The Damned (29 page)

“Oh Jesus. Oh
Christ
.”

“You believe in that stuff, Danny?” Lisa says. “Your sister sure didn't.”

“She murdered Meg Clemens?”

“See?” Michelle says. “You came to the same conclusion we did.”

“How?”

“Smashed in her head with something hard, be my guess,” Lisa says. “It was a mess.”

“Why? Why did Ash kill Meg?”

“Who knows?” Winona answers with a shrug. “People said Mr. Malvo was fucking the two of them. Maybe she was jealous.”

“Or maybe she just wanted to,” Michelle says.

“For the hell of it,” Lisa says.

“So to speak,” Winona says.

“No.
No!
”

“That's what
she
said, come to think of it,” Lisa says. “She looks up, sees us up here, figuring all her shit out. ‘
No!
' Like she knew what we were going to do before we did.”

This stops me. The cold presses in hard so that it's a fight to get the next words out.

“What did you do?”

Winona lowers her eyes to me. Gives me the pitying look of the smart girl in class who has yet again underestimated how dumb other people can be.

“We put an end to it,” she says.

In living time, Winona could only have joined the others two days ago. Yet the three of them stand together with the weird familiarity of sisters. It would be easy to read them wrong. To see them as harmless, the grins on their faces a signaling of fun about to be had.

And then, as I watch, they change.

The years drawn away from their skin, their bodies altering shape.
It's like a thousand layers are invisibly pulled off them until their real selves are revealed. Their sixteen-year-old selves.

“Which one of you started the fire?”

“I guess you could say we all did,” Lisa says.

“And she knew it was you? She saw you do it?”

“Right in front of her fucking eyes,” Lisa says.

“It's why we're here,” Michelle says.

“Why we'll never leave,” Winona says.

I almost pass out. Something about this place drains me of my capacity to move, to speak, to think. As if I'm melting into it, solidifying. Losing myself as I become the house. It's the same thing that's happened to the three of them up there, to Bob Malvo, to my mother, to everyone in the After who can't move beyond the borders of where they've been put. I'm a dead tree being planted in the last cellar on Alfred Street.

Ash didn't want me to come inside the house to find out who started the fire. She wanted me here, with her.

“You're killers just like her,” I say finally.

“We thought we were putting an end to something. Teenage vigilantes. Protecting others, y'know?” Winona says, puffing her chest in self-mockery.

“Because of what she did to Meg.”

“Because of who Ash
was
,” Michelle corrects again. “You knew it better than anyone, Danny. She was just getting started. A murderer at sixteen. She was on her way.”

“So how'd you do it?”

“She was going to burn this shit down,” Lisa jumps in to answer, liking this part. “Gas
everywhere
, right? That was her plan. Destroying the evidence. Meg's body. God knows there's enough arsons in Detroit that nobody would dig around much. It didn't have to be
perfect
. The fire trucks would take an hour to even get here. Ash knew all that.”

“Just like we did,” Michelle points out.

“Just like we did,” Lisa continues. “When I looked at Winona and
Michelle, I could tell they knew what I was about to do. I could tell they wouldn't stop me, that they would keep it a secret forever. It was as clear as if we'd said it all out loud. I was smoking back then—Newport menthols, remember them? How kids said they helped keep your breath fresh?—so I had a lighter with me.”

“Oh, she was cool. Cool as a Newport,” Winona says with a rehearsed laugh, the kind that comes after a frequently repeated joke.

“
Whoosh!
” Michelle says, making an exploding motion with her hands.

“That bitch was dead,” Lisa says, nodding.

“And then you bicycled back up Woodward, but not as far as the pay phone at the zoo,” I say. “That would have taken too long.”

“Maybe you're not so dumb,” Winona says.

“We used the phone at the Medical Center,” Lisa says.

“My quarter,” Michelle says.

“You used it to call me.”

“Following orders,” Lisa says.

“How do you mean?”

“It was the last thing she said to us from down there,” Winona says. “The
only
thing she said.”

“ ‘
Get Danny!
' ” Michelle screams, a perfect copy of Ash's voice. “ ‘
Get my brother!
' ”

“Isn't that fucked?” Lisa says, bringing her hands together in a single clap. “Not ‘Help me' or ‘Call 911.' She just asked for
you
.”

I'm sufficiently distracted by this thought that, at first, I don't notice the fluid dripping down on me, splashing on the ground, a small waterfall around the edge of the opening in the floor above. Gasoline. I look up to see it pouring out of a can Lisa swings around, grinning.

“Why are you doing this?”

“Because you came back, Danny,” Michelle says.

“And she said if you ever did, we should keep you here. Like you
should
have been kept here,” Winona says. “Except you cheated. You went back.”

“That sounds like something Ash would say.”

“It
is
something she said,” Lisa says, putting the can down when it's empty.

“You don't have to. You're free of her now.”

“
Free?
She has more power here than she ever did when we were kids. She was always special,” Winona says. “But here, her specialness is . . .”

“Fully realized,” Michelle says, finishing the thought.

“That's why she can move around,” I say, figuring it out as I speak. “Wander. Unlike the rest of them. Unlike you. She's not damned. She's a demon.”

“I've never really used that word to describe her,” Michelle says.

“Doesn't mean you're wrong, though,” Winona says.

“Who cares what she is? We gotta do what we gotta do,” Lisa says, and pulls her lighter out of her pocket.

And just like the last time, without a pause, she lights it with one turn of the flint and lets it drop.

I
stumble out of the way of the falling flame. Get far enough that when the lighter splashes into a puddle of fuel and ignites, making the sound of a folded bedsheet snapped open to its full size, I don't go up with it, too.

