Bellwether Read online

  Once they were all inside, Father turned to face them while Mother took her bag and disappeared into a back room. “We’ll be staying here for a while, setting things up,” he said, his voice sounding creaky, as though it was not accustomed to use. “It will be our base of operations for the time being.”

  It was the most Father ever said to them at once, and the words confused Lily more than ever. She looked around, seeing nothing but floors littered with concrete dust and garbage, and grimy walls with holes that had wires poking out of them. A heavy metal door gleamed dully from the back, and two other wooden ones stood partially open, revealing more emptiness, more dirty floors.

  Now that the family stayed here a few days, it didn’t seem quite so bad. Lily and Rose swept out the front rooms, scrubbed the walls, filled the holes, and painted over them with crisp, white enamel. Father brought soft cots for the girls, which he set up in one of the back rooms, one with a wooden door. He brought a small refrigerator and stocked it with snacks, and left money for the girls to go and eat at the various small restaurants around the plaza. On the third day, a truck came and delivered dozens of white foldout chairs, which Father instructed Lily and Rose to set up in neat rows in the front room. He said the chairs were for all the guests they would soon be having. Lily felt her spirits lift at this, for at last Father was finally coming through on the promise to have lots of people around for Lily to talk to. She was still disappointed that they wouldn’t be living in the house in the woods, but she supposed if she had lots of friends around, then this shabby little storefront would do for the time being.

  Lily was startled out of her reverie by the sound of footsteps on the other side of the door. She realized that the heated voices—Father’s mostly, with only insectile buzzing from Mother’s end—had stopped. Rose turned from the window and was looking expectantly toward the door, ready to receive her master. Father would soon be standing there, and would be asking more favors. Lily sat straighter in her chair. It wouldn’t do to be seen slouching or looking unhappy; she knew too well the consequences of that. So she turned toward the door, and waited, her face a mask of perfect happiness and devotion.

  Chapter Four

  Martin had the dream several more times, and it was really starting to bother him. It had been nearly four weeks since the strange man and that peculiarly alluring girl appeared on the doorstep, and though he hadn’t completely forgotten the incident, he didn’t impart to it any significance as far as the dream was concerned, other than marking the very day when the dreams had started.

  “Maybe you should see a shrink if it’s bugging you,” Chloe said when he told her about it. She looked more worried about him than he might have expected.

  The last thing he needed right now was a shrink, even though he was definitely stressed. There was just so much else to do. Crandall’s—which they named in honor of Crandall the Conjuror, the magician who once owned the house and whose magical paraphernalia were its main theme and decoration—were officially open for one week. Even though they only had two bands play so far, and were only exhibiting their own artwork at present, they found that turnout far exceeded expectations. Martin spent most of his days on the phone, booking local musicians, or going around to the studios and crappy apartments of local artists to have a look at their work. At night, when the place was open and buzzing, he was running around on hyperdrive, serving coffee and wine, making cakes and cookies and sandwiches in the kitchen, or networking with the other creative townspeople who had adopted Crandall’s as their new regular hangout. All the activity left Martin very little time for his own artwork, but he knew that going in, so was not terribly put out for now. Chloe was a big help, of course. She handled all the advertising for Crandall’s, as well as the accounting and purchasing. She was always off on some errand or another, but Martin hoped when some of the newness of the place wore off, they’d be able to relax, see each other more, and get back to some of their own projects. Though he was ashamed to admit it, he did harbor a tiny bit of resentment toward Ivan and Olivia, who didn’t help out quite as much with the running of Crandall’s, unless it was under the auspices of Ivan’s band or Olivia’s sculptures. Then again, both of them still had their day jobs, and were pulling in extra money that way, so he supposed he couldn’t complain about the amount of work that fell on his own shoulders.

  A few times during the opening week, he searched the crowds for the young girl who had flitted around the doorstep that day. He never saw her, and afterwards he always felt guilty for looking.

