The Book of Bad Things (27 page)

P
ING SQUEALED, CLUTCHING AT
Cassidy’s hand. Cassidy squeezed back.

“Stupid battery!” Joey said in the pitch darkness.

“We’re dead,” Hal added.

“No,” said Cassidy. “We’re not. We stay calm. We do what we need to do.” The night that Lou had broken into her apartment flashed into her mind. She’d never thought she would make it away from him. And afterward, she’d never thought she’d escape her fear. But she did survive. And she did escape. It had taken effort, but then again, the truly important things always did. “Get down. Dig. Dig!”

The group worked. Sounds of debris being tossed echoed all around. Long seconds passed. Another distant crash. Dirt rained down. Cassidy braced herself, immediately feeling ridiculous, as if tightening her muscles would protect her from a three-ton boulder dropping from above.

“Did someone say something?” Joey asked, a disembodied voice in the dark.

“I heard someone whisper,” Ping said from somewhere nearby.

“What was it?” Hal asked.

But Joey didn’t have time to answer. Another voice came from somewhere beneath the layer of debris.
Here
, it whispered. This was followed by a dog’s muffled bark.

Blind, Cassidy leaned toward the spot where the sounds had come.

“Is it another trap?” This was Ping.

“No,” Cassidy said, reaching into the pile of junk, pulling it away, feeling for the ledge and the passage from which they’d earlier tumbled. “It’s Ursula. And Lucky. They’re trying to help.”

They crawled then stood and stumbled through the blackened, garbage-strewn tunnel, talking constantly to one another —
Here, Here, Here, Here
— so they wouldn’t become separated. Cassidy reached out every few feet, feeling for Ping’s shoulder. Behind her, she felt Joey do the same. They moved quickly, the ground trembling, great pounding sounds of collapsing rock echoing up the passage from behind them. Once they reached the section of the path that was free from the beast’s “collection,” they began to run, feeling for the walls that narrowed with every step, every turn.

Continuing the ascent blindly, Cassidy wondered if this might all be a dream, for certainly it had all the hallmarks. Maybe, in a moment or two, she’d wake up in Tony’s bed, or for that matter, on the small couch in her mother’s apartment, her heart racing, sweat on her brow. But she wasn’t dreaming, she soon discovered. A dim light appeared up ahead. They all cried out, in relief, in pain, in shock, as they tumbled from the crevice onto the trash-strewn floor of the Chambers house basement.

Moments later, the steady rumbling sound grew louder, the earth shaking as the passage crumbled behind the wall. A torrent of dust and dirt belched forth from the crack in the concrete, coating their already grimy bodies.

The group scrambled backward toward the stairs. As Cassidy raced up the shadowy steps toward the broken doorway, she sighed, glancing over her shoulder at the last of the debris littering the floor. The stray clothes. Kitchen utensils. Worn-out basketball sneakers. All useless pieces of garbage and yet, the cause of so much trouble.

Outside, the group didn’t stop, limping along until they’d reached the asphalt of the cul-de-sac.

The sun was shining. Pristine, puffy clouds were scattered across a perfect blue sky. The air was hot, but a breeze blew through the trees behind them. They’d made it out. The curse was broken. The ordeal was over. This was the end.

But as Cassidy stood in awkward silence huddled with her friends, old and new, she couldn’t help but believe that this was also a moment of beginning. And she wasn’t sure if it was going to be a good thing or a bad thing.

Now she had no book in which to write, no blank pages to help her figure it out.

She glanced back up the shadowed driveway path, tree branches dancing casually in the breeze, as if everything were normal, as if monsters did not exist, as if friendships didn’t end, as if summers lasted forever, and she imagined her pages buried somewhere deep underground, along with the bodies and everything else the beast had stolen.

I
T WAS
O
CTOBER IN
B
ROOKLYN
, New York.

Most of the trees surrounding the Long Meadow in Prospect Park had begun to turn, the leaves transforming the green landscape of the Indian summer into a festive costume. Specks of red and yellow and orange flickered across the grass, blowing without care toward the whispering arc of traffic rushing through Grand Army Plaza.

