Amity (12 page)

That
was the reason that Amity couldn’t be
aware
, couldn’t be involved, invested in me.

Couldn’t be
alive
.

That just wasn’t the way things worked.

THE ONLY CHOICE, THEN, WAS TO DENY;
to squeeze my eyes shut and insist,
insist
to myself that the twisted, menacing proportions of the third floor, of Amity, were not some slick, calibrated trick of the paranormal, but only a glitch, a hiccup, of my own mind. To
insist
against the whispers rustling in my ear, so ominously similar to Ro’s twilight-state farewell.

Against the distant, faint buzz of insects, swarming, invisible, just above the surface of my skin.

It’s only a hallway, Gwen
, I insisted.

Only a house
.

THE SEWING ROOM WAS DUSTY
, strung with cobwebs and speckled with particles that drifted in and out of the sunlight, a prism of neglect. But nothing about the room was particularly otherworldly. The buzzing sound had stopped.

Thankfully, it took only a quick scan of the boxes to locate the one labeled
BEACH TOWELS
in my mother’s neat, efficient scrawl. After a brief tussle with a length of packing tape, I fished one out, a swath of vivid Day-Glo stripes that defied the darker murmurings of my mind.

Thank goodness.

Vaguely calmed, I slung the towel over my shoulder and moved closer to the large, multi-paned picture window on the far wall of the room. The view truly
was
a portrait: bold, verdant foliage rioting against the cloudless sky. The river beckoned to me.

But …

I blinked and leaned closer to the smudged glass.
The wind must be rustling the trees
, I told myself.
Surely that’s all that’s out there
.

It was the first, the best explanation. The sensible, reasonable,
rational
explanation.

But it wasn’t the
right
one.

That’s not the wind, Gwen
.

There was someone
out
there. Down by the boathouse. A young girl, maybe ten years old, a blur in faded jeans and a wild, thick ponytail that danced back and forth over her shoulders as she moved. Who
was
she?

I sighed.

Slowly, like an unexpected kiss, I felt a firm hand slip around my waist. The gesture was soothing, reassuring. Comforting.

And then there was my mother, the scent of her freesia hand lotion enveloping me, and her breath on my cheek. “What are you looking at, Gwen?” she asked.

“There’s … Did you see someone out there?” I pointed to the spot where I’d seen the girl only seconds before, but she’d vanished in the split second I’d let my attention wander.

“I saw your brother outside with the ax. It looks like he’s really planning to cut some firewood. Why do I feel like that’s something I should discourage?”

I didn’t want to think about Luke, about the ax. The girl’s image had grounded me, and I wanted to cling to that.

“Never mind,” I said, shrugging. I turned from the window at last …

… and stopped, stock-still.

My mother stood in the doorway of the sewing room.

My mother stood, head cocked slightly, looking quizzical, in the doorway of the sewing room.

She wasn’t directly behind me, although I’d felt her breath on the nape of my neck, and sensed her skin by its smell …

… and felt her arm at my waist.

She hadn’t been behind me at all.

She’d been standing in the doorway of the sewing room. My mother had been standing, not behind me, but in the doorway of the sewing room.

She’d been standing in the doorway of the sewing room this whole time.

TEN YEARS EARLIER

DAY 8

SUNDAY WAS PRETTY QUIET
, for a change.

Mom went to church, like usual. She’d always been pretty into religion and stuff; I guess her family was like that when she was growing up, I mean. We didn’t see her family too much—they were settled further up the coast, and I guess they weren’t too fond of Dad, which I couldn’t exactly blame them for.

So it was Sunday, and it was quiet. Mom was at Mass, and Jules was somewhere in the house watching Abel, and Dad was down by the boathouse, working on this beat-up Leeward, a day sailer he scavenged as soon as he’d signed the papers on Amity. He’d always wanted to have a boat, he’d said.
Always
. It was the first any of us were hearing about this lifelong dream.

The thing was a real clunker anyway—you could see just from looking at it; it was old enough that it was wood, not fiberglass, and no joke, that wood had seen better days. You didn’t have to know anything about boats to know that it would be a long time before this one was ready to test its sea legs again. Even in the hands of someone who knew what he was doing, and that wasn’t really Dad. Okay, he was mechanical—always real hands-on at the dealership—but boats were never his specialty.

But it kept him busy, so I wasn’t complaining.

Honestly, it was actually starting to feel maybe a little
too
quiet around the house. Boring. And if there’s one thing I hate, it’s being bored. I’m not real good with boredom. That was one thing the counselors downstate would say, over and over, and as far as that went, I had to agree with them.

Mom’d got it together to stand up for herself enough so now there was a cheap-ass phone in the kitchen again, plugged in, just waiting,
lurking-like
, you know, in case there was ever some kind of emergency.

I picked it up to dial someone, just for something to do. I don’t even know who I was thinking I’d call—it’s not like I had this great crowd of friends back downstate, just waiting to hear how I was doing, you know?

’Course nothing can ever be easy with Dad. So even though there was a phone and it was plugged in, I guess we weren’t up-to-date on the bills, because when I picked up the receiver, all I heard was a shaky static that put my teeth on edge. It was as bad as nails on a chalkboard, or the whispers that sometimes come to me from inside my own messed-up head.

