The Church of Dead Girls

Praise for
The Church of Dead Girls

“If ever there was a tale for a moonless night, a high wind, and a creaking floor, this is it. . . . I don't expect to read a more frightening novel this year. Very rich, very scary, very satisfying.”

—Stephen King

“A complex parable of social disintegration . . . Dobyns's sad and disquieting novel carries a contemporary moral, true in even the smallest American towns.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“A chilling evocation of small-town life turned upside down. Dobyns delivers the goods.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

“Edgy tension and considerable suspense. . . . This could be any small town, and that truth is perhaps the most frightening thought of all.”

—
The Washington Post Book World

“The creepiness mounts with Hitchcockian intensity; the bloody conclusion is worth the wait.”

—
The Chicago Tribune

“Tantalizingly sinister . . . Dobyns hooks us from the very first sentence.”

—
People

“Dobyns delivers all the satisfactions of a good thriller writer . . . but he also captures something beyond the reach of most genre novelists: a sense of life on the page. . . . Every summer, readers look for a novel that will keep them turning the pages without insulting their intelligence. It's unlikely there will be a better novel this season than
The Church of Dead Girls.
”

—
New York Daily News

“In its Gothic evocation of small-town life and mob hysteria, it often suggests the influence of Sherwood Anderson and Shirley Jackson, and Dobyns knows his upstate New York setting as well as Frederick Busch and Joyce Carol Oates.”

—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“A brisk dip into the ice-cold waters of schizophrenia, nymphomania, and serial murder. . . . A vivid and deeply scary tale.”

—
Kirkus

“Dobyns reveals the dark impulses and tangled relationships that lie underneath. . . . An unusually thoughtful psychological thriller.”

—
Booklist

Also by Stephen Dobyns

POETRY

Winter's Journey

Mystery, So Long

The Porcupine's Kisses

Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides

Common Carnage

Velocities: New and Selected Poems, 1966–1992

Body Traffic

Cemetery Nights

Black Dog, Red Dog

The Balthus Poems

Heat Death

Griffon

Concurring Beasts

NONFICTION

Next Word, Better Word: The Craft of Writing Poetry

Best Words, Best Order: Essays on Poetry

STORIES

Eating Naked

NOVELS

Is Fat Bob Dead Yet?

The Burn Palace

Boy in the Water

Saratoga Strongbox

Saratoga Fleshpot

Saratoga Backtalk

The Wrestler's Cruel Study

Saratoga Haunting

After Shocks/Near Escapes

Saratoga Hexameter

The House on Alexandrine

Saratoga Bestiary

The Two Deaths of Señora Puccini

A Boat off the Coast

Saratoga Snapper

Cold Dog Soup

Saratoga Headhunter

Dancer with One Leg

Saratoga Swimmer

Saratoga Longshot

A Man of Little Evils

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

First trade paperback edition 1998

Copyright © 1997 by Stephen Dobyns

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dobyns, Stephen, date.

The church of dead girls : a novel / Stephen Dobyns.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-101-99181-7

1. Missing persons—Fiction. 2. New York (State)—Fiction. 3. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

PS3554.O2C48 2015 2015017173

813'.54—dc23

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For Toby and Catherine Wolff

T
his is how they looked: three dead girls propped up in three straight chairs. The fourteen-year-old sat in the middle. She was taller than the others by half a head. The two thirteen-year-olds sat on either side of her. Across the chest of each girl was an X of rope leading over her shoulders, down around her waist, and fastened in the back. All three girls were barefoot and their ankles were tied to the legs of their chairs. Even so, the ropes were loose, as if to hold their bodies erect rather than to keep their living selves prisoner: meaning they had been tied after they were dead.

I didn't witness this. I only looked at the photographs my cousin showed me. There were many photographs. And he said the police had a videotape of the entire attic, but I never saw it.

Perhaps the chairs were two feet from one another. Because of the dryness of the attic, the girls looked old. They didn't look like teenagers anymore. They were gaunt and bony and resembled women in their seventies. A large air conditioner and dehumidifier had been kept running all day long, day after day, and the moisture had been sucked from their bodies. They were dried out and their skin looked like dark wrinkled paper. But they were not equally dried out because they had been killed at different times, so the girl killed most recently looked youngest. The girls' heads were tilted back or to the side. The one in the middle had blond hair. Long strands hung across her face. The others had brown hair. All three had hair down to the middle of their backs and perhaps this meant something. It gave them a virginal appearance. Although now, looking so old, they appeared nunlike, spinsterish. And by the time the photographs were taken their hair had become dusty. And they were emaciated, at least two of them were, as if they hadn't been fed. But perhaps this was an effect of the dryness. All the vibrancy had been leached from their skin. The hollows of their cheeks were startling indentations. Their gums had receded from their teeth.

