Amity (6 page)

Red, thick, and rusty.

The water spurting from the tap was red and rusty as an infected wound, and my hands, which had been submerged in it, had erupted in angry, swollen

(gunshots?)

blisters.

(what when how?)

I couldn’t know. I couldn’t say.

But I
did
know—again, still:

I wasn’t alone. I
wasn’t
. No matter what halfhearted reassurances I’d made to Luke, or to anyone else, I knew the truth.

I wasn’t alone in Amity. Someone—some
thing
—was here with me. Lurking in the fault line of the mirror, maybe. Or maybe stirring now, eager to escape.

(she was shot in the head)

(the head the head the HEAD)

I clasped my blistered fists together and swallowed down a scream.

TEN YEARS EARLIER

DAY 2

THE HANDPRINT WAS GONE IN THE MORNING
.

It was the first thing I did when I woke up—jumped out of bed and over to the window to check, I mean. But the window was wiped clean, or anyway: it was the same exact dirty that Jules had bitched about. It was streaky and dusty and strung up with cobwebs, yeah, but it was definitely not marked up with any handprint. Not anymore, if it ever was in the first place.

That made me pretty angry, if you want to know the truth. It felt a little like being lied to, which I don’t like. That reflection—that dead-like, rotting thing in the window—That didn’t get to me. I thought it wanted to talk to me, wanted to really get to know me, have a heart-to-heart or something, and I was okay with that. What bugged me was the not knowing for sure, the wondering. And the handprint being gone was confusing, mixed-up, and slippery the way things sometimes get in my head.

I threw on some clothes and wandered out into the hallway, wondering if it was safe to head downstairs and scrounge up something to eat. Without the dealership, Dad wasn’t working regular hours, but I didn’t think he’d be hanging around the house too much. He didn’t really like spending time with any of us and the feeling was mutual. Except for Abel, maybe, who was still a little too young to know better, poor kid.

When I passed by Jules’s room, her door was open. Quiet guitar-band music was playing: that airy, depressing girl stuff. I ducked inside. She was still in last night’s pajama pants and that hoodie, all stretched out at the neck, sitting on her mattress with her knees pulled up to her chest, staring off at the door to our bathroom. Her room was a mirror image of mine; there weren’t any special girlie touches up yet or anything. Just a lamp on her dresser. Its ruffled shade made the space look even sadder than if she’d left it completely bare.

“New places are hard,” I said, parroting what she’d told Mom the night before. I was hoping for a laugh.

Jules shot me a dirty look, her eyes flashing. “You’re funny.”

She stood up and tightened the drawstring on her pajama pants, then reached to the scratched-up radio on the windowsill, turning it off. “Enough.” The room felt extra-quiet, empty, without that
pity-me
strum playing in the background.

“What’s your problem?” I asked, sounding more annoyed than I meant to. I was thinking of that
face
, bone-white with the oozing, gaping sockets where eyes should have been.

“I slept badly,” she admitted. She tightened her hair elastic so her curls sprang up an inch higher at the back of her head. “I think … Well, I was cold. But also, the boathouse door. It kept banging and waking me up. It sounded like—”

“—like a shotgun,” I said, jumping in, maybe a little too eager.

She looked at me, her mouth a tight line. “Yeah, exactly. But it didn’t bother you.” She said that last part angry.

“Well, you know.” I shrugged. “Nothing ever bothers me, really. Nothing creeps me out.” Another of her little sayings from yesterday back to haunt her.

She didn’t think that was funny, either. And I
knew
why she was all annoyed. I could see why other people—why Jules—wouldn’t make jokes about shotguns blasting in the dead of night. That wasn’t normal, it wasn’t the way regular people were supposed to think.

But the thing about it was, even if she didn’t think it was funny …

I did.

IT WAS TRICKY WITH ME
.

Whether I was feeling angry, whether I was having—or
not
having—normal-person reactions to things, I still reacted to
Jules
, you know. I didn’t like to see her upset. So I told her I’d look at the door to the boathouse, see if there was something I could do to fix it. She seemed relieved, her ponytail relaxing, bobbing a few inches lower down her neck. That was good.

And if I maybe had some other secret kind of reason for wanting to get closer to the space? Like something maybe calling me from down there? Well … I kept that to myself right then.

And that was good, too.

MOM WOULDN’T HAVE WANTED ME TO TAKE THE CAR
. Wherever Dad was that morning, he didn’t go there in our crappy four-door. But Mom wouldn’t have been too keen on me taking it into town, on the off chance that Dad came home earlier than she expected and got it into his head to be bothered by the car being gone. Dad got bothered by things pretty easy.

I
didn’t care about Dad getting bothered—just another one of those things that was a problem for other people that just didn’t get to me, right? And I didn’t much care what Mom did or didn’t want, either. So I didn’t ask about the car. I just took it.

I knew where to find the keys. Dad was predictable. Back downstate, he kept them stuffed into his underwear drawer, tucked into his holey old shorts like a secret porn stash. I waited until after lunchtime when Mom, Abel, and Jules headed down to the river in their old, stretched-out bathing suits, Mom with a huge, billowing T-shirt over hers to cover everything up. Even with that circus tent brushing back and forth between her knees, you could still make out the yellow edges of a fading bruise peeking out like a frown. She tried, I guess, but there’s only so much covering up you can really do.

