Death in Her Hands

by Ottessa Moshfegh

  “Sit back,” I said to Charlie. I pulled onto the side of the road and patted my hair down. I remembered with horror that I hadn’t brushed my teeth or washed my face. There was black dirt under my fingernails. There was probably sleep in my eyes. I may have smelled just as bad as Charlie.

  “Mrs. Gool,” said the police officer when I rolled down my window. I could see his crotch there at eye level. I could imagine his genitals all squashed up inside those tight black slacks. I squinted up at him, holding a hand over my eyes.

  “Gul, yes. How do you do?”

  “Well, I’m fine, Mrs. Gool, but you’ve been driving erratically since I’ve been following you, about three miles. You didn’t see me behind you?”

  “I’m afraid I didn’t. My dog here must have been blocking my rear view.”

  “Have you been drinking at all, Mrs. Gool? Take any medications?”

  “Medications? None at all. I am sorry if I was speeding. Was I? I’m in a bit of a hurry.”

  “You were going well above sixty, and the posted speed limit is forty-five. That’s over fifteen miles per hour too fast, Mrs. Gool. That’s thirty-three point three percent too fast. Where could you be in such a hurry to get to? Do you have an appointment somewhere? Keeping some lucky guy waiting, are you? No, no, don’t answer that. Everything OK, Mrs. Gool? Nobody chasing you, is there?”

  “Oh, no, nothing like that.”

  Why was he so curious? What did he know? I could imagine Walter, stuffing his face with popcorn, saying, “It’s obvious. He was Magda’s lover. He’s the obvious killer. It wasn’t Henry. It wasn’t Leo. Where do you get these dumb ideas? Vesta, look at the evidence. He is angry that you moved into the cabin because he was using it as, how do you call it, a bachelor’s pad. For cheating.”

  Aha, I thought. This is why the cops didn’t like me. Considering Walter’s theory, I nodded as the officer spoke, pleased that there might be a real reason why he had made me feel so unwelcome when I’d first moved to Levant.

  “And there’s a blind driveway up there,” he was saying. “Who knows when a car might be pulling out? That’s why we put up signs. You see?” He pointed off somewhere, but I didn’t look. The sun was in my eyes.

  “I’m so sorry. Will you ever forgive me?” I hoped my acting came across as truly pitiful. If I could have cried on cue I would have, to prove how naive and weak I was, and to assure him that I knew nothing, suspected nothing. I didn’t want any trouble.

  “I could write you an official warning, but I think I’ve made my point,” he replied, laying his thick fingers in their black leather glove over the edge of my car window. I tried to smile. “Now slow down,” he said. “Hey, buddy,” he said to Charlie, his voice suddenly modulated up and breathy. Charlie, my fool, wagged his tail and came forward, as if the gloved hand were going to reach through the open window and pet him. I could picture that gloved hand closing in around Magda’s pale, thin throat.

  “Mrs. Gool,” he said, tipping his cap. I watched in my side mirror as he walked stiffly back to his squad car, which was an odd color for a police car, I thought—blood red. He had a club, a gun. An agent of death. He could be Ghod, in fact, a dark and hungry spirit, an evil ghost. Yes. Ghod. There he was. I’d come face-to-face with him. If anyone was capable of murder, it was Ghod, a life-sucking leach, Satan’s soldier. And if anyone knew how to cover up a murder, it was a police officer. I rolled my window back up and waited for Ghod to drive away.

  Sitting there in the car, I had a moment of daydream staring into the bright white sunshine. It was like I was back in Monlith driving home from the shopping center, and I was like a little kid for a few seconds, excited for no reason, my mind emptied, waiting at a red light, with no place to go but to go on living and enjoying myself. It was an odd moment to get lost—in the face of evil and conspiracy. But for some reason, I felt energized, peaceful, and young.

  Ghod pulled into the road, made a U-turn, and drove back down Route 17 toward Levant. I’d locked my cabin, hadn’t I? I couldn’t face going into town that day. I felt shaken and vulnerable, as anyone would after a brush with evil. “You’re in over your head, Vesta,” I could hear Walter say. “Go home. Be who you are. Do a jigsaw puzzle. Water your little garden. Drink some tea.”

