by Nick Lake
Which is why it’s especially painful that it was Jane, later, who ruined everything.
Out on the street, the sky was overcast and I could smell the ocean, brought in by a breeze, the air freighted with salt water and molecules of sea life—ground down by the years into mist—fish scales, shells, anemone.
I breathed in deeply, loving that smell, even if I hated Oakwood.
“You laughed,” said the voice, and suddenly my nostrils were full only of decay, the rotting of dead sea creatures.
“When you get home, you will slap yourself. Hard. Twice.”
And you know what?
I did.
These are the times when I didn’t hear the voice:
1. When I was sleeping.
2. When I was playing loud music. I used to listen to a lot of hip-hop. But rap is basically guys talking, and if you hear a voice that isn’t there, already, then it’s too much. So I switched to IDM, R&B instrumentals, anything with echo and reverb and bass and no one talking, ever. Never heavy metal. I tried that once. If you ever hear a voice and think you might be cursed or possessed or haunted, do not listen to heavy metal. It is a VERY BAD IDEA.
And:
3. When you were there.
I got into a routine. It sounds stupid, but I did. People cope, I guess.
There’s a convention: If someone has cancer, they’re “brave” and “fighting.” If someone is having problems with their mind, that person is only ever “struggling.” This is, on one level, stupid and offensive. I mean, the people who die of cancer—what, they didn’t fight hard enough? They weren’t brave enough?
But on another level, when it comes to the mind breaking down, it’s not wrong that you struggle. I struggled. Everything was hard. Getting up. Getting dressed. Going to school.
The voice would say:
“Change into something prettier. You look like a ******** bum.”
It would say:
“Walk up and down the stairs fifty times. You’re getting a fat ass.”
It would say:
“You’re so ******** pathetic, that’s why you have no friends.”
It would say:
“Open your mouth to reply to that cute boy who has ACTUALLY STOPPED AND SPOKEN TO YOU IN THE CAFETERIA AS IF YOU’RE A REAL, VISIBLE PERSON, AND ACTUALLY SEEMS INTERESTED IN YOU, and I will make your dad die in an accident.”
I’m paraphrasing—not the dying-in-an-accident bit, the boy bit.
And I kept my mouth shut. It didn’t make much difference at school. I never had any friends anyway. I was a freak and a weirdo. I sat alone, I worked alone. The voice let me speak to teachers if they asked a direct question, and if I obeyed it in all other things. It even let me finish King Lear and write a short assignment on it. I guess the voice considered Shakespeare un-fun enough that it was not verboten.
At home, I noticed that the voice was always loudest in my room. So I moved out—I mean, not out entirely, but to the little apartment above the garage, the one Dad would rent to kids working summer jobs at the amusement park.
Your apartment.
But back then it was mine. I laid out all the books I’d borrowed from the library in the little sitting room and kept the bedroom tidy; the voice made sure of that. I even cooked a couple of times in the kitchen when Dad was at Donato’s. Simple stuff: pasta, steak.
Like I said, when I was reading, as long as it wasn’t something fun, the voice left me alone. And especially when I was in the apartment. I don’t know why; I guess I would speculate that it was because my own room held more memories of my mother in it, invisible but there, like dust in dark air.
But anyway, reading in the apartment was the safest activity. Which meant no TV, no sketching in my sketchbook, no reading for pleasure. But nonfiction was fine, the drier and more boring the better.
So I read a lot. I’d stock up on books at the library and bring them back to my fortress above the garage, and I’d work my way through them: stuff on Greek myth, Native American legends, the history of the Spice Routes, technical textbooks on coding in Linux. Anything, so long as it wasn’t a story.
But mostly, anything I could find about the Houdini Killer.
I remember the exact day when I worked out what was happening with the voice, or thought I did. It was June now, near the end of the school year. It was seventy degrees out. Dad was introducing a new millipede to a tank in the house; we didn’t hang out much back then, but I’d seen the box arrive by FedEx, the holes cut in it. Old Mr. Grant next door was mowing his lawn; the drone of the rotor blade was coming through the open window and I could smell cut grass, mingling with ocean air. Mr. Grant lives on the side that does not have the mobile home filling the yard.
Obviously.
I was reading about Echo; what the voice was interested in was educational value. Not that it said so, but I got the point quickly after I turned on the TV and caught a few seconds of My Super Sweet Sixteen before the voice forced me to run up and down the block fifty times or it would cut out my dad’s tongue, which in itself was very Ovid, but more Procne than Echo.
Anyway.
You know the Ovid version of the Echo story, of course:
Echo has been helping Zeus to sleep around, distracting his wife, Hera, with her beautiful singing voice while Zeus schtups every shepherdess and naiad he can get his divine hands on. Hera finds out, and takes away Echo’s voice, her greatest asset, so she can only repeat the ends of other people’s phrases. Echo sees Narcissus in the forest, this unbelievably beautiful boy, and falls in love. But she can only say what he says back to him, which sometimes distorts his words in comic ways and besides anything weirds him out, and anyway he’s too, well, narcissistic to reciprocate, so he rejects her totally.
He says, “May I die before my body is yours.”
