A House With Good Bones, page 12
Doll parts, I thought suddenly. What if it was doll parts?
Relief flooded me. There. That was a logical explanation. There had been a severed doll arm under the roses. Granted, I’d never liked dolls myself—I had always been a stuffed animal person—but Gran Mae had had a couple creepy dolls in period costumes from the Franklin Mint. They were probably in the attic now. Maybe one had gotten damaged and thrown in the trash, then a raccoon had gotten into it and dragged a severed doll arm under the bushes.
Part of me knew that this was a terribly flimsy explanation, but it was the only one I had. Otherwise I’d have to worry about serial killers on Lammergeier Lane, and that really would be ridiculous. Serial killers didn’t live in housing developments with white walls and builder-beige carpet and white picket fences and pictures of roses on the walls and …
Okay, now that I thought about it, they probably did live in houses like that. Stepford-style developments had to be a breeding ground for the darker side of humanity. But Lammergeier Lane wasn’t Stepford. It wasn’t neat enough. We didn’t have an HOA. There were vultures on the roof and tangles of woodland pressing against the back fences. Our neighbors weren’t painfully, terrifyingly nice; they were paranoid old men, like Mr. Pressley, or genuinely nice people with badly trained beagles, like the Goldbergs. Normal people.
Nice and normal.
And Stepford definitely didn’t have a wild garden at the end of the road run by a woman who rehabilitated vultures. That wasn’t normal at all. It was that lack of normalcy that must have stuck in Gran Mae’s craw. She had wanted the fifties family so badly, my grandad coming home from his job at the office while she spent the day vacuuming the house in pearls and high heels, like June Cleaver in Leave It to Beaver.
Of course, by that measure we’d all failed. Grandad had done well enough, I think—at least, Gran Mae had seemed to think so—but there was no room in Gran Mae’s perfect world for a fat granddaughter and a grandson who listened to heavy metal at top volume in his bedroom.
I dusted off my knees. My shirt was covered in mulch and there were dead leaves in my hair. The vultures on the roof next door croaked to one another solemnly. It sounded like commentary.
“Sorry to disappoint you, boys,” I said. “I’m not dead yet.”
Another croak came from across the yard. I looked over at the house opposite and saw that two more had settled on the roof there. They exchanged pleasantries over the top of our house, but none of them landed on our roof.
They like to keep an eye on that house, Gail had said, though she never said why.
Maybe someone was feeding them severed limbs and they’re hoping it’ll start up again.
Stop that, dammit. It was a doll arm.
Doll arms don’t have dirt under their fingernails.
I took a deep breath and shoved the thought firmly out of my head and went inside to clean up.
* * *
To top off an already rough day, I went to the bathroom to clean up my scratches and discovered that I’d started my period. (I know, I should have seen it coming, but I’ve had a few things on my mind, okay?) I groaned. Just what I needed. Did I have any tampons? No, of course I didn’t. Great. Lovely.
I checked under the sink and located some scrubbing powder for the bathtub and an elderly loofah, neither of which would make an acceptable substitute. Did Mom have any?
Normally I wouldn’t just wander into my mother’s bedroom without permission, but this was an emergency and I knew Mom wouldn’t mind. I kept my eyes down as I went through. (I didn’t expect to see anything terribly illicit, mind you, but everybody’s entitled to some amount of privacy, and if she happened to keep a vibrator out on the nightstand or something, I did not want to know about it.)
The master bathroom fixtures were all seafoam green, which I had thought was ridiculously cool at fourteen and still kinda do. Giant seafoam-green bathtub! What’s not to love? The bathroom mirror was spangled with notes in my mother’s handwriting. I checked under the sink, praying that menopause had not yet visited this house, and was rewarded with a familiar box. Thank you, Jesus.
