Morgan wandered out of the downstairs bathroom, towel-drying her hair and leaving wet prints that evaporated in her wake. In an oversized shirt worn thin by time, and a pair of boxer briefs, she plopped down on her mattress. Then, she reached for the bottle of Absolut wedged in the couch cushion and slugged it back.
The vodka swam between her teeth, scorched her throat on the way down. Upstairs, muted by the floor between them, she could hear the sounds of A Christmas Story as her mom curled up next to her dad on the couch, and Grandpa Teddy slept with his mouth open in the recliner. That was how they spent most Christmas nights, but this year, Morgan had excused herself as being sick—not a lie—and hoofed it downstairs, toting her two new gifts: one from a handsome and wealthy admirer and the other from a sadistic anonymous fuck who wanted to see her squirm.
The same sadistic anonymous fuck who’d left her the key.
She knew it without a doubt. The handwriting on both notes was the same. She set her presents on her desk, the camera on one side of her computer monitor and the portable DVD player on the other. Then, she sat on the edge of her mattress with her knees drawn up, and stared, daring either one of them to move.
When they didn’t, her gaze slid to Eleanor’s box of photographs, on top of which lay a duplicate portrait of the one she’d first studied on the mantel. Her eyes burned a hole in the picture as she dared to imagine how different things would have been if she’d been born a Reynolds. If she hadn’t been “the ruin,” “the little wretch” as Aunt Bern had called her.
Left in her clutches at four years old and for four more years thereafter, Morgan had always thought Bern had been named for the scars on her face, the puckered flesh that made striated rivers on her skin. Legend had it she’d knocked a scalding kettle on her head when she was young. Or her sister—Morgan’s mother, Ava—had. Both women told different stories, apparently.
The people paid her aunt cash, mostly, but sometimes they presented little baggies of what looked like snow in exchange for twenty minutes, forty minutes, an hour—depending on the amount—with Morgan. There was no set menu. It was à la carte. They could do whatever they wanted to her in the allotted time, so long as they did not kill her.
That didn’t mean some of them didn’t come close.
They wore hoods, or what Morgan later learned were balaclavas. Black wool hoods that concealed everything but their eyes, and even that space had a mesh insert. They could see her, but she couldn’t see them. A man beat her with a belt. Another strangled her with his tie. A woman hurt her with a corkscrew. But the worst were the plastic bags from the liquor store. Cloudy black things and vaguely translucent, they always looked to Morgan like skin shed by a snake. They slipped them over her head like a bonnet and knotted the handles around her neck. She screamed. Not because anyone would save her, but as her sentence dragged on, she learned that screaming made her black out faster, so she didn’t have to be lucid for the horrors that ensued.
And then, one morning just weeks after Morgan’s eighth birthday, all was quiet. She didn’t hear the growl of the coffeemaker. Or the shuffling of Bern’s slippered feet across the kitchen floor. She didn’t hear the dreaded knocks on the door, or the whisper of a jacket sliding over the back of a chair.
The only sounds came from outside. Cars shushed past. A shovel scraped against a sidewalk. A dog’s metal tags tinkled. A shrill scream scared the birds from the power lines. An icicle fell from the gutter and splintered.
When the police came, they wrapped Morgan in a blue fleece blanket. They muttered words like “Jesus Christ” and “house of horrors.” They asked if she had family, to which Morgan shook her head.
Bern had been her only family. Her mother had run off years ago. She’d disappeared so effectively, in fact, that Morgan had begun to doubt her existence at all. All she had were vague memories and the Bart Simpson doll she’d given her before dropping her off at the house on Winslow Street, never to be seen or heard from again.
The investigation revealed that Bern had slipped and fallen on her way to the mailbox. Cracked her skull on the sidewalk. The cops told her not to look, but Morgan stole a glance out the window and saw Bern lying there. Her eyes looked frosted over, like a windshield in December. The blood had already frozen around her head.