  The dream was still haunting him, though, probably more than he let on to anyone. It visited him every other night or so, and while it wasn’t causing terrible distress, it often disturbed his sleep. He could still function adequately, but he did start feeling more tired and snappish as the days wore on. Besides that, the more insidious effect was the slow change he experienced in his perception of the house itself; to him, it now felt alive and watchful, and possibly dangerous.

  Now the dreams were a constant companion. He was more and more reluctant to pass that dark wood wall on the lower landing. Even though in his dreams it was a place of safety, in the waking world, its shadowed confines seemed somehow sinister, and Martin always ran up the stairs past it with a thumping heart, feeling like a frightened four-year-old but unable to stop himself. Olivia had ragged him about it once, but after she saw the expression on his face, she hadn’t mentioned it again, and neither had anyone else.

  One Sunday morning a month after the opening, the dream startled Martin awake just before dawn. He lay in bed for fifteen or twenty minutes, listening to his breathing in the dark. He tried to close his eyes, but they simply popped back open in defiance of his wishes, and finally he threw off the covers and felt his way through the room to the door, taking care not to wake Chloe. Maybe he could go downstairs, get out his paints, and work in peace for an hour or two before anyone got up.

  To his surprise, Ivan was also awake, and sitting at the kitchen table with a notebook and a cup of coffee in front of him. He looked up, bleary-eyed, as Martin entered. “You couldn’t sleep either, huh?”

  Martin shook his head in response, then poured himself a mug of French roast from the pot. It smelled good; rich and reassuring. He sat down at the table across from his friend. “It’s that fucking dream, man,” he said, rubbing his eyes, annoyed at their stinging dryness. “Maybe I should see a therapist, like Chloe says.”

  “Well, if you do, then I guess I’ll have to go with you,” Ivan said. “I just had it, too.” He sipped calmly from his coffee cup.

  Martin stared across the table at him. “Get out, you red bastard.”

  Ivan smiled a little at the familiar poke at his Russian heritage. “You first, capitalist pig,” he returned good-naturedly, as he had since they were teenagers. His humor dissolved in an instant. “I’m not shitting you, Martin. It was exactly like you described it. I was just writing it down, so I’d remember it better.” He tapped his pen on the notebook before him, the little green one he usually wrote his lyrics in. The pages were covered in cramped black writing.

  Martin had a sudden urge to move to the other side of the table; he didn’t like the feeling of the stair landing behind him, of an unknown something perhaps watching him from behind that blind wall. It was stupid, of course, and he stayed where he was, but the feeling persisted. He scrubbed at his unshaven chin. “Maybe you just dreamed it because I told you about it. Maybe it was just in the back of your mind, you know?”

  “Maybe.” Ivan’s eyes were as blue as the shadowed planes of an iceberg.

  Martin wanted to say something else, but he couldn’t think of anything. What could he possibly say? That he was beginning to think the house was haunted when he’d never believed such things were even possible? That he suspected these recurring dreams were trying to warn him about something? He told himself he didn’t want to say these things aloud because they
would sound ridiculous, because Ivan would laugh. Deep down he knew he was even more afraid of the possibility that Ivan wouldn’t laugh, that he would nod and agree with everything Martin said in that placid way of his. For Martin, that agreement would come with an unacceptable solidity, a coalescence, into reality. He wasn’t ready to deal with that just yet. Maybe he was willing to go on with the charade that this was all just him, stressed out or even losing his mind. No outside verification, not yet.

  They drank their coffee in silence until the rising sun had yellowed the window glass, until the birds had begun their ritual twittering. Martin heard the others beginning to stir upstairs, heard the creak of bedsprings and water running in the shower. “Do you have to work today?” he asked.

  “Just until two,” Ivan answered, obviously relieved to be talking of more mundane topics. “Then I’ve got a lesson until three, but after that I’ll be able to come home and help you guys out. Should be a lot slower tonight, I hope.”

