The Barter (27 page)

Rebecca felt herself moving with effort up the walk, pulling herself against the weight of her own fear as if she were dragging heavy, wet horse blankets again.

She opened the door from the front steps and discovered Matthew sitting unsteadily on the parlor rug near the stove, eyes red with recent crying and purple shadowed with baby exhaustion. He was holding something in his plump, dear little hands, frowning at it, busy in thought in that way small children can be. It took her some moments to recognize the object he grappled with, its tubes flopping horribly across his lap.

Rebecca closed the door behind her, and the little boy looked up from his study of the sticky, mysterious tubes of her father's stethoscope. At the sight of his mother, Matthew's face curled into a smile that was also half a cry. Under the heavy glass-globed lights of the parlor, Rebecca, still in her coat and gloves and hat, scooped up her little boy and held him, looking around her in real fear for the remainder of the disaster, wherever it might be.

Just as Matthew was setting out to protest the situation, the scratchiness of her coat, and the stethoscope abandoned like so much forbidden fruit on the warm rug near the stove, Rebecca heard the
back door open and the heavy step of her husband on the kitchen floorboards. “Rebecca?” he called.

He met her in the downstairs hallway, which formed a dim tunnel between the brightly lit kitchen and parlor. John was openly dismayed at seeing Matthew in his mother's arms at this hour of the night, rather than asleep and safe in his cot.

“Where is everyone?” John asked, and Rebecca felt a cold stone against her breast. “They must be upstairs,” John looked up. “Hello up there. Dr. Mueller? Miss Nussbaum?”

There came a sound from above, a thud like something falling from a shelf. Rebecca and John looked at each other, startled and afraid.

“Stay here,” John murmured. “Until I know it's safe.” Then John made for the stairs with his long-legged gait. Rebecca stood with Matthew in her arms, both of them watching as John disappeared into the dimness of the upper hallway.

A fearsome quiet followed. Rebecca felt as if a hook in her rib cage were tugging her toward the staircase. She had to know what was up there, but she was suddenly afraid to let her little boy see whatever might be waiting. She forced herself to blink her burning eyes and look away. Matthew leaned his little head against her shoulder. His warm, round cheeks were a soft, kissable plumpness that curved down past his tiny chin, making of his face a darling round pear, creamy white and sweet. Matthew didn't look like her—he had John's dark eyes and his lighter hair—and as he lifted his head again to turn his serious, tired baby smile on her, Rebecca's heart tightened with love so crushing she thought she might die of it.
I would do anything for you, but I can't stay here with you
, she thought at him fiercely.
Forgive me.
She moved into the parlor and set the boy down in his former nest on the rug near the stethoscope.

“Stay here and play quietly, my own sweet love,” she said, kissing his head and his cheeks and his little dry mouth. He looked at her expectantly. So small. Was he too close to the stove? There was no time to lose. She would return to him. She breathed him in and then stood and made for the stairs, backing toward them while smiling insincerely at the little boy on the rug, afraid of the quiet up there, so afraid of it, but still impelled toward it by something she knew but couldn't name.

Matthew's small face crumpled at the sight of her retreat. He began to wail in earnest as she reached for the banister and began to climb.

“Sssh, sweet love,” Rebecca whispered. “Sssh, sssh.” But he only sobbed the louder. Rebecca looked over her shoulder at her baby, grown purple faced with the rage of incomprehensible loss. “All right, all right.” She dashed back to the parlor and put the stethoscope back in Matthew's hands. He flung it away, reaching for her instead. “No, no, little love. You can't come with me,” she whispered, unhooking his fingers from her skirt, scarcely able to think.
What is happening up there? Why is it so quiet? Why hasn't John come down?
She stood hastily, and Matthew fell over with a graceless flop and began to scream into the rug. She righted him as softly as she could and then turned and ran for the staircase.

She didn't make it far. His screams escalated. “You're going to hurt yourself,” she cried down to him. “Be still! Be still and wait for Mama!” Rebecca looked up into the darkness awaiting her at the top of the stairs and tried to still her heart.
God help me,
she prayed forcefully, staring at the black upstairs hallway and searching for the strength of heart to climb up into it.
He's only a baby. I can't bring him into that.