After, Morgan’s homelife became a kaleidoscope of different families, different houses. She never stayed in any one place too long; her ways of staring for hours on end and arranging everything in perfect symmetrical formation, from Legos to books to knives in the cutlery drawer, had a tendency to scare people. Especially adults. The children seemed more or less intrigued, but as soon as they began to mimic her behavior, she was cast out like a package delivered to the wrong address. Return to sender.
That was how she ended up almost exactly where she started, in Black Harbor, no more than ten blocks from where she’d lived with Bern. Lynette and Bruce Mori were a childless couple who’d been on the list for over a decade. And so, one monochromatic Christmas morning, she appeared on their doorstep—the gift they’d always wanted, but made with broken parts.
The social worker said it was a clean start. But even then, Morgan knew better. She was like a memory card. You could do your damnedest to erase all the images on it, but they were all there underneath it all, waiting to be recovered.
She was small and uncivilized. When she eventually started school, only the faculty were wise to the fact that their first grader was ten years old. She got her driver’s license at twenty, and graduated at the age of twenty-two. She was careful not to make any friends through it all. Or perhaps it had been less effort on her part and more the natural aversion of her peers. We learn from a young age to stay away from things that look like they could hurt us.
She didn’t hurt anyone until later.
The Ruins. She’d named it that herself, after hers truly. A nod to Bern, it was her way of telling the universe that she hadn’t forgotten about what happened to her in the little slanted house in Black Harbor. Like her, The Ruins began as a blank space. It had previously been a department store with bright lights and whitewashed walls. Women in heels and black slacks offered perfume samples and makeup trials. There were jewelry cases and racks for scarves and handbags and unnecessary accessories. And when the mall went bankrupt and the store went out of business and purged all its finer things, Morgan leased it for pennies on the dollar.
Her thesis: What would humans create, if unbridled? If fear of judgment wasn’t part of the artistic process, what would they bring into the world? The left side of the brain is limited by the right side’s fear, but without that fear factor, without dreading rejection, how far would people go?
The Ruins opened up to a dozen art students who brought friends—filmmakers and models and photographers, creatives who wanted to live in and make use of the space. And within a few months’ time, it had become a burgeoning and wonderfully weird community. People from the outside were invited in. They paid monthly memberships that helped keep the lights on, the events going, everything from New Year’s parties to film festivals and poetry slams.
In the center of it all was a fountain that had long since been drained. A tree made entirely of Mylar foil sprouted from it. Thousands of feet of fishing line draped from its branches, to which Polaroid photos were clipped. In its trunk was a hollow that held an exposed, anatomical heart that had a battery pack and a mechanism inside so it beat sixty times per minute. Beneath the tree was a light that could be changed to red, yellow, blue, or magenta to manipulate an ambiance.
There was a garden of flowers made from thrift store dishes. Mannequins dressed to kill, frozen in mid-strut down an aisle fashioned into a mock catwalk. They wore electrical tape and barbed wire, a dress of singed one-hundred-dollar bills. One was clothed in a sleek black dress with a sleek black heel, her other foot being devoured by a grisly hunter’s trap, the chain trailing in her wake like a shackle. Carlisle’s mannequins. That was where she’d seen her and David before—gluing spikes and feathers and adding finishing touches before the pieces came to life on the catwalk.
Stairwells were covered in graffiti and palindromic poetry and each room had its own atmosphere. They were named for tragic women: Hester, Sybil, Ophelia, and Lenore. Sometimes, people just called them by the colors of their walls: scarlet, grey, violet, and black.
Morgan’s favorite haunt was Lenore’s room, with its matte black walls and sculptures of ravens diving from the ceiling. That was where she waited for them, the guests who paid not to create but to destroy, on a white bench at the base of a skull mural. It extended from the wall like an unhinged jaw.
She waited for them as she had at the house on Winslow Street, twenty years before. Only now, she had better clothes. She wore ribbed over-the-knee stockings and a short leather skirt. A torn T-shirt or a lacy bralette. One shackle encircled her left ankle, another for each of her wrists. But they were only for show; never locked. Her pulse pounded whenever someone entered. Excitement mixed with nostalgia, and of course, a dash of fear. That she’d fail. Be overpowered again.
