They’re in Cheryl’s room, talking in hushed voices, not wanting to upset Hannah any further. The wallpaper is floral-patterned. Precious Moments ceramic figurines line the bureau. The alarm clock is islanded by a white doily centered on her nightstand. The carpet is striped from its daily vacuuming and the bed is neatly made with a country quilt and throw pillows stitched with nauseating affirmations like I Believe in Myself and Live, Love, Laugh!
Lela resists the urge to mess the place up. And she resists, too, the want to discount everything that Cheryl then tells her. Maybe the red marks on Hannah’s body came from the man in the woods and Cheryl simply didn’t see them before? And maybe she misheard him? Maybe he wasn’t actually using them to get at Lela? Maybe the shadow glitch on the Mirage is a beta problem, no different than a CD skipping or a DVD occasionally banding the screen with black lines? Is there an explanation here that isn’t Ouija? Maybe.
Or maybe, probably not. Lela doesn’t say a word. The truth is, the more she hears, the greater her fear and guilt and doubt. She doubts everything she has ever believed. Rather than admit this, she says, “I need to make some calls.”
“Who are you calling?” Cheryl says, squeezing her hands as though trying to strangle the last bit of water from a dishrag. “The police?”
“Not yet.” She almost apologizes for getting her sister into this mess, but holds back. “Can you put something together for dinner? I haven’t eaten all day, and I think my head’s not on straight because of it.”
Cheryl opens the bedroom door and lets out a yelp. The black balloon floats into the room, dangling a silver ribbon like a jellyfish’s poisoned tendril. Lela snatches it from the air and squeezes it in her hands and pierces it with her fingernails until it pops into flaccid shreds. The air expelled smells ammoniac and makes her gag.
“Look at us,” Cheryl says. “Jumping at shadows.”
Cheryl closes the door behind her, leaving Lela alone. Lela plugs in her phone and waits two minutes before punching the power button. It sings to life. Immediately it registers twenty messages, which she ignores, along with the warning that her storage is full. She dials Josh’s number, and a few seconds later her ear fills with the pubescent crackling of his voice: “Hey.”
He followed up, as she requested, and has some intel. “I don’t really know where to start, so I guess I’ll just list off stuff I wrote down.” The Rue, for one. The address has a long history of ugliness. “I read your articles. The ones about Jeremy Tusk. Pretty good stuff. Kind of scared the shit out of me. Do you know that the Museum of Death—this place in LA—has a whole exhibit on Tusk? They have a bloodstained T-shirt and a few messed-up drawings he did and a diary he kept and even one of his skin-shade lamps.”
In the diary, Tusk talked about why he did what he did. Because the shadows told him to. That’s what he said. The shadows visited at night, sometimes in the shape of a giant bat that clung to the corner of the ceiling or a hunchbacked rat that roosted in his closet, and said they would hurt Tusk if he didn’t do as he was told. They knew about him from his scholarly articles and conference lectures, from the books he had harvested, from the ceremonies he had performed in the name of research. “They are hungry for flesh and thirsty for blood, and I am like their fork and their mouth, their instrument of consumption,” Tusk wrote.
But thirty years earlier—Josh is kind of surprised Lela never dug this up herself, it would have made for an eerie embellishment—in one of the Rue’s second-floor apartments, a husband killed his wife and then himself. And then ten years before that, the maintenance man hung himself in the furnace room. And thirteen years before that, a fire gutted the building and killed three families. And two years before that, a girl disappeared from her bedroom at night, never to be seen again. And then, in 1912, during the construction of the building, three laborers died when a steel beam collapsed. “I mean, I’m sure every old building has its share of bad luck, but this place seems kind of crammed with nightmares.”
“How far back did you go?” she says. “Anything before the building went up?”
“I was getting there. I’m kind of doing this telescoping thing, see. So I checked with the historical society and also consulted the library and City Hall archives. I didn’t realize how shitty the Pearl used to be. Like, it’s all foo-foo now. Galleries and lofts and bistros and whatnot. It used to be nothing but rail yards and warehouses and shacks for blue-collar immigrants. The Rue went up in 1912. For a while it was used by rail workers and the factory workers hired on at the Weinhard Brewery and area warehouses, then it was briefly a brothel, then it was just a shitty apartment building.”
“What about before 1912?”
“I can’t be sure about an exact address, so we’re talking about a more generalized area now. But in the mid-1800s, ten lumbermen were found in their camp. Dead. Naked. Some of them were hanging from trees, strung up by their guts. Others were laid out in the mud, their limbs cut off and mixed up, sewn into the wrong places on the wrong bodies.”
She doesn’t realize she has her eyes closed until she tries to scratch down a note. “Anything else?”
“I got a few fires and a smallpox outbreak but can’t be certain of the exact location. And then, on a whim, I checked out some Multnomah legends. There were a few that stood out. All of them about the Shadow People. Like, the Shadow People took bites out of the sun until there was no more light and a long winter came. Or the Shadow People would sometimes sneak inside of an elk or a wolf or a bear or a person and pretend to be them, use their skin like a costume to do messed-up stuff like eat babies or burn a village or shove somebody off a cliff. There were five Shadow People—it was like its own insurgent tribe—and they supposedly haunted an area off the Willamette where nobody fished, nobody hunted, because they didn’t want to get gobbled up by shadow mouths or raped by shadow dicks or whatever. But then I guess a bunch of warriors from all the local tribes got pissed and gathered together at a meeting in the Gorge and said they weren’t going to put up with this shit anymore. It was like an Indian UN meeting or something. And they banded together and finally took the Shadow People out in this shock-and-awe campaign during which the moon eclipsed and the Willamette ran red. Then they buried them, and even though they performed a cleansing ceremony, nothing grew over the burial site for many moons or some shit.”
“Jesus.” Her mind quickly links the five Shadow People to the five exhumed skeletons. That would make the skull in the other room a link to a time when darkness roamed freely. She shakes her head to clear away the thought, dismiss the connection. She is looking for a logical explanation for all of this, not more superstition. “Do you happen to know why five is always such an important number?”
“Five fingers to control a hand. Five senses to know the world. Five wounds to kill Christ. If you’re talking about a pentagram, the top point can indicate the spirit lording over the four elements of matter. Or, if you flip it over, the two points at the top and the one at the bottom are supposed to look like a horned goat with a beard.”