She heard the baby fall over again, and his screams intensified. Fearing that he really had hurt himself, she hurried back down the stairs and craned from the landing to look into the parlor. Matthew was on his side, perhaps too close to the stove after all, fists clenching and unclenching, eyes shut tight, screaming.

“Matthew, hush! Stop that now! Your mama is going to be right upstairs!”

Matthew's eyes opened at the sound of her voice, and he reached for her, his tiny fingers spread open like a forced flower, his sobs hoarse and pleading.

It was too much for her. “You poor thing.” As fast as she could move, she went to him, scooped him up, pressed him against her shoulder, none too gently. There was no time to lose. Something was happening up there. She had to get to John. Her shoes made the staircase shudder. “We'll go together. We'll go together. Be brave, little one.”

She raced toward the dark at the top of the stairs, where all the light seemed to have been sucked out of the world by some tremendous leave-taking force, like a wind that sweeps a door closed. But three-quarters of the way up, midstep, she felt herself overreach, her body overbalancing, as if the next stair had sunk, suddenly and without warning, three feet into the bottom story. As if the whole staircase belonged to a different house, one built just a bit lower and to the left of her father's house, the house where she knew herself to be. Clutching her baby boy to her side, she felt herself hanging perilously close to a fall.

Dream, this must be a dream, I must have fallen asleep in the wagon on the way home, afterward, and I'm tucked up against him under the blanket and dreaming this, dreaming this entire disaster.

But as much as she wished it, she knew it wasn't true. She was
falling, with her baby in her arms, on stairs she'd traversed a thousand times.

In the half seconds that felt like days during which her body overcorrected and searched for a reality that was no longer there, she saw the house as if through a film of smoke or bright linen gauze, the sort her father used for bandages, but the house was utterly changed. Here it was bright, it was hot. Here the top of the stairs led to a hallway with three doors on one side—not the eight doors, four on either side, that she'd raced in and out of as a girl. As hideous and sickening as the sensation of falling was, and even as the unfamiliarity of the place in which she found herself doubled and redoubled the terror of what was happening, she felt more impelled than ever to get to the top of the stairs. Something she wanted was up there. Something she wanted very badly. She had to get to it. She had to get to it—no matter what it cost, she knew she was willing to pay.

She urged herself forward, hurling her body and angling her shoulder—the opposite shoulder from the one that cradled Matty—toward where she knew the staircase ought to be, ought to be. Although here in this dream house it was as if she were throwing herself over the banister. And for a stomach-dropping moment she thought she'd done just that.

The staircase spun back into place before her.
I'm going to hit—

Her shoulder and the side of her head thudded against the edge of the wood. Matty screamed on and on. She cradled his small head, pushed up onto her knees with her sore free arm, gathered her heavy skirt out of the way, and lunged again for the top of the stairs.

Her father's door was the first on the left. As her fingers closed over the knob, it turned. John was there. She launched herself into him bodily, and he took her in.

“He's gone, Beck.”

Still holding Matthew, she pushed past John into the room, as peremptorily and instinctively as she'd run into his arms. There was a light past him on the bedside table, illuminating a room in which nothing seemed possible—surely this was a play, a stage? Not her home. Frau was on the floor. “Oh God!” It burst from her throat in a sob.

John managed to gather the boy away from her. Rebecca, still not seeing, or unwilling to see, what was in her father's bed, knelt at Frau's side. She was warm, but breathing shallowly.

“She's unconscious. She fainted, Beck; she's still alive.”

“What—” Rebecca, with her hand on Frau's cheek and her little boy screaming and screaming behind her, and her husband pushed away like so much unwanted food, finally looked at what was in her father's bed.

*   *   *

I
t emerged that on the night of the Doctor's death, poor Adeline had passed some nightmarish hours. Dr. Mueller had gone up to bed not long after John and Rebecca left for the schoolhouse, and sometime later, at around the hour that popular songs were being sung at Betsy Hart's house in town, a repeated sound, like a choking cry, had stirred Adeline Nussbaum from her bed and brought her to the bedroom door of her old friend and protector, her one remaining cousin from the old days in Duisdorf, before their small, rudderless family had scattered to pieces all across the cities and America and left each other to make their own ways as best they could. Adeline had lived in America long enough to see that not all the Germans here came from luck and large families. Some came here lonely and died here lonelier still.

