “My brother is writing his dissertation on the Nez Perce language. A lot of the old stories are being written down, so they’ll be more permanent now.”
Pops gave him a sharp look. “Writing is good, but some things were not meant to be written down.” Pops then turned to me and Mom and looked us over. “You’re the ones who live here?” he said. “The ones who are visited by spirits?”
I looked up at Mom, not quite ready to say the words aloud to a complete stranger. She gave him a pleasant smile and nodded. “My son lives here too, but he’s at a friend’s house for the evening. Will that be all right?”
Pops waved a hand in her direction. “Sure,” he said. “No big deal. Where do you want me to set up?”
Mom looked around a little uncertainly, then guided him toward the kitchen table. “I guess this will work,” she said. As he began to set out his props, she continued. “Look, I’m not sure what my daughter told you, but you’re not going to do anything . . . unfriendly
to these spirits, are you? My philosophy is live and let live (“live and let haunt,” I couldn’t help muttering under my breath) and I, well, I don’t want to toss anyone out, especially since they were here first. Exorcisms can be so . . . spiritually violent.”
Pops raised his eyebrows at her. I wondered if he got this kind of speech from a lot of crazy ex-hippies, or if this was a first for him. “It’s not an exorcism,” he said impatiently. “Ceremonies like this one are really for the living, not the dead. This house cannot be blessed because it is blessed already by the spirits of the people who have lived here. This is only an acknowledgment of that blessing.”
Mom nodded, satisfied with this explanation. Pops took a bag from Arthur and pulled out an iridescent shell about the size of a baseball mitt, and placed a dried-up fir branch inside. “Patosway,” he said as he lit a match and held it to the branch. “It has many cleansing properties. And the fire acts as a purifying agent.” The match went out.
“That’s our ancestors’ idea of a joke,” he said with a gentle smile, and he lit another. That one, too, went out. He went through six matches, losing a little more of his good humor each time, until at last on the seventh he was able to light the branch. He blew out the flame and wafted the resulting smoke around the kitchen and toward the front hall. It smelled wonderful, though it stung my eyes before it dissipated. The kids stood around the table, fidgeting and looking bored.
After a minute, Pops pulled out a shiny brass bell and rang it three times, using his whole arm to swing it back and forth. I was so focused on the sound, I almost didn’t notice my cell phone buzz in my pocket. I reached in to turn it off. “Sorry,” I said.
Pops cast me a dark look, but I noticed Mom and Arthur reach into pockets to turn their phones off right afterward.
Pops put down the bell and began reciting a long prayer in a strange but beautiful language. Before he was done, though, we heard another vibration. Pops froze, stopping the prayer. I looked at the other two, but they just shrugged. Pops cleared his throat and continued with his song, but before long he broke off again. “What is that?” he said.