The Keeper (30 page)

S
he ran home that day with her hands over her ears. She moved down to the basement. She moved to the other side of town. She wandered the woods and the river and the streets of Bedford, but the voices did not stop. The voices never stopped.

The people in town who had once been kind began to glare at her, if they saw her at all. In Susan, Cathy Martin saw the specter of her illness, a gaunt decrepit thing. Ted Marley saw himself. Every time April Willow saw Susan, she thought of her own daughter, long gone.
(How old would she be? Twenty-six? Twenty-seven? Her eyes were blue, too.)
Georgia O’Brian added speed to her step, so that she would not have to smile an uneasy smile at her.
(I feel so sorry for her. But my God, the way she spends her time. She does anything she wants just because she’s had a hard life. I wish I could fall apart, too.)
Bernard McMullen covered his eyes. Danny Willow sighed. Steve McCormack saw a horrible woman who used sickness as an excuse to cause harm, just like his mother. In Susan, Alexandra Fullbright saw a Pied Piper luring her children away one by one. First would go Bobby, next Margaret, then Katie, and last the twins. Lured away by a Pied Piper into a world that made no sense. Bobby Fullbright intuitively saw his girlfriend’s guilt, and despised its source though the name he gave it was pity. Liz Marley saw one moment in a flooded basement repeated so many times and in so many ways that it became a question and an answer, an act and its reason. There were others who liked to look at Susan. The men who visited, Rossoff, the women who peeped behind curtains, Louise Andrias in particular. They envied her darkness, and imagined themselves in her place.

The worst were the shadows cast by the dead. Some tried in vain to escape Bedford while others hovered, speaking insistently about all the things they should have remembered when their footsteps had carried an echo. They watched her from corners of rooms. They hurried through Main Street as if they had someplace to go. The older ones sat in their graves, practicing moving slowly.
(How long will it take to blink? A second? A year?)
The worst was her father, who walked behind her when she wandered through town, never approaching, never speaking. He didn’t ask for her forgiveness. She didn’t offer it.

She began to hear the sounds of Bedford; the rushing river like her own pulse, the pumping of the paper mill like her breath, the voices of the people who lived here like her own voice.

Time passed and she waited. The mill closed. The dead called to her more insistently, and the people of the town dreamed of her, or she dreamed of them—she was no longer sure which was which. The haunted things grew stronger, breaking through the fabric of the town, of her body, so that nightmares began to come to life. They visited Mary Marley during her waking hours, and chased Liz Marley behind a cemetery. They reached up from the basement of the paper mill, and showed Louise Andrias all that she wanted to know.

The haunted things called to her until there was only one story left to hear. They called to her until she could not stand to listen anymore. There was no Susan left. She looked into her mirrors and no longer saw her own reflection. Instead, she saw the faces of Bedford.

At last she found Paul Martin. She’d thought it had been to harm him, to force him into seeing what she had become. But when she saw him, she’d understood that she’d found him for another reason. She’d wanted him to stop her. Instead, the thing she had promised herself would never happen came to pass. She became the woman in the woods, the monster. She was the will of Bedford, and she set Bedford free.

By dawn smoke would fill the town, and the living would join the voices of the dead. In a few days, investigators would take samples of the sulfur-rich air and test the blood of the recently deceased. They would leave Bedford as quickly as they could, all the while wondering why, on such a nice spring day, they’d been unable to stop shivering, and what that barely audible buzzing sound that had filled them with dread had been. They would leave this place to Susan Marley, who would till a garden of lost souls.

A
round Liz Marley the house breathed, and the boiler beat like a heart. A giant, bright red fun-hop ball bounced down the second-floor hall, and in the den a television tuned to a twelve-year-old Red Sox game flicked on and off and on again. She could feel herself slipping away. Her voice, she did not remember it. Her mind, it did not exist here. Her name, it might as well belong to someone else.

It was three
A.M.
on Thursday morning. Just like old times, they sat at the kitchen table. To her right, Mary Marley openly wept. To her left, Susan pulled back her shoulders so that the hole in her chest where her heart had once been became prominent. The moment was so surreal that Liz was reminded of that board game Operation, which she had played as a child: a preposterous little man with a shiny red nose and missing anatomy. And then she wiped her mouth, and felt the black crust on her lips, and remembered why her stomach was so full. A cake. A heart. In her mouth. Down the hatch.

“Huh, huh,” she said, trying to form words, trying to object in some way, and then she hitched, and sobbed, and finally cried out. Christ, was this really happening? Christ, are you out there?

“Why are you doing this?” Liz asked, only she did not speak. She didn’t remember
how
to speak. Out the window, shadows crept like things being born. Smoke was thick. She thought about Bobby, his smell like sweet oil.

Susan nodded at the open basement door. At that moment the walls groaned, the house rocked, a little girl cried:
Stop, she doesn’t like it,
and Liz forgot to breathe. “He’s waiting, Lizzie,” Susan said. “It should have been you. It always should have been you.”

Mary became alert. “A man?” she asked. She started to stand, but then she saw the woman sitting next to her. She recognized her dead daughter, and began to weep.

Susan put her cold, oozing hand around Liz’s wrist, and they locked eyes. Liz thought about a knife, a pair of scissors. She would stab Susan’s ruined face. Sever her head from her body. But what difference would it make? How can you kill what is already dead? Liz blinked, and the battle she did not realize she was fighting against her sister was lost.

Susan flipped the round kitchen table that was between them and it went rolling. Pinned to the wall, Mary watched. She yanked Liz’s wrist, and dragged her down the hall like a rag doll. Liz kicked against the floors and walls and Susan’s legs. She screamed, and the sound echoed through the house, over and over, so that the house screamed back in bitter mockery. With the strength of all of Bedford, Susan threw her down the basement steps. She tumbled down, while up above, the door locked shut.

