The Orphan (24 page)

‘I had to get rid of it, but I was afraid to touch it. No one had seen me throw it in the sewer, I hadn’t seen it since, but here it was, back in my possession. I looked around my room, thinking maybe she got in here, but how would she have known where I lived? Maybe she’d followed me, broken into the house, but I guess I knew then the truth was something simpler and far worse than that. She’d sent it back to me another way, same way she’d slipped it in my pocket the first time. She was cursing me or something, and that barrette was like the key. Didn’t matter if there were miles between our houses, or walls. She wanted it there, so she put it there.

‘I was too scared to go outside in the cold and the dark, so what I did was, I opened my bedroom window up there on the second floor, and I flung it out across the backyard, aiming for the neighbor’s fence. Tomorrow I could see if it was in the yard and if so, I’d smash it, burn it, flush it down the toilet or something. But right then I just had to get it out of the house.

‘Feeling a little better, I hopped in the sack. I don’t remember what I ended up trying to read, but I was only at it for maybe ten or fifteen minutes, unable to concentrate on anything, and then it started. I heard her whispering to me. The girl. I hadn’t thought of her in at least a week or two, well before Christmas, but now all the sudden I could hear her voice.

‘‘‘
Tommy Berkley
,” she said, whispering. “
Toooooom
mmyyyy.”
Like she was teasing me, being playful. Her voice was clear and soft, but I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. I figured it was just my imagination again. I tried to ignore it.

‘‘‘Were you spying on
me
?
” she said, even softer now. “Were you watching me through the window, Tommy Berkley? Did you like what you saw? Don’t you think my barrettes are pretty? I wanted you to have it so you could remember me.”’

‘I sat up in bed, my skin all goosed out. It sounded like she was in the room with me, right there in my bedroom, but I couldn’t see her anywhere. She sounded so close, I thought maybe she was hiding under my bed. I remembered the footsteps and I couldn’t help thinking maybe she had snuck over and slipped her way inside while Nate and me was downstairs watching the ball drop.

‘I didn’t want to look, but I had to know. I couldn’t stand the thought of her lying there under my bed. What if she started making me levitate? What if she tried to possess me? All I could think of was that stuff we’d seen in all the movies, like
Amityville Horror
and
The Exorcist
, except this was worse because she was real, a real girl we went to school with, and I’d really seen something I knew wasn’t normal. Now what if she was in my house? Under my bed?

‘I counted to three and then fast as I could I leaned over and looked beneath it. My lamp was still on, right there on my nightstand, so I could see plenty good. And she wasn’t there, of course. Nothing under the bed except a couple of lost socks, an old baseball, and a bunch of dust.

‘“If you want to see me again,” she says in the same playful voice, “you have to open the door, Tommy. Come in here and let’s look at each other. Fair’s fair. You got to see me but I didn’t get to see you.”

‘So then I knew. She was in the closet. My bedroom closet, just about ten feet away, across from the foot of my bed. But by then I was sort of tired of all these nightmares and thinking about her, and I wanted to prove to myself this was all a bunch of bullcrap. You know, twelve years old is old enough to know the difference between real and make-believe. I was determined to prove her wrong, straighten myself out.

‘I got out of bed and marched straight over to my closet door. I hesitated for a second or two but not much longer. I opened it. There were my clothes, my shoes, some toys piled in the corner, stuff I never played with anymore. That’s all I saw. Until I looked down at the floor, right in front of my feet, and there it was again, sitting on the carpet. The little rainbow barrette. The same one. With the same three dirty blonde hairs sticking out of it.

