Bad Things (14 page)

She was out of the bar before I really knew what was happening,

and by the time I’d got to the street, she was gone away around some

corner I couldn’t fi nd.

When I got back inside the bar the people in the corners were talk-

ing to their companions or looking into their beer. Kristina was back

behind the counter.

“Something you said?”

I glared at her. “Kind of an obvious joke, wasn’t that?”

She stared straight back at me, and I noticed the color of her eyes

86 Michael Marshall

properly for the fi rst time, a pale green shading to gray, like mountain

rock glimpsed through a layer of lichen.

“You look like someone who’s fraternized with a few barkeeps in

his time,” she said. “So you’ll know we work from a limited script.

You ready to pay?”

“I’m sorry,” I said, though I wasn’t. “It’s been a long day, and I’m

tired and pissed off. None of these problems are yours, naturally.”

“Best kind,” she said, slightly less frostily. “You want another

beer, or what?”

I nodded and she poured it out.

“So—Ellen just upped and went, huh?”

“You know her?”

“Not really. Used to come in here once in a while, with Gerry

Robertson.”

“Her husband.”

“Right.”

“Anybody else?”

“No. Defi nitely not. They were a cute couple. I mean, kind of a

May-to-December deal, well, October maybe, he was early sixties,

but they were tight. Gerry wasn’t a dumb guy, either.”

She sounded sincere, but there was something she wasn’t saying.

“And? But?”

“Are you, like, a private detective or something?”

“No. I’m a waiter.”

She laughed. “Really.”

“Really. You got some plates of food in back, I’ll be happy to carry

them around to prove it.”

“We don’t do food anymore. Not since the last couple deaths.”

I laughed, and for a moment it seemed like we caught each other’s

eye, though that sometimes happens when you’ve had a couple too

many beers. “So what aren’t you telling me?”

“Well, just about what you said earlier. Even though it wasn’t true.

About being an old friend?”

B A D T H I N G S 87

“What about it?”

“I got the impression there
were
no old friends with that one.

That where she was before Black Ridge was her business. If you see

what I mean.”

I did, though I wasn’t sure what difference it made to anything, or

whether I cared. I fi nished my beer and went out into the dark, where

it was cold and getting colder, and you could smell the coming rain.

It was only when I was putting my phone on to charge in my motel room that I noticed a new icon on its screen. Someone had left a

message.

I’d walked quickly from the Mountain View, and knew—as the

phone had been in my coat pocket—it was possible I’d failed to no-

tice an incoming call from Ellen. That didn’t mean I wanted to hear

what she had to say. It had taken fi fteen minutes to walk back, enough

to decide that tomorrow was going to fi nd me on a plane back to

Portland, perhaps—just perhaps—via a diversion over the moun-

tains to Renton. If Carol would consent to meet, that was, and wasn’t

freaked out by my suddenly appearing in her near neighborhood after

three years. Maybe that wouldn’t happen, but I was looking for ways

to make the trip up here seem less like a dumb idea.

In any event, it seemed unlikely that anything Ellen had to say

would derail the decision to cut my losses and go. So I might as well

hear it.

I retrieved the message, my thumb ready over the button that

would delete it. It wasn’t Ellen, though it was a woman’s voice.

It said: “Don’t trust her. She lies.”

C H A P T E R 1 3

You live in a place, and you create it, and in time it may come to

seem like a surrogate child—your responsibility and fate, your joy

and cross. The older she got, the more Brooke understood this.

She considered it once more as she stood at the back of her sitting

room, looking down out of the window toward the black velvet of

the forest.

To leave somewhere is hard, especially if claiming that land had

already involved upheaval, and hardship, bloody-minded determi-

nation of a kind most families dare not hope for in a single gen-

eration, much less time after time. It takes strong blood to create

somewhere new, to commit a town to life.

Only after generations of winnowing will it be shown who has

held the center, and always will.

This was something her grandfather had taught her, back in the

good old days of her own childhood. Before bad things happened

and the fl at plains of adulthood widened out. The word he used

was
omphalos
—from the Greek, apparently, meaning “navel.” Put

another way, a web. Grandpa only lived to see the toddler steps of

B A D T H I N G S 89

the Internet, but he understood its principles ahead of time—far bet-

ter than those who now frittered their hours buying and bragging

and networking with individuals who, were their company genuinely

worth having, probably wouldn’t be spending quite so much time

alone in front of a computer.

The truth of the world, as Grandpa taught it, was that everything

in it is related, and can be made to pass through the same point. You,

yourself. I.

To illustrate this he would hold up an object at random, anything

from a matchbook to a donut. He’d note how the matchbook was

constructed of cardboard, in turn made of wood. This led to discus-

sion of trees as a wide and varied species, the manufacture of paper,

and its predecessors, and the importance of logging to the settlement

of the Pacifi c Northwest in general and Black Ridge in particular—a

business his own father, Daniel, had been instrumental in setting up.

He’d move on to what was printed on the matchbook, the colors, and

how these might be traditionally used—red for Christmas, black for

death. He’d comment on typography, how this locked the design in

time and led off down further side roads, from the use of giveaways

in commercial environments back to the development of the printing

process, and the prehistory of the written word itself.

Before he even got started on what the matches were actually
for,

the importance of tobacco to the early colonization of America and

its ritual deployment by local tribes prior to that . . . an hour would

have passed, and then someone would come into the room, breaking

the spell.