And she says, “My body is yours.”
Which obviously mystifies him and only makes him angry so he runs away. It’s all pretty funny and tragic and she wastes away and dies and blah blah blah, you know the rest.
But did you know there’s another story?
It’s in Longus, in his Daphnis and Chloe. Which, incidentally, is one of the very first novels. Long, long before Don Quixote. You thought I was a geek before? Ha.
Anyway. In this one, there’s no Zeus and Hera. There’s just Echo, who is a nymph. Again, she has a beautiful voice—one she can use to imitate any sound, the song of any mortal, the call of any beast, the liquid babble of a stream. Then along comes Pan, the goat-god of chaos and hedonism. Pan is worshipped by followers who enjoy going into frenzies, and who tear animals to pieces in his honor.
Yes:
We’re back on sparagmos, the act of tearing people to pieces. And the foot in the shoe. I don’t say anything by accident, you know that. Or you will anyway.
So. Pan sees Echo in the woods, and hears her, and he wants to possess her beauty. But he’s also a musician, a great one—the term “Pan pipes” comes from that fact, of course—and he is admiring and jealous at the same time of the way she can sing back any sound, the way she can even re-create perfectly the supposedly inimitable beauty of his own playing.
So, naturally, he tries to sleep with her.
But this time it’s Echo who does the rejecting. She guards her maidenhead, the usual nymph stuff. Runs from him in the time-honored fashion, refuses his advances. The way nymphs are always trying to do with Zeus, though usually he turns into a bull or a swan or something and tricks them into coming close and then rapes them.
The ancient Greeks: a weird people.
I got offtrack there. Pan tries to sleep with Echo, and she says no, so he goes mad, and being a Greek god and therefore mental, he whips his followers up into one of their frenzies—the word “panic” comes from this—and they tear Echo into little bits with their bare hands, and scatter her and her blood all over the woods.
But the earth. The earth loves Echo’s music, so the stones and the trees and the plants take her into themselves, and they
preserve her voice inside them, so that anytime anyone shouts or sings, Echo imitates their voice perfectly, calls back to them.
And this way Pan is thwarted, because he can still never possess this girl or her amazing voice. Every time he plays his pipes, she pipes them back at him from the rocks and the trees and the caves, echoing his beautiful music, taunting him.
Do you see?
The whole world preserves her voice, so she can accuse her destroyer over and over again.
I read this, and I thought:
Oh.
I remembered the voice saying, “I want justice.” I thought about how the voice had appeared to me first at the police station, after I found the foot. I thought of Echo’s voice left behind after her death, to punish Pan. My own suspicion, which I had pushed down inside myself.
What if the voice …
I took a breath. I didn’t know how to ask the question indirectly. “Are you … are you one of the murdered women?”
Silence—but mixed with interest. Focused interest. The eye of that giant predator turning slowly to look at me.
“He killed me and you did nothing.”
The voice’s voice was laced with venom. The voice of a snake, almost, all whisper and serious hatred. And this is how stupid I was: I took that “you” as collective, like an indictment of the whole town, the police, the justice system, whatever.
It didn’t occur to me the voice was talking to me. Singular. Saying that I had done nothing. Like I said, I was stupid. You’ll see.
Back then I just said: “Someone killed you. Is that right? And now you’re just … a voice. Like a kind of ghost, but one that only speaks.”
Silence.
“You want me to find out who did this to you? You want revenge?”
Silence.
“I think I’ll just turn the TV on, watch a movie.” I held my breath. Usually if I said something like this, the voice would tell me to slap myself or walk into a wall. I had done that a few times, walked into the wall, for considering anything that might be construed as entertainment.
Silence, still.
I sat there in wonder. The voice was a ghost, murdered by the Houdini Killer, and she wanted me to make it right. That was why she appeared after the foot, that was why she was so angry, that was why she’d picked me. Hell, I guessed it was probably her foot.
I knew what I had to do now.
I had to find the Houdini Killer. If the police couldn’t do it, maybe I could. People who hurt other people always get away with it, don’t they? That was what I’d wanted to tell Mr. Nakomoto.
Well.
Maybe not.
IMPORTANT CAPS-LOCK SPOILER:
I was not right thinking that the voice was a ghost.
I was very, very wrong.
I’d already read a lot about the Houdini Killer and what it amounted to was:
0.
Absolutely nothing.
No one knew anything because there were no bodies, only a foot—thanks to me—and nothing to link the girls, except their work.
Since the foot, of course, there were some more conjectures: most of the stuff online—the voice was cool with me researching online as long as I didn’t go on Facebook or whatever—agreed that the killer must have dumped the bodies at sea, and that was how come the foot ended up on the beach. Just like Dad said.
So they cross-referenced the dead women’s client lists and the membership lists of the strip clubs, where they could, with people who owned boats. But they didn’t find anything.
I know this because:
I was in the kitchen with Dad one morning, and I asked him, as casual as I could, if his buddies at the police station knew anything about the foot and the whole maritime-burial theory.
“You want to know what the cops are doing about finding this guy?”
“Uh … yeah.”
He looked at me with uncharacteristic concern. “You afraid?”