What were they wearing? Not their original clothes. Those had been taken from them. They wore handmade gowns cut from thick velvet. The middle girl's was dark green, with long sleeves and a hem that nearly reached her ankles. The girl on the right wore a gown of dark red, the one on the left a gown of blue. But to speak of the colors is to say nothing. Sewn to the dresses, pinned to them, even glued to them, were stars and moons and suns cut from white or yellow sparkling cloth. But also animals, or rather their silhouettes: dogs and bears, horses and fish, hawks and doves. And there were numbers that seemed random—5s, 7s, 4s—the glittery numbers one buys at the hardware store to stick on mailboxes. There seemed no pattern to them. And pieces of jewelry, cheap costume jewelry, were pinned to the velvet and were draped over the numbers and stars and animals: bracelets and necklaces and earrings. It took a moment to see the actual color of the dresses because they were so covered with numbers and jewelry and patches of fabric.

Did I mention the words? Some of the patches had words written on them, but not words that made sense, “
CK
” and “
NT
” and “
TCH
” and “
FIL
.” Fragments of words, the beginnings and ends of words. What could they have meant to anyone? Also attached to the cloth were brass bells and little mirrors, pieces of metal and multicolored glass balls.

Presumably this clutter of patches and jewelry, words and numbers had been affixed to the dresses after the girls were wearing them and once they were tied to their chairs, because there were none behind their backs or under their bony buttocks. One understood that the girls had been placed in the chairs and decorated after they were dead. And such a labor must have taken days because nothing was helter-skelter.

What of the chairs themselves? They were straight-backed, but they hadn't been bought anyplace. They were amateurishly made, knocked together from two-by-fours, and they leaned crookedly. But one didn't notice they had been built from two-by-fours right away because nearly every inch of their surfaces was covered with the shiny tops of tin cans or round red reflectors or the bottoms of glass bottles, green and yellow and clear and brown. Most were nailed down but the circles of glass were held in place by bent nails tacked around their edges.

The chairs shone and glittered and—how shall I say this?—they seemed to stare back at the viewer. They were not stationary. Their color and shininess made them active, even aggressive. The legs of the chairs were wrapped in tinfoil and the metal circles and glass and reflectors were stuck on top of the foil. But again one realized it had been done after the girls were already seated, because where they were leaning or where they touched the seats the wood was bare.

And the attic? It was a large room with a pitched ceiling. At its highest it was perhaps twelve feet, but it sloped down to two feet on either side. The room was about thirty-five by fifty feet, with a curtained window at either end. The air conditioner had been fixed into a skylight in the middle and near the peak of the roof. But I never saw the whole thing; I only saw it from different angles by combining the photographs. Between the studs were strips of insulation with shiny foil backing, so the whole room sparkled and must have seemed absolutely alive in the light from the candles. Hundreds of strips of tinsel also hung from the ceiling. Perhaps they moved slightly in the drafts from the air conditioner. And how they must have sparkled.

Because that was the other thing: the candles. Many were stubs but the stubs had been replaced and replaced again, so that whoever lit them had come to the attic and lit them many times. In the photographs the candles were not burning. One had to imagine them, to imagine their reflections in the insulation's tinfoil backing, their flickering in the glass and red reflectors and metal discs adorning the chairs, their twinkling in the cheap costume jewelry pinned to the girls' dresses. How busy the attic must have been in the light of these candles and each candle reflected hundreds of times. The walls, chairs, clothing: a conversation of light, an ecclesiastical shimmering. And how the faces of the three girls must have glittered. The combination of light and shadow must have made their faces quicken, as if the girls weren't dead, as if they had never been dead.

But all this must be imagined. I know for a fact that the authorities never lit the candles. They simply took their photographs, removed the bodies, and dismantled the whole spectacle. I don't know if it is being stored someplace or if it was destroyed. One can imagine the unscrupulous trying to steal it, planning to put those flashing chairs on display for others to pay money to see. Perhaps they would put mannequins in the chairs and dress them as the girls had been dressed. The Church of Dead Girls it might be called, or the Monster's Den.

Because surely the person who killed the girls was a monster. But hadn't this person lived among us? Our town is not large. This person came and went, conducted business, had acquaintances, even close friends. Nobody looked at this person and thought, Monster. Perhaps this was the most disturbing aspect of the business: that the person, on the surface at least, never seemed extraordinary, or none of us had the wit to identify the signs. What would those signs have been? Wouldn't evil or monstrosity call attention to itself? And yet this person had a place within the community. How do you think it made us feel about one another, even afterward, when the discoveries were made? If one of us who had such an awful secret seemed innocent, then what about the others? What were their secrets? And were they looking at me as well? Of course they were.

Three dead girls in three straight chairs, collapsed against the ropes, heads tilted, their skin papery, their bare feet on the wood floor looking more like paws than feet, brown and bony. Their mouths were slightly open and their lips pulled back. One could see their small teeth, imagine the dark dryness of their tongues, the darkness of their silent throats. How their teeth must have glittered in the candlelight. And their eyes, half open as if the girls were drowsing, they too must have shone.

But there is something else. Their left hands were missing. Each girl had her left hand severed at the wrist. One could see their wrist bones. And those stubs, they must have glittered as well. In the photographs, there was a startling milkiness to these wrist bones. The skin and flesh had receded, shrunk back, letting the wrist bones jut from the stumps. Their whiteness and roundness made me think of eyes, blind eyes, because, of course, how could these white bones ever see?

And the missing hands? They weren't in the attic, nor were they in the house.