The Book of Bad Things (18 page)

H
AL DIDN’T REMEMBER
the accident. He told them how he’d woken up in the field having, by some miracle, been thrown from the vehicle before it collided with the tree.

Another driver had seen the crash.

There were flashing lights and sirens, intermittently illuminating the field, the stretcher, the ambulance, the crushed metal
thing
that had once been his car.

He remembered begging EMT workers to search for the dummy, to bring it with them, to stop off at Ursula’s house before they went on to the hospital. They’d watched him like he had a serious brain injury, but the tests showed that he did not. And there had been
many
tests before they released him into the care of his father, who’d driven him home in silence.

That morning, by the time he’d walked back to the scene of the accident, the wreck had already been towed away. About twenty yards past the tree, the dummy lay on its side in the dirt. In the morning light, it seemed harmless — just another piece of junk that someone wanted to be rid of.

Hal fit the stand back inside the mannequin where it had separated the night before. One of the wheels was stuck, broken, but he managed to get the thing over to the curb. He pushed it up the road, limping into Chase Estates, through the labyrinth of streets, to the uppermost point of the development. To the cul-de-sac.

That was where he’d heard the screaming.

“You were right,” said Joey flatly. “That didn’t help at all.”

Ping nudged his arm. “Of course it helps. You can’t solve a puzzle without all of the pieces. And I’d say we have plenty more now. We can finally see the bigger picture.”

“Oh, I can tell you what the bigger picture is,” said Joey. “Don’t need puzzle pieces for that.”

“And?” Hal asked.

“We’re all totally screwed.”

P
ING IGNORED HIM
. “Let’s start with what we know. According to the diagram we found carved into the bedroom floor, the Chambers house sits on a vortex. Those lines and stars and circles coincide with info from my magazines and Joey’s map of Whitechapel.”

“Yes,” Joey said, sitting forward, “but what does it mean?”

“Getting to that. We know that a vortex acts like a whirlpool. Or like a black hole in outer space. A place where energy spins, creates force. Like gravity. What do we know about black holes?”

Late morning light spilled through the windows at the front of the Nance house. The air conditioner hummed outside. After a moment, Hal raised his hand as if the den were a classroom. “They drag objects into them, crush them. Keep them there.”

Ping nodded. “So if a ley-lines vortex is like a mini black hole, it may act in the same way. It wants to pull objects close to it.
Keep them there
.”

Cassidy sat up straight, even as she sank deeper into the couch cushions. “Is that why Ursula never threw anything away?”

“The house wouldn’t let her,” Joey added.

“Maybe,” said Ping. “I mean, lots of people all over the world hoard junk.”

“My aunt, Jeanne, has this illness called OCD,” said Hal. “Obsessive-compulsive disorder. Hoarding is a symptom. Jeanne takes medicine to control her compulsions, and she’s doing just fine.”

“It must be really difficult for her, though, dealing with that,” said Cassidy, thinking of some of her neighbors back in the city, the ones she’d visited with Levi Stanton. “It’s made me feel a little sick whenever I’ve heard someone in this town calling Ursula a nutso-freakazoid.”

“I don’t think Ursula had OCD,” said Ping. “Either way, Whitechapel didn’t treat her very kindly.”

“She didn’t treat Whitechapel very kindly,” said Joey quietly.

“She was a victim,” said Ping. “Whether it was a disease or just her personality. She carried a whole lot. Don’t you think?”

“And I doubt Ursula had medicine to help her,” said Hal. “She was alone and helpless and scared.”

“Okay, so Ursula’s a martyr.” Joey threw his hands into the air. “But right now, we’re missing the point. Our problems are all about her house.”

“I think so too,” said Cassidy. “It’s the house. The house is doing bad things.”

“It’s the
vortex
,” Ping corrected. “The house just happens to sit on top of it. Moved there by Owen Chase years ago, so he could build his estates.”

“So, Ursula … and her uncle Aidan before her,” said Cassidy, trying to work it out in her head as she spoke, “might have learned that to remove anything that had been …
claimed
by this vortex was a bad idea.”

“Bad how?” Joey asked.

The air conditioner clicked off. The house settled into stillness.

“Something came for me,” said Hal. “Something dark. And old. It manipulated that mannequin. It growled this primal-sounding noise. It made me see things, hear things. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mrs. Moriarty or Mr. Chase experienced something similar before they … you know … died.”

“So if it wasn’t Aidan and it wasn’t Ursula,” Ping said, “maybe something else is inside the house. Inside the vortex.”

