The Twisted Ones Read online

  Nobody had been through here with bleach for a long time.

  The porch was covered in all the usual yardwork detritus—a rake and a trowel and a faded bag of fertilizer granules. An old pair of gloves lay discarded on the rocker. (Of course there was a rocking chair. I told you we were in the South.) Everything was tied together with ropes of cobwebs. The rake handle was practically glued to the porch supports. It was one of the ones with a hollow metal handle, and there was a big web right around the end, which meant that there was a spider living in the handle.

  I made a mental note to buy a new rake. That one belonged to the spider now.

  None of this was why I’d started swearing.

  I swore because when I unlocked the front door and opened up the house, the light fell on a stack of newspapers.

  Behind it was another stack of newspapers. Behind that was another stack. They were tied up neatly with string, and there was a pile of magazines next to that, and another pile, and another, and oh shit Grandma was a hoarder.

  I took a deep breath and scrubbed my face with my hands.

  Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I feared. Maybe it was just one room.

  It’s never just one room, my brain said, and of course it isn’t, but maybe just this once…

  Yeah, no. It wasn’t just one room.

  It wasn’t… It wasn’t awful. She didn’t collect cats, thank God, so the house hadn’t turned into one of those horrible biohazards with urine on every surface and burying beetles scuttling under the furniture. And she wasn’t the sort of person who hoarded food, so there wasn’t two-year-old garbage everywhere. Dad had taken the trash out when he took her to the home, and then he’d come back and emptied out the refrigerator.

  He hadn’t defrosted the freezer. I could tell by the dried circle of water stains on the floor, where it had leaked out when the power was shut off. But honestly, if you have to take your ninety-nine-year-old mother out of her house and put her in a home while she’s calling you every name in the book, I’ll cut you some slack on remembering the freezer.

  (He never said that she called him every name in the book. I’m just assuming on this one.)

  Still, it could have been worse.

  The newspapers were piled up and magazines were stacked five feet high, but you could still get to the living room furniture. There were places to sit. When I flipped the light on, it looked like a very cluttered room, not like an alien topography.

  The place was a terrible firetrap, though. All that paper everywhere. It was a miracle Grandma hadn’t burned the place down by accident.

  (Oh God, if only! I don’t wish even an evil old bat like her to die by fire, truly I don’t, but if she could have passed peacefully in her sleep and then the house burned down a couple of hours later, that would have been fine. And I’d still be able to sleep at night.)

  The hoard was somewhat organized, I’ll give her that. I went from room to room, listening to the floorboards creak. There were narrow paths between the stacks. Magazines and newspapers in the living room, Tupperware and bags full of other bags in the kitchen.

  It got worse as I got farther back in the house, though. The bathroom was a jumble of ancient shampoo bottles and body lotions with the caps melted on. The toilet… well, pray God the well pump had survived the years of inactivity without locking up.

  The stairs to the second story were completely jammed with garbage bags. I prodded one with my foot. The contents moved like cloth but smelled like mice.

  One of the closet doors was wedged open. The inside was a solid block of Christmas decorations, old coats, and unlabeled white jugs. The tiny bit of floor that I could see had a white crust over it where the jugs had leaked.

  There were three closed doors off the hallway that probably led to bedrooms. I had originally been planning on sleeping in one of those bedrooms, but Christ only knew what was being stored in them.

  The whole place stank of must and mice and silence.

  Bongo barked. The noise jerked me out of my increasing despair, and I went back outside. It was an overcast day, but the sky seemed very bright.

  I let Bongo out of the truck and grabbed his leash. You can’t let coonhounds off the leash, not ever. They’ll smell a rabbit and wind up in the next county. I owned more ropes and harnesses and tie-outs and carabiners than a dedicated bondage enthusiast.

  (Okay, okay, fine, I’ve heard of dog owners who have hounds that are so responsive that they will heel beautifully with no lead at all. Those are smarter owners than me and smarter dogs than Bongo. But we do fine by each other, and that’s the important thing.)