‘I was scared, and then almost furious. I bent down to pick it up, pinching it between two fingers, and that’s when her hand came out. I just saw a pale blur from the left side of the closet, just inside the door, and then her fingers were clutching my wrist. Her fingers were ice-cold. I cried out but she wouldn’t let go, and when I looked left, following that arm into the dark, there was Sheila Burkett lying on the floor, staring up at me. Her face so white it was gray, gray like a dead person’s skin, and her eyes were wide open, black inside. She was on her back, naked from the waist up, which is all I could see. Her mouth was open wide. Her little hands was still clutching my wrist but nothing moved, she wasn’t moving, and her other hand was curled into a claw at her throat as if she was trying to pull away a rope that was strangling her. But there wasn’t any rope. Her lips were chapped white, they looked like dried clay. She didn’t make a sound, and I knew she was dead, that’s why she’d been haunting me all this time. She’d been in my closet for weeks. Dead, whispering to me from the other side.

‘I started screaming and pulling away but her fingers were frozen around me. I screamed and pulled until I slipped free and fell back on my ass, and then I got the hell outta there. I ran downstairs screaming my head off, and ran right into my old man as he was coming through the front door, snow on his coat, skunked to high hell. Mom too. They both drank in those days. I collapsed between them, raving like a madman. I didn’t want them to know anything about Sheila, I was afraid they’d find out I spied on her, and in that state, I probably would have confessed everything once they started asking. I just said there was a dead girl in my closet. My mom stayed with me while my dad went up to have a look.’

Tommy paused again, catching his breath and blinking himself back to the here and now. Darren waited for him to finish, but he already knew the rest.

‘My pop didn’t see any girl in my closet,’ Tommy said, embarrassed, as if he had forgotten he was an adult and was still foolish for believing what he’d seen. ‘But I wouldn’t sleep in there for a month. I never saw the barrette again, not in the room or in the yard or anywhere else. I slept on the couch, or sometimes on the floor of Nate’s room. What a sucker. Big brother sleeping on his baby brother’s bedroom floor. Well, whatever I shouldn’t a done to her, I guess she showed me.’

Darren waited a minute before speaking, but that seemed to be the end of it. ‘Sounds like she really got to you, Tommy. I’m glad I never peeped in her window.’

Tommy scowled at him. ‘Lucky you.’

If you only knew, Darren wanted to say. He was thinking of objects, the need to possess, the power of holding on to things. Rainbow barrettes and knives and magazines and a certain red bicycle.

Tommy looked spent, irritated. Darren understood that his old friend was ready for him to leave, but he had to know the last piece.

‘What happened after we trashed his bike? He missed some school, if I remember. Sort of disappeared. My memory tells me his father beat his ass for letting his bike get ruined, being bullied by us. Is that right?’

‘The bike wasn’t the end of it, no,’ Tommy said. ‘Adam was in and out of school for the next year. He told everybody who’d listen he was saving for a new bike. That would have been his fifth-grade year, sixth for you and me and Ryan.’

‘But somehow he never got the bike,’ Darren said. ‘Do you know why?’

Tommy shook his head. ‘I don’t know nothing about the bike. What I do know is, the last day of school was always a half-day, which is how I remember when this happened. That was the day the Burkett trailer burned to the ground. His parents and his sister were inside. They burned to death. The firemen and police or whoever, they found the bodies. Three of them. Not four.’

‘Not Adam,’ Darren said.

‘Adam disappeared. They never found his body, dead or alive. He didn’t come back to school the following fall. Police searched everywhere for him, but as far as I know, they never did find Adam Burkett. He just disappeared.’

Darren looked Tommy in the eyes. ‘You’re telling me Adam did it. Adam set the fire. Burned his own house down. Killed his whole family.’

‘I probably would have too, the way that kid suffered,’ Tommy said. ‘You really don’t remember any of this? It was big news in school.’

Deep black smoke of burning wood and charred insulation coiling inside his nostrils. His eyes opened to a stinging furnace of orange, red and black phantoms feeding their way toward him. Streams of tears immediately blurred his vision and wet his cheeks. The skin of his arms and neck were coated in a veneer of hot panic sweat. He thrashed in bed, tangled as if his limbs were in the grip of invisible forces who wanted him to surrender to the billowing layer of dusty ceiling smoke and the flames licking up his bedroom walls.
 

