Poe Read online

  Her inquisitive gray eyebrows arch at this news. “Why?”

  “It’s shit,” I say.

  “Well,” she says, as she rises from the table, “you should have someone read it before you throw it away. Stephen King threw Carrie in the trash. It was his wife who pulled it out. Of course, she never gets any credit. The woman never does.”

  “Typical,” mutters Lisa.

  “Everyone who reads my book says it’s shit,” I say cheerfully.

  Amelia bends over to Lisa. “Does he have a record deal with a major label?” she whispers.

  “And do you agree with them?” Elizabeth looks genuinely interested.

  I shrug. “I can’t tell the difference anymore.”

  “No, sweetheart,” says Lisa, answering Amelia’s question. “He doesn’t.”

  “Then how come he gets to use bad words?”

  “I wish you’d stop telling her that,” mutters Elizabeth. “Amelia’s going to be an artist like her grandmother, not a musician.”

  “I’m a writer,” I say seriously to Amelia. “Writers can use all the words they want to. It’s our job.”

  “Lucky,” says Amelia, kicking at her chair.

  “Maybe she’ll be a writer,” I say, and at this both Lisa and Elizabeth gasp in protest. The identical look of shock on their faces is almost comical.

  “For a couple of postmodern feminists, you two are pretty controlling.”

  “Ha!” says Amelia, giving me a fist bump. She’s starting to grow on me. “I showed him Daniel’s numbers,” she adds congenially.

  The room drops into instant and immediate frozen silence. Lisa gives me a nervous glance and reaches for her water; her hand trembles ever so slightly.

  Elizabeth sits back in her chair with a tub of ice cream and four paper bowls. She turns to me, her intense green eyes penetrating and serious. “And what did you think of Daniel’s numbers?”

  I have a feeling this is a pass/fail question by the way that Lisa is suddenly gripping her fork and staring at the table. And I have a feeling I can’t pass a lie by Elizabeth.

  “He’s either crazy or he’s a genius. Or both.”

  “Yes,” confirms Elizabeth in a small voice. She scoops the ice cream into the bowls and then passes them around. Lisa relaxes, just a bit. “Madness and art,” says Elizabeth quietly, “are the Bennet family legacy. On the male side of the family, that is. The women, we just get the art.”

  “Do they mean anything?”

  “The numbers?” Elizabeth pauses, and we can all tell that Amelia is listening intently for the answer. “You did a good job eating all your peas, sweetheart. If you want to take your ice cream and go watch TV for a bit, you can.”

  “I want to stay heeerrre,” Amelia whines.

  “Go,” says Lisa firmly. “TV.”

  If Amelia was allowed to swear, I’m sure we’d be recipients of a blue streak, but instead she just grinds her chair against the floor, grabs her bowl, and stalks from the room with dramatic stomps that shake the dishes in the cabinet. Immediately there’s the buzz of high-pitched voices and the usual cartoon violence from the living room.

  Lisa starts to stand. “She knows she’s not supposed to watch cartoons.”

  “Let her be seven for a minute.” Elizabeth waves her back into her seat. “You haven’t told him anything.” The accusation in her voice isn’t hard to miss.

  “We’re still getting to know each other,” says Lisa defensively.

  “Go get the painting.”

  “Mom—”

  “If he hasn’t run away screaming after seeing Daniel’s numbers, I don’t think he’s going to when he knows the whole story.”

  Lisa doesn’t seem quite so convinced. She stares at her mother; an unspoken but obviously old argument hangs between them.

  “Fine,” she says tersely as she stands and goes to the dining room. I can hear her lifting one of the canvases off the wall.

  “More ice cream?” says Elizabeth. She doesn’t wait for me to answer and adds another scoop to my bowl anyway.

  I’m starting to see why Lisa is jealous of my crappy yet private apartment.

  “He was twenty-five when the voices started.” Elizabeth takes the canvas from Lisa and lays it down in the middle of the table. I recognize it from my house tour with Amelia, the demon in the field with a woman hiding behind the thresher.

  “Look closely,” says Elizabeth.