  So I drove home. I thought of the chicken in the oven. I tried to focus on that, and what I could do with it, how I’d carve it and save it—some in the freezer, some in plastic Tupperware in the fridge. I thought of which parts I would keep for myself, which parts I would feed to Charlie. I tried not to think of Magda. I didn’t feel strong enough to bring her to justice all by myself. Ghod had sucked the courage out of me. I wasn’t even frightened, I was struck dumb. By the time I pulled back up to the cabin, I felt my mind had closed.

  Charlie immediately trampled through the pine woods to do his business, then came down the gravel again, thundering past me still on my walk to the front door. He went down and splashed in the lake. I was in a dull, heavy mindspace, but it still made me laugh to watch Charlie play so maniacally, thrashing around the water with a soggy branch between his teeth. The slightest thing delighted him. I wished I could be more like that, and tried to promise myself I’d work harder to be happier. Why was I driving myself mad over Magda? Perhaps I’d imagined the entire thing. It could have been just a bad dream, a fever dream—sometimes it took awhile to get my footing if I’d been sick. I felt my forehead with the back of my hand. Yes, I did feel a bit warm. If I just took a nap, I thought, I’d wake up and everything would be as it was. There was no murder, there was no mystery.

  I stopped in my tracks, then, as I approached the cabin door. Something was wrong. It was my garden. It looked different to me. It looked smoothed over, as though someone had come and swept it with their hand and tamped it down somehow. I’d left so many imprints and marks, my boots and hands, my buttocks had even formed two moon-faced hollows in the dirt. And now it was like placid water. It was very strange. Upon closer examination, it seemed that not only had someone swept my dirt, but they’d plucked out the little seeds I’d planted. I dug for them with my fingers, but they were gone. I looked all along the line where I’d planted them, and they had absolutely disappeared. Who would do this? Would a bird peck the seeds out of the dirt? Had its wings produced such a windstorm as to sweep the dirt smooth, as it now appeared? Or was it somebody, some person, who had been so sneaky as to tweeze out my seeds, then used something—a newspaper, or a broom perhaps—to sweep away any trace, any footprints? It was a deranged and evil thing to do. Abortive, I said to myself, cruel, to snatch out the seeds of hope before they’d even had a chance to sprout. I could have cried. And then my sadness turned to spite. Ghod couldn’t have had time to do such a thing. Who, then? If it was you, Blake, I thought to myself, I will get you back. Whoever had done it would feel my wrath. I spat at the ground, turned my key in the lock, and went inside, leaving the door open for Charlie, who, probably sensing my displeasure, bounded in with muddy feet, but I didn’t care. I turned the oven back on. The smell of roasting chicken filled the cabin, and I let it cook, and uncorked a cold bottle of red wine and went and sat at the table. I turned on the radio. I’d forgotten to put it on when I’d left the cabin in a huff just a little while ago. Stale jazz was all I could tune into. Pastor Jimmy would be on that night. I sat and listened, fuming, my mindspace mostly static and rage, but nothing decisive until half the bottle was gone. The chicken was cooking.

  “You stay here,” I said to Charlie. His ears horned for a moment. I got up and grabbed Walter’s urn off the shelf, held it under my arm as I dragged one wooden oar out the cabin door, shutting Charlie securely inside. By the lake, I righted the rowboat, lugged it down to the water, got in and balanced, and pushed off. It was like taking a cold shower to be out there, watching the world move like a kaleidoscope on the surface of the water. And there was Walter propped between my boots, his fancy urn, like a king’s crown or something
. I supposed disposing of the urn of ashes would be a symbolic dethroning. I didn’t want Walter in my mindspace anymore. I wanted to know things on my own. I’d feel better that way. I could do things according to my own rhythm. I could finally think for myself. I wouldn’t row as far as the island that day—if Magda’s body was out there, I wanted to be calm and collected when I found it. And so I stopped my rowing about a hundred meters out, held out the urn, saw one last time my dull reflection in the brushed brass, then let it plunk into the water. That was it. It seemed so easy once I’d done it. I didn’t say a mournful good-bye. I’d done enough of that already. I picked up the oar and turned the boat around and rowed home.

