The Damned Read online

  “Fuck!”

  I released the sleeve and leapt back hard this time, my full weight slamming against the furnace. The bent-metal roar of it echoed up the vents and into the house above.

  The windbreaker writhed and shivered.

  The sleeve I’d been holding reached all the way out of the drum. A hiss of nylon as it extended its full length, then suspended itself a foot over the floor. Nothing for a time. Like it was thinking. A snake waiting for its prey to walk by.

  Then it moved. A round bulge made its way down the sleeve on the inside like a reverse swallow.

  Something appeared from the hole of the wristband at the end. Hard-knobbed, gray-nailed, but most of it black, shining wet in spots. It paused as though making sure it had my complete attention. Then it came out all the way. A burnt human hand emerging to crack its fingers wide.

  I squeezed my back against the furnace and it moaned in complaint. But I didn’t run. Hypnotized by the hand. Its swaying, cobra-head dance.

  Now the other sleeve joined its twin. Both out of the dryer and bending at the elbows to place charred hands on the floor. Clawing all the way out. The rest of the jacket filled out, embodied.

  Including the head.

  Slid out from the collar like a turtle from its shell. A partly exposed skull of bloodstained bone and matted hair. Once blond, now speckled black with charcoal.

  She stood.

  Wearing the green and white windbreaker zipped all the way up. Over her heart, the Dondero High coat of arms.

  Go! Oaks! Go!

  Our high school cheer. Chanted from the bleachers on game days, now shouted inside my head by Ash with mock cheerleader enthusiasm. Ash, who was never a cheerleader, would never have been a part of something so lame, so peppy. Though now she rotated her arms as though her hands held pom-poms. So close her nails almost brushed my face.

  Go-ooo . . . OAKS!

  She stopped. Made a disappointed, I-thought-you’d-be-happy-to-see-me face. A face of skin so loosened by burns it hung off nose and cheek and chin like dripping wax.

  Go, I tried to say.

  “How are you here?” I said instead.

  Ash shrugged. The shoulders of the windbreaker rising to touch the hanging commas of her earlobes.

  The same way I always was. But now—I’ve graduated.

  These words so close they can be felt more than heard. The crunch of sand as you laid the side of your head upon a beach.

  Before, you were my doorway. If you thought of me, dreamed of me, I could come through, she said, and slid one of her feet a quarter step toward me. But now a part of me is here—I’ve got my foot in the door—and I can come and go. Talk and walk and push and pull and bite. The old me!

  Both feet took a full step closer. Her bare, rot-slicked soles making moist slaps on the concrete floor.

  “You didn’t look like that before,” I said.

  Like what?

  “Burned.”

  That’s what happens when you get left behind in a fire.

  “I didn’t leave you behind.”

  Yes you did. You left me in the basement of that house to die.

  “That’s why you tried to bring me back? Because you think I did something wrong?”

  It’s a mistake that needs to be corrected.

  She raised one of her hands and I stiffened in anticipation of her touch.

  You being alive is a fucking mistake, Danny.

  Her hand drifted away from me to the light switch on the wall.

  But you can start to make it right. You can help me . . .

  She flicked off the light.

  In the dark, I could hear her breathe.

  Another thing I didn’t remember from any of the times before. She didn’t need to breathe then. But now she was practicing a forgotten skill, the rattling in and out. The warm stench of her insides.

  “Why?”

  It’s the same question, asked in the same cracking voice, that I put to her over and over when we were kids. One word standing for the implied others.

  Why are you doing this to me?

  And she answered in the voice of the dead. Clear and unhalting, but also hollow. A recording of words already said at some other place, some other time, and now overenhanced to compensate for the absence.

  We’re still twins, Danny. We’ll always be twins. And twins look out for one another.

  She pressed against me in the dark.

  Twins never let go.

  The windbreaker crinkled, bunched up as it was pressed to my chest. Through the material her ribs and collarbone slipped out of place and back again, unhinged. She rose up on tiptoe to place her hand on my face. The flesh rough as a horse brush.

  “Don’t. Please . . .”

  The forefinger found my lips and slipped between them, the taste liverish and sour.

  The middle finger next. The pinkie. Pushed past my tongue like she might slide her entire fist, her arm, all of her into me just as she’d slipped through the sleeve of a jacket.

  Then I went blind.

  A rush of lemon-light. Too much all at once to discern what was there.

  “Danny?” Eddie said.

  I focused on him. Let his eyes tell me that Ash wasn’t there anymore.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” I said.

  “Should we call a doctor or something?”

  “No. But I think we should go. Now.”

  “Okay.”

  He stayed with me as we made our way to the base of the basement stairs, where I did something I shouldn’t have. I asked him not to tell his mother about this. To pretend he came downstairs to check on me and I happened to be coming up at the same time and all was well. No problem, no freaked-out Danny discovered spitting onto the laundry room floor with the lights out.

  “It’ll just worry her, you know?” I said, standing aside to let Eddie go first up the stairs.

  “Sure.”

  “We’re good, then?”

  “Great.”

  I was about to follow after Eddie when he turned on the second step. His face twisted with worry. And sweat. A silvery line just under the curls atop his forehead.