  Bongo went sniffing and snuffling around the edge of the porch, over into the bushes, back to the porch. I let him follow his nose. I didn’t have anywhere to go and I didn’t want to open one of those bedroom doors before I absolutely had to.

  We went over to the carport. The woodpile in the back was probably at least 80 percent spiders at this point, and shared space with a generator that dated from the Nixon administration. I looked up the side of the house, to the windows on the upper story, and I could see something pressed against them—boxes, maybe, or furniture.

  Two stories’ worth of stuff. I let out a heartfelt groan, and Bongo looked back to make sure he wasn’t doing anything wrong.

  “It’s not you,” I told him. “You’re fine.”

  He peed on the woodpile by way of agreement and ambled around the back of the house.

  The porch wrapped clear around to the back, on three sides. The back section was screened off to keep bugs out, but there were holes in the screen where something had gotten in.

  Bongo went immediately on alert, which probably meant that the holes were from squirrels.

  Trees pressed in on three sides of the garden: loblolly pine and pin oak and tulip tree. (Aunt Kate is a botanist. When I was growing up, she would constantly interrupt herself to reel off the names of passing plants. As a result, I can follow extremely fractured conversations and I also know common trees on sight the way most people know dog breeds.) There were some saplings making inroads around the edges, and the grass had grown high and rank in sunny spots. The shrubbery was too dense to walk through in most places, but the right-hand corner, under the oak, was nothing but dead leaves. The woods behind it hadn’t been cleared recently, because I could see quite a way back there, before a stand of holly trees blocked the view.

  Mostly I saw even more dead leaves and a couple of large rocks. Not exciting for anyone, except possibly Aunt Kate.

  The backyard had contained a garden at some point, and bits of the deer fence were still there. The fence posts leaned drunkenly, with chicken wire bunched up between them. Mint and oregano had run riot everywhere, and every step we took kicked up a delicious smell.

  I had a strong urge to pull some of the weeds, but I wasn’t here to garden. Pity. I might have enjoyed putting the garden to rights. More than I would enjoy excavating the house, anyhow.

  How had I not known she was a hoarder?

  I’d only been a kid when I’d visited, but kids remember things. There hadn’t been the piles of newspaper then. The counters in the kitchen had appliances, not stacks of Tupperware.

  A memory surfaced of Grandma washing Ziploc bags and drying them with a hair dryer. Dad saying, “She grew up during the Depression, Mouse. A lot of folks who lived through that have a hard time throwing anything away.”

  Well. The signs had been there. And sometime in the last decade or two, she’d just… gone over the edge.

  I pulled out my phone and looked at it, thinking of calling Dad. He could have warned me.

  He did say it was a mess. And that it was bad.

  Yeah, but his definition of a mess and mine are apparently a lot different!

  There was no cell signal. I cursed my carrier and shoved the phone back in my pocket.

  If you’re thinking that she was going mad in the house alone for forty years, like Miss Havisham, don’t. Dad paid for caregivers, and he went down
to visit her fairly regularly when he was still able to get around. But the caregivers got harder and harder to find as she drove them off, and eventually there was just the woman who took her into town.

  Maybe that’s when it got bad. Maybe that woman didn’t go into the house. Maybe nobody’d known the state the place was in.

  Bongo wanted to go under the porch steps. “No, buddy,” I said, leading him past. He looked longingly at the hollow under the stairs. There might be a possum he could lick!

  “I know,” I said. “I’m the worst.”

  We finished our circle around the house. There was a set of double doors that probably led down to a root cellar. Jesus. Who knew what I’d find down there?

  Bongo’s tail was wagging good-naturedly as we finished the circuit. One of his ears had flipped over along the way.

  “Let me fix your ear.…” More wagging.

