“I want to know if you put him up to this,” Steve said, his bitter coffee breath washing over Grizz.
“That’s enough,” said the other man. “He’s just lost his son.”
“Stay out of this. You don’t know these people like I do.”
“C’mon,” the deputy insisted, laying a hand on Steve’s shoulder. “It’s late. Let’s go.”
Steve shrugged away the hand but didn’t say anything more. Grizz thought they might ask him to come identify the body and dreaded the moment, but they didn’t. There wasn’t any need. There was no mystery to be solved, or so it seemed. Seth himself was a mystery, but not to them.
He didn’t speak or look up as the men left. Few people know you so well as those who hate you. He was imagining his boy out in the corn. A child where no child should have been. Did that barrel taste of hot powder when he put it in his mouth? Did it clack against his teeth, sear his tongue?
Tell me why, Seth. Tell me if I am to blame. Tell me what I am to do now. Speak, boy
.
GAST
C
lara Warren went into the kitchen when she heard him fumbling with his keys at the back door. A moment later her husband stepped into the entryway and slipped out of his loafers. She drew in a deep breath and folded her hands over her stomach, smelling from the staleness on his skin how awful his day had been. She knew the stray cat busy lapping up milk from a saucer on the floor was about to add to his unhappiness. Clara had been hoping to get rid of it before he returned.
“Clara?” Logan said after he climbed the stairs to the kitchen. “Is that the same tomcat I asked you not to let in the house?”
“It might be,” she said. “It bears a certain resemblance.”
He put his hands around his face and then he sneezed. Logan was twenty-seven years old, two years older than Clara, but still the age of many of his parishioner’s grandchildren.
He had ash-blond hair and a thin, mousy beard he’d grown to try and look older and wiser for their benefit. After expelling the sneeze, he rubbed his sinuses and peered at her with his glacial blue eyes. “Is that my mother’s good china?” he asked, noticing the saucer. “That’s been passed down in my family since the Warrens came over from Lancashire?”
“Next time I’ll use the Tupperware.” Clara went to him, touching his arm. “Logan, I know you don’t need any more stress, but the cat was crying up a storm outside. It must have belonged to someone who lived here before. I’m sorry.”
Logan wore a black clerical shirt called a Friar Tuck he special ordered from Augsburg Fortress. He had a closet full of them in varying shades, from lilac to midnight, which he always wore with khaki trousers. “I’m going to go upstairs and change,” he said, tugging at his collar. “And when I come back downstairs that cat is going to be gone. Vamoose. Adios. No pets allowed in the parsonage, understand? Especially not a tomcat. It’s not how things are done
out here
.”
Clara bit her tongue. She didn’t like his authoritarian tone, but it was understandable after the day he must have had. While he spoke, the cat swirled around her ankles, purring. She had already named it Soren, hoping that calling the cat after Logan’s favorite philosopher might endear him to it in some way. “Yes,” Clara said, trying a hesitant smile, “I understand.”
He paused. Logan had an aquiline nose and an imperious way of staring a person down, even though Clara was the same height. “You are going to be okay, aren’t you?” She heard the weariness in his voice and knew he wasn’t trying to be mean.
Clara tried to read what else might be in his eyes. Disappointment, surely. This was his first pastoral assignment, his first big test. His congregation had been stricken, and he hadn’t found the words he needed to offer succor, and she wasn’t helping him any.
They had been married less than a year when Clara discovered her pregnancy. And now they were here, serving a congregation way out on the southwestern Minnesota prairies, strangers to the small town of Lone Mountain and strangers to each other. Lone Mountain: the name of the place like a pebble dropped into a well somewhere inside Clara, some deep pool she couldn’t see yet, where ripples were spreading. But Logan had told her he didn’t want children. Hadn’t he made himself clear? She had forgotten a pill or maybe two; she was always forgetting things.
T
HEIR TALK AT DINNER
at first only circled the murder and suicide, like blackbirds blown hither on a windy day, unable to find rest. Over a beef roast she’d cooked so dry it stuck to the roofs of their mouths, they discussed funeral arrangements, the way the church would fill because Sheriff Will Gunderson had been deeply feared and respected. Both the victim and the killer were members of Logan’s church.
