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We never questioned why the Saint of the Altar particularly liked doll parts, any more than the generation that was old when my Uncle Jimmy was young questioned its previous preference for shorn locks of hair. When you’re a child, the particulars of urban legends make sense in the same distant, interplanetary kind of way that the particulars of adult interactions make sense. And by the time the children of Wickett grew up to be adults themselves, they’d stopped believing in local monsters. Except the human kind, of course.
So when Sarah killed herself—or at least when Sarah turned up dead in her hot tub with an empty bottle of white zinfandel on the porch and half a bottle of Xanax in her system—I didn’t even think about going to the bridge between the two black lakes to get some kind of vengeance. I mostly blamed myself, actually, for not getting us out of Wickett sooner.
I’d been shopping around on home buying websites and browsing apartment rentals in Essex county for five months. Reading up on the pros and cons of condos and what kind of HOA fees were reasonable and imagining the sort of embarrassing hippie shit Sarah (Phish-loving, tent-camping, sage-burning Sarah) would pull out when we decorated our place. Our place. For five months, or maybe more, I had been daydreaming about our future without taking action. And she’d been living in the house she used to share with Alan, out on the edge of our dead town.
I guess that everyone in Wickett knows that they live in a dead town—a dead town clinging like a burr to a dying mill city in the sleepy northwest corner of Massachusetts. It’s very white. It’s very poor. It’s not a wonderful place, if you’re different in any significant way from the majority of the population. It’s not quite as bad as when you hit southern Kentucky and the buildings—not just the homes, but the businesses—are wallpapered in Confederate flags, and you realize (with that gut-sinking feeling of anxiety) that you are among some truly backwards, truly scary, truly low-empathy motherfuckers. Sarah and I went there once, on a road trip to Mammoth Cave National Park, and when we saw a convenience store on the outskirts of Cave City that was painted to resemble a giant mural of the Stars and Bars, Sarah dropped my hand, even though we were inside my truck and nobody could see anything.
Wickett isn’t that bad, and I’d be lying if I said it was. But we have our things. Cave City had racists marching into their local Cracker Barrel for dinner as proud as anything, but Wickett’s got that lowkey New England breed of bigot. Much quieter about it, but still there.
And Wickett has the Saint of the Altar.
That was our own fallacious ‘friend of a friend’ or ‘it happened to my cousin’ creature feature. I believed in it as a kid, of course—I think all kids are susceptible to the veneer of fact that clings to urban legends even after the glitter of other, more archetypal fantasy creatures has faded—and, like all the other kids, I snuck onto the old brownfield land where the Little Cherubs factory once employed ninety percent of Wickett. It was a rite of passage to skirt the crumbling outbuildings, marked by graffiti and the elements, and make your way to the heart of the place...and bring back a piece of one of the old dolls ‘for the Saint’. Doll parts were scattered everywhere in the factory ruins even decades later. Mossy and semi-buried in the detritus and dirt, but still everywhere. Bringing back an arm or a leg was okay, a torso was better, a whole head was spectacular, a head with the eyes still intact was frankly amazing and would make you the king of the neighborhood for a week solid. The golden apple, of course, was one of the I Love Lucy baby dolls that had shot Little Cherubs—and by extension, Wickett—up to another level of prosperity when they were introduced in 1952. But nobody had ever found one that I knew of. I guess you can buy a vintage one on eBay, if you have five hundred dollars and offbeat taste in home decor.
Our town has been circling the drain since at least 1968, when the Little Cherubs Doll Company closed. For the first half of the 20th century, everyone and everyone in Wickett worked at Little Cherubs. My Aunt Val had a grainy old picture of her grandmother packing and dressing a whole table of unblinking dolls on the factory floor that dated all the way back to 1937. She kept it framed and hung in the foyer with all the other family pictures, in a special central place of honor. I think Aunt Val was proud that her Grammy had been a working woman, even back then.
I’m a working woman, too (though thankfully a woman who works is less of a rarity and more of a ‘human being with a job’ at this late great date) and it was because I’d made my family’s plumbing company relatively lucrative that I had a nest egg big enough to move the two of us to a better part of the state. That was the most inexcusable part—I could have done something sooner. But I just waited around while Sarah got divorced, and while Alan dragged the divorce out for as long as possible. And then Sarah was dead, and my future blew away like leaves in the wind.
I didn’t really believe that anything bad had happened to Sarah. I didn’t believe it when I went over there after a full thirty hours of radio silence. I didn’t believe it when I walked around the back, after another fifteen minutes of banging on the doors and windows. I didn’t believe it when I called my Uncle Jimmy, and asked him to go home and grab my spare key to Sarah’s place, which I’d forgotten when I’d come over in a rush, because I was now too scared to leave.
