Black Mouth E-Book

Ronald Malfi

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

A group of friends return to their hometown to confront a nightmare they first stumbled on as teenagers in this mesmerising odyssey of terror.An atmospheric, haunting page-turner from the bestselling author of Come with MeFor nearly two decades, Jamie Warren has been running from darkness. He's haunted by a traumatic childhood and the guilt at having disappeared from his disabled brother's life. But then a series of unusual events reunites him with his estranged brother and their childhood friends, and none of them can deny the sense of fate that has seemingly drawn them back together.Nor can they deny the memories of that summer, so long ago – the strange magic taught to them by an even stranger man, and the terrible act that has followed them all into adulthood. In the light of new danger, they must confront their past by facing their futures, and hunting down a man who may very well be a monster.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Also by Ronald Malfi and available from Titan Books

Title Page

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Copyright

Dedication

I: The Land of the Living

Chapter One: Detox Boogie

Chapter Two: Mia Tomasina and the Sunshine Devil Girl

Chapter Three: A Reluctant Homecoming

II: Hello from Planet Childhood

Chapter Four: Dead Rabbit

Chapter Five: Scar Tissue

Chapter Six: Tricks of the Trade

Chapter Seven: The Misdirection of Clay Willis

Chapter Eight: Penance

III: Black Mouth Kids

Chapter Nine: Red Ball, Gold Coin

Chapter Ten: The Reunion

Chapter Eleven: The Final Lesson

Chapter Twelve: Mouth-Shaped Mouth

Chapter Thirteen: A Discovery

IV: Sutton’s Quay

Chapter Fourteen: A Man of Faces

Chapter Fifteen: The Carnival (First Night)

Chapter Sixteen: Baby in a Mineshaft

Chapter Seventeen: Stull on the Outskirts

Chapter Eighteen: A Storm (so to Speak) Gathers

Chapter Nineteen: Bibby and the Magic Man

Chapter Twenty: The Carnival (Second Night)

Chapter Twenty-One: Patch the Prestidigitator

V: In The House of Fear

Chapter Twenty-Two: Home

Chapter Twenty-Three: Into the Well

Chapter Twenty-Four: Destiny

Chapter Twenty-Five: Aftermath

Epilogue: A Grand and Unspeakable Majesty

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Ronald Malfi and available from Titan Books

Come with Me

Ghostwritten

Also by Ronald Malfi

Bone White

The Night Parade

Little Girls

December Park

The Narrows

Floating Staircase

Cradle Lake

The Ascent

Snow

Shamrock Alley

Passenger

Via Dolorosa

The Nature of Monsters

The Fall of Never

The Space Between

Novellas

Borealis

The Stranger

The Separation

Skullbelly

After the Fade

The Mourning House

A Shrill Keening

Mr. Cables

Collections

They Lurk: 4 Novellas

We Should Have Left Well Enough

Alone: Short Stories

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Black Mouth

Print edition ISBN: 9781789098655

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789098662

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First Titan edition July 2022

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Copyright © 2022 Ronald Malfi. All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

This one’s for Kangas.

“There is no magic in recovery.”

—ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS

I

THE LAND OFTHE LIVING

CHAPTER ONE

DETOX BOOGIE

1

One week after our mother committed suicide, my brother Dennis was taken into police custody while walking along the shoulder of a winding mountain highway wearing nothing but a pair of saggy white briefs and what I can only assume to be an empty expression on his face. He had made it six miles out of town, which meant he’d been walking for hours beneath the blazing summer sun. When the police found him, he was dehydrated. His face was lobster-red and glistening, his chest and shoulders blistered with sunburn, and the hairless bulge of his belly, which drooped over the frayed waistband of his underwear, was jeweled with sweat. He must have looked like some ripened tropical fruit, freshly washed. The only exception was his feet, which were bare and powdered in road dust. With each step he took, he stamped asterisks of blood onto the pavement.

I learned all of this—about Dennis walking along the highway in his underwear as well as our mother’s suicide—from a police detective out of Sutton’s Quay, West Virginia, who had somehow managed to track down my cell phone number and dropped me a line. Admittedly, the timing wasn’t great. I was fresh out of rehab, a condition of my continued employment with the Ohio foundry where I had worked for the past six years. I was operating a crane transporting a steel casting ladle of molten metal when the ladle adjustment failed. No one was injured, but the damage was considerable (as was the cost of cleanup and repairs), and that section of the foundry had to be shut down for a number of days. Len Pruder, my shift supervisor, pulled me into his office on the day it happened. He was a squat, potato-shaped fellow with bad hair plugs. He stuck his face in mine, so close that the tip of his nose grazed my lips, causing me to draw back.

“You’re drunk, Jamie,” Len said, nostrils flaring. His swollen red eyes ticked back and forth as he studied my face. “You goddamn son of a bitch, you stink like a brewery. You’re lucky you didn’t kill someone. Pack up your shit and get the hell out.”

So I packed up my shit and got the hell out. Two days later, however, I received a phone call from the floor manager, an ex-Marine named Yaeger, who invited me to a meeting. I agreed, then immediately felt ambushed when I showed up: Yaeger, Len, and some well-groomed people in suits all sat on one side of the large wooden table in the foundry’s break room, patiently awaiting my arrival. The people in suits were lawyers, I soon realized, once they started popping the brass clasps on their briefcases. When one of the suits asked me if I’d been drunk while operating the crane—“inebriated” was the word he used—I said I had probably been hung over, since I’d spent quite a few hours at Donovan’s Pub the night before, but that I didn’t think I’d still been drunk. When one of the suits asked if I frequently came to work hung over, I said no, not really, although maybe sometimes. Truth was, I was sitting there right in front of them with a bellyful of lead and a hangover that felt like someone was using a tack hammer to the back of my eyeballs. Because, hell, when you get fired from your job, you go out and get shitfaced, right? Anyway, I must have sounded reliable, or at least genuine, because the suits nodded at my response and seemed content. Yaeger, still sporting a military crew cut that made it look like someone had taken a push mower to the top of his head, actually grinned. Only Len Pruder, seated directly opposite me at that creaky wooden table in the foundry’s break room, scowled. His face had gone the color of a pomegranate, and his jowls quivered.