The sounds had continued behind her cousin's door, and so eventually, after calling softly through the wood to him, she'd pushed the door open and found the old man strangling on his own blood, purple in the face, eyes bulging, unable to speak or breathe but not yet dead, horribly not yet dead. As she stood in the doorway, the Doctor, that sturdy and inscrutable man who had always seemed invincible in his way, vomited blood onto his chest.

Her shriek of horror awoke the baby, who tumbled from his cot in Rebecca's room across the hall with a ragged thump that jolted Frau's heart, and that was followed by screaming of such an intense pitch that she was convinced the little lad had broken his arm. From that moment she was consumed by the effort and the helplessness of trying to find a way to aid them both at once, by herself. She ran to the Doctor, who didn't seem to recognize her, his whole body thrown into the effort of fighting something that seemed to have exploded within itself. So then she ran to the boy, who seemed mercifully unharmed, although she could hardly pause long enough to examine him. She hastened downstairs in the dark with the still-screaming boy, where she found herself alone and in a terrible conflict. Could she leave the boy to get help? She couldn't bring the baby with her into the cold, and she didn't have time to dress him. Did she even have time to run to the neighbors for help? In a fever of indecision she lit all the lamps she quickly could, hoping somehow that the brightness of the house might alarm the neighbors. She left the boy in the parlor with the only toys that came to hand: the topmost items in the Doctor's old medicine bag, which customarily sat on a table in the hall by the door.

From there Adeline pulled herself as quickly as she was able back up the stairs, carrying the Doctor's bag with her. In narrating
the evening's events to Rebecca and John later, she tried, she did try, to explain what happened in the Doctor's room over the course of the unending hour before the Hirschfelders arrived at home, but was largely unable. Her English seemed to fail her. No one who lived nearby had noticed the lights blazing from the house or heard the boy's screams, or if they had, they hadn't made it their business to come. She said merely, “After some time, the little boy, he stop crying downstairs. But I could not leave him alone, your father, in his
Leiden
.”

The Doctor had only just finally died when Rebecca saw him, and the blood on his bedclothes was still bright and fresh.

B
ridget manages, somehow, to scramble partway up from the floor, with Julie half in her arms and half in Mark's. Crabbing backward, away from the ghost in the door, Bridget whangs her head, for the second time in seconds, on the stair banister post. Tears start in her eyes, and she realizes that in falling she has also bitten the inside of her cheek hard enough to draw blood—it feels like there's actually a little loose flap of skin in there, and the pain is both needle sharp and throbbing. There is no air in the house, no air in the universe, and her lungs are white pain. Standing, running, getting away, is impossible. Her arms are shaking so hard she can hardly keep herself propped up.

The ghost has turned effortfully in the doorway and is staring down at them with hunger in its eyes. Inside the shape-shifting openmouthed whiteness Bridget can still just see the blackened figure of a woman, melting and struggling. And now it moves, taking a shuffle step that throws it off-balance, and it brushes against the doorframe with a revolting thud like a hand flapping against the inside lid of a coffin.

Mark, of course, cannot hear it. He has struggled along on the
ground with Bridget, keeping low to prevent Julie from falling out of their arms, and with a grunt he lands on his ass on the polished wooden floorboards. He pulls Julie away from Bridget to his own chest, smooching and rocking the girl and looking at Bridget with betrayed astonishment in his eyes.

“What the hell, Bridget?” he demands. “Are you drunk? How much did you drink?”

As Bridget watches in nauseated terror, the ghost reaches out its flickering, grotesque arm and closes the front door to the house behind it.
Now we are all here. Now you are mine.

“We have to move. We have to get Julie away from here,” Bridget whispers.

