Welcome to Hell
Hell’s Hundred is a new Horror Fiction imprint from independent publisher Soho Press.
Named after the once bleak, now chic New York City neighborhood of SoHo—formerly known as “hell’s hundred acres” for its grim industrial facades and deadly fires—Hell’s Hundred provides fertile ground for new nightmares to take root.
Terrors of the flesh and of the mind. Beauty taken to grotesque extremes. Love, malformed and monstrous. Fetid, blood-soaked alleys of a candle-lit past. From grisly and macabre to darkly humorous, Hell’s Hundred publishes bold visions of horror from voices new and established.
HellsHundredBooks.com
Blood Like Mine
Stuart Neville
August 2024
Come Closer
Sara Gran
On sale now
Our Winter Monster
Dennis Mahoney February 2025
youthjuice
E.K. Sathue
On sale now
BLOOD LIKE MINE STUART NEVILLE HELL’S
Copyright © 2024 Staurt Neville All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Published by Hell’s Hundred an imprint of Soho Press 227 W 17th Street New York, NY 10011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Neville, Stuart, author. Title: Blood like mine / Stuart Neville. Description: New York, NY : Soho Crime, 2024. Identifiers: LCCN 2023029776
ISBN 978-1-64129-541-3
eISBN 978-1-64129-542-0
Subjects: LCGFT: Thrillers (Fiction) | Detective and mystery fiction. | Novels. Classification: LCC PR6114.E943 B56 2024 DDC 823’.92—dc23/eng/20230710 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023029776
Interior design by Janine Agro
Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Rebecca Carter saw the first flakes of new snow fall from the night sky and settle on the windshield. The road ahead was dark, twisting down through the hills, the headlights catching scrub and rock peering through the drifts of white.
Golden City lay below; she had caught occasional glimpses of its lights through the trees. She had planned this route several days in advance. Boulder lay to the north, and Superior south of that, then Golden at the edge of the Denver metro area. She would head south from there, skirting the mountains, then down to New Mexico, or maybe west toward Utah, driving until the fatigue got too much to carry. West or south, didn’t matter, but she needed to put some distance between here and there.
“Try to get some sleep,” Rebecca said. “Go on, get in back.”
“Not yet,” Moonflower said.
She had been christened Monica, but not long after, Rebecca had taken to calling her Moonflower. For the
blossoms her own mother grew in the greenhouse behind their home in Madison, Wisconsin. They bloomed at night, pale white faces in the darkness. A thread that still connected Moonflower to her grandmother, causing an ache in Rebecca every time the memory surfaced.
“Come on,” Rebecca said. “You’re tired. I can tell. You’ve been doing that thing you do.”
She rubbed her nose with the heel of her hand, mimicking the gesture Moonflower had made all her life when sleep wanted her.
“Have not,” Moonflower said.
“Have too. Now, come on. Listen to your mother.”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m a baby.”
Moonflower teased at her coal-black hair, twining it around her fingers, a crease in her brow.
“No, we’re not doing this. It’s been too long a night and I don’t have the patience for your attitude. You hear—”
“Mom!”
The beast filled her vision, hulking across the road, snow dusting its back. The elk froze as Rebecca wrenched at the wheel, the van swerving left then right. The passenger side wheels mounted the shoulder, losing grip, throwing the van back across the asphalt. Moonflower cried out as her head bounced off the door. Rebecca felt the rear of the vehicle fishtail, and she eased off the gas, moved her foot to the brake pedal, resisting the urge to stamp down on it and risk losing all control. The van mounted the shoulder on the opposite side of the road and now all Rebecca could see was a white mound of snow, reflecting the glare of the headlights. A dull thump, and she was thrown forward as the van slowed with a lurch, the seatbelt grabbing her chest
and waist. Now she depressed the brake, and the van finally halted, its nose buried in snow. The engine fought for a few seconds then stalled. All was still and quiet now, save for the wind and Moonflower’s jagged breathing. Rebecca reached for her daughter.
“Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
“Yeah, no,” Moonflower said. “I’m fine. I hit my head, but it’s all right.”
“Let me see.”
“It’s fine, Mom.”
“Let me see.”
She turned her daughter’s head, examined the skin. A red mark at the corner of her eye, that was all, no blood. No open wound.
“Okay,” Rebecca said. And to herself, “Okay.”
She pulled the handle and pushed the door open, fighting against the bank of snow outside. Enough of a gap to squeeze through, she told Moonflower to stay put, then climbed out, her feet sinking into the white. She struggled to the rear of the van and looked back along the road. Thirty yards away, the elk looked back at her. Still and impassive, its breath misting. Eventually, it huffed, lowered its antlered head to sniff at the road, then moved off toward the treeline.
It didn’t care. It had almost caused a serious accident, and it didn’t give a damn. A creature whose only concern was its own survival. All else was background noise. Like most animals.
Rebecca cursed then made her way along the passenger side of the van, the snow deepening as she went. When she reached the front, she shoveled snow away with her bare
cupped hands, ignoring the stinging cold. No damage that she could see, thank God. Could’ve been far worse. Plenty of stretches of this road had sheer drops on one side or the other, thirty, forty feet down onto the rocks below.
Rebecca thanked the universe for small blessings. Maybe she could just back out of the drift and move on. As she turned to head back around the van, a sound stopped her. A hard and artificial noise washing through the wind and the rustling pines. An engine. A vehicle approaching.
She slapped the passenger window with her palm. Moonflower looked back at her, shaking her head, mouthing, What?
“Get in the back,” Rebecca shouted.
Moonflower shook her head again, confused. “Why?”
“Someone’s coming. Get in the back.”
Moonflower peered through the windshield, then in the side mirror, trying to see who approached. Rebecca slapped the window again.
“Just go, now!”
Moonflower made a show of sighing and rolling her eyes, but she did as she was told, climbing around the passenger seat and beneath the heavy blanket that separated the cabin and the load bay. Rebecca strained to hear which direction the swelling growl came from. Before she could figure it out, lights glared against the front of the van. There, coming up the incline, a pickup, glowing lamps fixed to its roof, headlights filling the world with violent white. She couldn’t help but raise her forearm to shield her eyes.
The truck slowed as it neared, brakes whining, until it halted alongside the van. The passenger window rolled down, and a dog of medium size and indeterminate breed barked as
it placed its paws on the edge. A man peered out at her from the driver’s seat. Middle-aged, bright and watchful eyes, lined andruggedcountryskin.Hescratchedthedogbehinditsears, and it dropped back down onto the passenger seat.
“You all right, ma’am?” the man called. “Need any help?”
Rebecca swallowed before she answered, dragging the fear down into her stomach.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” She pointed back up the slope. “There was an elk or a moose or something in the road. I had to swerve around it, and I wound up here. But it’s okay, there’s no damage.”
He leaned toward the window, examining the van and the bank of snow it had lodged in.
“I can tow you out of there.”
“No need, thank you. It’s not that bad, honestly. I can just reverse out.”
“I’ve got a chain in back,” he said. “Won’t take two minutes, no trouble at all.”
“Really, there’s no need, thank you.”
He considered for a moment, studying the van and the snow. Studying her.
“Ma’am, I won’t sleep tonight if I don’t know you got out of there. Now, if you’re concerned for your safety, being out here on your own and all, I’ll move on up the way a little. I’ll just keep a watch for a minute, make sure you get yourself back on the road. How would that be for you?”
Not good, Rebecca thought. She wanted him gone, but there was no sense in arguing. It was bad enough he’d seen her out here. Arguing with a decent man because he’d offered assistance to a stranded woman could only make things worse. For everyone.
“Okay,” she said. “Thank you.”
He dipped his head in agreement, put the truck in gear, and moved off, his wheels spinning before catching grip. Rebecca watched as he made his slow way up the slope. He stopped at the same spot where the elk had stood a few minutes before. Through the cabin’s rear window, she saw his silhouette as he turned to watch her.
Better move, Rebecca told herself.
She made her way around the van, high-stepping through the snow, leaning on the side for balance until she found the driver’s door. It remained open, snow spilling into the footwell and onto the driver’s seat. She swept it out with her hand and climbed in, pulling the door closed behind her, only to drag more snow inside.
“Shit,” she said.
Moonflower giggled somewhere behind her.
“It’s not funny,” Rebecca said, her voice like flint.
Moonflower whispered, Sorry.
“Just stay quiet and keep out of sight.”
Silence from the back, and Rebecca felt a sharp bite of regret. No need to vent her anger at the child. Didn’t matter. They had to get out of here. She turned the key in the ignition, and the engine coughed. For a moment she feared it might not catch, but it did, a pleasing rumble that thrummed and rattled through the cabin. She placed her hand on the dashboard.
“Good girl,” she said.
And it had been a good van. Best she’d had in years. Almost always started first time, rarely stalled, and the AC still worked. Warm in the cold places, cool in the hot.
What more could they want? But now it might have to go. She might have to get something else.
“Goddammit,” she spat.
“What’s wrong?” Moonflower asked, fear creeping into her voice.
“Nothing, honey,” Rebecca said, smoothing her tone. “Just stay quiet back there, okay?”
“Okay.”
She put the van into reverse and dabbed at the gas pedal, felt the wheels spin beneath her, barely rocking the suspension. In the side mirror, she saw the truck idling, the man’s silhouette, watching.
“Please,” she whispered.
A touch of pressure from her right foot, barely enough for the tachometer’s needle to rise, then a little more. An inch of movement, then another.
“Thank—”
Then a lurch, the wheels spinning again.
Rebecca eased off the gas, pressed down on the brake, grasped the wheel between her cold-bitten fingers. Closed her eyes and offered a prayer to the god who’d abandoned her decades ago. She toed the gas pedal once more, feeling as she pressed down, listening with her body to the engine, the wheels, the chassis, seeking the sweet spot. The van moved, crawled, slow as spit on glass.
Hold it there, she thought. Hold it.
Back and back and back, still going, thank God, still going until the rear wheels met the road, the front wheels following, and she could feel the asphalt beneath. She rested her head against the steering wheel.
“God,” she said. “Thank you, God.”
She looked up into the side mirror. The truck still idling, the driver watching. She lowered her window, waved back at him. His hand, a thin black silhouette, returned the gesture, then he turned away. His exhaust belched, and the truck climbed the slope and rounded the bend, out of her sight.
Rebecca began to tremble, pent up adrenaline charging through her, seeking escape.
“Jesus,” she said. “Jesus, fuck. Fuck me.”
She had long since stopped worrying about swearing in front of her daughter. What was the point?
“You okay?” Moonflower asked.
The blanket lifted, her pale face appearing from underneath, and again Rebecca remembered why she’d called her daughter that all those years ago. Like the flowers in the old greenhouse. The memory of her own mother tending them, and the ache that came with it.
“Yeah,” Rebecca said. “You need to sleep. Get back there.”
She put the van into drive and moved off, slow, feeling the road through the steering wheel. Be careful. No more mistakes.
That man would remember her. And the van. The make, the model, the color. Maybe the registration, not that it mattered. And he’d remember her, describe her if he was asked to. Rebecca cursed under her breath, made a fist, bit her knuckle to keep from shouting out her anger. Breathe. Deep in, from the belly, then out, long and slow. Calm.
When she’d found her balance, she said, “Love you, Moonflower.”
From the back, her daughter’s voice heavy and weary, “Love you, Mom.”
Special Agent Marc Donner was met by a Jefferson County Sheriff’s Deputy at Denver International Airport. It occurred to Donner as he followed the deputy to the parking lot that he’d bounced through Denver countless times on his way to somewhere else but never actually left the airport. At least this was a first.
Foster was the deputy’s name, a brawny young man, buzz cut hair and thick forearms. Probably polished his service weapon more than he needed to. He steered the cruiser, a Ford Interceptor SUV, out through the crisscrossing lanes, away from the terminal, and onto a wide road with nothing but stretches of dry eternity on either side. Then, suddenly, a towering dark horse, rearing toward the sky, its eyes blazing red. Like the devil’s own steed bucking against its rider.