The first flame shoots straight up through the hole, licking the sides, starting a new fire on the first floor. When it lowers it widens at the same time. Searches for something to connect itself to down here. Finds a pile of oily rags to the right, some ripped-up floorboards to the left. Ignites them both.

I can't see the three girls because of the smoke, even if they're there. Something tells me they're not. This is a house fire in Detroit. They likely wait outside, watching from the sidewalk the way others do on Devil's Night. Enjoying the show of destruction that people here always describe the same way.

It's cheaper than the movies.

The heat knocks me back into the corner. The cellar alive in dancing
oranges and reds soon obscured by black fog. The smoke reaching down my throat. Writhing and heavy.

There's no way out by going forward. No way behind, either. Only a single window between two rafters, too high to reach and too small to fit through even if I could.

A figure steps toward me from out of the smoke.

A girl.

She's come to burn with me. Twins again.

Backlit by small explosions of fire so that her face is hard to see in detail, though there's light enough to see it isn't Ash. It's the girl she murdered. Meg Clemens. Clumps of soil wormed with small yellow roots clinging to her T-shirt and jogging shorts. Hair matted, skin bloodless and thin as a plastic corner store bag.

The dead, risen from the dead.

Though this isn't her place. Like Greg in the car lot, she's come here for me.

She raises her hand. I don't have the strength to resist her if she means to strike me or pull me close. So I watch. A finger stiffening straight to point directly behind me. Her eyes squinted closed as if against a blazing sun, but knowing where the cellar window is all the same.

“I can't reach it,” I tell her. The words starting a painful series of coughs.

Meg comes closer without waiting for me to find my breath again. Locks the fingers of both hands together. Bends and lets the hands swing like a stirrup.

“I'm too heavy,” I say.

Now, Danny.

It's Meg, but not her voice. That's been taken from her. It's her soul—there's no other word for it—that reaches me. A girl who liked working on the school paper and singing on a stage, someone who was blessed with a handful of talents but didn't use them to make others feel unlucky the way others born with good luck did. Meg Clemens wanted to
live
. And then she met Ashleigh Orchard and
accepted her invitation to come to an abandoned house on Alfred Street—an offer of peace, a chance to
work things out
, to be
friends
—and found the end of that life in a part of Detroit she had never seen before that day.

Now.

I put my foot into the cup of Meg's hands. Her knees almost buckle at half the weight I put in them, but the fingers stay locked. They'll break apart when I stand on them and they have to lift me up a foot and a half for me to grip the window's ledge.

Yet that's just what she's doing.

Lifting me before I'm even ready for it. Strong and untouched by fire even as the first licks of flame stroke the backs of my legs and a howl dries to nothing in the superheated air.

Meg lifts me up until my head is even with the window, the glass missing though a few orange shards remain. There might be room for my head and shoulders to squeeze through but not enough leverage for hands to pull myself out.

I try. Prove myself right.

Nails biting into the hard ground of the house's backyard but getting nowhere. My head out, sipping the night's coldness, but the rest of me still hanging against the cellar wall.

Then I'm sliding forward. Pushed. Meg lifting my feet with both her hands, getting me out to below my ribs so that I have the leverage to claw the rest of myself onto the ground.

I end up rolled onto my back. Blinking up into the black of what, in life, is understood as sky, but here is just the end of things.

The house shrieks.

As the fire eats through the wood the foundation shifts, a grinding of materials that comes out as an utterance of grief. If I don't move soon the whole building will come down on me. But first I'm crawling back to the window. Looking through to find Meg still there. Her eyes open now, finding mine. The fire encircling her as if waiting for permission to proceed.

“Why?” I ask, though I mean only to thank her.

She's your twin. Not you.

The flames devour her all at once. She stands unmoving at their center like a wick. The light a cone rising up from her, yellow and high.

She isn't you.

The heat knocks me back. Followed by a tentacle of flame, reaching over the ground, pursuing me as I crab-walk away.

When I'm a hundred feet from the house I'm stopped by the low remains of a brick wall. Part of the original stables that were here when the house was first built, before motors and assembly lines. It lets me prop myself against it and watch the fire eat. Taking Meg along with every other memory connected to its walls and floors. The past itself burned to nothing.

Where are you, Sister?

Ash had no associations in life, only wants. As for love? She was incapable of feeling any herself, and there were only two people who she needed it from. She had mine, was born with it. But the other was denied her.

What place was forbidden to you? Where is the one door you most wished to open?

The baseball stadium's lights go on. An instant brightness that obliterates what was visible of the skyline a moment ago.

Except for the round towers.

Black and broad-shouldered. Holding high their two blue letters like a calling. Like an answer. Telling me where she is.

T
here's a small crowd on Alfred Street when I come around from the back of the house. I don't see Winona, Lisa, or Michelle among them, not that I study the faces, trying not to attract attention from where it's currently held by the fire.

Less than a hundred yards on, a deafening crash turns me around to see the house falling in upon itself. A tornado of sparks spiraling into the chalkboard night.

When I make it to Woodward, the cold has returned along with the shivering, even with the burns to the lower half of my body. The stadium's lights remain on, so the streets and structures of the city's core are glazed in tarnished silver, their shadows stretched miles to the west.

There's an underwater quiet as I cross the Fisher Freeway and enter downtown proper. My stride slowed as if pushing through denser matter. The air halfway to stone, to ice.

It didn't seem I would make it the thirteen miles from my Royal Oak bedroom to here, yet I have. The last mile to the black towers is
a different matter, though. A distance made impossible not only by injury but the city itself. A resistance I can feel in the ground, grasping at my ankles with every step.

I will keep going for the ones I have come here for, their faces now erased along with their names.