It Will Just Be Us, page 1
IT WILL JUST BE US
A Novel
Jo Kaplan
To Jackson and Penny for being a far cry from evil
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This novel wouldn’t be what it is without the friends and family who hold up this madhouse. My deepest appreciation to my mom and dad for having endlessly and unquestioningly supported my dream of being a writer ever since I was a weird kid writing creepy stories. Your support means more than you know.
I also want to thank my sister Mal for always being so enthusiastic about my work, even though horror isn’t her thing, and making sure I’m a part of my niece’s and nephew’s lives even from two thousand miles away. You and Marc are such great parents—don’t worry, your kids will never turn out like the one in this book.
Publishing this book, and life in general, wouldn’t be nearly as sweet without Jake, who loves me and gets me like no one else. Thanks for keeping me sane, for being a sounding board, for listening to me babble about writing, for making me laugh, for indulging in conversations consisting almost entirely of quotes from movies and TV shows, for always finishing each other’s sandwiches, and for marrying me.
This book would not have made it this far without those who did the work to actually put it in front of your eyeballs. So many thanks to my agent, Jill Marr, who is an amazing advocate. I am deeply grateful to my editor, Chelsey Emmelhainz, who knew exactly what this story needed and helped make it so much better. And thanks also to the rest of the folks at Crooked Lane!
PART ONE
THE PARABLE OF THE KNOCKER
1
In Wakefield Manor, a decaying ancestral mansion brooding on the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia, there is a locked room. For years it has been inaccessible, closing out from the world all the aborted secrets stilled in its dormant womb. After climbing the main staircase that curves up through the house like a twisted spine, you’ll find a hallway with striped and long-faded viridian wallpaper that evokes algae-choked seafoam. On the third floor you’ll pass a linen closet, a disused nursery, a bathroom with a cracked clawfoot tub, and a wood-beamed room inhabited by broken furniture draped in white sheets. Then the hall narrows and turns a corner, its high ceiling webbed in shadow, and you are faced with a windowless passage, at the end of which lies the heavy door of distressed mahogany—and whatever lies beyond it.
What I have imagined must live in this locked room, if anything can indeed be said to live there at all, are the agonies of ghostly lives playing out on a dusty stage, the callous whispers of betrayal and the succor of revenge; creatures ineffable and unfamiliar as a lamprey must be to an amoeba, not merely vast but vastly alien, having come from either the distant past or the impenetrable future; or otherwise a black hole that invites the earth to leap inside to its death. These wonders have occupied me with indelible curiosity and, I will admit, a long-standing dread of the end of the third-floor hallway.
Imagine a younger me: a deliberate child, inward-drawn, with those two serpentine braids my mother used to weave into my unruly hair. Imagine that child creeping purposely down the hall while her mother downstairs scolds the older sister for breaking a glass.
Left to her own devices, this young Samantha wonders what lies beyond the door. What delicious secrets does it hide? What immortal trappings might she witness were she to peer through the keyhole, just waiting for a skeleton key to twist it into submission? She dares herself to look. Go on, she thinks to herself. Just a peek.
Where’s your sister? a voice from downstairs asks, accusing, then calls for Samantha!
Kneeling on the groaning hardwood, she is just leaning forward to press her eye to the keyhole when footsteps thunder up behind her, followed by her mother’s voice: “Samantha! Get away from there. I’ve told you how many times? You want to pretend you’re deaf, I’ll tell you in sign language.”
A sharp yank on a delicate arm drags her away from the door.
The look on little Sam’s face implies disappointment that her mother has found her so quickly in this dim, remote passage, swollen and close as an asthmatic throat, and perhaps she thinks of all her hiding places and wonders how many of them, truly, her mother has found out.
We may never know, because the hollow gong of a doorbell interrupts us.
Younger me vanishes into the twists and folds of time, and I consider that hallway and the locked door where the ghostly apparition of little Sam knelt. The doorbell rings again, impatiently and heedless of the late hour, unbefitting behavior for visitors. Outside the night yawns breathlessly, cold and still.