“What the hell is that?” Donner asked, pointing at the sculpture as they passed.
“Blucifer,” Foster said. “Blue Mustang, to give it its
proper name. You remember that Osmonds song? Crazy Horses, waaah, waaah!” He splayed out his fingers as he wailed, wobbling his jaw, then gave a bellowing laugh. “You know, the guy who made that thing? It fucking killed him. I shit you not.”
Donner looked back over his shoulder at the sculpture. “No kidding. How?”
“Damn thing fell on him. Killed him dead.”
“Jesus,” Donner said.
The road straightened, more wilderness spreading out on either side of the road. Flat as a plate and rough as sand. The suggestion of buildings on the horizon, settlements, industry, life in the far distance. So much space made Donner’s skin crawl. The isolation of it. He was used to walls, high and tall, all around. The sky a punctuation between buildings, not this great blue blanket that hung over all creation. Nature was for parks and playgrounds, not growing wild and free in places like this. He pulled his coat tight around him.
The deputy cleared his throat.
“You’re here to look at the body, right?”
“Yeah,” Donner said.
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why’s a fed want to look at this particular corpse?”
Donner fussed at his shirt collar. “I don’t know, maybe it’s relevant to my interests, something like that.”
Foster stared at him, hard, then looked back to the road. “It’s a serial, right?”
Donner didn’t answer.
“Right?”
BLOOD
Donner raised his hands in a noncommittal gesture. “I don’t know. Could be.”
“Holy shit,” the deputy said, rubbing his fingers across his smiling mouth. “A fucking serial killer. Goddamn.”
“Maybe,” Donner said. “Probably not. Probably just some random shit that went down, some poor bastard got his throat cut for no good reason, but I gotta look at it. I gotta see.”
“Holy shit,” Foster said again. “So, it’s just you? I thought maybe they’d send down a whole team for something like this. Like forensics and psychologists, all that. Like Jodie Foster in her brown suit and flat shoes and shit.”
“No, just me,” Donner said. “I gotta look at it first, try to figure out what it is. Then, maybe after, we send for Jodie Foster. Her and Hannibal Lecter tied to a hand truck.”
Foster laughed.
“Tell you what,” he said. “You need anything while you’re here? You need a ride someplace, or some local intelligence, whatever. Just call. Night or day. I’ll see you right.”
Donner nudged his shoulder. “Thanks, man.”
He was good at that. Making friends.
Avista Adventist Hospital stood on the hinterland of housing developments and strip malls between the city of Boulder and the town of Superior, a squat complex of buildings covering acres of ground. Trees and shrubbery lined every path throughout, graying drifts of old snow piled at the edges.
So much space, Donner thought. Drive him crazy.
The mortuary was a level down. Doctor Leitch from the
county coroner’s office met him there, the body already laid out for inspection, covered by a plastic sheet. Donner was relieved when Leitch peeled it tastefully back rather than whipping it away with a flourish. It meant he’d dealt with murders before; they’d become mundane to him, not cause for fuss and drama.
Frost dusted the eyelashes of the dead man, and the ends of his hair. A Y-shaped incision on his chest had been neatly stitched, as had the one that circled his scalp.
“Pretty straightforward, at least on the face of it,” Leitch said, pointing to the obvious wound in the cadaver’s throat. “Large cut here, severing pretty much everything that matters, leading to massive blood loss. He died within seconds. But then you look closer.”
The pathologist leaned down, staring into the open wound. He prodded two gloved fingers into the florid maw.
“A blade inserted here, most likely a hunting knife, pushed right through, between the C3 and C4 cervical vertebrae, cutting the spinal cord. If he wasn’t dead from blood loss, he was dead from this. No blood at the scene, though.”
“So, he was moved after the fact.”
“Yup,” Leitch said. “Strikes me as unusually thorough. Somebody went to a lot of trouble to first make absolutely sure he was dead and then prevent his discovery. But I guess that’s why you’re here.”
“Yeah,” Donner said. “Tell me about where he was found.”
“Up in the foothills,” Leitch said. “In the trees, way out in the sticks. My guess is whoever dumped him there
reckoned he wouldn’t be found till the thaw, maybe March or April. By that time, coyotes would’ve taken most of him. We’d have had a job identifying him, I can tell you that. But a man named Johnny Colfax found him first. His dog sniffed the body out, I believe.”
“Have you spoken with Mr. Colfax?”
“Only briefly. The Jefferson Sheriff’s Office and the Golden Police Department have both had their way with him, but neither made much of it. Between you and me, I think they’re out of their depth. They’re arguing about jurisdiction, both sides wanting it out of their hands. I believe you coming along is the answer to their prayers. Let the G-man take care of it. Especially when they found out he had a record.”
Donner had received the email yesterday afternoon, pinged by the National Crime Information Center when Golden PD had uploaded the data. The body had been found almost a week ago, but it had taken a few days to ID him: Bryan Shields, aged thirty-seven, had bought himself a lifelong membership to the National Sex Offenders Registry when his credit card details were found in the payment records of a child pornography website. Probably shunned by friends and family for what he’d done, so no one to miss him when he disappeared. The first box ticked on Donner’s checklist. That, the open throat, the body dumped in the asshole of nowhere. It all fit the pattern, and Donner’s supervisor had begrudgingly given him permission to check it out.
And here he was, Bryan Shields, dead as dead can be, one more crumb on a trail that Donner had been following for nearly two years.
“What now?” Leitch asked.
“I gotta make a call,” Donner said. “Excuse me.”
He exited the mortuary into a tiled corridor and took his cell phone from his pocket. McGrath answered on the second ring.
“Well?” she asked.
“It’s our guy,” Donner said, “no question. Everything fits.”
“Shit,” McGrath said. “You want me to fly out?”
“No, there’s nothing you can do here. Just try to keep Holstein off my back while I dig around a little. There’s a guy I need to speak with, the one who found the body.”
He listened to McGrath breathe, his partner biting back a question, until he could stand it no more.
“Say it.”
“Shit,” she said again. “Are you sure you want to do this to yourself? I mean, who cares if some sick fuck gets killed and dumped in the woods? It’s one less creep for us to worry about.”
“I care,” Donner said. “It’s my job to put these bastards away. Mine. Not some goddamn crazy with a hunting knife.”
“All right,” McGrath said. “I’ll do what I can at this end. Call me if you need anything, day or night.”
“Thanks,” Donner said, meaning it.
“Yeah.”
McGrath hung up.
Hermother’s cry took Moonflower’s attention from the game. Super Mario Bros on the Nintendo DS. Mom had bought it for her from a pawn shop in Bakersfield. She couldn’t count how many times she’d played through the game, every beat of it committed to her memory, every button press, every move. There were so many hours to fill out here in the big wide nowhere. She dropped the Nintendo and scrambled to Mom’s side. “Jesus Christ,” Mom said through gritted teeth. “Goddamn altitude.”
Cramps in her calves. She always woke with cramps when they were way up high in the mountains. Mom hissed through her teeth and writhed, her eyes screwed shut. Moonflower unzipped the sleeping bag and reached inside, massaging the calf of her mother’s right leg, pulling and stretching at the knotted muscle, like steel balls beneath the skin, getting the blood flowing. Mom groaned, her legs forced straight by the pain.
“We need to get down from the mountains,” Moonflower said. “Go south, go somewhere warm, like Scottsdale. You like Scottsdale.”
“Not yet,” Mom said. “Not until I’m sure it’s safe.”
“You can’t ever be sure.”
Mom knew she was right. They would never be safe, not really. But Mom had said they needed to balance the risk. What if that man had said something? She’d been keeping an eye on news reports from the Denver area and no mention had been made of a woman and a van, but still, she couldn’t be certain. Later that same day, Mom had stolen the plates from a Ford van outside a truck stop near Boulder, and she’d drawn no attention as they made their way through the rises and falls of the Colorado Plateau.
They’d arrived in Blanding two days ago and taken a spot in the White Mesa RV Park and Trading Spot. Forty-eight hours was too long to stay in one place, but exhaustion had been wearing on her mother, making her irritable and forgetful. She needed to rest and get her head straight or she’d get careless, make mistakes. And she always said they couldn’t afford any mistakes.
Careful, she would say. Think. Don’t draw attention.
Having a power supply in the parking bay meant they could keep the little portable heater going, and charge Mom’s Chromebook as well as her phone. And Moonflower’s Nintendo. Maybe one more night here, but then they had to move on.
Mom gave a weary moan and raised her left leg to get her daughter’s attention. Moonflower obliged and moved her hands to that bunched-up muscle, kneading
it with her knuckles. Mom wriggled her thick-socked toes as the blood circulated. She let out another moan of relief.
“Okay?” Moonflower asked.
“Yeah, thank you.”
Mom sat upright on the mattress and stretched her legs out in front of her, continued rubbing at the calves.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“Eleven,” Moonflower said.
“Shit. I didn’t mean to sleep so late.”
“You needed it. It’s good for you.”
“Did you sleep?”
“A little,” Moonflower said, dipping her head as she spoke, betraying the lie. She had lain awake through the last hours of the night, into the morning, the Nintendo’s volume turned down low so as not to disturb her mother.
“Maybe try to get some now,” Mom said. “I’m thinking we could stay here another day.”
“Maybe.”
She dipped her head again.
“I need to eat something.” Mom reached for her boots, pulled them on, then shrugged on her winter coat. “I won’t be long.”
She crawled to the back of the van and pulled the release, the door opening out, light streaming in. It didn’t reach as far as Moonflower. Mom climbed out and buttoned up the coat. Her breath misted in the hard, thin air.
“I can check if they have any new magazines,” she said. “Maybe a paperback?”
Moonflower gave a smile, humored her. “Yeah, sure.”
As Mom went to close the door, Moonflower said, “No. Can you leave it open? I like the view.”
Mom turned and saw what she meant. Endless blue sky. Snowy mountaintops in the far distance. She pondered for a moment then shook her head.
“It’s cold, honey.”
“I’ve got my coat and my sleeping bag.” She gathered them around her, even though the cold didn’t bother her. “I can wrap up.”
Mom regarded her, her face drawn tight with worry.
“You stay right there,” she said. “You don’t talk to anyone, even if they talk to you.”
“I won’t,” Moonflower said.
“Okay. I’ll be right back.”
She lingered a moment, like a leaf unsure of the breeze, before walking away in the direction of the store.
Moonflower pulled on her coat, too big for her, but warm and pillowy. Roomy enough for her to draw up her knees to her chest, her chin tucked down inside the collar. Huddled against the blaket that separated the van’s cabin from the rear, too far back from the open doors for the light to touch her, she studied the rise and fall of the mountains. Like white elephants. She had read that description somewhere, and she had to search her memory to find it: a story by Ernest Hemingway. It had been in a collection Mom had shoplifted from a used bookstore. Moonflower hadn’t liked the story; it had seemed like a lot of words to say not much at all. She understood it well enough, a man and a girl—a girl, not a woman, the story had been clear—talking around her getting an abortion, but never actually saying it out loud. Moonflower was old enough to know about such things.
Like white elephants. To Moonflower, the mountains
were more like giant ocean waves, foaming with rage. It was the sky above them that she loved. So wide and blue, and she wanted to swim in it. She remembered swimming. Moonflower remembered a vacation somewhere in California, she couldn’t recall where exactly, but the hotel had a pool, and she swam in it every day, her body a blade cutting the warm water. So long ago, before they had to run, but she could feel the water on her skin even now.
A girl walked across the open rear of the van, silhouetted against the blue. She glanced into the gloom as she passed, then disappeared. Moonflower held her breath, knowing she had been seen. Sure enough, the girl stepped back into view, peering into the van. Thirteen, Moonflower guessed, maybe fourteen. She wore a puffer jacket and a woolen hat with a pom-pom on top.
“Hey,” the girl said.
Moonflower froze and said nothing, hoping to vanish into the shadows.