I was scared because Sarah’s car was in the driveway, and all the lights were on inside. I could hear Gracie barking, her excited ‘Company! Is! Here!’ bark that tapered into mournful howls, and that was strange too, because Sarah always shushed Grace and checked on whatever she was barking about. I was scared because Sarah always texted back, even when she was mad. She liked talking too much to give me the silent treatment.
I waited for my Uncle Jimmy to show up in the old turquoise Chevy he drove when he wasn’t driving one of our two company vans and give me my spare key, and while I waited, to ease my fear, I walked around the back of the house.
The house that Sarah lived in—the house that she and Alan had once shared—was just about the last house in all of Wickett. The backyard looked out on deep green woods that started as Rowe Forest and turned into unnamed state land, stretching for fifty miles or more, all the way through to Bennington County in Vermont. I walked around the house, skirting the mossy edge where the yard line met the treeline, and noticed that up on the crooked red back porch, the hot tub cover was off.
I found Sarah dead in the hot tub on the back porch. She’d only been in the tub for eight hours or so, the medicolegal death investigator said later. But her skin was already beginning to peel off. I tried to pull her out anyway, and fucked up the crime scene—which later the county coroner’s office said was not a crime scene—and screamed, and screamed, and didn’t even think to call 911 for a good four minutes, until my poor Uncle Jimmy showed up and followed my wailing around to the back of the house.
The official ruling was ‘accidental drowning’, but everyone in Wickett—except for me, and Uncle Jimmy—believed that Sarah had died by her own hand. She’d always been liberal and eccentric and sensitive, and had an official diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder, and somehow, in the public opinion of our town, all those relatively ordinary things added up to a tragic soul, marked for an early death.
For a while after that I was inside of a black hole. It was soundless and motionless and emotionless in my black hole of grief, which helped me get through a lot of difficult things, like Alan getting to sit up front at Sarah’s (closed-casket) funeral with her folks and her siblings while I sat in the back of the local Protestant church and thought about how Sarah wanted a non-denominational ‘celebration of life’ with a lot of jam band music, followed by a scattering of her ashes.
“I hope I die while a lot of people I know are still alive,” Sarah told me. “That’s the only way I’m going to force all of you to rock out to The Allman Brothers and Cream. Literally over my dead body.”
“I’ll be right there, babe, handing out earplugs for your mourners,” I said, and she snort-laughed and slapped me on the side. Ha ha.
In the black hole it didn’t hurt me when Alan greeted me on the sidewalk in front of Robinson’s Hardware with a likable (and sad) smile for everyone around to see, and asked me “How are you, you fucking homewrecking dyke?” in a quiet, even voice that only I could hear. The pleasantly sorrowful look never left his face.
Alan was one of those lowkey New England bigots I mentioned. Not the kind you can guess about, though. A more insidious kind: the clean-cut ‘what a decent guy’ kind who looks so soft and well-scrubbed from the front. The kind who never shows you their secret places, because everything behind the facade is full of rot. I still don’t understand exactly why he wanted to be with Sarah. But I think, beyond obvious things like her beauty or her intelligence, that it had a lot to do with control.
But in the black hole, Alan being a piece of shit to me in public was of no consequence. His gentle fake smile didn’t sting. In the black hole it didn’t matter that he had Gracie with him, on a leash, and that she went from neutrality to a full butt-wiggling wag when she saw me.
“Hey Gracie,” I said. In the black hole it was easy to ignore Alan standing at the far end of Gracie’s leash. “Hey, Graceless Wonder. How’s my girl?”
Gracie held her kindly lab face (speckled with white at the muzzle) up and made big sweet eyes at me. But before I could pet her, Alan gently—but very firmly—pulled her away. She stopped wagging. She was always a little scared of men, Sarah told me, from something that happened before they’d adopted her. Well, before Sarah adopted her, right after the two of them separated. But that was a gray area, and a girlfriend with big plans didn’t get the family dog, not over a spouse who had never officially divorced the dead woman in question.
Inside the black hole, it didn’t bother me too much that Gracie had maybe three years left in her canine life—five, if she was very lucky—and that those years were going to be spent with Alan instead of me.
But...eventually, when I was done blaming myself for not getting us out of Wickett fast enough, I started to think. And what I thought was that Sarah probably hadn’t killed herself.
This was a few months after everything. Inside of the coffin that Sarah hadn’t wanted, her nails and teeth would’ve already fallen out. Her muscles and organs and skin would be liquefying. More than they already had in the hot tub, of course.
