I watch George from the ground. A huge man in a too-small chair, he has a broad chest and a neck too thick for his head. Earl has made him a temporary rag doll, his limbs too heavy to move, but if he comes around to his full force, I will be in trouble.
“Do you hear that?” George asks. His head lolls back on his neck so loose and sloppy that I fear it will fall off and bounce away into the hungry darkness of the cellar behind him. With great effort, he rights his head on his shoulders. Drool slips from the corner of his mouth and glistens in the scruff of his graying beard.
“Hear what?” I ask.
“That bitch is here,” he says. “I hear you!” he screams into the woods, and for a brief moment, the cords of his neck stand out thick and red. Fierce as tree trunks. His chin falls to his chest, the black ski mask still covering his brow.
George mumbles something.
“Excuse me?”
“I hear her out there. She thinks I don’t know she’s lurking. That I won’t catch her.”
“Jesus Christ,” I whisper.
“I can’t move my body.”
“I see that and I’m grateful.”
He chuckles.
The wind blows past him and toward me. I cover my nose with my hand. His piss smell is strong, fresh even.
“Why are you bloody?” he asks.
“I fell. I need to wash up.”
“Stream’s just behind the storefront. No one’s stopping you,” he says. “Hear that? Do you hear that?!”
“I don’t hear anything.”
“She whistles all the time. Same stupid song.”
I listen hard but hear nothing human, only the stream George mentioned and the wind as it moves through the loose planks of the house behind us.
“I need some gas to get out of here, and if I can get that, I’ll call for help for you as soon as I’m able.”
“You’ve got to stab her right in the heart. Then burn this place down. That’s the plan.”
“Whose plan?” I ask.
“My plan!” he yells, and smacks his hand to his chest. The thump is strong even as his arm falls heavily back into his lap and stays there thick as a log.
“Get the insurance money. Fuck me if she’s gonna do it first. It was my idea.”
“Is someone else out here? Besides you and me and Earl?” I ask.
“Earl?” he asks, and then scoffs. “Wait, did you bring me more? Tell me there aren’t any more now.”
“More what?”
He shifts his feet on the ground. He’ll be mobile soon. The poison, the meds, whatever else Earl’s given him is wearing off.
I jump up.
“Hey!” he hollers after me.
I run around the farmhouse to look at the storefronts and the long porch that connects the buildings. It stretches out like piano keys. Some planks are missing, others rest where asked, but spit up their nails in protest.
The door of the dime store is painted bright red and newly so. It isn’t peeling in the way that the other doors look to be and there is a fresh piece of glass in the frame. It is thick, double paned, and crystal clear.
The red door opens easily. The space inside is set up like one might expect it to be if this were a movie set. The counter is on my left, an old cash register sits on top. Shoulder-height shelving lines the room and the shelves behind the counter are full with small wooden bins. The bins are empty, but they would fill quite easily with candy and gum and cigarettes. Everything is made of pine and the shelves are carefully constructed, newly fitted to the wall.
I exit the dime store and push open the door of the grocery store. The space is twice as big and has not been touched. It is largely empty with dust coating the floor. Sun rushes in through a hole in the back wall. On the floor near me is a toolbox with very little dust on top. I squat down and open its lid, hammers and screwdrivers, pliers. I pull out the drawers, three of them, one at a time. My heart pounding. Nails and Allen wrenches and green garden twine. I jog back out to George, who sits as I left him in the lawn chair. He’s passed out again.
I twine his right wrist to the chair. I wrap it around and around as tight as I can before I move to his other hand, using the twine to keep his right wrist and hand connected to the chair. If he regains his full strength, mentally and/or physically, he will easily get out. I know that. This is a small reassurance that I can keep track of him, and in his weakened state, he might actually stay put.
He rustles a bit and my heart hammers faster. I pull tighter on the twine, make sure it cuts into his skin, not drawing blood but if he fights it will. When I am done, I step back, feeling confident.
The wind picks up and with it the whistle George promised. The sound of it whipping through the wood of the farmhouse, dipping into the gaping hole in the roof and rushing to find its way out of smaller cracks and crevices. The open cellar door shudders and then slams shut. My shoulders jump up around my ears but George doesn’t move.
Could I drag man and lawn chair into the house? Would that convince anyone that I’d tried to save him?
“Why’d you go and do that?” he asks, barely waking.