“I’m Olivia,” the girl said. “Or Livvy. That’s what my parents call me. What’s your name?”
She waited for an answer, the silence clamoring between them.
“You here with your folks?”
Moonflower felt the cold now, creeping in beneath her coat. She became aware of the mess back here. The mattresses and the blankets and the sleeping bags. The loose piles of clothing. The little propane stove, the dented pots and pans. How her own hair hung lank and dark while this girl’s curled from beneath her hat, the sun catching the golden highlights. Stud earrings and lip gloss. A dusting of
eyeshadow. She wanted to tell the girl to go away but she kept her mouth tight shut.
“I’m here with mine. They’re hippies. I mean, they say they’re Generation X, Nirvana and all that shit, but they’re totally hippies.”
Go away, Moonflower thought.
She saw the hurt flit across the girl’s face.
“Yeah, anyway, I’m bored out of my mind, so if you want to hang out, we’re in the Jayco two spots down. Just knock on the door.”
The girl forced a smile and walked away. When her footsteps had receded, Moonflower scrambled to the doors and pulled them shut, one after the other, sealing herself in the darkness.
Copyright © 2003 by Sara Gran. All rights reserved.
Published by Soho Press, Inc.
227 W 17th Street
New York, NY 10011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gran, Sara.
Come closer : a novel / Sara Gran.
ISBN 978-1-64129-524-6 elSBN 978-1-56947-922-3
1.Women-Fiction. 2. Demoniac possession Fiction. I. Title.
PS3607.R42C66 2003
813’.6—dc21 2002044655
Printed in the United States of America
Interior design by Janine Agro
Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
There was the tapping, and the fighting, and the smoking, and the dreams, and I never would have thought to link them if it hadn’t been for a mistake, or what seemed like a mistake at the time. I had ordered a book from a small publisher out of state—Design Issues Past and Present— that I was hoping would inspire me a bit with a project at work. I came home to the loft one rainy April night pleased to find a package waiting by the door. But when I got upstairs and opened the box I saw they had sent the wrong book—Demon Possession Past and Present —instead. A disappointment, but nothing to cry about. I put the book on the coffee table, forgot about it, and went about making dinner.
After dinner was made I sat on the sofa. Ed was late again. Out of boredom I picked up the accidental book, Demon Possession Past and Present.
On the first page there was a little quiz:
ARE YOU POSSESSED BY A DEMON?
1. I hear strange noises in my home, especially at night, which family members tell me only occur when I am present.
2. I have new activities and pastimes that seem “out of character,” and I do things that I did not intend and do not understand.
3. I’m short and ill-tempered with my friends and loved ones.
4. I can understand languages I’ve never studied, and have the ability to know things I couldn’t know through ordinary means.
5. I have blackouts not caused by drugs, alcohol, or a preexisting health condition.
6. I have unusual new thoughts, or hear voices in my head.
7. I’ve had visions or dreams of personalities who may be demons.
8. A psychic, minister, or other spiritualist has told me I’m possessed.
9. I have urges to hurt or kill animals and other people.
10. I have hurt or killed animals or people.
COME CLOSER
On the next page was an analysis of the quiz results. I had scored a four out of ten; there was the noise in our apartment, I had started smoking again, I had been fighting with Ed, and I had been having strange dreams.
0–3: You are probably not possessed. See a doctor or mental health professional for an evaluation.
3–6: You may be haunted, or in the early stages of possession. Do not be alarmed. Seek a spiritual counselor for assistance.
6–10: You are possessed. Consult with your spiritual counselor immediately. You may be a threat to the safety of yourself and your family.
Possession usually begins with a preliminary stage called “obsession”—the obsession of the demon with the victim. In this stage the victim is still alone in his body but all five senses, and in addition the memory and mind, can be manipulated and disturbed by the Entity. The victim may feel lust, envy, greed, or urges toward any of the sins with stronger force than ever before. It is common for the victim to hear the demon in the form of rapping, tapping, or scratching that seems to follow them around; also common is for the victim to have their dreams infiltrated by the Possessing Entity.
I put the book down and picked up a fat biography of Frank Lloyd Wright I had been meaning to read for months. But just a few pages in, as quiet as a mouse and loud as a gun shot, there it was again.
SARA GRAN
Tap-tap.
That same annoying noise. But it was clearer tonight. Now that I listened to it carefully I was sure it wasn’t the pipes at all. And it was far too loud for a mouse.
Tap-tap. Tap-tap.
I was beginning to get uneasy. I stood up and walked around the apartment. Nothing. It was just like before; the sound was always close, but never exactly where I was looking. If I was in the kitchen, it was in the bedroom. If I went to the bedroom, it seemed to be coming from the bathroom. I gave up and went back to the sofa. I picked up a magazine from the coffee table. Miniskirts were coming back into style.
Tap-tap.
I was more and more uneasy. It had never been this loud before. The rain outside blew against the windows and I tried to tell myself the sound was just the rain, tapping on the glass. Or the pipes. Or a faucet.
Tap-tap. Tap-tap.
Alone in the quiet apartment, I now heard that it wasn’t a tapping at all. More like a pitter-patter. It continued with a steady tattoo around and around the apartment. It sounded like footsteps, scratching steps like a dog or a cat running quickly over a wood floor, claws scraping on the wood.
Pitter-patter, pitter-patter.
Of course it wasn’t footsteps. No one lived above us and there was obviously no one in the apartment with me. The sound got louder, closer. It couldn’t be footsteps. As much as it sounded like footsteps there was no way, it was absolutely impossible, I shouldn’t even let it cross my mind that the sound could be footsteps. I stared at the magazine. Slingbacks were the shoes to wear with the new miniskirts.
COME CLOSER
Pitter-patter, pitter-patter.
The sound that wasn’t footsteps came closer. It circled around and around the sofa. I stopped pretending to read the magazine. It was in front of me, pacing back and forth in front of the sofa.
Pitter-patter, pitter-patter. It stopped right in front of me. I couldn’t move. I was sure I was hyperventilating. Just then I heard a noise to my left and I screamed.
Ed. Just Ed, coming home.
I SAW HER again in a dream that night. I was sitting on the sofa, listening to the tap-tapping, like I had been that evening. I looked down at the floor and I saw a pair of feet. Small, perfect white feet that seemed to materialize from thin air.
I looked up. Above me I saw a bright, black eye. She was standing right in front of me, and yet it was as if I was looking through a keyhole. I couldn’t see her all at once. I saw a pert white nose, and then in a separate view the pink lips wrapped around pointed white teeth. If I looked down at her small white foot I lost sight of everything above the knee. If I looked at her hand all I saw was a hand, with long unpolished nails.
“Don’t fight, Amanda,” she said with her pink lips.
The room went black. I was falling, slipping down out of myself into a warm damp blackness. She took me to the crimson beach. We lay on the sand and watched the fish jump in and out of the ruby sea. Here I could see her clearly, as a whole.
“I choose you,” she said.
“You’ll never leave?” I asked.
“Never,” she said. “Nothing can get me out.”
SARA GRAN
She put her arms around me and pulled me tight against her. Our ribs crushed together and our hipbones slammed and she pulled me tighter until I couldn’t breathe, I was choking, and my spine met hers, vertebrae against vertebrae.
Ididn’t bother to read the rest of Demon Possession Past and Present right then. But I did put it on the bookshelf instead of returning it like I had planned. It was too late, I reasoned, for the other book to be useful now anyway—the project was due in a few days, and it would never get here on time. Besides, maybe someday it would be good for a laugh.
AND ANOTHER FUNNY little thing I noticed. After that night, that dream, I never heard the tapping in the apartment again, and neither did Ed.
ON SATURDAY MORNING we decided to drive downtown to run a few errands. Ed had run out of his allergy pills. He didn’t need them every day, but they were important to have on hand in case he came across an errant cat or a renegade strawberry. I needed a bottle of hair conditioner and had also been thinking about a new toothbrush. We had been meaning to start checking prices on dishwashers—the old one left a thin layer of grime inside the coffee cups. And there was a Tibetan restaurant nearby where we liked to get lunch. In the car we bickered over which drugstore to go to. Like all couples we had developed our own language, a shorthand of associations and memories.
“Are we going to the Italian?”
“Too expensive. Want to go to the crazy lady place?”
“They don’t have my conditioner there. How about the place with the socks?”
“I hate that place. How about the big place?”
“Which big place?”
“The new one, near the crappy French restaurant.”
“Which crappy French restaurant?”
“The one where we went with Marlene, and she got the soup with the—”
“OH! Right, right, right. Near the Tibetan place.”
“Right.”
“Sure, let’s go there.”
In the big drugstore, a quarter of a city block, Ed waited on line to fill his prescription while I found my toothbrush and then my conditioner. With time to kill, I browsed the cosmetics section. I was looking at a cute red lipstick when Ed found me. He had his pills. We paid and left to go to the Tibetan restaurant for lunch.
On our way out of the drugstore we heard a rapid, highpitched beep.
“Step back.” A teenage security guard ordered us back through the alarm. Ed and I rolled our eyes at each other and stepped back into the store. After a nod from the security guard we stepped back out.
Beep-beep-beep.
The guard waved his hand for us to step back in. We stepped back in.
“Open your bags, please.”
We rolled our eyes at each other again. Ed opened his bag, which held the pills, toothbrush, and conditioner, and fumbled
COME CLOSER
in his pocket for the receipt. The guard nodded approval and then turned his attention to my purse. I held it open with an exaggerated sigh. He peered down into the bag and poked a hand in to rummage through the contents: wallet, keys, scraps of paper, change purse. After a quick minute he pulled his hand out, a black tube of lipstick held between his thumb and forefinger. It was sealed in clear plastic and had a wide white alarm strip wrapped around it.
“You have a receipt for this?”
I stared at him, shocked. “That’s not mine.”
“I’m going to ask you to come with me, ma’am.” He put his hand on my arm to lead me toward the back of the store. I pulled my arm free.
“Get your fucking hands off me!”
The guard looked at Ed and me. “Do you want to tell me how this lipstick got in your purse?”
“I have no idea,” I told him truthfully. “It must have fallen in. I was looking at it, but then I put it back. Seriously, I have no idea. Look—” I opened my wallet, which held a few hundred in twenties. “Do you think I would steal a four-dollar lipstick?”
“It’s in your purse,” he said.
“Listen,” said Ed. “We’ll pay for it. How’s that?”
“But I don’t even want it!” I protested.
Ed ignored me and looked at the guard, a come-on-we’rea ll-men-here look. “I’ll pay for it.”
After a dramatic pause the security guard nodded. He escorted us back to the cashier, where Ed paid for the lipstick, and then we left.
Outside the store we looked at each other in astonishment, shaking our heads as we walked toward the Tibetan restaurant. I lit a cigarette and for once Ed didn’t scowl.
SARA GRAN
“I can’t believe it,” I said. I really couldn’t. “I haven’t stolen anything since seventh grade.” When I was twelve and my stepmother said I was too young for makeup I went on a shoplifting spree, ending when I was caught red-handed with a contraband eyeliner.
“Maybe he put it there,” said Ed. “Thought you wouldn’t put up a fuss.”
“Why would he want to do that?”
We were silent for a moment, contemplating the possible motivations of a rogue security guard.
Ed shrugged. “It must have fallen, like you said.”
“Yeah. I guess when I put it back in the dispenser it fell back out.”
“It must have.”
“Must have.”
“Yeah. It must have.”
First Ed burst out laughing, then me. Almost arrested in the drugstore, over a four-dollar lipstick I hadn’t even wanted! We told the story again and again to friends and coworkers, and even to Ed’s mother, over the phone. It was too funny. Hysterical. And even funnier was that at the end I was glad to have the lipstick; it was a dark, brick red that I never would have bought, far from my usual neutral, pinkish brown, but for the rest of that summer and fall I wore the red lipstick almost every day and when it ran out, in mid-November, I went back to the same drugstore and stole another tube.
