Ambrose would say that as there are humans sensitive to the peculiar humors & wonders of the others, who attract them, it must follow there are those who are the opposite & actively drive such humors away. But A. felt to seek out such wonders led to sin, whereas I cannot believe that the opposite leads to virtue. Certainly there is no virtue in her.
Miss Ambrose terribly. Have made a grave error, I fear. If I can get the book back, will leave at once, take chances with the others. Would rather die in fear and glory than needled to death in this wretched house.
The sentiment was understandable, but die in fear and glory was an odd way to put it. Was Cotgrave planning to join the foreign legion?
I had no idea what to make of the bit about sin and virtue. Apparently he’d been religious.
“Though it doesn’t sound much like Sunday school. More like Thomas Aquinas. Or maybe he was a Gnostic or something,” I said to Bongo.
Bongo stretched out again. I held my breath in case that joggled loose anything foul, but apparently he was done for the night.
I turned the page and grimaced.
I made faces like the faces on the rocks, and I twisted myself about like the twisted ones, and I lay down flat on the ground like the dead ones.
(Again? I thought. Cotgrave was obsessed.)
Reading it here doesn’t last as long as reading it in the Green Book. Only two or three days, not weeks. Writing it down lasts longer, though. I can go almost two weeks if I write it down.
It occurred to me again that Cotgrave might have been suffering from dementia. He had been very old when he died, hadn’t he?
I had no idea how old, come to think of it. If he’d been the same age as my grandmother, then somewhere in his eighties, maybe? Certainly old enough for the wires to start getting crossed.
Then again, Dad was in his eighties, and he was still rather frighteningly sane. Grandma had been too, except for the hoarding, and the hoarding probably wasn’t related to old age.
And I twisted myself about like the twisted ones and I lay down flat on the ground like the dead ones.…
Ugh. Well, I could see how he got that stuck in his head, I suppose. It didn’t exactly have a rhythm, but it had an intrusive quality to it. Like when you stand on the edge of a high place and your brain whispers to you about jumping.
Have started going for walks just to get out of the house. Sometimes she won’t let me nap. I go into my room, but she bangs on the door to make sure I’m not sleeping. Don’t want her in the room any more than necessary.
Took a nap in the woods yesterday. Not a good idea, probably, but was so tired.
Poor old soul, I thought. It was painful to read. My grandmother had been such an awful person. Even knowing that he’d died years ago and nobody was interfering with his sleep now, I felt bad for Cotgrave.
I wondered if Dad had known about this. I had been in college—maybe even high school—in another state. I couldn’t have prevented it. But I wish someone had called the state about elder abuse and taken the poor man away.
Though maybe he wouldn’t have wanted to leave, since he still hadn’t found his book.
Should probably write down everything I remember of the Green Book, in case it really is lost. She keeps the living room clean for her son, but the closed rooms are a monstrous clutter. Place may burn down and the book lost.
Would have to hide the manuscript somewhere, though. If she found it, she’d hide it, too, just to spite me.
Wish there were someone I could mail it to. Ambrose has been dead so long. Should have asked him about other students. But he sent me the book.
I wish I’d never read any of it.
The rest of that page was blank, except for a little “Kilroy Was Here” doodle at the bottom.
Would you find it odd that the doodle nearly made me cry? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe you understand how people work.
It was such a human thing to have done. The rest of the journal could have been like reading a book, albeit one in cramped handwriting, but then there was the drawing. I’d doodled that exact thing on essays and in the margins of math homework.
In fact…
I stared at the page, not really seeing it. Had it been Cotgrave who showed me? It seemed like I’d always known about Kilroy, but you hardly ever saw it on the Internet. I couldn’t remember my father drawing one ever. And Aunt Kate had laughed when she saw one of mine and said, “Wow, that takes me back!”