“This isn’t the first time,” Len spoke up. He looked on the verge of having a stroke, and there was a vein as thick as a McDonald’s drinking straw pulsing on the side of his head. “This guy’s a liability. He’s gonna wind up killing himself or someone else. Sometimes he doesn’t even come in for days at a time, and we gotta scramble the schedule to get someone else on the floor to cover—”

Yaeger raised a hand and Len Pruder went quiet. The lawyers at the end of the table looked nervous and uncomfortable.

As it turned out, the steel casting ladle hadn’t undergone a safety inspection in over three years. I guess a more industrious guy could have flipped the script and walked out of that meeting with a sizeable cash settlement, but I was happy to leave with my job reinstated.

“One condition,” Yaeger said, drumming a set of boltlike fingers along the scuffed wooden surface of the table. “You gotta do a stint in rehab, Jamie.”

“I don’t have the money for something like that,” I said.

“It’s covered under your health insurance. Drinking and getting fucked up—it’s considered a disease nowadays. Like cancer.”

I watched the suits bristle collectively at this, but they did not interject.

“Anyway, it’s company policy,” Yaeger went on. “No way around it, if you wanna stay on the floor.”

“You’ll need to attend regular Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, too, Mr. Warren,” said one of the suits as he thumbed through a stapled packet of papers.

“How often is regular?” I asked.

“Daily, at the very least.” The guy had a pinched, birdlike face, and an Adam’s apple like a desk call bell. “Company policy stipulates ninety meetings in ninety days.”

“That sounds like a lot. People really go every day?”

“More, if they need to.”

“My insurance pay for that, too?”

“Those are free,” Yaeger told me. “Been to a few myself.”

I thought about it for maybe three seconds.

“All right,” I said, because I needed this job. “Sounds fair.”

Len Pruder looked like he wanted to launch himself across the tabletop and choke me out.

A few days later, I went into rehab. It was a twenty-eight-day program, the shortest one they offered, and the woman I spoke with over the phone assured me that I was very lucky. “There’s usually a very long waiting list to get in,” she said.

“I didn’t realize these places were so exclusive. Should I rent a tux?”

The woman on the phone did not find me funny.

I expected an institutional setting, one with stark white walls, crisp bed sheets, and caretakers wearing hospital scrubs. In reality, what I got was more like a VFW hall partitioned into various rooms, every wall paneled in imitation wood, and not a stitch of carpeting in the place. There were crucifixes and inspirational phrases in picture frames on nearly every wall, and a small janitorial closet that doubled as a chapel, where you could pray to a plaster bust of the Virgin Mary or grab a push broom and sweep the floors, depending on your mood. Upon my arrival, I filled out some paperwork then was taken to a room by a middle-aged woman with brash streaks of gray in her hair and blackheads nestled in the corners of her nose. A half-dozen cots were lined up here in military fashion. The whole place was characterless, except for the acoustical ceiling tiles, which were decorated with the swirling yellows, oranges, and browns of water damage.

The first couple of days were fine—I ate my meals, watched television or read books, played board games or ping pong with my fellow inmates in a drab, wood-paneled recreation room that stank of cigarette smoke and the headier, semisweet fragrance of ass crack. There were five other men in the place, each one battling their own personal demons—arms blackened with collapsed veins; mouths empty of teeth; body odor as acrid as volcanic spume. One fellow, thin as a rail spike, walked around with a perpetual smile on his face while his squinty little eyes dribbled a never-ending supply of tears. He would ghost from room to room like that, his expression never changing. I began to think of him as the Weeping Walker, although I never said this to his face. In fact, I steered clear of him altogether. So did everyone else. He was too creepy to engage with, so everyone just left him alone. The Weeping Walker didn’t seem to mind; he just kept on weeping and walking.

Nights were restless, but that was nothing new to me. I’d never been what you might call a good sleeper, although the nightmares that had haunted me in my youth had, over time, retreated somewhat to the shady corners of my subconscious. I would lie there at night, listening to the orchestration of snores and farts from the other guys in the room, unable to fall asleep. But it was nothing I couldn’t handle, if it meant saving my job.

But then something changed. I began to notice the mesh wiring over all the windows—and not just notice it, but to obsess over it. I was suddenly, mercilessly, reminded of a place where I’d spent nearly a year of my youth—an empty place full of black circles, circles, circles. My skin grew itchy and felt too small. Claustrophobia tightened its muscular coils about my body. I imagined blood on the soles of my feet, and drying in russet streaks along my pant legs. Those restless nights turned into marathons of insomnia while my head filled with nonspecific terrors. I stared at the moonlit ceiling tiles (patterned with the shadows of wire mesh) with eyes that blazed like headlamps. Those swirling water stains conspired, in my mounting paranoia, to heckle and terrorize me as they began to slither across the ceiling. I became convinced that something had insinuated itself beneath my cot, slotted there like a peg in a hole, where it lay in total darkness lightly plucking at the grid of bedsprings in the cot’s metal frame. After several nights of this, I got rid of the frame and slept with my mattress on the floor.

Some change was taking place inside me. I grew irritable, unsettled, twitchy. I found I couldn’t keep my hands from shaking. I felt both loose and tightly wound at the same time. I stopped eating. I screamed at the woman with the streaks of gray in her hair. Terrified of the dark, I slept only in the daytime, discarding even my mattress now and opting to sleep directly on the floor, which felt cool against my steaming flesh. The headache that was gradually boiling inside the crock pot of my skull was a constant, never-ending torture; I frequently sobbed with the heels of my hands pressed into my eye sockets for fear the expanding force of that headache might jettison my eyeballs from my skull. I vomited so regularly and with such intensity that my stomach felt like a balloon someone had pumped full of hot gas. Pissing myself became my favorite hobby.

