Magpie, page 2
The job doesn’t pay much, but it’s been enough to keep me in the small apartment that Mr. Mortimer found for me. His friend owns the space and didn’t ask any questions when Mr. Mortimer vouched for me. It even left me with enough to buy the laptop I spied in the window of a pawn shop. When Mr. Mortimer hired me, I was firm with him that I would be leaving in October, told his friend the same thing when I moved into the apartment. It still didn’t stop him from trying to convince me to stay. He must suspect I am in some kind of trouble, and he can’t help but try to solve the problem for me. He is always trying to fix anything broken around the old diner, and I’m arguably the most broken thing here.
He sets down a steaming cup of coffee and pushes it toward me as he takes in a deep breath. “Now, Maggie, if the issue is the rent, you know Lavern and I have a spare bedroom—”
“You know I can’t,” I interrupt before shoving another bite of pie in my mouth. I barely taste the sugary, lemony perfection. Swallowing, I take a large drink of coffee, and only when I’m sure my voice won’t break do I look at Mr. Mortimer and say, “But you know I wish I could.”
Mr. Mortimer offered me the first kindness I’d experienced in a very, very long time. I’m finding it harder and harder to remind myself that come October 1st, I need to be on the run. Because I so desperately want to stay, to remain behind like the stains on the apron, adding my story alongside so many others.
“The tips only get better around the holidays,” he says, another one of his tactics to get me to stay. I let out a hollow laugh as I continue to eat.
It will be hard to find another job, even harder to find another Mr. Mortimer. If money were my only worry, I wouldn’t be leaving. I’ve prepared for this departure, because I knew it was inevitable. Stowed away in a hidden spot in my apartment is more than enough cash to keep me afloat for all of October. I saved every extra penny these last few months to ensure that. The money isn’t what I’m worried about. It’s the thought of staying in one spot that fills me with dread. Staying put, where he can easily find me.
“Is he trying to convince you to stay again?” Peggy asks, the bell above the door chiming to announce her entrance. Peggy has worked at the diner almost as long as it’s been open, and I often wonder if it would crumble to pieces in her absence. Her raspy voice speaks of years of smoking and hard liquor, and her quick, short sentences let newcomers know she doesn’t put up with nonsense. I liked her the instant I met her.
Smiling at her, I hop off the bar stool. I pull my jacket out of my bag and tug it on, knowing the temperature will drop with the setting sun.
“You have to let the young ones run free, Bob,” Peggy says, slinging an arm around my shoulder and pulling me into a tight hug. I try to fake a laugh, but can’t make the levity reach my eyes. Why is this goodbye proving to be so hard?
A glance out the window shows me the sun beginning its slow descent, casting fiery orange across the cloudy sky. I pull away from Peggy and toss my backpack over my shoulders. “I better be going,” I say, forcing a false cheeriness into my voice as I wave goodbye to the two. Before Mr. Mortimer can launch into another well-rehearsed plea to get me to stay, I hurry outside. A sharp, cold breeze hits me in the face as soon as I step out, and I tug the hood of my jacket up against the onslaught.
The walk to my apartment from the diner is a brief one, but as September draws to a close, each trip seems to take longer and longer, giving the sun ample time to set before I get there. Or maybe I’m just ready to be home, to be locked behind doors and away from the moonlight. I’m sweating by the time I round the corner to my street, even in the cool autumn air. I get the tingling sensation that I’m being watched, and I find myself walking at a brisker pace, my heart hammering away inside my chest.
“Magpie.”
I spin around, eyes wild, hair sticking to my sweat-drenched forehead. I must look like a madwoman as I scan the empty streets, my gaze darting around rapidly. My ragged breathing slows as I study each and every shadow. He wouldn’t be standing in the street, even with the sun as mild as it is. It is still daytime, and I’m still safe. I repeat those words in my mind, turning swiftly around. I run the rest of the way to my apartment, not stopping until I slam my door shut and lock it.
