Even in her late thirties, every time Sophie would creep back and spend sixty seconds in that house where she had grown up in a lovely and doll-filled attic nook, it was an irresistible thought: This is what a witch’s house would smell like. And then, No, that’s terrible. She’s not a witch. She’s your mother.
Fear of the strap (Now Sophie, how long ago did she ever hit you? How very long?), and a politely declined hot cup of tea, with only a sprinkle of guilt left to savor in its place. I must be going, mama. Thank you. Thank you. Sophie would dread the one deserved and silently-transmitted barb her mother would always send toward her on its blithe unerring course, straight to the heart: You’re not still taking those Valiums, are you? Or perhaps, It’s so good you have dear Tom. Me, I only have our family traditions, traditions you never cared for and left behind. Or even, You didn’t leave dear Tom out waiting in that enormous truck again, did you?
Sometimes pleasantries would lilt along the silent thorn’s wing as well, or only a moment of emphatic, magnetic judgment, pulling Sophie back into the gravity well of her living in the attic with Patrice, her eternal child-past. Then a smile, a genuine smile from Sophie’s ailing mother which was meant, yes, for daughter but only for a fraction of a second, before it became a beaming and wholesome grin for Darling Granddaughter.
And Sophie would set Lacie down, and Lacie would squeal out her battle cry with supreme enthusiasm, Grandmamma! And charge. And she would almost knock the poor old woman down. But there was love there, real love between child and matriarch, and there would be cookies for them to bake, and crochet stitch-steps to learn, and glassed-away antique dolls to marvel over, porcelain German things with their eyes forever closed, their perfect cherubic faces framed by thousands of little ringlets made of century-old horsehair.
And before her mother could stare her down one last time, truly critique her, be disappointed with her overpriced coffee or urbane and mannish mannerisms which had certainly been cultivated in the sin-towers of Black Hawk, before mother could deconstruct her entire successful adult life with razor words (Come, Sophia, let us sit in the parlor for only an hour’s quarter before you must go), Sophie would leave. And she would go far north, shopping in Cherry Creek, to Starbucks, Whole Foods, Jolynn would be on a crusade for Egyptian cotton sheets, it was all so inane, so pleasant and vaguely horrifying to remember… and none of those moments would ever live again. For mama Annabel and Miss Sophia, there would never be a reconciliation.
Here in a heap of solidified concrete ash was mother’s grave, a mounded hollow, made into a petrified black hole filled up with memory. Mitch must certainly have buried her, few other people even knew the woman’s name. And when Mitch himself had died? Who had been here to hold him until the end, and to bury him?
No! Sophie forced herself to look away. She backed up the H4, back around to the front of the house, where the fallen trees gave shelter and the nightmares of yesterday could not seem to extend their own tenebrous crossing. Mitch cannot be dead!
And Patrice, her whispers frail and sated and rarely heard now that Sophie had killed men and been covered in the unholy warmth of others’ blood, asked only: No? Then where is he, Sophie? Where is he? Go and smell the air outside, tell me it is not the stench of death.
Enough. I didn’t come this far to fall to fear.
Sophie parked the H4, turned off the engine without a second thought. If she never drove again, she would revel in that fatal actuality. She slipped on her gloves, her damaged helmet, began to pressurize the suit.
“Silas,” she said, looking into the mirror, “I’m going inside.”
She waited. He was unconscious, very near to death. His lips moved but nothing meaningful came out. She wanted to make certain the house was (Empty? Please, no, please) safe, and then carry Silas in, to rest his meager frame upon Aunt Jemm’s ancient canopy bed, to…
To die. You can say it. He is not going to make it through the night. She looked back at the darkened H4, listened to the ticking of its exhausted and cooling engine.
I can’t just leave him…
You must, sang Patrice, emboldened by Sophie’s terror of what she might find in the deep of the house’s tombs. Go see, go see all the dead people stacked inside, did you really believe your daughter would be here? Watching Disney? Reading storybooks perhaps, snuggling with Uncle Itchy, playing dollies, nibbling cookies? Oh, it is time for you to die, sister Sophie. Go inside and see, and see, and see…
“Fuck you,” whispered Sophie. She grabbed the flashlight and then the HK SMG, checked its ammo feed, its half-depleted magazine, clicked off the safety. She was going inside, through the front door no less, and nothing was going to stop her.
She flexed her fingers, took off and straightened her glove to be certain that she could fire accurately. A nervous gesture, she turned her wedding ring once, twice then with her thumb, trying to stop her numbed hand from shaking. The radiation burns between her fingers were like spidery white tendrils meshing between her veins, beneath the surface, and the more she stared, the more the burning began to itch.
She ignored this. She tugged the glove back on, took the gun in hand and walked up the ancient steps which creaked out ghostly whispers beneath her weight. Three rises led to a tilted, paint-blistered porch where withered flowers crumbled away along a corner-spun gust of wind. Once, in another age (Has it really been so long? Were Tom and I ever so young?), a young Boulder college girl had marveled at this stained glass and mahogany door straight out of the Gilded Age. A gold rush fantasy had forged a single impossible mansion here upon the plains, in the name of Conrad St.-Germain. And then the sepia glory died, choked by its own folly and the Coal Strikes and unions and machine guns, the more sensible dreams dragged into Colorado by steel mill and ranch and butcher’s hovel, aching dreams which thrummed upon the bolted and girder-bridged lines of the Union Pacific Railroad. Now, the mansion’s once-inviting door was a black smear suffocated by nailed-over ply-board, a single surviving pane of shattered glass.
Ghosts. Ghosts are in there.
Sophie tested the door. It was not locked, but it was stuck. She paused, decided not to wear the helmet inside after all. It was too restrictive, too narrowing of her peripheral vision, and she believed — hoped — that the stale air inside would be at least a little purer than the poisoned and dusting wind.
Unless there are bodies in there.
She opened one of the suit’s hip pockets, donned the simple elastic-banded filtration mask she knew of and found therein. She pushed against the door, it creaked but did not give way. And what if Mitch was not to be found at all? What if there inside lurked the utter nightmare, finding his body, Lacie’s body? No. There would be no “and then” if that were the end to be. She would kill herself.