Leaving work a few days later I walked by a hole-in-the-wall bar between my office and the train. I had walked by it a hundred times before without a second thought. Suddenly I wanted a drink. One drink, I thought. Just one. It had been years since I stopped into a bar, alone, for a drink. I stood in front of the door. It looked filthy inside. One drink, I thought. Just one quick drink.
An hour later I was on my third tequila, sitting at the bar with a man whose name I had instantly forgotten when he introduced himself to me. He was about my age, with short, scruffy black hair and an appealing, slightly wrinkled face. His arms were wrapped in tattoos; Japanese goldfish with bulging eyes and a mermaid with a sweet face and waves and waves of water in between. This was the kind of man I liked in my early twenties, before I met Ed.
“How about four,” the bartender said. I nodded. The man I was sitting with smiled. He had a once-in-a-lifetime smile. The bartender gave us two more drinks.
I looked around the room. Mostly men, mostly tattooed like my drinking companion. A band was setting up or breaking down in one corner of the room.
“You can drink,” the man said.
SARA GRAN
“I can,” I answered, but I didn’t feel drunk at all. Just happy to be out, having fun.
I GOT HOME late and Ed, naturally, was worried and angry in equal parts. I didn’t bother to apologize, or even make up a very convincing lie.
“Worked late, hon.”
Edward sulked, sitting on the sofa in boxer shorts and an undershirt. “I was worried. You could have called.”
I ignored him and went to the bedroom to undress. In a red kimono, I walked back to the bathroom and drew myself a bath, ignoring Edward again when I walked through the living room.
Let him worry, I told myself. Let him see what it’s like, sitting alone, watching the clock, waiting for your spouse to come home. I lay down in the hot water and poured in half a bottle of lily of the valley bubble bath, a birthday gift from Ed I had been saving for a special occasion. My spine and neck relaxed in the soft hot water. I knew we would have a fight after I got out of the bathtub. Ed would ask what my problem was and I would say I didn’t have a problem and he would say I was sure acting like I had a problem. Then I would say I guess the problem is that you think one member of the household can come and go as he pleases while the other has to account for every minute of her time. And he would say where the hell were you tonight. And I would say at the office, like I said. Call and check if you want. And he would look at the phone on its little desk by the bookcases, sitting there like a slug, and then look back at me. Forget it, he would say. Fine, I would say. Fine, he would say. We would go to bed chilly and wouldn’t warm up again until the next morning, or the next evening over dinner.
COME CLOSER
TWO WEEKS LATER. Another night at home. Another takeout dinner, shared late. We had made up from the last blowout but there was still a chill between us, a polite caution that replaced affection. After dinner we sat on the sofa together and disappeared into our separate worlds. A documentary about World War II was on television. Summer had come on quickly and it was so hot in the loft that Ed, who dressed immaculately even at home, left his usual summer cotton pajamas in the dresser and wore just a clean pair of white-and-blue-striped boxer shorts and a white undershirt. I had on a thin camisole and another pair of his clean white-and-blue-striped boxers. Edward flipped through a magazine. I flipped through a book on mid-century furniture design.
I lit a cigarette. Edward gently rolled his eyes. We had made an agreement that I would keep smoking in the loft to a minimum, a concession to Ed’s tragic allergies. I ignored him. I smoked and looked at my book, half listening to the television. The cigarette was in its usual place between the first and second fingers of my right hand.
I thought, What if I stuck Edward with this cigarette?
Everyone has thoughts like this from time to time: What if I burned my husband? What if I pushed him off this cliff? What if I jumped off this roof? The thought came into my head and then disappeared just as quickly. I lifted the cigarette to my lips for a last drag. Then, in my mind, I took it down to stub it out in the little white custard cup I used as an ashtray. Very nice, French, we had gotten a set of six as a wedding present, I don’t remember from whom. I do know that I never before or after made a custard. In my mind my hand moved toward the table and snuffed out the cigarette in the little white cup. My fingers, with a chipped brown manicure, were at my lips, the brown filter
suspended between the first and second fingers of my right hand. I took the last drag and then released my lips. I assumed my hand would move down to the table and put out the cigarette.
It didn’t. Instead my hand made a quick turn to the right and stabbed the burning cigarette into Edward’s leg, an inch above his left knee.
He screamed. I screamed. I ran into the kitchen for ice and Edward kept screaming. He jumped up from the sofa screaming bloody murder.
“Shit! Fuck! What the fuck did you do that for? What the hell is wrong with you?”
I was speechless. Edward sat back down, still cursing. I sat next to him and held a bag of frozen peas over the burn. The screaming tapered off into a muttering, and then silence. He closed his eyes and leaned back.
“What happened?” he asked, after a few minutes. He wasn’t really angry. Just shocked.
“I don’t know,” I told him. “I didn’t mean to.”
“Of course you didn’t mean to,” he said. “I know that.”
“I don’t know what happened. My arm just moved. I didn’t mean to. How’re you feeling?”
“Terrible,” he answered. “It hurts like hell.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry.” He reached over and ruffled the hair on top of my head. “It was an accident.”
“I love you,” I said.
“I love you too,” he answered.
“I don’t know what happened. It’s like it moved by itself.”
“Maybe it’s tendinitis. Julian’s wife had it in her shoulder and she couldn’t even hold her arm up. It used to just flop all over the place.”
“I don’t think so.” I told him. “My shoulder feels fine.”
“You twitched,” said Edward. “A spasm.”
I knew it wasn’t tendinitis. My arm hadn’t flopped. It hadn’t slipped, it hadn’t twitched, it hadn’t fallen. It had moved by itself. It had moved with a controlled movement away from the ashtray and toward Edward’s leg.
Edward didn’t say anything, and neither did I. There was nothing to say.
THE DAY AFTER I burned Edward, I took Demon Possession Past and Present down from the bookshelf and took the little quiz again. Not that I took it seriously. Not that I for a moment believed anything so ridiculous as that a demon or devil was influencing my life.
HELL’S Our Winter Monster Dennis Mahoney
Copyright © 2024 Dennis Mahoney All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Published by Hell’s Hundred an imprint of Soho Press
227 W 17th Street New York, NY 10011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN 978-1-64129-633-5
eISBN 978-1-64129-634-2
Interior design by Janine Agro Printed in the United States of America
Atfirst, Holly’s startled by the strange, green light. One minute, she was kicking the bumper of her car in an empty field, and now a fifty-foot cone with thousands of lights has appeared out of nowhere. She wobbles in the snow, bewildered by the sight, until she remembers Brian talked about this. It’s the giant metal sculpture at the border of the village.
But how the hell did she get here? She touches her head again, convinced more than ever that she’s suffered a concussion. This is the second time she’s lost consciousness tonight, and she has zero memory of leaving the car and walking through the storm. She doesn’t see her own footprints anywhere around her. The snow is falling hard, but if enough time has passed for the storm to hide her tracks, she ought to feel colder than she does right now. Incredibly, her core is full of energy and warmth, as if she hasn’t been exposed to the elements at all.
And yet she also feels defenseless, like a kid without her parents. Lost in an unfamiliar place, on her own, in a dangerous predicament that’s out of her control. She’s unprepared for this, especially with her memory impaired, and she almost starts crying. This is all too much.
DENNIS MAHONEY
But then she thinks: No. Fuck that. Fight. She was unprepared for most of last year and battled through. Breadwinning. Caregiving. Managing the home. Shaking off nightmares of violence and blood. She even carried the relationship, almost single-handedly, when Brian couldn’t find his own way through.
She remembers a survival rule she learned last year: she needs to keep moving. Inertia is a killer. She fights through the drifts to the big metal tree, where the light grows brighter and buoys her resolve, and then she takes out her phone and sees a voicemail from Brian.
Holly plays it back, relieved that he’s alive but also annoyed again—irked by the fear and weakness in his voice. It’s always on her to stiffen her backbone, and later she’s accused of being icy and inflexible.The same thing happens at the office with her colleagues. Someone drops the ball, Holly picks it up, and then they act as if she snatched an opportunity away. Suddenly, she thinks, What did Brian just say?
She starts the message over, concentrating hard to hear him in the storm.
He says something pulled him out the window of the car. She feels a cold, dark firework exploding in her brain, remembering but not quite remembering exactly—a shape that had risen in the storm and squeezed around her. Before she has a chance to clarify the memory, Brian says he made it to the big green tree.
She puts her phone away and spins around. He’s here. He must be close. And if they’ve both found the tree, they can’t have wandered far, which also means they probably weren’t unconscious very long. Everything feels safer now. The worst of it is over.
Holly hears a voice. Is it a voice? More of a moan.
“Brian!” Holly yells. “Where are you? I can hear you!”
Another, louder moan crashes her relief because it doesn’t sound good. It sounds like someone suffering. She shouts Brian’s name and walks around the clearing, moving farther from the tree and deeper into the dark. She sees a shape and heads toward it. The nearer Holly gets, the more she grows alarmed, because it seems to be a person lying on their back. Is it Brian? Is he hurt? She dives the last yard and lands on all fours.
It’s an unknown man with a thick, snowy beard.
He stares as if to say, Who the hell are you?
His eyes are shocked and teary, his jaw looks clenched, and he grips his right shoulder tightly near his collarbone.
“What happened?” Holly says.
The man tries answering and rising simultaneously. He groans when he moves and slumps back down. Holly helps him sit and lays a hand on his back, careful to avoid the man’s injured shoulder. She wonders how long he’s wallowed here alone.
“My name’s Holly,” she says. “Can you talk? Did you get lost in the storm?”
His answer sounds agonized and garbled in the wind.
“What?” Holly says, leaning closer to his face.
“I’m Vance,” he says. “I live here.”
He gestures with his chin. Holly sees window lights, hazy in the blizzard, from what appears to be a trailer at the border of the forest.
“What happened to your arm?” she says.
Suddenly he’s frantic, looking all around as if he’s just
DENNIS MAHONEY
now remembered something dangerous is near. Holly looks, too, persuaded by his fear.
“It threw me,” Vance says. “It was huge. Fucking huge! It got the other guy first, and then it grabbed my arm—”
“What other guy?” she says. “Where is he? What did he look like?”
“Where’s my shotgun?”
“Hey.”
“Where’s my gun?” Vance says.
A fresh chill of fear prickles through her body. She holds his bearded chin and turns his face in her direction, making him grimace from the tension in his shoulder. She regrets being rough but needs to focus his attention.
“Look at me,” she says. “Tell me what happened.”
He stares at her, amazed, as if he hasn’t fully processed that somebody is with him.
“You’re the girlfriend.”
“What?”
“I thought it was a bear. I was out here shooting and a fella came up. He saw the same thing. Said it pulled him from his car. Then it rushed us out of nowhere,” he says with quiet awe. “It got him from behind. Picked him up like nothing. It grabbed me by the arm and flung me in the air.”
What the hell? Holly thinks. Everybody’s nuts. In spite of herself, she scans around, dazzled by the whiteout, and feels as if a monster might attack any second.
“My boyfriend,” she says. “Where is he? Where’d he go?”
He shakes his head. “Gone.”
“Vance. Pull your shit together. Where’d you last see him?”
“He was there, and then he wasn ’ t. I’m telling you, he’s gone.”
She startles him by letting out a loud, feral sound. Part snarl, part groan—an exasperated growl. Everything enrages her.The storm.This broken man. Missing, helpless Brian needing her to save him.
“He might be in your house,” she says. “Come on. We’re going in.”
“I gotta find my gun.”
She ignores Vance’s words and hauls him to his feet, jostling his injury and causing him to whimper. She slings his healthy arm around her neck to keep him up. He’s out of his mind with pain, or fear, or frailty from exposure, and he lets Holly guide him through the snow toward his house.
The structure is a pair of mobile homes fused together. They enter a door into the left-hand trailer and the inside glares with stark, fluorescent light. Narrowing her eyes, Holly sees that Vance has gutted most of the trailer’s original fixtures and converted the space into a cluttered workshop. The walls are lined with welding gear and tools, and there’s a broad worktable heaped with scrap metal, clamps, and Natural Ice beer cans. A wood stove burns to her right. Straight ahead, there’s a doorway leading to the other trailer, which is dim with softer lights—presumably his living space.
