by Exile
Danielle shouted, “I’m not scared of Katherine. She’s weird and stupid.”
Katherine shouted back, “You’re the stupid ones, Deedees.” That was Katherine’s name for the twins.
Jaqueline held out her hand. “Give me the stone.”
“No! It’s mine! And it’s not a stone. It’s a dagger. A sacred dagger. You can’t take it. Nobody else can touch it! I’m the new priest. Me! Not you! I’ll sacrifice you, too.” She pointed the stone dagger at her mother.
Katherine stormed out of the cabin. The sun was starting to set. I said to my wife, “Let her ride it out. She’ll come back when she’s calmed down. You know how she is. She’ll find some other object, dream up some other story. She knows she was bad. If we make too big a deal out of it, she’ll dig in her heels and make it worse.”
But I was the worrier, not Jaqueline. She and the girls fell asleep quickly after sunset. I wouldn’t be able to nod off until Katherine was back home safe. I extricated myself from Jaqueline and went to sit on the porch. The moon was full and bright. Soon enough, to my relief, Katherine emerged from the woods and walked toward me.
I didn’t say a word. I nodded and smiled at her. She climbed on my lap and nestled into me. I could tell she’d been crying. She whispered into my chest, “I love you, Daddy.”
I stroked her back and murmured back my love for her.
I noticed that she was still clutching the stone dagger, but I didn’t say anything.
She said, “I’ll go to bed.”
She walked inside, with the dagger still in hand. I resisted the impulse to try to take it away from her.
A minute or two later, I heard an unusual and loud thump. I rushed inside. Everyone had been woken up by the commotion. Katherine was gone. I looked out the side window, and there were signs that someone had jumped down onto the dirt.
I explained that Katherine had returned. “She told me she was coming inside to sleep.” I didn’t say anything about the dagger. “I don’t understand why she ran off again.”
In the morning we noticed a few things were missing: Jacqueline’s sun hat; Denise’s favourite stuffed animal, a giraffe; one of Danielle’s dirty T-shirts.
Detective Logan leaves his card. Asks to call him if I hear from Katherine. He doesn’t say she’s a suspect. He doesn’t say I’m a suspect. But he doesn’t say we’re not under suspicion, either.
But how can he prove anything? The evidence won’t add up.
Katherine stayed away all day. We were leaving the next morning, so in the afternoon Jaqueline and I started to pack up and load the car. The sun set, and still our eldest daughter was missing.
The twins were paying attention only to each other, probably more relieved than worried. Katherine took up a lot of social space and loved to taunt them. But Jaqueline and I exchanged worried glances, clasped and unclasped each other’s hands, and fidgeted. I finally broke down. “One of us should go look for her. The other should st—”
I never finished that sentence. A bloody wound opened on Jaqueline’s chest. She clutched her hands to the injury, her eyes wide with pain and shock. Impossibly, another wound appeared on her belly. On her thigh. On her shoulder. Her neck. The side of the head…
In my mind, Katherine’s voice echoed: … the dagger stabbed them from a distance…
I screamed, “Katherine! Stop! Don’t! Katherine!” But it was too late. Jaqueline was dead.
The twins shrieked. I turned to them.
“Katherine! No! Please, please…stop.”
Danielle ran trying to avoid the invisible blows of Katherine’s stone dagger. She stumbled dead and bloodied.
Denise died clutching her twin, her wounds leaking onto her sister as they appeared on her own all-too fragile body.
Four days later, the phone rings. “Daddy, I’m at the police station.” It’s Katherine. “Can you come pick me up?”
When I get there, Detective Logan is waiting for me. He says, “Turns out your daughter was at the family cottage up north. There’s surveillance footage from the nearby village that backs up her story. Where she had dinner. A bar. A bank machine. All on the night of the murders. Not at the precise time of the murders, but close enough to make it impossible for her to have been in the city when they occurred.”
I don’t say anything in response.