He tried to scream but his throat was dry, rough, constricted. His lungs heaved and ached for fresh oxygen. A lattice of fire snaked across the floor, igniting the bedding, and flash-fried his hair to oily ash in seconds. His skin blistered and bled in rivers, but still he could not scream.
 

My nightmares, Darren realized, feeling invaded. Those weren’t just nightmares. They were Adam’s life, visions, the way he showed me what happened at Palo Park. The kid’s been infecting me with his lost memories, his trauma. I’m remembering what he can’t. The more I remember, the more real he becomes.

‘Something wrong?’ Tommy said.

Darren removed his sunglasses to wipe the sting from his eyes. He shook his head, trying to focus. Tommy was staring at him like he wished Darren had never come to the farm. He couldn’t stand this one moment longer.

‘Tommy, I have to show you something. In my car.’

Tommy shifted in his seat. ‘What would that be?’

‘I met him. He’s here. I don’t know what happened to him back then, but he found me a few days ago. Maybe longer.’

‘Who? What are you talking about?’

‘Adam’s real. Come on. I’ll show you.’ He stood and headed off toward the car.

Tommy stood but did not follow. ‘Hey. What is this?’

‘You remember what he looked like,’ Darren said. ‘I want you to see this…’ he almost said ‘kid’ but stopped himself. He wanted Tommy to see the boy before deciding Darren was flat-out nuts. ‘Come on, it will just take a minute.’

‘Is this supposed to be funny?’

‘No, it’s not. Just trust me on this, would you?’

Reluctantly, Tommy followed him to the car. ‘I got work to do, Lynwood. Whatever you’re up to, make it quick.’

They rounded the small barn. At once Darren could see that Adam was not in the front seat. He leaned into the open driver’s side window. Adam was not in the back seat, either. Alarmed, he withdrew from the car and scanned the front yard, the weeds behind the barn.

Tommy waited a few paces back. ‘So?’

‘He was here,’ Darren said. ‘Waiting in the car.’

Tommy said nothing.

‘He came to see me, Tommy. That’s why I needed to talk to you. You don’t understand. This kid, he knows things only Adam could know.’

‘Whose kid?’

‘No one’s. It’s Adam.’

‘Adam would be our age,’ Tommy said. ‘If he’s even alive.’

Darren nodded distractedly. ‘He must have gotten out. I told him to wait in the car. Did you see him? Maybe he’s screwing around in the barn.’

‘You aren’t making one bit of sense,’ Tommy said.

Darren trotted to the front of the barn and began to pry at one of the large wooden doors. It was heavy, the hinges rusted. The planks were dry, splintery. Darren heaved the door, jerking it outward, and one of the boards cracked.

Tommy stomped over and took him by the arm. ‘There’s nobody in my barn, you flake. Knock it off.’

Darren ignored the larger man and wedged his body between the doors. ‘Adam! Are you in here? Adam, goddamnit! I told you to wait in the car!’

The kid did not respond.

Tommy seized the back of Darren’s shirt and yanked him from the barn.

Darren staggered back, nearly falling as Tommy released him. He was out of breath. ‘I’m telling you, he was here. He’s real, Tommy. I don’t know how, but I’m not lying to you. Why would I?’

‘I think it’s time for you to leave,’ Tommy said.

‘Just wait —’

‘Now. I want you off my property, Lynwood. There’s something wrong with you. Always was. And I don’t like it. Now, go.’

Darren struggled for the words, something that would help Tommy understand. And he couldn’t leave Adam here, could he? Not now, not after what he had learned.

Tommy came at him, one fist raised. ‘I said —’

Darren backed off, hands up in surrender. ‘Okay, okay. I’m going. I’m sorry, Tommy. I didn’t plan any of this.’