In the southeast quadrant of the giant traffic oval stood the central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, the golden bas-relief sculptures that surrounded its main entrance glittering in the afternoon sunlight like gods on earth.

Cassidy Bean sat on the wide front steps, tapping her toes against the cold stone beneath her. She watched the pedestrians scurrying about, imagining that from high up, they’d all look as insignificant as a bunch of insects. Since the end of summer, Cassidy had felt the same. Small. So, so small.

“You see ’em?” Her friend Janet sat down beside her. Janet’s twin, Benji, continued to swing upside down on the stainless steel railing that ran alongside the stairway, lost in his own head.

“Not yet,” Cassidy answered. “Maybe I should have told them I’d meet them at the subway entrance across the plaza.”

“Give ’em some credit,” said Janet, smiling. “Not every tourist is completely helpless.”

“The Tremonts aren’t tourists,” Cassidy said, bumping Janet’s shoulder playfully. “They’re my friends.”

“Well, I hope they get here soon,” said Janet. “Mr. Stanton’s reading —”

“It doesn’t start for an hour,” Cassidy interrupted. “We’re fine.”

“I can’t wait to see him,” Benji chirped. “I’ve read all his books.”

“You have not,” Janet said, irritated.

Benji dropped his arms from the railing, dangling his upper body from the bar like a monkey. “Well, I read one of them.”

“He read a
page
of one of them,” Janet whispered. The girls giggled as Benji sidled up next to them.

“Are you laughing at me?” he asked, curious.

“Yup,” Cassidy said simply, which made all three of them laugh even harder. It felt good. She had only just recently begun to feel like herself again. Starting school had certainly helped.

In the couple of long weeks between the end of her time in Whitechapel and the beginning of the semester, Cassidy wondered if she might be slipping back to her old ways. She’d had moments of anxiety. Panic. Feeling lost in places she knew well and desperate at night whenever Naomi continued to lock herself in her bedroom. It wasn’t only her apartment that was weird. Before her return from Whitechapel, she would never have expected the entire city to feel as overwhelming as it now did. The eardrum-breaking noise of the train through the stations. The crowds of people stampeding obliviously against the lights into crosswalks. The flashing advertisements on top of speeding cabs. Even the store windows packed with everything anyone might ever need seemed like too much.

Everywhere she looked, she saw
stuff
, and the
stuff
always reminded her of what she’d seen in the cavern beneath Ursula Chambers’s house. The junk. The garbage. The filth. And the nameless creature whose desires had created the pit, had destroyed lives, had almost taken hers.

The rest of the summer had floated past her, past Joey and Ping, like a fantasy. Cassidy and Joey finished out the art program at the college, ending up with a small portfolio they were allowed to take home. Rose filled the rest of their days with scrumptious meals, with trips to the library, with movies and games and road trips beyond the Delaware Water Gap, which Cassidy was so thankful for.

Tales of Ursula’s ghost evaporated from the town almost immediately after that horrible Friday. Cassidy took comfort in the idea that the woman had finally found rest after a life lived in constant fear. At night, before bed, Cassidy prayed for her, grateful for her sacrifice, feeling saddened that no one would ever know what the old woman had done to keep the town safe.

In the evenings, she and Joey had met up with Ping and sometimes Hal, sitting on one of their front porches or back patios, a citronella candle burning nearby to keep away the bugs. They’d talk about what they could remember, about what they’d thought happened, about whether or not it had
actually
happened. They’d agreed to keep their story to themselves. How would they even begin to explain to anyone who hadn’t been there, hadn’t seen what they’d seen, when they themselves weren’t even sure?

Still, there’d been bits of proof scattered around the neighborhood from the day of the final confrontation. Hal’s parents came home from work to discover what was left of poor Lucky’s body lying in their foyer. Hal had felt horrible claiming ignorance, especially when the local police couldn’t provide answers either. However, he’d delivered the remains to the empty grave in Joey’s backyard himself, helping Joey dig another hole, then saying a final farewell to the unfortunate animal.