She calls Brian’s name. Brian isn’t here.
Vance shuffles to a chair and Holly shuts the door. He grabs an open can out of a dozen on the table and drinks the whole thing before tossing it aside. It says a lot to Holly that Vance, staggering and addled, knew exactly which can wasn’t empty when he chose it.
DENNIS MAHONEY
He slumps into his chair. Snow poofs off his body.
“Get me another beer,” he says.
He gestures to a fresh six-pack on the far end of the table. She tugs a can off the ring, pops the top, and hands it over. He pounds it down. The empty can crinkles in his hand.
“It was just like Paul,” he says. “Nothing I could do.”
“You aren’t making sense. I need you to concentrate and tell me something useful. Brian’s still out there.”
“Forget about him.”
“He’s my boyfriend!” she yells.
“I know,” he says. “He told me. He was worried I would shoot you.”
“What exactly did you see?”
He drops the can and stares at her with big, damp eyes. Are they teary from the cold, or is he genuinely crying? Whatever he remembers seems to frighten him profoundly. She feels Vance’s horror flashing on her face, as if he can’t tell Holly and his memory apart.
She claps her hands to snap him back. “Hey, you’re spacing out.”
“I didn’t run,” Vance says. “I stood my ground this time.”
He looks brittle and bloodless, and he holds his bad shoulder with an anxious, pained expression.
“This isn’t right,” Vance says. “It’s like steel. I can’t move it.”
“You must have popped it out of its socket. It’s probably numb.”
He tries pulling off his coat but the pain must be too much. Holly helps him slide his deadened arm out of the sleeve, and then he drops the suspender of his hip waders and tugs at his sweater.
“Leave it on,” Holly says. “You need to warm up.”
He keeps struggling with his sweater, belligerent and wincing. Holly tries to help but he shouts from the pain. He has the strong, musky odor of an animal in distress.
“Cut it off,” he says.
“What?”
“My sweater, cut it off. There’s scissors on the table. Help me out. Please.”
“All right,” she says. “Relax.”
She gets the scissors and snips through his sweater from his wrist to his neck. His hand is limp and cold. Worryingly blue. As she runs the scissors up his arm, careful not to cut him, the blade seems to scrape instead of glide over skin. When she cuts through the collar and peels away his sleeve, Vance looks confused. Holly drops the scissors. They both touch his shoulder, very gently with their fingers, and instinctively retract from the strange, icy hardness.
Holly thinks it’s got to be a prosthetic limb. But no— that’s his arm, frozen solid from his collar to his elbow. Frosted on the surface like a cold piece of stone. At his neck, halfway to his jawline, the skin is red and raw where his shoulder meets the unfrozen tissue. On the opposite end, his lower forearm and hand appear to have lost circulation. Holly’s never seen anything like it. Judging by his startled eyes, Vance hasn’t, either.
“How long were you out there?” she asks.
“That’s where it grabbed me,” Vance says. “I’ve got to warm it up.”
“Don’t jostle it. I think you ought to—”
He stands and lurches past her, heading for the wood
DENNIS MAHONEY
stove. His sweater is mostly on, hanging open with the scissored sleeve dangling to his thigh. He’s a damp, bedraggled mess—confused, somewhat drunk—and Holly can’t decide how to help or what to say.
Vance slips on melted snow. He almost catches himself by grabbing the worktable, but he drops to one knee, twists going down, and clangs his frozen limb against the iron wood stove.
The arm cracks off.
It thumps onto the floor in one big hunk, solid at the shoulder and soft at the hand, leaving a blank, jagged space from his neck to his armpit. He looks like a mannequin that just fell apart. A mannequin that’s painfully alert and fucking terrified.
“No,” Vance says, staring at his arm.
Holly stares, too. She can’t get a breath. Suddenly there’s blood. A lot of blood. Gushing. When his arm cracked off, it took a portion of his neck, and now the veins and arteries are pumping out blood. It shoots through the air, spattering and splashing on the floor and under the table. Blood sizzles on the stove, immediately steaming. Vance paws the wound. His hand slides down and leaves a bold red smear from his neck to his ribs. He slumps and looks at Holly with childlike horror.
“Help,” he says. “Help.”
Holly squats beside him, boots squeaking on the floor. Vance wobbles and she cradles him, supporting his upper body with a hand behind his back and using her other hand to put more pressure on his wound. But there’s so much blood. So much open flesh. They’re face-to-face,
close enough to feel each other’s breath. He’s bleeding out fast. There’s nothing she can do. He stares at her with fading eyes, reminding her of Brian on the night, last winter, when she held him, too. She’s dizzy from his panic and the smell of raw meat. Her vision pixelates and everything’s a hot, woozy glow.
You’re gonna be okay, she wants to tell him. But she can’t. Blood dribbles through her fingers and she fights back tears.
“I’m sorry,” Holly says. “I don’t know what to do.”
Vance’s open mouth takes quick little gasps. There isn’t peace in his expression when he starts passing out—only terror on the wane, like a siren winding down. He slips from Holly’s grasp and settles on his back. She flinches at the spurting blood and presses on his wound again. It’s hard to tell exactly when the flow gets weaker, but eventually the blood is nothing but an ooze.
His open eyes are different now.
He’s gone, she thinks. He’s dead.
Holly scoots back and settles on her heels.
Wind rattles the trailers, but the blankness in her head is louder than the storm, like the blare of sudden quiet after very loud music. Her hands are wet. Her coat is damp. She’s stunningly alone. The stink of blood saturates her nose as if she’d snorted it. Eventually she stands, walks across the room, and opens up the door for a cold blast of wind.
She plunges her hands into the snow outside the trailer and scrubs off the blood. It takes a lot of snow and leaves a lot of slush. She uses fresh snow to wipe the surface of her coat, but the body and the sleeves are almost soaked through.
DENNIS MAHONEY
She isn’t really thinking when she takes out her phone, calls Brian, and gets his voicemail again. When she talks, her words are faraway and not quite now, as if she’s acting in a movie with a speaker in her ear while another, different Holly is feeding her the lines.
Through the snow, beyond the tree, she sees colors in the distance. Flashing red and blue. The beams of moving headlights. Two police trucks are driving straight toward the trailer.
Something else is coming, too. She feels it in the storm again, same as at the car when her mind blanked out. She won ’ t say monster but it’s dangerous. It’s real. It killed the old man, it might have gotten Brian, and it isn’t some delusion she can simply wish away.
She finishes her message to Brian, crams the phone into her coat, and braces at the door.
The Christmas tree ’ s lights blur and disappear. She freezes in the doorway, staring at the storm while it rushes up and thickens, stronger than it’s been, until it’s too late to hide from the huge, swirling form.
This is personal, she thinks. This is terribly familiar.
Sheriff
Kendra Book picks up the arm. She wears disposable nitrile gloves, which are thin enough to feel both the texture and the temperature of Vance’s lost limb. Her mind revolts at the sensations. The slippery blood. The rubbery hand. The frigid upper arm, frozen to the core. She knows it’s solid all the way through by examining the break where his shoulder met his torso and tapping it with the end of her flashlight.
Clink, clink.
The skin, the bone, the meat—they’re as solid as a ham at the bottom of a freezer. Kendra lays the arm exactly where she found it, then turns around and sees how much she’s already disturbed the scene, having walked through the blood covering the floor.
The splatter, and the quiet, and the wrongness of it all make Kendra feel bottomlessly, helplessly alone. Being sheriff, she’s prepared for crazy shit and awful messes, but something this grim and horribly bizarre reminds her that she’s frequently as unprepared as anyone. She’d love to call the cops—except she is the fucking cop. The best she can get is reliable support, and even that is generally in very short supply.
DENNIS MAHONEY
She looks at Deputy Fickett, who reminds her of a pencil. Slender, long, efficient . . . but tentative, somehow. He has a smooth, soft face the shade of an eraser. At the moment, his expression is hardened into shock.
I’m on my own, Kendra thinks for the umpteenth time. She and Fickett arrived only minutes ago, driving up to Vance’s trailer in separate vehicles. Kendra led the way in her Ford F-150, a truck that’s rarely failed her on an unplowed road. They were responding to a chaotic 911 call from someone named Brian. The dispatcher hadn’t gotten clear details but had reported possible gunshots at the Rickman property.
Kendra and Fickett knew Vance Rickman. Everybody did. He was generally harmless, but this wouldn’t have been the first time Kendra had to warn him about firing his shotgun in the vicinity of tourists.
But instead of finding Vance playing with his gun, they found a bloodbath. Kendra cleared the interior with her weapon drawn while Fickett ran outside to look around the trailers. No one else had been there. Now they’re back inside again, and Kendra’s still annoyed she had to tell Fickett to check the perimeter.
She isn’t ready to take her bloody gloves off yet and says, “Reach into my coat pocket.”
Fickett does and says, “There’s only nicotine gum.”
“That’s what I want. Give me two.”
He peels the pieces of gum out of their blister packs and pops them into her mouth. Kendra crunches down, feeling her thoughts sharpen up before the chemical even hits. It’s hard to tell anymore if it’s the nicotine, the chewing, or the all-day habit she relies on the most.
She squats again and delicately probes Vance’s wound, examining the surface of the raw, soft flesh. The arm alone is frozen. The rest of him is warm.
“How the hell does this happen?”
When Fickett doesn’t answer, Kendra makes a fist. She asked a similar question almost word for word the day her girlfriend, Taz, loaded a U-Haul to move out of Pinebuck. They’d been solidly together. How the hell did this happen?
Taz had responded with the same blank look that Fickett is displaying right this second. Kendra felt alone then and feels alone now, as if her questions and emotions don’t merit a reply.
Kendra snaps her fingers to get his attention. She winces when the snap speckles blood across her cheek.
“He must have been outside a long time,” Fickett finally says. “Maybe he got hung up on his tree somehow.”
“Except his body isn’t cold. He isn’t even windburned. Look at this wound.”
She works her jaws hard, trying to fight the queasy smell with her Fruit Freeze gum. It tastes like chewing on a fruity piece of gristle.
“Vance was always welding and playing around with metal,” Fickett finally says. “You ever seen Terminator 2?”
Now it’s Kendra’s turn to give the blank stare.
“What’s that stuff?” he says. “Liquid nitrogen. Maybe he was using that for metal somehow, spilled some on his arm, and cracked it right off.”
“Damn,” she says. “Maybe he was actually a robot.”
Fickett looks abashed. She instantly regrets mocking his suggestion, but she can’t help wishing he were more than
DENNIS MAHONEY
her subordinate. Someone she could lean on. Someone like a partner. She turns the conversation to harder, simpler facts.
“Tell me again about that 911 call.”
“Dispatcher said it was hard to hear. Windy, like an outside call. The caller identified himself as Brian. Said he and his girlfriend spun off Route 4 and got separated. Said he was here at the tree and Vance was shooting. The dispatcher heard shots.”
“I don’t see his gun,” Kendra says. “Shooting one minute, attacked shortly after. He wouldn’t have put it away. ”
“It must be outside.”
“That or someone took it.”
She reexamines the prints on the floor. It’s easy to identify hers and Fickett’s. Vance’s boots are clean because he apparently fell where they found him and never walked through his own blood. But there’s a third set of prints—also boots, slightly smaller—that lead away from Vance toward the trailer door. Kendra opens the door and tucks her chin against the wind, looking down at the threshold where the footprints stop and overlap themselves, as if whoever wore the boots stood there a while.
Outside, several tracks lead toward the trailer—she can tell the direction by the way the snow’s been shoved forward—including hers and Fickett’s, along with some partially snowed-over tracks that must have happened earlier. There’s a lot of red slush, like someone cleaned their hands. But she doesn’t see evidence that someone walked away.
