Bad Things

by Michael Marshall

  Everybody else stood still, hair and clothes flapping in a growing wind. Only Marie looked truly real, her and the indistinct shape that now stood by her side.

  Carol was halfway along the jetty now. Something seemed to be rising out of the surface of the lake beneath her, like a faint haze. Her back was straight and she was staring directly at the woman at the other end, meeting her eyes coldly, and I was proud of her for this.

  It felt like there was a point, minutes or seconds from now, beyond which all was pitch-black, and as though this darkness had always been present in my life, and that everything I had ever done or dreamed had been a lie. As if my father had never cared for me, nor my mother, nor Scott, nor anyone else on this earth. So what did it matter what happened next?

  Carol was nearly at the end of the jetty now. Brooke would want me to follow, after which she would presumably leave us there for Cory to finish this thing off, to drop three bodies, the remainder of a family, into Murdo Pond.

  But then, for just a moment, Brooke’s view of me was obscured by Carol’s back—as I hoped it might be.

  I heard a voice whisper from just behind me, a voice I hadn’t heard in a long time.

  “Run, Daddy,” he said. “Run."

  CHAPTER 46

  I kicked off with everything I had. As I reached the steps and leaped straight up them, I heard a rifle shot. I dodged left as I hit the jetty, but I knew it was going to come down to how good a marksman Cory really was, and how much of a risk he was prepared to take, given that his sister stood beyond me.

  Carol heard or felt me coming, turned, tried to move out of the way, stumbled, and fell back.

  There was the flat crack of another shot. This missed by a foot and took a chunk out of the left handrail. I went back right, gathering speed now that I was on a level surface.

  Brooke saw me coming, and tightened her grip on Tyler. Cory fired again, too hurried, missed once more.

  Everything you ever do is a risk.

  I threw myself straight at Brooke.

  I hit her hard and fast and smashed her straight back into the rail at the end of the jetty. It broke and then we were falling, Tyler between us, my face so close to Brooke’s that we could have kissed.

  I punched out at her as hard as I could, and we hit the water hard, heads first.

  It was like being kicked in the heart and temples at the same time, so cold that my whole body went into shocked spasm, throwing me backward from Brooke.

  I glimpsed Tyler’s hand in front of my face, and grabbed at it, pulling him toward me, jerking his head closer to mine. His eyes were full of terror. I didn’t even know if he could swim.

  Brooke’s foot came jackknifing down, kicking at Tyler’s head. Her brain evidently worked fast enough to have decided this would do as a backup plan.

  I kept hold of Tyler’s wrist and used my other arm and both legs to drive us deeper, away from her and down into the dark. As he came closer toward me I saw his cheeks bulging, and hoped that meant he had air stored inside.

  Brooke’s foot lashed into my face across the bridge of my nose, and then we were down and out of reach. I felt the blood pouring out of my face and a sudden warmth and a metallic taste.

  I pulled Tyler closer toward me until I had him fast under one arm, still kicking, driving us as far from the jetty as I could, back into the lake.

  Suddenly my head was above water. Tyler’s came up with it, and I shouted at him to breathe. His mouth opened just before I sank again, his weight and floundering pulling me back under.

  My vision was obscured by the blood clouding up out of my nose, but as I tried to right us both and claw back up it seemed as though areas of shadow and light swirled within the water, as if it was disturbed more than could be accounted for by my movement. It was the coldest thing I have ever felt in my life, cold and hopeless, cold with the heavy resignation of those who have already left. I felt as if the center of the earth was pulling us down toward it, or as if we were being pushed from above, and as we floated deeper it was as if others fell alongside us. But I did not want to go deeper with them. Not now, not ever. I kicked viciously down with both feet, feeling as if I was fighting sleep, as if hands were grasping and pulling at my face, their nails scoring lines in my cheeks. I kicked again, and kept kicking, lashing out with my free arm, pushing up.

  Then we broke the surface again, and this time I was ready for it and already kicking toward the jetty. Brooke was well ahead of me, pulling herself up onto the shore, shouting at Cory—who turned smartly and pointed the rifle at my head.

  I dropped quickly under the surface again, kicked to the side, and then pulled us up to break the surface once more.

  Carol seemed frozen on the jetty, unable to move in any direction at all.

  “Cory, do it now!”

  Brooke was jabbing her finger in my direction, her voice barely audible against the wind pulling the snow around like a whirlwind. It would have been beautiful but for the likelihood I was about to die, and were it not that the movement of the air contained within it the source of the smell that had been at the back of my head for the last two days. It was not cinnamon or anything like it, but an odor so rank that the brain was forced to try to invent a new category, to call it anything but what it was.

  I desperately kicked out again with both feet and lunged toward the end of the jetty, trying to put a physical barrier between us and the gun. Cory was meanwhile moving the rifle around, panning it, trying to get a clear line of sight through the snow.

  Brooke kept screaming, telling him to do it, do it now.

  Tyler was clinging on to me, his head over my shoulder, and I felt him stiffen at the same time as I heard a clear, flat cracking sound.

  Carol screamed.