About a week after that, a land surveyor discovered unstable ground around Ursula’s old house. A wide fissure had opened up by its foundation, reaching out several feet, a darkness eating at the earth. His team determined that a sinkhole had formed in the area. The house was in imminent danger of collapse and was condemned. The residents of Chase Estates of course had raised a fuss, wondering if their own homes were safe. But after more investigation, Whitechapel was satisfied that the only rotten ground was far beyond the end of the cul-de-sac, up on the hill.

The farmhouse would be torn down. Someday. But Cassidy’s time in Whitechapel would end before that happened.

No one ever found the missing bodies. It was a mystery that would haunt the area for years to come. Their story would eventually capture the attention of the editors of Ping’s favorite magazine. And when Whitechapel eventually appeared on the cover of
Strange State
, Ping would ask her mother to buy her three copies — one for reading, one that she was certain would be destroyed by her brothers, and one for safekeeping. Someday, maybe, somehow, the truth would come out. But for now, Cassidy believed that even Ursula would conclude that the story of the ley lines, of the vortex, of the nameless beast was best tucked away on a secret shelf in their memories.

Across the street, a tall, thin woman waved. Cassidy stood, squinting through the slanting sunlight. When she noticed the others standing beside the woman, Cassidy jumped up and down. Ping and Joey held hands, mirroring her own excitement with their own little leaps. Dennis smiled and led the group through the crosswalk and up the steps to Cassidy, throwing his arms around her.

Janet and Benji backed away as the rest of the group joined in, enveloping her in corduroy and fleece and wool.

Rose stepped back and glanced up, taking in the grand sight of the library. “This is so beautiful! What a wonderful place to find you.”

Cassidy blushed, glancing between Ping and Joey. “I thought you’d like it. The train ride was okay?”

She introduced the Tremonts and Ping to her friends. When Benji shook Ping’s hand, he went uncharacteristically quiet, and Janet threw Cassidy a smirk. She had to keep herself from bursting out giggling again.

They spent the next half hour sitting on the wide steps. Rose and Dennis filled Cassidy in on what was going on with Deb and Tony and their “boring” lives in Whitechapel. Cassidy filled them in on her life in Brooklyn. Then, she led them into the library, to the auditorium, where her neighbor, Levi Stanton, was leading a panel discussion about crime novelists.

It turned out, Dennis had long been a huge fan. After the event, he treated the author and everyone else to dinner at a soul-food restaurant around the corner, where they became entangled in an intricate discussion about other authors of the genre.

Nestled at the far end of the long table, the kids were lost in their own world. Before the food arrived, Joey reached into a shopping bag and removed a small rectangular parcel, wrapped neatly in plain brown paper. He handed it to Cassidy.

“What’s this?”

“A replacement.” Joey smiled. “It’s from all of us.” He glanced at Ping who blushed. “Hal chipped in too.”

He didn’t need to say more for Cassidy to understand what was inside. She slowly removed the wrapping, revealing a leather cover and several hundred blank pages. For a moment, she was overcome. The room tilted. Her breath shrunk. Another
Book of Bad Things
? She wasn’t sure if she was ready to return to the dark places, to look closer into the shadows, or if she ever would be ready. “Thank you so much,” she whispered. She turned the book end-over-end, examining every nook, crease, stitch.

The object was beautiful in a way that something new can never be. They must have found it at Junkland. She squeezed the book between her fingers, understanding that she didn’t have to go back again, not if she didn’t want to. “I know exactly what I’m going to write in it when I get home.”

“Oh yeah?” said Joey. “What’s that?”

Cassidy glanced at the group huddled around the table. Her host parents chatted with her favorite neighbor a few chairs away. Her friends, Janet and Benji, smiled at her. And Ping and Joey simply sighed, contented to be together again. She couldn’t imagine a more perfect moment. Her heart hurt that it wouldn’t last. Still, she smiled. “I’m going to write about today.”