At some point, I was removed from the general population and relocated to a room no larger than a broom closet. An aging hippie with a long gray ponytail and an REO Speedwagon T-shirt tossed my duffel bag onto a fresh cot. I stared at the cot with renewed horror. Only when the hippie clapped his hands—a sound very much like the pop of a starting pistol in that suffocating little room—did I look away from the cot and over at him. The hippie leaned toward me, gazing straight into my eyes. Was this lunatic trying to hypnotize me or just peer deep into my soul? I recoiled from him, my stinking, sweat-dampened shirt sliding along the wall until I found myself trapped in a corner.

“Boy, you’re riding the ride now,” said the hippie. His teeth were tombstones.

That first night in my new room—what felt to me, in my unhinged state, like solitary confinement, or maybe even a coffin—I heard a different sound coming from beneath my cot. Not the muted thwang! of those plucking bedsprings, but the wet thhhk-thhhk sound of an infant’s mouth suckling at its mother’s breast. This image—of a child breastfeeding—appeared at the center of my head with such inexorable force and unshakable clarity that it carved through the pulsing fog of my headache with all the authority of a lighthouse beacon.

Gathering what strength I had left in my shaky, foul-smelling, unreliable body, I rolled off the cot and backed away to the far side of the room. (Given the size of the room, this meant I was only about six feet from the cot.) There was a single window in the room, a high and narrow rectangle of glass through which a channel of sodium light bisected the darkness and painted a distorted orange panel on the floor. A part of that orange panel bled beneath the cot, and I could discern, with a deepening sense of dread, that there was movement down there—a shape alive. I could still hear the noise, too: thhhk-thhhk-thhhk.

Until now, and despite the discomfort I had felt in this place as my body detoxed, it had never occurred to me to leave. I was here under my own volition; if I wanted to pack up and get the fuck out, there was no one who would stop me. Now, however, hearing that suckling sound and seeing that indistinct movement beneath the cot, the urge to flee was all-encompassing. Had I trusted myself to get as far as the front door without collapsing from a combination of exhaustion and terror, I might have done just that. But I didn’t.

Instead, I took a step toward the cot. I was hoping my approach would silence that suckling sound, the way crickets go quiet when you draw near. But that wet and greedy sucking did not stop. And with it arrived the vague whiff of smoke. I took another step. Then another. A knot formed in my throat as my shins came to rest against the cot’s metal frame.

A figure wrapped in a swirling black cloak materialized in the darkness beside me. A voice in my ear, whispering straight through to the epicenter of my soul: Do you want to see a magic trick?

“No,” I said aloud, but I reached down and gripped the mattress with both hands anyway. No dramatic flourish, no sense of showmanship—I simply yanked the flimsy mattress off the frame and tossed it to the floor, where it raised a cloud of dust into the chute of orange light spilling through the window.

There was a woman lying on the floor beneath the lattice of bedsprings, an infant clutched to her breast. She cradled the child’s pale, sloping head while it fed. The thhhk-thhhk-thhhk sound of its feeding rivaled the whoosh of blood funneling through my ears, my hammering heartbeat, the reedy hiss of air whistling up through the pinhole of my throat.

Quick as a snake strike, the woman reached out and grasped me around one ankle with fingers that felt like bone.

Stricken blind by terror, I was dragged down into the darkness.

2

My mother killed herself in the master bedroom of the farmhouse where Dennis and I grew up. She had drawn the bedroom curtains, switched on the bedside lamp that was electrically powered but fashioned to look like an antique flat-wick kerosene lantern, smoked a joint, and then ingested an entire bottle of prescription pain pills. Police found her supine on the bed, one eye closed, one leg dangling off the mattress so that her toes just barely grazed the dusty wooden floorboards. She’d already been dead for a week, and the summer heat had sped up her decomposition. The bedroom was dizzy with flies.

As for what specific ailment those pain pills had been prescribed, it was up for speculation. On the infrequent occasions my mother and I came within orbit of each other, she would complain about her diabetes, her arthritis, persistent migraines, unmanageable acid reflux, temporomandibular joint dysfunction, irritable bowel syndrome, vertigo, chronic insomnia, double vision, and all variety of bodily aches and pains. She also had lung cancer (according to the autopsy report), although I assume she didn’t know this because it had never come up during one of her pity-seeking diatribes.

At the time of her death, I hadn’t seen my mother or my brother Dennis in over four years, and I hadn’t been back to that farmhouse since I was a teenager. There was a period when, on a whim, my mom had purchased an old Airstream caravan—one of those things that resembled a giant metal thermos on wheels—and she and Dennis would periodically travel around the country together like a couple of reprobates. At some point on their journey, they would detour to whatever neck of the woods I was holed up in at the time, and I’d spend the obligatory afternoon subjected to my mother’s myriad complaints about her failing health while she inhaled an entire pack of Pall Malls and sipped cheap vodka from a paper cup. Dennis would show me photos of their road trip on his iPad, the screen gummy with fingerprints, always sitting too close to me, the heat that radiated from his meaty forearm dampening my shirtsleeve. These visits usually took place in a park or RV recreation area (neutral ground), some barbecue carryout containers spread out on an old bed sheet in the grass, bottlenose flies dive-bombing the potato salad and getting snared in the quagmire of gluey barbecue sauces. At the conclusion of each of these visits, Mom would give me one of her perfunctory little hugs, and then Dennis would gather me up in his big arms, squeezing my guts while yanking me clear off the ground. Yet like all of my mother’s capricious endeavors, these cross-country road trips were short-lived. (I think the Airstream was ultimately repossessed, too.)

The Sutton’s Quay police detective who informed me of my mother’s death was named Aiello, and he spoke in that familiar thick-throated drawl I had grown up to know as Appalachian English. He told me about Dennis shuffling half-naked along the shoulder of the highway, too, and how he had personally responded to the call because he was already in the area. Sure enough, there was Dennis, pink and shiny in the sun, doing the Frankenstein’s monster shamble down the highway. Detective Aiello had gotten out of his car and approached Dennis, attempted to engage the peculiar fellow in conversation. But Dennis hadn’t responded to the detective or even acknowledged that Aiello was standing there at all; Dennis had simply continued his laborious, barefooted trek along the gritty shoulder of the highway as if under a hypnotist’s spell.