  Lisa sits, pulls her chair close to mine. It’s hard not to notice that she smells like Ivory soap and something else, lemony and fresh. But I look down at the painting.

  The demon has the face of an owl. In fact it almost looks like the owl is wearing a black demon suit, which is binding its arms in a straightjacket.

  “The owl is the guardian of the underworld; he’s the keeper of the spirits. I gave birth to Daniel in this house, and that morning an owl landed on the branch of that birch tree out there. So I started painting them. I liked them. They felt protective somehow. Like they were watching over us. Especially when their dad left.”

  She sadly traces the painting on the table with her finger, a distant look in her eyes. “But this one is Daniel, after he was diagnosed.”

  “Schizophrenia,” says Lisa.

  “So they say,” says Elizabeth. I feel like Lisa wants to add something, but she doesn’t.

  “He’d been trying to raise Amelia on his own, working as a mechanic during the day, playing his music at night. Sarah, his girlfriend, wasn’t ready to be a mother; she wanted to give Amelia up for adoption. But Daniel wouldn’t hear of it. He hated his dad and felt like giving up Amelia would be abandoning her, something his dad would do, had done. So he moved back here with me, and I took care of Amelia while he was at work or traveling to his gigs across the state.”

  “You probably didn’t tell him about getting into the Thornton School of Music either,” states her mother in a flat voice. I notice that Lisa is very, very still. “A very prestigious school in Los Angeles. They even offered her a full scholarship. Daniel was jealous.”

  “That has nothing to do with anything,” says Lisa.

  “He was,” insists Elizabeth. “He changed. You can’t deny that he changed. He painted the room black.”

  “He played punk,” says Lisa. “That’s part of the whole punk thing.”

  “You think I don’t know that?”

  A very tense silence hangs for a moment.

  “Daniel was brilliant,” says Elizabeth. “He’d always been the center of everything. He could have done anything he wanted, been anything he wanted. But he made bad decisions. Rash decisions.”

  “Keeping Amelia wasn’t a bad decision,” says Lisa with a lowered voice.

  “But it limited his options,” says Elizabeth. “And when Lisa got into music school, his dream, well…”

  Now they both stare at the painting, as if it will speak to them, provide a definitive answer.

  “He didn’t talk about the voices at first,” Elizabeth continues. “He just seemed tired, a little withdrawn, maybe depressed. I thought it was because of Sarah. But once Lisa started planning her move to LA, he began drawing on walls. Then the walls weren’t enough—it was like they couldn’t contain the voices—so he drew on napkins, his body, the soles of his shoes. The same numbers over and over. He said they protected him, protected us. Then I knew. My father, Archibald Bennet, was a respected artist. Watercolors, some woodblock prints, but he’s most famous for his Amelia series. He hit a dry spell in his forties though, and then he heard voices too, drew numbers on the walls. They sent him to an asylum. But they didn’t have much in the way of treatment back then. He was given a partial lobotomy. He never drew on walls again, but then he didn’t remember who any of us were either. A hard trade.”

  “And Daniel knew about this?” I ask.

  “Papa’s numbers? I don’t know, maybe. I thought I threw all that stuff out, but he could have run across something in the attic.”

  “Wait,” I say. “T
hey’re not the same numbers?”

  Elizabeth nods. “I think they are. But I’m not sure. I didn’t memorize them at the time, and I tried to get rid of anything that contained them. I remember there were numbers in tables. ‘Magic squares’ my father called them.”

  Elizabeth turns to the canvas again. The overhead light casts a shadow on her face, revealing dark circles under her eyes, a few lines of crow’s-feet. Just telling the story seems to age her. “He tried to kill Lisa. One day I had a doctor’s appointment for Amelia downtown, and Lisa was home with Daniel. I never thought—never—that he would ever do anything to hurt her.”

  “That wasn’t Daniel,” adds Lisa firmly.

  Elizabeth stares at her uncomprehendingly. “He stabbed her in the neck with a kitchen knife.”

  The scar. That’s where her scar came from.