“Of the killer?”
“Yes.”
“I guess,” I said.
He nodded. “Thing like that, finding a foot. That’ll screw you up. Make you … struggle.”
NOTICE THE CODE WORD? The one people use about people with mental problems, as previously discussed? I didn’t, at the time. I wish I had. It meant that he had spotted that something was up with me. It should have been blinking with red lights, that word, flashing.
“Hmm,” I said, instead of noticing.
“I’ll ask at the restaurant,” he said. “See what the latest is.”
“Oh, okay, thanks, Dad,” I said.
“Don’t let it get to you so much, Cass,” he said.
ANOTHER WARNING SIGN I MISSED. People were already talking.
“I won’t, Dad.”
“Just, you know, keep safe,” he said. “Keep sensible. Don’t go out after dark. Keep dressing sensibly.”
“Dressing sensibly?” I asked.
“Yeah. You know. Like, not provocative.”
“Provocative?” I probably shouldn’t have been getting into an argument, but I couldn’t help it.
He blinked. “You see the photo in the paper of the last girl who went missing? See what she was wearing in that photo, taken just before she left the club? Looking like that, I’m not surprised that—”
“That someone decided to kill her?”
“That’s not what I’m saying. I’m—”
“Dad,” I said. “This is called victim blaming. Girls don’t ask to be attacked. Everyone should be able to wear what they want without creepy guys going after them.”
“I know that, but—”
“And men are not animals. I mean, shouldn’t we expect them to control themselves if they see a girl in a short skirt?”
“Yes, Cassie,” he said with a sigh. “You’re right. But I’m not victim blaming. I’m protecting my daughter.”
“Really?” I said. “Because mostly I thought you just played with bugs.”
Silence.
A long silence.
But he didn’t leave. Just stood there outside the door, on the top step, the garage below us, a motion-activated light above us that gave harsh halogen light and always came on automatically. Moths circling. The sound of a distant car engine, and way under it, ever present, the hushing noise of the sea.
“Cass, I—”
“What?”
He swallowed. “Nothing. I’ll see you tomorrow. Don’t be late for school.”
Of course, he never did find out anything at the restaurant. If he even asked.
“Slap yourself again.”
I slapped my face; it stung.
“Again.”
“Please. Please, no more.”
“Oh, okay, don’t. Let’s go play on the slot machines instead.”
JUST KIDDING.
Can you guess what the voice actually said? Yes! One hundred points to you. It said: “No. Do it.”
So I did.
I was in my bedroom in the apartment, sitting on the bed. Sunday before the last week of school. Outside it was getting hot, bright sun in the blue sky. A few scraps of cloud. The town was getting busier already. The workers for the piers had started arriving too. I even recognized a couple of them when I saw them walking down the street. Men and women who had been running concession stands since I was a kid. What they did in the winter, I didn’t know.
I went across to the main house. Dad was in his insect room, standing over a tank filled with tree bark and leaf mulch. He beckoned me in. I went over and stood by him. Shirtsleeves pushed up, he lifted a box. The tattoo of the seal on his arm seemed to swim as he moved. It was weird—he’d spent his whole life in the ocean, diving, and he lived in a town by the Atlantic, but he never went down to the beach anymore, not since he’d taught me to swim. Just played with his bugs in his study.
“I called your cell,” he said.
“Yeah? I must have missed it.” This was not true. I had taken the battery out and hidden the thing under the seat in the apartment. W
hen you hear a voice that isn’t there, a disembodied voice, a cell phone becomes an unsettling object.
He sighed. “Okay.” He opened the lid of the box, which had holes punched in the side of it, and used tweezers to gently lift out a wriggling millipede. The thing was the length of his finger, bright pinkish red with spikes on its back, huge, like something out of a horror movie.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Desmoxytes purpurosea,” said Dad. “People call this one the dragon. Because of the red. From Uthai Thani province.” He deposited it on a branch, then reached into the box and took out two more.
“It’s gross,” I said.
“It’s beautiful,” he said.
This was a script we followed. But then I went off-script because I realized he was holding his arm kind of funny. His hand and wrist were swollen. Then I saw the purple bloom around his eye. “You get in a fight?” I asked.
He grunted.
“At a bar?” This would have been bad. There had been a time after Mom died. A time with bars. And fights. Now there was a sponsor on the other end of Dad’s cell phone, and a disk in his pocket with ONE YEAR CLEAN written on it.
“Cass! No.”
“The restaurant?” I frowned.
“Yeah. Guy was making out he was a SEAL. Bragging, you know. Had a bunch of people with him, girls.”
“And he wasn’t?”
“Wasn’t what?”
“A SEAL.”
“Oh. Yeah, no.”
“How did you know?”
Dad looked at me. “He was bragging.”
I waited, just looking back at him.
“You see the shit we saw, you do the shit we did, you don’t brag about it.”
“So what did you do?”
“I said, ‘What team were you in, team twelve?’ And he said, ‘Yeah,’ and then I told him to get out of my restaurant. There are only ten SEAL teams. Guy didn’t want to lose face in front of his friends—so it got a little physical.”