The Damned (24 page)

The hallway has been scratched and soiled and bloodied, too, but not as badly. As though the animal knew where to look.

There's confirmation of this in my parents' room which, while visited—the door ripped off, territorial sprays of piss over the wallpaper—is largely undamaged aside from a crosshatching of gore on
the bedsheets where, last time, the indentation of my father's body had been left behind.

I back out to the top of the stairs. Wonder whether this moment is an opportunity to get out of here that will be missed if I linger, if what I'm here to do will be stopped in the first minutes by a rending of claws.

Which begs the question: What have I come here to do?

Do what Sylvie Grieg told me.
You can't push her back. She can only be pulled.

Try to save the living by dying.

But dying only gets me here. It doesn't save anyone. All it means is I'll never see them again.

No. Not allowed to think about that. If I stop moving I will be held in place forever. That's how it works here. You stop to ponder the past and it will screw you to the spot.

So let's try it again, Danny: What have you come here to do?

I'm here to yank Ash out of the living world and anchor her here, in the After. Her hell. Now mine as well.

How is it done? Sylvie Grieg didn't know that part and neither do I. But I'm pretty sure of the first step: I need to find the part of Ash that's still here. Play a different chess game than what I'm used to playing. Be the hunter instead of the hider for once.

Ash's door is the only one that remains untouched.

I'm expecting it to be barricaded as it was before. But this time the doorknob turns. The door whispers open over pristine carpet with a single nudge.

“Ash?”

I find my voice on the first try. Brittle, but audible. It summons nothing but the overpowering scent of the room. The same as it smelled when we were alive but denser now, so strong I raise my hands to push it aside. Fruit candies and lavender and talc. The industrial essence of 1980s girlishness.

Everything as it was. A space so clean and organized and free of character—no posters, no photos, no books—it feels like a film set. A script that called for A Good Girl's Room and neglected to provide
any details aside from the arrangement of various framed Certificates of Excellence on the wall, shelving that supported nothing but trophies. Tennis. Math-a-lympics. Swim Team. Science Fair. Best Actress.

The only thing on her desk is her diary. The leather strap holding it closed. Locked.

TO MY DAUGHTER, ASHLEIGH—DAD

Left here for me. But not the key.

I could cut the strap but that's cheating. And I'll be punished for cheating.

So I start out looking under the bed and feeling the closet floor on hands and knees. In the end, I throw everything onto the floor, smash the glass on the Certificates of Excellence, sling the trophies against the wall. Grind the little plastic tennis players and actresses under my shoes until they crack.

When I find the key it's on a second pass through her underwear drawer. Buried deep among the panties, so that I have to feel its hard copper through the soft cotton and silk. Another joke. Making me look like the horny brother, caught in the act.
Pervy,
as she approvingly described any boy who looked her way.

I unlock the strap. Start on the first page. Flip to the next. The middle, the end.

All three hundred pages of it the same.

I'm not here.

I'm not here.

I'm not here.

I'm not here.

I'm not here.

The handwriting careful, unhurried. A written self-portrait that was as close to the real Ash as she could get. Her autobiography.

All at once, the room's perfumes double in intensity. It forces me out to prevent myself from vomiting all over the carpet.

By the time I make it to the bathroom and kneel over the toilet, it passes. I'm partway to standing again when I hear it.

A drip of water from the faucet into the full tub.

It will require me to pull back the curtain to see what's there. The shower game. This time, there will be something other than a spinning soap-on-a-rope waiting for me.

There's no point waiting.

A body submerged beneath the still surface except for the head at the far end. My mother. Naked and drunk as the day I found her after school.

Her bloodshot eyes blink open and pull me into focus.

“Danny?” she says, a hand breaking through to hold on to the side but without the strength to pull herself up.

“It's me, Mom.”

“You're here, too?”

“Yes.”

“Why? What did you do?”

“I'm here to find Ash.”

“Of course,” she says, nodding so deeply her nose dips underwater and she has to sneeze it out. “Funny how it's hard to think of your children—how they run out of time the same as we do. The last thing a mother wants to think about.”

“Nobody likes to think about it.”

“Of course. Why would they?”

She's doing her best just as she always did. The
Of courses
and overstated gestures an attempt at an unruffled control of her own thoughts and words. As in life, she does it for me more than herself.

I kneel down on the bath mat and stroke the wet hair from her eyes. “Can I help you out of there?”

“Would you?” she says. “I don't know—I must have fallen asleep.”

“It happens.”

“How dreadful! A son shouldn't have to lift his mother out—”

“It's all right, really. It's fine.”

She squeezes up a smile at this. There's gratitude in it, and enormous sadness. But there's relief, too. She has been alone so
completely these shared words are like the warmth that comes with the first swallow of wine.

It's a little easier getting her out using a thirty-nine-year-old's arms than a ten-year-old's. Not that it still isn't a struggle.

Once she's out and sitting on the mat I go into my parents' room and find her something to wear. A billowy summer dress she reserved for “cleaning days,” the afternoons of incomplete vacuuming and abandoned miniprojects. I get her to raise her arms and, together, we pull it down over her. She slaps the wet floor, inviting me to sit, and I settle my back against the wall opposite her.

“Did you see whatever happened here, mom?” I ask, casting my eyes out into the damage in the hallway.

“Look at that. Terrible. I thought it was a dream.”

“What was it?”

“I only heard it. I suppose I was trying to pretend it wasn't really here so I didn't want to look. But it was
big
, whatever it was.” She shakes her head. The same disbelieving shake she'd give the TV news at the announcement of a fresh round of layoffs or lousy weather forecasted for a holiday weekend. “There's odd things on this side, Danny. Some more odd than others.”

