"You sound more lucid now," he conceded.
"Tell me if I was crazy last night, Myles. Tell me if you misjudged."
"I hope not, Angie, because I love you."
Myles was the first boy who"d spoken the wordsI love you to her, when he was sixteen and the revelation had shocked her into laughter, but this time she craved the words" music in a way she hadn"t dared before. Angela kissed Myles"s lips, a light caress of her mouth. Their breath mingled, and she felt his breath seep down to her toes.
"I love you, too, baby," Angela said. "You didn"t misjudge. Now stand aside and let me do what needs to be done. If you try to stop me, we"re about to fight." She had Rob"s .38 in her bag, and Myles knew it. Angela did not want to fight.
With a sigh, Myles stepped away from her.
The moment he did, the bathroom toilet flushed.
Myles pinned Angela beneath him against the wall, gazing toward the bathroom, hardly six feet from them. He expected Tariq to fly out of the bathroom and swoop down on them, she thought. But Tariq hadn"t flushed that toilet. Angela knew that.
From the bathroom, they heard water splashing down the toilet bowl, taking care of its own business. Myles silently held up a single finger to her:Stay here . Like h.e.l.l. Angela shook her head. This wasn"t Myles"s burden, it was hers. As he readied his bow again, Angela"s hand wandered inside her bag, to touch her waiting gun.
Myles took three steps toward the bathroom, ready to let loose an arrow if anything moved, and Angela followed him. Standing behind Myles in the bathroom doorway, Angela saw the toilet"s pull-chain swinging back and forth, its porcelain handle brushing against the wall. But there was no one in the room. The bathtub was empty, including the tub, the best place to hide. The shower curtain was wide open.
"Tariq?" Myles said.
No answer. Myles kicked the bathroom door back, and it slammed against the wall inside. There was no one hiding back there either. But Angela heard the floor squeak in the hall behind her, soft enough to be imagination.
It wasn"t. She sensed motion in the corner of her eye and looked back toward Corey"s room.
The pile of leaves was now a foot beyond the doorway.It had moved .
"Myles," she whispered, tugging his sleeve.
Myles looked where she was pointing. When he did, his cheeks hollowed.
The mound of leaves rustled. A dozen leaves suddenly flew from the pile in a looping dance. They flew as high as the ceiling, deformed b.u.t.terflies, then floated apart, scattering. As one of the leaves drifted near her nose, Angela yanked her face back. The leaf reeked of decay.
"f.u.c.k,"she said. Her skin recoiled.
Somewhere inside the remaining pile of leaves, which seemed bigger now, more cohesive, Angela heard a dry, rattling hiss. The mound hiked itself up, thencrawled forward, snail-like, before falling still. In that moment of stillness, Angela"s heart shook her chest. Her mind begged her to run, but she stared, dumbstruck, as the pile of leaves began to sway. Then, it shot itself two feet closer to her with a fluid, sudden motion Angela had never seen from a living thing.
This time, Angela screamed.
She heard a sound near her ear, Myles"s bow. An arrow cut the mound of leaves straight through the center, imbedding deep in Corey"s doorframe beyond it. Leaves scattered to the floor, individual pieces again, losing all sense of ever having been a single ent.i.ty.
But they had been. And Myles had seen it. He couldn"t deny it now.
Myles"s eyes were riveted to the floor and its bed of half-broken, withered brown leaves. He didn"t move, hardly breathing. The lack of an answer had frozen him.
"Am I crazy now?" she said.
Myles shook his head, dazed. He stepped gingerly to the leaves and nudged them with his foot before quickly drawing back. "Whatwas that? Where"d it go?"
Good question, she thought. Where was the invisible thing that had been in the leaves?
Angela heard gurgling from the bathtub, and then she knew. "The bathroom," she said.
The whole bathroom was clean, the only room upstairs that could make that claim. The tub sparkled, and no leaves or mud remained. If Angela didn"t know better, she"d think Mrs. Everly had come to straighten up today. This was the way she had hoped the bathroom would look when she first brought Naomi here. Well-preserved. Attractive.
But the appearance was a lie. Like Sean had said, things aren"t always what they seem.
Don"t you like my face?
Angela heard the same chilling, disembodied female voice she"d thought she heard in Corey"s doorway. This time, the voice seemed to have come from the bathroom mirror. Angela stood in front of the sink to face the beautiful mirror that was this bathroom"s prize possession.
The mirror"s reflection showed no trace of her.
