by Micol Ostow
(red room?)
—yes, this room, the red room, the underground lair, creeping toward me, reeking of rot and filth.
The image from the mirror, the fractured girl, steps forward, emerges like a ghoulish beacon from the haze.
This is what he did to me, she says, her ruined skull glistening in the flickering light.
He’ll do it to you.
I close my eyes, shrink in, contract, my heartbeat straining in my throat.
I blink, and I am back in the boathouse, a growing sense of dread creeping up my spine. Outside, creatures howl, mournful, louder than any known being.
The girl from the mirror is still here, suspended before me. Silently, she lifts a pale, translucent arm. She holds one index finger to her lips, and with the other, she points.
The boathouse is littered with boxes, with cases, with caddies and bins and baskets and buckets that rise, bursting through the floorboards, scattering clods of earth in their wake. They unclamp, slide open. She shows me:
A shotgun. An ax. A shovel.
The outline, the photo negative image of my brother—
of Luke—
his eyes alight, his lips drawn back. His head down, but still defiant.
She shows me:
Another outline, another image in negative tones.
A figure in profile—
ragged and ruined, jagged, fractured.
And dream or waking day,
within my mind or from deep beneath Amity:
The profile, I know, is my own.
BEFORE
THE TRUTH IS, the whole question of what to do about Dad started with Jules, way back when. She was the one who thought we’d be better off with him gone.
I mean, I agreed, of course, but she was the one to suggest it out loud, in real bald, bold terms. She was the one to say the thing we were both thinking—that twin thing again—out loud.
I remember the first time she brought it up. Remember it clearly, I mean.
It’s not the kind of thing you forget.
We were little, still—young enough that talk like that could just be laughed off if the conversation got a little too specific for our comfort and stuff. Young enough that we could pretend to forget all about it after, if we decided that’s what we wanted to do.
But, like I say—it’s not the kind of thing you forget. I never forgot, and I’d bet money I don’t have that Jules didn’t, either.
Honestly, Jules was never the forgetting type.
We were ten, maybe eleven, even, but only just. Mom was pregnant with Abel at the time. I don’t have to tell you, he wasn’t exactly planned.
But, you know, shit happens, or so they say, and like it or not, Abel was on his way. Mom broke the news to us one drizzly afternoon, white knuckled and red eyed, while Jules rubbed her shoulder and I gnawed away on a hangnail. I personally didn’t care much that there’d be a baby so much as I minded how it would affect all of us. It had been Jules and me for long enough, and we had a bond, you know, like a special twin thing, and it wasn’t like we needed anyone else.
So as time went on, I wasn’t too thrilled about the effect that the pregnancy was having on everybody; Dad raging from the minute he found out, and Mom, all typical, shrinking into herself so eventually she was just a huge, swollen belly and shoulders so slumped you wouldn’t have thought she had a neck.
Or a spine.
Dad made it his mission to terrorize Mom day in and day out. Usually it was with the same old BS, but every now and then he’d come up with some new torture just for her. Like when he shut off the water valve, then beat her with a broken broom handle until she finally “confessed” how she forgot to pay the water bill.
If he hit her long enough, she’d own up to anything. And then he’d hit her for caving in, or for “lying” to him in the first place.
Even I thought it was twisted.
Jules and I, we got off easy with him. God knows he’d huff and puff, but he never laid a hand on us like he did Mom—and later, Abel. For us, there were never any major bruises.
I had some theories about why Dad left us alone.
ONE THEORY, IN PARTICULAR, that is, about why Dad mostly laid off Jules and me, why he mostly left the two of us alone: it was related to what the neighbors, the parents of the kids in school and stuff—what they thought about me, to why they kept anything they cared about locked up tight when they saw me come around.
The neighbors had enough suspicions, but Dad …
Well, there was that one time.
There was that time Dad caught me. Playing. With that cat. The first cat we ever had, I mean.
First and last.
Jules called him Flip, since that was what he did a lot of when he was still a kitten. But she didn’t have too much of a chance to call him anything, because old Flip wasn’t around for very long.
So, that one time, Dad was the one who found me. Playing. And that was better than if it were anyone else. Like, Jules would just have lost it completely if she’d been the one to come upon me, out back, with that cat. Even if she did always sense the truth about me, who I was.
Who I am.
Instead, it was Dad who turned the corner around the back of the old house, downstate. So he saw me, crouched behind the storm doors leading to the cellar, with Flip. I don’t know if he really meant to sneak up on me, but I was pretty engrossed, you could say, in what I was doing when he crept up and over and got an eyeful. It just happened, like in a flash, and there wasn’t anything I could do once he’d seen it. Everything was just completely out in the open then.
I was completely out in the open then.
And there was no going back.
I was young, but it must have been pretty clear what I was. What I am. Here was the proof.
Dad didn’t say anything. Didn’t even seem too surprised.
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, after all. Isn’t that what they always say? And I am one bad apple. Rotten. To the core.
There’s probably a fancy doctor’s term for it, some psycho–mumbo jumbo way to describe all the little chemical misfires in my brain that make me who I am. But, plainly put, it’s this:
I am evil.
