The Keeper

by Langan, Sarah,

  She stood back and looked over the smoke-filled room. The smoke-filled town. The beating boiler. The ticking paper mill. The flooding roads that felt like blood through her veins. She did not want this. She wanted it. She had always meant to do this. She had never meant to do this.

  Susan took a deep breath in. The sound was a high-pitched whistle, like wind against glass windows. The barometric pressure in the basement suddenly got very high, and Liz’s ears popped. The smoke swirled in the shape of a small, black tornado. It circled the room, again and again, and still Susan kept breathing in. Her small chest puffed out to twice its size. The tornado smashed the bookcase into a thousand pieces on the floor, and spun the dresser and bed in the air, until it finally plunged inside Susan’s nose and eyes and ears and mouth. She took another breath in, and all the smoke entered her, leaving the air bright and clear. She took another breath in, and Liz’s own breath was lost. It left her lungs, and entered Susan. Immediately, the welts on Liz’s skin were gone, and her wet lungs were dry.

  Liz looked over at Mary, who was no longer coughing or even out of breath. Susan smiled at them. Her grin was without cruelty. Still, her head lolled. Still, her bones jutted through her festering skin. It was so difficult to look at her.

  Then Susan reached out her arms. For one long second, there was no one to receive her. Just Susan standing in the room with her arms wide and completely alone. But then Liz stood and embraced her sister. Mary followed. The three of them formed a circle. They held on tightly, trying in their awkward ways to express the inexpressible.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  The Keeper

  At five o’clock Thursday morning, the smoke in the Marley house thinned, and Bobby woke up. He raced down the stairs and found the three women standing in a circle. At his approach the circle broke. Liz left from her mother and sister, and went to Bobby.

  Susan turned from them and started up the stairs. She left the house and walked down the flooded and smoke-filled street. As she limped, one foot sliding along the water, the other thumping down through the mud, Liz, Bobby, and Mary followed from a distance.

  At the mill, there was a crowd of people, all with blue eyes. The buzzing sounds of the night became one sound; an endless, soulless scream. As Susan approached, the crowd parted for her. She walked through them and toward the black pipe of the mill, as if marching down an aisle at a church.

  She looked at every face, remembered every story. On the periphery of the crowd stood Bobby’s family. They held the twins in their arms while their daughters stood by their sides. In front of the mill was Danny Willow, who was tending to his wife’s body. He pushed down hard against the gaping wound that would not stop bleeding. Behind her, Montie Henrich pinned Kate Sanders to the ground to still her flailing arms. The recently dead were there too: Louise Andrias, Steve McCormack, Owen Read, Laura Henrich, Chuck Brann, and Thomas Schultz. And in the distance William Prentice was shrouded in shadows, a negligent father forsaken by his children.

  Ragged and limping, Susan kept going. The smoke poured from the orifices of the mill like a bleeding wound. Its machinery made kicking sounds like the boiler of her house. Like a heart. Like the voices. Like the rain. It beat faster and faster. Faster and faster.

  She got to the broken door of the mill, and then turned to look out over the crowd. She saw Lori Kalisz, Michelle Torrens, Artie Schupbach, and a handful of others, who would leave this town tomorrow if they lived, driving away as fast as they could. She saw the Fullbrights, who even now were thinking that they should have locked their doors, they should have lived farther up the hill, they should have built their house from steel instead of brick, as if such things could have made them safe. She saw Georgia O’Brian, whose only thoughts could be read on her face. My son, she was thinking, unable to go any further than that, shaking him, crying over him, listening to his chest for small breaths.

  She saw Liz, who held her boyfriend’s hand. They whispered words of consolation to each other, and Susan knew that together or alone, they would finish this thing better than they had started. She saw Mary, who smiled weakly at her. Mary was already beginning to forget. If she lived to see morning, she would tell herself that all of this had been a dream, and only remember the flicker of a moment in which her courage had overcome her fear. She saw her father’s ghost standing far back behind the crowd. A shadowy figure, he nodded at her, and then turned away. There was one last person she looked at. She met his gaze. The worms wriggled through his beard, and into his mouth. They bored through his skin and the sockets of his eyes. Rossoff dropped to his knees and died.

  She turned to the mill. Inside its doors, Paul Martin’s ghost beckoned her. He stood taller, his stubble clean-shaven and his suit neatly pressed. She knew why she had been drawn to him years ago, why she had sought him out over and over again, why their fates had always seemed so inextricable. Because she had known that all things between them had added up to this moment, and that he would not let her go through this alone. He smiled at her; a kind, placid smile.

  The crowd closed in around her. The mill kept beating, faster and faster. Faster and faster.

  She hesitated even while they coughed, and two more fell down dead. One was Richard Miller, the other Jonathan Bagley. Jonathan’s wife, Anna, knelt down and flicked his cheeks with rain as of to wake him from a pleasant dream.

  Jerome Donally was the first to throw a rock at Susan. It missed, but then Bernard McMullen smashed a Heineken bottle against her face. It bounced off her chin and rolled downhill. They closed in around her. The crowd. Alexandra Fullbright ground Susan’s shoulder joint out of its socket. Kevin Brutton yanked on her other arm until he came away with a sleeve of her skin. Faceless fingers poked through her stitches until her stomach opened, and her organs tumbled out. A spleen, a kidney, the gray tubing of her small intestine. They tore until she was only muscle and bone.