I searched inside of myself for flawed thinking. For the impulse to rationalize. Of course I had a vested interest in Sarah’s death not being a suicide, because if Sarah had in fact taken her own life, there were signs I’d missed. Perhaps they were so subtle that I couldn’t even be blamed for missing them...but a suicide implied suicidal ideation at the very least, or some kind of intent, or even a plan.
Still. Sarah didn’t even like benzos, she was well aware of their addictive qualities. She only took Xanax when she had anxiety so acute that it rendered her pretty much nonfunctional—took it so infrequently, in fact, that the empty bottle found on the porch next to the hot tub had been several months expired. Still effective enough, though.
Sarah wasn’t a big drinker. She did drink white zinfandel (perhaps her only major flaw, personally I’ve always been a beer person), but sparingly. And she rarely used the hot tub. She said the chemicals ‘made her skin feel slimy’, whatever the hell that meant.
Normal behavior isn’t necessarily important in a suicide case, though: there are impulsive suicides, and planned suicides, and in some ways every form of taking your own life involves extremities of emotion that deviate from typical behavior.
These were just thoughts, aimless thoughts that happened by and got caught in the gravitational pull of the black hole I was living in. I don’t know that they would ever have coalesced into anything meaningful, if not for the morning—about four months after I’d held Sarah’s slippery, semi-sloughed corpse half in and half out of the hot tub and screamed Help me, please to the sky—that Uncle Jimmy brought up the Saint of the Altar.
“I’ve been thinkin, Drew,” Uncle Jimmy said, as we stood in a drain field that reeked of sulfur one bright morning in the early summer.
“Thinking? That’s new,” I said. I’d just diagnosed a bad case of tree roots putting pressure on the drain field piping. It was an expensive fix, and I knew when I told Grant Leynes—who the bad septic system belonged to—that he was going to hit the roof.
“Very funny,” Uncle Jimmy said, dry as a bone. “I’ve been thinking about whether or not we should take a walk to the bridge between the waters and see if the Saint itself can’t help us.”
It was as strange as if Uncle Jimmy had just announced that the Pope lived in a napkin he kept underneath his bed, or that on full moon nights he turned into a pterodactyl and went gliding willy-nilly over the Quabbin Reservoir. I actually didn’t understand at all what he was talking about. Then, after a moment of rifling through my memories, I got it. Though I still didn’t get it.
“The...the Saint of the Altar? Like the old scary story?” I asked. “Are you compos mentis right now, James? Do I need to call a nursing home?”
Uncle Jimmy snorted out a laugh. “Uh-huh,” he said. “Why don’t you come over for dinner tonight? Then we can have a beer after and talk about it.”
I did go over for dinner, but not because I really thought we were going to have any more conversation about the Saint. I went because it was my habit to eat with Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Val at least once a week. More like twice a week after Sarah died.
After dinner, I sat on the back porch with Val and Jimmy until Dancing With The Stars came on and Aunt Val bailed to watch it (she never missed an episode). Then Uncle Jimmy chain-smoked while I vaped like my life depended on it. We matched beers for a little while, drinking while the glinting stars came out and the temperate air got chilly.
“Can I ask you something?” Uncle Jimmy said around beer number two. He said it in a serious enough voice that I paused the Red Sox highlight video we’d been watching on my phone and looked over at him.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Well, I didn’t want to bring this up before,” Uncle Jimmy said, and suddenly the lines on his face moved in a way that suggested real discomfort.
“Hey, are you okay?” I asked, but Jimmy just nodded yes and held up a hand—his classic shut up, I’m talking here gesture.
“I didn’t want to bring this up before, because I didn’t think you were doing so well,” Uncle Jimmy said. “With Sarah and everything. But I feel that now...now you seem to be better. Are you?”
“Getting better?” I asked. I thought about the lonely decades stretching in front of me into an afterlife of precisely nothing. I thought about Sarah’s laugh. It was already hard to remember. It had been sublimely ridiculous in some way, but I’d forgotten exactly how.
“Drew?” Uncle Jimmy prompted.
“I’m getting better, I think,” I said. “It’s still shitty. Sometimes.”
“Uh-huh, I expected that,” Uncle Jimmy said. “It’s only natural, you know. Do you think that prick Alan Riley Dunn had anything to do with her death?”
I was so startled by the question that I almost spat out my beer. “What?” I said, after a painful swallow.
“She was about to be rid of him, even with him putting divorce off for as long as possible by contesting it. And he’s a hateful man, isn’t he? Even back when you were kids I always thought so. His dad is actually a kind person, you know—I think it really is nature and not nurture in some of these cases. Alan’s always had that same knack for seeming nice as his father. But I think in Alan that niceness really is skin-deep.”