And I don’t mind it at all.
BUT STILL, THOUGH, IT WAS JULES WHO FIRST HAD THE IDEA ABOUT DAD; getting rid of Dad was Jules’s plan. From back when we were only eleven, when we were still kids, like I say.
I don’t know, maybe I was rubbing off on her. They say that, too, after all: one bad apple spoils the bunch.
So maybe what was happening to Jules was she was being spoiled. By me.
WE USED TO HANG OUT IN THE ATTIC, in the old house.
Even back then I was basically a loner—parents weren’t too encouraging about playdates, you know? But I could hang out with Jules. So we did, we hung out in the attic, even though it wasn’t finished or anything, and there was this one dank, dusty section in the corner, like a crawl space under the eaves, where you could see the slats of the floor set all wide apart, and between them, cloudy, pinkish puffs of insulation. Mom told Jules that if you stepped in that section—if you just happened to put your foot down in just the right place—you’d fall right through to the second story of the house, just land smack in the middle of that upstairs bathroom, like randomly taking a shower had been your plan all along.
Neither of us totally believed her, but we weren’t exactly taking turns stomping around that edge of the alcove or anything.
Nobody really cared what Jules and I did, what we were up to. Not even Mom.
Jules was playing with a lanyard, making one of those arts-and-crafts-y bracelets. It was a friendship bracelet, because, even though she was my twin, Jules still managed to have a friend or two from school. Still managed to be “normal,” even with me for a brother. So Jules did things like weave friendship bracelets while we were up there, in the attic.
While I did things like play with the cat in my spare time. Like I explained. We each had ou
r hobbies.
So it was quiet in the attic that day, which was normal for the two of us. I was flipping through a vintage Lovecraft comic. Nothing valuable—I wasn’t some geek collector, just a fan—but I liked the pictures. So I was half reading, kind of, maybe more like skimming. The quiet was good for that.
“He hits her in the stomach,” Jules said. She was matter-of-fact, not looking up from her lanyard. She spoke all casual, like she’d happened to stroll by a cool-looking shop window on her way home from school, and she just wanted to tell me about all the stuff she saw inside. But Jules was hardly ever casual, so I knew, right away-like, that something was up.
“Dad, you mean,” I said. Who else could she possibly have been talking about? Dad. Dad, Dad, Dad. That’s who.
“He hits her in the stomach. Or, at least, he did once. I saw it. After they thought we’d gone to sleep.” She was still fixated on her bracelet, her fingers fluttering, knotting row after row.
“What, like, just out of nowhere?” Not that it would be too weird. Dad could go from zero to psychopath in the time it takes a person to drop their fork at the dinner table.
She nodded. “Well, they were fighting. So it’s not like it was completely out of the blue. But I don’t think Mom saw it coming.”
“Mom never sees it coming.” Well, she does, but she doesn’t, you know?
“She was worried that he’d hurt the baby. But, I think …” She tilted her head at me. “I think that was the point.” She coughed.
Right.
“He’s an asshole,” I said. It was still a big word for me back then.
“Well, yeah.” Jules got quiet again, studying her lanyard, turning it over and over in her palm. I wondered who the bracelet would be for when it was done—whether that person was someone who really knew Jules. Who knew our family’s secrets.
Probably not. Jules was very careful about airing her dirty laundry. We all were. You sort of had to be.
Hell, I was her dirty laundry, lots of the time.
“We’d be better off without him.” She spoke so soft I thought I’d imagined it. But the flush creeping up her neck told me I hadn’t.
“Yup,” I agreed.
I thought that was all there was to say on the subject, but then I heard another throat-clearing, flustered sound from Jules, and saw the flush on her neck flash like neon.
Like something toxic.
“We should just get rid of him,” she said. “Just kill him in his sleep.”
She said it clear, her voice loud enough that there was no mistaking her words. I knew she meant what she’d said.
I didn’t answer right away. Not that I didn’t see her point. The Webbs would have been better off without Dad around, sure, but more than that—the world could’ve stood to be rid of him, too. No question there.
But still: kill him in his sleep.
Kill him in his sleep.
The thing was, the playing around, the games and hobbies I had, they were messy, screwed up, for sure, but they weren’t the same as killing a person. Not hardly.
Whatever was wrong with me—and I wasn’t denying there was something wrong, never have, never would, never will—it wasn’t that wrong.
Not yet.
What Jules was suggesting—it wasn’t even too hard to imagine, honestly, the more and more I turned it over in my head, in that stuffy, dusty, cramped little space underneath the eaves. It wasn’t too hard to picture. But what I’m getting at here, what I’ve been getting at all along, is:
It wasn’t my idea.
That’s important to remember.
It was Jules who suggested that things would be better for all of us with Dad out of the picture. We didn’t act on it right away, or even talk about it again … until Amity.
But it was Jules who started it all, way back when.
No matter how things turned out in the end.
THE STONES WERE JUST THE BEGINNING.