She sat dazed at the bottom of the stairs. No broken bones, only a few bruises. She waited as her eyes adjusted to the dark. She smelled something familiar down here. Irish Spring soap and paper mill sulfur. She could see the silhouette of something not far away. It was about Bobby’s size, only she knew it wasn’t Bobby.

As her eyes adjusted, she saw Ted Marley watching her.

T
here was a man in the house. Mary could feel him. All these years she’d watched for him; listening late at night, sniffing his clothes for a foreign scent (or a familiar one). There was a man in the house, she was sure of it. After her children’s blood.

Mary kept her eyes closed. Maybe she was crying. She didn’t know. Something was happening, but she couldn’t remember what. She tried to wake up. Tried so hard. But the night had gone on for so long, and her heart had grown so cold.

Earlier tonight she had been sitting in the basement, talking to a little girl in pigtails and Mary Janes. They had told stories, and listened to the chattering walls. The girl hid in the closet when Liz came home, but she came back as soon as Liz was gone.

In the pocket of her blue dress, the little girl had carried a rubber ball. With her hand she’d bounced it against the wall, and with her mouth she’d sunk her teeth into Mary’s flesh. But that was right and good. Better to bleed a little than a lot.

And then the back door had opened. Something came down the basement steps. Worse than the little girl. Worse than anything in this world. A terrible thing with eyes so deep that Mary got lost inside them. Felt herself go mad inside them. The thing’s steps in the churning water on the floor were slow and jerking. Slap-slap, slap-slap was the sound its feet had made.

Mary had looked at the creature; its blue eyes, its pale skin, its fingernails full of dirt, its funereal red rouge, and understood. Then she went far away. So far that her vision became two tiny specs, and her emotions as grounded as debris in outer space. What mattered? Did this matter? That? Her wet feet? The life she’d lived? Her courage, which had always walked too gently? Her daughter, who had died a ridiculous death at twenty-three? Or maybe just the itchy feeling on her scalp right now, that she dared not itch. That mattered, too.

The little girl in pigtails continued to bounce her ball. Thwack-thwack. The thing with leaden steps walked closer: slap-slap. The boiler kicked. The walls throbbed. Mary thought about the flooding this year, and the fact that Elizabeth always kept her socks long after she’d worn holes through their toes and heels, and whether hell is a place in which you are never allowed to forget the decisions you should have made.

Thwack. Slap. Thwack. Slap. The creature and the pigtailed innocent got closer and closer. Closer and closer. Thwack. Slap. Thwack. Slap. The child climbed down from Mary’s lap, and went inside the monstrous thing. All the way inside, into a deep black hole, until the little girl was gone. The thing and the little girl became one thing.

After that, Mary went deep inside herself. So deep that she forgot her own name.

Together, they called Elizabeth for supper. And then there was a pulsing cake
(Let them eat cake!),
and then stories Mary didn’t like to remember, and voices so loud they hurt her ears. And then something else. Something that had happened before. A terrible thing, only this time, it was the other daughter.

And now here she was, sitting in a chair. Trying to wake up. Why? A man. A man in the house.

Mary startled suddenly. Next to her, the thing lifted the table it had overturned and sat down next to Mary. It pressed its bone white face into the crook of Mary’s neck, and with its fingers began to tap against the wood. Tap. Tap. Only, the tapping was the sound of bone.

Where was she right now? In Corpus Christi, that’s right, she was home with her mom and dad in Corpus Christi, swinging high on the tire swing attached to the crab apple tree.
(Don’t eat the apples, they’re full of poison! All mothers hate their daughters in their most secret place.)
Higher and higher she went. In the sky was a little girl’s face. In the sky were twins who looked nothing alike. One girl fell to the ground, and the other flew away.

What was that smell? Why was the room so hazy? Was this smoke? Was there a fire? The thing smiled at Mary, and black blood ran down its chin.

Where was she right now? That’s right, in the parking lot. Sitting in her car while her girls recited lessons at school. Black clouds filled the sky and in the distance there was thunder. She would pull up to the entrance, so the girls could climb in without getting wet. But a man stood at her window, knocking with callused knuckles.

Where was her daughter, the living daughter? Where had she gone?
(In the basement, with the burglar. You let her go. What must you be made of to let this happen all over again?)
Mary saw two girls in her mind. One girl fell and the other flew away. Which was which?

Where was she right now? On her uncle’s farm, feeding the rabbits he raised for 4H.
(Be quiet. She just had a litter and when they get frightened they eat their young. Where are your children, Mary Marley? You should have eaten them long ago.)

The thing, a woman. Its lips were soft and black. It was smiling and crying at once.

“What are you?” Mary asked.

“Everything. Nothing,” the woman said.

“What have you done?”

The woman looked out the window. From somewhere in the house a child moaned, and Mary thought:
Oh, Susan. I’m so sorry. How many times must I say it?

Smoke thickened in the house. Black stuff, and it burned Mary’s eyes. She tried to wake up. Tried so hard.

Again, a child moaned. Who was that? What was that sound? Oh, yes, now she knew. It was her living daughter crying out. It was her living daughter howling because there was a man in the house.

Mary sat up. Elizabeth? Her heart beat faster. A man in the house. The man from years ago. These men, they stole everything and called it love.

“What are you?” Mary asked.

“You know what I am,” the woman answered, and God help her, she did know. A part of her had always known. Susan was different. This town was different. And all the phantoms and little girls and throbbing walls on this night were pieces of a monstrous hole, that over the years had found nourishment inside her daughter’s unbounded rage.

Where was she right now? In her house in Bedford, sitting next to her elder daughter’s corpse while down the basement steps her living daughter cried. Mary woke as if from a deep slumber with only one thought on her mind: her living daughter. Her second chance.