III
When we creak your step,
when we crack your glass,
when we tap, tap, tap,
that is a bone
that is all we have
though we are very shiny,
and filled with beetles.
We are made entirely of bone.
from The Dead Girls Speak in Unison
by Danielle Pafunda
18
Randall Haight felt the difference in the house as soon as he returned from the store, as though a charge of static electricity held by the carpets and fabrics had been voided. He stood in the hallway, a paper bag cradled in his left arm, the coldness of the ice cream inside making itself felt through the fabric of his sweater. He had chocolate as well, and soda, and cinnamon candies. She liked the smell of all of them, and they had a calming effect on her; quite the opposite of most children, he thought, but then she was so very different from other children.
The trip into town had already provided him with one unsettling experience. He had seen Valerie Kore on the street, accompanied by a man whom he didn’t recognize but who, by his size and stance, he believed to be a policeman of some kind. Mrs. Kendall, who worked part-time at the drugstore, was talking to her, her right hand resting on Valerie’s shoulder, her face close to the younger woman’s as she offered what Randall assumed were words of hope and consolation. Then Danny, the weird but decent kid who ran the Hallowed Grounds coffee shop, came out and gave Valerie a white paper bag loaded up with pastries and muffins, and something inside her broke at this small, unexpected gesture and she had to walk away, the cop trailing in her wake. Randall watched her go, and tried to pin down his feelings at the sight of her. Sadness. Empathy.
Guilt?
The cop had caught him looking at her. Randall hadn’t overreacted, though. He’d just smiled sadly, because that was what he believed a regular person would have done, a normal person. He was an actor inhabiting a role, and he inhabited it well, but as soon as she was gone from his sight he pushed her from his mind. Instead, he found himself looking at the faces of those whom he passed even as he exchanged friendly greetings with them, and peered in the windows of the businesses on Main Street, waiting to see if someone might look back, their eyes lingering a little too long on his, betraying themselves to him.
Which one of you is it? Which one of you knows, or thinks you know?
But there were no answers to be found, no suspicions to be confirmed, and he had driven back to his house in silence, wondering if the mailman had come yet, fearing what he might find in his box. To his relief, there were only bills, and his subscriber’s copy of National Geographic. No photographs, no films, no images of naked children, and he tried to make himself believe that it might be over even as he acknowledged this as just a brief respite.
Now, safe once again inside his home, Randall sensed an unaccustomed emptiness, an absence. He moved from bedroom to bedroom, checking closets and under beds. He looked in the master bathroom and the guest bathroom, the latter of which had never been used. Finally, he went to the basement and stood in front of the door. She liked the basement; it was dark, and cool. Sometimes he heard her singing to herself down there. When he was angry or working he’d tell her to be quiet, but she never listened. She sang jingles from the TV, and old pop songs that he’d almost forgotten existed, and ditties that she’d make up herself, tuneless rhymes that got inside his head and worried at him with their sheer randomness. But the basement was her hideaway, her refuge, and he was content to leave it to her. He tried not to disturb her when she was there because there was no way to tell how she might react. Once she’d flown at him in a rage, her nails headed straight for his eyes, but mostly she just tended to scream and scream, the sound of it bouncing back at him from the stone walls.
He needed to know where she was. He kept all the windows and the outer doors locked, although that was more to keep people out than to keep her inside, for he lived in fear of intrusion into his life. By now the girl showed no signs of wanting to leave him. He wondered if her hatred of him had become a kind of love, her need a channel that connected the two opposing emotions. She was almost like a daughter to him, a recalcitrant, difficult, demanding child, and he was the father because he had made her what she was.
He hadn’t seen much of her for the past two days. She’d hidden herself away when the detective came, as she always did when a stranger appeared. Earlier that same day, he’d caught a glimpse of her passing through the kitchen while he worked at his computer. He didn’t like the TV on when he was trying to concentrate. She’d learned that lesson quickly, and now she just stayed away from the living room until after five. The last time he had actually spoken to her was to tell her to go back to her TV shows on the evening following the detective’s visit.
He knocked on the basement door. There was no reply.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘You down there?’
He opened the door and spoke to the darkness. She disliked sudden intrusions and unexpected noises.
‘You can watch anything you like now. I’ve finished my work for the day. I’ll sit with you, if you want me to.’
He could see the night light burning against the far wall. There was a small pile of books in the corner, still unread, and a stuffed animal that he’d bought for her at Treehouse Toys when he’d been doing some work down in Portland.
He advanced to the first step, still reluctant to trespass. Early on, before he’d come to understand her ways, and she his, she had tried to knock his feet out from under him when he entered the basement, and he had barely managed to hold on to the rail and prevent himself from breaking his neck. A huge splinter had pierced his palm, and even though he’d managed to get the bulk of it out, some shards had penetrated deep into his flesh and had begun to fester, so that he’d been forced to see a doctor and have them removed under local anesthetic. After that he’d locked the basement door, and taken away the lead for the TV. Depriving her of TV was the worst punishment that he could inflict upon her, and always led to a battle of wills between them. He had learned to lock the lead in his safe because she would find it otherwise, but those periods when the TV was no longer hers to control were the worst between them. In retaliation, she would do her best to irritate him, tapping on the wall at night while he tried to sleep, or rearranging his papers so that he lost track of his accounts, or spilling milk in the fridge while he was out and then turning the power off so that he had to empty the contents and wash it out to remove the sour stink. Finally, a compromise would be reached, and TV rights would be restored, but the conflict always took its toll on both of them and they had each learned that it was better to avoid such confrontations to begin with.
But relations between them were not always so hostile. Sometimes, especially on cold nights when the old house creaked and moaned, and the wind found the gaps in the boards and under the doors, and branches cracked beneath the weight of snow and ice, she would climb into his bed unbidden, and press herself against him, stealing his warmth, like a dream made real.
He descended farther, crouching so that the entire basement was visible to him, and felt panic, and fear, and loss.
But, most of all, he felt a kind of relief.
She was gone.