  I kept pushing forward, not knowing what else to do, and finally got one hand onto the lowest rung of the remains of the ladder at the end of the jetty. Tyler was kicking and crying now and all I could tell was that it wasn’t his head that had been hit, because he was holding it bolt upright and no blood was flowing from it, or parts missing, at least that I could see.

  I tried to find something down below to brace my feet against, but I was losing the feeling in my legs and there didn’t seem to be anything beneath us in the water. I shifted Tyler higher up my chest so his weight kept him on me, and grabbed the other rail with my left hand, feeling the muscles in both arms howl as I used everything I had left to pull us up out of the water.

  Tyler was screaming now, too, but the screams didn’t seem to be sounds of pain. His fingers were digging into my back, and when I turned my head I saw he was staring at something over my shoulder.

  I pulled us up another rung and tried to blank out everything except the idea of getting up a further step after that, tried to fade out the wind and the sound the trees were making—tried most of all to blank out the smell. I couldn’t tell now whether it was coming from the lake, the trees, or out of the earth, or out of myself. It was what envelops your soul as it lies in the grave, the odor of your own body rotting around you. It was what would remain if you killed every living thing, and left behind only what lay between the trees in these mountains, and swam in its lakes, and could not be seen.

  One more rung and finally I was able to get a foothold, and push myself up the last few steps.

  As my head drew above the level of the jetty floor I saw Cory lying flat on his face on the snowy ground, a couple of yards from where he’d been holding his position. Brooke was crouched over him, cradling his head in her arms, making a sound I cannot describe. Beyond them stood Marie, shouting furiously at another figure that had appeared at the other end of the jetty.

  It was Kristina. She was holding Bill’s gun.

  As I fell down onto the planking I saw Carol backing away, toward the land. I thought at first she was looking at me, but then I realized she was staring at whatever Tyler had been screaming at, something that still lay behind me.

  I gently prized Tyler’s fingers from my neck,
and bent down to put him down on the deck.

  “Go to Mommy,” I said.

  He stared at me, too scared to do anything. I remembered how to smile at someone that small.

  “Go on,” I said, finally loving him. “Go to her. Now.”

  He hesitated, took a step backward, and then turned and ran down the jetty like a memory fading.

  When he’d made it to Carol, Kristina came walking past them toward me. She looked exhausted, and nauseous, and I realized far too late that although she was much thinner and taller and had dyed her hair to cover the red, it was Kristina that Marie had just reminded me of: and that she now looked as bowed over and spent as the motel owner had the day I checked in.

  “Don’t look around,” Kristina said as she approached. “Don’t do it yet.”

  My back felt burning hot now. My face was so cold it had lost all feeling, but the other side of my body and head felt like I was inches from the sun.

  Kristina stopped when she was a couple of feet away. She reached up and ran a fingernail along each of the scratches that I could now feel throbbing over my face.

  “It’s the best I can do,” she said, her voice full of sorrow. “I’m sorry. I’m new to this.”

  She started walking backward, and she, too, looked like she was being pulled away, back into a dream of which I was no longer a part.

  “Look now,” she said, finally.

  I turned.

  I felt a thing that had been here for a long, long time, for whom this was both home and body, something that was in every tree, in the wind and mud, which sounded in every echo and which fell with every flake of snow, something that informed every deed done, every secret hidden, each act untaken, and every word said beneath these skies.

  I knew I’d heard its voice before on bad mornings, and muttering in my ears in the dead parts of the worst nights. I know it had helped my finger pull triggers years ago, moved my mouth when I had said yes on evenings when I should have not—or perhaps that the relationship ran in two directions, and that when I had done these things, I had been feeding it. I knew it smelled my blood now and recognized it, and I understood that I had perceived it as a smell only because my senses did not know what else to do with their shocked knowledge of this creature’s presence, because it was a thing I could not see or touch and that was always beyond hitting or fighting or pushing away. So I didn’t try.

  I let it come in through my mouth and nose, breathed it deep, knowing that was the only way to stop it getting past me to reach those who stood behind. Everything under the sun follows the path of least resistance. Water flows down. People commit easy sins. And this thing came into the person that was closest to it, in space and character, and that person was me.

  For an instant everything around me seemed darker, as if all difference had faded away and everything in creation overlapped to occupy the same space. I realized that events that could have happened a hundred years ago were still very close, and also that this present night would remain here, a heartbeat away from every night, for all time: that if any future person stood on this jetty, I would be right here by their side, and they would turn away, disturbed. I heard the noise of bears and mountain lions and creatures that had lived in these woods much longer ago and whose bones we had still not even found. I heard the sound of horses and logging and settlers banging nails to make walls in cabins that were now rotted and fallen away. And I saw once again the figures that I had dreamed of meeting in the woods the night before, but now they seemed to be standing at the very end of the jetty, their backs to me. Two adult size, and three small, dripping wet.

  Behind me, in what remained of the here and now, I was dimly aware of the sound of Brooke Robertson, of her screams of grief, and felt bitter triumph. Otherwise there was only the wood beneath my feet and the smell now sunk deep into my bones.