  She collapsed to the ground, and the crowd stood over her. She saw their eyes, wild blue eyes, and knew that they had gone mad. They had become what she had been in life. She could read their thoughts. They did not want her to save them. They wanted to tear her apart.

  Just then, she heard a loud pop, and the crowd pulled back. Danny Willow pointed his gun into the air and fired again, and they scattered. Still, the smoke kept coming. Three more fell. Sean O’Connor, Dan Hodkin, Amity Jorgenson.

  Too weak to stand, she crawled toward the mill’s open door. Georgia O’Brian hoisted her up by the waist and held her wretched body steady. With her mind Susan communicated what she had to do.

  The two of them watched each other, and in Georgia’s eyes, Susan saw her own reflection. She saw the things she had chosen not to know. She saw that while she had always told herself that none of the things she carried belonged to her, some of them did. She saw that a part of her had wanted all this to happen to Bedford, and had wanted it all along. She had fantasized of a black cloud that filled Main Street, and revenge for the life that this town had stolen from her. She had fantasized of a little sister in a basement, taking a punishment no one deserved. She saw that she hated every one of them, even the ones she loved. Especially the ones she loved.

  Susan saw her true reflection in Georgia’s eyes. A girl and a woman. Corruption and innocence. Cruelty and kindness.

  The smoke kept coming. “Go,” Georgia said. “It’s not too late.”

  Still, Susan hesitated. In the distance, Matthew O’Brian took a final, rattling breath.

  “Now,” Georgia said sternly. “Do it.”

  Susan looked at the crowd one last time. She searched for a face and found it. Liz lifted her chin at Susan. Her favorite in the world was her sister.

  Why not Liz? Why not anyone else? Why Bedford? There are no answers to some questions, no matter what you do. Susan walked inside the mill. Georgia shut the door behind her.

  Inside, Paul Martin’s ghost stood by her side. She took a deep breath and wind rushed the streets of Bedford. The black smoke receded, exiting houses in the d
irection it had come. It whirled back through chimneys and out of drapes. It carried the corpses of thirty-four men, and lost little girls, and dogs named Benji, and old hurts and grudges inside it. A tornado of shadows, of shapes, of buzzing noise, and of smoke whirled down Main Street. It spun past Don’s Liquor, the Chop Mop Shop, People’s Heritage Bank, Shaws, Kmart, Gifford’s Ice Cream, and the park. It went down the mill’s pipe. It shot through the vat, and inside Susan Marley. She swallowed it whole.

  The smoke filled her pores, her skin, her bones. It whispered a thousand stories. It told her its worst secrets, her own worst secrets. It begged to be let out. She did not let it loose again. She knew then what she had become. Not a child running down a hill with a heart as white as snow. Not a woman made grotesque by her own corruption. She had become something different in this moment. She had become Bedford’s keeper.

  The mill kept ticking, faster and faster, until at last a pressurized pipe in the vat broke, and gas and flames ignited. She looked around the room that suddenly became bright, and she and Paul Martin watched it together like watching a sunrise. The fire licked her body, and touched the sulfur inside her, and then there was an explosion. The paper mill burned to the ground.

  Outside, the crowd watched the blaze until the mill’s embers grew cold. There was silence as the rain became a drizzle, and then a patter, and then nothing. All was silent.

  Acknowledgments

  More people than I can thank here offered their support in the creation of this book. I’m indebted to my tireless film agent, Sarah Self, for getting the ball rolling and keeping it that way; to my wise literary agent, Joe Veltre; and to my smart editor, Sarah Durand. A better bunch I couldn’t wish for.

  Thanks also to my writing group (Dan Braum, Nick Kaufmann, PZ Perry, Stefan Petrucha, and Lee Thomas); the poor suckers/good sports who read Keeper in its various stages of undress (Dallas Mayr, Peter Straub, Maribeth Batcha, Cathleen Bell, Meg Giles, Rob Sutter); the folks at Chizine, especially Trish Macomber and Brett Savory; the HWA; Nick Mamatas; and Susan Kenney, Richard Russo, and Debra Spark at Colby College.

  Finally, for their general good-eggedness, lots of thanks to JT Petty, who makes things better; Tim Carroll; Milda Devoe; Jon Evans; Michelle and Erik Gustavson; Marybeth Magee; Maura Maloney; Debbie Marcus; Laura Masterson; Margaret McDermott; Marianna McGillicuddy; Lori and Ryan Stattenfield; and the Langan and Henrich clans, particularly Mom and Dad, who never winced, even though they wanted to.

  About the Author

  SARAH LANGAN received her MFA in fiction writing from Columbia University. She studied with Michael Cunningham, Nicholas Christopher, Helen Schulman, and Maureen Howard, among others, all of whom have been instrumental to her work. She is currently a master’s candidate in environmental medicine at NYU and lives in Brooklyn, New York. The Keeper is her first novel.

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  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  THE KEEPER. Copyright © 2006 by Sarah Langan. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Mobipocket Reader August 2006 ISBN 0-06-124460-0

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