Today’s argument had been over something as stupid as most of the other arguments. Her stepmother, Rachel, had returned home from her job at Gethsemane Merchants’ Bank and began picking at her father. Her father had invested in a local store that looked like it was going to go belly-up in a couple of months. This was a side project for her father and she guessed he made maybe one bad investment out of ten. Most of their arguments were about money. Given their professions, Elise thought that was probably only natural. Her father was the president of CashSmart, one of those check cashing places that loaned money to people who shouldn’t have money loaned to them.
Elise thought they were both predators. That’s what she imagined them as, giant birds of prey, stalking around the kitchen and arguing over the one truly unimportant thing in life.
But she didn’t have to hear it anymore. Now there was the tranquil silence of the Obscura.
Her family moved a lot. At least once every couple of years and, everywhere they moved, Elise had an Obscura. A little hiding place that wasn’t really so secret but she thought maybe the things that happened inside them were. The last one had been a shed made from particle board her father used for lawn equipment and Rachel used for gardening tools. She hadn’t liked that one so much. It was always hot and smelled like gasoline and oil. Before that, during her family’s brief stay in the country, a barn had served as the Obscura. That was in Indiana. One of the more memorable ones had been when they lived in California. Elise had claimed a kind of cove on the beach as her Obscura.
It didn’t really matter what the structure was, the interior was always the same. Calm, relaxing, like a dream. Nevertheless, she found she was using the Obscura with lesser frequency than she used to. But maybe that was because of the strange idea she had. Maybe that was part of the secret.
It wasn’t until moving to Gethsemane that Elise noticed a direct correlation between the Obscura and the deaths. More specifically, the suicides.
After the first one, she started paying attention.
Suicide Number One had been a boy named Alan Stanton. He had committed suicide by hanging himself on the same day she was in the Obscura. At first she didn’t really think anything of it. Then she read about it in the local paper and found his death had also occurred at roughly the same time she had been in the Obscura.
There was also one other important detail she couldn’t seem to overlook.
Alan Stanton had smelled bad. He had smelled very very bad. If Get High had a smelly kid, all fingers or maybe, all noses, would point to Alan Stanton. It seemed as though he had a double dilemma of not using underarm deodorant and not washing his ass.
When she had come out of her dream state in the Obscura, she had noticed this smell. She had not immediately placed it as Alan’s unique brand of stink. She just knew it was awful and all permeating and she had to leave because of it. But there was something familiar about it. She thought about that pungent stench for days but didn’t make the connection even after hearing about Alan’s death at school.
It didn’t strike her until Carrie brought it up. She had been at Carrie’s house and Carrie was talking about how completely crazy it was someone they knew actually killed themselves and she had said something about bad hygiene being a sign of suicidal tendencies. Elise had laughed, thinking bad hygiene was probably more the result of laziness than any sort of deep seeded psychosis and it hit her and her laughter died away.
Yes, Alan had indeed smelled.
And, on the day of his death, the Obscura had also smelled.
When she had gone back home, rushing into the Obscura, not to hide this time but to smell, she breathed in and there was still just the faintest hint of that stench and she was able to place it perfectly. She shared a gym class with the unfortunate Alan Stanton and there really was no worse time for a person with body odor than gym class. But that was where she had smelled the scent before.
And then she began wondering if she had somehow killed Alan Stanton.
In fact, if that were the case, she wondered how many people she had killed over the past several years. She had been hiding in some Obscura or other for as long as she could remember. And, when she was a kid, she used to do it all the time. She used to do it just to get attention. She would go out there and hide and, eventually, her father or her mother and, later, Rachel, would come out to look for her. But she didn’t know of any way she could put the two together. She had never attached her visits to the Obscura with death before and she couldn’t remember any of the exact dates of when she had gone into the Obscura. She was either too young and unobservant to notice, or it had never really happened before.
So, she decided she would have to wait and see.
The Obscura was hard to resist. It was a convenient place to go when Dad and Rachel were fighting. It was much better than her room. She couldn’t hear them in the Obscura. But it also seemed to cast some kind of spell over her. When she was younger, it seemed like her imaginary friends always seemed a little more real in the Obscura. As she grew up, the sensations were more abstract but just as magical. They became more feeling than vision. It was like a drug. She didn’t think any drug could make her feel the way the Obscura made her feel. Even those kisses she had shared with Steven, while they may have come close, could not match the pleasure she felt when in the Obscura.
She didn’t think it was a sexual pleasure. She had never fantasized about having sex when she was in there. Truthfully, she didn’t really fantasize about having sex at all. She still saw that as something very far off. She thought maybe it was more spiritual. She had heard of people being overcome by the Holy Spirit and thought it had to feel something like this. She could see how being in the Obscura made her feel like someone looking upon a beautiful heaven. Just a feeling everything was right and it was going to go on being right and like she was surrounded by some kind of awesome grandeur that could never, in a million years, be matched. That was what being in the Obscura felt like. It didn’t feel like that all the time. Sometimes she really did just use it as a place to go to get away from the fighting. Sometimes she took her homework into it so she could do it without distraction.