He opened the Firebird’s door. Adam’s backpack was on the front seat. See, he wanted to cry, there’s his backpack! And everything in it is from 1982, just like him. But he’d lost Tommy, that much was clear. He wouldn’t believe anything Darren said now.

He got in and started the car. ‘Tommy, listen. If you see a kid out here, you might want to stay away from him. Call the police.’

‘Asshole, in ten seconds I’m going to call the police on you.’

Darren waved him off. ‘Fine. Good. I tried to warn you. You deal with it.’

Tommy was still watching as he backed the Firebird into the turnaround and spun a cloud of straw dust into the dry summer air.

Sheila walked the pastures, in the fields and across the country roads. The sun was going past four o’clock now and she was sweating, her skin running with clean fury. The time was coming, and she could feel her body preparing itself, cleansing itself of mercy, her senses opening to the call. She walked over barbed-wire fences, down through drainage ditches, stepping on soft rows of tilled soil sprouting baby crops, waiting for the signal.

For two days the family had done little more than eat, sleep, practice their invocations, and try not to squander their emanations. They kindled reserves of spite and prayed to their victims, remembering the dead. Sheila slept little, her brief dreams populated with the faceless pigs she had ceremonied and sapped.

The parents were recovering quickly, now that their threesome had been reunited. Physically they were a wreck, but their faculties quickened, confusion giving way to clarity, purpose, unity in their hatred. Sheila made several trips back into town to fetch other medicines for them – Ibuprofen for their aches and pains, ginger and ginkgo for vigor and alertness, sage and lavender to burn in the room and awaken their channels. She also brought meals high in clean protein, rich in amino acids and iron: salmon, broccoli, farm-fresh eggs, cottage cheese, brown rice, haddock, kale, chard. She hand-fed them until their appetites had been primed but not sated. On the second day they were able to bathe themselves, and she rewarded them with better sets of clothing and another round of massages. They slept sixteen of every twenty-four hours.

She had been a good soldier, and a smart one, ditching the Ford and its befouled camper in a grove of trees in the middle of public land, fifteen miles east. She did not bother wiping the interior for prints, at least not beyond the steering wheel and cabin surfaces she herself had touched. Torturing that young district attorney two decades ago had ensured there were no public records of her family; besides, Miriam and Ethan literally had no fingerprints, only scars. It was a relief to be rid of their disgusting living quarters, their pathetic and rancid mobile home. It had only reminded her of childhood, the stink of the trailer, life in the mobile-home park, where every loser, twat and pig was up in each other’s business.

She had walked the fifteen miles back to town herself, to a used car lot in need of some easy cash. After twenty minutes of frustrating banter with the salesman, she negotiated for an inconspicuous and sad but serviceable little Toyota Tercel, melon-green with gray cloth interior. It would not be much help in a getaway or a hostage situation, but it ran smoothly and it was all she could afford. The car cost eleven hundred, leaving her just under four hundred. Miriam and Ethan had not carried money for over a decade, siphoning gas and stealing food to sustain the vermin existence, living on trash like trash.

Once they had the boy, their fortunes would turn around.

Sheila took walks, usually close to midnight and just before dawn, but sometimes in the middle of the day, clearing her mind of conflict and misgivings and resentment toward her parents. Strolling around the town, and outside the community, down the long country roads and in the fields, she felt her primal instincts returning with renewed ferocity.

She practiced The Crawling near two of the farmhouses, keeping to her belly and channeling the serpent for silence, as she had been taught. The first house had been empty and she spent nearly an hour inside, scenting the rooms until she had developed a picture of their lives, the useless toil and numb misery.

The second house, she arrived at sunrise and the family was just beginning their morning rituals. She got as close as the front screened-in porch, where she perched on a bench seat and kept still as Mom brewed coffee, Dad watched the weather report on TV while shaving with an electric razor, and eventually a little girl, six or eight years old, a freckled Irish lass Ethan would have drowned had Miriam birthed it to him, came out in her pajamas to bundle up on the sofa, snuggling with the family Labrador.