Would Seth’s father want his boy’s funeral to be held the day after, and if so, would anyone come? They didn’t talk about how close Clara had come to being murdered.
Did he daydream about my death?
she wondered.
Would it have made his life simpler?
Eventually the quiet between them became oppressive, and her throat thickened. When she looked over at Logan, his face was blurry.
“Why are you crying?” he said.
“Me?” She touched her face, surprised to find tears there. “I don’t really know,” she said softly, and then it became more difficult to breathe. In her second trimester sudden tempers bloomed up in her like cumuli over open plains. Once the tears started, she couldn’t stop them, and they built and built until she bent over there at the table with her face in her hands, weeping.
Logan came around the table and leaned over her chair. He cupped his hands over the fullness of her belly, pressed his chin to the top of her forehead. How she had longed for him to hold her like this. Underneath the bitterness of his sweat she smelled a hint of his true grassy scent, at once faint and sweet. An earthy smell that made her feel safe from the moment she met him. “Don’t be sad,” he said. “There isn’t anyone who can hurt you. Not anymore. Isn’t any reason to be frightened.”
She shook her head. She interlaced her fingers with his and drank down her tears. He didn’t know. He didn’t know how a monster story was supposed to work.
Logan patted her hair and gathered up their dishes to take to the sink, leaving Clara alone at the table. The conversation was over.
Why do people do the things they do? Of course, the first thing Clara did after Logan climbed the stairs for bed was let Soren back inside. She would not leave something to suffer.
L
ATE THAT NIGHT
C
LARA
woke to an eerie calling. Only two days after Seth shot himself, she heard his ghost crying out under the stairwell and the sound of it shook her to the core.
“Help me,” cried a child’s voice, a whispery echo in the hollow drum of so much space, a sound that plucked her from sleep with little icy fingers along her neck and spine. Over and over those two words climbed the stairs and glided under the door to find her in the bed. And it was not his voice exactly she thought she was hearing, not the rasp of a boy nearing manhood, but the child inside him, still recoiling from what he had done. This was the voice of a murderer’s ghost, some otherworldly summons.
Help me
.
No good comes from hearing such a thing when you live in an old stone parsonage at the edge of town. Clara reached over and jabbed Logan in the kidneys, but he only grumbled in his sleep and turned over. In the newness of her marriage it shocked her how alone she felt most nights with another human being lying so close beside her. The view out her window showed a steep
hill freckled with rimed tombstones the color of polished bone under the moon.
She burrowed into her sheets, pretending she wasn’t hearing anything at all. Six months pregnant, she was surprised how well her body took to it. Her thighs clenched a body-length pillow; her gown dampened with sweat. She squeezed her eyes shut and imagined she was elsewhere, but still she went on hearing the crying child.
Gast
, she said, naming him aloud in Old English.
A lich, a feond
. Such words usually soothed her. They are the root of our language, our mother tongue. They are heavy with a thousand years of history and tether us to earth. Clara needed such words to hold her down when she thought about madness or escape. Hearing the ghost child, she searched her mind for other words, an Anglo-Saxon
galdor
to drive off elves and wicked spirits that she had written down in a notebook using a runic script Irish monks called the Insular hand, but she couldn’t remember how the words went.
As she did this, she stroked the nubs of her missing ring finger and pinkie, where the skin was worn smooth as river-tossed stones, with her good hand. The left hand was her ghost hand. Two of the fingers, blackened by frostbite, were sliced off in an emergency room when she was only a baby. But ever since Clara could remember, at night when she dreamed the hand became whole again, played through her hair, ran along her skin with a spider’s weightlessness. She dreamed of the hand writing things down in
a book, things the good hand would never imagine. She had come to think of it as a gift, her own private absence, a reminder to go on searching for what was not there. Her body taught her every living day that such things as ghosts were possible, so it shouldn’t have surprised her that the boy would show up two nights after the murder. There was no denying the voice under the stairs.