Detective Aiello, whose law enforcement career spanned eleven years (although his transfer to the Sutton’s Quay Police Department had been fairly recent), had the good sense to realize there was something decidedly off about my brother, even without taking into consideration the fact that he was trudging along the road half-naked in the middle of the day. So instead of attempting to slap a pair of silver bracelets on my brother and muscle him into a police car, which would have been a chore, Detective Aiello radioed dispatch for assistance then proceeded to walk with Dennis for about a quarter of a mile. It was hot as hell, but Aiello figured he could use the exercise.

Just as Aiello heard sirens coming over the hill, Dennis stopped walking. He blinked his small gray eyes, and for the first time since Aiello had joined him on his journey, winced from the sizzling glare of the midday sun. It was as though he had just been roused from a deep sleep. He turned to Aiello, some semblance of clarity filtering back into his small and somewhat childlike eyes. Some of the moisture on my brother’s face, Aiello suddenly realized, was tears.

Dennis said something, which Detective Aiello could not readily make sense of. He asked Dennis to repeat himself, and Dennis obliged.

“She. Is now. Dead,” said Dennis.

This statement, delivered in my brother’s odd and halting pattern of speech, made Detective Aiello uncomfortable. My brother looked like the dude from that Steinbeck novel who accidentally killed a puppy, and his whole lights-are-on-but-nobody’s-home affectation didn’t help matters any. When police backup arrived on the scene, the officers wanted to wrangle my brother into the back seat of their cruiser, but Detective Aiello didn’t think that would go over so well. Instead, Aiello got a blanket from the trunk of the cruiser, draped it over my brother’s broad, sunburned shoulders, and agreed to walk all the way back to the farmhouse with him. Hours later, when Dennis and Detective Aiello finally arrived back at the farmhouse, my mother’s body had already been discovered, and cops were taking photos of her desiccated corpse.

“Where’s my brother now?” I asked the detective. I was on my cell phone in my car, a 1972 puke-green Ford Maverick with vinyl bench seats and a St. Christopher medallion superglued to the dash. It was early evening and I had the windows down, but the air was stagnant and the interior of the Mav felt like the inside of a kiln. I was in the parking lot of the First United Methodist Church on Mill Street in downtown Akron, where I’d been coming for the past week to attend AA meetings. I’d been back to work at the foundry for a week now, too, operating once again under the contemptuous scrutiny of Len Pruder.

“Well, you see, that’s sort of been an issue,” Detective Aiello said.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Well, Mr. Warren, it took us a couple of days to track you down, and we didn’t have nobody else to call locally, so—”

“Where is he?”

“He’s here. At the station.”

I cleared my throat and said, “My brother has been staying at the police station?”

“He’s fine, Mr. Warren. We had a medic come in, give him a once over. He was dehydrated and there were some abrasions on the bottoms of his feet from walking all that way barefoot, but he was otherwise okay. Thing is, we didn’t know what to do with him, where to take him. We didn’t think he should go back to the house on his own, given his…well…”

“No,” I agreed.

“I was gonna put in a call to the state, see if they’d come and get him, but then I was able to track you down. Figured it’d be better to have you involved instead.”

My head was swimming.

“Anyway, your brother is fine, Mr. Warren. He even seems to like it here. And there’s always someone around to keep him company. It’s just that we didn’t know what else to do.”

“Is he there now? Can I talk to him?”

“Sure. Hold on a sec.”

Then there was Dennis’s breathy salutation in my ear on the other end of the line, the familiar halting speech pattern, the edge of urgency at the back of his throat.

“I saw her, Jamie,” Dennis proclaimed. “She is now dead.”

I closed my eyes. My body trembled like something hooked up to jumper cables. “What about you, buddy? Are you okay?”

“She. Is now. Dead.”

“All right, buddy. All right.”

There was a jostling, then Detective Aiello was back on the line. Somewhere in the background, I could hear my brother’s high-pitched keening—something like a laugh or a sob or some nonspecific outburst of noise.

“If you do the quick and dirty math, given the coroner’s estimated time of death for your mother, Mr. Warren, you’ll see that your brother had been living in the house with her for about a week or so after she’d passed.”

“A week?” My brother had been living in that house with our mother’s corpse for a week? I opened my mouth to say something but then shut it again. I didn’t know what to make of this information. It was disturbing, even for Dennis.

“But again, Mr. Warren, he’s fine. Your brother. Like nothing ever happened. Everyone at the station has really taken a shine to him, too. Only…”

“Only what?”

“You’ll have to come out here, Mr. Warren,” Detective Aiello said. “You’ll have to come and get him. As soon as you can.”

She. Is now. Dead.

You’ll have to come.

Black Mouth had finally caught up with me.

3

It wasn’t that I had been spontaneously stricken blind by the sight of the woman nursing the baby beneath my cot, or the very real sensation of her bony fingers closing around my ankle; it was that I’d been overcome by what is known in the business as the Detox Boogie. In other words, I’d suffered a seizure as a result of acute alcohol withdrawal. When I came to, I was sprawled out on the floor of my tiny room, the undersea glow of early morning light leaking through the room’s solitary window. The crotch of my pants was damp and the room reeked of ammonia.

I was shaking, my body simultaneously hot and cold. When I rolled my head to one side, a dagger-like pain speared down my neck and detonated across my shoulders.

The mattress was still on the floor where I’d tossed it the night before. There was nothing beneath the cot’s frame but scuffed linoleum tiles and dust bunnies.

Peripheral movement caused my head to turn—painfully. The Weeping Walker stood in the doorway, his messy pink eyes leaking tributaries of saline, the edges of his sharp, cadaverous grin expanding beyond the confines of his face.

“Get somebody,” I groaned. My voice sounded like the squalling of a rusty hinge.

The Weeping Walker floated away. Moments later, the gray-streaked woman (her name was Deena) and the aging hippie (his name was Fred) filed into the room. Deena helped me sit up and gave me water from a plastic bottle, which I chugged until it was empty without coming up for air. Fred only folded his arms, leaned against the wall, and nodded his head. The look of satisfaction on his face struck me. It was as if he’d been somehow complicit in what had happened to me in the night, and the outcome brought him great pleasure.

