The Book of Bad Things (4 page)

Imagine a human face whose skin is peeling off in wide sheets so that you can see pinkish bone underneath. Imagine the eyes, bulging and pale, as if they’re about to pop like balloons, as they catch sight of you. Imagine an unhinged jaw hanging at a crooked angle so that the mouth is drawn down into a jagged frown. Imagine that mouth creaking open, revealing broken teeth and a blackened, flapping tongue, as it comes closer, trying to bite.

Images like these terrified me a couple of nights ago when Janet and Benji invited me over to watch a video. The decaying zombies in the film freaked me out really bad. Nightmare bad. So I’ve done some research to help me sort out my thoughts. And what I’ve learned about them, the
truth
about zombies, might be even worse!

Most people think of zombies as these movie monsters, dead people risen from the grave to walk the earth with an unquenchable desire to feast on living flesh. I guess, in a way, this is what zombies are now, how we see them in theaters and on television screens with friends on Halloween. But zombies aren’t only make-believe.

Some people believe that zombies are real — that they are human beings who’ve been poisoned by evil “witch doctors.” The poison slows their hearts to an “undetectable rate” and the victims appear to be dead. Their families mourn and hold funerals and bury the poor people, even though they are secretly alive.

Later, after the poison wears off, the victim wakes up in the coffin! The witch doctor sneaks back to the cemetery and digs up the person. But the person is not the same as before. They are listless, unable to speak. They look pale, like a corpse, and move stiffly. These symptoms are long-lasting effects of the poison. The witch doctor takes the victim from the cemetery to his home where he keeps the “zombie” as a slave, to work and do whatever nefarious deeds the witch doctor requests.

A real zombie may look like the person they were before they were poisoned, but they’re not. It’s as though their souls have been stolen away, replaced by something new. Or by nothing at all.

Imagine that.

A
SHORT WHILE LATER
, Cassidy sat on Tony’s mattress, staring out the open window toward the Tremonts’ backyard. Since Rose had forgotten she was coming, Tony may have recently slept here. So Cassidy had stripped the sheets, located fresh ones in the linen closet in the hallway, and remade the bed, wiping at her eyes with the corners of the bedspread.

When Rose returned, she came upstairs and knocked on the closed bedroom door, but Cassidy called out that she was changing her clothes. She couldn’t let anyone see her crying.

What if she wanted to go back to the city? How hard would it be to get in touch with her social worker to arrange for another bus ticket? If she left, what would she tell her friends Janet and Benji … or Levi Stanton? What would she do when Naomi, her mother, laughed at her, chiding her for thinking she was worth some rich family’s time and money? And love.

Outside, an expanse of lawn sloped up toward a distinct line of trees where the hillside forest interrupted the neighborhood. One tree in particular caught Cassidy’s attention — a tall oak that rose high above the house’s roof, the roots of which came closer to the back patio than those of the other trees. This was the tree where the Tremonts had once leashed Lucky.

Something was moving by its base. An animal. Cassidy leaned toward the screen, catching a glimpse of what looked like dirty fur and tall haunches before the thing disappeared around the other side of the trunk.

A dog barked, brief and rough and angry. Cassidy flinched, unsure if the sound was real or only in her imagination, if it was nearby or far away. Rubbing goose bumps from her arms, she stood and backed away from the window. She didn’t know why the sound disturbed her. She liked dogs. She often wished for one of her own. That could have been any of the neighborhood dogs, but there was something about the barking that reminded her of old Lucky.

Cassidy made her way down the hall, sneaking past Joey’s closed door. Downstairs, Rose was busy in the kitchen, so Cassidy went out to the backyard, stepping cautiously toward the oak tree. She kept a wide berth, in case the thing she’d seen from the upstairs window was hiding behind the trunk. Slowly, she approached and placed her palm on the rough bark. A silvery loop had been screwed into the wood. This had been the link that held the end of Lucky’s long leash, giving him free reign of the backyard. Cassidy touched the metal and flinched at its coldness. And before she realized what her mind was doing, she found herself thinking about that afternoon, almost one year ago, when everything had changed.