Brooke would look up, blinking, having been pulled so far into

the object, unfolded at the center of its interlocking web of relation-

ships, that she had forgotten about being herself.

You could do it with anything. Donuts led to sugar (growing, re-

fi ning, importance to the development of Africa and the Caribbean,

its chemical nature and allied compounds) and to baking (crucial po-

sition of wheat in world markets, genetically modifi ed or otherwise,

90 Michael Marshall

cultural relevance of unleavened bread), and to the history of the

Krispy Kreme corporation (and its retention of a cool 1950s-styled

logo, versus companies like Holiday Inn who’d fi nally drunk the de-

sign Kool-Aid and bowed under the yoke of the rectangle . . .).

At which point her grandpa got up and went over to a drawer

where, after a little digging, he pulled out an old matchbook, showing

one of the old Holiday Inn signs in Massachusetts, not far from the

town where the Robertson family had lived before making the long

and pioneering journey out west.

The circles closed, briefl y, before the web quickly started to

branch out again—a spider scuttling out over the whole of creation.

As she got a little older, her grandfather would encourage
her
to

start the process, giving her a nudge only when she temporarily ran

out of steam. Once you understand that you’re integrated with ev-

erything else, you appreciate there is nothing of irrelevance in the

universe.

That, actually, it
is
all about you.

And in all this time, during the many, many hours they spent in this

game, he never touched her. She knew he wanted to—and her grow-

ing awareness of this, and the fact he never once submitted to the

impulse, led to her loving him very much indeed.

It is impossible to stop yourself feeling things. Feelings are like

cats (as he also used to say). You can enjoy them, appreciate them, be

annoyed to hell by them—but there ain’t nothing you can actually
do

about them. Cats and feelings act outside the realm of human con-

trol. With the continued application of will, however, you can do (or

not do) anything in the world. This she also learned from him, long

before she became familiar with charlatans like Aleister Crowley and

their adolescent excuses for pandering to mankind’s basest instincts,

weary children determinedly playing with their own shit as a way to

appall the eternal parent that surrounds us.

B A D T H I N G S 91

A man’s job is to provide the backbone, not the blood. To be

strong, to be iron, the tree in the forest around which everything

else grows. Some people do, others organize. Some have power

—unfi ltered, prone to excess—and others understand how to direct

it, to gain advantage through its use.

The blacksmith makes the sword.

The knight wields it.

Grandpa had been a strong man. His father, too. Brooke’s own

dad . . . Not so much. He had been
nice,
of course, but nice does not build walls that stand for two hundred years. The matter that worried

Brooke the most in the middle of these nights was the course of the

bloodline now. She had forestalled it going to seed, but that wasn’t

enough. It was time to set up another meeting on someone’s behalf.

Her brother always agreed to try, at least.

She couldn’t do anything about that right now, however, and so

instead she stood and looked out into the forest a little longer, until

the difference between her and it shaded away. You live in a place.

And once you’ve been there long enough, the place lives in you.

The doorbell rang eventually, and she heard Clarisse downstairs pad-

ding across the hallway to answer it. Then a quiet male voice, reced-

ing as he was shown into the sitting room. Time for business.

Brooke glanced in her mirror as she passed it, and didn’t mind

what she saw. Tall, trim, and polished, with thick chestnut hair, clear

blue eyes, and the kind of bone structure that has nothing to fear

from age. She looked like the kind of woman who haunts boutiques

and gallery openings and sits on the board of the local tennis club—

as, in fact, she did. Most people are limited in their perception. What

they see is all they know—and so to look one way, and yet be another,

is the most basic magic of all. Nobody needs to know about the dam-

age inside.

She took the main staircase down through the house—her house,

92 Michael Marshall

their house,
the
house—and across the hallway to the sitting room.

Within it, a man sat perched on the edge of one of the good chairs.

He wore glasses, and a coat that looked expensive.

“Richard?”

He nodded quickly. “Rick. Richard, well, Rick. Yes. I’m a friend

of —”

Brooke cut him off. “I know everything I need to know about

you, or you wouldn’t be here.”

The man blinked, evidently unused to being spoken to in this

way by a woman. Other than his wife, presumably. He looked the

kind of slick, confi dent male to whom his partner would have occa-

sion to use blunt words once in a while.

“Okay. Right. Of course.”

“What can I do for you, Rick?”

“I’ve been told,” he said carefully, “that you can make things hap-

pen.”

“Happen?”

“Make . . . people do things. Change their minds.”

“Sometimes, yes.”

He breathed in deeply, eyes dropping away for a moment. Most of

them did something like this, on the fi rst occasion, as they considered

for the last time whether this was a line they really wanted to cross.

“I’ve got a problem,” he said, all in a rush.

C H A P T E R 1 4

The next morning was bright and clear—unlike my head, having

endured a long night in a bed that appeared to alternate exces-

sive softness and hardness on an inch-by-inch basis. It had been

windy, too, causing branches to move against the back of the motel,

scratching along the shingles. A little after three it got so bad that I

considered going around there and snapping them off. I lay motion-

less in the cold and dark trying to summon the will to get out of

bed, but drifted into a state somewhere between more-or-less asleep

and just-about awake, until eventually the walls of the room grew

slowly lighter.

A shower didn’t make me feel better, nor a long stare in the

mirror. It seemed odd not being able to step out of the door straight

onto a beach, and I realized for the fi rst time how used I had gotten

to my new life. Perhaps you have to try to go home in order to un-