The hallway recedes from me as I back away and turn the corner.
“I wonder who that could be?” remarks my mother to no one, rubbing her hands over her chilled arms as she makes her way to the front door.
I descend the staircase that unfurls to the foyer as she unlocks the door, and an uncanny presentiment ensnares me. I call down for her to wait, and she pauses with her hand on the brass knob.
“Whatever for?” she asks in surprise.
I can feel something lurking on the other side of the closed door.
I’d like to explain to her so that she will not think me silly. I’d like to explain to her that closed doors inherently provide us with the potential for threat while offering a simulacrum of cold comfort. Imagine: something is waiting for you on the other side of this door. Perhaps there is a knock, or the ring of a doorbell; you know something is out there, but you don’t know what. Or even worse, there is only silence; you think there might be something out there, but you cannot know for sure. And while the closed door might offer the guise of security from that indefinite world, it simultaneously creates a deeper dread as it conceals whatever stands just beyond. Something in the wind that scratches its way inside, something that slips between the patter of raindrops, something without form until you open the door and look, until you have to open the door, until you cannot stand anymore not to open the door.
“Perhaps it’s Charles Severance,” I suggest lightly.
“Friend of yours?”
“No, Mother.”
She looks at me blankly.
“Don’t you remember The Parable of the Knocker? That serial killer in Alexandria who knocked on people’s front doors and then killed them? He wrote that biblical manifesto about himself. You must remember.”
The doorbell shrieks again with an irascible appeal. We are angering whatever begs to be admitted from the night.
“So you reckon there’s a serial killer out there ringing our bell?” says my mother in her gently chiding drawl.
“I’m all ears, then. Who do you suppose it is?”
“A little swamp creature that’s lost its way, ringing to see if we can spare a cup of sugar. Or perhaps arsenic.”
When she opens the door, the person beyond remains obscured, and I wonder with a thrill who it could be at this time of night. At this time of night? Have I become my mother? It seems so very like a thing she would say. In fact, I’m sure she’s said it just now, if I could only remember exactly when. But then, she is the one who’s opened the door.
“Oh, this is a surprise,” she says, before her tone drops with concern. “What’s happened?”
A little swamp creature, indeed—my enormously pregnant sister, not deliberate in the least, barges through the door. Her heavy breathing floods the foyer, which seems too bright against her red-veined eyes. At either side of her extraordinarily round belly she carries two small valises. It has been raining, and the sodden fraying rope of her hair glistens like the night sky.
“Elizabeth?” says my mother. “What on earth is it?”
The raindrops on her cheeks are tears. “Everything,” she spits out, dropping her bags. “Everything’s gone wrong. Can I stay here for a while?”
“Well, sure you can. But what about Donovan?”
Elizabeth’s words are brittle. “That’s what’s gone wrong.”
“Oh, honey,” my mother says, and wraps her arms around Elizabeth, who crumples into them like a child. From above my sister’s shoulder my mother’s eyes find me. “Well, don’t just stand there. Go put on the kettle.”
My banishment to the kitchen offers something of a reprieve from Elizabeth’s dramatics. Nothing my sister has ever done could be considered deliberate; she is more likely to react from pure animal instinct than from any sense of calculation, from any sense of decency. When we were children, every splinter and stubbed toe against a fallen log provoked wails of distress. Mountains and molehills are all one and the same, equally devastating to the one who pulls the universe in revolutions around herself.
I sometimes think to myself, proudly, that I am not like her. I will never be like her. I will melt into the walls; I will be careful and deliberate in all that I do.
The kettle squeals sooner than I anticipate, as I have some trouble telling time. It slips away from me here and there, quickly now and slow again, like running water—perhaps from living so long in a haunted house.