  “Yeah.” Martin suddenly felt very awkward, as though the two of them were trying to talk around something neither of them wanted to mention. Ivan was his best friend, and had been since he moved next door to Martin’s family when both of them were eight. By sharing his revelation about the dream, it was as though he revealed something embarrassingly intimate about himself, about both of them; he might as well have confessed to feeling Martin up one night when he was drunk. Martin didn’t much like this new unspoken feeling between them.

  After Ivan left for work, saying nothing more than goodbye, Martin rinsed out the cups and made a fresh pot of coffee for the girls, then set up his easel in one corner of the former dining room. He didn’t feel much like painting, but he knew this was a rare chance, a free hour to work without worrying about running Crandall’s.

  He loaded up his brush with paint and stood before the primed and grounded canvas, his mind a frustrating blank. All he kept thinking of were those goddamn dreams and that shadowy landing, and of Ivan’s cold blue eyes with the intimate knowledge of the same dreams locked behind them. Shrugging—after all, he had to paint something—Martin put brush to canvas, waiting for that moment when his subconscious would take over, turn him from an artist into a mere conduit for his own hidden images and unacknowledged desires.

  An hour or so later, when he stepped back to consider his work, he was startled by its depth and fierceness. While his work always held a trace of a darker aesthetic, as evidenced by his sinister murals of hovering magicians with menacingly outstretched fingers, this was different, unfamiliar, almost as though something had taken over his body and used it to express its own alien wishes. Martin leaned closer, uneasily, and a small shiver traveled up his back.

  He had painted Ivan’s frosty blue eyes, with their wide compassionate pupils and midnight-ringed irises but around the eyes there was nothing—no hint of a face at all, only a deep, unrelenting blackness. The blackness spread and spiraled outward, coming toward the viewer, but also receding away, forming itself into a perfectly articulated, rectangular passageway.

  A passageway he unwittingly painted right in the middle of a flawlessly rendered wooden wall, with three shadowy steps in the foreground.

  Chapter Five

  Ivan followed his student, a rail-thin fourteen-year-old boy with dark, floppy hair that fell past his shoulders, out of the music shop, closing and locking the door behind him. “Keep working on that fingering,” Ivan said, adjusting his own guitar case on his back. “You’re getting really good, just keep practicing what I showed you.”

  “Sure will. Thanks, Mr. Androv, I’ll see you next week.” The kid shouldered his own guitar and hopped on the skateboard he’d been holding under his arm. Ivan watched him as he glided gracefully down the sidewalk and around the corner.

  It was Sunday afternoon, and although some of the shops in the strip mall were still open, there didn’t seem to be many people around. The first definite nip of fall peppered the air, and Ivan was glad; the summer had been far too long and far too hot, especially with all the work they’d had to do on the house. He thought back to the months of cleaning and repairing and painting, of being covered with dust so thick that the sweat was locked inside the pores for lack of release, of digging through filthy bags and boxes in the closets, in the attic, in the basement, and being lucky to find only a few rat droppings and dead cockroaches. A few times they hadn’t been so lucky, and found live squirming nests of rodents. Ivan shuddered at the memory.

  Thankfully, all of that was finished now, and he was looking forward to spending more time on his music and playing with his band. They’d already done their first gig at Crandall’s, and it had felt good to play in front of an audience again. Opening the place was really a dream come true for him, for all of them.

  The only thing that might spoil it was that goddamn dream of his. He wished now that he hadn’t mentioned it to Martin this morning. He’d only had it twice, and maybe Martin was right that he was just dreaming it because Martin told him about it. He didn’t think so. He thought something weird might be going on with the house. He wasn’t sure why he thought that, but he did. He hadn’t said anything about it to Martin because he hadn’t wanted to freak him out any more than he already was. Now that he mentioned the dream to Martin, he felt like something strained cropped up in their friendship, and he was sorry about that. Maybe tonight he could talk to him, make everything all right again.

  As Ivan walked to his car and loaded his guitar and briefcase into the back seat, something caught his eye among the all-too-familiar shop facades. The store at the very end of the plaza sat empty for almost a year. Ivan remembered it had been a slightly grubby video store for a while, and then a frozen yogurt place. After that folded, the haze of dust on the glass front windows was broken only by the dingy white rectangle of a hand-lettered “For Sale or Lease” sign.