“Maybe the vortex
itself
is alive,” Hal answered. “Maybe it’s … intelligent. Greedy. It wanted back what we’d taken from it.”

“If it couldn’t have the mannequin,” said Ping, “it tried to take
you
.”

The group was silent for a moment. “The dead,” whispered Cassidy. “If we’re right about the vortex, maybe somehow it got its claws into the bodies and brought them back in place of what they’d stolen.”

“That’s why Ursula hoarded,” said Ping. “She knew how it worked. If you take something from the house, you die. It could be why Ursula, or maybe her uncle, had carved the map into the floor. One less piece of paper that had a chance to get out into the world. She or he could sort out that hypothesis safely.”

“That all works,” said Cassidy, “except that Owen Chase gave his mother-in-law, Mrs. Moriarty, the mirror she said Ursula begged her to return. Moriarty never set foot inside that place, and she didn’t
take
anything. I think how it works is like this: If you
possess
what belonged to the house, or the vortex, you die.”

Hal nodded, his eyes wide, excited. “Then, the vortex-thing reaches out and brings
you
back to replace what it lost.”

“You mean, your
corpse
,” said Joey, grimacing. “Your walking, rotting corpse …”

“Ursula kept that basement door padlocked for a reason,” said Ping, slowly, quietly. “Maybe she’d seen it for herself, who knows how many times.”

Joey flinched. “You mean, she’d been living with who knows how many zombies in her basement? Right up the street from all of us?”

“So the
ghost
that people have been talking about,” Cassidy added, “is different from the
zombie-thing
I saw walking up the street. Ursula’s spirit hasn’t been trying to hurt people. She’s been
warning
people. Telling them to bring back whatever they took from the house.”

“That makes sense,” said Ping. “I mean, if any of this makes sense, then that does too.”

“Wait,” said Hal, looking pale, “does bringing the object back to the house break the curse? Am
I
safe now?”

Ping pressed her lips together. “We’ll have to wait and see.”

“And what about us?” Joey asked. “Since we were in the house, are we safe anymore? Or have we been claimed? Cursed? Does the vortex-thing think it
owns us
?”

“We have to do something,” said Ping. “We have to tell someone what’s going on.”

“Who’ll believe us?” Joey asked. “Not my parents, that’s for sure.”

“But they’ll have to believe us when we show them what we’ve seen.”

Cassidy cleared her throat. “But how can we bring anyone back to that house, knowing what we know now? If the four of us have been cursed, or
claimed
, simply by stepping inside the place, we can’t allow that to happen to anyone else.”

“What about the cleanup crew?” Ping suggested. “The Dumpster men. They’ve been inside the Chambers house. Maybe they’ve seen things too. Maybe they can help us.”

“But how do we track them down?” Joey asked. “We don’t even know the name of the company.”

“Let’s look it up,” Hal said, getting up from the rocking chair and heading to a small desk in the corner of the room where a Mac console sat, its sleep light glowing from its glossy white front. He tapped the space key, and the screen came alive.

The talk of curses sparked something in Cassidy’s memory, and she slipped her backpack off her shoulders. As the others continued to confer, she pulled her notebook out and flipped through the pages. Moments later, she discovered what she was looking for.

Different cultures all over the world have histories of curses in their folklore. In fact, there are several different words for curses, even here in the United States. Jinx. Hex. The Evil Eye.

A curse is something that happens to you, a streak of bad luck, a sort of supernatural force. Some people believe that humans can place a curse on a person they wish to harm. Others believe that a place can be cursed — simply going to that place will bring you bad luck. And others believe that objects themselves can carry powerful curses: To touch one of these objects may spell your doom.

Most say that cursing someone involves a ritual and removing a curse, a different ritual.

Some curses seem relatively silly and harmless, like when the Red Sox couldn’t seem to win the World Series for all those years because of something that supposedly happened a long time ago to Babe Ruth. And yet other curses can kill you.

One of the most famous curse legends I’ve read about comes from Hawaii. It’s the classic “don’t take something from this place or you’ll be sorry” hex, kind of like the ones with the mummies and the archaeologists and the pharaoh tombs in Egypt.

The story goes that in Hawaii, it’s bad luck to remove lava rock from the island. That to do so makes the goddess Pele angry. If you’re on vacation there and you take a rock home as a souvenir, all sorts of calamities will befall you. They say Pele can reach across the ocean and make you pay for taking what belongs to her. The only way to appease the goddess is to return the rock to the island from where you took it —