Bad Things (22 page)

She smiled with what appeared to be genuine warmth. “Well, it’s

been a few months, Cory. I’m sure our resident Eastern European

fuckbunny must be needing her holes plugged again by now.”

I was incapable of responding to this.

Brooke tilted her head on one side. “Tell me, Mr. Henderson.

Does the fact she’s a murderess add a certain something? Does it im-

part a special frisson?”

148 Michael Marshall

“Not here,” Cory told her mildly. “Evidently it will be some time

before we can pay a visit to our poor friend. I suggest we come back

later.”

“Good idea, little bro,” his sister said. “I’m sure we’ll meet again,”

she added to me, and winked. “I’ll look forward to it, handsome.”

And then the two of them walked away.

Forty minutes later a harassed-looking doctor came out to say I could

visit with Ellen briefl y. I was directed to a side room where she lay

propped up in bed, staring out of the window at the clouds gathering

outside. After I’d stood in the center of the room for perhaps a min-

ute, she turned her head.

“Are they here?”

“No,” I said. “Assuming you mean Cory and Brooke. They were,

but they left.”

“You met her?”

“I guess,” I said. “We had an encounter, certainly.”

I walked over to the bed. The side of her face was extensively

bandaged, heavy bruising already creeping out from underneath it.

“Are you okay?”

She shrugged.

“What’s the damage?”

“Twenty stitches.”

“I saw the car. I’m amazed it wasn’t a lot worse.”

“Lucky me.”

“You don’t seem surprised that I’m here.”

“The nurse told me a man was waiting. Didn’t sound like Cory.

There’s no one else it could be.”

“Were you trying to do something this morning?”

She glanced down at her hands. “No,” she said. I wasn’t sure I

believed her. “Though maybe I should have been. Maybe it would just

be quicker that way.”

B A D T H I N G S 149

“Ellen, what’s going on?”

“I told you. I tried to.”

I went around the bed to the window side and sat down in the

chair.

“Tell me again,” I said.

It had started, she said, the day after the funeral. Until then the

Robertsons had appeared to treat her with compassion, as if she were

one of them. Of course they hadn’t been aware until that point that

their father’s will stipulated Ellen be allowed to remain on the prop-

erty for as long as she wanted. Once that wish had become known,

things changed.

At fi rst, Brooke and Cory had simply stopped talking to her, or

registering her existence. If they passed her on the grounds, or on the

streets of Black Ridge, they behaved as if she wasn’t there—and it was

this that had caused Ellen to start spending time in other places, like

Sheffer, where she had eventually overheard the conversation relating

to Scott’s death. The maid who’d previously cleaned Ellen’s house

stopped doing so. The Wi-Fi that had extended across the property

stopped working, suddenly requiring a password that Ellen did not

know—but then, twenty-four hours later, worked without one again:

around the time she began to suspect that Cory (whose business con-

cerns included IT installations in local fi rms) was in a position to

spy on her communications with the outside world. If Ellen tried to

phone the Robertsons, the call was not answered. When she knocked

on the door of the house, apparently no one was ever in.

When it became clear that a freeze-out was not going to be enough

to dislodge her, matters began to escalate. Mail stopped arriving at

her house. There had never been much, but her mother wrote once

in a while, and these letters stopped arriving—along with the bills

and mail-order catalogs that make you feel connected to the world.

After trouble with a credit-card company over nonpayment of a state-

150 Michael Marshall

ment that had never arrived, she had to switch to paying everything

online.

“I know it doesn’t sound like a big deal,” Ellen said.

But I could imagine. The trivial supports us. You think you’re

withstanding the crisis and then one morning you discover there’s

no bread in the kitchen or you don’t like your shoes and next thing

you’re smashing your forehead against the wall and crying as if you’ll

never stop.

Meanwhile, other things started to happen.

There would be knocks on her door in the middle of the night.

The fi rst few times, she went down—to fi nd no one there. By the fi fth

or sixth occasion she began to fi nd this ridiculous, and stopped going

down—until she noticed one morning that things seemed to be miss-

ing from the downstairs rooms, or at least to have been moved—as

if whoever had knocked and received no answer had then used a key

to enter the premises. The missing objects weren’t even things you

might believe they would wish to regain possession of, or not always.

A couple of minor heirlooms went, certainly, but also a side table Ellen

had bought for fi ve bucks at a yard sale, and a battered saucepan, and

fi nally all of the soaps from the main bathroom—which was on the

same level as the bedroom in which Ellen slept.

So she started getting up again when she heard the knocks, and

running downstairs, shouting furiously at whichever Robertson must

be playing this stupid game.

But still they were never there, and still things continued to dis-

appear.

One night Ellen tested it. She watched television until eleven, and

then switched the TV off—along with all of the house lights. She

didn’t go to bed, however, but sat on the fl oor in the hallway, wrapped

in a blanket, and waited. She kept watch throughout the night, using

coffees and cigarettes and magazines.

At nearly two a.m. there was a sudden banging on the door—

B A D T H I N G S 151

terrifyingly loud, with no warning and coming from nowhere. She

didn’t answer it. She stayed crouched on the fl oor, a kitchen knife

ready in her hand, waiting for it to be unlocked and opened.

It was not, however, and she stayed that way until fi nally it began

to get light again outside.

She trudged upstairs just after seven, feeling obscurely trium-

phant, as if she had managed to turn the tide in her direction.

Her toothbrush was missing, however, and though she spent two

hours turning the house upside down, it never turned up.