“All part of the ride, my brother,” he said, and pumped one fist in the air in solidarity. “Welcome back to the Land of the Living.”

That was how my twenty-eight days in rehab turned into sixty. I was there when my fellow inmates departed and a new collection of wild-eyed, trembling degenerates took their place. (Only the Weeping Walker remained, and since no one seemed to acknowledge him, I began to wonder if he actually existed or if he was something altogether fashioned from my own imagination.)

I had my cell phone with me the whole time I was in that place, but I never once made a phone call. Nor did I receive any (except for the periodic phone scams, where a robotic female voice who addressed me as Barbara urgently wished to discuss my student loan debt). There was no one in my life to call, no one sitting in a house or an apartment or in a car or on a bus or a plane who cared about what was happening to me. I had no real friends, just coworkers from the foundry who were good for a few beers after work, but I had managed to alienate many of them over the years. I’d wrecked too many cars, gotten into too many fistfights at the local watering holes, blacked out in too many back alleys. My absences from work caused them undue hardship, and they began to distance themselves from me after a while. There were the occasional women in my life, each one too transitory to be called a girlfriend. One woman, whose name I’ll respectfully leave out of this sad dissertation, had been special. For a brief period, we’d even lived together. But I had done everything within my power to fuck up that relationship, too.

Sixty days turned into ninety.

“It’s like the aperture of the world’s growing wider,” Fred said one afternoon as we sat playing checkers in the rec room. “You start seeing all your past transgressions under that wider lens and it bugs you out, man. But don’t let it get you down. Because, see, that’s someone else’s life. You’re a new man now, amigo.”

The idea that I was glimpsing past transgressions resonated with me. Most disconcerting was the inexplicable impression of finger marks in the flesh around my ankle where the woman beneath the cot had grabbed me. Everything else could be written off as a detox-induced hallucination, but this was the one thing I couldn’t reconcile with myself.

When I left that place, Deena gave me a hug and said she was proud of me. Fred presented me a handmade hemp bracelet and another fist pump in the air, which I returned this time. The Weeping Walker, somehow still haunting the dimly lit rooms and wood-paneled corridors of that facility, peered out at me from behind one of the wire-mesh windows as I stood on the sidewalk, a grinning ghoul who may or may not actually exist.

Some alcoholics describe coming into sobriety as a metamorphosis. Others have said it is closer to a molting, where they’ve shucked off their old skins and exist now, wet and radiant and alive, in new ones.

For the first time in my life, I felt like I was filling empty spaces.

4

I promised Detective Aiello that I would head out for West Virginia first thing in the morning—a promise that felt like a lie even as I said it—then I disconnected the call. Across the parking lot, a group of people stood outside the rectory doors of the First United Methodist Church, most of them smoking cigarettes. Emily Pearson was among them, checking something on her cell phone. I watched them until my wristwatch said it was seven o’clock, and they began to file one by one into the rectory’s basement for our nightly Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

Ninety-six days sober—but, as the saying goes, who’s counting?

Five minutes later, I was speeding toward my apartment, a bottle of Ketel One wrapped in brown paper on the seat beside me.

I saw her, Jamie. She is now dead.

At the time, I just assumed Dennis had been talking about our mother.

I was wrong.

CHAPTER TWO

MIA TOMASINA AND THESUNSHINE DEVIL GIRL

1

Around the same time I was doing the Detox Boogie on the floor of the rehab facility in Akron, Ohio, an avant-garde filmmaker living in Los Angeles named Mia Tomasina had just sat through a showing of her most celebrated film, Dead Rabbit, and was stepping out into the back alley behind the theater to smoke a joint before the Q&A session began.

“Hey. Hey, there! Do you come here a lot?”

Mia looked up from her cell phone, joint smoldering between her lips. A crumbling brick wall dressed in ivy ran the length of the alley. Mia didn’t see the woman until she peeled away from the wall, her profile gliding into the sickly orange nimbus of a lamppost’s light out on the sidewalk. She was swarthy and feline, something summoned into existence by a collaboration of shadows. Something, Mia instantly thought, not to be trusted.

Mia plucked the joint from her mouth and said, “Who’s there?”

“Do you come here a lot?” the woman said again. “What’s your name?”

“My name is on that little chalkboard in the lobby,” Mia said.

The woman laughed. She scissored the air with two fingers. “You mind if I grab a toke?”

“I’m not really in the habit of swapping spit with strangers,” Mia said, which, she’d be the first to admit, wasn’t altogether true. What she’d meant was she wasn’t in the habit of swapping spit with strangers who looked like they were in the habit of prowling parking lots and back alleys for a fix.

“Aw, come on, sis. Don’t be like that.”

Fuck it, Mia thought, and extended what was left of the joint in the woman’s direction.

The woman crossed the alley, putting her bony hips to work, and plucked the joint from between Mia’s fingers. Her cut-off jeans were so short Mia glimpsed a bruised sliver of ass cheek when she pirouetted before her, hands arched above her head like a ballerina’s. Mia couldn’t tell if she had once been pretty or not.

“Yeah, sis, I think I seen you round here before. You must come here a lot.”

Mia just smiled at the woman. She’d never been here before in her life.

“Don’t you even wanna know my name?” the woman asked, still pirouetting. The glowing red tip of the joint rotated in the air as she twirled.

“Sure, why not,” Mia said. “What’s your name?”

“Sunshine,” said the woman. “Sunshine Devil Girl.”

“What is that, Polish?”

Sunshine Devil Girl laughed again. Handed Mia back the smoldering stub of her joint. Mia immediately pitched it in a puddle on the pavement, where it sizzled, sssst.

“I’m psychic, you know,” Sunshine Devil Girl told her. Mia had sunk to the concrete steps leading up to the theater’s fire exit by this point, and Sunshine Devil Girl placed a ratty sneaker on the step between Mia’s thighs. “Does that bother you?”

“Your foot near my crotch?”

“No, dummy. That I’m psychic.”

“No. That doesn’t bother me.”

“It doesn’t bother you that I can see your future?”