“I'm getting her into bed,” Mark snaps, exasperated, and rises to his feet with the sobbing little girl in his arms. Like it's nothing. He steps over Bridget at the foot of the stairs and ascends quickly, making funny
nom-nom-nom
noises into the crook of Julie's neck that cause her to insert one giggle, exactly one giggle, into the line of sobs she is producing. Bridget hears the upstairs bathroom door close, hears Mark's comforting voice talking to their girl, hears the bathtub faucet come alive with a hiss that runs through the walls.

Meanwhile neither she nor the ghost has moved.

“What do you want?” Bridget manages through numb lips.

Around its blackened center the ghost actually enlarges—spreads itself wide like a hellish preying bird. The world grows momentarily dark and bone-chillingly cold.
I want it all. Everything you love is mine.

“Please don't,” Bridget begs. “Please, please just leave them alone. Take me, take just me.”

The ghost's head dips low, as if bending to a trough. Then its jaw
lowers like a mantis, and its black and earth-stinking mouth opens wide enough that Bridget can see directly into the chasm. There the dark-eyed woman inside is trapped and reaching.
Join her, then. Go on. Climb inside. You knew all along you were going to be swallowed alive.

There's a happy squeal and a splash upstairs.

Bridget's mind stutters to Julie.
I would do anything for you, but I can't go in there. Forgive me.

“I have something for you,” Bridget extemporizes. “I have something you want. I promise.”
It's slow it's slow it's slow, I can lure it away from them, I can lure it into the dark, and then I can escape and get us all out of here.

It flickers and then preens again, growing and stretching, a mindless wall of cold and anger that dissolves all the air around it into nothingness.
Everything you love is mine. You know yourself that you already gave it all away.

“Follow me. Follow me. I'll show you,” Bridget pants.

Keeping her eyes on the ghost, her breath a thin and painful whistling in her throat, Bridget gropes behind her for balance and begins slowly to pull herself up. The airless world spins, and for a heart-stopping second she's sure she's going to black out. The ghost tilts its maw toward her, as if to scoop her in, and Bridget almost loses her determination not to scream. She scrambles backward into the dark, moving faster now.

She is halfway into the darkened living room before the ghost makes its move, throwing its weight forward to drape halfway over the banister post, flopping horribly, half impaling itself. Then it swings its weight forward and begins its struggle after Bridget.

She needs to outflank it again. She tries to think how she can
trap the ghost somehow, corner it and then get away with her family. But whether because of her terror or because of her struggle to breathe, her mind can't focus. She staggers, lurching from one support to the next, gripping the arm of a chair and then reaching for the corner of the low bookshelf by the entrance to the dining room, pulling herself to the entryway and holding herself up by clinging to the wall. The smell and the airless void of the grave pursue her.
This can't be happening. This dead thing can't be chasing me through my own house.

It doesn't want my baby's story. It doesn't want my deepest grief. It doesn't want my house, or my marriage, or my daughter.

I already gave it all of those things. I already dissolved myself into the white.

It's just ready to finish the job.

And then something like a cloud descends over her eyes, over her mouth, like the view from an airplane window when the craft is overtaken by a cloud. But this cloud isn't water vapor suspended in air. This cloud is made of knives.

It has me it has me—

The pain is excruciating. Bridget's mouth opens in a shriek, and now it's in her mouth, the whiteness seeking a way down her throat, seeking a way into her heart, a way to gut her from within.

She falls to her knees, out of the white—she can no longer stand, but also it feels as if some force has come from behind her and given her a push.
It was her.
The woman—the one struggling in blackness inside of that hateful cloud.

Bridget gasps for air and begins to crawl again, digging her fingernails into the dining room rug to pull herself along. She makes her way to the corner of the kitchen entryway and pulls herself to her feet, looking back into the darkness behind her for the ghost.

What is silhouetted against the faint light coming from the entryway brings tears of horror and pity to her eyes.