“Sarah said he never hit her,” I said. “But I’ve thought about it. About him putting—”
“The hot tub cover on, to drown her,” Uncle Jimmy said.
My arms broke out in goosebumps.
“Yes,” I said. I was almost whispering. “I’ve had that exact thought. He has a gun, too. Maybe he forced her to take the pills. But then—then of course I would think that.”
“You don’t want to believe she was suicidal and you missed it,” Uncle Jimmy said. “I understand. And ‘the husband did it’ is so, you know, cliché. So it stands to reason that you and I might go there.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t know if those kinds of thoughts are really fair, you know? To Alan. It’s cliché, like you said.”
It was cliché. It was cliché, and there was no way to prove it, but the idea remained. Sarah, naked and pleading. Sarah being forced to wash down pill after pill with wine. Sarah drowning, beating against the lid of her own killing jar until her breath ran out.
“It bothers me a lot,” Uncle Jimmy said. “She was a bit like a second niece to me.” Second niece really meant second daughter, because Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Val thought of me as a daughter. But Uncle Jimmy never outright said it. I think he felt like it would be disrespectful to his younger brother—my late father—to ‘replace’ him, even out of necessity.
“I know you liked Sarah,” I said. It felt surreal, discussing possible murder. It seemed unreal when I voiced my suspicions—doubly unreal because Uncle Jimmy had them, too.
“I loved Sarah,” Jimmy said, and his old-man voice was as firm as oaks. “Adored her. So did your Auntie. We were very happy for you, Drew, because you’ve always been such a quiet kid. I pictured you getting married, having a nice pretty house, maybe adopting a grandniece or grandnephew for me to spoil—”
This was the one place where Aunt Val and Uncle Jimmy were your typical annoying elderly people with elderly-people-values. They themselves had no children, and yet thought both my disposable income and free time were being utterly squandered without kids to use it up. I didn’t bother to correct Jimmy, though. Sarah was dead, so what did it matter?
“—and since none of that is going to happen, I figure the only thing we can maybe salvage for you out of the situation is a little justice,” Uncle Jimmy went on. “Assuming that justice hasn’t already been delivered.”
“I don’t...I don’t follow you,” I said. It seemed like the best response to this weird, upsetting conversation was to open another beer, so I did just that.
“That’s why I brought up the Saint,” Uncle Jimmy said. He said it patiently, like bringing up the stupid monster that Wickett kids taunted each other with was a totally sane thing to do. “What do you remember about the Saint, Drew? From when you were a child? Children always talk about those sorts of things, I don’t know why. I guess most kids have a macabre streak a mile wide, even though adults don’t like to think so.”
“I...you really want to hear about this?”
“Uh-huh,” Uncle Jimmy said, so flat and stern that there was no room for confusion.
“Well...” I took a long hit off my vape and considered it, rifling through my memories. “I remember we used to sneak into the ruins of the doll factory and dig up ‘gifts’ for the Saint, like as a game. I remember we said that stupid rhyme when we jumped rope or played hacky sack. Saint of the Altar takes your gifts, and damns the souls of those you named. The only ones who walk the trail are desperate or insane.”
Uncle Jimmy nodded. “It was different back when I was a child.”
“Worse rhyme scheme? Even more offensive to the mentally ill?” I asked.
“The rhyme scheme was still pretty bad,” Uncle Jimmy said. “But it was a little more explicit. The Saint never damned a soul itself. But it will judge someone for you, if you make the right kind of offering.”
“Judges them and...and then what?” I was interested, despite myself. I like folklore, and our dead town with the dead doll factory at the heart of it was primed for creepy legends.
“If it sees something malignant inside a body, I guess it...I suppose it collects it.”
“Malignant like cancer?” I asked. But Uncle Jimmy shook his head no.
“Malignant inside,” Uncle Jimmy said, and he looked terribly grave. Cancer, of course, was inside. But I understood that my Uncle meant something deeper.
“Jimmy,” I asked, cautiously. “Why do you keep talking about this like it’s...I don’t know, real?”
“Don’t give me that ‘nursing home’ look,” Uncle Jimmy admonished, wagging one large index finger at me. “You used to believe in ghosts and all that.”
“Yeah, as a kid,” I said.
“Do you think you could believe again? Or at least keep enough of an open mind to take in what I show you without going raving mad like some Twilight Zone character?”
“No Lovecraftian gibbering and ranting, got it,” I said. I guessed that the window of madness was closed to me. If it had ever been open, it was probably in those moments when I was holding Sarah’s dead body halfway out of the hot tub.
“Would you like to find out if Alan did it? If he actually did it?” Uncle Jimmy said, and now his creaky voice was as low and ominous as the wind through the pines of Rowe Forest.