Only an hour after dark, with the whole storm ahead,
and she’s already had to hold a dead man’s arm. It pisses Kendra off. The trouble never ends.
There’s always more coming, Cookie had told her in the diner. Fix what you can and let the rest go.
But what if nothing gets fixed and I can’t let go?
Kendra’s known cops who totally unravel from the bad, slow spiral of an unsolved case. They blame themselves. They second-guess everything they do. And then eventually, they start to bobble unrelated cases, feeling more and more futile and incompetent and angry. Kendra feels the same about the Skylars’ disappearance. She even feels the same about Taz taking off. Neither problem solved. Neither loss let go. And now tonight, with the blood squeaking underneath her boots, her confidence is shot.
She’s suddenly ashamed to be pitying herself with poor Vance Rickman savaged on the floor.
“What are you thinking?” Fickett asks.
“I’m thinking about the bear that killed Paul Whittington. Vance never quit obsessing over that. He looked for bears, shot at bears, talked about bears. He always seemed terrified a bear would get him. ”
“You think a bear did this?”
“No. But something came and got him, so I guess his fears were justified.”
A loner, Kendra thinks, who couldn’t make it on his own.
She snaps her gloves off and says, “Get Davis over here. Then follow these tracks into the field and find exactly where they came from. After that, I want you to check Route 4 and see if there’s a car off the road. Call the medical examiner, too.”
“What are you going to do?”
DENNIS MAHONEY
“Look for someone covered in blood or carrying Vance’s gun. ”
That’s what she always has to do when something goes wrong: pull her shit together quick and face the worst of it alone.
and Oliver walk with interlocked elbows. They’re in love. They’re high. They’re extra in love because they’re high, and because it’s their four-year wedding anniversary, and because the blizzard is beautiful and wildly romantic—an invigorating chaos they’re savoring on the half-mile walk from a cushy restaurant back to a snuggly firelit cabin. They have nowhere to go but directly into bed, and the painful cold will only make the bed feel warmer.
Gary passes Oliver the vape pen, holding in a lungful of Cantaloupe Haze. Oliver takes a hit and holds his, too, and then they kiss and cough and laugh into each other’s mouths. They’ve had a very good year in what was already a very good marriage. Gary and Oliver are that couple, the one their friends might envy or resent if they weren’t so easy and enjoyable together. When they argue, it’s productive. When they get along—and they usually do—it doesn’t make them lazy or predictable or dull.
Their rented cabin is far away from Main Street, nestled near the forest at the outskirts of the residential neighborhood. They could have rented a B&B or regular hotel room, but their own private cabin—more expensive, more exclusive—seemed a better way to go.
“We’ve earned it,” Gary had said.
“Plus, we’re snobs,” Oliver had added.
So here they are tonight: happy, high, and warmblooded after a dinner of roast duck with blueberry sauce. They laugh at the snow, whenever it blows, walking in a winter wonderland.
Gary is small and lean, like a tan little peanut. Oliver’s a tall, muscular redhead who outweighs his husband by fifty pounds. He can bench press Gary and sometimes does. They’re intellectually well-matched. Each of them makes good money. They’re in their midthirties and have seriously started considering adoption.
“I want to try jai alai,” Oliver says out of nowhere.
Gary snort-coughs vapor, laughing at the non sequitur but also, incredibly, at the long chain of connections, in-jokes, and shorthand references that led to Oliver’s statement. It had begun with a server’s mispronunciation of puttanesca, which had brought them to an anecdote about Oliver’s sister, and now it’s led to jai alai and Gary understands it. At times like these, they feel like one person.
Gary stops Oliver in the middle of the road. The street is unplowed. There’s no vehicle or person in sight, and the nearest homes are set back on spacious properties, their lighted windows ghostly in the snow. There’s a streetlight ahead and it’s just possible to make out a reflective snowmobile crossing road sign.
Gary packs a snowball, curves his arm, and flings the ball like a jai alai player with a cesta. He misses the road sign by a mile. Oliver cracks up and makes his own ball. He hurls a very near miss with his bigger, stronger arm.
They try a few more times until Oliver pauses, taking his time to sculpt a perfectly round, aerodynamic snowball.
Oliver flings it at the sign in a long, gorgeous arc. Gary follows its ascent, enchanted by the flight, until the ball disappears in the dense falling snow. They listen for the bong when it finally hits the sign. Instead, they hear a crack, dangerous and loud, and the electric pole next to the road sign tilts to the left. Wires tug and snap, blowing sparks and shaking the power lines up and down the street. The wooden pole breaks and thumps on the road. Gary and Oliver jolt at the sound. The lights go out in the nearby houses, and even though the neighborhood hadn’t seemed especially bright, everything is suddenly and startlingly darker.
“Holy shit,” Gary says.
“That wasn ’ t me,” Oliver says. “That couldn’t have been me.”
They stand and stare, astonished by the fallen pole, until they both decide it must have been a strong gust of wind.
“You made the team,” Gary says.
He belly laughs hard. Oliver laughs, too, but it’s a nervous, trembly laughter. He peers through the storm, trying to see the wreckage in the road. Those are live wires, he thinks, and snow is a conductor. He remembers something about keeping both feet on the ground and shuffling to safety, but before he can suggest that to Gary, something moves near the fallen pole.
Pale. Blurry. Big.
“What is that?” Oliver says. “Look at that. There.”
He shakes Gary’s arm without taking his eyes off the thing. Is it moving? Are those arms? Gary’s laughter sputters
into coughs, and he squints and tries to focus on whatever Oliver’s pointing at.
“You see it?” Oliver says.
“Is that an animal?”
“It’s upright.”
“A bear? But don’t they hibernate?”
It broke the pole, Oliver thinks. It’s bad. It’s something bad. The Cantaloupe Haze makes him vibrate and shiver. Every falling flake is electric on his face, and his shock from all that’s happening is twitching every muscle.
Gary, on the other hand, is dreamily transfixed, as if he’s five years old and standing in a snow globe. Incredible, he thinks. Look at the arms. Look at the size!
“That’s got to be ten feet tall,” Gary says. “It took down the pole. The whole fucking pole! Is that for real? That can’t be real. It’s like an abominable snowman.”
“We should go,” Oliver says, sounding very little for a big, broad man. “Let’s go. We’ve got to go.”
“Wait!” Gary says. “It’s looking at us now. It’s moving. Is it moving? It’s coming right toward us.”
The thing remains indistinct, an enormous snowy figure in the wild, snowy dark. Gary’s fascination overcomes his fear. He’s also reassured—as he always is, with everything— to face the unexpected with Oliver beside him. Almost hypnotized, he watches the figure approach. He actually thinks, in some corner of his mind, about the kind of people who stare at tornados—the ones who just stand there, gazing at the funnel, for reasons they themselves never understand.
It’s thirty feet away now. Twenty.
Oliver was talking. What did he say? We’ve got to go.
He turns to grab Oliver’s arm . . . but Oliver is gone.
Gary spins three-sixty, looking all around, and then he’s dizzy and alone and the thing is almost on him, ten feet away and coming up fast. Even this close, it’s sickeningly vague—a giant, moving shape in a whirlwind of snow. There’s a body. Arms and legs. A head without a face. Gary turns, slips, and runs in one fluid motion, expecting any second he’ll be smashed or flung aside. It’s right behind him, he can feel it, and he bounds through the snow like an athlete pumping up and down through a tire run. His vision is a blur. His legs are burning rubber, weakening and stinging from the terrible exertion.
When he finally looks back, he doesn’t see the creature, which scares him even worse because it might be fucking anywhere.
He stumbles on a buried curb and face-plants hard, and then he rolls onto his back and wipes the snow out of his eyes.
He left me, Gary thinks. He left me here and ran. His legs and lungs ache and everything’s insane—the storm, the dark, his frantic thoughts—and all that makes sense is getting up and running, yelling, “Oliver!” and “Oliver!” and “Oliver!” again.
youthjuice
E.K.
i
Sathue
HELL’S
Copyright © 2024 by Erin Mayer All rights reserved.
Published by Hell’s Hundred an imprint of Soho Press 227 W 17th Street New York, NY 10011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sathue, E. K., author. Youthjuice / E.K. Sathue.
ISBN 978-1-64129-592-5 elSBN 978-1-64129-593-2
Subjects: LCSH: Cosmetics industry—Fiction | Skin—Care and hygiene—Fiction. | Female friendship—Fiction. LCGFT: Horror fiction. | Novels. Classification: LCC PS3613.A9553 Y68 2024 DDC 813'.6—dc23/eng/20231214
Hebe Illustration: duncan1890/iStock
Interior design by Janine Agro
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
hebe
Hebe (hee-bee): The Greek goddess of youth, daughter of Zeus and Hera.
At HEBE, we believe beauty is your birthright. You were born perfect, but life drained you of your vibrance. We return your inheritance. From the boardroom to the bar bathroom, HEBE’s products tap into your natural vitality, making you glow from within. After all, the world belongs to those who bathe in abundance.
In 2013, Tree Whitestone founded her blog, The Dew, with the understanding that peering into someone’s bathroom lets you see their soul. She carried that philosophy forward into our curated line of luxurious (and accessible) skincare and makeup. You are what you put on your face, and our products are made from the purest ingredients. No toxins, no parabens, no artificial fragrance. Just the good stuff. Because we think you should look your best—always. Remember: Beauty is possible.
The interns are dew fresh. The interns are blond, brunette, redheaded. They have waves, bobs, ringlets. Glossy lips and eyelids. Dresses with side cutouts and patterns of flowers, of fruit, of space. They are turning their faces to the sun. They are scaling back, into the shadows, afraid of damage. The interns are wearing hats. The interns have French saloon art and velvet fainting couches in their one-bedrooms. The interns live next to the Brooklyn Bridge, in the East and West Villages, on the Upper East Side. The interns wear matching lingerie and vintage door knocker earrings, tiny cardigans with nothing under-neath, unbuttoned to the pastry swell of their small breasts. How do their nipples not chafe?
The interns carry our lavender satin drawstring pouches with phone, keys, and matte lip stain inside. Matchbooks from Balthazar or Jimmy at the James. Receipts from Dimes. No wallet. Not even ID. If they are killed, if their bodies are found, they will be Jane Doe. They don’t care, they are dancing in backless dresses. They
don’t care, they have nail art. They don’t care, they have a new rib cage tattoo, do you wanna see?
The interns didn’t read that, but they posted the books so you know they would read them if they had the time. There is never enough time. The interns love the artist, want to be the muse. They say, draw me. They say, paint me. They say, sing me.
The interns have symmetrical faces.
The interns carry our lip balm, a status symbol, candycolored tubes jutting from pockets and rolled shirt sleeves like packs of cigarettes. The interns wink and say, Got a light? Smoking isn’t cool anymore, moisturizing is. Health is the new smoking. The interns understand this, and they keep their vices locked tight. They drink green juice and eat kale salad for lunch. They reach for ephemeral ethical consumption with reusable grocery bags and recycled bamboo sundresses that disintegrate in the wash.
And our products. Gilding their cheekbones, kissing their lips, telling them they are perfect and holy and worthy. They are beautiful, luminous, and we make them more so.
The interns, they want and want and want. We give them what we can.
MANY RUMORS: TREE is a natural brunette. She’s a natural blonde. Her father is a politician. Her mother, a descendant of Mary Shelley. Tree dropped out of Wesleyan or she graduated Phi Beta Kappa. Tree sleeps for fifteen hours a night. Tree never sleeps. No one can say how old she is, exactly. She sprung from the womb fully formed, ageless. Someone finds, in the annals of the internet, or a friend of a friend of a friend’s basement, a yearbook photo. Sixteen- or
seventeen-year-old Tree, a black turtleneck gripped around her neck, draped with a circular diamond on a delicate platinum chain. Her white-blond flashbulb hair parted threateningly down the center, follicles marching in a succinct line that exposes her skull. Diamond studs twinkle on her earlobes. Wide-set eyes settle under the broad canopy of her eyebrows. Her smile is tight and compact. Why doesn’t she let her teeth show? I know they are perfect. White and square, the kind in toothpaste commercials. Teeth that dentists dream about. Maybe she paid for them later.