“Is Dad here with you?”

“No. But I wish he was.”

“What about Ash? Does she visit?”

“I wouldn't call it visiting,” she says, blinking. “She comes and goes and sometimes I happen to see her when she does. But she's not here for me.”

“What's she here for?”

“She doesn't say.”

“Do you go with her sometimes? Out of the house, I mean?”

She cocks her head like I might be teasing her.

“This is my
place,
” she says. “This house. It's where I stay. Even if I wanted to, I couldn't leave.”

“But Ash can.”

“She roams.”

“How?”

“It must be because she wasn't properly attached to anything—to anyone. Back then.”

“The thing that was here. The animal. It can roam, too?”

She crosses her arms as though against a sudden chill. “I don't know about much outside these walls, Danny. I'm here on my own. I'm
meant
to be here on my own.”

“I can't stay, either, Mom.”

“Oh?”

“There's something I have to do.”

“You mean outside?” My mother reaches out her cold hand and hooks her fingers through mine. “Promise me you'll be careful.”

“Why? What's out there?”

“Monsters. People,” she shudders, as if the second of these is the more hideous.

“What can anyone do to us? We can't die. We're already
here.
”

“There's always a new way to die,” she says. “Just like there's always a worse version of here than here.”

She slides forward over the puddled floor and pats my hand the way she did when I was a child.

“Dying is different in this place, but it still happens. And it's
awful,
” she goes on. “When you come back the next time everything's the same—you still come back to your
here
—except there's even less sun, less order, less hope. Less of the good things you're able to remember from being alive.”

The good things.
What were they for her? Me, I feel sure. But she couldn't think of me without thinking of Ash as well, which situated me in the purgatory of the bittersweet.

She wasn't always the way she was. In the photos of our parents taken before we were born they were often laughing, wearing funny hats at a New Year's Eve masquerade, Dad dipping her low in some dance competition while she playacted a swoon, the two of them beaming and lipstick-smeared outside the church at their wedding.

The best day of her life had to be back there somewhere. Starting out together with Dad, buying this house on the edge of what was then a still prosperous city. And if I'm right about that, it means that
this is the dark flip side for her. Alone in a house that her husband avoided as much as he could, blacked out from drink in a cold tub. My mother's After is the hell of denial. Her being here proves that not doing what we ought to do can condemn us just the same as doing what we know to be wrong.

That, and making the wrong kind of prayer. The wrong kind of trade.

“I'm glad you got it,” she says now, nodding at the watch on my wrist.

“Why didn't you give it to me yourself?”

“You were in a place I couldn't go. But sometimes the things we carry can pass through, even if we can't.”

When I stand I offer her my hand to help her to her feet but she refuses it. Splashes a hand in the water on the floor as if to say she's fine where she is.

“Can I ask you something, Danny?”

“Sure.”

“You knew, didn't you, that Ash was with me when I died?”

“With you how?”

“Here. In this room. By the tub.”

“Not helping you.”

“Not helping me, no. Rather the opposite of helping me.”

She watches me like a doctor waiting for an injected drug to take effect.

“She
drowned
you?”

“It didn't take much, God knows.”

“Mom! Oh
Christ
—”

“The funny thing is I thought she was going to wash my hair. Her face was almost gentle. Almost
sweet.
”

“She
murdered
you!”

“It only took one hand on my head to slide me down and keep me there. She didn't seem angry or anything like that. She didn't say a single word. It was like she was only vaguely interested in watching me take the water in and fight as best I could, try to pull myself up by her arm. I remember looking up at her pretty face and thinking,
It's like she's watching a show on TV.
And then I thought,
A show she's already seen.
”

She shakes her head at the memory as if a trick had been played on her, one she had to admire for its cleverness.

“I'm going to find her,” I manage, the room spinning. “I'm going to stop her from hurting anyone else.”

“Stop her?”

“That's why I'm here. To put an end to it.”

“But this
is
the end.”

I try to think of something to say but none of the candidates is anything that would mean anything here.

I'm sorry.

There was nothing you could have done.

She lost her soul the same day she was born.

“You better get on your way,” she says before I can try any of them. “The days are bad. But the nights . . . you don't want to be out there at night.”

I find a brush on the counter and use it to untangle her hair. Lay a dry towel over her legs. Bend down and kiss the side of her face. She surprises me when she turns her head to kiss me, too.

“Good-bye, Mom.”

“I'd rather not say the same to you, if it's all right,” she says. “The thought you might come back is something I'm going to try to hold on to.”

She turns away from me to look out the small rectangle of the bathroom window, where she can see only pillows of fog pushed along by a whistling wind but never clearing.

“Happy birthday, Danny,” she says.

I
have to go no farther than the sidewalk to see that my mother was right. The After has different levels.

You need only look both ways along Farnum to know this place is farther down the slide than where I was when Ash brought me here.
Less sun, less order, less hope.
The formerly well-tended gardens and lawns now high with thistles, thick vines crawling up walls to join fingers with others as though pulling the homes into their graves. The pavement cracked, huge slabs heaved upward like an ice-jammed river.

All of it seen through the fog-that's-not-a-fog. Selectively obscuring, veiling, disappearing. Making distances difficult to judge. Casting gray doubt over everything you think you see.

More disturbing are the screams. Every couple minutes a new howl of agony or protest, some sounding a half mile off, others no more than a block or two. No sirens. No reply of gunshots.