  Perhaps it was my old eyes deceiving me, or my raw nerves still quaking from having found my seeds plucked from the soil, but as I made my way slowly back to shore, Charlie began to bark inside the cabin, and through the few trees that stood between the lake and the windows looking out from my dining table, I thought I saw something move inside. I thought I saw a figure, what kind I couldn’t say, pass from the table on one side of the cabin, and backward, to the kitchen. Just a slight shadow whose movement, from such a distance, was nothing more than what could be mistaken for a shifting branch, a blur of wind, a bird crossing from one tree to another, its shape reflected and twisted in the cabin windows. I could have been mistaken, but what I thought I saw was a dark, diaphanous shape—man-size, but only darkness, not a solid body—reading my papers at the table. At first I blamed it on Walter. If I hadn’t had to discard him in the lake, I would have been there to guard my papers on the table. I could have blocked that shadow person from getting into the cabin. I could have fought that being off, I could have stood up for myself. That was the sacrifice I’d had to make to be rid of Walter at last. He’d been there to protect me, and so I’d never learned to fight. But now I would, I resolved. Forget being happier, more organized. I would be smart and tough and forge my own way. I didn’t even need Charlie, I thought, stunning myself. If I lost Charlie, I’d still be okay. He quit his howling as I got closer, standing on his hind legs to see out through the windows, tail furious. I tied the rowboat to the tree and dragged the oar back into the cabin. Inside, nothing seemed at all different. Upstairs, I saw the empty space left on the bedside table where Walter’s urn had been. I quickly rearranged the books and knickknacks to fill the gap. I went down to the kitchen and pulled out the chicken and ate a drumstick, hot as lead, straight from the oven, like I was some kind of animal that had been starving in the wilderness all its life.

  I went back to my desk and wrote.

  My name is Vesta Gul. If you are reading this, I have been murdered by Ghod. I believe he murdered a girl named Magda, as well. Her body is probably buried on the little island in the lake across from my cabin. Please, feed my dog.

  Five

  When I had separated the chicken, wrapped it, and stored it as I’d planned, I fed Charlie and locked him in the cabin. “Be a watchdog for once. If anyone breaks in, attack.” I didn’t wait around to hear him whine and putter, I just left and got into my car and drove back to the library, where I felt there was more research to be done. I wanted to go back on the internet. The computer had guided me this far, hadn’t it? It was like an oracle, a guiding force. Every detective had some special source of wisdom, didn’t he? The computer was like my mindspace. I didn’t have the answers, but I had the right questions, I believed.

  I drove very carefully now on Route 17. I didn’t want Ghod to stop me again. That would only delay the story. I was often tempted to abandon books if they flailed along too slowly. The muddy middle, a reviewer had called it one day on the radio. But if Ghod were to kill me, I reasoned, there could be some satisfaction in coming to Magda’s same violent conclusion. She had been strangled, that I knew. A boy’s hands, like Blake’s, couldn’t have done such a thing. It takes great strength to strangle someone to death. Magda was drunk, or drugged, when it happened, and caught off guard. She could have fought the killer off, I bet, had she been sober, awake, prepared. She was feisty like a cat. She had those long fingernails. Her affect was flat, but in a flash she was rabid, furious. She could scratch your eyes out, she could stomp on your heart with her worn tennis shoes. The horror, to think that so much life and energy had been strangled out by those cruel, gloved hands. If those hands ever came after me, I would stab them, I imagined. I would take Magda’s switchblade and cut off each of their fingers. With that, she and I would triumph. Wouldn’t that be something? Magda’s soul would be free to fly up to wherever it wanted. Or maybe it would go into the computer, I imagined, almost laughing to myself. Everything existed on the internet. It was infinity on Earth. It was like heaven. Maybe Magda was already there.