“Well yeah, but—”
“Okay. Then let’s go for a walk,” Uncle Jimmy said.
“A walk? To where?”
“To the Little Cherubs factory,” Uncle Jimmy said, Then he put his cigarette out and went inside to get his coat, although the night only had the slightest chill.
“Come on. Bring your sweatshirt.”
I followed him. When I asked him questions, he shushed me. But it made me think of times when I was younger, and Uncle Jimmy had shown me secret places in the woods around our town, places only children would use. The old rope swing by Chagall Creek. The rotting shed at the end of Barrier Road, where the walls were covered with someone’s collection of old license plates and the ground was covered with nips of Jim Beam and Fireball. The deep but strangely clear body of water in the old quarry, which had no real name but we all called Lost Lake. The Devil’s Rock boulder—far enough away that the trek to it was rare and special, even as unsupervised kids—which was hidden so well in the woods I’m surprised there was a path out there at all. Obviously it looked like a horned creature. Uncle Jimmy took me places, and sometimes Aunt Val took me places, too, and I think other parents took their kids. Enough of us had a working knowledge of the treasures dotted through the forest around Wickett, anyway, to never ever get bored.
But that evening Uncle Jimmy took me to the Little Cherubs doll factory. The warmish day gave way to a cold night. There was a wind blowing as we walked through the woods—this kind of insistent wind that didn’t make you uncomfortable all at once, but iced up your hands and ears with prolonged exposure.
I guess that from inside my black hole it didn’t matter too much if Uncle Jimmy was playing a trick on me. Pranks weren’t really his thing, although Aunt Val had been known to keep a joke going from time to time. But being out in the woods felt good. It was nice to walk at night with my Uncle and pretend that it was a few decades earlier, and that life was still simple and uncomplicated. It was nice to get creeped out enough that I had to turn my phone flashlight on. At least I was feeling something.
By the time we reached the familiar hulks of crumbly outbuildings and the ground under our feet grew treacherous with debris, I had gotten myself pretty scared. I jumped at the sound of an owl. I jumped when a cricket nearby got particularly loud. I jumped at any suggestion of nocturnal eyes in the dark, even though the biggest animals living around that human-ruined patch of earth were probably mice.
“Why are we out here?” I whispered. It seemed like whispering was appropriate.
“You gotta bring something,” Uncle Jimmy said. “An offering for the Saint. I guess it’s favored the Little Cherubs dolls for a long time now. The folks who were old when I was young said it used to be partial to locks of hair.”
“The Saint of the Altar likes to be given doll parts,” I said. “Right.”
“Uh-huh,” Uncle Jimmy said. “Listen, pumpkin. I know you don’t believe me, just like I didn’t believe your Auntie Val when she brought me out here, and she didn’t believe her cousin Janey when Janey brought her. I won’t ask for your belief. Just keep an open mind, and do as I say, okay?”
“Okay,” I said. “Auntie Val went looking for the Saint of the Altar?”
“Less talking and more searching,” Uncle Jimmy said, indicating a particularly large pile of detritus.
I shut my mouth and dug around in it with my foot. It was mostly rock and rubble, shingle pieces, scraps of wood...and then I found a doll leg. It was naked, no shoe or anything, but I picked it up and showed it to Jimmy by the light of my phone.
“Good?”
“Uh-huh,” he affirmed. “Hold on to that, okay?”
“Okay,” I said. “But I still don’t—”
“Now we have to walk a while. And we have to go in the darkness. Turn that flashlight off.”
Something about Uncle Jimmy’s attitude was strange to me. He was carrying himself with an air of formality, like he only really did during weddings or funerals. He took off away from the remains of the doll factory with his back very straight. His posture was perfect. I followed him through the ruins and onto a path that led deeper into the woods.
The sky, when it was visible above us, was glazed with stars. A thin moon hung in the center of it. My eyes adjusted to the darkness, until everything was purple and deep blue instead of pitch black.
We stopped in a clearing I was pretty sure I’d been in before, and Uncle Jimmy turned in a slow circle, looking at the woods around us.
“We’ll wait here,” he told me. “Maybe we’ll see the lights, and maybe not. If we do, we can follow them to the place between the waters.”
That called up something for me. Something forgotten.
“I remember the lights,” I said. “As kids, we said if you walked with the will-o'-the-wisp, you could find the altar.”
“Uh-huh,” Uncle Jimmy said. “But it doesn’t always work. I think it helps if you keep an open mind—”
Uncle Jimmy broke off as a small light flickered into view to our left. It was maybe forty yards further on, and it was hanging in midair like a second moon. But a much smaller moon, bone-white and maybe chest high.