  And then the figures at the end were gone.

  The lake seemed to fade back behind the curtain of falling snow, to flatten down from being a wall into its usual horizontal position. I found I could turn from it, as if it was no longer pulling me, and looked back along the jetty instead, toward the land.

  All the people who had stood in front of the trees had disappeared—so completely that I wondered if they’d ever really been there at all, or if they were merely the souls who were in thrall to the Robertsons and the power they somehow brokered on the town’s behalf. Carol was holding Tyler in her arms, their heads so close together that they seemed fused into one.

  Marie had gone. Kristina was sitting by the side of the lake, vomiting, her head in her hands, looking as if her back was broken.

  The only person looking at me was Brooke.

  She pulled herself away from her brother’s body, and straightened up, a pistol in her hand. Something about the ease with which she gripped it told me that she was the better shot of the family.

  She walked onto the jetty until she was halfway along. Her stride was steady and her head held high, and I could see in her face every good, strong quality that had pulled men and women across thousands of miles to live in places like these. I also saw there everything that had subsequently been given up, and lost, and sacrificed, to keep on living in the face of the cold and the mountains and rain and the bad things that wanted only to live here in solitude, and which dreamed long, slow dreams of wiping our kind from the face of the earth.

  As she started to raise the gun, I heard a voice.

  “That’s enough, Brooke.”

  She and I turned our heads together, to see Sheriff Pierce coming out of the woods alone. The rifle he held was not pointed at me, but at her.

  “That’s enough,” he repeated. “We’re not doing this again.”

  She lowered the gun slowly. Seemed to glance at Carol for a moment, or perhaps not at her, but at the child she held in her arms.

  She turned back to me and smiled what appeared to be an utterly genuine smile, for a moment looking like a teenager, a young girl with things to do and every happiness to hold, the beautiful new generation of a family that had always been blessed.

  Then she tucked the barrel of the gun under her chin, and pulled the trigger.

  CHAPTER 47

  A year ago, before any of this happened, I remembered something from my childhood. I was in my midteens and my mother was doing stuff in the kitchen in the ordered and correct way she had, while I sat at the table and cranked through homework. Dad was doing something outside. The radio was playing, serving up this song and that, and eventually one I didn’t recognize came on and it wasn’t my kind of thing and so I reached out to change the station.

  I stopped when I saw my mother. She was standing by the sink, staring unseeingly out into the yard. She had turned away, but only by a few degrees, as if she’d done what she could before being turned to stone by whatever force had gripped her. The veins were standing out on the side of her temples. She swallowed every two seconds, and kept blinking, as if fighting to keep this thing inside.

  As I stared at her, bewildered, I realized she was listening to the radio. The song got to the final chorus and I knew I couldn’t be found watching. I dragged my gaze back to the homework on the table, and waited it out.

  I kept my eyes down after it had finished, when my mother walked out of the kitchen into the hallway for a few seconds. I heard her cough several times, as if clearing her throat, and the sound of a blouse sleeve wiped hard across her eyes.

  Then she was back in the room, doing whatever she’d been doing before. When I eventually did look up, it was as if none of it had ever happened: though the next time our eyes met, what took place on her face was the flattest and emptiest thing I think I’ve ever seen. It looked like a dead person’s smile.

  I was young and so by the next day it was history. I never asked her what that had been about, and I’m sure she wouldn’t have told me—but I had something similar happen to me last year when I was sitting alone in a bar in Portland, eight years after she’d died. A song came on the bar’s
jukebox, a song I’d listened to with Jenny Raines, and I suddenly had an inkling of what my father might have been weathering when our walks ended; what had accidentally caused a distancing between him and me that culminated in me running with bad kids, joining the army, and perhaps everything that happened in my life after that.

  I sensed a presence in the shadows of my life, and I believe a song grabbed my mother by the heart that afternoon and yanked her back to a period she never allowed herself to think about, to emotions walled away but still alive—that it took her into that parking lot in the back of all our heads and kicked her in the guts until she bled.

  When it happened to me I did exactly what she had done. I coughed, and wiped my eyes, and carried on.

  I live in New York now, in a small apartment in a pocket of the East Village that is sturdily resisting becoming fashionable, and remains home to people who are old and do not speak English as a first language—and some of whom, I have heard it said, do not own a single iPod. It has narrow streets and trees that are bare, now that it is winter, and it feels like a place should. I have a job ten minutes’ walk away at a restaurant and bar called the Adriatico, a few turns off MacDougal. I earn even less than I did in Marion Beach but at least I am the official pizza guy, so don’t let anyone tell you there’s no hope of progress in the world.

  When the bar shuts at the end of the night I hang out with the other staff for a while, and then walk home through streets in which there’s generally something still happening and our light and sound and chatter make it impossible to believe that this area, like all others, was once a wilderness.

  I’ll sit out on the stoop and smoke a last cigarette, enjoying the feeling of cold stone and the sound of distant traffic, before finally going upstairs.

  To my continual surprise, I do not live here alone.

  From what I hear, the restaurant in Marion Beach is very quiet now.