  I tied him out to the railing on the front steps. He could probably find a way to twist the leash around, but I wasn’t going to be more than thirty or forty feet away. And anyway, I suspected that I’d be coming out of the house frequently, just to be surrounded by clean air instead of junk.

  He flumped down on the porch and looked tragically at me. I gave him a chew toy, and he began gnawing on it and making terrible canine faces of pleasure.

  You know, thinking about it now, if Bongo had been scared of the house, I might have left. I was right on the edge. I could have called Dad and said it was beyond my ability, it was too full, it was a mess, and he should just hire one of those companies that deal with hoarder houses and get them to drag it all to a landfill.

  But Bongo thought the place was grand. There were things to sniff! There might be squirrels! And I hadn’t seen anything terrible yet, just stuff. Nothing I couldn’t fix with a couple hundred garbage bags and directions to the county dump.

  I had a pickup truck. I had a lot of irritation at my recent ex to work out, ideally with manual labor. I might as well give it a try.

  Which just goes to show that my dog and I were both as sensitive to that other world as rocks, and probably that we deserve each other.

  * * *

  I went back into town to get garbage bags and a couple pairs of sturdy gloves. Pondsboro actually has a little downtown. They’d love to be like Southern Pines, two hours away, which is so quaint it makes your teeth hurt. The rich country-club people all go there to spend money, so you can have antique stores instead of junk shops and a really good independent bookstore and little shops that sell nothing but scented candles and fancy doorknobs.

  Southern Pines is in the Sandhills, though, and it’s a lot easier to put a golf course there. So Pondsboro’s downtown isn’t nearly as ritzy, despite their best efforts. But they do have a good coffee shop and a bad diner and a hardware store that hasn’t been eaten by one of the big chains. I went to that last one for garbage bags and gloves and about a dozen containers of those little bleach-soaked wipes. (And, yes, a scented candle. It didn’t matter what it smelled like; it was bound to be better than the smell of musty house.)

  I picked up a cheap pair of sheets, too. They were red flannel, with a Christmas-tree pattern, and since it was now late March, they were on deep, deep clearance. I felt weird enough about sleeping in a dead woman’s house without sleeping on her sheets. Even if I found a clean set in a closet, they would smell like the house or (worse) like her. I’d rather have Christmas trees.

  The barista at the coffee shop was a cheerful Goth woman with hair dyed black in back and hot pink in front. She skillfully extracted the reason I was in Pondsboro, how long I was staying, and who my grandmother was.

  “Oh!” she said, when I said her name. “Old Mrs. Cotgrave? She’s dead?”

  “Hard to believe, isn’t it?” I said into my latte.

  “She used to come in here. She was… ah…” I could see her trying to decide whether or not to be diplomatic.

  “A raging bitch, I imagine,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  The barista grinned. “Well, yes. And a lousy tipper.”

  “I’m sorry about that, too.” I sighed. “It wasn’t just you. She was an awful person.”

  “Some people are,” she said sympathetically, and gave me a warm-up on the latte when I got up to leave.

  I made a mental note to come back, and not just because the coffee shop had Wi-Fi.

  Bongo enjoyed the drive back. He stood with his front feet on the central armrest and gazed out the front.

  “If I get in an accident, you’re gonna go right through the windshield, you know.”

  He ignored this. I looked in the rearview mirror and got a great view of the dog’s forehead.

  Once we got back to the house, I let him come inside with me.

  He walked around, sniffing. The smell of mice was much too exciting, and I had to haul him away from the bags on the staircase.

  Oh well. It’s not like he can make much more of a mess.…

  I pulled on the gloves. They were good solid work gloves, men’s size medium, not the crappy little floral-print things they try to sell to women. With the gloves and the trash bags, I felt obscurely armored. Whatever horrors awaited, at least I wouldn’t have to touch them.

  I lit the scented candle. It was called “Berries and Dreams,” and I am sad to say that it had been the best of the selection and the only one that did not involve patchouli in some fashion. It smelled like the lip gloss I’d worn in third grade—strawberry with notes of wax.

