I went into the kitchen, made instant coffee, and ate a breakfast bar that tasted like cardboard with chocolate chips in it. It tasted better than the coffee. If I was going to be here for very long, I’d have to spring for a cheap coffeemaker.
I set to work moving the largest pile of crap, which included a number of broken picture frames, assorted As Seen On TV kitchen gadgets, still in the original boxes, and a brass giraffe. Not sure about the brass giraffe. I patted its head. It was cold to the touch and had a vague, worried expression.
Moving the boxes revealed the back door. Well, I knew it had to be around there somewhere.
I opened it, found myself looking at a teetering wall of junk, and closed it again.
“Well, Bongo, ol’ buddy, we’ll be using the front door for a while yet.”
Bongo was nose deep in his own breakfast and did not seem perturbed by this.
A few minutes later I took him out on a leash around back and peered through the screens of the porch. In the morning sunlight, it was pretty obvious that the porch had been a dumping ground for old furniture, gardening equipment, and what looked like an ancient grill. All the corners had been filled in with more junk. It was really kind of impressive. She hadn’t just hoarded; she’d made walls and ramparts out of her possessions, like she was expecting a siege.
I turned away and saw an animal on the far side of the yard.
It was only for an instant, out of the corner of my eye, but I jerked back, startled. The animal vanished.
“What the…?”
Bongo was utterly unconcerned. A rabbit had been through here at some point in the last century and he was determined to track it to the end of the world. I fed out more line on the leash.
It was the rock. The big rock that Bongo had been going nuts over the other night. I’d forgotten all about it, and apparently so had he.
It was carved in a peculiar, abstract shape, with a deep swirl that went clear down to the ground, although whether the rock was partially buried or it was a deliberate choice by the carver, I couldn’t tell you without getting out a shovel and digging.
I turned my head a few times, puzzled, and suddenly the animal leapt into sharp relief again. It was… a hare, maybe? No, a deer. The carved swirl looked a bit like the curve of hindquarters, but I couldn’t tell you why it read so strongly as a living creature. There wasn’t anything like front legs. The head was thrown backward so far that it lay upside down against the spine. The “eye” was two deep parallel lines. Nevertheless, when I turned my head, it seemed to move.
When I approached it, I couldn’t see the deer at all anymore. The illusion worked only from a distance. Up close, it dissolved completely.
I touched the surface. It had the rough, crosshatched marks of a chisel. It was a good deal colder than the surrounding air. I shivered and wiped my fingers on my jeans, not sure if it was wet or just chilly.
“Did you see it the other night and think it was alive?” I asked Bongo. “Is that what set you off?”
Bongo strained after the scent of rabbit and didn’t give the rock a glance.
As art went, it was actually pretty impressive. Much higher quality than I’d expect from my grandmother. I wondered if it was original to the place, or if Cotgrave had brought it in.
Despite the craftsmanship, I found I didn’t have any desire to take it home. There was something unsettling about the lines of the eyes, as if the animal were angry. Did deer get angry?
Not the sort of thing you want at the bottom of the garden, anyhow.
“Just as well, really,” I told the dog. “Staying here makes me want to go home and burn most of my stuff. I’ll go all minimalist and sleep on a futon and have one perfect orchid for decor.”
Bongo gave up on the rabbit and slumped against my leg, grinning hugely.
“… and you’ll probably eat the orchid, won’t you? C’mon, let’s go take a load to the dump and get a cup of coffee that isn’t swill.”
* * *
I spent a pleasant hour at the coffee shop. The Goth barista was just leaving, and I got to meet her assistant, a six-foot-plus black man with a voice that I could hear through the soles of my feet. I told him that I was reduced to instant coffee at home and he looked at me as if I had told him about a great personal tragedy.
“We sell beans,” he rumbled. “I will grind them for you if you don’t have a grinder. No one should have to drink that stuff.”
I went to the hardware store and recklessly purchased a coffeemaker, then came back. The deep-voiced barista ground me up a pound of beans, which cost nearly as much as the coffeemaker. I could summon very little regret for this.