Cassidy and Joey had been bored. By that first week in August the previous year, it seemed as though they’d done everything they could do. However, there was one activity the two of them had steered clear of, a possibility they’d never talked about: visiting Joey’s mysterious neighbor up the hill.

On the first night Cassidy had ever spent in Whitechapel, Joey had shared Ursula’s story. Over the next two summers, Cassidy overheard his neighbors tell their own versions of Ursula Chambers’s tale. The woman was a local legend. There were several things that most people agreed to be true, all of which had occurred before Joey was even born. Ursula’s elderly uncle Aidan had owned the land on which Chase Estates now sat. When he’d passed away, Ursula inherited the centuries-old farmhouse along with everything in it. She’d arrived in Whitechapel, a whip of Irish energy. Her thick brogue entertained folks whenever she’d venture into town for an errand. Ursula was short and squat, with a round, red face. Her hair was curly and gray, cut in a bob. Though her blue eyes were small, almost swollen, they were the center of her engaging and kind energy. She always wore a matching sweatshirt and sweatpants. She seemed to have a pair in every color imaginable: pink, brown, yellow, fuchsia, turquoise, baby blue.

She’d been in the house for about a year before people noticed a change. Her tone turned brusque and short. Where she’d once been friendly to everyone in Whitechapel, she now cut them off, unwilling to converse. Soon, she stopped coming into town. In fact, she rarely left her house at all. The boys who delivered her groceries and other supplies claimed that she demanded they leave the bags at the bottom of her front steps. And she never tipped them. When a sulfuric stench wafted through the thicket between her house and the cul-de-sac, they figured she’d canceled her trash pickup. Some theorized she was burning her garbage in her own backyard.

Of course, the local kids grew curious. Some of them approached the house to see if she would respond. She did — by screaming at them. Yelling out from her darkened windows. Threatening to make any trespassers sorry. Soon, she became a pariah, the target of eggings, of small fires set in her driveway, of the awful graffiti that now decorated all sides of the poor old farmhouse. They started calling her The Hermit of Chase Estates.

Cassidy had been intrigued by the tales, but she also thought they might actually be able to make a connection with Ursula, so the previous summer, Cassidy had suggested they visit her. In the city, Cassidy knew several elderly people — relatives of her classmates, even some of the neighbors in her building — who’d been stuck, by circumstance and their own frail bodies, in their cramped apartments. They were mostly just sad and lonely and had given up on life in a way that was difficult for Cassidy, or any young person, to understand. A few times, her neighbor Levi Stanton had invited her to accompany him as he knocked on their secluded neighbors’ doors, with gifts of wine or cheese or chocolates. He loved talking to them and hearing their stories, he explained to Cassidy later, not only because they were often great inspiration for his books, but also because of the looks on their faces when he said hello to them. Cassidy wanted to see the same expression on Joey’s secretive neighbor’s face.

The plan was simple. They’d march up to the house and knock on the door and invite themselves in. Ursula couldn’t be as bad as everyone said. But Joey wasn’t sure it was a good idea. What if she attacked them? Cassidy laughed and suggested bringing Lucky along. “For
luck
!” she’d said. When Joey continued to hang back, she added, “What’s the worst that could happen?”

T
HEY’D GONE THROUGH
the woods. “We should come up from the back,” Cassidy suggested, to avoid Ursula’s view down her driveway. Joey stayed behind by a few feet, holding tightly to Lucky’s leash. They trampled the brush, avoiding thickets of pricklier bushes and any reddish leaves.

Soon, the building appeared through the thinning trees. The house would have been quaint had it been maintained over the years. But now, its grayish brown color had been covered in spots of blackish green. Mildew or mold, something toxic and insidious, clung to the broken shingles. True to the tales, nasty words had been spray painted and carved into the sides of the house.

All of the window screens were covered in years of dust and dirt. Beyond, the glass itself looked as though it had been spattered with a thick sludge. The panes in the basement looked especially bad, some of them broken and padded with what looked like old curtains or blankets.

The backyard was barely a yard at all, mostly patches of bare ground covered in fallen acorns and pine needles, interspersed among plots of ragweed and several tall trees that drenched the place in ominous shadow.