I study the solid metal door, with all five locks latched firmly in place, as I try to calm my heart. I can’t shake that sickening feeling of eyes on me. I scrub my hands over my face, a nervous gesture. Peeling my hands away, I rush to my mattress and yank the sheets off, locating the small tear in the material. Leaning forward, I press my hand into the slit, searching. My fingers roam around the fluff and springs inside the mattress, until I feel it.
Sucking in a breath at the sensation that slides over my skin the moment I make contact with it, I pull out a long, blood-red ribbon. Hanging from the end is a wrought iron key. Its gothic design casts a strange shadow, all twisting, ornate curls and jagged edges. The top of the key is crafted in the outline of a bird in flight. Black and white, with its long tail and sharp beak, it’s a bird I know too well. A magpie.
Gripping the key tightly in my hand, I turn and walk back to the door, leaning against it and sliding down to the ground. The sensation of holding the key is overwhelming. It is near agonizing to ignore the call of it, and I only allow myself to hold it for a few moments a day, if only to remind myself that I still have it. Gazing out the window in front of me, I keep watch long after the sun sinks below the horizon and plunges the world into darkness. I sit in the shadows, staring straight ahead, and with an instinctual feeling, I sense the clock ticking over to midnight.
Night has fallen, and I’m no longer safe.
“Maggie, it’s just a house,” Tim says as he rubs my shivering arms up and down. My teeth are chattering nonstop in the autumn cold. I look up at the great Victorian farmhouse, its looming awnings and dark windows staring back at me. It isn’t painted black with gargoyles adorning the drainpipes, nothing like the haunted house I pictured whenever Tim and Jessica brought this place up to me. It looks well-loved, cozy, even. It certainly shouldn’t fill me with a deep sense of foreboding.
It’s just a house.
“Doesn’t it seem strange that they would make us wait this long?” I mutter between my chattering teeth, sinking further into my coat as my eyes stray back to the picturesque house. I shiver again. Tim wraps his arms around me, pulling my back tightly against his chest as he presses a kiss to the top of my head. I try to lean into his touch, beg myself to feel anything when his lips press against my skin. I try to battle the creeping numbness that has filled me steadily these last few years, but after so long fighting, I’ve realized it’s easier to just pretend.
“They have to wait for everyone to get through,” Jessica says, shivering beside me, pulling me from my thoughts. She nudges my shoulder and grins at me, trying to infect me with her excitement. I return a half-smile, the best I can muster. “It won’t be any fun if the place is full of people. The emptiness is spookier.” She makes her voice deep and dramatic for the last word.
“Don’t you want to be scared, Maggie?” Tim asks, holding me tighter, and damn if it doesn’t feel like a cage.
I shift uncomfortably against his hold, and he instantly relents. I take a hasty step away, giving him a sheepish look. How can I possibly explain that his touch borders on suffocating? Tim has never been anything but respectful and kind all through our high school relationship, following us now into college. He is a perfect boyfriend on paper, and it is that perfection that I resent.
It would be so much easier to sink into this numbness if he weren’t there, trying to pull me out of it. I can easily ignore the growing disquiet inside of me when I’m alone. None of my classmates take note of the sullen girl who never speaks up, never asks questions. No one at work questions why I’m not chattier, why I never agree to go out with them for a drink after work. When I’m around anyone but Tim and Jessica, I can let that abyss of darkness inside of me spill out and consume everything. I can drift in it, get lost in it.
Tim and Jessica are another story. Friends since childhood, we’ve grown up alongside each other, a near inseparable trio. We do everything together, and it was a surprise to no one the day Tim finally asked me out on a date. Most people would have thought we would ruin the dynamic of the friendship by dating, but our group’s bond is deeper than that. The three of us would stay up into the late hours of the morning, planning our lives down to the last detail, determining how to always remain in each other’s. I used to love it, melting into Tim’s arms with Jessica by our side, excitedly imagining the future. It used to be so calming to have every detail of my life decided.