But if she lay down on the soft dead leaf covered grass, she would lose herself to it. And she now thought that was probably a dangerous thing. She was nearly certain, whenever she lost herself to the Obscura, someone died. It wasn’t just her being in the Obscura, she did that virtually every day. No. She had to be overcome by it.
It took until Jeremy Liven killed himself for her to realize this but, by that time, it was undeniable. This was the realization she had just made the first time she saw Steven, walking along in the dark night. And that was when she determined she was never going to lose herself to the Obscura again. That was, in retrospect, why she had been out walking in the first place. With the Obscura closed off, there wasn’t any place else to go.
But she had lost herself in it one other time. The night of Mary’s suicide.
Rachel had been in another one of her moods, only this time she had been attacking her father behind his back, when he wasn’t even there to defend himself. Rachel had one of her friends over. A heavily perfumed older lady who worked at the bank and had the odd name of Mrs. Legg. Rachel was telling Mrs. Legg about what a jackass her husband was. Elise had been passing by the kitchen when she heard this. She stopped her walking and turned toward Rachel and mouthed the word “Bitch,” hoping Rachel had seen her. She continued walking to her room, thinking maybe Rachel hadn’t seen her or maybe, if she had, was playing the part of cultured housefrau and didn’t want to start an altercation with Mrs. Legg in the house.
Only a few seconds later, as soon as Elise had sat down on the bed in her room, Rachel opened the door and came in. She lorded over Elise with her hands on her hips.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Rachel asked.
“Right now I’m just sittin on my bed,” Elise said in the dumb teenager voice that drove Rachel mad.
“No. I
meant down there.”
“Oh. Down there? Down there I was calling you a bitch. Well, not really calling you a bitch. I just mouthed it ’cause I didn’t want Mrs. Toe—was that her name—to hear it. I thought it might make her think less of . . .” But Elise couldn’t finish before her head rocked back after Rachel’s slap.
“Get out of this house until your father comes home. I don’t want to see you. And don’t go near Mrs. Legg on your way out.”
Elise didn’t argue. She simply stood up, went down the steps and through the back door, walking to the Obscura without really thinking about it. She had been told to leave and that was the most logical place to go.
And then Mary’s death had happened and that hurt her a lot because she was friends with a lot of Mary’s friends but there was the whole meeting Steven thing to take the edge off the pain. It was that night, coming to in the Obscura with the scent of the vanilla body lotion Mary wore still fragrant in her nostrils, she had met Steven. Not just saw him but talked to him. She had met him in the dark and he had talked to her, telling her all the right things, making her feel like less of a murderer.
That was why she was surprised when Bradley Shank excused his brains all over the auditorium floor. She was surprised because that had probably been the only authentic suicide of the whole lot. Even though that was the one that had made “The Suicide Virus” front page on nearly every nationwide newspaper, it was the one completely unrelated to all the others. She had not been in the Obscura at the time of his death, but sitting in the audience. And when she got home and dashed to the Obscura, knowing she wasn’t going to lose herself to it but just wanting to see if she could smell Bradley’s fabric-softener and hair gel scent, she had smelled nothing.
The next day, the day of Steven’s death, she had decided she was going to take down the Obscura. It was a pleasant summer day and she didn’t really have anything better to do. She was somehow responsible for the suicides. She wondered about the mechanics of it. She didn’t really know how it worked. It all seemed so crazy. She wasn’t the one killing them. She knew that. There hadn’t been any evidence any of the suicides were murder or there had even been another person present. Still, there were all those odd feelings she had. She wasn’t about to go to the police with a confession or anything, but she knew. And that was all that mattered to her. If another suicide happened then she thought she would probably end up taking her own life out of guilt.
She had woken up that morning, certain she was going to tear it down.
That was when everything went wrong.
It amazed her exactly how like an addiction the Obscura had become. That unfortunate day, she walked toward it, belying the promise she had made herself just that morning.
The parents fought and she ran to the Obscura and it soothed her jangled nerves. That was how it had been for however long she could remember. That was what had happened. She had been sitting in the living room, listening to Rachel and Dad’s voices escalating, until Rachel started throwing and slamming things. Her father had left, jumped into his BMW and sped off somewhere. Anywhere but here, Elise thought, almost sympathizing with him. Following his lead, she left the house without even realizing what she was doing.
Then, reaching the Obscura, she held up, remembering her oath, resigning herself to the fact that she was just going to have to go into her room and throw a pillow over her ears so she didn’t have to hear the raised voices of her father and Rachel if her father decided to come back.
Once at the back door of the house, she realized this was not going to be possible. The doors had been locked. She didn’t have to think too hard to know it was Rachel’s doing. For all she knew, the fight had been staged simply to drive her from the house. It wasn’t hard for her to figure out Rachel hated her. And it probably wouldn’t have surprised Rachel to learn the feeling was completely mutual.