“Wow,” said Joey, coming up behind Cassidy. “It’s like she’s barricaded herself in there.”

Cassidy shook her head. “We’ve got to help.”

“What if she doesn’t want any help?”

“Some people don’t know they need help until they get it,” said Cassidy, stepping forward, pushing through some of the taller grass, her chin held high.

“Wait,” Joey whispered. “Be careful. She’s probably watching us.”

Cassidy imagined Ursula hunched at a cracked windowsill: a plump little woman dressed in a fluorescent green running suit. Cassidy had seen scarier things inside her own apartment back in the city. She lifted a hand and waved. Pausing, she scanned each of the windows that faced the backyard, but she saw no movement. “Let’s try the side door.”

Joey sighed in dismay, but he and Lucky continued beside her. Suddenly, the mastiff pulled forward so hard, Joey lost his grip on the leash. The dog bounded toward the base of the house, barking and sniffing at the splintered glass.

Joey chased after Lucky, calling out for him to
Heel!
Lucky didn’t heed him, tugging at a piece of blanket that was sticking out past the broken glass. Cassidy froze where she stood about a dozen yards from the farmhouse. Something was moving behind the screen right above the dog. A creaking noise split the air as the sash lifted. A pale face emerged from the darkness.

Ursula’s message was brief but thunderous. “Get out of here!”

Joey leapt for Lucky’s collar, trying to pull the dog away from the window. “We’re sorry, Mrs. Chambers!” he called up to her.

“I don’t care if you’re bleeding to death. Get out of my yard! Now!”

Cassidy simply stood there. Ursula didn’t need help, didn’t want help, wouldn’t know what help was if it came up and poked her in the eye. Cassidy’s fingers went numb, her neck tingled. The ground tilted and her body felt like it was shrinking. It was how she’d felt back in the city, whenever she had an “episode” at school and ended up at the nurse’s office.

She gripped the straps of her backpack as the world began to spin, and the only thing she could think to do was run.

A few minutes later, Joey met her in the Tremonts’ backyard, dragging Lucky with him. By that time, Cassidy had caught her breath, had regained feeling in her hands and feet and neck. But Joey’s face was red, his hair slick with sweat. His mouth was twisted with anger. “Thanks,” he said, clipping the leash to the oak tree. “Great idea.”

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I didn’t think she would be like that.”

“Why not? Because you’re so special?”

Lucky was still excited. He leapt up on Joey, knocking him against the tree.

Cassidy noticed a piece of blanket sticking out of the dog’s mouth. She reached out to pull it away, but Lucky growled at her. She blushed and then brushed herself off. “I don’t think that.” She remembered the notebook in her backpack, her
Book of Bad Things
. Levi had told her that writing down the things that scared her, naming them, facing them, would help with the panic attacks. Why would Ursula Chambers have hidden herself away inside her house if she too didn’t harbor a collection of fears? “I just thought that I might have had some good advice for her.” Joey shrugged, lifted an eyebrow. But Cassidy hadn’t shared the secret of her book with him. So she only shook her head and apologized again.

Finally, he rolled his eyes. “Goofball. I guess that was pretty exciting anyway.”

As Rose called to them that dinner was almost ready, they left Lucky at the tree. He lapped greedily at the water in his bowl. The scrap of blanket lay a few inches away.

Now, Cassidy stepped away from the oak, eyeing the empty hook where they’d attached the leash. The leash had been connected to the collar around Lucky’s neck. She shuddered, leaning toward the shadows of the forest. She searched for the place where Joey had marked the dog’s grave, a disruption of earth, but dead brush littered the ground, hiding the marker.

Something moved through the trees up the hill. Cassidy crept closer. This animal seemed large enough to be a deer. But when she squinted to catch a better glimpse of it, it was gone. She thought of the thing she’d seen from Tony’s window minutes earlier, the dirty fur, the tall haunches. It had looked like Lucky. A growl came from the scrub brush. It
was
a dog. And it didn’t sound friendly. Cassidy held her breath, crossing her arms, hoping she was as invisible to it as it was to her. She was determined to get back to the house without making a sound, but then a hand fell on her shoulder and she screamed.