The door from the porch to the kitchen and dining area was unlocked and Sheila knew she could Crawl past them with ease, finding a safe zone to hide until one of them separated from the unit. She had brought along the straight-edge and six feet of cord, and twice she was tempted to use them, the fevered itch for murder unbearable. Instead, she tamped the black down inside herself, savoring it, letting it coil and build. She needed to store up as much animosity as was possible in such a short time. The couple she mercifully excused after Dillinger’s had added precious fuel to the cause, but she needed more.

Sheila walked on, saving her wrath for her brother, The One Who Got Away. They did not speak of him; they needn’t. But she could feel the anticipation gathering between them, even miles away on her walks, and like Miriam and Ethan, she hoped that he had retained his own talents after all these years. If they could bring him home for a proper ceremony, they would reap great improvements in their own abilities. Adam had always been the strongest, both in his latent abilities, like The Reading and the Touching, and in his will not to use them. Sheila knew that’s why he had run away, and that was why she had grown to hate him. He thought he was superior to them, but he would discover his true purpose soon enough.

She meditated a great deal on his parting gift to them – burning their home to the ground. Sheila had always wondered if he had intended to kill them, or if in his fury he had simply lost control. Perhaps he had wanted only to take away their shelter, scatter them from sanctuary. He had been only a child, after all, and one who had abhorred violence as much as Sheila and Mother and Father craved it. Hard to imagine him torching the place with murder in his heart.

She had always wondered if he knew of their escape, her awakening just before the flames reached her in the closet and her heroic rescue of Miriam and Ethan. What had he been doing in those first few days during the aftermath, while she had been busy nursing the third-degree burns at their parents’ bedside in the camper? Had he followed the newspaper accounts? If so, what had he made of the reports? The bone-charred remains of two adults and one adolescent female discovered in the wreckage. He would have been convinced his family was gone by his own hand, as had the police and firemen and other investigators.

He would have had no way of guessing that Sheila, age fourteen, had been forced to return to the burn site and exhume the other three half-consumed bodies beneath the trailer’s foundation stilts. It was a kind of miracle, a stroke of dark Fate working in their favor, the family’s full sextet of victims had not been discovered on the first day. Otherwise the police would have been forced to conclude something beyond a small family perishing in an accidental fire had been at work in that rathole trailer park.

Sheila didn’t think her young brother had ever come to terms with, or ever admitted to himself, what Mother and Father had been up to on those late nights, coming home with large, carpet-wrapped parcels. Digging into the back end of the trailer, storing the homeless ones and that couple and the two teen runaways where they belonged, in their new home, where in death they would continue to feed the Family’s darkly blooming auras as surely as they fed the worms below.

But he must have suspected something, felt the black mass gathering that spring as their business escalated. Maybe that’s what drove him away. The ticking of his internal clock as it counted down to the final choice, join the cause or defy them and die.

Many times, when he was too young to understand the Family’s true purpose, he had come to Sheila for guidance, for protection and solidarity, none of which she could provide. The way he used to whine about being tied up in the shed for two or three days at a time. The way he refused to help them pick the winning numbers out at the dog track. Or that time he refused to help them deal with the homeless couple they brought home for Thanksgiving one year. Always such a baby.

Sheila had always teased him along, sometimes walking him to the park at night and then ditching him to walk home alone, or taking him to the shed to show him her blossoming womanhood, but what she really missed was torturing him. Binding his wrists and ankles while he slept, prodding him awake with pencils or a kitchen fork, covering his mouth with a wet rag and pinching his nose until he screamed from his ears. And the symbols, of course. Maybe, when she caught him, she would spend a few days inscribing him in symbols and removing his fingernails with pliers, just for old times’ sake.

