Amity (4 page)

I gnawed at my lower lip, tasting that murky tang particular to rainwater. “I’m just … It’s embarrassing. That we had to move.”
Because of me
.

Luke reached forward. Thinking he meant to hug me, I leaned toward him, only to realize he was brushing a stray leaf from my shoulder. I shivered, feeling foolish.

“There are worse things than being embarrassed,” he pointed out.

“True.”

Though I couldn’t think of any specific examples just then, I had the very clear idea that there would be time enough for those. It was a sense that poured over me, sodden as the weather.

“Gwen,” Luke said, and this time he laid a palm flat against my shoulder, firmly enough that gooseflesh pebbled my skin against the wet, cold fabric of my tank top. “You don’t want Mom and Dad to worry.”

Meaning:
Shake it off
. Allow this dreary foreboding to slide down my shoulders as easily as rainfall for our parents’ sake. (And, therefore, my own.)

I nodded, still shivering, and pushed off the box, knowing I’d find a bruise on the back of my pale thigh tomorrow.

“Come on,” Luke said, gesturing at the remaining boxes. They framed him, penned him in like a cardboard maze. “Not much more to go.”

He was right.

But then, as it turned out, so was I.

AUNT RO HAD SAID THAT SAGE WAS CLEANSING
, her face sincere as she offered me an embroidered silk bag filled with several dry, dusty gray-green sprigs. This was on the day the movers arrived at our old house, my parents preoccupied enough that we didn’t worry about them, about their distaste for our shared superstitions, our joint inclination toward magical thinking.

“It’s important,” Ro said, “to usher the good energy in. Proactively.”

I had unzipped the bright, egg-yolk-colored bag and gently traced the tight twine knots with my fingertips, noting how thin and delicate the leaves felt. It was hard to imagine that anything so papery-fragile could wield power, but I knew well enough that my own expectations could clash against the actual, physical world that others experienced.

Aunt Ro was the same way. Our emotional connection was ambiguous by “normal” standards, but was taut, innate, almost a living organism. It was Ro and her superstitions I’d clung to feverishly at Laurel Valley, through the gauzy veil of morning meds, evening meds, through the inane monotony of fervent, confessional group therapy sessions.

Through the paralyzing insistence that my perception of the world was not, strictly speaking, wholly reliable. In fact,
I
was other, not those around me, those beyond Laurel Valley.

Aunt Ro, of course, was only
other
in that she seemed to understand me.

She was my mother’s older sister, and they were very close, but I was the one who adored her. Ro was a force of nature, magnetic and colorful, bold as the bright yellow silk bag of sage. She was open, attuned to alternate frequencies in a way no one else I knew was. She was, maybe, the
only
person who understood me. Who didn’t think—hadn’t ever thought—that I needed Laurel Valley. She saw quirks, abnormalities, as blessings. She had plenty of her own.

Aunt Ro was different, and that made me feel better, more comfortable, more

(safe)

secure in being different, too.

So when she’d given me the sage, still faintly scented, like a sachet in its pouch, I’d nodded and assured her I’d find the best place to put it to use in our new home. “Start off on the right foot,” she whispered, running a cool index finger across my cheek.

Now, as the rainstorm finally tapered off and dusk began to stain the late afternoon sky, I considered the ideal place to make my offering. Mom and Dad were gone, returning the moving van, and Luke had proclaimed himself “done for the day,” disappearing into his new bedroom. Rather abruptly, to be honest. But since he’d left me alone (which was, for the moment, my preference), I could hardly take issue.

“It’s best to get as close as possible to the foundation of the house,” Ro had said. “Everything that grows comes from earth.”

“The basement.” It was as close to the earth as a house could get.

She pursed her lips. “The basement. You’ll want to start from the ground up.”

Then, of course, she had known nothing particular about Amity or her history. She was only offering what she thought was good advice. Even with everything that was to come, I could hardly bring myself to blame her. The sage had been meant to cleanse. With another house, another space, another plot of earth, it might have worked.

