The Damned (32 page)

“Why?” I say. “She was our
mother.
”

“You
know
why,” she says, tightening her hold. “She wanted to save our lives but she showed us the river instead. And I went through, Danny. I saved you but they took me down. They took my soul.”

Just when I'm about to black out she lets me go.

“So I took hers,” she says.

I try to back up toward the door but I can't. A wall of density, a charged force stops me whenever I move away from her. It forces me to stand where I am so I can take all of her in, admire the full realization of her perfection here, her home from the moment she was stillborn.

“Eddie,” I manage.

“I'm sorry. Who?”

“The boy. Did you bring him here?”

“You saw him? That would be his doing if you did. I just pulled him away from his worried momma. Bait for you to come find me. It didn't matter to me what happened to him after that.”

“He was here.”

“Bad boy.”

“Does it mean he's dead? If I saw him?”

Ash pouts in fake sympathy. Cocks her head to the side and her golden hair, shining without any light for it to reflect, makes a half moon of her face.

“I see that you
care,
Danny, but you'll stop soon enough,” she says. “You'll forget. That tree stump of a woman you married, the runty boy you thought you could be a pretend dad to, that ridiculous bit of time where you let yourself think you were
free
—it'll all be gone. I promise you that.”

She slides over to stand next to our father. Strokes his head with a manicured hand.

“You'll be just like Dad,” she says. “The last of the Orchard men, reunited. And only with eyes for me.”

Just being here with her draws the last vapors of life from me. Whatever I'd carried with me that allowed me to walk from place to place, the thing that infuriated the dead who saw or sensed or smelled it on me, is going. Soon Ash will steal the last of it and leave me like the man in the chair, encased within himself, tortured in ways of her design but unable even to scream.

She was always special.

“Why did you kill Meg Clemens?” I ask her, as much to test my ability to speak as for an answer. “She helped me, you know. When the friends who killed you tried to kill me. She got me out of that house.”

She lifts her hand away from our father's head, the fingers stiffening a second before relaxing again. A tell of irritation she fails to wholly conceal.

“Meg the Good,” she says. “May her spirit rot in heaven.”

“She didn't deserve to die.”

“We all die.”

“Not like that.”

“But we
could,
” she says, and smiles, her “sweet face,” a masterpiece of rehearsed authenticity. Then it drops. Circles appear below her eyes the color of an old banana peel. “Because you never know, do you?”

Dots of shadow explode before my eyes. The reverse fireworks that precede a blackout. I reach out and, as I stumble, find the wall. Clip my head against it and half the dots shoo away, though the rest still swim before me, binding and doubling like cells.

“Easy now,” Ash says.

Not damned.

“Why is Dad here?” I fight to ask her, holding on to my voice like a rope tossed to a drowning man. “Why is this his place?”

A demon.

“You didn't figure it out yet? You didn't
guess
?”

A bright flash behind my eyes, the chalky taste of bleach at the back of my throat. Migraine symptoms. Never had one in my life, but talking with Ash—doing it here—is a new sickness, mutating and becoming more creative by the second.

“No,” I manage.

“He was an accomplice to murder,” she says. “He knew the most terrible things and this is where he'd let himself think about them. Look out this window and whisper all his secrets to himself.”

That's forever.

“I don't—”

“He followed me. Two days before my birthday.
Our
birthday. Ever since Meg went missing he wondered if I might have been involved somehow, might have known something. So he went all private eye and saw me getting into Mr. Malvo's car after school and tracked us all the way to the house on Alfred Street. When the two of us went in Daddy sat behind the wheel and watched. Two minutes later poor Dean came running out, got in his car, and took off.”

“Why? What happened?”

“I
showed
him Meg. I showed Mr. Malvo that I was the only girl
for him. And he looked down into that cellar and saw her body and figured out a couple things in a hurry. One: I was in charge now, not him. And two: he couldn't tell anyone because he'd be the one who'd go to jail, the pervy teacher, not me, not a
girl,
not Meg's friend.”

“So he left you there.”

“Until Dad came in. Sneaky Daddy. Tiptoed up behind me and looked down just the way Dean did. It was like he was seeing something he half thought he'd end up seeing. He just sort of nodded—you know the way he would? That okay-so-that's-that nod of his? Turned around and made a funny kind of speedwalk for the door like he was trying not to throw up on the floor.”

It's like she's reading my mind, which is nothing new. My father's fight not to be sick the same as mine.

“Dad
knew
?”

“Don't you remember the way he was acting around that time? How weird he was? I tried to talk to him about it but for two days all he would say is ‘Let me think.' He was twisted up tight as could be. ‘Let me
think
about this, Ashleigh.' And then it was the night before my birthday—
our
birthday, there I go again!—and he opens my bedroom door and whispers, ‘Meet me at the house tomorrow.' I heard that and I knew he'd never tell. I was his daughter and he had a duty to me. That's the kind of man he was, right? The funny part, the sweet part, was my killing Meg brought me and Dad closer than anything.”

A dry spit. Nothing in my stomach to throw up. Nothing inside of me at all but a churning nausea, edged with clawing pain.

“So you weren't meeting Malvo the day of the fire,” I get out. “You were meeting Dad.”

“It was my Sweet Sixteen! I deserved a special party! You thought Daddy went to work, remember? So I asked the girls—Michelle, Lisa, Winona, remember those bitches?—to come along with me. Promised to show them something. A surprise. And they
would
have been surprised, wouldn't they? Seeing Meg. Watching my dad make Ash's mess go away. And they would never tell, either.”

“Why?”

“Because I told them they couldn't.”

The floor undulating under my feet now. Not swaying in the way of a ship at sea, but bending unpredictably, knees buckling, like trying to walk across a trampoline. Except I'm not walking.