When the grinder had stopped grinding, he asked why I was in town, and I explained about Grandma.
“Cotgrave?” he said.
“Yeah?”
“My mama was the one who took her into town twice a week.”
“Your mother’s a saint,” I said. “Seriously. A saint.”
He grinned. “After raising my sisters and me, the old lady was nothing.” He shook his head. “Sorry to hear she’s gone, though.”
“You’re probably the only one,” I said dryly. I wasn’t feeling all that charitable toward Grandma now that I’d read her husband’s journal. “But thank you.”
“Ah, well.” He bagged up the beans. “House bad?”
“Bad enough. She was starting to hoard in a big way.”
He nodded. “Mama said she wouldn’t let her in to see it, just waited on the front porch for her. She thought it was probably a mess in there, but she didn’t keep cats and she was always dressed tidy, so no point in prying. Always wondered what happened after she went off to the home.…”
“She lasted nearly two years,” I said.
“Tough old lady.”
“That’s one word for it.” I smiled to soften the words—he was being much kinder than I was. “Please thank your mom for me, okay? If she hadn’t been taking her into town, we’d have had to put her in the home a lot earlier, and she would have hated it.”
“I will.”
I waved and took my coffee with me. It smelled amazing. I might not drink it. I might just keep it around and huff the bag occasionally.
I got home, let Bongo pee on some things, and went inside. In the middle of setting up the coffeemaker, I heard a noise so loud and shocking that I nearly dropped the glass pot.
It was the phone ringing.
I hadn’t heard a landline phone ring in so long that it took a minute to place it and then another minute to actually find the phone. It wasn’t in the kitchen; it was over in the living room. My eyes had slid right over it—it hadn’t occurred to me that it would be hooked up.
I eyed it like a snake as it rang. Should I answer? Who could be calling a dead woman?
Finally I picked it up and said, “H-hello?”
“Mouse?” The voice was tinny but clear. “Mouse, is that you?”
“Dad!” I said. “Dad, it’s you!”
“I had the phone company reconnect the line,” he said. “You didn’t answer your cell phone.”
I sighed. Dad was old enough that e-mail was a foreign land to him, and of course my phone was still barely keeping a charge. “No, we don’t have cell signal out here,” I said, rather than explain about software bugs.
“I’m glad I caught you. I wanted to make sure you made it there okay.”
“Yeah.” I blew my breath out in a huff. “It’s… it’s pretty bad.”
Uncomfortable silence. I could hear him moving around on the other side of the line. Finally he said, “Yeah, it is.”
I wanted to say Why didn’t you warn me? but that sounded too accusing. Instead I said, “How long was she doing this?”
“I don’t know. I knew the stairs were full of junk. You know how she couldn’t throw anything away. But I hadn’t gone into the rooms. I thought it was just like having a cluttered attic until I came down to take her to the home.”
I leaned over and looked
at the staircase. By the third step, it was impassable.
“I never stayed with her because of the dust, and she always wanted to go out. She’d been piling up newspapers, said she was going to get them recycled, but… I don’t know.” He coughed, one of the painful coughs that make me cringe. “I’m sorry, Mouse. I should have done more, but you know how hard it was to get her to do anything.”
“It’s okay,” I said. It was surprisingly easy to forgive him. The clutter didn’t feel like my father’s neglect; it felt like a manifestation of my grandmother’s malice. It could have turned on him as easily as on me. Would have turned on him, in fact, but I’d stepped in front of the bullet.
“It’s not okay,” he said wearily, “but it is what it is. Can you fix it? If it’s cleared out, the place should be sellable, but you’ll have to tell me if it’s more trouble than its worth. Should I just get someone to tear the place down?”
A day or two ago I would have said yes. I opened my mouth to say just that.
She has hid the book.
Somewhere in the house was Cotgrave’s Green Book. Whatever that was.