I straightened, tampons in hand. I hadn’t read the notes on the mirror—they were almost certainly all just reminders to refill the toilet paper or call the mechanic—but my own name jumped out at me from one at eye level.
she loves sam
she won’t hurt her
I blinked. Underneath, in slightly larger letters, with three frantic exclamation points, was another note reading:
it will be okay!!!
“… um,” I said. And as I slowly read the other notes on the mirror, my heart sank. “Oh, Mom…” I said, leaning on the sink. “Oh, Mom. Oh hell.”
CHAPTER 13
There was something wrong with my mother. Hallucinations or paranoia or early onset of dementia. Thyroid condition. I was leaning toward that one. The sudden weight loss fit. And the notes. Oh god. The notes.
tell mother you love her every night
pray out loud before bed—important!!!
get new print of roses for kitchen
But most of all, the one on the back of the bathroom door, that said simply:
it’s real you’re not imagining things
Dear god, what was going through her head? Something terrible, clearly. Something she didn’t want to talk to me about. (And who could blame her? If I was having problems, I’d have bent over backward not to inflict them on anyone else myself. Mom and I were too damn much alike, that was the problem.)
I left the bathroom, feeling desperately ashamed of myself. I’d been crawling around fretting about old phantom hands in the shrubbery, which was obviously ridiculous, and meanwhile Mom was in much worse shape than I’d thought.
Who could I talk to about it? I didn’t know any of her coworkers. I sure as hell wasn’t going to call her boss. Who did that leave? Phil? Gail?
Maybe Gail. Gail had said that she didn’t think there was anything wrong with Mom. If she was covering for her out of friendship, maybe I could convince her to talk to me. And if she wasn’t … well, I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.
It was too late tonight, of course. Too late for anything but wine and television and worrying. It seemed like that was all I did lately, but I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I’d had too much wine to drive somewhere with signal and call Brad. I could text various friends of mine, who are generally lovely people, but what were they going to say? “Wow, that sucks. Tell me if there’s anything I can do to help.” And they’d mean every word, but they couldn’t fix my mom’s problem, and it wasn’t like any of them had a spare fifty grand to move Mom into dedicated care, if that’s what had to happen.
I felt suddenly desperately lonely. I don’t, usually. When you grow up as the weird kid taking photos of bugs you get used to it, and when you later find that the world is full of other people who want to talk about bugs with you, it’s a glorious revelation. But here I was, thirty-two, alone in my mom’s house, and everything was terrible, and I couldn’t fix any of it.
Fuck. I brought the box of wine into the living room, set it on the coffee table, and put on Inspector Lowell. Maybe I should get a Scottie dog. We could solve mysteries together. The Mystery of the Sudden Ladybugs. The Mystery of the Upsetting Notes. The Mystery of What Happened to All the Wine. The Mystery of What Is Going On With Mom.
Maybe all the beige had driven her bonkers. If so, I couldn’t blame her. It was going to drive me bonkers soon. I wondered what Mom would say if she came home to discover that I’d painted the living room turquoise.
She’d be supportive, of course. Mom was always supportive. Dammit. That was the worst of this, that I didn’t know how to be supportive in return. I was supposed to be helping, and all I was doing was upsetting her and bad-mouthing Gran Mae and breaking glass everywhere. And alienating Phil. “Can’t forget about Phil,” I muttered, raising my wine in a toast.
Maybe the best thing I could do was leave and tell my brother that he should come handle it, because I was making a god-awful mess.
On-screen, someone was murdered in their bedroom. The camera watched from outside as they collapsed against the window, hands clawing at the glass. Then the murderer finished up and the hands slid limply down the pane.
Disembodied hands was too much for me right now. I turned off Inspector Lowell, drained my wine in three gulps, and went upstairs. The clock ticked at my retreating back.
When I got up in the middle of the night for my usual trip to the toilet, the house was oppressively silent again. The air conditioner wasn’t even on. Maybe this was the sound of beige paint, this fraught absence of sound. “I hear the souuuunds … of ecru,” I sang, and began giggling. Christ, I must still be drunk. I shoved the bathroom door open.