  When I passed by the curve in the road where Ghod had pointed out the blind turn, I slowed and peered down the long drive to the neighbors’ house. I’d seen them come and go so rarely. They’d been downright cold when I saw them from the rowboat that day last summer, had ignored me whenever we passed each other on the road. It was like I didn’t exist to them, I was invisible. But actually, it was more like they thought I was beneath them. I didn’t like that. I didn’t like them. Passing by the turnout where Ghod had pulled me over, I cringed. I could swear I caught a scent of sulfur hanging in the air, the smell of the devil, that putrid creature, a goblin, an angel of pain and darkness. It was exciting to feel so much spite for somebody. It inspired me; I almost felt like dancing. If I was an artist, I thought, I would paint a huge black-and-red canvas, stabbing with my brush in a frenzy until I fell down on the floor in a heap, sweating and dizzy, the world spinning above me. I wished I could be breathless like that, and for so long I’d believed I couldn’t. I was old, I’d thought. Ecstasy was no longer a possibility. All I had left was contentment and equanimity, I’d believed. I blamed Walter for making me think all that. It was he who had no capacity for ecstasy, he who was so frightened of joy and freedom. He was the one who selected the house in Monlith, distant from the world, a farmhouse adrift in vacant acres of grasses good for nothing, not even cows to graze on it. Dry dirt. Crabgrass it was, always that steady buzz of some ugly bug hiding between the blades. I couldn’t even picnic out there. Walter wouldn’t let me. It was like he’d been my captor. I’d been held hostage all this time, I thought. Now I’d let loose. I’d let myself go.

  By the time I arrived at the library, I was again ravenous. I bought a Snickers bar from the vending machine by the door and swallowed it in three big chunks.

  I’d never been to the library so late in the day before, and was a bit frustrated to discover that the half a dozen computers in the reading room were occupied by as many youngsters in hooded sweatshirts and jeans so baggy that even the pudgiest of them seemed to me like a little stick figure draped in cloth. They looked like Benedictine monks sitting there tapping at their keyboards, faces wan in the cold blue glare off their screens. I stood and watched them impatiently. Each of them was agape, mesmerized. I could see that they were connected to something that had immense power over them. This was what happened when the mindspace was the internet, I thought. One loses one’s sense of self. One’s mind can go anywhere. And at the same time, the mind becomes lame when it is connected to something so consuming. Like Walter’s ashes in the urn, their computers were containers for these young minds. If I was on the internet, too, I’d just turn into one of them. My mind would connect with theirs. And I didn’t want to share my mindspace with these drones. Even the girls seemed like stooges, huddled over the keyboards as though nothing else existed. They had no idea that someone older, someone whose work was far more important, was standing there, waiting.

  Was one of these trolls my Blake? I wondered. Somehow it didn’t seem possible. I couldn’t picture him in the mundane bounds of a world such as that library. I imagined him more like the teens of my day—supple and unweathered on the outside, but with angry or sad eyes, wearing clothes that fit, eager to please his parents. He was beleaguered
not by the pressure of what was on the television or computer, but by a desire to succeed and get away from all that. To follow in more noble footsteps, and look for glory in the long term, not short, like these kids in front of me. What were they even doing in the library? Not touching any of the books, that was obvious.

  Blake wouldn’t be using a computer at all, if he was here. He’d be waiting for me in the stacks, so that’s where I wandered, to the back of the library where the books were kept, a room with linoleum floors and beige metal shelves. Strange that the renovations to the library didn’t extend to the stacks. Apparently the funding hadn’t reached that area. The lighting was dim, and as I walked slowly up the aisle, it seemed I was alone. A powerful stench struck me suddenly, and when I stopped walking, I could hear a soft shuffle, so I looked around the corner of the aisle. It was an old woman, like me, but grizzled, in a long beige raincoat and soiled slippers. From twenty paces she reeked of rotting fish. I hadn’t ever thought there’d be homeless people in Bethsmane, but this human was certainly destitute. Maybe she wasn’t homeless, but lived in a hovel, some hole in the ground, and trudged into town every now and then to pick up books. I didn’t even want to know what she might be reading, which books she might have touched, as though that information would poison my mind against all books, would turn my stomach in some deeper way than the smell already had. My eyes started to water.