I could have told Uncle Jimmy that I had the most open mind in the world. After I’d held the dead body of my truest love on her porch one bright morning, anything seemed possible. Even whatever the hell we were doing here.
“Is it dangerous?” I asked. I felt fear holding me close, a cold-handed lover in the dark woods.
“No, it’s not dangerous. Not if you bring a gift,” Uncle Jimmy said. “And do exactly as I say. We’re going to follow that light until we come to the path between the two black lakes. Then you walk that straight through. The water might look inviting, Drew, it might look like the most inviting thing you’ve ever seen—but you can’t touch that water, and you cannot let it touch you. Then you’ll leave your offering. I’ll be there the whole time, all right?”
“I thought will-o'-the-wisps led travelers away from the safe pathways. In stories, I mean.”
“I guess this one leads you away from safe pathways too,” Uncle Jimmy said. “But it isn’t going to take us to our deaths.”
I don’t know if this is a good idea, I almost said. But a sudden, vivid thought stopped me from voicing my objections. It wasn’t a tragic picture of Sarah, even though that would make sense. An image of Gracie rose in my mind. How she’d put her tail between her legs and dropped her head a little bit when Alan led her away from me on the sidewalk outside of Robinson’s Hardware.
“Okay,” I said. “As long as we’re not going to die. Aunt Val wouldn’t miss you much, but losing me would devastate her.”
Uncle Jimmy laughed—but it was a dutiful laugh, soft and mechanical. His eyes were trained on the will-o'-the-wisp.
“Let’s go, pumpkin,” he said, and began to follow it.
The bobbing light stayed well ahead of us, but never so far ahead that it disappeared. After a while, I realized that I was in a part of the woods I’d never been in before. The sounds were unfamiliar to me—I could hear something like the crickets I’d always heard in Rowe Forest during early summer, and something like peepers as we followed the endlessly moving light past watery places. But they sounded wrong. The beats, the rhythms of the creatures I had spent my whole life hearing were a tad off. The lone owl that hooted in the dark went hoo-hoo-hoo-h’HOO-OO-OO instead of hoo-h’HOO-hoo-hoo. That might seem stupid, but when you were hearing it, it made all the difference in the world: one sound was a sound that I had heard on television and in movies and out in the real woods for my entire life. The other one sounded like a woman laughing. Or something way high up in the trees that was trying to sound like an owl.
The ground underfoot began to change into something harder. After a while it seemed like we were walking on an old stone road, but in that darkness it was impossible to tell. The light up ahead was too distant to illuminate much.
I felt like things were very close to us in the dark on both sides of the path we walked. Nothing reached out for us—no skeletal hands grasped at my sweatshirt—but the feeling of being watched was so strong that it raised the hairs on my neck. I realized that I had goosebumps, and that I’d maybe had them for some time.
My nerves were awake. I was being pulled out of the black hole of grief by my very real and very pressing fear. Uncle Jimmy and I were lost. We were following a ball of swamp gas into the woods in the middle of the night on the basis of a hopscotch rhyme, with only my no-service phone (with twenty percent battery) at our disposal. Uncle Jimmy was going senile, or something, but I wasn’t, and it was my responsibility to get us back to Wickett safely.
I was going to say something, but then we came to a place where the trees dropped away like they’d been razor-cut. The light winked out. The wind blew, terribly cold and startlingly strong against my exposed hands and face. Here the slim smiling moon was so bright that it lit up the entire world. And the entire world was a long stone walkway between two bodies of water. A small sandy beach ran along each side of the stone walk, demarcating separate lakes. Identical, but separate.
No moonlight shone on the waters of those lakes. They seemed to swallow all light. And up in the middle of the stone walkway was a table.
No—not a table. An altar. It was chest-height, made of a single piece of gray and weathered stone. There were carvings around the base, faded into illegibility.
“You go on up there,” Uncle Jimmy said, and for a second he looked unfathomably old to my eyes, like bringing me to this place had cost almost more than he could pay. Then he touched my hand. “You go on up there and you set that doll leg down on the altar. Then you turn around and come right back here. Don’t look behind you at the altar when you’re coming back. You understand?”
“Yeah,” I said. My mouth felt very dry. “I understand.”
“Good,” Uncle Jimmy said. “Go on, now.”
I stepped onto the stone bridge, and looked back at my uncle. He nodded at me, and then lit a cigarette, cupping his hands so that his lighter wasn’t snuffed out by the wind. I could see the ember glowing at the water’s edge.
The black water on either side of me didn’t speak. Nothing came out of it as I stepped on to the bridge. I turned my gaze away from the still water with an effort, and fixed my eyes on the old stone altar as the ceaseless wind whipped around me.