He waits a few beats, then asks, “How about you? Have you been there recently?”
“I would never go back there,” I tell him. “I can never go back. You must know what happened.”
“I don’t believe the cockamamie story that’s in the report. I don’t think you do, either. I don’t think she does. You’re the only ones who know the truth.”
“Detective, she was only ten years old.”
“I’m thinking, maybe we need to reopen that case.”
I don’t say anything. Detective Mahfud emerges from the door behind the reception with my daughter in tow. Katherine looks cheerful – too cheerful. She grabs my arm, gives me a peck on the cheek, and says, “Let’s go.” She waves goodbye at the detectives with the fake smile of a celebrity saluting her fans.
I don’t know how much time elapsed before Katherine came running back to the cottage, tightly gripping the stone dagger. The moon was still preternaturally bright. The woods were eerily quiet, as if all the animals were afraid of making the slightest noise, of revealing their presence.
She stopped abruptly and gaped at the carnage.
In the heavy silence, I heard my eldest daughter whisper, “But it was only a game… It was only supposed to be a game…”
It wasn’t my daughter who did this, who murdered my family. It couldn’t be her fault. It couldn’t. That rock, that dagger was to blame.
I rushed to her and knocked the evil thing out of her hand. She kept repeating, “It was only a game…only a game,” not reacting to me at all.
I took the dagger and ran deep into the woods. I could hear it whisper to me. Whisper images of violence and bloodshed and unholy rituals and inhuman creatures. Maybe it was my imagination, remembering the stories Katherine had told us earlier. Regardless, I didn’t want to be touching that filthy thing. I tried to shatter it against a big rock, but I only succeeded in chipping away at the bigger stone. Finally I buried the dagger under that big rock, hoping no one would ever find it again.
When I returned to the cottage, Katherine was sitting on the steps of the porch. She looked straight at me and said coldly, “They’ll think you did it, Daddy. They’ll think you killed them.”
She was right. And I thought, I’ll let them think that. This one moment can’t ruin my daughter’s entire life. It wasn’t her. It was that rock. That dagger. That thing.
Shaking with grief, I sat on the chair. She climbed and nestled into me. We were both crying. She whispered into my chest, “I love you, Daddy.”
I noticed that she was clutching a knife. A big chef ’s knife from the kitchen.
She plunged the knife into my thigh and twisted it. I struggled not to scream.
“Trust me, Daddy. They mustn’t think you did it.”
She pulled out the knife – it hurt even more as she did that – and ran off to throw it into the small stream that ran next to the house. She came back with a heavy rock. I was writhing in pain on the ground.
“When they ask you,” she said, “tell them you didn’t see anything. Tell them you were looking for me. You were attacked first.” She repeated: “You didn’t see anything.” Then, she brought the rock down on my head. Once, twice, forever.
The police visit regularly. Always the same two detectives. Logan and Mahfud. Every month, on the night following the full moon, there’s always a string of murders. Same wounds. Same lack of evidence. They only have one thing in common. The victims are always acquainted with my daughter. Coworkers. Boyfriends. Old schoolmates. Teachers. Bosses. Doctors. Shop clerks. Every victim came into contact with my daughter at some point. Most times, the detectives can dig up a story of some previous argument
or altercation, some motive for a grudge. For revenge. In every case, my daughter can account for being nowhere near the crime scene.
The detectives have been coming to see me for a year now. Detective Logan says, “I know she’s responsible. Somehow. It doesn’t make any sense. But I know it’s her. And she killed your wife, too. Her sisters. Why are you covering up for her? Help us, man. Help her. You know there’s something dangerously wrong with your daughter.”
I’ve long ago stopped responding to their taunts. I sip my tea until the two of them have exhausted whatever they want to say.
They have no evidence. They have nothing.
Me. I only have one thing. I have my daughter. That’s all I have. I can’t bear the thought of having less than that. Less than one daughter. Less than Katherine.
