Bad Things (33 page)

clothes that were dirty and worn and old-fashioned. The man was

closest, only a few feet away, and as he pushed his face closer down

to mine, like a dog scenting a stranger, I saw it was scarred across the

cheeks and forehead with a pattern of freshly slashed cuts that I knew

was the same as the marks I’d seen on the back of my motel room—

and that his face was my own.

Then they were all gone.

There was no sound, no wind. I got to my feet and panned my

vision across the hundred and eighty degrees in front of me, until my

eyes began to prickle and my ears roar, and fi nally heard something

coming through the undergrowth toward me.

I turned slowly around, as afraid as I ever have been in my life.

And woke up.

C H A P T E R 3 1

She could have stolen a car. She possessed that skill, assuming

the vehicle was of certain types—a legacy of the bad old days. But

she didn’t want to leave town like that, a thief skulking away in the

night. She wanted to leave as Ellen.

Not Ilena.

So she’d gone to the place on Brooker and took the only car they

had left, an anonymous compact. The guy behind the desk told her

many things about mileage and insurance and fi lling the car up

before reaching her (unspecifi ed) destination, but she was unable to

take it in. She didn’t think John was right, that she had a concus-

sion, but her head defi nitely wasn’t working right. She couldn’t re-

member when she’d last eaten—before the hospital, certainly—so it

could be that was it. Could be, but probably wasn’t. It was the town,

the trees. They were all in her head.

After a while the rental clerk stopped trying to tell her stuff she

clearly wasn’t taking in, and gave her the keys. He gave her body a

good looking over at the same time, until she stared at him, and he

stopped.

She went to the lot around the side of the offi ce and stood in

the dark looking at the cheapest car she’d driven in a long time.

234 Michael Marshall

Since before Gerry. Might as well get used to it. The money she had

wouldn’t last long. She would need a job and an apartment and many

other things, to walk around the world’s shelves and try to fi nd ob-

jects and situations to care about, if she could.

Time to start again.

Again.

Only when she was behind the wheel did it begin to feel completely

real, only then did she get her aching, cloudy head around what she

was planning to do: leave the only place she’d ever been genuinely

happy. The cause of that happiness was gone, of course, dead and

gone, but still we put our faith in places. We think that if we just lived

somewhere different, everything would be okay. We believe that if

we paint the stairway a bright new color, and clear out the closets,

our minds will follow. We’ll take just about any ray of hope rather

than accept that 95 percent of the world we inhabit exists within the

confi nes of our own skulls.

She wished she had something to bring with her, but it couldn’t

be. She had brought a few objects from the house the morning before,

the morning of the crash, but they were in a bag in the trunk of her

car and she had no idea where that was. Towed somewhere after the

accident, presumably, but either she hadn’t been told where or she’d

forgotten. It would have been nice to have those things, small though

they were. A couple of items of clothing, bought in special places. A

book in which he’d written a loving message. A napkin from a café in

Paris, from that fi rst weekend. She had secretly put it in her pocket

when he went to the bathroom. She had known it was the start of

something. Sometimes, you just do, and keeping souvenirs is the only

way we have of pinning those moments down before the world takes

them away.

But really, what would she do with those objects? Take them out

once in a while and shed dry tears over them? Use them to remind

B A D T H I N G S 235

herself of the way things no longer were? She wasn’t twenty-one any-

more, either, and no amount of wailing would bring that back, either.

There’s only one piece of baggage you can never really do without.

Ellen lifted the right arm of hers and turned the key in the ignition.

As she drove out through the quiet town she heard her phone beep-

ing in her pocket. John Henderson, perhaps, trying again, as he had

several times that afternoon. She had nothing to say to him. Seeing

him in the coffee shop, after Jassie Cornell had killed herself, had

been like watching a child getting ready to march off to war clutch-

ing a stick as a pretend rifl e. She’d told him as much as she could

without coming right out and saying it. If he didn’t get it, there wasn’t

anything more she could do. She regretted getting in contact with

him, pulling him up here, trying to defl ect her doom into him with

the pattern she’d been taught. There was nothing she could do about

those things, either. As Gerry said, on one of the long nights where

they had talked through her bad times, his arms around her and her

face running with tears:
The past is like an asshole ex-boyfriend, Ilena.

Change your number, and just don’t ever talk to him again
.

If it wasn’t John calling, then it was one of the others, and she

certainly had nothing left to say to them. She put some music on the

radio instead.

She drove past the end of Kelly Street without a second glance. A

couple of hundred yards farther up the road, about half a mile short

of the beginning of the real forest, the radio faded, and then cut out.