“It’s not my future I’m worried about.”

Sunshine Devil Girl drew her face closer to Mia’s. Her eyes were too wide and her pupils looked to be two different sizes, as if she was suffering from a concussion or some other head injury. She wasn’t very pretty at all, Mia decided—the girl’s face was too sallow, her complexion ravaged by a lifetime of drug abuse and volatile boyfriends. There was a disconcerting sore at the corner of her mouth, which didn’t help things.

“Everybody’s worried about their future, sis,” Sunshine Devil Girl told her, rather solemnly.

It was Mia’s turn to laugh.

“Seriously, bro,” Sunshine Devil Girl went on, ignoring her laughter. “I know what I’m talking about. I’ve got this gift. You can’t bullshit me.”

“Okay,” she said, hoisting one shoulder in a halfhearted shrug. “But I’m no bro, bro. I’m sis, remember?”

Sunshine Devil Girl would not be sidetracked. “Let me tell you your future. If you’re not afraid to hear the truth, it should be no big thing, chicken wing.”

“No, thanks. I got no cash on me.”

“I don’t do it for money,” she said. “I mean, if you had a pack of smokes, I’d take ’em. Or another joint. I’m not a jerk. And I’d do other things for money. I mean, I’ll eat pussy or whatever. But I never tell someone their future in exchange for payment. It’s bad fucking karma.”

“Yeah, hon, you look like the poster child for good karma,” Mia said.

Sunshine Devil Girl frowned. Or at least Mia thought she did. “You don’t gotta be a cunt about it, sis.”

“Whoa, okay,” Mia said, holding up both hands in surrender.

“Seriously. Come on, now. Don’t be a dick.”

“Fair enough,” Mia said. “If you don’t do it for money, what do you do it for?”

“Posterity.”

Mia’s laugh was a bit more tempered this time. She started wondering where this woman had come from, how she’d just happened to materialize out of the darkness here in the back alley of this old theater. There was something on the front of her too-small T-shirt—a graphic of a Ferris wheel with a grinning cartoon sun above it. The sun was wearing sunglasses, the phrase ¿Que pasa, amigo? printed beneath it. The fuck does the sun need sunglasses for? Mia thought randomly.

“Come on, sis,” Sunshine Devil Girl persisted. “Is it because you’re scared?” She bent down and brought her face within mere inches of Mia’s, and Mia could smell the marijuana on her breath. Something dirtier, too—a thing that goes down deep. The crusty sore at the corner of her mouth looked like a tiny tortoise shell. “You’re scared, aren’t you, sis?”

Mia just shook her head. She kept her gaze leveled on the girl. After a moment, she said, “Okay, fine. What the hell. Go ahead and tell me my future. For posterity.” And she held out her hands, palms up, for Sunshine Devil Girl to examine.

“Nah, sisterhood,” Sunshine Devil Girl said, and she executed a clumsy roundhouse kick to Mia’s hand. “I’m not a fucking palm reader. That’s amateur-hour bullshit, sis. That ain’t me.”

“My mistake.”

“See, you gotta telescope straight into someone’s soul.” She stretched her arms again above her head, her T-shirt rising high enough to expose a luminescent white panel of abdomen. Her bellybutton was pierced and looked like a doll’s nose, her ribs like a bear trap. Then she brought her hands down in front of her face, each hand making a circle through which she peered at Mia with one eye. “Like looking through a telescope, all right. Or maybe it’s like a drill, you know? One of those big spooky drills they use to get oil out of the ground? Only it’s not the ground and it’s not oil. You hear me?”

“Sure,” Mia said.

“I’m talking about your body, sis.”

“I hear you,” Mia assured her.

“And your hole is so big I could see it from the street,” Sunshine Devil Girl said. “Like, from the far end of the alley, even.”

“That’s pretty descriptive.”

“I’m being serious, sisterhood. That’s why I just had to come over and jaw with you, you know? Everyone’s got an opening—like, a hole straight through to the center of them. Some are small as a pinprick.”

“But mine’s not,” Mia said.

“Yours is like a fucking tunnel in the side of a mountain, sis. And that means I gotta be extra careful. I gotta go far enough down to puncture and pass through the bubble of your destiny without bursting it. I’m like a surgeon that way. Or maybe a plumber. Gotta go straight down to the very bottom of the well. Thing is, I don’t wanna fall in and get stuck.”

Mia smiled as the girl peered at her through the telescope of her hands. But the smile felt strained and too much like a grimace. That comment about going down to the well? It unnerved her. There was suddenly a bad taste in her mouth, too. Where’d this fucking junkie come from, anyway?

It’s not like a telescope and it’s not like a drill, spoke up a voice in the back of Mia’s head. It’s closer to a camera lens, which is fitting, butit’s also something else. Something darker. Something more dangerous. Something that goes straight through the center, all right…

“Ain’t you gonna ask me what I see?” said Sunshine Devil Girl.

Mia cleared her throat and said, “What do you see?”

“It’s bleak as fuck, sis. I’ll be honest with you.”

“What is it, exactly?”

“That’s just it—bleak as fuck. You hear me? It’s all over you. Filling you up like shit water through a pipe.”

“All right,” Mia said, and stood up. “Thanks for the insight.”

At Mia’s back, the fire door opened and the event coordinator poked his burly head out. “You got five minutes, Mia.”

“Thanks.”

The coordinator shifted his attention to Sunshine Devil Girl, who was still studying Mia through the circles of her hands. Telescope. To Mia, the guy said, “This chick bugging you?”

“It’s cool,” Mia said.

“I’m not doin’ nothing, dickhead,” Sunshine Devil Girl said to the guy, still gazing with one eye through her hands at Mia. “Leave me the fuck alone.”

“Give a holler if you need anything,” the event coordinator said to Mia, then vanished back behind the door.

“Listen, I gotta go,” Mia said, reaching into the rear pocket of her jeans.

“But what about your future?”

“You told me. Bleak as fuck, remember? Thanks for that.” She extended a few crinkled bills to the girl.

“What’s that for?”

“Not for telling me my future,” Mia said. “That would be bad karma.”