She is tall, the dead woman, but painfully thin. She is more solid than Bridget has ever seen her because with one arm she is trying to pull herself out of the white. The other arm looks broken, somehow useless, bent at a wrenching angle. But she is trying to pull the white off, pull it up and over her head like a dress (
or like a nightgown
) that was found, too late, to be made of something dangerous, something that would eat her alive. (
I know that feeling, I know it. I've been the ghost in my house, that whiteness is mine, too—or—or I made it—dear God, I made it, I chose it.
) As Bridget watches, the woman's thin frame doubles over and shudders. She pushes up from her knees and forces herself to stand. Her hands clutch at the edges of something around her that Bridget cannot see—she is nothing but a shade, with the entry light behind her as she struggles for her freedom in the darkened doorway. It is clear that the woman is in terrible pain, that she is fighting for her life with what might be the last, the utmost that she has.

Bridget can no more watch a person struggle through that kind of pain than she can let someone hurt her baby girl. Before she knows herself what she is doing, she is moving back toward it. Back toward the shape-shifting, the flesh-dissolving, the hungry and hateful
it,
because the
she
(
she could be me, she could be me—I am what you are
) cannot hold out much longer. She's across the room, but Bridget feels as if she reaches her merely by summoning the will to move, as if she has folded the space in the room like the corner of a tablecloth and erased the few feet between them.

“I can reach—let me help—” She puts her arms out to the woman, into the space where she seems to be, although even as she
approaches she's not sure what her hands will encounter there, what her arms might enclose. She lunges in, reaches through, and for a half moment she thinks their fingers touch, and it's not painful, it's not like the press of hot knives through her skin—but it is cold, and wet, and hard where this woman is, and she has become that place, and it's a place she does not want to be.

In the dark, her eyes change. In the dark, in the second before Bridget realizes neither of them is strong enough, not yet. They haven't beaten it, not yet.

It slips over the woman's face like a caul and changes her into a horror. The eyes suddenly black and bottomless and huge, the mouth like a grave tipping her in (
YOU'RE MINE, TOO, MINE MINE MINE
). Bridget screams and yanks herself backward, but her hand (
it's got my hand, dear God, I can't take it
) is agonizingly held in its clutch.

“MARK!” She screams his name. But what could he do, even if he were here? This is the ghost that she chose. She's the only one who can see it or fight it or free herself from it. There is pain here, unimaginable, but it's pain she made, inherited, stepped into, was born into. It's almost familiar. It's almost like birth.

Let me go, please—I'm sorry, I can't get through, I'm not strong enough—

She's no longer sure which thoughts are her own and which are the thoughts of the woman—or the raw, frequency-annihilating broadcasts of the staticky, flickering white ghost. She's connected to both; she's inside of them as surely as they are inside of her. She's not sure who lets go of whom, who was pulling or clasping, but somehow she's released. For now. But the ghost is still a hungry mouth, it still wants her—and as she falls backward, it lunges again.

Bridget lands on her back and rolls. There is a thud behind her—something hitting the floor. She staggers to her feet and runs into the darkened kitchen, where for a moment, in a panic of fresh pain and bewildered instinct, she thinks the impossible (
I could just leave, I could just run out the door into the night, a madwoman, get into the car and leave this horror show
) and then she stops. She forces herself to think.

Mark might be safe, it's true—he might not even be living in the same layer of reality that admits such things as the ghost, or the woman inside it. He might not even have heard her screams; the struggle of the last few moments simply took place in a house he doesn't inhabit.

But there is another person in the house who can see the ghost. Who could always see it, who would go on seeing it, even if Bridget somehow found it in herself to leave her behind. There's another person here that the ghost might accept, a compromise, if its first choice became unavailable. A girl, clever and special, worth everything.

It won't stop. It can't.

What does it want? Everything, everything. And it knows just where to find it.

A shuffling sound has arrived at the kitchen doorway. Something hisses like static in her ear, the piercing sound of an empty frequency. The air thins out; the smell of damp earth and wet mud overtakes her.

Bridget is shaking. Her legs won't move. She feels literally rooted in fear. She tries to force herself to put one foot in front of the other. She cannot do it.

But it's slow, it's slow, I can get there before it—

A thud. A dead step. Then a draft of air wafting over her
shoulder, like a dreadful mockery of a summer breeze, cold like the grave and moving the loose hairs that have escaped her braid. Like a breath on her neck.

You're all mine now.

Her paralysis shatters, and she is running for the stairs.