  Elizabeth points to the woman in the painting. “She ran into the field, hid behind the thresher. It was a driver passing by who called police. When they came they found Daniel naked, covered in blood. He’d drawn the numbers all over his body—his chest, his arms, and face. And he was screaming, ‘I release thee! I release thee!’ Lisa almost bled to death.”

  “Don’t be dramatic,” says Lisa. “It wasn’t that bad.”

  I look at Lisa. Not that bad? “Did he say why?” I quietly venture.

  Elizabeth shakes her head. “There are lyrics to some of the songs that he was working on that make me wonder, but you know anyone in punk has a few songs about demons.” There’s something too even about her tone; it sounds like she’s trying to convince herself.

  “It’s a disease,” says Lisa. “It doesn’t matter whether he thinks the voices were demons, aliens, or the CIA talking to him through an implant in his head. He’s where he needs to be, getting help.”

  “If he’s… getting help, why did you think he was in my apartment?”

  Elizabeth looks shocked, and I can tell this is news to her. Lisa gives me a quick kick under the table to make the point.

  “Somebody broke some pictures at Dimitri’s,” she says with measured calm. I notice she doesn’t mention the letter. I decide not to either. “I thought maybe Daniel had broken out again.”

  “Again?” Knife-wielding crazy brother was on the loose?

  Lisa reads the expression on my face. “About a year ago Daniel set off the fire alarms by blowing powdered cocoa under the fire detectors, and he got out.” She is, remarkably, unable to keep a small hint of pride out of her voice. “His IQ is off the charts.”

  Now they both turn to me, as if waiting for me to make some excuse, head to my car, maybe run over a few chickens as I speed out the driveway. And it is quite the complication. But instead I pick up a crust of cold pizza, take a bite.

  “So you going to show me your drums, or is that just a line you use to pick up guys?”

  Elizabeth’s face breaks out in a warm smile, the warmest of the evening, and she puts her hand over mine. “It’s always better to know what you’re getting into before you jump into bed.”

  Lisa throws her spoon onto the table with a clatter. “Really, Mom. I mean really.”

  But Elizabeth just looks into her empty ice cream bowl, trying and failing to hold back a laugh.

  Lisa is still muttering as we head down the stairs to the basement. “Poking her nose in my business… Can’t she just leave it alone?”

  The basement is remarkable in that it looks nothing like the rest of the house whatsoever. If there had been Kelly green carpeting, then Lisa must have pulled it all up, leaving a bare cement floor covered by a few white, looped throw rugs. There’s an antique brass bed painted firehouse red, pushed up against the cement wall and decorated with modern pillows and a clean linen comforter. The room’s only window lets in a modicum of daylight. On the other side of the room is a white metal desk, and above it a large corkboard covered with Amelia’s artwork, a few casually snapped photos, a flyer for one of Daniel’s gigs, and some handwritten lyrics on college-lined notepaper.

  Impossible to miss, dead center in the room, are the drums. Black and chrome, they’re polished to an almost-obsessive gleam.

  “They look expensive,” I say.

  “I’m still trying to pay them off,” says Lisa. “One of the reasons I can’t afford a place of my own. But the good thing about being way out in the middle of nowhere is that nobody complains about the noise.”

  “I can understand that,” I say. “What made you start drumming?”

  “Mom says I was always banging on stuff. She got tired of me pulling the pots out of the kitchen, so she got me my first set.”

  I hold up a pair of fuzzy bear slippers, arch my eyebrow. “Little big for Amelia, don’t you think?”

  “I wasn’t expecting company,” she says, snatching them from me. “And just remember I didn’t make fun of your bamboo coffee table.”

  “Why, is there something funny about my bamboo coffee table?” I start to tickle her, and her laugh is infectious, bright, and airy. “It’s not polite to laugh.”

  “Then stop,” says Lisa between giggles, and somehow we collapse on her bed. God, it feels good to laugh.

  “Your bed is so comfortable,” I say with a sigh.

  Lisa turns over on her side, puts her head charmingly on her hand. “You know I didn’t think you’d run off because of Daniel. But my mother. She’s scared off more than a few prospects.”