I wish I was the one
, Sheila thought, walking as the moon guided her across another cow pasture.
I should have been the one to burn the house down.
Because wasn’t it true that, in trying to kill them or at least send them packing, Adam had also earned their… well, not respect, but their esteem. Awe, maybe. That he would dare to take it all away, what little they had, and cast himself out into the world, left to fend for himself. Whatever it had done to them, it also changed their estimation of him.

I hate him, I hate him, hate his shit-lined guts.
 

But if he was back, mightn’t that mean he had run out of luck? Perhaps he needed them now as much as they needed him.

Did he have murder in his heart that afternoon? Had he really been capable of burning them all?

Was he now?

But it didn’t matter much, she supposed. What was done was done. No matter what he had intended to inflict, he had hurt them. In many ways sentencing them to a fate worse than death, for in his disappearance after the cleansing fire, he had condemned them to walk the earth as freaks, their private scars made visible, the Family business worn like a mask that could never be removed. At least it was so for Mother and Father. Sheila had been lucky in matters of physical presentation, only because she had felt the approaching heat of his anger as well as the flames, waking from her sleep ritual even as the smoke filled the trailer. Even so, she almost left them to burn. Maybe she should have.

Miriam and Ethan had blamed her anyway, furious she had not come for them sooner. Without the boy around to blame, they punished her instead. They let her tag along through puberty, for the obvious reasons, but as soon as she developed a will of her own and reached eighteen, demanding rights, a fair share of the food and drugs, they cut her loose. From nineteen till now she had been forced to become her own woman. Sometimes she felt she should thank them for that. Other times she wanted to gas them.

All of this speculation and nostalgia was a fine way to pass the night hours, walking, waiting, but she needed to focus on the task ahead. The big question.

Would the three of them be strong enough to see it through?

To fight Adam when he resisted?

To harness his goods?

Sheila was ready, but Miriam and Ethan were weak. They weren’t emanating much of anything yet, and this concerned her. How much help would they really be able to provide, when the moment of truth arrived? It was a miracle they had been able to drive in from Wyoming, stalking Adam around Boulder for nearly a week before getting close enough to kill. That was a source of hope, that they had been able to kill at all. It proved Adam had been close, and they to him, for how else would they have found the strength to sap the Kavanaugh family? Not without Adam’s help, that was for sure. And yet the ceremonies had depleted them severely.

They could also be bluffing, faking their arthritic movements. What if they wanted him for themselves? When it was all over, they might turn on her, trap her in a ceremony, sap her once and for all.

Of course, she could do the same to them. Use them until they had fed on Adam, then get rid of them so that she could spend all they reaped from him across the rest of her days, alone, in peace, without having to care for them like the couple of geriatric chimpanzees they were. Not much loss there. Regardless of what they were able to take from Adam, Miriam and Ethan were not going to enjoy any sort of golden retirement.

Yes, that was the plan, then. Sheila would have to treat whatever came next as though she were a team of one. Miriam and Ethan might help with scouting, playing lookout, or driving short distances. Beyond that, they were simply batteries to her, fuel cells to her psychic flashlight. Until they had Adam in their custody, the parents would be, essentially, useless. She would keep them in the game until Adam had been ceremonied, then put them out of their misery.

I’m not afraid of him, Sheila told herself. He was always stronger, but I’ve had more practice in the real world. He has a soft heart. I have the instincts and morals of a lioness. I have nothing to lose.

She was in the middle of a cornfield, two or three miles from the motel, when the signal found her:

There were no words, only color, emotion. The exclamatory yellow energy, a hazard warning. Meaning now: alert, wake up, beware.

And then simply:

The astronomical symbol for Saturn, which had been one of their codes for him, the baby of the family, the wonder boy. God’s little sickle, Miriam used to say, and one day he will cut a wide path, reaping riches for the family. The first night she brought him home from the hospital, Miriam had drawn it on his forehead in her rarest unguent of eucalyptus ash, three generations of family blood, and albino goat horn marrow.