“Then what’s it for, sis?”

“For this enlightening conversation.”

Sunshine Devil Girl suddenly adopted the countenance of a wary forest critter, some weak and helpless thing that only knew how to eat, sleep, fuck, shit, and sense danger. Yet in the end, she plucked the bills from Mia’s hand and wedged them into the too-tight pocket of her jean shorts.

“Have a good night,” Mia said, pulling open the exit door.

“Wait!”

Mia turned around. The glow from the nearby lamppost made Sunshine Devil Girl’s skin shimmer with an otherworldly radiance. Sickly…yet somehow beatific, too.

“Something’s coming, and it’s gonna cross your path,” Sunshine Devil Girl told her. “Whatever you been running from, it’s about to catch up to you. So keep an eye open so you don’t miss it. You get me, sis?”

For a moment, Mia could not move. She stood there with one hand clutching the door handle, the other driving her fingernails into the tender meat of her palm. A sudden, curious needling at the back of her brain urged her to bolt down the alley, to jump in her Jeep and get the fuck out of Van Nuys, and not look back.

“Sis? You get me?”

The spell broken, Mia blinked her eyes, shook her head to clear it. She nodded, suddenly feeling like she was the train wreck in this little duo. How’d that happen? One of those M. Night Shyamalan twist endings.

“Sure,” she told the girl. “I’ll keep an eye out. Thanks.”

“You got it,” Sunshine Devil Girl said, already receding back into the shadows of the alley. She blew Mia a kiss. “Much love, sis.”

Mia Tomasina watched her go until the darkness of the alley swallowed her up.

2

She was just a junkie with a creative streak, but something about that encounter resonated with Mia. There was no logical reason to be afraid, nothing specific in what the woman had said to trigger anything. Yet she couldn’t shake it, couldn’t let it go. She spent the following week in L.A., taking meetings, quarrelling with distribution companies, discussing imaginative ways to coax money from would-be financiers, and holding bitch sessions about the industry with her fellow filmmakers over sake bombs at Nagoya. Yet Sunshine Devil Girl’s warning persisted: Whatever you been running from, it’s about to catch up to you. You get me, sis?

It got to the point where she started to ascribe meaning to innocuous things—the bark of Ms. Lopez’s dog in the apartment complex every night; the days when her mail came an hour later than it should; the patterns in traffic signals. One evening, after meeting with an actor friend of hers at a bar in Long Beach, she was driving home when the power went out up and down the boulevard on either side of her. The houses all went dark, the traffic lights died, a car alarm started blaring somewhere in the distance. Panicked that she might miss something momentous, she pulled her Jeep over onto the side of the road, climbed out, and stood in the middle of that desolate, powerless street. Looking for…what, exactly?

She didn’t know.

And too much of this was liable to drive her crazy.

She was booked at a film festival in Utah, but when her flight into Salt Lake City was delayed twice, she began to wonder if this was some sort of sign. Were the gods transmitting code to her via airline delays? Still, it was good to leave Los Angeles, because maybe that meant she’d leave her newfound hypersensitivity behind, too. Yet while at the festival, she found herself assigning weight to seemingly inconsequential things, much as she had done back in L.A.—the number on the door of her hotel room (218), the timeslot she was given to show her film (11:11, which was a time almost too random to be random; it must mean something), the curious biplane that kept sweeping across the desert sky every day at noon as if to alert her to some impending catastrophe. Was there some deeper meaning embedded here? Something she’d been warned to keep an eye out for?

“Whiten your teeth with Crest,” said the woman on the hotel TV, and Mia thought, What?

When she returned to L.A., she had lunch at an outdoor Japanese restaurant with a friend’s mom, a woman who was supposedly clairvoyant or some such thing. She was seeking confirmation, or perhaps whatever the opposite of confirmation was, hoping that this woman might untangle the wires she had somehow unwittingly gotten herself knotted up in. She told the woman, whose name was Elsie, about the encounter with Sunshine Devil Girl behind the theater in Van Nuys, and what this girl had said to her.

Elsie laughed garrulously after hearing the story, then affected a pitiable, almost condescending tone as she patted the top of Mia’s hand from across the table. Elsie’s fingers were bejeweled with all manner of cheap titanium rings, and the sleeve of bracelets along her wrists jangled and chimed like coins spewing from a slot machine.

“Mia, dear, are you honestly saying that some strung-out junkie lurking in an alley in Van Nuys has spooked you this badly? Sweetheart, why on earth are you getting so worked up over this?”

It was a good question. One Mia didn’t have an answer for. One she kept asking herself.

“It must have been some act,” Elsie concluded.

“I don’t think it was an act.”

“Darling, it’s always an act.”

Mia wasn’t so sure.

“Come on, come on,” Elsie ultimately beckoned, wiggling her fingers at Mia. (Elsie was already on her third gin and tonic by this point.) “Throw those dainty little paws on up here.”

Mia placed her hands on the table and Elsie twisted her wrists so that Mia’s palms faced the sky. Gently, Elsie raked her long acrylic fingernails across Mia’s palms. It tickled. Mia’s own fingernails had been gnawed to nubs, the remnants of black nail polish on some. She felt suddenly embarrassed of her hands.

“Now there’s a story,” Elsie said, running a thumb along the crude speed bump of a scar along Mia’s left wrist. Clearly self-inflicted. Mia tugged that hand away, self-conscious of the old wound.

“Right hand for females for reading birth traits,” Elsie explained. “Left hand for females for reading the future.”

“Is the future the same as destiny?”

Elsie seemed somewhat perplexed by the question. “It’s what your future holds, Mia, though nothing is set in stone.”

“The future, then,” Mia said, reluctantly placing her left hand back on the table.

Elsie studied Mia’s palm.

Amateur-hour bullshit, Mia thought, and pictured Sunshine Devil Girl pirouetting in some gloomy back alley at the edge of the world.

“Well, see, so this is good news,” Elsie said.

“What?”

“Well, look. You see, your love line is long, and you’ve got two very distinct marriage lines. See here? See? Is there perhaps a certain gentleman in your life at the moment? Someone special?”