The Obscura’s pervading calm was loud in her head. It occurred to Elise that it wanted her inside it. It wanted to fill her up with whatever strange magic it possessed. But she didn’t want that. She couldn’t live with the guilt it would bring. She now realized the Obscura’s therapy came with a cost she was no longer willing to pay. If no more people killing themselves meant she had to face reality head on, then she was willing to do that. As much as she wanted to be inside it, she just didn’t think it was right.
The only thing she could do to get away from it was just that—get away. She started walking, leaving her house behind and walking around the neighborhood. She walked up into Green Heights, deliberately avoiding Steven’s street. Had she been there a few hours earlier, she would have seen him dive into his truck and head out to the field. The field was on her mind too. It was the only thing really different she had seen in the last few months. Well, different in a good way anyway. Seeing the valedictorian blow his brains out on the podium had been different but not exactly the kind she was looking for. But the field was too far to walk. She wasn’t feeling that ambitious. Walking was easy, even entertaining, when Steven had been beside her but, without him, it just seemed like exercise.
Away from her house for nearly an hour, she decided to double back. Besides, it looked and felt like it was going to rain. She didn’t want to be stuck out in the middle of the street during a thunderstorm or, given the time of year, maybe even a tornado. She didn’t have any friends who lived close by. Nowhere to duck and hide if things got bad.
Surely things had cooled off at home by now, she thought. At least they would have unlocked the doors, not wanting her to get stuck out in the impending weather.
But when she got back to the house, the doors were still locked and, judging by the absence of cars in the driveway, it looked like Rachel had now left as well.
Great, she thought.
She felt like one of them had to have hidden a key somewhere outside but, if either one of them had, they neglected to tell her of its whereabouts. She looked in all of the obvious spots—under mats, beneath rocks, on top of the door frame—and came up empty-handed.
Behind the house, out by the woods, the Obscura beckoned her. It wanted her to come to it and, as the rain began, the winds picking up, causing the droplets to sting as they struck her skin, Elise didn’t see anywhere else she could really turn. She didn’t want to be in the Obscura but maybe she had to be.
Besides, the Obscura wanted her. Maybe it was the only thing that did want her. Lowering her head and crossing through the backyard, Elise gave in to the Obscura’s strange song.
She walked around to the far side, where the opening was, ducked down, and went inside, smelling the leaves and the moist earth. It didn’t keep out all the rain but it kept out the worst of it. And if things worked the way they sometimes did in the Obscura, she would be oblivious to the rain anyway.
Twenty-three
In the Obscura
The Obscura changed things. It erased feelings like guilt and fear. One moment, upon sitting down atop its soft bed of soil, she had the disturbing, undeniable thought someone was going to die. The next moment, she was caught up in the Obscura’s spell. Death became the furthest thing from her mind.
The beating of the rain became the waves and she thought of that most magical of Obscuras, the one beside the Pacific Ocean. She felt that sultry sea breeze against her skin, brushing the hair back from her forehead. She tasted the salt on her tongue and slowly, slowly shut her eyes, wanting everything the Obscura had to offer.
Then, as she had felt five other times this year, she felt it enter her. Suddenly, she knew what the Obscura was. A map of its bizarre geography was provided to her. It was more than just a structure. It was something like a shrine, there to summon a higher power. She had no idea what this higher power was. Who this higher power was. Once outside the Obscura, it was easy to think of the power as malevolent, evil. But inside the Obscura, caught under its seductive spell, it was hard to think anything that felt like this could be anything but good.
She was not the murderer. She was not the caus
e of those suicides. It was this thing that entered her when she lost herself to the Obscura. She was its way out. She was how it got into the world. How it got to the unfortunate souls. How it ate at their minds. All it needed was a mind to enter. A mind that was blank, calm. Once in that mind, it could become anything. But it chose to become fear. It was fear that had murdered the suicides.
This burst of clarity came at her in snapping waves and was just as quickly gone, overpowered by the Obscura or maybe just the thing driving the Obscura.
It wrapped itself around her, like a cool mist, complementing the balmy air. It rubbed against her skin, working it into gooseflesh, raising the follicles before working its way into her pores. It moved slowly. There was no sense of time in the Obscura. “Slow” was relative. It may have been seconds or hours before it fully entered her. She didn’t know and, at that point, once it was fully entrenched in her body, mingling with all her cells and spirit, she was oblivious to it. She was gone into a completely thoughtless state as close to death, as close to nonexistence, as she could ever get.
She didn’t know how long she stayed like that. For all practical purposes, that state didn’t even exist to her. It was, somehow, without being.
When she woke up the waves of the Obscura regressed, replaced with crashing black waves of regret.
It had happened again.
She knew enough now to know someone else had died. And she knew exactly who it was. She wouldn’t have to see it on the news or read about it in the papers to put everything together.
It was Steven.
The Obscura, its seductive god now parted, was redolent with his scent. It was a scent, more than any of the others, she knew very well. It was a fresh soap smell, covered just so slightly with boy sweat and maybe just a hint of cigarette smoke but not enough for it to be offensive. She thought she could even smell his saliva and maybe somewhere, very faint, the smell of his come.
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