  I wave my hand dismissively. “Wimps all of them.”

  Lisa tugs at a button on the comforter. “So you’re not freaked out?” There is a serious note under her light tone.

  “You’re talking to the guy who woke up in a morgue, remember? Plus I seem to be attracting some serious weirdness of late. I’m a spooky-shit magnet.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I pause but decide to fill her in. A part of me agrees with Elizabeth that you should know what you’re getting into before you jump into bed, and now that I know Lisa’s whole story, it’d be chickenshit to omit mine. I start at the beginning, which I consider to be the death of my parents. I find the words to briefly describe my mother, my father—it’s hard to talk about them, but I manage. Then I bring her up to speed about the ripped photographic prints, how I made the connection that one is a shot of the woman who was on the other table in the morgue. I try to explain the woman in my dream that I’m calling Poe—just saying the word causes a shiver at the base of my spine—and my new assignment for the Devonshire Eagle to investigate the story. I tell her about the article on Aspinwall with the accompanying altered photo, the dream about Daniel in the woods, the real snow in my bedroom, and the equally real footprints, and I end with the $500 leather book that’s sitting on the backseat of my Mustang.

  “Christ,” says Lisa. She pulls her hair loose from her ponytail, considering. “But you haven’t said anything about the envelope.”

  “Like I’m going to. If I remember correctly, you looked more than a little freaked out when you saw it.”

  “I might have overreacted.”

  “You recognized the writing. You thought it was Daniel’s.”

  She nods. “But it couldn’t be, right? If he’s in the hospital?”

  “Maybe he sent someone,” I say, immediately regretting it because her face falls as she considers this.

  “It’s possible. What did it say?”

  “Race you.”

  “Like your dream,” she says hesitantly.

  “Well, I’d just read it before taking some serious sleep medication,” I say with a forced note of cheer. “No wonder.”

  She’s obviously not buying it.

  “So are you freaked out?” I ask.

  I can see that Lisa is choosing her words carefully. “You know what I said upstairs about Daniel suffering from a disease? That it wasn’t him, it was the schizophrenia?”

  I nod.

  “Well, he was also starting to get into some really dark stuff. Occult stuff. He used to hang out at Aspinwall alone. Said he could write better
there.”

  “And you went with him?”

  “Sometimes. I was worried about him. How do you think I knew where all the bad floorboards were? But the termites must have got worse over time; the dining room used to be pretty solid.”

  An unsettling thought dawns on me. “You were looking for something that night. That’s why you crashed our spooky party.”

  “Partly. I thought maybe he’d left something behind. Something that would help me… understand.”

  “I feel so used,” I say in mock hurt.

  “I said partly. I wanted to meet you too—”

  “Sure, easy to say now that you know I’m such a catch.”

  Lisa punches me on my arm.

  “Ow. First you use me, now you beat me. I think I liked you better when I didn’t know you.”

  She gives me a warning look. “Dimitri—”

  “Kidding, okay? Just trying to lighten the mood. So did you find anything?”

  She sighs. “Nothing but the usual crumpled beer cans, cigarette stubs. But then I found something really weird in an old saltine tin. Scratched my hand trying to get it out from a hole in the wall.”

  She leans over the bed and pulls up the tin. It’s rusted, dented, but the colors are still remarkably intact and the name clearly visible, Bremner Wafers. I pull off the top. It smells smoky, there’s ash at the bottom, and inside is a folded sheet of paper. I carefully open it up. A bad Xerox copy with certain words underlined with red marker:

  Dark sigil of the sun,

  Numbers end 4, 2, 31,

  Lay out the magic square,

  Light candles, then beware,

  Become a god, become a slave,

  Two sides of the same coin,

  Become a god, become a slave,

  Your soul and his will join.

  “Daniel wrote this?”

  “No, that’s what’s weird. I Googled the lyrics, and they’re from an eighties metal song, “Succubi Dreams.” Daniel hated eighties metal—said they were fat corporate bands playing at being dark so they could snort coke and pay off their Beverly Hills mansions.”