Their breathing was always the first thing she heard. It was heavy and hurried, stifled somewhat by the black hoods Morgan doled out as courtesy. Everyone took her up on it. In the underworld, anonymity was valuable, and once you lost it, there was no getting it back.
Their energy matched hers when she patted the bench beside her. Excited. Nervous. They thought they were there to meet a fifteen-year-old girl. That’s what she’d told them online, and she looked young enough to play the part. Some of them had done this kind of thing before; others were exploring the darkest parts of themselves for the first time.
Morgan always made sure it was the last time.
She let them touch her. Some, she even let them press their lips to her neck, slide their hands up her shirt. She never let them get too far, though, when she’d straddle them, slip her chains over their shoulders, and jam the needle into their neck.
The ketamine only took a few seconds to do its thing. She liked the sound they made when they hit the floor. All that dead weight, crashing down. Some of them had to have broken bones from hitting so hard. She never found out, though, because once she pressed the hot iron to their necks to expose their ugliness to the world, she never saw them again. Her henchman—a mute giant of a man—came in afterward and hauled out the trash.
When they came to in an empty, half-dilapidated parking garage hours later, their only memory took the form of their new status burned into their flesh, defined by a single word: Ruined. Going to the police would require them to admit what they’d been doing in a place like that. And the police might dig. Exhume things they didn’t want pulled to the surface. Like the fact that the complainant was under the impression they were going to The Ruins to engage in violent sex with a minor.
It had been the perfect business model.
Until it all disintegrated. Poof. Nothing left but a key and that goddamn note. My Ruin: All roads lead back to home.
Whoever had burned down The Ruins was watching her. They knew who she was and that she would eventually summon the courage to return home—to the house on Winslow Street. They’d planted the portable DVD player, and not long before she’d gone there. The balloon had still been afloat. In this cold, a balloon wouldn’t last more than a few hours.
It could have been the person from the video. They’d been wearing a camera, obviously, to catch her in the act.
A cop?
The man had been white or at least light-skinned, so it hadn’t been Officer Garrison despite the fact that he’d been looking for her. And Hudson … she’d seen his neck. The smooth, unmarred skin. It wasn’t him.
Then who? Who was haunting her? Hunting her?
Her eyes scanned the piles of photos on her desk. She went over to it. Pinched between her fingers was a picture of the Reynoldses all sitting at a pub table in Dublin. Could it be one of them, she wondered. But what ties would any of them have to her? Her focus homed in on Carlisle and David. They’d visited The Ruins as artists, attended her swanky soirées. They would know what she was capable of, what she did in those back rooms named for tragic heroines.
She picked up another photo. And another. In each, David and Carlisle stared at her—through her—their looks taunting her with what they knew.
“No,” Morgan breathed.
She rifled through Eleanor’s box of paper memories, searching for a photo where they didn’t have a damning glare, and came upon a copy of the family portrait she’d first seen on the mantel less than a week ago.
The Carlisle and David in the portrait didn’t know her. They were young, six and thirteen. But they stared at her as though they could see through her, as though they understood. Perhaps because they weren’t so different from her, with their love for macabre things. Carlisle with her singed dresses and bear-trap heels. David with his aerosol portraits of human pincushion dolls in the stairwells.
Morgan, at least, had an excuse. Bern had made her into what she was, a misanthropic vengeful creature. What was theirs? While their dad had disappeared without a trace, there had to be more to it than that. Something more depraved.
She moved whole albums out of the box, turning over every picture of David and Carlisle, until at last her fingernails scraped the bottom. Something cold knocked loose from the corner and rolled toward her.
It was a film canister. Curious, she held it up to the light of her lava lamp. It looked old. The orange label had begun to peel. And then, she dropped it as though it had started on fire. It clinked and rolled across the concrete floor, circling back toward her like a planchette on a Ouija board. Morgan picked her feet up, hugged her knees to her chest. She might as well have been communicating with a ghost; she felt the blood drain from her face, her lips go numb, as even in the dim light of her parents’ basement, she saw the handwritten initials on the canister: M.R.
Her lips moved soundlessly. My Ruin.