I woke up in the hospital. A police officer sat in the chair next to the bed.
I gurgled some kind of noncommittal noise.
The cop stood up, opened the door, and said, “He’s awake.”
Suddenly, the small room was packed. The police guard. Two plainclothes detectives. A doctor. A nurse.
After a lot of fussing, one of the plainclothes detectives asked me, “What’s the last thing you remember?”
I remembered too much. Including what Katherine asked me to do. I lied: “I don’t know. I was shouting for my daughter. For Katherine. We hadn’t seen her all day. Then a blow to the back of my head. Then – nothing. Is she… Is she okay? Is she safe?” All I could see in my mind’s eye were my daughters and my wife. Dead. I teared up. I knew I shouldn’t. But maybe they wouldn’t make anything of it. They’d think it was about Katherine.
The police were all over me for weeks, trying to pin the murders on me, but Katherine was adamant: from her hiding spot in the woods she saw two men attack me, and then she ran to the village to get help. She’d always been a good storyteller.
I stuck to Katherine’s script. They never believed us. But there was no evidence against us. No motive. Sure, they found the kitchen knife Katherine had used on my thigh. But they couldn’t make it tell the story they wanted.
Finally, they closed the case. Unsolved.
I wished I’d stayed a good father to my daughter Katherine. Maybe she wouldn’t have turned out the way she did. But after the dust settled I could barely ever bring myself to speak to her. I ignored all her attempts at closeness. But I gave her anything she wanted. Except a good father. I wasn’t a bad father. I was barely a father at all.
When she moved out at age sixteen, I only vaguely noticed.
When I turned sixty, I began to yearn for her company. But I never reached out. Sometimes, when she was at her most desperate, she would show up. I cooked for her, and she’d tell me stories about her life. The more she revealed, the more I realized she was incapable of sustaining any kind of friendship or relationship. Regardless of how badly she herself behaved, she always painted herself as the victim. Even through the lens of her distorted, damaged, self-serving perspective, it was horribly obvious that she was toxic and dangerous.
I barely ever said anything to her. When she’d had her say, eaten her food, she’d stumble out, back into her broken life and out of my nonexistent one.
Katherine is home, with me. She never asked to move in; one day, I noticed that she had taken over the unused guest bedroom. Spray cans, feminine lotions in tubes and bottles and small jars, and sundry beauty products invaded my tiny bathroom.
With my chaotic daughter in the apartment, it has become a constant chore to keep the premises in a habitable state of order and cleanliness. Still, it gives me satisfaction and even a hint of serenity to have her here.
It was the full moon last night. The first full moon since she started staying with me.
She gazes out the window at the fading light while I put away the dinner dishes.
When it gets fully dark, she turns to me and says, “Let’s play a game.”
It’s only then that I notice she’s holding the stone dagger.
In her other hand, she’s holding two business cards. They’re too far for my failing eyesight to read, but I think I know what they are.
She goes to the phone and punches a number. “Hello, may I speak to Detective Logan, please? My name? Katherine Cray. Thank you.” Katherine smiles at me, like a naughty little girl trapped in a forty-two-year-old body. “Hello, Detective Logan. Is Detective Mahfud there with you? She is? Good.” She hangs up without another word.
“Let’s give the cops at the station a good show. Let’s see them try to solve those murders.”
She lays down the two cards on the long table in the living room.
I say, “Katherine, don’t. Please. Please stop. You have to stop this.”
“All these years I never ceased hearing the dagger whisper to me. Even from so far away. For decades I resisted, but finally I went back. What other friend do I have? What other family? The stone dagger needs me. It wants me. It was easy to find. It told me where you’d hidden it.”
A memory of pain shoots through the old wound on my leg. The hand on my cane trembles.
“I love you, Daddy. Even if you can’t love me. I understand that you can’t. I’m sorry.”
I swallow. There’s nothing I can say.