Mia laughed. There hadn’t been a gentleman in her life since Vince Overmeyer had coaxed her hand down the front of his pants while in the back seat of his parents’ car when she was still in high school. That had been the first and last gentleman she’d ever had in her life, thank you very much.

“I don’t think this is about romance,” Mia told her. “Isn’t there, like, a lifeline or something? Something that will tell me if I’m about to die?”

Elsie gawped at her. It was almost comical.

“You’re not about to die, Mia. Good Lord, the stuff that’s in your brain! Is that where all those weird movie ideas come from?”

“How do I know what I should be looking out for?”

“You won’t know because there’s nothing there, dear.”

“Then why do I feel so certain that you’re wrong and that junkie chick in the alley was right?”

Elsie withdrew her hands across the table. If Mia had offended her, that hadn’t been her intention. Elsie finished her drink, then stared with disquieting intensity at Mia. She had red freckles in her hazel irises.

“Can I speak candidly with you, dear?”

“Of course,” Mia said.

“I don’t think you need to be consorting with me or anyone else who deals in the spiritual realm,” Elsie said. “I do, however, have the name of an excellent psychotherapist.”

3

Around the time I was attending my third Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, having been clean and sober for over ninety days, sipping a cup of lukewarm coffee while seated in an uncomfortable folding chair next to Emily Pearson in the basement of the First United Methodist Church on Mill Street in downtown Akron, Mia Tomasina was checking into a rather undignified motel in Lexington, Kentucky. The room was paid for by the Fans of Feral Female Cinema (a horrible name for an organization, Mia thought) and was part of her stipend for attending yet another showing of Dead Rabbit, followed by yet another Q&A. It seemed she made her living more and more these days talking about her movies as opposed to making them. She had hopes, based on the success of her latest film, Bulletproof, which had been acquired by one of the notable streaming services of our time, that she might be able to raise half a million dollars for a future production she’d been kicking around, because she was ready to focus all of her attention on her work. Although she’d obsessed over what the strange woman behind the theater in Van Nuys had said to her for nearly two months, she had ultimately climbed out of that strange hole to rejoin the land of the living. That was it: the Land of the Living. A proper fucking noun.

It was a two-day event, beginning on the first evening with a dinner at some restaurant that had clearly once been a Chili’s. Perhaps thirty members of the Fans of Feral Female Cinema film group were in attendance, most of them heavyset and odorously off-putting. (There were one or two younger women among them whom Mia found attractive, but she’d learned long ago not to mix pleasure with… well, whatever the hell this was.) The event was tolerable at best, but went downhill when Mia suggested the group rename themselves the Fans of Feral Female Films to at least comport with the whole F alliteration. This proposal was met with blank stares, as if she’d just spoken in some foreign tongue. Anyway, it was nothing a few Scotch and sodas couldn’t handle.

The following evening, the group showed a print of Dead Rabbit in a dilapidated old theater. When she went outside to smoke a jay before the Q&A, she could see the lights of a carnival in the distance. She watched the great Ferris wheel crank lazily against the night sky, nearly lulling her into a trance. It reminded her of Sunshine Devil Girl’s T-shirt. Before heading back into the theater, she closed one eye and traced the outline of the Ferris wheel with one finger: a circle.

“My movies,” she said, “are these really angry, really depraved things. That’s a direct reflection of me as a filmmaker. You walk in mid-scene, you’d think you’re watching a snuff film. Or a Nazi propaganda film. Or just someone’s psychedelic nightmare imprinted on celluloid. I tried doing the commercial sellout thing but I didn’t have the spine for it. Or maybe I had too much spine for it. I don’t know. The industry sucks and the people are about as genuine as a three-dollar bill. Anyway, I’ve never played well with people. Fuck ’em, I say. I’ll make my own way.”

The women stood and applauded.

As part of their appreciation, they gave her a gift basket of cheap screw-top wine, a keychain, and a Fans of Feral Female Cinema T-shirt (Official Member, it said over the left breast). Their questions had been pedantic and grating, or maybe Mia just hadn’t been in the mood. Whatever the case, she was relieved when it was all over, and she was able to climb back into her rental car and head back to the motel. She’d be on a flight to L.A. first thing in the morning.

Yet despite her exhaustion, she found herself detouring off the highway and heading in the direction of the carnival, where she spent the next half hour strolling along the midway while picking apart a bright pink ball of cotton candy.

And that was when it happened.

A man stood among the crowd, staring at the carousel as it went round and round. Calliope music shrilled while little kids waved to their parents as the intricately carved horses went up and down, up and down.

The way he stared at those kids on the carousel. Hungrily.

A tornado came blasting through her cerebral cortex. Shrapnel went flying.

She managed to fumble her phone out of her back pocket and snap a few hasty photos before the man vanished into the crowd. She hurried across the midway in pursuit, shoving people aside, scanning the crowd for any indication of where the man had gone. But she could not find him.

Something’s coming, and it’s gonna cross your path. Whatever you been running from, it’s about to catch up to you. So keep an eye open so you don’t miss it. You get me, sis?

She got her, all right. Jesus Christ, she got her now.

4

Around the time I received the phone call from Detective Aiello informing me of my mother’s passing and my brother’s peculiar, half-naked romp along the shoulder of a highway, Mia Tomasina went online to locate a lost but not forgotten childhood friend. This man’s name was Clay Willis. She hadn’t spoken to Clay in many, many years, and wasn’t sure he would be happy to hear from her now. She could locate no phone number for him, but she did manage to find an email address.

From: [email protected]: [email protected]: hello from planet childhood

Clay,

I wish I could be there right now as you read this to see the look on your face. Am I a ghost? Am I a figment of your imagination? What I am is a dispatch from your childhood. Remember me?

I’ve attached a photo to this email. It was taken the other day in Lexington, Kentucky. No context, I just want you to look at it. If it means something to you, hit me back.

I know how this sounds. I really do.

All my love,

Mia Tomasina

The arrowhead cursor hovered over the SEND button for an eternity. Was this madness? Was this stepping over a line? Was this her destiny?

In the end, she hit SEND.

So be it.