Something moved in the bathroom sink.
A white hand reaching for me. I only caught a glimpse out of the corner of my eye, but for a horrifying instant, I knew that’s what it was, coming out of the drain on an impossibly elongated wrist, and it was going to latch onto my face with its dirty nails and they’d find me in the morning dead and the hand would be gone, coiling bonelessly back down into the pipes, waiting …
I shrieked and flung myself backward. The towel bar struck me painfully in the back. The pain shocked me awake and I scrabbled for the wall and the light switch.
Fluorescent light blossomed overhead and chased away the vision of a hand. Something was moving in the sink, but it was a dark spreading stain.
Ladybugs.
“Goddammit.” I leaned over the sink, my heart still pounding. They were pouring from out of the drain, spreading across the ceramic like blood. Hundreds of them, crawling on top of one another, sliding down the slick surface of the sink, with still more flooding out. Some had already reached the countertop and were scurrying across it, blood splatter from the open wound.
I hastily pulled the little metal knob that closed the drain, and the tide stopped. The green-pepper smell of crushed ladybugs hit my nose. Dammit. I hadn’t meant to kill them.
“What are you doing in the drains?” I demanded. “Drain flies, sure. The occasional centipede, yeah, okay. But ladybugs do not swarm in drains!”
The ladybugs crawled around the sink, refusing to answer. My fingers itched. I held up a hand and ladybugs coated my fingers like a red glove, so densely I could barely see the skin.
“Jesus Christ!” I shook my hand wildly. Entomology brain thought this was all quite fascinating, but it was getting swamped under the sheer numbers of the invaders. Ladybugs flew in all directions, some of them actually flying, some of them hitting the wall or the mirror and raining down with tiny ticking sounds. A couple landed on my face and in my hair and I am embarrassed to say that I shrieked and slapped at them, and that didn’t help at all and they were still on my hand and covering the counter now and I couldn’t look in the mirror because they were on the mirror and I couldn’t tell what was on me and what was on the surface of the glass and one was on my ear and in a minute it would crawl inside—
Get hold of yourself! You’re a professional, dammit! They’re not demons, they’re not monsters, they’re Harmonia axyridis and maybe some Hippodamia convergens and they swarm sometimes and that’s the reason they’re here. Stop freaking out and think!
I forced myself to stand still. I flicked the one on my ear away, took a deep breath, and looked in the mirror. There were two on my forehead and one meandering around my chin, like a giant mobile pimple. That thought made me snort and I felt a little bit calmer and picked them off and set them in the sink again, and brushed the last few off my hand. The webbing between my fingers was itching in earnest now, probably because they’d been trying to bite. (Yes, Asian lady beetles do bite, but they can’t get through human skin, so it’s just a small scratch. No matter how many there were, I wasn’t going to get skeletonized by ladybugs. I was in more danger of rose picker’s disease.)
It occurred to me suddenly that if the ladybugs were in this sink, they might be coming out of the other sinks as well. I had a horrible vision of all the drains in the house erupting with shiny red beetles, flooding our house like the elevator in The Shining. I took two steps to the bathtub, saw a single ladybug wandering around, possibly from being flung, and hastily closed the stopper.
Still wobbly from too much wine, I staggered around the house, closing all the drains. None of the others had ladybugs coming out, but you couldn’t be too sure. The clock ticked at me from the mantelpiece. Mom’s notes were dark squares and I avoided reading them.
Once again, I found myself vacuuming up bugs in the middle of the night and shaking them loose in the backyard. “That’s enough of you in the house,” I informed them. “Stay out here and take care of the roses.”
I staggered back upstairs, grumpy and groggy. The shot of adrenaline had worn off while I was vacuuming. My hand still itched. I scratched it irritably and sat down on the bed.
I wanted to go back to sleep, but I had a nagging feeling that there was something I had forgotten to do. Something I’d dreamed about. Wasn’t there?
The roses say … say your prayers.