“You don’t know how hungry the stone dagger is, Daddy. How good it makes me feel to give it what it wants. What it needs. What I need.”
She stabs the two cards – Detective Logan’s, Detective Mahfud’s – again and again.
The phone rings. We both ignore it. She continues to stab. Again and again and again.
GOODBYE IS A MOUTHFUL OF WATER
Dominik Parisien
There was a longing in the houses. From the boat, you felt the pull of them, the gravity of their loneliness willing you down, below the surface to the algae-strewn depths.
“They had a place of their own here,” your grandfather said. You were only seven then, but you were your grandfather’s grandchild – you knew enough to know he didn’t just mean the houses, that this was a place he’d called his own, before it was drowned, before he’d lost it all.
It was nothing new – your grandfather frequently boated you out to the drowned village, and while you watched the ducks in the distance he fixed his eyes downward.
Sliding over next to him, you caught a glimpse of an old roof below. You loved to imagine the houses of the village colonized by the monsters you knew dwelled in the river, the giant fish that would nibble your toes if you would only put your feet in the water. Sometimes, you even saw the dead looking up, their faces different shades of grey like in your grandfather’s many photo albums.
When you’d told your grandfather about them, the dead, how they frightened you sometimes, he’d taught you to tap the water. It made them all ripple, even disappear. He was always coming up with games, and together you’d made one of it; you’d point to where they lay waiting, and he’d tap them all away. But only some days: others he’d only stare down at the houses.
“There are times I wish I could just blow it up,” he said. He meant the hydroelectric dam up the river, of course, not his drowned village.
“Why don’t we?” you’d asked.
He had laughed at that, full-throated, startled. “Yes, I suppose we could, couldn’t we?”
The river is a dark blur snaking beside you as you drive, pushing 130 kilometres per hour, 140. There are no thoughts of screeching, twisted metal in your head, of shattering glass, of flames. You push the car to 150, your only fear that you will not make it to the hospital in time.
Water ran down from the house onto the driveway, made the asphalt ripple like a bad illusion.
Your mother, who stayed in the car when she dropped you off in those days – you were eight after all – swore aloud and opened the car door.
“Stay inside,” she said, which of course you didn’t. When you set foot on the driveway your shoes filled up, sloshed noisily.
Water rushed out the seams of the front door, out
the corners of the windows. Through the kitchen window you saw Tupperware boats navigating the room, fruits and cushions and clothes bobbing up and down.
Your grandfather waved from the living room, a snorkelling mask strapped to his face, a framed picture of your grandmother in his hand. Watching him, you knew he’d done it for you, somehow; that this was another game of his, though you didn’t yet know how to play it. Or, that it was one of the steps to destroying the dam. There was always a reason to everything he did.
“He drowned it, he drowned the goddamn house,” your mother said.
Somehow, your grandfather’s startled, disarming laugh found its way into your mouth, and there was no stopping it once it started, even when your mother screamed to shut up, just shut up.
Your grandfather is dying. You knew that the moment your professor beckoned you to the front of the class, directed you to the hallway where one of the university’s security guards handed you a phone. Your mother’s voice was frantic, telling you to come, come quick, she was already there. Younger you would have wondered at her presence, how the distance between two people could be bridged so easily.
In truth, it had never been great.
Now, the car engine roaring all around you, you regret not having darted off the moment she called. Instead, you sat in the university’s parking lot, your fingers gripping your key next to the ignition, thinking you had to wait, had to wait just a little, that you couldn’t arrive too soon, so he couldn’t make you live up to your stupid promise, because you knew he would.
You were nine, on your way back from visiting your grandfather in the nursing home, when you asked about your grandmother. You hadn’t known her long. When you tried to picture her in your mind without the aid of a photograph, she was an old green safe balanced atop a small body. When she smiled – and you usually pictured her smiling – the safe opened to reveal liquorice and other candies she kept in her room, which she always gave you when you visited.
“Why did you let them take Grandma away from her home?”