But I don’t think so; I think she was born that way. An ideal smile with both rows visible, and noninvasive gums.
DUSK. THE GIRLS from work gather on the roof, sucking anti-inflammatory turmeric root from vape pens. Tree reclines on a lounge chair, leather slides kicked off and legs hidden inside her pleated midi. The party orbits her. She’s freshly bronzed from a week at Amangiri. Not truly tan, though, not burnt.
Gemma appears at her elbow, perches like an exotic bird on the footrest, and feeds Tree a wedge of cashew gouda off an ivory plate. It feels like something I shouldn’t witness, and I look down at the street, leaning on the partition that encloses the deck.
Soft material brushes my arm and I rotate into the turmeric cloud encompassing the roof. A navy headband. One silver hoop earring. Brown eyes.
“You’re the new girl,” says a petite brunette, her face broad and plain as the bottom of a new shoe.
“Sophia.”
“Emily.”
“Nice dress,” I say, and I mean it. It’s black with skinny jeweled straps, rocket ships and shooting stars printed on the fabric. Something I would wear.
“Thanks. Vintage.” It’s not vintage; I saw it on a mannequin in a shop a few blocks from the office. Considered trying it on. But I couldn’t afford it, so I didn’t bother.
Her lie lands as a blatant challenge. I let it settle, the weight of her fib and my sympathy for her need to seem cooler than she is. Taste, real taste, is curated, not designed.
We nurse mocktails. Nothing I think to say sounds interesting, even to me, so I say nothing for a minute, two. Then, because the silence is oppressive: “Nice night.”
Emily snorts. “Yeah. A dream.”
“So, what do you do?”
“I’m Senior Editor of The Dew. I took over the blog when Tree switched gears to launch the product line.” Emily pauses, sips amber liquid from a plastic coupe. “I was the first intern,” she adds. The phrase has the stilted, rehearsed cadence of something she’s repeated so often that it’s been stripped of its original meaning.
HEBE’s origin story is well-publicized. Tree started taking grainy DSLR photos of her glamorous friends’ bathrooms when she was nineteen, quoted them at length about their beauty routines, and published the results on her website. She saw the appeal in voyeuristic glances at the innermost quarters of the borderline famous. Borderline being key; these women could not be garishly notable. A pop star or a legendary actor would defeat the point, which was the attainability illusion. The women she profiled—sought-after DJs, infamous party girls, fashion bloggers, magazine editors, and the occasional novelist—were, in a way, less reachable than the household
names, origin stories shadowed, wealth and connections concealed.
The site’s most-viewed article was a profile of a reclusive best-selling author. I had memorized the salient details ahead of my HEBE interview. My favorite part is the author’s response to Tree’s question about how she maintains her sig-nature chin-length bob: I trust my hair to stay out of my way and, mostly, my hair listens. The profundity of beauty that has the decency to leave you alone.
“Should I cut my hair?” I say it out loud, though I didn’t mean to.
Emily laughs. She twists her un-split ends around her fist and lets them go. “I take it you’ve read the Dianna Smart interview on our site?”
We giggle like children.
“Sometimes when I edit interviews I’m thinking, damn, I should be on the other side,” she says.
“Photographed in your pool-sized bathtub?”
“Asked about my ideas and my favorite retinol serum.”
Emily peers at the bubbles in her champagne. She puts her coupe on a nearby table. Her lashes are dark, her lips sheeny, as if she dipped her face in lobster butter. So healthy; Dom’s diametric opposite. And Mona’s too, if I let myself go there.
Emily’s eyes are brown marbles threaded with gold. She lowers them and lifts the sleek black vape to her tawny lips. Her too. Smog presses in, sweat gluing hair to my neck in clumps. I dab my moist forehead with the back of a wrist. The gloves are sausage-casing tight.
“Nice gloves,” Emily says, and offers a pull on the vape. “Turmeric root. It’s supposed to cure cancer or whatever. I just like the taste.”
I decline reflexively, then worry I fractured a bonding opportunity. Emily’s breath emits delicate spice. She asks how I enjoy working at HEBE, and I tell her it’s the most fulfilling job I’ve had in my life, which may or may not be true but feels true at the moment.
Emily slyly purses her lips. Takes another turmeric drag. Our chatter embodies the camaraderie of two people who are not yet friends but could be. I leave the party before it gets awkward, a slippery Irish goodbye off the deck, through the office, and onto the street.
MARIGOLD IS SITTING on my desk the next morning. She looks rough. Red lipstick gathers in the cracks of her mouth and dark circles clump under her eyes, a washed-out layer of concealer poorly blended on top. Not ours. Something fuller coverage.
Her imperfection in the flame of office light is jarring. She stands. We square off behind my chair. She’s much taller; my nose would graze her collarbone if we were to hug.
“Tree requests your presence,” Marigold says.
Interns circle the open-plan like flies, distinguished by a shared demeanor. Taut yet expansive. They carry coffee trays and product samples, cutting a weave from the various enclosed offices of the C-suite.
“This way.”
Half the lights are off in Tree’s office, casting an apocalyptic glow. There’s a second door at the back that I didn’t notice before. Like a portal to another dimension. Marigold leads me through, into a pristine room that resembles a high school science lab. Cabinets on three walls, wide tables in the center bordered by tall stools. A full-scale anatomy model with
no legs is nestled on a counter, the worms of her intestines bared.
Tree doesn’t hear us come in; she’s touching the plastic heart. I swear that it pulses as she takes her hand away. A smile swallows her face. Her hair sloshes. I see it now: Tree and Marigold have the same haircut. The same sheeting effect as they turn their heads.
Intensity gathers around Tree, an electric current. Suddenly, I don’t want Marigold to leave me alone with her. But Marigold has already vanished, taking my escape hatch. Clicking the door shut. “Hi. Uh, Marigold said you wanted me?”
My mind plays tricks: Tree in a petal-hued lab coat. A steady, viscous drip, the sound like saline gulping through an IV tube. Tree’s hand reaching, reaching, covered in red fluid. Her skin makes contact and brings me back to myself. It’s just a sleeve brushing my cheek, then a thumb tracing a warm pulse down my neck. I smell her gardenia perfume. Huh. She really is wearing a lab coat. But her hands are clean and she’s dabbing at my upper lip.
She licks a fingertip and wipes at me again. “You’ve got something . . .” Tree squints, her brow folding like the crease of a paper airplane. Botox must not be her secret. It doesn’t allow the face to move that freely. “There. Looked like a chocolate smudge.”
Tree’s neck is so close, a pale runway. I jerk my head away. “What did you need?” I ask, with more force than intended. Tree perches on a stool. She pulls out her phone and starts scrolling. Maybe I can leave.
“Let me tell you a story.” Tree touches the next stool. I take the seat, a reluctant RSVP. Salmon entrée, please. Only there is no wedding food, no boiled prom vegetables. Just Tree and
her ghoulish skinned-alive mannequin in a fantasy science classroom from bubblegum hell.
We are breathing the very same air, our lungs pulsing in time.
The story goes: there is a girl who lives on the edge of a forest. In what town? “Doesn’t matter,” Tree says. “Any forest. Any town.” She lives among the trees. What trees? “Doesn’t matter. Douglas firs. Redwoods. Maples.” Pick a tree, stick with it. That’s the tree surrounding our heroine. She lives with her mother, who is covered in tattoos. The tattoos are all silhouettes of women. Mouths and hands, gesturing. Holding. A lipstick bullet trapped like a cigar between teeth. Curls of line work piled on an outlined face. The mother never talks about her life before the girl and the forest, but she keeps a collection of matchbooks in the top drawer of her armoire, from places dotting the coast of California.
“They live in California?”
No. They share a mismatched wardrobe. Nothing fits right. Zippers snag at the waist and the sweaters are large enough to fit both women at once. The girl doesn’t know where the garments come from. Every few weeks, her mother leaves the girl with three cans of refried beans and disappears for a day or two, returning with a bulging garbage bag. They go through the bag together, pulling green taffeta and maroon silk from the plastic, laying the spoils smooth on the bed in makeshift outfits.
When they finish, the bedroom is the aftermath of a department store massacre. The girl doesn’t ask where the clothes come from. She puts on a new silk slip with the straps that slip down her shoulder and tries to be grateful. The clothes are pretty, after all, and she was taught that pretty is a virtue one cannot afford to deny.
But she has suspicions. Whenever her mother brings a new batch of clothes home, her face is a little younger, too. Collagen-plump cheeks, fewer lines in her forehead. A bruised and bloodied lower lip. The girl asked her mother about it once. “One day you’ll understand,” the mother said, and handed her daughter a ruffled ’80s party dress. “Here, put this on.”
On a cool summer night, her mother comes home with blood on her shoes. Blood on the garbage bag. She tries to hide it, but the girl sees, and pretends she doesn’t see.
Says, “Oh, what a lovely blouse!”
She doesn’t forget though, and the following week the girl follows her mother to the forest border. It’s the first time she’s been beyond the tree line in as long as she can remember, maybe ever. Maybe she was born among the trees.
She trails the dirt road until it intersects with a highway and watches a black car pull up and swallow her mother. The girl waits until the door closes and the car peels off before she sticks out her thumb. Hitches a ride with a stale man in a stale Volkswagen bus, trailing the sleek car carrying her mother into a city. Maybe it isn’t much of a city at all, not what you and I would call a city, just a flat, sheenless cluster of buildings. But it is as much of a city as the girl has ever seen. To her, it’s a metropolis.
The girl starts to get out on a corner and the man puts his big hand on her slim thigh, the oldest story in the world, and she opens the door and throws herself onto the sidewalk. Knees and palms scraped, bleeding, she looks up as her mother vanishes into the crowd.
Here, Tree pauses. “I want to show you something,” she says.
“What happened to the girl?”
“That’s where the story ends.”
E.K. SATHUE
Tree gets up, opens a cabinet over an epoxy resin sink. I’m thinking about the girl, the trouble the mother got into in exchange for all those thrift-store rejects and the swollen lip. The mob, probably. As my grandma Lucy would say, it’s always the mob.
Tree returns with a white jar the size of a clementine. She unscrews the lid, sets it down on the counter. I notice a red dot in the center, pulsing in the hospital fluorescence. Inside the jar is a cream as white and smooth as fresh snow. It smells like crushed flowers, acidic and sweet. My gloved hands tingle with the urge to destroy.
Tree says, “Will you take this home and try it for a few weeks?”
“Me?” I ask, like an idiot.
Tree assures me that yes, she wants me. She tells me not to do anything besides wash my face. No retinol, no serum. Sunscreen is okay. And to record my results in a notebook, which she also provides. The cover is lavender leather, the HEBE logo stamped in the center.
“You’re doing an important service for the company,” Tree says, as I clutch the jar, with all its promise of a new face, a new life.
With that, I appear to be dismissed. Tree calls to me one last time as I move to the door. Her hand is on her long throat, psychedelic magenta swirls on her nails the only spots of color on her blotted disposition.
“There’s nothing as sacred as a young face,” Tree says, with closed eyes, like she’s forgotten I’m there.
DOOMED DREAMS AND unease stalk me through the night. The cream is on the bedside table. Last thing I remember
before passing out is putting it down, the white jar’s cataracted eye staring into my bedroom’s neverdark.
The morning holds a Saturday’s traditional restless energy. A feeling like I’m late for a plan I don’t remember making. I stare at my phone, pick at the tender dead skin haloing my thumbnail until blood bubbles to the surface.
Richard rolls over, his breath deepens. I tuck my bloodied thumb into the palm of my hand and hold my breath, watch the rise and fall of his chest. I imagine reaching over, snuggling into his side. Inhaling his musky night-sweat. I shift and his arm drapes a diagonal across my body, pinning me to the mattress like a butterfly mounted inside a frame.