If I strained, I could almost remember—or could make up the memory out of whole cloth, most likely—Cotgrave with a slip of paper, showing a little girl who wasn’t his granddaughter how to draw Kilroy, in this very house, after Grandma had done something to make me upset yet again.
I couldn’t remember why I had been upset. Too many things to choose from, probably. I had been close to crying, hadn’t I? But just old enough that I didn’t want to cry in front of my grandmother. So I had run outside, and Cotgrave had been sitting on the porch in a rocking chair and he had looked at me and said… said something.…
“Don’t mind her. She’s a spiteful old bitch.”
The obscenity had shocked me and made me giggle all at once. I had shoved both hands over my mouth, still close to tears. “I don’t like her,” I whispered through my hands.
He nodded. “I don’t like her very much either,” he said.
I was too young to wonder why he stayed married if he didn’t like her. I just nodded. When you’re a kid, you’re always wrong if you’re mad at a grown-up. But now a grown-up had agreed with me, and that meant that maybe I was right after all.
Cotgrave had a newspaper in his hands. The “funnies,” he always called them, not the comics. He folded a page over and took a pen out of his pocket. “Do you know Kilroy?” he asked.
I shook my head.
He drew a line on the margin of the comics page, next to Prince Valiant. A line with three curved shapes in it, the longest one in the middle. I watched, fascinated, and then he drew three more curves and the line became two hands and a nose. He added a curl of hair and two dots for eyes. “Kilroy,” he said.
“Do it again,” I said. It was like a magic trick, the way the lines turned into a person.
He drew it again and again and then taught me, patiently, how to draw it myself. “We used to draw this on things,” he told me. “Mr. Chad, we called him. But the Yanks called him Kilroy, and it stuck. You’d get to a place where you’d never been and then you’d see Kilroy and you knew someone else had been there before you.”
Thirty-odd years later, I looked down at the drawing of Kilroy in the journal and sighed. He’d been talking about being a soldier in the war. I hadn’t known that then.
Oh, give it a rest. I was tired and sad, that was all, and the job in front of me was making me tired and sadder. Maybe I was just inventing tragic nostalgia where none should exist.
“That’s enough for one night,” I said. I put the journal in the desk drawer. Tomorrow I’d download a novel. A Regency romance with lots of sex and tragic misunderstandings and a happy ending like Marshmallow Fluff. Something kind and set completely apart from this awful house.
I blew out the scented candle, turned off the light, and fell asleep at once.
* * *
In the middle of the night, Bongo started whining to go out, so I got up. (This is a hindbrain function for dog owners.) I snapped on his leash and took him outside.
The moon was very bright. The trees were very dark, but the house was brightly lit and cold blue shadows lay across the ground. I’d shoved my feet into my sandals, but I wasn’t wearing socks, and the cold grass soaked my bare feet. My nightgown had Eeyore on it, demanding coffee, which was adorable but not as warm as it could have been.
I don’t think most people can be outdoors in a strange place and not feel a little bit of trepidation. There might have been serial killers. Or bears. I don’t think I’m afraid of bears, but I’d rather not find out for sure.
Naturally Bongo needed to sniff
out exactly the correct place to pee. We went around the side of the house, past the carport—“Seriously, buddy?” I muttered—and he had to stop and smell all the things.
We went out into the garden while I grumbled, and then Bongo’s fur went up in spikes and he began to bark.
I wasn’t afraid. I was exasperated—don’t get me wrong—but not afraid. Because… well…
“It’s a rock, genius.”
Well, it was. It was a big rock, about knee high, on the edge of the cleared area, near the oak tree. It had been shaped into some kind of yard art. If I came back during daylight, I’d probably see that it had been carved into an American eagle holding the severed head of a terrorist or something. Grandma wasn’t exactly a patriot, but she dearly loved having an excuse to hate a whole group of people.
I doubt she could have hated any terrorists as much as Bongo hated the rock, though. Never mind that he’d been less than thirty feet from it a few hours earlier, that rock was now making him nuts. He was actually snarling at it, and I didn’t think he knew what a snarl was.