A day or two ago I might have just let it lie. But he’d cared about it so much, and he’d written about it, and…
… and he drew Kilroy on the page. And he taught you to draw Kilroy when you were a little kid. And your grandmother was cruel to him.
And he was obsessed with the book. The Green Book. With someone who twisted themself around like the twisted ones…
Oh, don’t lie to yourself, Mouse. You could walk away from Kilroy and the rest without feeling too much of a qualm, but it’s killing you to think there’s a weird book hidden somewhere and you might not get to read it.
A bulldozer would make finding the book extremely difficult.
“No,” I said, surprising myself. “Give me a while longer. I’m making headway. I can’t swear that the second floor won’t be a biohazard, but so far, so good.”
“All right. Call me if you change your mind.” He paused, and I waited. It always took him a moment to lead up to this. I don’t think it came easily, but he was determined to do it anyway.
“Love you, Mouse.”
“Love you, Dad.”
We hung up.
* * *
“I’m an idiot,” I told Bongo. “I could have gotten out of here. This place sucks.”
Bongo thumped his tail on the floor agreeably.
“But… God. I think I want to find that book. As if that’ll fix something.”
Thump, thump, thump went the tail.
“I mean… poor old soul. I know he’s not gonna care anymore. But he had to sleep in the woods. And the book clearly mattered to him. Why was he obsessed with this book?”
I sighed. It didn’t make any sense, and I knew it didn’t make any sense, and… well, here we were.
Maybe I just couldn’t let a book go. Maybe it was just that I didn’t want my grandmother to have won.
I looked around the room. It was so dark inside the house, even with every light in the place on. The kitchen looked almost like a normal kitchen and I’d shifted most of the newspapers, but there was still a corner of the living room covered in shoe boxes and old PennySavers, and the hallway was a disaster and behind every door there was more junk.
I hadn’t even gotten the stairs cleared. I’d been here for three days.
Maybe my grandmother had won already.
If she was a ghost haunting this place, she’d be smirking at me. Go on. Run away. I don’t know why you bothered.
I kicked a chair. It was childish, but I felt a little better. One thing I knew, though… I really didn’t want to be here right now.
“C’mon, Bongo. Let’s go for a walk. Clear my head.”
I snapped Bongo’s leash on him and he jumped up. We headed into the backyard and past the oak tree. He ignored the carved rock completely, focusing instead on a mourning dove that was strutting around in the leaf litter like it owned the place.
It wasn’t very cold out. North Carolina weather is so erratic that it could go from blazing hot to below freezing by the end of the week, but it seemed to have settled into a springlike state. The trees had narrow green leaf buds out, but they weren’t quite committing to budding yet. All the bare branches layered together like clouds of heavy gray smoke.
I gave Bongo’s leash a tug, and he left the dove and walked along with me. Scary rocks notwithstanding, he usually has very good leash manners, despite his other flaws. (This is a testament to the rescue organization’s training, not to my skills as a dog owner.) We kicked up dried leaves as we walked.
The open, leaf-floored woods gave way to a denser growth where the trees had been logged at some point in the past. The pine trees were only about as tall as my head, nothing like the towering loblollies with their bare trunks. There was still a broad cut through the undergrowth, scarred by old tire tracks. Somebody might have been out in their ATVs, but not for a while.
I suppose I was technically trespassing, but it was out of deer season, and my impression was that nobody around here cared very much. I had walked in the woods when I was a kid… hadn’t I?
I tried to summon up a memory, but couldn’t. All I could remember was paved park trails. Maybe I hadn’t wandered around behind Grandma’s house after all, baffling as that was. I was a kid who enjoyed the outdoors, particularly compared to the cramped sniping inside the house. Wouldn’t I have walked around back here?
Nothing looked familiar, or rather, it looked familiar only from trips with Aunt Kate. “Wintergreen,” I muttered to myself, passing a familiar rosette of leaves. “Crane-fly orchid.” That makes it sound like I’m some kind of amazing plant-identifying genius, but this one’s easy. The leaves are dark purple underneath and even a botanical bystander like me can remember it. Their old name was crippled crane-fly orchid, but it’s one of those names that’s softened as people learn not to be total assholes to one another.