I didn’t realize it at the time—I was ten, after all, and more than anything then, the stones felt like a twisted endgame of the tricks my mind had played on me for as long as I could remember. Stones raining from the sky in thunderous clumps, that’s fairly apocalyptic material. So you can’t blame me for doing what I could to put the memory out of my mind afterward, when it was all over.
Mom and Dad certainly didn’t want to acknowledge it, wouldn’t speak of it, disregarding any hints building to that day. I’m sure that’s why we ended up moving after all, once it was over at last. Truly over, that is. After the hospital, and the treatments, and … everything. I think the hope was that relocation would be a fresh start, a clean slate, all of those brutally optimistic, fatally inadequate clichés about sunnier days ahead.
Thankfully, coming from a small town as we did, we managed to keep the story of the stones as small as possible. For my part—and especially after the treatments—I pushed aside any thought, any recollection, or even the stray moment of muscle memory—that called back to that buzzing sensation, roiling and building, under my skin.
Obviously, in light of what was to come, it wasn’t an isolated incident, a random, freak occurrence.
In retrospect, what happened that day with the stones foretold everything that would come. After.
At Amity.
The time with the stones was a harbinger, a portentous manifestation of all of my damage. Even if the doctors—who also came later—would have termed that one of my classic overreactions. One of my signature moments of hysteria. Even if the doctors would have called it pure coincidence, I knew better.
I knew, even then:
The stones were just the beginning.
IT WAS A BRISK FALL DAY, the sort of late afternoon when the sky is streaked in vivid brushstrokes of color so full, so saturated that dusk itself takes on a three-dimensional quality.
Luke and I were in the backyard of the old house. I sat cross-legged on the patio, the cold of the flagstone seeping through the seat of my jeans. I was playing jacks, I remember; though the small metal pieces were elusive, and the process itself felt vaguely pointless—some grown-up’s misguided idea of fun—the smooth bounce of the bright pink rubber ball against the pavement was satisfying.
The patio wrapped around the side of the house, and while I scooped up jacks halfheartedly, Luke practiced pitching a softball against the wall with maniacal zeal. He slammed the ball against a net he’d set up along the side of the house like he hoped to send it clean through the nylon. Sweaty and red-faced even in the afternoon chill, he stooped forward in an imitation of ball players he’d seen on TV. His attention was so pinpoint-precise, I abandoned all pretense at my own game.
Catch and release, catch and release … The hissing of the ball against the net was soothing, and I could see it was lulling Luke, almost hypnotizing him. It must have been doing the same to me, or I might have been more alert, more aware. Might have seen what was clearly to come.
As it was, we were both stunned when the reverberation built to a fever pitch, Luke pulling back, winding up, smashing the ball forward with the force of a tsunami. The net stretched back, and we turned, craning, and watched together as the ball sailed in a perfect arc over Luke’s head. We were stunned momentarily, both taken by the powerful trajectory being traced against the sky.
We were stunned, that is, until we realized—both in the same instant, I think—exactly where the ball was headed. My eyes flew open as I met Luke’s panicked gaze. At the sound of the ball shattering our neighbor’s window, Luke winced.
“You’d better go inside, Gwen,” he said darkly, shaking his head. “Before Sanderson comes out to tear my head off.”
Old Man Sanderson lived next door, in a run-down split-level with enough peeling paint to render the house an entirely different shade from its original color, which had at one point (presumably) been a dusty blue. He was, as his name suggested, old in that bearded, balding, graying way. He was also not the sort of person you wanted to spend much time with under the best of circumst
ances, which these were certainly not.
“He’s mean,” I said to Luke, doubtful.
He was mean. Mean enough that neighborhood kids didn’t even dare egg his house on Mischief Night. Mr. Sanderson was, we all suspected, the type of person to open his door to trick-or-treaters—after spiking a bushel of shiny red apples with fresh razor blades. He was the person around whom urban legends were built, a living, breathing cautionary tale for the children on our block.
“Exactly,” Luke said. His gaze was hard, but I detected a telltale flicker of fear in the set of his mouth. “So go.” He gestured again, emphatic. “Go.”
I wish I could say I refused.
Nonetheless, I did manage to support Luke, without any conscious effort, after all.
Without any conscious effort.
I did still find a way to help my brother out.
ONLY SOMEWHAT RELUCTANTLY, I wandered inside, shuffling my feet along the ground. The relief I felt at being excused from the impending confrontation was offset by the guilt of leaving Luke outside to face Sanderson on his own. Our parents were out, off together on one weekend errand or another, and I couldn’t decide if their absence made the situation better or worse. They would have been upset, of course, to know that Luke had broken a neighbor’s window, but they would have known it was an accident. Luke wasn’t, by nature, a troublemaker.
Not then.
And even back then, even before Amity, I was no stranger to hauntings. I believed, as everyone else did, that Sanderson was to be avoided at all costs.
I peered through the side window of the living room, nose pressed against the pane. Sanderson was making his way across our yard and toward my brother with a tight, grim expression on his face. His hair was thin and greasy, limp, streaked with more salt than pepper, and his posture was stooped. Everything about him curved forward, like the arc of a tidal wave, coiled and ominous.