Faulty wiring: my brain. The phone. Tons of things in my life.

I slammed down the phone, but the whispers didn’t stop. There was still that rustling, like a fire burning somewhere. My skin felt real itchy, like it was suddenly the wrong size for my body. Sometimes that happens to me.

Anyway, I was feeling real bored, twitchy, buzzing from wanting to be distracted.

I needed to move.

SECONDS, MINUTES, HOURS, WEEKS
later, I blinked, and I was there, at the top of the basement stairs.

And now I heard music. It was coming from below, full of static, like an out-of-range radio station.

The door, heavy and wooden and thick, was closed. When I reached for the handle, it resisted.

Amity and her locks. As the music swelled in my head, I slammed forward hard with all of my body weight, imagining the door splintering from its hinges, imagining me riding it like a sled, down the staircase, into the black. I saw this so clear I was sure, like completely certain it would happen, that I’d just go flying, riding that door like a magic carpet, empty hinges squeaking in my wake.

But the door didn’t break open.

Instead, I heard a click, like a key turning in a lock.

The doorknob twisted, and that basement door swung open.

IT WAS DARK DOWNSTAIRS
, and then the music trailed off, so I was alone with my wet, raggedy breathing.

I reached out and groped along, moving forward best as I could in that thick darkness. The walls were damp and I smelled must, stone, and dirt, and underneath that, a spoiled smell, like rotting. That death-shroud, coffin feeling from the first night came back to me. I wiggled my fingers just to prove to myself that I could, that I was actually here, that I was real. That I was alive.

The wall moved.

I wiggled my fingers again, stronger now. My hand closed over a smooth, oval stone. It was big, like an egg that something prehistoric—something make-believe, I mean—would leave behind.

I wondered just for a minute if this was one of those times the counselors warned me about. A
distortion
, one of those time-space hiccups that swept me away from now, from all of the rest of the world.

The counselors don’t like those hiccups, what they do to me. What they mean for everyone else.

But there weren’t any counselors here right now. Just me.

Me and Amity.

I flexed my fingers and shoved my hand further, pushed
that giant rock so it rattled, so it shifted a little in place.

Is there …

Is there something behind the wall?
I rapped a fist against the rocks, but it was hard to hear an echo with the basement walls all mossy and damp. I clamped my fingers around the egg, twisting it, stretched as far up on my toes as I could go in that grave-like space.…

There was a scraping sound, and the little hitch of resistance coming undone. My stomach squeezed, excited-like.

Almost …

I heard a scream.

RAGE, THAT GREAT OLD FRIEND Of MINE, STABBED AT ME, HOT AND SHARP
, in a way that I liked as much as I didn’t.

It rushed at me, so I snapped, all sudden, back to that real-Real place, the one where other people live, where the buzzing in my head is—mostly—dim enough that those screams
—those screams!
—could break through.

Abel
.

Wasn’t Jules watching him?

I moved, reluctant first, then faster as the wails started building some serious steam, bounding up the basement stairs like a maniac. I thought if Abel was bawling about the crap in the bathroom pipes again, I’d slap him so hard his teeth rattled.

I thought:
I’ll give him a real reason to cry
.

But upstairs, the bathroom was empty, and the doors to the bedrooms were all closed. Confused, I took a minute to pinpoint where the noise—tapering down a little bit—was really coming from.

The river?

Yeah. The river. That kind of made sense for some reason, didn’t it?

I whipped back through the house, winding from the dining room to the kitchen, running up to the sink and leaning against
it, searching, a little bit frantic, out the wide back window.

That was when the music started again.

It was broken and choppy, clouding up all the space in my head like a warning signal, or something stronger, even. And when I glanced down at the river, past the low, hilly slope of our backyard, it was running red.

Blood red.

“CONNOR.”

Rage needled me again
(oh hey, buddy
—
how’s it goin’?)
, and
wham!
—there I was, back in the kitchen, the Concord River churning along, back to its normal, muddy-river-water color now.

And I
knew
it was normal, that color; I mean, I knew it was the way all of those regular, normal people saw the river when they looked at it. But buried down deep, I had this strong, solid feeling that actually the blood was the true part, the
real
-Real, if that makes any sense.

I don’t know. I guess it’s kind of confusing, where Amity ends and everything else begins.

But it made sense to me, that I’d be the only one to pick up on that, the only person to see the bloody water with my own two stupid eyes. It went along with most of what I’d come to know about myself, what I’d come to teach other people about who I truly am.

Even though the river was back to so-called “normal,” there was still, for sure, a flash of blazing blood red happening in the corner of my eyes. And when I turned toward it, toward the sound of my name, there was Jules, curls in crazy corkscrews down her shoulders, hands on her hips, looking
maybe annoyed, maybe even something worse.

A trickle of blood ran from her nose.

“What happened?” I asked, and I could have meant a million different things.

“Abel went down to the boathouse,” she said. Her jaw was tight. “He wanted to check it out.”

She reached for an almost-used-up roll of paper towels on the counter. I pulled a sheet off for her, folded it into a square, and ran it under some water from the tap, that stinking sulfur smell hanging in the air between us. She tilted her head back and I stepped toward her, pressing the towel against the trail of blood oozing from her nose. Honestly, I was kind of mesmerized by it. I
wanted
to get closer to that red rivulet.