Jane Was Here (10 page)

Collin lets out a high-pitched girly yelp. Chuckling, Hoyt releases him. Gita calmly takes out her cell phone, punching in a number.

“Who’re you calling?”

“The police.”

“Be my guest. You’ll look like a little fool. There’s no statute covering horse bites.”

She slaps the phone shut. “Let us out
right now.
”

Hoyt swerves to the shoulder and lets the kids out at the foot of a steep hill. He tosses their bikes onto the road. Jumping back into the cab, he starts to pull away.

“You suck!” Collin shouts after him, a belated show of audacity for his girlfriend.

Hitting the brakes, Hoyt leaps out. Collin dives into the bushes. The girl stands fast, pointing imperiously like Moses with his rod: “Get thee hence, demon!”

Reaching into the cargo, Hoyt pries open the garbage pail, and before she can dodge it, pitches the skunk at her feet.

THE LOOK ON
the Poonchwalla girl’s face when the skunk turned tail and blasted her! Hoyt is still laughing when he stops off at the package store to pick up a gallon of gin and some Tylenol. Still laughing when he parks at his house. Not laughing when he finds his door ajar.

He often forgets to lock it. The house, a squat 30s bungalow, is at the end of a deeply rutted dirt road, shielded by dense pines, in the shadow of Rowell Hill. People don’t come out here unless they’re invited and they’ve run out of excuses.

His mutt growls, hackles rising. Hoyt quietly sets the liquor store bag on the landing and retrieves the .357 Magnum he keeps in the wood box, pushing his door open with the gun’s barrel. Pete shimmies impatiently through the gap and bounds into the house, disappearing into the kitchen. Hoyt hears savage barking, plates crashing to the floor.

A raccoon streaks out, headed for the door, Pete in pursuit. Hoyt steps aside to let them settle up outdoors.

He enters the kitchen. Shattered dinnerware crunches under his boots: the coon was probably feeding from the tower of dirty dishes in the sink. Still, the animal didn’t open the front door by itself. Nor did it pull up a chair to his table and peel an orange onto a plate. Yet there they are, the curved scraps of orange rind, with seeds from the devoured fruit neatly grouped beside them. A drained glass of tomato juice, poured from the can in his fridge. A box of crackers from the cupboard, the salty crumbs scattered about. An empty cheese wrapper, the final affront. Someone made a meal here.

Hoyt’s bowels churn; his skin fizzes; the alien presence feels everywhere, touching everything. Standing stock-still, he listens for sounds. The house is silent. Outside, Pete’s collar tags jingle. Hoyt looks out the window to see him trotting to the woods, limp raccoon in his mouth.

Hoyt moves stealthily through the house, his gun cocked. No one is there. He returns to the living room, where the front door is still open; the first mosquitoes of the evening whine around his ears. Plugging the bug zap-per in, he fetches the bag of liquor from the stoop, locks the door and retreats to the couch, where he wrenches the cap off the gallon jug, pouring three fingers of gin into a smudged glass on the coffee table.

Who was here?

He senses something altered in this room. He can’t put his finger on it, just a feeling. The heaps of books around his armchair are undisturbed; the sofa cushion, which Pete uses for a bed, still lies on the floor.

Washing down four Tylenols with gin, he looks around for something to read.

On the coffee table beside his cell phone charger sits a book he doesn’t recognize: a small bound volume with gilt-edged pages. He turns to the flyleaf:
The Holy Bible
, King James version, printed in New York, 1851.

He flips through the mottled tissue-thin pages, the march of miniscule verses. Though he doesn’t remember buying the book, that doesn’t mean he didn’t. Often he buys a dozen moldy old volumes at a time, enjoying the notion of all the hands that have held them over the years.

He examines a gold insignia stamped into the leather. Not a cross, as befits a bible, but some weird variation:

Then he notices something inserted like a bookmark between the pages. He opens to the marked page. In the seam is a long lock of hair, a reddish brown shade, silky to the touch.

How long has it lain here preserved and undiscovered? Whose was it? Rolling the strands absently between his thumb and forefinger, he glances over the text someone has marked in thick pencil. The verse describes the angel Gabriel appearing to a virgin in Nazareth. A common enough passage.

Suddenly, the pain returns: a noose ripped tight about his neck. For a few seconds he is unable to breathe.

A second later, the pain abates. Hoyt feels dizzy, confused. About to reach for the gin, he realizes the lock of hair is still in his hand.

Its luster has faded, the strands now feel dry, coarse, wiry. Repulsion fills him, as if he holds the desiccated souvenir of a dead thing.

He tries to shake the strands off, but they cling to his fingers. Bolting to the kitchen, he stamps the foot pedal on the garbage pail, flipping the lid open. He scrapes the tangled hair into the bag, dumping orange rinds on top.

The lid falls shut.

In a frenzy, he cleans the kitchen, the sun setting behind Rowell Hill as he sweeps up broken plates, washes dishes, wipes the table clean of crumbs and congealed spills. Tossing the sponge in the dish rack, he turns to leave.

The garbage pail catches his eye. He halts, disbelieving his eyes. The lid is lifting, forced up by a profusion of snarled auburn hair, which expands, growing over the brim, tendrils searching blindly for the floor.

As if it lives.

Grabbing the pail, Hoyt runs out the front door toward the woods, feeling the hair curl like brittle vines over his hands.