I shriek, a small animal noise, like a rabbit. Clearing my throat and deepening my voice, I say, “Your son says you’re dangerous.”
“I don’t have a son.” He slurs his words and the slurring seems to make him giggle.
“Well, I’m sure he’d rather not claim you either, but he’s real enough. You need to tell me if I can find gas on this property.”
“Hell, yes, you can find gas. Loads of it. Enough to blow the whole place up.” He giggles. “Take this ski mask off my forehead. Itches.”
I don’t want to touch him or go too near, but he’s still weak and I’d like to see his full face.
I move behind him and reach out from arm’s length to pull the mask off.
The relief of it gone seems to make him pass out again. His head hangs forward. There is a tattoo on the back of his neck. Three black lines. Wavy. Like water.
“What is this place exactly?” I ask.
“It’s my fucking freak show. My goddamn fresh start. Can’t you tell?”
“I don’t mean what is it to you. I mean why is it here.”
“It’s an old mining town. They thought they’d found gold and maybe they did but not much. Mostly they found metals like copper. But all that dried up a long time ago. The 1940s. That house there. My house belonged to the mine manager. They say he hung himself inside when he realized there wasn’t enough to keep the place going. I thought I could make money back off this place. I probably could have if my fucking family had just listened to me. Come to think of it that’s probably what he thought too. They say he killed his men. Lined ’em up on payday and shot them. Got the first one in the head but the others weren’t so easy. Started moving and had to hunt them in these woods.”
“You don’t seem much better.”
“You think this place isn’t evil? You think I had a choice? This place is hungry and fuck you anyway. Now leave me be,” he says. “I’m tired.”
“You’re drugged,” I say, but he’s already gone under again. I smell the ski mask. It’s not terrible so I shove it in my pocket.
I look around me at the back of this almost town. None of it belongs here, yet it’s all stubbornly built to outlast its own story. Its ghostly outline too weak for human life and too strong for the hills to reclaim.
The closed cellar doors make me feel brave. I walk around George to the front of the house and climb the three steps to the porch. Like the storefronts, the house is deteriorating with only a few signs that anyone is trying to fight it. The front door is shut, a solid door, made of the same pine that built this miniature city.
Inside the house the air moves, whirls and runs and rushes in little eddies. Snow floats by in the darkened front room to my left, catching the sunlight that floods in with it from the hole in the roof. The flakes shine and fall to dust the floor, sparkle their bright icicle selves and rest without melting. I cross my arms under my breasts so my leather jacket hugs tighter to my body. In front of me is a straight and sturdy staircase leading to the second floor and, to the right of the stairs, a hallway lined with an Oriental rug—its gold and blues still fairly vibrant in the old dark of the house. An upright piano sits in the room to the right along with a sofa covered with a white sheet and piles of moving boxes.
The piano room is shadowed, dark in the corners. The floorboards groan. There is a cellar down there. Its depth and body count undetermined. I step as lightly as I can. The space adjusts to my presence. It wheezes and splinters.
The boxes are stacked around a double mattress on the floor, probably to protect the person sleeping there from the rush of the wind whipping through the hole of a house. The bedsheets are tousled, its blankets too few for winter.
George sleeps here, I think. A space heater sits at the open foot of the bed.
“There’s a generator,” I say. I move to a floor lamp and switch it on.
The boxes are neatly labeled. A woman’s handwriting: kitchen, bathroom, keepsakes. And then a little kid’s hand: toyz, books, stuff. I open a few and find their contents true to their labels. The one marked closet is full of clothes. Dresses, shirts, T-shirts with puppies a kid’s size five. A little girl. I hold a small pink shirt to my nose and remember a similar shirt I had when I was little. Pink with white cuffs and a strawberry on the front. I loved that shirt. This one, saved, I imagine, by Earl’s mother, smells of the box and of its travels—like baby powder sprinkled through a horse stable. Sweet and fecal at the same time.