  “Who was that?” he said.

  “Sorry?”

  He glanced up the stairs to make sure nobody was standing there.

  “I can tell you don’t want to talk about it. Like every time I’ve been about to open my mouth your face is all Don’t do it. But I don’t think I can do that anymore.”

  “Okay. Okay. So what are we talking about here?”

  “The witch,” Eddie said.

  18

  * * *

  Why hadn’t I thought of her as that before? It came to me only then that, for decades, whenever I saw a cutout figure of a woman flying on a broomstick taped to a school window at Halloween, whenever I got up and left the room if someone was watching The Wizard of Oz at the scene when Dorothy’s house is spinning around in a tornado and the mean lady who wanted to destroy Toto flies by, I saw Ash, green-faced and cackling.

  “The one who picked up my ball in the park when you . . . when you fell,” Eddie went on, still two steps above me on the basement stairs. “The one who was in the laundry room just now.”

  I was nearly sick moments earlier when Ash stood so close to me, but it took an even greater effort not to be sick now. The worst part was the expression he wore. The eruption of panic that shaved years off him, returned him to darkest childhood, confused and exposed. The revelation that he’d pushed deep all this time for my sake, for his mother’s, and that he couldn’t carry any more.

  He looked like me at that age.

  “She was my sister,” I said.

  Eddie took a sharp breath and it seemed he might weep with gratitude. With those four words, he wasn’t alone in his fear anymore. It occurred to me, with gratitude of my own, that I wasn’t, either.

  “She was my twin,” I said. “But she’s something else now.”

  “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  “Yes.
But there are some people, for one reason or another, who don’t entirely stay that way.”

  Eddie nodded, like this was all he needed to hear, and he would now start back up the stairs. But he was only gathering himself for what he said next.

  “She’s going to kill you.”

  “Eddie. Hold on. Listen—”

  “That’s what she told me!”

  I sent my arm out for something to hold me up. It was sheer luck that my hand found the railing.

  “She’s spoken to you?”

  “A couple times.”

  “In person? I mean, has she touched you?”

  “No. In my dreams,” he said, searching for the right words. “At least they seem like dreams, but they’re not. That’s how they might have started out but now they’re getting, I don’t know, solid or something.”

  “What did she say?”

  “It’s hard to think of things she said. If she’s not in front of you, she gets blurry. Like she’s covering the trail she leaves in your head.”

  “Just tell me what you remember.”

  It was his turn to reach out and hold on to the railing. His skin drained pale and papery as a napkin.

  “How she won’t stop until—”

  “It’s okay. We don’t—”

  “—until she pulls you down under the ice.”

  For a moment neither of us spoke. And in this pause I realized we were still underground, the washing machine commencing its spin cycle, rattling and pounding. Part of me wanted to turn and keep an eye on the laundry room door but I didn’t want Eddie to see how frightened I was.

  As I glanced up the stairs again, thinking I might have heard footsteps on the kitchen floor above, it hit me all at once. This was precisely the position where Ash stood in the house on Alfred Street when the fire wrapped itself around her. Down in the hole of the cellar, looking up. Her fear of being alone greater than her fear of burning alive.

  Don’t leave me here! DANNY!

  With the memory of her scream came a whiff of smoke.

  “Do you smell that?” I said.

  Eddie sniffed the air. “It’s stew in the slow cooker,” he said. “And her. Like girl deodorant or something?”

  This was the longest conversation the two of us had ever had. And it was about Ash. The closest I’d felt to this boy and it was her we had in common.

  “She’s already tried to kill you, hasn’t she?” he said. “She did kill you.”

  “Yes.”

  Something shifted inside Eddie. He stood straight, lifted his chin.

  “What can we do to make her go away?”

  “I don’t know. There was never really anything you could do about Ash. Nothing I could ever figure out. And I’m talking about when she was a living girl. Now? I don’t know. I really don’t.”

  Eddie mulled this over. I assumed he was trying to work up a solution, getting his head around the impossible. But his mind had been hooked on a detail.

  “Ash,” he said, as though the word belonged to a foreign language. “That’s her name?”

  “Ashleigh. She hated it, though.”

  “Ashleigh Orchard,” he said to himself, testing its shape in his mouth. “Ash-leigh Or-chard.”

  Then he did something that startled me. Eddie looked over my shoulder toward the laundry room and shouted into the basement’s darkness.

  “Fuck you, Ashleigh Orchard!”

  The thought passed through my mind that I should tell him that’s not a suitable word for a ten-year-old. But I agreed with him. It was the very thing I’d wanted to shout into the dark many times myself.

  “We have to tell Mom,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Do you want to do it?”

  “We’re family now, right? We do it together.”

  Eddie started up the stairs and I followed. Though not before one last glance back at the laundry room, now still and dark with the end of the washing machine’s spin. There could have been anything in there and you would never know.

  19

  * * *

  In the living room, we told Willa about what Eddie and I spoke of in the basement.

  Later, in our bedroom, I told her everything else.