Instead of her face, the mirror"s gla.s.s showed the bathroom behind her; the spanking clean tub, the toilet with its lid open, the washboard on the wall. Seeing her removal from the place she knew she was standing, Angela"s mind shriveled. She closed her eyes tightly, like a toddler trying to make something ugly go away.
When Angela opened her eyes, a girl with golden pigtails stared back at her from the mirror, her face caked with mud. Grinning in blackface. The girl"s gray eyes laughed at her.
Angela screamed, more in rage than terror, although the terror made her hands shake and rendered her thoughts silent. Spittle flying from her lips, Angela spun in the bathroom for the first heavy thing she could find. She jiggled the porcelain toilet seat to loosen it, yanking with all her strength, then wrenched it free. Regaining her balance, she heaved the seat against the gla.s.s.
The grinning girl cracked down the center; the middle of her face, and her eyes, fell away. With another shout, Angela hit the mirror with the toilet seat again, breaking her thumbnail with a sharp ripple that made her yell again, this time in pain. The seat clattered to the floor.
"Sweetheart,stop," Myles said from behind her. He grabbed her hand, leading her out of the bathroom as broken gla.s.s cracked beneath her feet. "What the h.e.l.l are you doing?"
"I saw her,"Angela said."In the mirror."
"Who? Who did you see?"
Angela realized who, and she couldn"t bring herself to tell him. Maddie. Ma Fisher. Her face as a girl. She"d recognized Ma Fisher"s eyes, gray as the sky outside. Angela clasped their fingers together, and she felt Myles"s pulse clambering. Poor guy, she thought. It was selfish to keep him here. But would he leave if she asked him to?
"What did you see in the bathroom?" Myles said.
Angela shivered despite her newfound calm. "The girl who took Corey from me."
"What do you mean?How?" He sounded desperate to understand.
Angela shook her head. The girl in the mirror was the ghost of a woman who had yet to die. An echo. She hadn"t been like Tariq, not exactly. She"d been something else.
Angela didn"t have time to try to explain.
A metallic clang tolled from the bathroom, shaking the walls like the night the tree fell. Myles readied his bow again, and they backed away from the bathroom doorway, farther down the hall. The clang came again, followed by a loud groaning-wood or metal, she couldn"t tell-and this time the floor trembled, too. The hallway lights flickered once, then died.
"Whatnow?" Myles said, exasperated, not asking her. Asking G.o.d, maybe.
The third clang was thunderous, and mud sprayed from the bathroom doorway, as if from a hose. The foul-smelling mud spat across the hall, drenching the floor and walls near Gramma Marie"s open doorway. Mud ran down the wall like a soupy human stool. Another spout of mud arced out of the bathroom door-from thebathtub? -and this time, the sickly splatter reached as far as the staircase and Corey"s room. Watching mud land within an inch of her foot, Angela cried out. She leaped backward, b.u.mping against Myles.
Staring down at the mud, Angela noticed a clump of something drenched inside it, and it took her long seconds to recognize what it was: bird feathers. A lot of them. Chicken feathers.
Rejected offerings,she thought, not sure where the thought came from, or how she was able to think at all. The smell in the hall was overwhelming, dizzying. Angela wanted to vomit, but her throat was paralyzed. All of her was paralyzed.
Almost as if to wash her, water came next.
Grimy water sheeted down the walls of the hallway. Water dripped in droplets from the ceiling, puddling at her feet. Angela couldn"t remember when the water had started-from one breath to the next, the water was justthere . Another clang sounded, and water poured from the ceiling, nearly too heavy to see through. Myles yelled out, trying to shield the top of his head from the dingy, muddy water, as if he expected it to burn him. "We have togo!"
Those simple words were a revelation.
The attic,Angela thought, another displaced whim that didn"t feel as if it were from her own mind.We have to go to the attic. Angela took Myles"s hand to lead him, semi-blind in the sudden onslaught. Myles followed, cursing words she"d never heard him say aloud. The leaves beneath their feet were slippery from mud and water, and both of them skidded trying to run toward the attic at the end of the hall. Myles"s bow caught in the doorway, nearly knocking him off-balance, but they pulled the bow inside and slammed the door closed behind them.
It wasn"t raining on the attic stairs. Here in the narrow attic stairwell, there was peace.
Their breathing mingled, shallow and panicked, in too much darkness. Not enough light from the attic window was reaching them at their odd angle on the stairs. "Light," Angela whispered, a prayer. If she didn"t see light soon, she would faint from pure fear. Images of dancing leaves and flying mud glutted her mind.