I pull the box that reads keepsakes off the top of a stack of three large boxes and it smacks the floorboards. The floor stays intact. Unfolding the lid, I find photographs. Not old-timey enough for a ghost town. More recent than that. Polaroids of a man and a woman. The man is some long-gone version of George. Shaved and smiling. Not yet an evil thing. The woman is beautiful. Young. Long, blond hair with big sunglasses above high cheekbones. A baby in her arms. There are lots of her and the baby. Packets of them with their negatives still in their sleeves. The baby is fat cheeked and held close. There are only a few pictures like this of me with my mom and dad. The three of us looking like a family. I always blamed my mom for not having more photos of us, but now that seems cruel. We kept having to move and in each move something else would go, but my father always made sure I had my stuffed tiger, Clover, so I thought he was a hero. I never thought about all the other things he let slip away.
I push the box aside.
What am I even looking for? I need gasoline. That’s the only thing I need from this place.
Outside the wind has picked up. It’s cold, especially in the shade of the porch. The gun presses into my torso.
“George,” I say, walking back to stand in front of him. He does not answer. His eyes are closed, head drooping forward. My makeshift ties look silly, crafty rather than professional against his thick wrists. “Wake up,” I say, and kick his foot.
I take the gun out of my pocket and knock it against his cheek. His eyes flutter open. He sees what I intend for him to see and then lets his head fall to his chest again.
“Where is the gas?”
“I don’t fucking feel right,” he says, and starts coughing. The cough starts up front and then comes from someplace deeper. White foam comes up next, onto his chest, his head resting heavily against his breastbone as he coughs.
“You all right?” I ask, but the retching gets worse, moves through his body, and for a moment, he pulls at the ties I’ve put on his arms and they give a little but not enough. He slams his feet into the dry brush and his chair tips, he goes backward and is on his back, gagging.
I rush forward and pull on the arm of the chair. Something snaps and I move my hands to his arm, grabbing cloth. I can’t pull him over so I move to the other side and push.
Chair and George tip onto their sides. He continues to vomit but now it’s clearing his throat.
I step back and let him go. It takes a while for him to quiet.
“Undo my hands,” he says.
“No.”
“Check the cellar,” he says. “For supplies.”
“Fuck you.”
He laughs.
I look to the now-closed cellar doors.
“Why would you keep the gas in the cellar?”
“Flashlight in the toolbox. I resting now,” he says into the cold ground and then he passes out again.
“I’m not going in the cellar,” I say to no one, but then I’m walking back to the storefronts, peering in windows at empty rooms and finding nothing inside.
In the grocery store, I dig through the tools and find a heavy-duty flashlight. The batteries are still good.
I give George a kick in the boot as I pass. He doesn’t move.
“I’m going to check the cellar,” I say. He says nothing. I watch carefully. His breath moves a blade of grass near his nose. Not dead yet.
I set down the flashlight to open both doors. One, then the other, and they creak open wide. The smell of earth comes up warm into the cold October air. The depth of the darkness seems unreal, swallowing everything but the top three steps.
Behind me the wind blows, harder suddenly, as if desperate to push me into the black hole of a cellar. I smell George on the wind. All his stink has exited his body, fleeing the scene of him. The earth too stubborn to absorb any more human waste.
The smell of George, the cold, and the feel of the ghost town watching make the cellar less terrifying or at least turn it into a simple extension of the horror show I’m already in. It’s just a hole in the ground, dug by a man who wanted to make a home. A cellar could have hope in it.
The darkness parts for the beam of the flashlight. I will only need to take a step or two inside to see if there is any truth to what George has told me. There will either be something there or there won’t.
I put both boots on the first step. It’s sturdier than the floor of the house. The second step. Solid. Third. The walls are dirt, roots poke out into the dark, veiny and pale. The ceiling is low and the beams even lower.
I no longer smell George. Instead, I smell the earth. Rich and thick. I point the beam of the flashlight to the floor and water reflects up at me. Just a shallow layer that has not soaked in. A recent rain. There is a table against a far wall with cardboard boxes stacked on top. One of them says kitchen and another says magazines.
Breaking my promise to myself to not go in too far, I step down into the water. It’s not deep but it’s thick, more mud than water. My boots make a sucking sound when I lift my feet.
I reach my hand out and touch a box. The exterior gives under pressure like flesh and then my fingers slide through, touching something that feels like fur.
The room changes. The warmth, the earthen smell unsafe. The house above me creaking as it thinks about collapse. How could Earl want to stay here?
There is a smaller space back behind the chimney. The walls are wet with mud. I trip over nothing but lose my balance anyway and dig the fingers of my right hand into the wall to keep from falling to the floor. Once balanced I pull my hand from the muck and wipe it on my bloodstained jeans.