  How Ash and I were stillborn and something about the experience stole a part of her. How she died in the fire and I died, too, trying to help her, how I never knew why she went to the house on Alfred Street but it may be that it was against her will. How she piggybacked onto me when I came back after my collapse on Cambridge Common. How she’s stronger this time. Not a bedeviling spirit anymore but a material being, acquiring new skills, learning all the things she can do.

  Willa looked at me, unblinking, for the time it takes to breathe in a chestful of air.

  “Okay,” she said. “We’re getting out of here.”

  I TRIED TELLING HER IT wouldn’t make any difference, that it wasn’t the building or rooms in it that were haunted but me, that Ash was able to follow us wherever we went, but Willa insisted we get a hotel room somewhere and, even if I was right, “she can mess up the damned Holiday Inn instead of my house for a change.” She meant to be funny. But I could see how scared she was.

  We picked Eddie up from school in the afternoon and, telling him we were going on “an adventure,” we got a suite at the Commander, the sitting room windows overlooking the Common, so that we could see the very spot where I collapsed, the tree Ash hid behind.

  I pulled the curtains closed. Let Eddie watch back-to-back movies on the TV. Ordered up burgers and chicken wings and beer for dinner.

  It was almost fun enough, distracting enough, to think that maybe I was wrong. Maybe we’d shaken her. I even did the mental math of calculating how long, if I sold the house in Porter Square and liquidated my savings, we could afford to stay there, living in fluffy bathrobes and eating room service every night. A couple years at least.

  Eventually, none of us could fight sleep any longer. Within minutes of Willa turning out the bedside light over the table between our bed and Eddie’s, it started.

  Small things at first. The tap in the sink turned on (maybe Eddie forgot to turn it off after brushing his teeth?), the TV flicked back on with the volume cranked (maybe Willa rolled over onto the remote?). I got up and silenced them both. Returned to bed with a shrug, an unconvincing show to Willa that maybe that would be it.

  The door to the room opened.

  The hush of the rubber runner along the bottom grazed over the carpet. The column of light from the hallway widening over the curtains, our clothes piled on a chair. It remained held open for a moment before it was released. Closed with the solid ka-thunk of the weighted latch.

  Everything still. The faint noise of traffic coming out of Harvard Square, audible a moment ago, was silenced. I could feel Willa awake next to me, head raised from the pillow, scanning the darkness. Eddie holding his breath five feet away.

  Maybe I was the only one to hear it.

  Only a whisper, at once too close to my ear and too far away to assume anyone not used to the sound might detect it. But it was clear to me all the same. Her bright, lifeless voice, announcing her readiness to play a new game.

  Wakey-wakey!

  The bathroom taps, the shower, the TV, the ventilation fan, every light in the room. All of it went on at once. A second later Willa’s scream was added to the cacophony.

  I ran around the room turning everything off. As I went, Ash followed me. So close I could almost feel her chin on my shoulder.

  In a moment the room was returned to quiet. The only thing to hear was the door open and close across the hall, the hissed “Shit!” of the guy who got out of bed to see what the hell was going on in Room 614.

  I stepped out of the bathroom and found Willa holding Eddie against her, the two of them standing at the end of his bed.

  “We heard it, Danny,” she said. “We both did.”

  “Of course you did. It was loud as—”

  “Not the TV and stuff. The voice.”
>
  Eddie stepped away from his mother’s arms to stand between us.

  “Wakey-wakey,” he said.

  20

  * * *

  When we made it back home Willa took Eddie up to our room and assured him they’d sleep next to each other for the rest of the night. I told them I’d be fine on the sofa.

  Besides, I had some calls to make.

  I’d thought of her before that night. Violet Grieg. The old woman who went to hell and brought her father back with her.

  A good man.

  She was the only Afterlifer I’d encountered whose experiences were similar to ours. The NDE that resulted not in consolation or wisdom but a curse.

  Wherever I go, he follows.

  It was four in the morning but I called Lyle Kirk’s home number anyway.

  “The fuck is this?”

  “It’s Danny Orchard, Lyle.”

  “Danny? Jesus, man.”

  “Sorry for calling at this hour, but I’m in a bit of a situation.”

  There was a moment as I heard Lyle straightening from whatever futon or floor he’d been lying on.

  “Sure thing,” he said. “That’s what we do.”

  “Remember the last meeting I came to? That lady who collapsed after talking about her father?”

  “Debbie Downer. Absolutely, yeah. I remember.”

  “Her name was—”

  “Violet Grieg.”

  “That’s right. You have any contact info for her?”

  “No, I don’t. And even if I did, she can’t talk to you, Danny.”

  “Why not?”

  “She’s dead.”

  I was standing. But now I sat.

  “How do you know?”

  “I set up Google alerts on everyone who comes to the meetings,” Lyle said. “You know, staying informed on news among the membership and all that. Her name popped up a couple days ago.”

  “How’d she die?”

  “Suicide. Got it right the second time around.”

  I looked over my shoulder. The sensation of being watched. A sensation I’ve had, in greater or lesser degrees, my entire life.

  “What the hell’s this about, Danny?”

  “Thanks, Lyle. I’ll let you get back to sleep,” I said, and hung up.