You can always buy a new toothbrush, and she did. But when she

locked the door of her house that night she no longer felt the place was

hers, or that she lived there alone. The fact that all windows and other

points of access were secured only made the feeling more acute.

The knocks on the front door continued. After a time sounds

began to come from the window of her bedroom, too. And from in-

side her closet, and underneath the bed, or so she thought. Never

loud enough to be
provably
more than the shifting of fi ttings or fl oor-boards in response to fl uctuations in temperature—which the house

seemed increasingly prone to—but enough to keep her awake night

after night. Milk bought from the market in the afternoon turned

brackish and sour by midevening—unless it was the water that was

at fault, or the new brand of coffee she drank in order that every cup

not remind her of the specifi c brew that she and Gerry had always

favored.

Then had come the night when, just before going to bed, she

had momentarily lifted one of the bedroom blinds, which she now

kept permanently drawn, and seen a large black bird hanging over

the pond.

It had seemed to hover in place, unmoved by the strong winds

swirling down and around, whistling through the trees. Then it was

gone, but then she heard the sound of something moving away into

the trees. Something larger.

152 Michael Marshall

Ellen yanked the blinds shut, and spent the night perched on the

end of her bed. That’s when, according to her, she knew.

“Knew what?” I asked.

“It was a
strige,
” she whispered, not sounding like she was from

Boston at all.

“A
what
?”

She turned to stare out of the window.

The thing about grief is that there is no telling what it will do to you.

It comes from so deep a well that it is capable of bending reality—or,

at least, of mangling how the affl icted perceive the world. I had felt

or heard or seen things that I knew full well I could not have done.

A face glimpsed in the street or playground, a happy shout from two

streets away that sounds so familiar you cannot believe it might have

come from a stranger—until you run desperately to see, and fi nd that

it has issued from a child who looks nothing like yours. Death opens a

wound which is so raw that you may fi nd yourself jamming the squar-

est of pegs into the roundest of holes, attempting to heal the breach

in a universe that now feels horrifi c and broken.

I had heard Scott’s shout. I had seen the face of my mother, who

had been dead for ten years. But, of course, I actually had heard or

seen neither.

Now was not the time to tell Ellen this. She would work it out

soon enough, I hoped, and I know from experience that you will

never alter someone’s belief system by direct confrontation with con-

trary evidence. Faith is the opposite of proof.

So I asked her a question instead. “Brooke called you a murderer,”

I said. “Why would she say that?”

“She says I hurt their father. That he died because of me. That’s

why they’re punishing me.”

“The coroner’s report was black and white. A heart attack, like

you said.”

B A D T H I N G S 153

“How do you know that?”

“I get around. So why are they harassing you?”

“They don’t believe it.”

“How do you know, if they’re not talking to you?”

“Because three weeks ago, she
did
. I was on Kelly Street, I was . . .

I was thinking of going into that bar, the Mountain View. Just to be

somewhere, you know, to have someone to talk to. But then suddenly

Brooke’s there in front of me, and she just
lost
it.”

“How?”

“She started shouting at me in front of the other people— people I

used to know, who used to talk to me when Gerry was alive, and who

just walked around us as if it wasn’t happening. How I’d pay for what

I’d done. And since then everything has felt even worse. I can’t think

straight. Everything’s getting louder, all the time.”

“Ellen, there’s nothing
left
for you here. So why don’t you leave?

Start again somewhere else.”

“Like you did? After what happened to your son?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Did that work? You ran away. What did
you
fi nd? You can’t just

leave. If you try, it just comes with you. It comes with you inside.”

“This
‘strige,’
this is something from home? A Romanian

thing?”

She nodded irritably.

“So how could it be here? In America?”

She looked at me as if I was very stupid indeed. “In Romania we

also have things called
abore,
” she said. “And
munte,
and also
noapte
.

It’s very strange, but it turns out you have them here, too.”

“And what are they?”

“Trees. Mountains. And night.”

I was losing patience. “Your English is very good, Ellen. So what

would we call a
strige
here? The nearest equivalent?”

She cocked her head and looked straight back at me. “A witch.

Okay?”

154 Michael Marshall

I breathed out heavily and leaned back in the chair, considered

again telling her about faces glimpsed and sounds heard, but knew it

wouldn’t work. In her position my grip on reality might be tenuous,

too—assuming I would be sober enough to have views on anything

at all.

“You think I’m crazy, yes?”

“No,” I said. “I think it’s a great shame that Gerry Robertson

should die so soon after fi nding a woman who loved him as much as

you did. And still do.”

“You think that’s all this is? Everything I’ve told you?”

“I’m going now,” I said, standing. “But I’ve got to ask one thing. If

what you think is happening is real, what bearing does it have on me,

or on Scott? Why would anyone have wanted to harm me?”

I don’t know,” she said. “Unless you’re being punished, too.”

“What for?”

She smiled coldly. “That’s for you to know, right? Tell me, what

did
you
do?”

I told her to get some rest, and walked out of the room. When I

was halfway down the corridor I heard her shout after me.

“What did you do
?
”

C H A P T E R 2 1

I told the nurse at the station that Ms. Robertson had requested no

further visitors be admitted without checking with her fi rst. The

woman agreed with the confi dence of one who knew this was a

function she could perform, and take satisfaction in.

On my way to the elevator I passed a door that was half open,

and glimpsed a girl sitting on the edge of a bed. It was the blue-