Ridiculous. I didn’t pray. I hadn’t prayed in years. It’s not a thing I did. I didn’t know what was out there, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t an interventionist god who cared whether or not I say grace over my pizza.
The roses say …
I stared at the ceiling, hearing the whisper in my head. It sounded just like the one that had whispered, Little piggy. Not a real voice. Somewhere between a thought and a memory.
I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in ritual. I doubt you can be an archaeologist and not know that rituals have a powerful hold over human brains. I sighed and knelt down next to the bed.
I would have sworn that I didn’t remember how to pray, but the words were right there on my tongue.
“Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep,
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.”
Morbid damn prayer. I’d always thought so. Who wants little kids to fixate on dying? But I felt better after saying it, and I crawled into bed and didn’t dream about ladybugs or hands or anything else.
The Seventh Day
Darkest Night: Velvety dark red petals on short, sturdy stems. Buds appear almost black. A beautiful, disease-resistant hybrid tea rose that performs well in high heat, blooming continuously throughout the season.
CHAPTER 14
Phil was in the kitchen when I went down for coffee. “Don’t shoot,” he said. “I’m just here to fix the ice maker.”
“Ha.” I told him about the previous night’s ladybugs. His eyebrows shot up.
“I’ll take a look,” he promised. “I haven’t seen any yet today.”
“Thank goodness for small favors.”
“None in the ice maker either.”
“Oh good.”
I sat down on the couch with my coffee. Phil did not immediately flee my presence, which was probably more than I deserved, given that I had so far threatened his life, brandished rose petals at him, and showed him ghostly hands in the shrubbery.
Opening my laptop, the first thing I saw was MAD WIZARD OF BOONE ARRESTED! I blinked a few times, and then decided that hell, I wasn’t going to get anything else accomplished today, I might as well read about my infamous ancestor.
Finding information took longer than one might think. Outside of the coverage of his trial, where he did not exactly endear himself to the court, he seemed to have stayed out of the newspapers. But chasing Elgar Mills led me down another rabbit hole of frankly extraordinary proportions, and I have never been able to resist a good internet rabbit hole.
“The problem with the world,” I informed Phil an hour later, “is that there’s just so much of it.”
“Is that from a Snapple bottle?”
“No.”
He considered this at length, then said, “You should write Snapple bottles.”
“It probably pays better.” I waved at my laptop. “Look at this. I’m trying to find one d … darn sorcerer, and he leads to twenty others and a book on the history of Thelema in the United States.”
“The what what?”
“Thelema. It’s a religion, or a ritual magic system, or something like that. Aleister Crowley invented it.”
Phil looked over my shoulder. “Oh, him. He was on a bunch of album covers in the nineties, wasn’t he?”
“Also that, yes.”
My great-grandfather, Elgar Mills, had not been an associate of Crowley’s, so far as I could tell. Instead he’d hung out in the forties, briefly, with a man named Jack Parsons, who was an associate of Crowley’s. Also a rocket scientist and also completely batshit. (I don’t like to step on anyone’s religion, but when you start mixing cocaine, free love, amphetamines, statutory rape, mescaline, and ritual black magic, you have crossed out of the religious-tolerance zone and into the perhaps-you-should-be-kept-away-from-other-people zone.) There was a lot written about Parsons and all of it was bizarre. Most of what I could find about Elgar that wasn’t newspaper clippings about his trial lay in footnotes in books about Parsons. Fortunately large sections were available online.
Very … large … sections.
I’m a good researcher, in all modesty, but this was a lot to get through. While Phil probably didn’t care much about my great-grandad, I kept reading bits aloud to him anyway. I’m not sure if I wanted someone else to witness the train wreck with me, or if, like the hand in the photograph, I wanted to make sure someone else saw it too. “Says here that Parsons wanted to fertilize a magic baby and have it born via immaculate conception, so it could be the new Thelemic messiah and bring about the Age of Horus.”