“Is there a possum behind it?”
I tried to lead him around the rock, but he was not having it. Bongo weighs maybe sixty-five pounds and I am probably stronger than he is, but I try not to test it in case it turns out I’m wrong and it reverses the power dynamics of our relationship. He did not want to get any closer to the rock. The rock was the enemy.
I stopped bothering with the leash and got him by the collar. This actually seemed to make him happy, although not in the way I’d expected. He stopped snarling and started barking, the look-my-packmate-is-here-and-we-are-gonna-mess-you-up bark that he uses at home when the neighbor’s dog is tormenting him through the fence and I come out to take him inside.
“Come on. Come on, Bongo. Bongo! Leave it!”
He left it, reluctantly. I walked him back toward the house with my hand on his collar.
As we approached the front door, he suddenly cheered up and his tail started wagging again. He remembered that he had to pee, and I barely got my foot out of the way in time.
You may think that I’m being exceedingly dense not to think that something was wrong at this point, but in my defense, I once saw Bongo lose his shit at a garbage can. An empty garbage can. I’ve never figured out what his beef was with that can. Maybe there had been a possum in it at one point in the distant past.
What I am getting at here is that my dog is not a reliable indicator of Bad Things Going Down.
(Although hell, what do I know? Maybe that garbage can was sitting right at the nexus of where our world touches another one, and he was baying and charging at it to let me know that eldritch abominations were breaking into our reality. Who knows anymore? I sure don’t.)
Once he had finished anointing the grass, he was happy to go back inside. The scary rock was forgotten. We threaded our way through the house and I shut the bedroom door behind me.
Partly it was to keep Bongo inside, but it was also because the rest of the house felt hostile, as if the clutter was going to come oozing inside on tentacles of old newspaper and baby dolls.
I kicked off my sandals and shoved my feet under Bongo’s ribs. He was like a space heater, even through the blankets, and unlike my last boyfriend, he never complained about my cold feet.
I fell asleep again immediately, before I was even warm.
* * *
Just before dawn, Bongo woke me up by leaping to his feet and baying hysterically at the window.
I opened my eyes, said, “Jesus,” and looked at the window. The moon had gone down, but the yard was bathed in that cold gray light that means you’re either up too early or way too late.
Something pale bounded through the yard on four legs, followed by another one. Bongo lost his mind. He’d start with a bark and it would trail up at the end into a “rooooo-roOOO!” howl. Every time he bayed, he bounced on his front feet, which made the bed shake.
“It’s deer, idiot!”
“Hwuaaaafffforrrroooo!” he said, or words to that effect.
I groaned and flailed for my phone. The screen said that it was 5:03 a.m. I groaned again, set the phone down, and poked Bongo in the ribs with my foot. “Settle down.”
“Wuuuaaaaoorrroo-rooo!”
“The deer are not going to come and kill us in our sleep, buddy.”
Bongo seemed unconvinced. He settled down, muttering in his throat, though that was probably because the deer were gone.
“Go back to bed.”
“… hrwuff.”
I could hear all the horrible noises of early morning—the birds starting up and the spring peepers. It was frog season in North Carolina, and the frogs can go all night and half the day when they’re in the mood.
There was a hollow knocking sound somewhere. It sounded close to the house. Probably a woodpecker, I thought, though it was spaced out. Then again, there’s a lot of different woodpeckers. The big Woody Woodpecker kind and little black-and-white ones and one that’s got a head the color of a highlighter pen.
Bongo glared out the window until I fell asleep, and for all I know, he kept glaring for a long time after that.
* * *
I got up around eight in the morning and poured Bongo some dog food from the bag in the car. He looked at me sadly, perhaps wishing for more cheeseburgers.
“Today, groceries,” I said. “And a radio.” I had exhausted most of the songs that I could sing, and while I have an extensive knowledge of the discography of Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails, neither of them lend themselves well to singing a capella.