Dusk obscures the path through the trees. Veering off, he crashes through the underbrush, arriving at the edge of his junk pit: a shallow ravine where he chucks old appliances, paint cans, truck batteries and rusted lawn chairs. Hurling the contents of the pail down the slope, he stands panting, peering into the darkness of the pit.

Somewhere it’s there, growing. Hoyt kicks dead leaves over the edge, to bury the horror, then gropes his way back to the house.

C
HAPTER
T
EN

M
arly waits until the congregation files out from evening service before approaching Reverend Crowley.

“Father, could I talk to you in private?”

The elderly priest doesn’t seem too thrilled by her request, regarding her through cataract-filmed eyes. “Are you a parishioner at this church?”

“No. I mean,” she adds shyly, “I don’t go anywhere.”

“Are you interested in joining St. Paul’s?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.” She has not set foot in a church since she was a teenager, at Saint Anthony Parish, when Father Petrelli put his finger up her. But she needs to confide in somebody, and priests are supposed to help. “Please. It’s something important.”

He ushers her into his office, sits at his desk, and folds his hands, waiting.

Squirming in the chair across from him, Marly looks down at her own hands in her lap. Last night, she woke to find them spontaneously soaked in blood again. She had been thrashing in her sleep; there were red streaks all over the sheets. But when she returned from washing her hands in the bathroom—again finding no scratches, cuts, or wounds anywhere—the stains on the bedclothes were gone.

Her howls filled the trailer as she sat and cried. If she had owned a car with enough horsepower, she would have hitched up her home right then and dragged it into another town, another county—shit, another
state
—someplace where you could sleep without being woken every single night by horrible dreams.

Worse, her sunny disposition is being borne away like a bright beach ball in a riptide. Who is Marly without hope? Strangely depleted, sick within: a stranger.

Father Crowley rattles phlegm in his throat. “How may I help you?”

“I keep having this feeling,” she begins miserably, “that I’ve done something really bad. I’m ashamed, and I don’t know what for.”

The priest remarks, with a touch of smugness, “If you haven’t attended church for a long time, I imagine you’ve accrued quite a few sins.”

“Well, some. But here’s the thing—” Marly takes a deep breath, then shows him her palms. “My hands bleed sometimes. The blood comes out of my fingernails and then it runs all over the place. And then it disappears.”

Father Crowley’s eyes narrow. “Like Christ’s hands on the cross? Are you referring to
stigmata
?”

“Kind of. I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Congratulations are in order, then,” he comments dryly. “It seems you’re a saint.”

He regrets his quip when he sees Marly brighten, hope flickering absurdly over her face. He adopts a more compassionate tone: “I’m afraid our church gives no credence to stigmata, spirit possession, and the like. It’s really more in line with Catholic belief. Why don’t you speak to Father Petrelli?”

Her eyes fall to her lap again, the light of hope dying.

FIRST SETH POONCHWALLA
has to go buy three cases of tomato juice, in the large restaurant cans, at Valyou Mart. But even after his sister soaks in a bathtub filled with tomato juice, she smells; the whole apartment reeks like bloody hell. Now he has to listen to Gita squawk and blubber from the bathroom while he sits at the computer in the motel office, trawling the web for more tips to remove skunk odor.

Next thing you know, he’s driving back to Valyou Mart, this time to purchase thirty bottles of a feminine douche that online tipsters claim will do the trick. While he’s at it, he’ll buy a case of cold decongestant capsules: tomorrow he needs to head to his lab and cook up some more illegal product for clients.

Seth is a chemistry prodigy, with a passion for robotics. In a few weeks he will attend MIT as a freshman, on a partial scholarship. Student loans will bridge the tuition gap, which Seth plans to pay off quickly with the proceeds of his drug dealing.

This sideline had an accidental genesis. Three years ago, Seth’s parents sent him to one of the motel rooms to investigate suspicious fumes in the corridor. He knocked, smelling acetone and ammonia. When there was no response, he used his master key.

Inside the room, 17-year-old Tyrone Perguson and his single, welfare mom lay passed out on the floor. Glass jars, surgical tubing, hundreds of matchbooks, and a dozen empty boxes of cold-remedy capsules littered the bed. Something was burning in an electric skillet on the bureau. Fluid from a plastic jug of engine starter had spilled across the carpet.

Tyrone and his mother had apparently been overcome by the pungent ether. Seth turned off the skillet and dragged the bodies into the corridor, where they revived in time to escape before the EMT unit arrived.

They slipped back the next day, avoiding eye contact. By then Seth had figured out, from the ingredients in the room, that they were trying to make methamphetamine. He was offended by their carelessness and lack of method.

Tyrone was in the same grade as Seth but they had never spoken (Tyrone was in the remedial classes). The next time they passed in the halls, he muttered “Thanks” to Seth.

Taking him aside, Seth gave him a short lecture on lab technique. Instead of getting his back up, Tyrone suggested they split the profits, with Seth doing the manufacturing and him selling. Two years later, when Tyrone was convicted on weapons charges, Seth inherited the whole of the business: an enthusiastic clientele of locals intent on murdering their brain cells.

Seth’s crank is scrupulously made, and near to pure. For someone of his talents, the processing is easy, though laborious. He takes his time with the volatile ingredients— hydrogen chloride gas, ethyl ether, red phosphorus—keeping his focus monkish, revering the equations.

As for the law, he long ago moved his lab off the motel premises to a safe hideaway. Sales are conducted right at the reception desk when he’s on night duty. He has some $20,000 in cash sealed up in the pool robot, crawling along the underwater floor.