Now, some people would disagree with my thinking here. (I do know a little bit about how other people think, what normal people usually say and do.) But if you ask me, in some
ways Mom kind of deserved what she got. I mean, if she was going to go around trying to cover things up, how could she expect them to ever change, right? It was weak, that behavior, and if there’s one thing I’m not, it’s weak.

Still, that bruise
—all
the bruises—they made the edges of my vision go red, made my fingers clench around the firm metal of the car key. Maybe Mom was weak, but Dad was still evil, and even with my own … well, my own special way of seeing things … the way real life sometimes looked to me as flat as cardboard …

Well, I fucking hated Dad.

So when the ignition of the car turned over and the dashboard sparked to life, I gritted my teeth, hunkered down, and just barreled out of there.

Nobody could hear me down by the river anyway. I was pretty sure about that. That Concord River, she rushed.

THERE WAS ONLY ONE ROAD TO AMITY
.

The house lay at the end of a long, twisting dead end. The only way past was by river, so in order to get to anything close to civilization, I drove back in the direction we came the day before, the dirt road already looking more uneven, more forgotten and overgrown than it did yesterday. This was real and true backcountry, but it felt almost jungle-like, with branches and bramble unwinding from gnarled tree trunks and clawing at the edge of the road, reaching for me. The air was humid and wet, stinking, all ripe like moss and overgrowth. And the way the leaves jittered on their branches, well … it sounded like they were whispering little messages to me.

As I squinted through the windshield, gripping the steering wheel so hard my knuckles were bone-white, I had a flash of that face again, that gaping, empty gaze from the night before, and I nodded, like I was answering those whispers myself. That shuddery feeling I kept getting around Amity swelled up in my stomach, light as air. Then it was gone, a soap bubble popped, and I nodded again, like I was reassuring the house and her … well, her
tentacles
, that’s how those snarled, ragged branches felt right then—reassuring everything that was connected to Amity … that I’d be back.

And when the leaves rustled again, they told me they knew that I would be.

I thought then that Amity was already all mine. I didn’t realize it was actually the other way around.

I FOLLOWED THE MAIN ROAD TOWARD TOWN
, the roadside trees thinning out some, and the voices and the whispers quieting, too, the closer I got. But that soft hum, which felt so right, so welcoming, it was slowly getting replaced, like drowned out, I mean, with a popping loop of static. No matter how hard I listened, I couldn’t make out whether the static was inside my head, or outside of it.

That happens to me sometimes. I don’t worry too much about it.

The dirt road gave way to blacktop, although the pavement was patchy and maybe even tougher on the car’s suspension than the dirt was. After a few more miles, a dotted yellow line, fading at some spots, appeared, telling me that people were here, that Real Life was up ahead. The static was suffocating now, like the knob on my mental radio had been turned all the way up.

There was a small convenience store kind of grocery up ahead, with a neon sign burned out black in three places. Two battered-looking cats padded around the parking lot, suspicious, hovering a couple paces away as I pulled in. As I made my way to the front door, they glared at me, wary. I kicked a leg out in their direction and they broke away.

I thought:
Weak
. All of them.

The door stuck when I pushed on it, and then the rubber tread on the floor gave a little coughing hiss when I leaned further. I watched the man behind the counter watching me, looking a little doubtful—challenging, even—while I shoved up against it. He gave a tiny jut of his chin when I stumbled in.

There was one other person in the store, a fat, bearded guy in a T-shirt pulled tight over his sagging beer gut. The top of his head was bald, with a semicircle of grayish fuzz hanging on for dear life, tracing a scraggly path from one temple to the other. The dull fluorescents overhead bounced off his bald patch. He flicked his eyes in my direction, then shifted a little. It wasn’t like he had his back to me, completely, but there was an angle to the way he was standing. It wasn’t friendly.

That was fine. I’m not always too friendly, either. It depends on the situation, you know? What the situation calls for.

Anyway. There was something I needed. For Jules. So I figured:
Who cares
? Just get in and get out. Get it done.

The man behind the counter plucked a toothpick from somewhere up alongside the register and popped it into his mouth, rolling it around on his tongue real energetic, keeping an eye on me the whole time. His friend still wasn’t turned my way, really, but I could see his shoulders creep just a little bit higher toward his ears, his shirt catching on his belly and rolling up over itself.

“Do you know where the nearest hardware store is?” I asked, thumbs hitched into the pockets of my jeans. Through the angry fuzz of my headspace, I could hear how my voice sounded in the cold, stale fortress of the store, all flat and closed and not trying to make any good impression. I had a feeling that these guys, they wouldn’t appreciate my tone,
the way it was so clear, how I felt so distant in my head, you know … but I didn’t care.

“Or maybe you have something here,” I went on. “I’m looking for a latch, you know, like for a shed. To keep the front doors closed. Even a set of chains and padlock would be good, if you had hooks for the chains. I’ve got a drill at home to get the hardware onto the doors.”

Hell, maybe a padlock would be
better
. Maybe I could find a way to make that boathouse my own little hideout, or something. There had to be a way to make that happen, no matter what dear old Dad’s plans were for the place.

When I wanted something, I usually found a way to make it happen. And now the static in my head was swarming, like a nest of wasps, buzzing, all eager, like really into the thought of making the boathouse my own. Right now that felt like a pretty terrific idea.

“I guess the wood might be pretty old, so I’m not sure how solid it is. But I’m pretty handy with a drill, so I think I could make do.” I’d always been good with power tools, even before I started working part-time at the dealership, before I had any good reason to be handling drills.