And I twisted myself about like the twisted ones.…
I started singing something. I didn’t even know what it was until I hit the chorus and discovered that it was the theme to Cheers. Bongo looked up from his food long enough to give me a disappointed look.
“Sorry.”
Once he’d finished, we headed out to the truck. There was nearly a full load in the back. Maybe the nice Goth barista could tell me where to find the county dump.
As it turned out, she could, and also where to get a breakfast that wasn’t watery eggs from the diner. There was a half-decent place hiding behind the gas station, as long as you weren’t too picky about things like matching chairs and the existence of tablecloths.
“How bad is it?” she asked, glancing out the window to my truck.
“Bad,” I said. I stared into my coffee. “She was a bit of a hoarder.”
She hissed in sympathy. “I know how that goes. Ugh.”
“At least she didn’t have cats. It’s just papers and clothes and a whole room full of dolls.…”
“Nothing creepy about that,” she said, grinning.
“Not in the slightest.” I shuddered theatrically, and we both laughed.
Back to the hardware store I went, for a radio and even more garbage bags. Then the grocery store, which was an honest-to-God Piggly Wiggly. The South is weird.
Bongo grumbled at me for leaving him in the car, even on a cool day, but when I came back with bags filled with dog treats and potato chips, he forgave me. He believes that anything that makes a plastic crinkling noise is probably for dogs. (Again, on the off chance that my vet is reading this, he got that from his previous owners. I swear.)
I checked my phone, thinking about calling my father, but the battery was nearly dead. “Dammit, I charged you last night.…”
I hooked it up to the truck, started the engine—sorry, environment—and drove close enough to the coffee shop to get on their Wi-Fi. The e-mail I was waiting for hadn’t come through. I didn’t feel like trying to call Dad and getting cut off two minutes in. I downloaded a couple of novels and drove to the dump instead.
The guy at the dump helped me unload the steam cleaner. He was a grizzled old white guy in a John Deere baseball cap. “You going to have more?”
“A lot more,” I said. “I’m cleaning out my grandmother’s place. She passed away, and it’s… well, there’s a lot of junk.”
�
�Sorry to hear that. Hang on.” He went into the little office and came back out with a sticker. “If she was a county resident, that’s good enough for me. Put this in the truck window and you can dump for free.”
“Oh God, thank you!” I hadn’t even thought about the fees. “That’s really helpful.”
He smiled. “Glad to help. I’m Frank.”
“Melissa. Friends call me Mouse.” I grinned. “As often as I’m gonna be here for the next few weeks, you should probably just start with Mouse.”
Frank tapped the rim of his baseball cap. “Nice to meet you. Who was your grandma, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Mrs. Cotgrave,” I said. “Off Horse Bridge Road.”
“Over by the commune?”
I braced myself, just in case he had opinions about hippies. “Across the road and down a bit from it, yeah.”
He nodded. “If you’ve got more stuff in the house you can’t lift, go over there and see if Thomas is around. He’d probably give you a hand with it.”
I am not a fan of Southern chivalry in general, particularly the sort that involves people calling me “little lady” and charging me three times as much for car repairs, but I’ll make allowances if it helps move my microwave. “Thank you.”
“God bless,” he said, waving as I drove away.
I checked my phone again before I got out of data range, discovered that it hadn’t charged worth a damn and was also hot enough to fry an egg. “Sonofabitch…”
I pulled over, did a quick search online, discovered that there was a known bug in the latest operating-system release that made the phone run hot and burn battery like it was going out of style. They promised to fix it really soon.
Great.
Well, it’s not like I got signal out at Grandma’s place anyhow.
I switched off my nicely toasty paperweight and drove… Look, I’m going to call it home for now with the understanding that it was not—and never would be—home, but there’s only so many clever ways I can type it out. I drove to my temporary, not-for-real home.
The Twisted Ones Page 4