The voice rose from the basement, the place she had been standing on the day the boy came to her door. There was a tortured tenor to its vibration. The skin around her belly went taut as the baby pressed a hand or foot to the surface, testing the watery limit of its cell, urging her to rise. Whatever cried down there was in pain. Sweat beaded her upper lip; she tasted it with the tip of her tongue.
Why did you come here first with your gun? I was down in the basement on Saturday because that was where I kept a pack of Old Golds hidden and I needed a smoke and a slug of Widow Larsen’s rhubarb wine if I was to make it through the tedium of another lonely afternoon. There, now you know it. Damaging my baby before it can even draw breath
.
The sound of your gun sent a shudder right through me. It echoes even now. I wished I’d had the courage to climb the stairs and look you in the eye and talk you out of what you were about to do. Would your rage have dissipated if I took you in my arms? Or did you mean to murder me so that my blood and my baby’s blood might be some terrible stain on the town, a nightmare story to be told for a generation? Have you come to haunt me to remind me of my cowardice?
The crying lulled for a moment, and Clara became aware of other sounds. September had arrived after a dry summer, and even after sundown the heat pressed on the countryside. Cicadas sang in an electric hum in the cemetery trees at the edge of the yard.
Rain birds
, her husband called them, a sweet name for a spiny insect. They droned in the dark, but if the cicadas promised relief, the way Logan had prayed for a rain the week before, they lied.
Stupid to pray for rain
, he’d come home mumbling;
it wasn’t in my notes, but there the words were in my mouth. The wrong thing to pray for
, he’d said again without explaining why.
The sound scraped up the stairwell.
Help me
. Clara lay atop the sheets, wondering over it. She wanted to forget Seth. She wasn’t even going to his funeral, and she resigned her long-term substitute position with the district the day after the shootings.
She pulled up the pillow around her ears, and still the cries came to her. The palpable heat beyond the window and the sound of the wind hummed in her blood. Clara gathered up her courage and climbed out of bed. Moonlight illuminated her room, scattered with cardboard boxes, the lids peeled open. From one she hefted out her
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
, which she figured a suitable weapon for doing battle with ghosts trying take up residence under the stairwell. She held the substantial bulk of the alphabet in her hands, a word for every reality. Madness was for when words failed.
Her bare feet felt cool against the floorboards. A hot
breeze through an open window rustled her gown. The heavy dictionary hooked under one arm, she opened the door and advanced into the hallway. The parsonage was a two-story built of German red brick, an aging home with many empty rooms where the air had long gone stale and undisturbed. The bones of the house creaked in the night but then went still when her footfalls sounded in the hall. In this breathless quiet the boy’s crying magnified. His
help me
throbbed in her ears.
Before she could lose courage she hurried along the hallway and crept downstairs. On the lower level the child’s sorrowing continued to reverberate through the kitchen and dining room.
She felt the pull of that voice tugging her onward, a coiling rope of sound to bind her. She let it lead her to the lip of the stairwell and waiting basement. Here she paused, threw on the light switch, and went down, step by step, to meet the boy’s ghost. The light did not comfort her because the stairs were painted nail-polish red and glistened like the inside of a sick person’s throat. A waft of sour breath exhaled from the basement. This had once been a root cellar, and it retained a smell of rotting potatoes and onions, even though it was paved over with concrete when they put the washroom down here. At the base of the stairs shadows formed a tarry pool.
By the time she reached the bottom of the stairs and fumbled for a cord, she smelled the oil from the old furnace and under that a sharper scent of musk and blood. Every
tiny hair along the back of her bare legs stood on end. Her nightgown stirred against her shoulder, as though a hand touched her there, but she did not scream or go back up the stairs. Shivering, she held the dictionary to her chest like a shield. The sound garbled here, an eerie whimpering no longer amplified by the empty space in the stairwell.
Clara found the cord and was momentarily blinded when a bulb swinging from a metal chain blinked to life. She waited for her eyes to adjust, her breathing tight and tense. Beneath the stairwell a shredded box lay on concrete, and here shapes writhed and cried out. As shadows retreated and spots quit dancing in her vision, she saw four tabby kittens squirming on the cardboard next to their mother.