I got right up to the altar and set my Little Cherubs doll leg on it with unsteady hands. No monster appeared. The only thing that spoke was the air. The stone, when my hands brushed against it, felt slick and porous to the touch, as if it’d spent a long time submerged in water and had just resurfaced. I turned around and walked towards my uncle, who was faced away, staring into the trees that our path had come out of. I didn’t turn around, and when I reached him, he stubbed out his cigarette on the bottom of one boot and started walking.
“Where’s our guiding light?” I asked, as we headed into the dark woods.
“Don’t need it to get back,” Uncle Jimmy said. “But we want to keep a good pace. The Saint will be following us now.”
We walked back through the woods, staying to the path. In the trees that cold wind was less audible and less biting. But I felt like there was something behind us. Something moving in relative quiet, just far enough away to stay hidden.
It seemed like we’d been following the will-o’-the-wisp for hours on our way to the altar. But on our return journey we hit the familiar clearing in fifteen minutes. Then we were at the ruins of the Little Cherubs factory, and then we were in Uncle Jimmy’s backyard. When I checked my phone, it said it was barely eleven, even though my most conservative guess would have placed the time around two in the morning.
“You go on home now,” Uncle Jimmy said. “And lock your doors. It will come knocking on them soon enough.”
“It will?” I asked. Now that we were back in the real world, I started to think again that this was some elaborate prank. The stone table and the strange bridge were real, but they served as props in a rite of passage that involved the old timers scaring the shit out of the younger generation. Probably where the urban legend had come from to begin with.
Then Uncle Jimmy turned to face me, and in the low light that filtered on to the back porch from the dining room inside, his face was so solemn and afraid that any conviction I was forming about being the victim of a prank evaporated.
“Yes, it will,” Uncle Jimmy said. “You go home and you lock all your doors. Sometime after midnight it will come knocking. It might tell you things, or try to get you to open the door, but you absolutely must not open the door. You understand me, Drew?”
“Yes sir,” I said. I hadn’t called Uncle Jimmy ‘sir’ since the last time I was grounded, as a teenager.
“When it asks you for a name, you tell it Alan Riley Dunn. Okay?”
“I got it,” I said. “I promise.”
I was uneasy on the ride home. Our trek out to the stone altar was already feeling blurry and unreal—the black hole was creeping back up on me. What we’d done was cathartic, I told myself. Uncle Jimmy had provided me with a little measure of relief from my grief. I wasn’t going to lock all the doors like some idiot when I got home.
But when I pulled into my driveway and walked the path to my front door in quiet darkness, I felt the hairs on my neck stand up. I felt watched.
I went inside and my heart was pounding like crazy. I realized that I was terrified. I locked my doors. I locked my windows and drew down the blinds. I even went into the bathroom and whipped the shower curtain back in a breathless rush, half expecting an obvious murderer with a big glinting knife to spring out at me.
There was nothing and nobody. Eventually I felt calm enough to sit on the couch and watch the Nature Channel. A show about a family of zebras lulled me to sleep, and when I woke up there was something about finches on and I got up.
It was true night, by then, deep early-morning night, and I collected myself and my glasses and started up to the bedroom. I was nearly there when the sound—the sound that had woken me up, though I didn’t realize it—came again.
A knocking came from my back door. The one that faced toward the woods.
I froze on a stair riser, looking towards the shadowed door at the back of my little house. Then the sound came again: three polite, barely-there raps on the door, in quick succession.
I walked toward the door with a sound of rushing in my ears.
“Hello?” I said. I did not open the door.
“Drew? Please let me in,” Sarah said. It was her. It was her exact voice. Almost.
“I—I can’t do that, Sarah,” I said.
“Please,” the voice said. It was too clear through the door. Perfectly enunciated, as if we were speaking quietly together in the same room.
“I can’t. I don’t think it’s really you,” I said. I put one hand to my face, feeling a curious combination of terror and misery. I sat down against the door.
“You’re right. It isn’t Sarah,” the voice agreed, and the way it changed made a chill run across my shoulders. It was still Sarah’s voice. But now it was many other voices, too. It sounded like the wind over the two black lakes. It sounded like something that had been submerged in water for a long time, and just resurfaced.
“I made an offering to you,” I said. I was whispering. But the voice replied as if I were perfectly clear.
“An offering,” Not-Sarah said. “Yes. So nice. In return, I will pass judgment. Give me the name of the soul and I will look within.”
“Alan Riley Dunn,” I said. “I think he killed Sarah. I want...if he did, I want you to...do whatever it is you do.”
There was silence for a moment.
Then another moment.
Then a sound came—a deep scratching sound, like something had dragged long claws along the outside of my door. I flinched back, my heart leaping.