Bongo snuffled through the scrubby brushes, occasionally poking himself in the nose with a twig. Then he’d jerk his head back, looking offended, and snort.
I gave him a little bit more line so that he could run back and forth. Every now and then he’d get it wrapped around me and I had to do a balletic twirl to straighten it out again.
I was in the middle of one such twirl when I looked up and saw a woman watching me.
My startle reflex was so strong that I gasped. Not that there shouldn’t be people there—I mean, this probably wasn’t even Grandma’s property anymore—but I just hadn’t expected anyone.
Bongo really wanted to go make friends. I pulled him back, just in case she didn’t like dogs, and waved.
The woman looked at me for a little too long, then raised her hand in the limpest sort of greeting. She was tall and had long, pale hair. Her clothes were loose and flowing, sort of hippie-earth-mother type, only in gray and brown, which was probably why I hadn’t spotted her at first.
She turned and began to walk away.
Well, then.
“Guess she doesn’t want to make friends,” I told Bongo quietly.
Bongo was all for running after her and forcing the issue, but then a squirrel scolded him from the trees, and by the time that encounter had come to its natural end the woman was long gone.
I heard the woodpecker tapping again, which meant that I was looking up, not down at the dog, and so of course Bongo took that moment to fling himself into a gap in the bushes.
“Yrrrrk!”
Bongo let out an excited bark and strained against the leash.
“Dammit, dog…”
It was a weird little gap, almost like a streambed. I think it had probably been a drainage ditch at some point, but it was dry now. Trees had grown up over the sides and laced together to form a crisscrossed roof overhead.
The ground was cracked clay. It was as good a direction to walk as any, and if it got too narrow, I could step up a foot or two onto the bank. And Bongo really wanted to see what was
down there.
“Fine…” I stepped down into the ditch.
Bongo had his nose down, straining at the leash. When I came after him, he glanced back at me—good, you’re here, let’s go!—and took off at a trot.
Every now and again, somewhere in that dense skull, some relay clicks over and Bongo is suddenly competent. I know what I’m doing. I’m a professional. Follow me. It’s amazing to watch, except for the bit where he can cover an enormous amount of ground without even noticing and then wants to be carried home.
But it’s not like I had anywhere to be. I hurried after him at a trot, watching my feet in case there were any sudden holes to step in.
That’d be just awesome; step in a hole and break your ankle a mile from the house.
I’d rather be out here with a broken ankle than back in that house right now, I thought to myself, even though that was probably a bit melodramatic.
No, you wouldn’t. You’re wasting time. You should be back at the house clearing out the bedrooms. Those rooms full of dolls and Tupperware won’t empty themselves.
Ugh. Maybe I should just call Dad back and tell him to hire a bulldozer.
If you were back at the house, you could be looking for the Green Book.…
Well, there was that.
The corridor of trees grew more solid. When I glanced up briefly, I had an impression that I was surrounded by wicker walls. Bongo was dappled with sunlight through the breaks in the branches. He looked a bit like photos of the antelope he was named after, bits of bright light and shadow on dark red hide.
Antelope probably did not move with that businesslike, ground-eating trot. The leash was taut but not straining.
We were going uphill, I realized. There were more rocks underfoot now, some of them half buried in the clay, some lying loosely on the surface. One turned when I stepped on it and I had to catch myself. Bongo looked back at me again—still with me? Come on, human. We’ve got places to be.
The path got darker and steeper, and Bongo started doing some of the work of pulling me up the hill. I have friends with huskies who do a type of cross-country skiing where they hook the leashes to their belts and let the huskies pull them along. Huskies are made for pulling, though. Coonhounds are mostly made to follow their nose to a tree and then bay hysterically until a hunter comes along and shoots whatever is in the tree.
The Twisted Ones Page 6