I should not be down here.
I walk forward and touch the brick of the chimney. I hold my place while I point the beam beyond it into a dark cavern of a room. A wooden dining chair sits in the corner. The cane of the seating punctured through by years of people sitting in it. If I stay too long my brain will fill that chair.
My mind stores bits of horror in places only it can call up to use against me. Bodies that have cracked open, skin that bubbles and churns. Liquids that ooze and morph, skitter and squirrel themselves back into human form and then sit themselves lumpy in a chair across from me in a dark, dark basement. There she is, looking just like me, Emma My Emma, belly gaping open, joints bent at the wrong angles, hairs wiggling along her arms like worms.
“We are all of us made up of crazy,” Ray liked to say. “And madness in its simplest form is narcissism—a self stared at so long and so hard that any potential beauty in it becomes horrifying.”
The flashlight beam captures gas cans in the far corner. Three of them. George was not lying. A blip of hope. It’s possible that life is a series of steps. You take one and then another and then another until you are on a journey. You have purpose. Control.
I move toward the chair and the gas cans behind it, but I stop short. Maybe it’s the still empty chair facing me or the beer bottles at its base that make me turn around to see what I would see if I sat in the chair. And there she is, the body. The inevitable ghost in the ghost-town cellar.
An unerasable thing.
She’s been there a long time and if she still has a smell its indistinguishable from the damp rot of the cellar itself. She sits propped against the chimney. Her hands are in her lap. Her chin somehow still held high to look back at the chair. Defiant. Her skin is leathery, shrunken, her bones too large to be kept inside by what’s left of her outer layers. Cheekbones push through, a glaring white.
The beam fades slowly, going from bright to nothing in the time it takes for me to realize how dark it will be without it right before it goes. I shake it, slap it on my thigh, but it stays stubbornly out. The chair behind me begins to fill. The softened wood of the collapsed cane seat working to hold someone up. The creak of the body nestling in. I drop the flashlight into the mud, it makes a soft sploosh and I dig through my pockets for my Zippo. I wrap my fingers around the metal and pull it out of my pocket. Flick it once, twice. It doesn’t light. The exhale of breath comes into the room. Alcohol. Hate. Secrets. The Zippo lights. I see him then in the chair. My daddy. Elbows on knees. Hands to face. In the weak light, he raises his face to me, and I see his eyelids black and leathery like a crow’s. He blinks rapidly in the faint light.
“The train’s coming,” he says. “Choo choooo.”
I step backward from his ridiculous grin. His impossible body leaning back in the chair so that it tilts on two legs. I step on her. On Earl’s mother and I fall backward. Land in her lap, my nose to her neck as if I want her to cradle me and she is soft, warm. Her flesh full. She smells good, like sandalwood and something softer, baby powder. For a second there is still light and so I imagine her arms rise up to wrap me in a hug. She holds on to me and I feel it all—the love she has left in her. We are there in it together before I feel it turn to sadness. It isn’t me she wants.
“Get the baby. She’s in the corner.”
I hear it crying before I know Ray is in the dark, holding her, our little nothing. Our never-real baby. Crying loud and clear and terrified. The room fills with Ray’s smell and his voice: “Emma, you were supposed to come with us.”
And then there’s fear.
The murk of the cellar floor lets the flame live for a second, maybe two. A cellar door slams. The flame is snuffed out. The second cellar door slams. It is pitch-black.
I launch myself up as part of her loosens under my weight. Detaches. I hear skin, what’s left of it, separate from the whole of her. An arm, maybe. Some appendage she does not need. I’m around the chimney and finding the stairs with my feet in an instant. The miracle of adrenaline making me both fast and efficient.
I push the cellar doors open wide, one with each hand and hurl myself into the fading daylight.
I throw up then. Vomit canned beans and stomach juices until nothing else comes up.
On my hands and knees, I try to breathe. My abdomen sore, my throat burning. For a second, I think I’ll shit myself. I don’t. Then I hear the whistling. Long and low. Directed into a tune I can’t recognize. I raise my head and there is the lawn chair, righted so it sits facing the cellar. Empty. George is gone. The green twine I used to tie him up still tangled around the armrest of the chair.
I rise. I need to get out. I run into the wood, wheezing in the cold air.
In the distance, I hear a train. The click and clack of it on the tracks.