When I bring out the tea, Mother and Elizabeth have settled themselves in the drawing room. All these rooms have old names. If it were a modern home, there likely would be only the living, the dining, the kitchen, the bathrooms, and the bedrooms; but here in this monstrosity of a manse, built piecemeal over the course of many years in which the previous owners—well, my ancestors, mad, the lot of them—kept adding on as if to confuse the ghosts that live here, there are simply too many rooms not to have names for each of them, or else how would you ever find each other? That is why this o
When I return with the tea, my mother is asking my sister the particulars of her departure from her husband, but Elizabeth is uncharacteristically tight-lipped on the matter. True to form, however, with her attentive listeners, she proceeds to divulge a litany of general complaints: “He never wanted to get married—you remember, he dragged his feet like a child. He didn’t want to be a father. Or he could never decide. He blamed me for getting pregnant.” Angry tears glisten and run over. “He said I should have gotten an abortion!”
“That man,” says my mother, shaking her head. “Well, it’s good you came home. You stay as long as you like. Sam, won’t it be nice to have your sister here? And a baby!” Her eyes catch on Elizabeth, whose face is a mask of despair. “You know, Lizzie, this might be a blessing in disguise. Why don’t I consult the cards?”
“God, Mom, no,” groans Elizabeth. “Can’t we behave like normal people for once?”
Mother hides her frown behind the mug of chamomile. “Needs lemon.” She bustles off to the kitchen, leaving us alone, two strangers who once spent sixteen years of our lives together, with only each other for companionship in this lonely place.
“How long, you think, before she asks to read my palm?” Elizabeth murmurs.
“Well, it won’t hurt if you just let her.”
“What else should I have expected?” she says, more to herself than to me. She has a habit of speaking to herself aloud in front of me as if I’m not there, but also with the full intention of me hearing whatever it is she wants to say. If not, she would just think it like the rest of us.
“So,” she says, as if realizing we are alone, now, for the first time since I left her house after my brief stay with her and Don and moved back here.
As happens sometimes with sisters, once we were adults and no longer lived in the same house, Elizabeth and I became fond friends, with the kind of connection fostered only between turbulent sisters. We met up regularly for coffee and gossip, or lunch while reading movie reviews, or drinks and card games.
It was a system that suited both of us, these weekly visits, until one evening when two drinks at the bar turned into four. I suggested, half joking, that we were both turning into our mother the older we got; that made her angry. She was nothing like Agnes Wakefield, and I had better be grateful for that. I didn’t see why I should be. Our sniping took us onto the curb in the valley between streetlights, and I told her she could pretend to be something else, but she had always been a rotten bitch to me, ever since we were children.
“If I’m such a bitch,” she said, fishing her keys out of her purse, “then you can find your own ride home.”
I watched the taillights of her car shrink away in the darkness. Trees closed in the country road, and she was gone.
As I pulled out my cell phone to call for a ride, it slipped from my unfeeling fingers and skittered across the pavement. Such a brief moment. How many times have I dropped my phone and reached over to retrieve it—something you hardly even think about, it’s such a natural act.
But I was drunk, and I did not notice the person coming up behind me.
When I bent down for the phone, there was a sharp crack on the back of my head. I fell forward, landing badly on my wrist—felt a knee in my back, tried to push away the stranger, but he was too heavy. I could not turn to look at him, so he remained a mystery, a dark weight on my back, reminding me of my own shadow as a child, the ghost who used to follow me around, the tall shape of seething darkness, although perhaps darkness is not quite the right word—not necessarily darkness but nothingness, a shape of nothingness sometimes glimpsed standing at the top of a staircase or the end of a hallway. The Nothing Man, who even my mother never believed existed. And that, I thought in that wild moment, was who knelt on my back, the Nothing Man, and if I did ever manage to turn my head, I would see the terrible emptiness of him.
As if he sensed my thoughts, his hot breath in my ear said, “Don’t try to get up.” Of course I tried, but a hand pushed my head down, pressed my cheek into the gritty asphalt, and I felt the chilling circle, a mouth of metal, press into my neck.
