Chapter Three: Stones
No kid ever forgets the way through the neighborhood in which they grew up. Like salmon, almost, returning to the headwaters where they were born. Think about the place you lived as, say, a ten year old.
What's the fastest way to get from your back yard to the local candy shop? The ravine in the woods where you snuck wine with your friends or shared a stolen cigarette? Where are the paths, worn smooth by generations of children, that crisscross a town and know your feet even years later? My feet find them now, cutting across empty lots, over railroad tracks. Through the rain, the gray rain that falls on the just and the unjust and the sightless and the ignorant as well as the perceptive ones who put their heads down and push away the truth with liquor or drugs or sex. The rain soaks me to the skin, my too-large dress clinging to my legs and making it hard to run. No matter. I have all the time in the world.
Another turn, and there it is across the brown field full of bits of trash and heaps of turned earth where some enterprising landscaper came to collect topsoil. I stop, arms hanging uselessly at my sides, and stare across the expanse at the derelict house that crouches like a gargoyle against an iron gray sky. 29 Neibolt Street. The Well House. The place where You hide. Perhaps even live. Anything built there is doomed, of course. Be it a jail or a brothel or a church. Long ago the people of this town realized that it was futile to have anything commercial built on that spot. Mysterious fires, violent murders, people gone mad. This was the price of taking up residence here. The last attempt, a private home that was once possessing of a modest sort of grandeur, has lain empty for longer than I've been alive. The inhabitants leaving abruptly after not one but both of their children went missing within a month of each other. Only a fool would approach this place. Only a group of fools following a broken hearted leader who loved his brother and couldn't bear to just go home and forget like everyone else.
And now, only me.
I cross the field, my sandals sticking in the mud, and slog up the creaking worn stairs to the front porch. There's a moment of hesitation before I shove the front door open, and it swings silently inward. Only the sound of the rain, harder now, pounding down on the pavement behind me and bowing the heads of the sunflowers in the yard. The house seems to exhale, dust and gossamer cobwebs and the scent of withered leaves….and something else. I take a deep breath, savoring the strangeness of it, and step into the darkness. I pull the door shut behind me. In the foyer, broken boards on the stairs greet my eyes, tattered curtains hang over the windows, rats scurry through the walls and the wind moans around the sides of the house.
"What the hell are you doing here, Beverly?" I ask myself, hugging my arms against my body as the chill sets in. I can handle discomfort. God knows I've felt enough of it. Now what? What was I expecting? That there would be a giant, eight foot clown standing in the doorway with a plate of warm cookies, ready to invite me in? Maybe not so much, no. Where is it, where did we find you? Well you found us, really. Leading us through this house until finally, in the kitchen, there was the charge and then my hands were slippery with sweat on the fence spike and the tip was sharp and your snarl of pain and rage was inhuman. I move to the narrow hallway, the mud on my sandals making every step messy and treacherous. So I kick them off and leave them right where they are. Screw it. Barefoot, wearing a pale yellow sundress when I should be attired in battle armor, soaked to the skin and shivering, I tiptoe into the dirty kitchen and stand at the top of the stairs leading to the basement for what seems an eternity.
Then, one step at a time, careful to avoid piercing my foot on a stray nail or some other hazard, I make my way down. Down into the cold musty dark where the rats and the spiders and the Well opening await me. It was always supposed to be like this. Called here somehow. Salmon. The stream. Memories. Maybe I really was 'born' here. Certainly the very best parts of my courage and my resilience were laid bare here in this place, and down below in the tower room with the floating bodies and the disjointed carnival music and the scents of peppermint and decay and cotton candy and myrrh. Burial spices from ancient times, the scent that seemed to cling to your skin and clothes. Not unpleasant, but surely a smell that sent warning down every jangling nerve.
I am in the basement now, and the Well is before me. No sound down here but the pounding of my heart. My breathing. Why am I here? Why? Did I come here to find you? Kill you? Just look at you and reassure myself that the nightmare was real? Did I come here to die? Hell of a way to commit suicide, really. Death by Clown. Maybe that's it, though. Maybe I really did come here to die. I approach the edge of the Well and lay my cold hands on its cold stones, sinking to my knees beside it. Staring at the rocks, trying to peer through the gloom. I can barely see a thing. But in the intermittent flashes of light from the storm outside and the barest shafts of wan daylight streaming through dirty windows, I can just make out black splashes on the rocks. Dried. Strangely patterned, as though some viscous liquid had beaded and rolled up instead of down. Mocking physics the way you mocked us all summer. Hesitantly, I touch one of the old stains, my wet finger succeeding in wiping off a small amount. I look at my hand, studying the minute smear. The bent fence spike, covered in dust and cobwebs, lies on the floor not too far off. Was it really me who wielded it?
I raise my fingertip to my lips, tasting the blood. Your blood. Eyes closing as the flavors of sickly-sweet candy and dark smoky salt bloom across my tongue. You were injured when you crawled down this well. And even more injured when you vanished into the deeper opening below this one. If I had any rope, I'd climb down and seek that secondary yawning mouth in the crust of the world into which you disappeared five years before. But the frayed end of the rope beside me is a mere four feet from the spool. Not enough to get anywhere. There are no ladders here. I have no way of getting down.
I came here to die. I came here to put the fear and the sorrow and the memories of Daddy's calloused hands on me to rest. I came here because you were the only miraculous thing that had ever happened to me, the one Thing above all other Things that made no sense and was not mundane and did not have such awful reality about it. Reality was your playground. And we, unwilling playthings. I rest my forehead on the bloody stone, tears running hot down my cheeks, mixing with your blood. It doesn't float. Whatever primal magic that animated it must have dried up long ago. Or perhaps your very being is so decimated as to be unable to maintain its wondrous abilities. Black claws, blood orange hued eyes, immense towering height, grimy satin and the menace of tinkling bells. These were your accouterments, your glamour that shielded whatever in the hell you really were from our eyes and minds. How I wish I had died then, taken by a dark miracle, instead of facing the long defeat of life with some unremarkable ending when my body has had all it can take and my tortured mind finally succumbs to the pain.
There's a shard of glass not far off. Lightening takes a flash photo. Still life of wet girl in cold basement, broken glass on floor. Crumbling well nearby. My numb fingers reach for the sliver, and I carefully bring it to me. Across for attention, down for death. Right? Sure, that's how it went. I've had enough attention to last a hundred lifetimes. This is as close as I can get to the otherworldly being who should have finished me, but did not. The first cut stings horribly, but when I see the blood well up from the gash I feel only a sense of relief. I dig into my flesh again, teeth gritted, and slash from wrist to elbow. My hand fumbles, too slippery to hold the glass anymore. How long will it take? When I die, will it all go black? Will I see something beyond this world? Will you find me, devour my soul before I can escape to Heaven or Hell? Walk into the Deadlights, Bevie.
The last thing I'm aware of as unconsciousness takes me is the feel of claws closing around my upper arm, and a menacing, cold voice hissing at me.
"Idiot girl," it says, low and lethal. There is only darkness, soft warm darkness to sink into. Everything fading. "You could not leave well enough alone, could you."