IT WAS AS DARK AS THE INSIDE OF A COFFIN
at the top of the basement stairs. Outside, the rain had given way to a gusty, constant shriek of wind that sang through the walls of the house. Amity was large, but not preposterously so. Still, its Victorian farmhouse layout was filled with nooks and pockets, corners occasionally revealing odd-sized doors and skewed archways like Alice must have found through her looking glass. Luke was still upstairs in his bedroom, and the only sound I could make out was a persistent drip from the kitchen faucet.

Reflexively, I curled my fingers more firmly around the bag of sage. It was the wrong shade, that sunny, egg-yolk hue: too hopeful and insistent, so at odds with my mood.

All the more reason for the exercise, I thought.

I groped for a light switch and found one on my right; when I flicked it on, a bare bulb at the foot of the stairs glowed pale and ghostly, only a slight improvement from the pitch-black. I made my way downstairs, clutching the sage in one fist and a box of matches in the other. I tripped on the very last step and staggered, trying to regain my balance, telling myself that my growing unease came only from my stumble, and nothing more.

The footprint of Amity’s basement was wide, as large and implausibly laid out as the house itself. Once my eyes adjusted
to the dimness, the main space was something of a relic. A deflated couch rested along the wall supporting the staircase, a matted, moth-eaten pillow without a case flopped against one arm. The floor here was poured concrete. A round, braided rug in muddy earth tones lay before the couch, looking defeated and drab. An oily stain spiraled along its stitching. The air smelled of must and thick, clotting mold, rich and sulfurous. Involuntary tears sprang to my eyes.

Get out
, I thought.
Leave now
. Nothing good in this world smelled the way that basement did. Nothing I wanted to know about.

But Ro had said to be proactive, to be positive. She was coming tomorrow, would know, as she always did, whether or not I had followed through.

Ro had said to get close to the earth.

I sighed, keeping my breath as shallow as possible.
Close to the earth
. There was still the issue of the concrete floor, which I thought might be a barrier to true cleansing. I could see, from the small column of light that swayed in time to the movement of the hanging bulb, that the basement shared the greater house’s tricky perspective: a narrow passageway, basically a dugout, gave way on either side to small, stone-lined arches revealing grottoes floored with dirt and rubble.

Dirt and rubble
. That sounded more promising.

I shuffled forward. I didn’t allow myself to wonder why Amity should rest above a series of semi-excavated caves, since I couldn’t imagine an explanation that would be remotely comforting. A few paces further and the mouth of one small grotto—a crawl space, really—yawned open, welcoming me eagerly, or threatening to swallow me whole.

THE FIRST TWO MATCHES THAT I TRIED
sputtered and died out.

On my third attempt, the match struck with a rough scrape. When the flame licked blue-gold at my fingers, I held it to the bundle of herbs with only a fraction of hesitation.

The leaves caught quickly. As they smoked, I took them by the gathered stems, shaking my little voodoo bouquet along the perimeter of the room, taking care to deliberately scatter ash in each corner. This was what Ro had instructed, but even knowing I had her encouragement, even with a specific directive, I felt foolish there, in the shadows, waving burning kitchen spices along the dirt floor.

Ro had a friend from college who read tarot cards and tea leaves for a living; Ro claimed she’d predicted no fewer than five major disasters in recent history, but Mom’s contempt for this woman bordered on fury. “Hokum,” she called it. “New Age hoo-hah.” As if
hoo-hah
were
cancer
or
famine
or
a violent crime, punishable by
 …

Well, punishable. So it was those words whispering to me, through the dark, through my shame, through my irrational fears, my irrational thoughts. I pushed them down, tried to let them settle beneath the weight of that murky, pregnant air.

Rational thought was important, I knew. Imperative,
even. And rational thought told me, that truly, there was nothing I
needed
to cleanse the house against; that even if this house did have history, it couldn’t be that much worse than my own. In fact, a change of location was expected to do me good.