Time sagged. Wind stirred litter and dead leaves across the empty street. Dirt migrated from my lips, mashed against the ground, into my mouth. A beetle crawled across the asphalt near my right eye, its wiry legs twitching. The knee in my back was a sharp weight crushing my gut. I smelled my own alcoholic sweat and a man’s sour musk blanketing me.
My purse was yanked from my shoulder, and with my hair spilling over my eyes, I heard only the sounds of careless rummaging. He took what he wanted, tossed the empty bag to the ground, where it flopped like a dead fish, an empty and forsaken thing.
“Please don’t kill me,” I prayed into the asphalt.
It was eternity before the cold weight of the gun vanished from my neck.
“Don’t try to get up,” he said again, and then the knee was gone as well.
I gasped in dizzy lungfuls of air, hardly aware how much life his knee had choked from my chest, and I waited until his footsteps receded, never looking up, never turning to see his true form. I waited until a lonely car or two blew past on the street. I waited until someone else emerged from the bar and presumed me drunkenly passed out and stepped over me.
He hadn’t taken my cell phone, because it had slid away in the dark. He took only my wallet. What small miracles we are granted.
The police dropped me off at my apartment, but I couldn’t bear to go inside where I would be alone in the dark. When I finally did, and locked the door, and pulled a chair in front of it, and removed the chair to check again that the door was locked, even then, even with the barricade, sleep eluded me, chased away by every rattle of the loose windowpanes and every scratch of wind.
Elizabeth was full of apologies. In one of them, an invitation to stay with her for a while managed to sneak, perhaps unintentionally, past her lips.
How long has it been since I stayed with them? A year, perhaps? At times it feels like only a few days since I moved back home; sometimes it feels like I have never left at all, that everything beyond these walls has never truly existed.
I look up at Elizabeth. It seems strange to see her here; she hardly ever visits. I wonder how permanent her stay will be.
“Do you think it’s over between you two?”
Her face twists. “I don’t know.” She turns her wedding ring on her finger, around and around. “I don’t know.”
Mother returns with extra lemon wedges. “I’ll go make up the bed. The sheets must be dusty. Sam, would you help your sister bring up her things? She really shouldn’t be carrying anything heavy.” She sets down the tray of lemons and stands there as if unsure where to settle her hands. “Just think—a baby, here! A blessing in disguise.”
I carry Elizabeth’s luggage upstairs to her old room, where a four-poster bed holds court with a weatherworn desk and a dresser bearing framed photographs. Soft ragged posters line the walls: Audrey Hepburn, Green Day, American Beauty, a Degas facsimile. Artifacts of adolescent angst. The canopy above the bed drapes down in a gauzy cotton-mouthed smile.
“I see she still hasn’t changed anything in here.” She sits down heavily, and the beleaguered bedsprings squeal. “I used to pretend I was a princess locked away in the highest tower of a castle when I pulled down the canopy around me.” She sighs. “How’s Mom been?”
“Same as ever,” I say. “But I can sense a change now that you’re here.”
She smiles wryly. “Don’t worry. It won’t last.”
She’s right. The next morning, which dawns clear and dewy, a sleepy aftermath of yesterday’s agony of rain, I find Mother in the backyard sitting in her wooden Adirondack chair and gazing with glazed-eyed nostalgia at the tumble of overgrown greenery and puddled marsh leading windingly to the swamp beyond. A tumorous weed-choked garden has grown wild over a defunct stone fountain, now bone-dry and weathered as a tombstone, ensnared by possessive vines, collecting the odd damp leaf to decay in its bottommost parts. Tomato plants bloom enthusiastically amid bushes that haven’t been trimmed in so long they’ve grown rough and rogue, with an air of neglect that doesn’t belong in an inhabited home. But who has the money to hire a caretaker or a gardener in these times, or the energy to keep up such a sprawling, schizophrenic place?