  Now, something looked different. The windows were clean and sparkling, and the dirty sign was replaced by a smaller white rectangle of cardboard, on which someone wrote a single word in black marker: Bellwether.

  Ivan stood by his car for a minute, wondering about that. He couldn’t see activity inside. There might be shades or blinds on the inside of the windows, although with the sun glaring against them it was hard to tell. He thought how weird it was to put up a sign with just one cryptic word on it, without saying what type of business it was, or whether it was open. What product or service could a place called Bellwether possibly be peddling? Bellwether, meaning a predictor, an indicator of something to come. Strange, and a little sinister. On the other hand, he told himself, it had piqued his curiosity, hadn’t it? So maybe the owners of the business knew what they were doing after all.

  Then again, maybe not. He shrugged and chuckled to himself, ultimately not curious enough about the new shop to walk down there and peer inside, and then slid into the driver’s seat of his ancient Civic. He’d promised Martin he’d be home to help them set up, and he wanted time to run through a couple of new songs with the band before they played them in the set tonight. Chloe had even said she’d throw in on vocals for a few tunes, and he hoped she would. It would be like old times.

  No sooner had Ivan put the key in the ignition than the glass door of the once-empty shop eased open.

  At first, he thought it was a little girl who had stepped out, a girl of about seven or eight, with long blonde hair and a pink sundress that was several years out of style.

  When he looked closer, he realized she wasn’t a child at all, but a dwarf.

  He had seen little people before, of course, and he had never attributed any uncanny aspect to their diminutive stature, but this girl was different. For one thing, her face appeared to have… He hesitated to use the word melted, but it was the first one that popped into his head, although he was a little ashamed of himself for thinking it. There was no doubt her features appeared lower on one side, as though eye, nose, and mouth had
slid down the skull like softened wax and hardened into fleshy lumps somewhere around the curve of her jaw. Even one side of her forehead looked as though it had caved in.

  Her limbs were similarly malformed, although her legs seemed adequate to hold her weight upright. Her arms were several inches shorter even than her relative proportions should allow, and they twisted at odd angles, as though someone had broken the bones and pulled the ends apart in opposite directions. Her stunted fingers hung by her sides, stiff and fat as rolls of quarters.

  Ivan knew he shouldn’t stare at the poor creature, but he found he couldn’t help himself. There was something so disturbing about the juxtaposition of her pitiable deformity and her otherwise delicate femininity—her obvious youth, her flowing blonde hair, her outdated, but still fairly pretty, pink dress—that Ivan was overwhelmed by a feeling he couldn’t quite identify, but that held traces of revulsion and attraction, pity and disgust.

  Something in her eyes horrified him.

  The girl boldly stared right at him, making no attempt to disguise the fact. He had heard of gazes being penetrating, but never really experienced it until now. She looked at him and through him and into him, all at the same time. Despite this, her eyes were utterly empty, hollow, like the eyes of an ugly, lifeless doll.

  Trembling, Ivan managed to tear his gaze away from hers, which held him like a tractor beam. He turned the key and started the engine, ridiculously relieved at the sound of the motor roaring to life. He laughed at himself—what, did he think the magic midget over there would use her evil eye to keep the car from starting?—but the laugh rang false, and died on his lips.

  When he looked up again, she was waving at him, her tiny hand moving in perfectly timed arcs, as though her misplaced elbow joint held a hidden clockwork mechanism. Ivan had the unsettling vision of the girl’s entire body, constructed of springs and cogs and copper wire, all cleverly covered by a layer of eerily realistic, if substantially flawed, skin tissue. Then he chided himself for being such an idiot—she was just a poor deformed girl, for fuck’s sake, there was nothing scary or weird about that, was there? She probably had enough grief from people every day of her life without him thinking she was some kind of malevolent spirit.