  It was still better than mouse crap.

  * * *

  My first order of business was to find a bedroom. I was waiting on e-mails to be able to work on an editing job, so I wasn’t losing money at the moment, but if I had to spend the whole time in a motel room, I’d start burning the bank account at both ends. Motels that allow dogs charge a lot of money for the privilege.

  The door at the back of the hallway had boxes piled to knee high in front of it, so I wasn’t hopeful about it, but the other two were reasonably clear. There was a rampart of plastic storage bins between the two doors, reaching to the ceiling, but you could get by them if you turned sideways.

  I pulled open the first door and then slumped against the doorframe with a groan.

  Christ. The doll room. I’d forgotten all about that. She’d had those awful china dolls with the painted eyes, which were bad enough, but she’d really liked the newborn dolls. The ones all made up to look like realistic babies, except that when something’s that realistic, it just looks dead.

  The whole damn room was full of dead babies. Most of them were still in boxes, but she’d taken a bunch out, too. Then she’d stacked the other dolls in front of them, so all you’d see were horrible hyper-realistic faces peeking out from behind the edges of boxes or piled together. It looked like a monument to infanticide, and also to the astonishing holding capacity of clear plastic bins.

  On the far side of the room, over the sea of babies, was a tall built-in storage cabinet, running to the ceiling. The china dolls stood inside that, in their little shoes and little coats, their hair dusty and immaculate.

  I remembered her taking me into the room—you could see the floor then—and showing me the dolls and then telling me sternly that they were not for playing. I can still recall feeling embarrassed and resentful about it, because I wouldn’t have wanted to play with her stupid dolls anyway. I much preferred stuffed animals, and china dolls are creepy no matter what age you are.

  They hadn’t gotten any less creepy. They stood in the case like objects of worship, surrounded by infant sacrifices.

  There is probably a sum of money that could have incited me to sleep in that room. I am not wealthy and I can be bought. But it would be up in the thousands. I’m easy, but not cheap.

  Since no one was appearing to proffer large sums of money, I shut the door to the room again and leaned against it, shuddering.

  The old woman, wandering around the house for years, buying dolls that looked like infants. For the first time I start
ed to feel a little guilty.

  Possibly you think that I should have been feeling guilty long before this. Maybe you think I’m a terrible person. My grandmother, after all, had lived alone for years and had died unloved. She was my blood kin. I should have been coming down to visit her, and… I don’t know, reading aloud to her or something.

  That seems like it would have been an excellent way to get a book thrown at my head.

  You have to understand, it’s just not how my family works. We don’t stay where we aren’t wanted. Grandma had made it clear that she wanted nothing to do with me, and if somebody wants nothing to do with you, you leave.

  We are a family that divorces quietly and without contest. If someone says they are done with us, we take them at their word.

  But the corollary to that, I suppose, is that we return just as quickly and with just as little fanfare. My dad and my stepmother, Sheila, were separated for nearly seven years, and then one night she called him up and said, “Please come get me.” And he did, and they’ve been together ever since. I resented that at the time, but she takes good care of Dad, and after a while that was the only thing that mattered.

  If Grandma had called me up in the middle of the night, at any time in all those years, and said, “Mouse, I need you here,” I would have come. I would have gotten in the car and driven all night. I didn’t like her and I didn’t love her, but I would have come because she’d asked.

  But she never asked.

  Should I have known somehow? But I hadn’t seen her since I was seven and she babysat me after my mom died, when Dad couldn’t afford a sitter. That had been so sufficiently awful that I’d been relieved to go live with my mom’s sister, Aunt Kate, even if it meant that I saw Dad only on weekends. I hadn’t spoken to her since I was seventeen and called her to ask if she wanted to attend my high school graduation.

  She had snorted at me and said that she didn’t know why I was bothering to graduate. I was Catholic trash and was just going to get married and squeeze out babies for the rest of my life.