There had been no hostility between Nancy and the captain, just a distance that couldn’t be bridged, a staining sorrow neither knew how to wash away. There was even affection sometimes, moments when you could glimpse how things might have been between them.
The coroner declared the cause of death was an aneurysm, a rare type, that burst with force. The captain didn’t know he had it. He’d bled out so fast, there was no hope.
Nancy had wept, surprised by the intensity of her grief.
The weeks after Captain’s death had been hard for all of them, hardest for Bibi. When the golden retriever came to her out of the rain, a friend when she most needed one, she called him Olaf, because that was Captain’s middle name. Gunther Olaf Ericson, United States Marine Corps, retired.
She had warned the dog to stay away from the apartment because evil dwelt there. But nothing wicked had roamed those rooms when the captain lived in them. Because of him, it was a fine place. The evil came only in the weeks after he passed away.
Now, twelve years after those bad days, she had returned to learn if that evil might still linger. Or if not the abomination itself, something that would help her to recall what had happened in the attic. As she had written in her little spiral-bound notebook, that incident was one of three lost memories that were somehow the roots of her current crisis.
Call this shock therapy.
Or desperation.
She had not brought the butane lighter. On the walk between the motel and the Honda, she had dropped it in a public trash can. She hadn’t purchased another lighter at the mall. If she achieved some breakthrough, the recovery of a crucial memory, she would not be able easily to employ the captain’s memory trick and erase the newfound knowledge before putting it to use.
Following the flashlight, she went from the kitchen into the empty living room, darkness reclaiming the apartment behind her, darkness to either side of her, darkness retreating ahead, but only where the cold white LED beam forced it to relent.
She’d been aware of an unpleasant smell in the kitchen; but it lacked strength. By the time that she reached the bedroom, the odor intensified. A stink nurtured by two years of abandonment. Mold thriving in the walls. Mouse piss.
In the bedroom closet, she reached to the dangling pull-cord with her left hand and drew down the folding ladder.
Bibi did not switch on the attic lights. The electricity had probably been disconnected in preparation for the demolition crew. Even if power was available, she preferred not to ascend into the glare of the gable-to-gable string of bare light bulbs that she had been grateful for twelve years earlier. She had been scared on that previous adventure but also driven by a not unpleasant expectation; and she wanted to recapture as much of that mix of feelings as she could, the better to jar her memory. As an adult, she didn’t scare as easily as she had back in the day. A greater measure of darkness might juice the fear factor.
When she reached the top of the ladder and stepped into the attic, the flashlight silvered the fog drifting through one of the screened vents just under the eaves, a slowly churning mass, almost pulsing, like the ectoplasm summoned from another world during a séance. She recalled the long fingers of fog questing through the same opening on that Sunday morning twelve years earlier.
The central aisle flanked by rows of shelving was as before, although everything once stored there had long ago been removed. The shelves were backed with sheets of Masonite, preventing her from seeing into the side aisles until she arrived at the head of each.
On that far-away Sunday, maybe there had been a presence in the next to the last aisle on her left, though Bibi did not expect to encounter it now. She hoped only that, standing where she had stood then, teasing herself into a similar frame of mind, she might recall a useful fragment that had survived the flames of the captain’s memory trick.
The flashlight flensed away the darkness to the left, and no figure loomed there. She probed the side aisle to her right. It was likewise deserted.
A final pair of side aisles were unexplored, but logic insisted that she needed to remain in the precise spot where she had stood on that previous occasion. She faced to the left, trying to summon a recollection of whoever or whatever had moved from shadow into light.
She listened to settling noises in the old structure, of which there were many, breathed in the rankness of mold and rodent droppings, shivered not from fear but from the chill of the night, and waited, waited.
Although uneasy, even apprehensive, she wasn’t fearful to the degree she had been as a young girl. She doubted that she could recapture that anxious mood to a sufficient extent in the current environment. So she switched off the flashlight, plunging the attic into perfect darkness.