I don’t know when the aching cold first crept in. It was so slow it’s hard to say. I became used to it, unaware that it was slinking closer, freezing more of me. I realized it first when we were discussing which college we would all attend, and the conversation suddenly felt like planning my own funeral. I found myself uncomfortable in Tim’s arms, his loving embrace suddenly too tight. I shook the feeling off, too scared to consider why my life suddenly felt smothering. It was the first time I forced a smile onto my face, and I never melted into him quite the same way again.
As high school came and went, and the three of us started college in the fall, the numbness planted deep roots inside of me. I smiled and laughed alongside my friends, though I was too cold to feel the joy of it. Jessica was an expert at reading my moods, but I became even better at faking happiness. If I didn’t acknowledge the chilling darkness that was claiming more and more of my mind, then I wouldn’t have to fight it.
The fake smile I painted across my face became like a second skin, but eventually the numbness claimed that too. It was harder and harder to muster the energy to pretend to be excited alongside Tim and Jessica. They are content to continue to live in our small town, in our small lives. The truth of the matter is that I can’t remember the last time I felt content. I can’t remember the last time I felt. I began to find it impossible to stomach the idea of continuing this life. I thought that maybe if I got out, it would unplug this well inside of me and the darkness would drain out.
I applied to multiple colleges out of state, even one in Ireland, sending the application letters in late one night and feeling like a traitor for it. I never heard back, not even a rejection letter. I tried to hide my disappointment, tried to push down the longing to be out of this town, out of this dull life, out of myself entirely. But the feeling refused to die, festering deep in the pit I shoved it in, rotting me from the inside out. I knew they sensed it. I even caught them on more than one occasion whispering behind my back, when they thought I was well out of earshot.
“—something’s not right, Tim.” Jessica’s voice filters out of our dorm, the door left slightly open. I slow, looking up from the game I’m playing on my phone and listening.
“She won’t talk to me about it,” Tim says, his voice pained, and guilt grows inside of me at the sound. “I’ve tried to get her to talk to a counselor, or an adviser. Fuck, I even tried to get her to just talk to her doctor. But she insists she’s fine.”
“Then she gives you that fake smile…” Jessica muses, and my hands hang limply at my sides as the gnawing cold steals more of me.
It’s easier to be numb than to face my friends, and the fear and worry I know will be etched on their faces. So I turn from them, and I walk away.
I made an effort after overhearing that conversation. At least, I tried to. I told myself if I pretended hard enough to be the Maggie that Jessica befriended and Tim fell in love with, then maybe I would truly become her again. So, when they sat before me, showing me a viral video about a haunted house somewhere close to us, I smiled and demanded we all go as a group. They were giddy, almost jumping out of their seats as they explained the famed nature of the House, and how lucky we were to have it show up so near us.
I closed my eyes and decided to try, try to be happy for them.
I didn’t really have any desire to spend an evening in the cold just to have bad actors in costumes jump out and try to scare me. Yet I was the one to follow the clues in the video, to decipher the exact location of the House. It was a few towns over, but we all quickly agreed to attend on Halloween night. The two of them became obsessed with the House, sharing endless videos and posts about it. If I’m being honest with myself, I think they were just excited that I was responding to them again.
I felt like a monster. I was able to sit alongside my best friend and my boyfriend and start our lives together like we always dreamed. I should have been happy, thrilled to be living this life. But I could only think of Ireland, or New York, or any town that was far away from this one. As Tim moved inside me, his was not the face I saw, my traitorous mind wondering what another’s touch would feel like. Would it chase away the cold that had settled so deeply inside me I was no longer able to find my way out?