A circle of light switched on. Myles had brought a flashlight, she realized vaguely, grateful. The grooves between the planks of the wall came into sight, and everything behind the closed attic door suddenly seemed very distant. She could still hear the water falling in the hall, but it wasn"t in here. Itcouldn"t come in here, she realized.
This was the place. This was where Gramma Marie wanted her to go.
Behind her, Myles"s breathing was a labored wheeze; she hadn"t known until now that fear made it so hard to breathe. She climbed the stairs, toward the hazy light above them, clinging hard to the wooden pole that served as a bannister.
"When Gramma Marie first came to work here, she and my mama had to sleep up here in the attic. The man who owned this house thought people would gossip if she lived in the main house. She was young then. Andpretty ." Angela knew she was rambling, but rambling gave her solace.
"It"s not leaking up here," Myles observed, ignoring her. He had gravel in his voice. He needed to understand why it was raining in the house. He didn"t know yet that he never could.
"In summertime, it was hard to sleep up here at night," Angela went on, feeling her fear unclogging. "All the heat collected until you couldn"t do anything but swim in it. The baby didn"t mind, but Gramma Marie would lie awake all night and wait for morning. She was just so grateful to be on the land, onthis land, she never complained. Not once. She would read by an oil lamp. And sew clothes for Mama. And cry over her husband who died. You know how I know, Myles?"
Myles didn"t answer her. For now, he was lost from her, trapped inside his questions.
"She never told me, but I remember it now. Iremember," Angela whispered.
By the time they reached the attic and the dim sunlight, Angela was blinking away tears of relief and hope. She had walked here before. Through Gramma Marie, the soles of her feet had touched these stairs before she"d been born.
The ceiling was so low that Angela could barely stand at her full height, and Myles hunched over as he walked behind her. Dust teemed in Myles"s flashlight beam as they surveyed the s.p.a.ce, which spanned the entire second story of the house. Boxes were piled neatly against the walls, leaving the unfinished floor almost clear. Spiderwebs swathed the corners like party decorations. Angela lifted a tarp and found a stack of wooden planks, old building materials. On the floor, there were cans of blue paint, the color of the house, the color of the closet door in the junk room.
Gramma Marie had painted that closet door downstairs herself, Angela realized. To make it easier to find. And one small part of the wall was painted blue up here, near the attic window.
"It"s completelydry up here," Myles said, crouching, feeling the dusty wooden floor. "Could that water be coming from pipes below us? Is there a way Tariq could be doing that?"
Angela didn"t answer. Let Myles surrender his logic in his own time, she thought.
She needed to find the room where Gramma Marie slept. In her imagination, the room was no larger than a walk-in closet, with barely s.p.a.ce enough for a bed and a chair. Angela couldn"t see a sign of any room like that now. She saw no doorways and no door the entire length of the attic.
Instinct drew her toward the attic window, the highest point in the room. The window was in a cove, with high walls on either side. The round window stared out at Toussaint Lane below, and Angela could see the steady rain outside. The window was still cracked in at least three places, and a triangular shard of gla.s.s had fallen out, maybe during that awful clanging, that shaking of the walls.
Angela studied the cove"s walls. She knocked on the right side. She wasn"t sure what she was listening for, but the wall felt dense against her knuckles. Next, she knocked on the left side. That knock was very different. "It"s hollow," Myles said, noticing at the same time she did.
"There"s a way to get in there."
With Myles"s beam to a.s.sist her, Angela ran her fingers along the sloping wall, looking for some kind of entrance around the left corner, outside of the cove. That brought her to the narrow section of the wall that was painted blue. A rusted, old-fashioned heating stove that looked like it weighed a hundred pounds sat in front of the wall, its steel panel inscribedOakdale Sunshine. Beside the stove, there was a three-legged gadget, some kind of b.u.t.ter churn. At the frailest time of her life, soon before she died, Gramma Marie had dragged these items here to protect something.
Downstairs, the angry clang came again, and the floor trembled. Angela"s knees nearly folded beneath her. That sound was a horror.
Only the sound of gla.s.s clinking behind the blue wall, from the hollow, helped her smother the impulse to run out of the house before it was too late. Therewas something hidden here. "L-let"s move the stove," Angela said.
"What are you looking for?" Myles said.
"I don"t know. Just help me, please."
Myles helped her drag the stove away from the wall, knocking over the flimsy churn. A thick, knotted rope came into sight where the stove had been. Angela had to stare at the rope a moment to realize it was a door latch. She couldn"t see the door, but she saw indentations in the paint that betrayed a door that had been painted over. Angela pulled on the rope, but the door stuck.