Rational thought told me to trust my surroundings, not my addled mind.

Then with a
pop
, the lone lightbulb blew out, and the door at the top of the staircase swung shut.

I GASPED
at the sudden eclipse, clinging to the dying glow of the burning sage. Again, the thought of a coffin came to me, lid closed as tight as a vault’s. A clinking sounded.
Probably the furnace
, rational thought insisted.…

But then it was August.

The grottoes, Gwen
.

Who had carved them? And why?

Those questions seemed much more pressing now. A mud-floor cellar was something I’d heard of, something one finds in the country.… But cave-like, rabbit-warren dugouts? Those were something else, something different. Or they could be, if one were prone to … 
hokum
and
hoo-hah
. To hysteria.

If
.

I breathed in, the moist air skating in the back of my throat. I wasn’t too far from the staircase,
couldn’t
be; once I found the banister, I’d be able to hobble upstairs, albeit blindly. The staircase
couldn’t
be that far from where I stood,
rationally
, since I hadn’t come very far past the main area of the basement. The sad, stained rug had to be just a few shuffles away from my reluctant feet. It
had
to be.

But it wasn’t.

The sage had nearly burned out by now (though the idea that the basement was cleansed wasn’t at all reassuring in
the bleak, tomb-like darkness). My breathing quickened along with my heartbeat, and as a familiar tingle I hadn’t felt in many years came over my skin, I willed myself to regain control.

Slow, deep breath sounds filled the space, hammering out their own meaningless pattern.

I dropped the sage and placed my hand flat and firm against my chest, over my heart. It was still racing, still twisting and writhing to a manic inner rhythm. And I was gasping for air, almost hyperventilating. There was no question.

The slow, steady breaths I was hearing weren’t my own.

I HEARD A FRANTIC DIGGING SOUND
, desperate scrabbles against stone and loose, rocky soil. The breathing was louder now, and faster, too.

The matches
, I thought.
You still have the matches
. I jammed a hand into my pocket and dug the matchbook out, tearing off a match and trying to steady my hands enough to light it. I dragged it against the strip of flint, pinching the cardboard ends of the book with my free hand, once, twice, three times, before it caught, a pinprick of illumination leaping up, like a tiny fairy sent to light my way.

(go away, crazy)

But I
wasn’t
crazy. Not anymore.

I followed the small swath of light toward the breathing sounds, barely daring to breathe myself, fearful of what was down here in the cavernous black with me.

Or, perhaps, of what
wasn’t

(not real)

actually there.

(But I
wasn’t
crazy, anymore!)

I wasn’t.

I WASN’T
.

“Murray!”

I swatted the dog lightly on his side. He felt solid, his fur warm and velvety. “You almost gave me a heart attack.”

He didn’t turn away from the corner he’d been worrying at, though, and the
scritch-scritch
of his nails against the wall pulsed and echoed. Now I heard a creak, and a click, and the door to the basement swung open, flooding the space with light, so that I could see exactly where I stood.…

Which was exactly at the base of the staircase, that sagging, sorry couch off to my right, cushions bowing out into a crooked frown. The light from the kitchen was bright and I squinted, raising a forearm protectively over my eyes.

“What the hell are you doing down there in the dark, Gwen?” It was Luke, his legs splayed apart in a superhero’s stance, reduced to a grayscale outline against the relentless light from the kitchen.

“Murray came down here,” I deflected, hoping he couldn’t smell the burned sage, or wouldn’t recognize the scent if he did. “He’s”—I gestured to the dog’s frantic scraping at the floor—“he’s digging. I guess he found something.” That tingle crept over me again, making my scalp clench and crawl
—go away, go away
—and I had to restrain myself
from bounding up the stairs at a tear. “The light blew out.”

Luke’s mouth twisted, an expression I couldn’t quite read. “So come on up already.”