“It was going to be fun,” Ash says. “But then the girls chickened out and I kept going on my own. When I got to the house, Dad was there. The place dripping and stinking with the gas he poured all over. He told me what I already knew: he wasn't going to the police, he was going to cover things up with me.
He was my father.
It was really quite beautiful, Danny. It was so
worth it,
you know? But then he said something I
wasn't
expecting. ‘But this is the end of that,' he said. ‘Once this is done, you'll be nothing to me. This is the last act I will perform as your father. From this point on,
you're not mine.
' ”

Ash laughs. It's like the screech of tires. The helpless moment before impact.

“But you would never let him go,” I say.

“Clever Danny.”

“So what did you do to him?”

“I kissed him.”

Ash turns her head to look out the window. Scans the grey, undefined horizon as if words were written there.

“A
real
kiss. A grown-up kiss, a fuck-me kiss, a this-is-going-to-be-so-good kiss,” she says. “I started loosening his belt with one hand, the other on his back. I just wanted to keep him there. So I could let him know that he could do whatever he wanted. I was still
his.
I wanted to be his. I wouldn't tell because that's the kind of girl I was. The kind of girl every boy wants because you can do things with them that nobody else would let you get away with.”

She turns to me again and the shadow-dots race and cloud. I have to blink hard to stop them from claiming all of the light that's left.

“What did he do?”

“He pushed me away,” she says, taking a step closer. “He understood exactly what I was offering and it disgusted him. I disgusted
him. He kind of threw his hands into my shoulders. Pushed me. Hard. I stepped back, lost my balance a little. And then I'm falling. Went through the hole in the floor and landed weird, broke my ankle, and I'm screaming for him to get me out of there. But he just looks down at me. Not angry. It was hatred, Danny. Hate isn't a feeling, it's the absence of feeling. And that's what he felt toward me: absolutely fuckall.”

Her arms rise at her sides, readying. Coming at me slow but filling the space of the room until there is nothing but her.

“He just walked away,” she says. “I'm guessing he was going to find a ladder somewhere or something, because I don't think, even after all that, he'd leave me to starve down there with a dead body, that he'd let me die. But I'll never know for sure. Because the next thing is those three cunts are standing there and they're lighting the place on fire.”

Dad jolts in his chair. His lips tremble, but nothing comes out. His hands gripped to the armrests as though fighting to stay upright.

“And you're screaming for me,” I say. “Not for Dad, not for them to call the cops. Me.”

“There
was
only you, Brother,” she whispers. “Useless, unwanted you.”

I look back at her and Ash is inches from me. Her fingertips on my eyelids, drawing them closed.

The darkness is a weight. Like falling into water wearing a parka and jeans and boots. The struggle to the surface a hopeless shifting that only takes you deeper.

But there is something down here with me.

The vague notion of a past. Something found and cherished and lost, though I can't see it or think of its name.

Come, Danny.

Ash pulls me down to where the water hardens into stone. Holding me in place.

Come . . .

And I do.

Not toward her, but into her.

The thing with me in the darkness—the warm thing, unnamed,
alive—tells me to open my eyes. And when I see my sister I push forward.

Wrap my arms around her like a drunk. Use my height, my long legs, to set her off balance. Backstepping.

What are you doing?

I'm thrashing at air. Drowning in darkness. Eyes closed against it for the same reason I refused to open my eyes when swimming underwater: there may be something there, something unexpected and monstrous. Except this time I know if I were to look there would be an immense nothingness, and it would be more terrifying than any imagined creature.

But I'm kicking at it anyway. Cutting the dark with my fingernails. Resisting.

Danny?

Because there's another down here with me that isn't Ash. A something to her nothing.

Look at me, Brother.

I squeeze my eyes tighter until they hurt. Two entry points where knitting needles have found a way through, a pair of probes looking for a brain. To deny them, to deny her, I try to summon the unnamed thing I remembered a moment ago.

I thought of it as something. But really it was
things.
Voices, faces. The way they speak and laugh and touch.

People.

There were people in the past, and they're there now, in the present. Two in particular. Summoning me just as I summon them. Some call it prayer. And as with all prayers, it comes down to either asking someone else to fight for you, or asking yourself to fight.

Stop it, Danny. Stop it now!

Ash's voice is the pain in my head. It's the knitting needles. It's a disease of the bone marrow, malignant and enflamed.

But that's not what's important now.

What's important is to not stop. To push deeper into my twin, the space inside her, thrash and kick at her borders.

Look at ME!

The shattering glass sounds like rain. A downpour that attacks every surface, a symphony of concussions.

We're through the office window, the two of us cycling and tumbling. The rain replaced by the howling rush of air.

LOOK!

I look.

And there is my twin, tumbling away faster than me, as if her density exceeds mine. As if the earth wants her more.

Danny!

The same voice, the exact same pleading as when I looked down at her in the house's burning cellar.

DON'T LEAVE ME HERE!

Now, just as then, I reach for her. And now, just as then, she's too far.

I reach down to my sister, and she reaches up. But the only thing we touch is air.

DANNY!

They look like stars.

Behind Ash's spinning form the ice is a night sky buckshot with points of light. The river a Milky Way of distant systems, summoning from an uncrossable distance.

But they are only the faces of the dead. Coming into detail as we hurtle toward them. They see us, too. Fingers scratching at the ice's rough underside, desperate to be the first to pull us down.

They aren't people under there. Not spirits or souls, either. They are a collection of all the horrors they have created in others and themselves, nameless and distilled. A bottomless current of fear.

The ice swings up fast. In the next breath we'll hit it. We'll be through.