The first time Tim touched me, his fingers were so soft and tentative, yet they ignited a fire in me, a fire I wanted to burn in forever. Then his embrace began to feel too tight, his hands trying to hold me like I was water slipping through his fingers. The heat couldn’t reach me, couldn’t ignite me like it used to. The pain in his eyes was too hard for me to acknowledge, and his worried lectures only made me angry, so I pulled back from him. And, eventually, he began to pull away, too.
I knew he could feel it, each time I rolled away from him or pulled back from his touch too quickly, the same touch I used to melt into. I could see it in his eyes each time I ended our kiss too quickly, dipping my head to keep myself from seeing the hurt in his eyes. He does not deserve my disdain. Neither of them do. But I still can’t help but let that growing darkness fester within as I shiver in line for a haunted house I care nothing about.
It was one thing to plaster a fake smile across my face as we drove the miles out of town to an abandoned farm, the house the only structure untouched by time. It is a lot harder to maintain that plastic happiness as I stand shivering in the cold and the damp, waiting to get this night over with. I don’t even like horror films, and the idea of Halloween has always seemed a bit childish to me. But I’m trying, so I force myself to laugh alongside Jessica, attempt not to pull away from Tim too quickly.
We arrived early, but the line for the House was already wrapping around the building. I was surprised to find it nestled in an abandoned Victorian-era farmhouse instead of set up in a big warehouse like the haunted houses in bigger cities. It’s nothing like I imagined it would be. It’s so…normal.
A tall man in skeletal makeup was the first actor we encountered, a doorman of sorts, although there were no tickets to be had. I wondered how the House survives when they don’t charge for admission. The skeletal man looked down at us with his glowing red eyes, and it took everything in me to not take a staggering step back. The makeup team must be incredible; he looked terrifying, and I felt my heart beginning to speed up. I was expecting a ghoulish painted-on face, or a plastic mask, but this man looked every bit like a dying soul.
His eyes caught mine, sending a stirring feeling snaking around my heart as he flashed me a crooked grin. He unclipped a velvet rope, allowing us to enter the queue for the House. As I passed by him, our fingers grazed for the barest of moments—and I felt. For the first time in years, something broke through the numbness in me, and made me feel again.
Tim and Jessica were already several paces in front of me, but I couldn’t pull my eyes away from the man staring down at me with piercing red eyes. He looked as if he was going to reach out to me, and all at once the cold rose up, terrified to be broken again, and I bolted from him.
Catching up with Tim and Jessica, I heard the last of the conversation they were having about the House.
“—you never know where it will be, or what kind of structure it will be in, so each year it’s a different scare,” Tim said. He gripped my hand, tugging on it, and I realized I was staring at the strange man. Breaking my gaze, I let Tim pull me after him as he continued, “You can go every year of your life and live a different adventure inside this place.”
Now, the House looms before us, only a few patrons in line ahead. Our turn to enter will be soon. I can still feel the gaze of the skeletal man searing a hole in the back of my head, and can’t help but turn—just in time to see him clip a black velvet rope behind us, turning away another group that protests loudly before sullenly walking back toward their car.
“I guess we made it just in time,” I comment to Tim and Jessica, but they are too busy chattering away about what they think the theme of this year’s House is going to be. I feel the infection, the festering darkness, beginning to wake up as we wait, growing stronger as my mood sours. I’m damp from the misting rain and freezing from the autumn wind, wanting nothing more than to be back in my room, wistfully scrolling travel websites. Exactly what part of freezing my ass off in the middle of a field is supposed to be fun?
The line moves, and we step closer to the House, the evening dimming around us. Eventually we are the only ones left waiting, and I notice just how quiet the night truly is without the voices from the other groups around us. After the last group makes their way inside, I turn and notice the skeletal man is moving with us, keeping the black velvet rope just behind me the entire time. Almost like we can’t escape. I scoff at that idea, turning back to wait.
The rain turns from a gentle, if annoying mist to large drops, and I can’t take it anymore. I spin on the man, who looks as though he hasn’t taken his eyes off me the entire time I’ve been here.