“Alan Riley Dunn is innocent of killing,” the voice of the Saint said. It didn’t sound like Sarah at all anymore.
“Oh,” I said. Even though there was a monster on the other side of my door, I felt numb. “So Sarah really killed herself?”
“It was an accident,” the Saint said. And then, after a moment, it added, musingly: “I am...sorry. This is not the answer you wanted.”
“No, it’s okay,” I said, even though I was crying. “I really wanted to know. I’m glad I know. Thank you.”
“I will grant you another favor,” the Saint said. “As thanks for my beautiful doll leg.”
It occurred to me, then, that collecting these things, these trinkets—like doll parts, and locks of hair—was something a hoarder would do. Maybe the Saint of the Altar was lonely. Or sad.
“That’s nice,” I said. “That’s nice of you. I’d love to get my dog back. Well...she was our dog.”
“Done,” the Saint said, and it tapped against my door again. “Goodbye, Drew.”
“Goodbye,” I said. Then I was alone. The silence from the other side of the door no longer crackled with the presence of Something.
I put my head in my hands and cried for a while. For Sarah and her problems, problems I had never quite seen, and out of self-pity, and fear, and grief.
Eventually I stopped crying. Drifted. I woke up to another sound of knocking. For a minute I thought it was the Saint, coming back to drag me into the darkness behind its altar of stone. But it was daylight, and I was tremendously stiff. I’d slept the whole night against the door.
“Hello?” I asked.
“Oh, Christ. Open up,” Uncle Jimmy said. I staggered to my feet and swung open the door.
“You scared the hell out of me,” Uncle Jimmy said, without preamble. “I was knocking on the front door for a while. It made me think...”
I’m sure he meant it made me think that the Saint did something to you, or you did something stupid like let it in, but I thought of my own experience: it made me think of that day I knocked on Sarah’s front door and got no answer.
I felt oddly fragile at that moment. I leaned forward and hugged Uncle Jimmy tightly. My uncle isn’t any more touchy-feely than I am—which is not at all—but he hugged me back.
“I should beat your ass for that adventure, old man,” I said, into his shoulder. “I almost died of fright when that thing showed up.”
“Uh-huh,” Uncle Jimmy said, patting my back. “I told you it was real.”
Then he pulled back, and looked me square in the eyes.
“I saw Alan over at the laundromat on Main,” he said. “I guess he looked alive enough. I suppose you didn’t get your catharsis. I’m sorry, pumpkin.”
“I did, actually,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Okay,” Uncle Jimmy said. “Okay.”
I made coffee for the both of us. We were drinking it in the front yard while Uncle Jimmy critiqued the way my azalea bushes were blooming when Alan Riley Dunn, the man himself, pulled into my driveway with Gracie leaning her head out of the back seat of his car and barking her ‘Company! Is! Here!’ bark at me.
Alan looked different. Wouldn’t quite meet my eyes. I wanted to ask if he’d seen anything strange, anything at all. But I waited to see what would happen.
“Drew,” Alan said briskly, like we were jogging by each other to get to two different country-club tennis courts.
“Alan,” I said. “I’d offer you coffee, but I’m fresh out.” I had plenty of coffee, but for Alan I was fresh out.
“No need,” Alan said. He opened the back door of his sedan. Gracie jumped out and beelined for me immediately, tail going a mile a minute.
“Hey, Gracie,” I said, and patted her back while she snuffled at me.
“Look,” Alan said, all businesslike. “She isn’t thriving with me. I feel like...do you want her?”
“I do,” I said. “She’s my dog.”
“Right,” Alan said, and then handed me a dish and a leash. He got a bag of dog food out of the back of his car and brought that over, too.
Uncle Jimmy watched this whole thing with his eyebrows somewhere north of his receding hairline.
“Thanks,” I said, and Alan got in his car like a thousand devils were chasing him, and pulled away quickly, raising his hand in a single sharp wave as he went.
So I got Gracie, after all of that. And Alan’s been less rude than usual, when I’ve encountered him around Wickett. Actually, he hasn’t given me a hard time even once, not in public or in private.
I still miss Sarah. I feel like I failed her, sometimes. Or never saw the whole her. I think about the unfairness of life, and how she wasn’t recognized for who she really was in death. But that’s the way of things...and that’s becoming a bit easier to live with, lately. Gracie and I usually visit the grave Sarah didn’t want to be buried in on our long walks, and I can bear it.
I guess I finally am ‘getting better’, as Uncle Jimmy put it.
So in case you were wondering how I know that the coveted Little Cherubs I Love Lucy doll is five-hundred dollars on eBay, well. Never let it be said that I don’t show my appreciation for a good turn.