Soon afterward the car started to cough, too, and judder, and then

died. She steered calmly onto the side of the road.

She waited patiently, turning the key once every three minutes.

Eventually it started again. Things got like this sometimes, around

here. Little things, never big enough to make a fuss about. Signs that

the place itself was shifting in its sleep, and might be about to wake

up. All the more reason to get the hell out.

236 Michael Marshall

As she pulled back onto the road she thought she heard some-

thing in the backseat of the car. She knew that if she looked around, it

would very likely be Gerry sitting in the back there, or the thing that

looked like him. He had followed her from the hospital. She had seen

him on the street after the horror with the girl in the coffee shop.

He had been walking slowly along the other side, his head turning to

keep his eyes on her.

If she looked in the backseat now the face she would see would

have the same look in its eyes, and she knew the story it told wasn’t

true. Gerry hadn’t hated her. He had loved her.

That knowledge was the one thing she was determined to take

with her out of this place. It was the sole possession they couldn’t take

from her.

And so she didn’t turn around, but put her foot fi rmly down on

the pedal, and set off down the road into the forest.

She got less than twenty miles.

She didn’t notice the headlights behind her. She had been crying,

and it had taken all her concentration to keep herself going straight

and safe along the dark forest road.

There was the sound of a car accelerating past her, in the other

lane.

She jumped, startled, and wiped her sleeve across her eyes. It was

a long way to Seattle. She had to keep her shit together. Probably just

as well the other car had given her a little shock. She’d concentrate

better now, put the radio back on, try to think forward. There was no

need to think about the past tonight. She would have plenty of time

to regret that at leisure.

But once the car had gone forty yards past, it suddenly cut back

into her lane.

She jammed her foot on the brakes, skidding thirty feet. She was

thrown hard into the belt, and then thudded back into her seat.

B A D T H I N G S 237

She moved fast, shifting the car into reverse, but as she wrenched

around in her seat she realized another car had come up behind and

was blocking that way, too.

There was nowhere to go, and so she turned back around and

took her hands off the wheel.

A man got out of the car in front, a silhouette in her headlights.

She watched as he walked back along the road.

When he reached her car he rapped gently on her window.

She lowered it. The policeman looked gravely down at her.

“What’s up, Ellen?”

“I’m leaving.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I did what I was asked.”

“Yeah, kinda. But this afternoon you were saying things that you

shouldn’t have said.”

She looked up at him. He shrugged. “Someone heard you. You

knew what the deal was.”

“But I did what I was told,” she said. “I’m done. You have to let

me go now.”

He didn’t say anything.

“She was never going to let me leave, was she?”

He still didn’t answer, just opened her car door. Before his hand

fell on her, Ilena managed to turn her head to look into the backseat

of the car.

Gerry wasn’t there. There was nothing there.

Nothing left anywhere anymore.

P A R T 3

Once we have taken Evil into ourselves,

it no longer insists that we believe in it.

Franz Kafka,

The Zurau Aphorisms

C H A P T E R 3 2

Brooke swam from seven until seven-thirty, fast, methodical laps up

and down the covered pool at the rear of the house. Then dressed

in her suite, blow-dried her hair, and selected a pair of good shoes.

Carefully, as if the day ahead held a wedding, or a funeral. Because

one never knows—it might.

Cory was already at the breakfast table when she arrived, half-

way through an eggs Benedict. He rarely ate more than cereal. He

must be hungry. She realized, as she sat, that she was hungry, too.

The air felt very thin today, short on sustenance, as if the land had

exhaled overnight and was waiting for a reason to breathe in again.

When Clarisse appeared at her elbow with a pot of Earl Grey

tea, Brooke asked for the same as her brother. Who meanwhile kept

eating. Small, neat mouthfuls.

“Good evening?” she asked eventually.

Another mouthful went in, was chewed, swallowed.

“Very pleasant,” he said. “She’s very . . . nice.”

“And?”

He shook his head.

242 Michael Marshall

Her plate arrived and they ate in silence. In between mouthfuls she

looked out of the window, watching the trees sway at the edge of the

property. The house was warm, but it looked cold outside. The sky

above was a weather report with only one story to tell.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

“Upward and onward.”

“So what are your plans for the day?”

“As yet unfi nalized. You?”

“Yakima for lunch.”

“Business or pleasure?”

“Business.”

She didn’t believe him, and he knew it. “One of the pumps in the

pool isn’t working properly.”

“I’ll give Randy a call.”

Clarisse reappeared to freshen their teapots, and to dispense fur-

ther portions of silence. Brooke ate hers slowly. Cory moved on to

toast, spreading it thinly with butter, back and forth, forth and back.

“Cory?”