"Hold up," Myles said. He took the rope, turned, and tugged. His first tug yielded nothing, but he shifted his body to put more of his weight into the pull, and his second one loosened the door. By his third try with a hard grunt, the door flung open with the strong fragrance of incense.
This little room had a sharply sloping ceiling, and it was dark, too. "Light, Myles," she said.
The beam flew inside. In that instant of light, Angela saw a shock of bright colors-green pervading, but also flaming red and orange, white and gold. Colorful banners hung from the ceiling, mirroring the rainbow on the walls. An altar, she realized. Angela had thought Gramma Marie"s bedroom altar was intricate, but she could see now how reserved it had been, almost entirely lacking in color, and taking up so little s.p.a.ce in her bedroom, on a corner table of white wicker. Gramma Marie"s true altar was almost too crowded to take in at once, its colors marvelous.
But Angela"s eyes were drawn to a wide, six-foot wooden cross, painted red, bound with thick, heavy rope. The cross had half a human skull planted on top, with only the twining rope where the lower jaw should be. Ropes lashed the cross with upside-down bottles and a small white chair, all of it bound tight. Dusty bottles hung upside down from the cross. Rag dolls without faces swung on ropes from the ceiling, six of them dangling near the cross. The dolls were upside down, too. They looked like a nightmare come to life.
Sweeping his flashlight over the cross, finding the skull, Myles made a sound Angela couldn"t distinguish. Disgust. Or terror. He took a step back."Holy G.o.d. What-"
Angela felt her heart bounding, too. Whose skull had this been? How had Gramma Marie gotten it, and what did it mean? Why was the skull on top of the cross? And what were the dolls for? One by one, the images repelled Angela. No wonder Gramma Marie had never let her see this altar, she thought. Gramma Marie"s religion was a foreign language to her, its symbols alien.
But Gramma Marie was in this s.p.a.ce, waiting. Angela knew that much.
She took a step inside the room, and the potency of the incense doubled, a cloud of scents over her. Deep scents. Earthy, musky, tart, sweet scents. Sage, lavender, rosemary, cedar. The smell was so luxurious, she forgot to feel afraid. This room smelled like G.o.d.
"Give me the flashlight, Myles," she said.
"Be careful," he said, but handed it to her, raising his hand to his nose as if the skull"s owner had died in here. She couldn"t blame him, but she wished he would come beside her and smell what the room really was. It was a celebration.
Angela could see celebration in the bright chalk drawing on the floor, a symbol far more complex than any of those on her ring: crossed lines, four dots, bulbous ends to the vertical line, feathery flourishes at the ends of the horizontal line, a symbol that meant more than she could understand. She saw celebration in the faces painted on the wall by an amateur hand, the lines uneven and faces too big for the bodies, but nonetheless rendered with love. Brown faces against green clothing in gilded paint, with haloes and light behind their heads. Her eyes lingered a long time on the rendering of an old man with a white beard, bent over, leaning on a walking stick.
A drum stood in the corner, Red John"s drum, another celebration. The sight of it made Angela long to hear it played. She mourned suddenly that she had never seen her grandmother dance to the drum. What a sight she"d probably been. Gramma Marie haddanced.
Directly beneath her, Angela heard the clang again, and the floor jumped. Swinging bottles in front of her clanked together dully, and two small green ones on the floor tinkled, falling over. "Angie, I don"t like this," Myles said behind her. "Nothing should be shaking the house that hard. That feels like it"s from theground, at the foundation."
Whatever kind of intuition Myles had, it was working for him, too. He was right. They would have to leave the house soon.
"Give me a minute. Let me feel her," Angela said.
Angela"s flashlight beam went back to the bottles at the foot of the cross. There, between two bottles at the base, she noticed a small covered pot that looked like it was made of clay. The pot was too small to be promising as a weapon, but this was what Gramma Marie wanted her to have. Angela grabbed the earthen pot and cupped both hands around it, holding tightly.
Agovi, she realized. She had no idea what the word meant, but agovi was what she held.
"Done," she said, and Myles gave her s.p.a.ce to back out of the worship room.
Tears crept down Angela"s face as she thought about the things she would never know about that room, about that altar. But she had rescued a piece of Gramma Marie.
Maybe, she thought, she had rescued her grandmother"s soul.
If a house could feel pain, Angie"s grandmother"s house was in agony. As nonsensical as the thought was, Myles couldn"t discard it as he and Angie raced down the muddy stairs from the second floor and found the chaos waiting downstairs.