I stare at the ceiling and count my breath. One on the inhale, two on the exhale. And so on and so on, until I reach nine, then I start over. I’m wide awake. I kiss Richard on the wrist and gently scoot out from under his arm. Satisfied that he’s remained asleep, I put the coffee on and move through the apartment while it brews, examining my face in the mirrors.
In the bathroom, I try to identify the distinct sensation of my features—closing one eye and then the other, opening my mouth—but each gesture is more like touching a numbed tooth than the last. In the apartment entranceway, fragmented across three circular mirrors grouped above the table with its perennial stack of abandoned junk mail, I’m a child. In the toaster ’ s reflection, I am not getting any younger. Closer to thirty than not.
The coffee beeps. I fill an old mug, NYU logo on the side and a chip around the rim that my tongue slips into with each sip. The mushroom powder gives it an earthy flavor that I hated at first but have taken to strongly; I miss it when I drink coffee without it.
Richard appears in the kitchen doorway, damp hair and a towel around his waist.
“Hey there,” I say. “I didn’t hear you get up.”
“Figured I’d hop in the shower, be all fresh-faced when I see you so you don’t leave me.”
He kisses my forehead, takes down a mug from the cabinet, and fills it with coffee from the carafe. Shirtless in the sundappled kitchen, he appears like an apparition from a catalog.
I joke that Richard stays with me because of the apartment I share with Dom, which is beautiful and airy, splashed with yellow light in the summertime. She allows me to live there for a nominal fee, which, as I understand it, mostly covers utilities.
Which is to say, I would date me for the apartment, too.
Richard kisses me on the mouth this time, my coffee mingling with his toothpaste, and goes to get dressed. The next sip burns my tongue. All day I taste blood.
2008
Clark’s Deli was on the main road, a quaint stretch past the train station where the traffic thinned, opening onto squat awnings announcing shops and bars. Inside was a linoleum floor, cheerful rows of gum and candy bars set into the counter, providing a garish contrast with the condoms and cigarettes and scratch-offs tucked out of reach behind the cashier.
Here, on this spot, on a rainy afternoon, Mona’s feet set on a salmon-pink tile and mine on an off-white, our friendship splintered beyond repair.
I can’t remember why we went to Clark’s that day. We usually avoided the place, which was where the popular kids from school bought Arnold Palmers that the employees mixed themselves and poured into massive Styrofoam cups. They’d come to class five minutes late, those white cups flashing spotlight beams on the corners of their desks, squeaking with every sip. Nothing explicitly stopped Mona and me from purchasing Arnold Palmers before first period like our classmates, the same way nothing stopped us from leaving campus at
lunch or shopping for polos and jeans at Abercrombie & Fitch in the mall. At the same time, these activities were aligned with a certain social class, counter to our stance of chosen loneliness, that it would look nothing less than desperate for us to adopt them for ourselves.
On this particular Sunday in early March, the sky had turned from cloudless blue to blank stone white in a matter of moments. Mona eyed the scene over her cigarette from our bench in the square, farthest from the church entrance so we could catch God coming.
She gave the air, suddenly chilly, a hard sniff.
“We should take cover,” she said, and pulled me off the bench. She walked to Clark’s with such purpose that, looking back, I wonder what she’d known. Her impassive face betrayed nothing as she stopped under the burgundy awning, aimed her eyes at me, lifted one shoulder in a characteristic shrug, and said, “I want an Arnold Palmer.”
I was the one who opened the door and stepped inside.
Clark’s appeared empty at first glance. The racks were too tall and cluttered, rendering the eye utterly confused, unable to make out where Pepperidge Farms ended and Lay’s began. I blinked until the chaos settled, and I could make out the gleaming dome that housed prepared foods and salad ingredients, the menu suspended above and, between them, a tall boy with sharp cheekbones watching us. His dark eyes glittered like a raccoon’s.
Mona had charged ahead by the time I broke eye contact with the boy. I hadn’t seen him before, which wasn’t unusual. Small towns outside of New York City were not so small, really. People passed through like ghosts, leaving nothing behind on their way to somewhere else.
I couldn’t see Mona anymore, but used the crinkling as she rifled through junk food as a sonic map to locate her. In the back corner next to the refrigerators, she had a family-sized bag of Snyder’s honey mustard pretzels in one hand and an Oreo liberated from its container in the other. “There you are,” she said, and handed me the pretzels.
“Mona, what the fuck?” I whispered, gesturing at the Oreo. She bit into the cookie, sending a spray of black crumbs onto her chest.
“You want one?” Mona reached for the nearest bag. I pulled her hand away. “Ow! What’s your problem?”
Mona shrugged and ate another pretzel. Then she left me in the aisle and moved back toward the entrance. I followed. The boy watched as we came around the bend, leaned back, arms crossed, a bemused dimple pressed into one cheek as though someone had poked him gently but firmly with the eraser end of a pencil.
I waited for him to call us out for stealing. Instead, he turned away in tacit permission. When I looked at Mona, she was chewing.
The craving came over me then. How long had it been since I’d last had iced tea or lemonade? Neither drink impressed my keenly developing taste buds. Sugar-sweet that hurt your teeth, or a bitterness that pruned your tongue. The one time I made lemonade as a child, I’d forgotten to add sugar. Sold it like that too, at a folding table on our postage-stamp lawn— mirthless lemon water for thirty cents a cup. I hadn’t tasted it, and didn’t understand why my customers’ faces shrank after their first sip, why they shuffled away so quickly with barely a thank you. When my mother discovered me outside—I’d made the batch early in the morning while she was asleep,
hoping to delight her with my earnings later in the day—she whisked the plastic cup I was handing to our neighbor Mrs. Greenwood out of my grip, took a sip, and spit the lemonade onto the lawn, spraying my bare ankle and moistening a patch of grass. She made me return Mrs. Greenwood’s change, then watched from our stoop as I went door-to-door down the block, offering refunds.
I couldn’t remember which of our neighbors patronized the stand, so I ended up digging into my allowance and paying every household on our street thirty cents.
I approached the counter. He was wiping down the grill station, pointedly not looking at me. I made a fist and rapped on the glass displaying hard discs of bagel stale from the morning, various cream cheeses, prepared salads.
He spun, a mangled rag dangling from one hand, the other perched on his hip.
“Can I help you?” he said, and his voice held a trace of amused irritation.
“Two Arnold Palmers,” I said.
With exaggerated movements he pulled two cups from a dispenser and filled them to the top with ice. Mona shuffled up next to me, still chewing. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Her upper lip bulged as she ran her tongue over her teeth.
The boy carried the cups to the register, slamming them onto the counter. The Styrofoam buckled under his fingertips. He rang us up, announcing the price in a hollow voice deeper than the one he’d used before. His tone fluctuated with the looping cadence of a lazy hand draped over piano keys.
Since I had ordered the drinks without asking Mona, and since she was poorer than I was and perpetually spending
her meager allowance on mysterious pills and weed, I scraped around in my bag, took far too long to count out exact change.
I dumped the money on the counter, crumpled bills first. Slowly, the boy lifted each coin and dropped them, one by one, into the register. The sound of coins jumping against the drawer’s metal walls frayed my nerves. He didn’t seem to be counting, an edge of antagonism punctuating his gestures, amusement playing at his face, as if it were all—us, Clark’s Deli, this town, the whole world—a big joke.
And why did I feel such a pull toward him, when his smirking confidence should have infuriated me? The boys at school were similarly churlish, but you could tell they did it for attention and that it wasn’t rooted in any real sense of superiority. They were as insecure as any girl; they just displayed it with the false masculine veneers that television and their angry fathers had taught them to adopt as protection.
This boy’s attitude, on the other hand, had nothing to do with us. We could be abducted by aliens in the middle of Clark’s and he’d hardly notice.
Mona took the cups, handed one to me. I felt the boy’s eyes meander over the underdeveloped curves tucked into my light-wash skinny jeans, and that simple, human glance, that urge to look, is what burrowed into my skin, parasitic, and changed the course of our collective history.
My hand shook. Fingers turned smooth and rudderless. They rubbed, useless, against the Styrofoam as it slipped toward the floor. The cup tumbled, and then my legs, from the shins down, and the linoleum became sticky with liquid sugar. All I could think about was my mother’s furrowed mouth spraying drops of lemonade on the grass.
E.K. SATHUE
To say that I wanted to die at that moment sounds dramatic. But I was sixteen, and everything was drama. The wind hurt my skin. Tears could be summoned in an instant, by an especially orange sunset, or the opening notes of a favorite song. Embarrassment in front of a cute boy (I had, between order and payment, decided that he was very cute) was more than enough to render me momentarily suicidal.
Mona was no help; she laughed, and her laughter was the most irritating bell. Fury took hold of me; I wanted to shake her. I had worshiped Mona since childhood, and never once before now had I wished for her to suffer.
Around us, Clark’s turned flat and gray. The boy had returned to cleaning the grill, and I waited for him to notice the disaster. Time extended, traveling down a long and painful funnel, as he finally sensed us staring and whirled around. He came closer, squeezing the rag, glanced first at my empty hand, then at the cup on the floor, then at the vague brown liquid circling my feet. The lid had popped, remaining tan-gentially attached to the cup by the straw anchored through the lid’s hole. Melted ice trailed onto the tile. I fought the urge to nudge the cup with the toe of my shoe and send it spiraling. To make a bad situation worse.
“Was that you?” the boy asked, rhetorically. His words snapped something within me, and I stooped to righten the cup, halfheartedly pushing some of the spilled ice back inside, which only left my palm slick and wet and freezing. I wiped it on my jeans, smearing a handprint.
The boy disappeared through a doorway at the far end and emerged wheeling a bucket and mop. He was giddy as he came around the counter, as if my klutziness were the single most exciting thing to happen to him all day.
I relaxed and smiled up at him. He was so tall. “Sorry,” I said, and giggled girlishly.
Mona hadn’t spoken in a while. She wanted to leave, but I needed to see how far I could take this. Flirting did not come naturally to me; I hadn’t had much practice. I had no idea where to begin. The boy had no name tag. This felt deliberate, as though he had materialized with no history, no future. Only this very moment.
Mona and I stood still as he sloshed the mop around us for a minute, replaced it inside the bucket, and returned to his post. There, he prepared a fresh Arnold Palmer, and delivered it with a shallow bow, one arm tucked behind his back, as though asking if he could have this dance.
I took the cup. Yes.
The little bell on the door fluttered as Mona and I stepped outside. The sun had returned, and my mood was buoyant. My irritation faded. I felt like skipping.
“He was cute,” Mona said, and sucked at her straw. The tip was crumpled and veined where the plastic cracked under her teeth. Mona mangled straws like they had killed her family.
He was cute. I heard it as confirmation. Acceptance of my burgeoning crush. Those days I did nothing without Mona’s permission. I didn’t know what I liked until Mona told me I liked it. We’d be in the car, a song would come on, she’d hum along absently, and from then on I would not be able to get enough of that song. We’d go to the mall and I would think I wanted some shirt or sweater until she shook her head or wrinkled her nose or told me it was what a hooker nun would wear. I’d protest as I slid the garment back onto the rack. But I put it back every time anyway. Nights in the park that ended behind the bushes with some boy started with Mona looking at him,
looking at me, and giving a succinct nod. Mona’s agreement that the boy from Clark’s, whose name, I would later learn, was Chase, was cute—I took it as a sign.
I raised the cup to my lips, taking a drawn-out sip. Sugar hit my tongue, traveled to my brain, making me blissfully dizzy. I was filled with light and sunshine and all the beautiful things. Mona hit me on the arm and took off running down the block. I tossed the cup, still partly full, into a garbage can and chased after her.
When I think back on it now, I see the two little girls we still were running toward a future we could not possibly imagine. This is the one perfect instant I return to in the dark hours when I miss her the most, made all the more precious by its status as the one immediately preceding our downfall.
But ah—wait. Look, she’s getting away.