The Good House Read online

  “Don’t!”Corey yelled, leaping toward him, but Bo’s fingers released it, and the unfinished petition to Papa Legba fell onto the tower of flames, immediately burning black.

  “Oops,” Bo said.

  The fire, the woods, and Bo seemed to spin, tilting at a strange axis. Corey was beyond dizzy; he felt as if he were literally floating now, separate from himself. He gazed once more at Becka, rumpled and crying in a paint-spattered heap. He remembered the most important thing again:You take care of your own. All sound vanished from Corey’s ears.

  “Have you ever seen magic, Bo?” he said. Corey felt himself smiling.

  Bo glared at him, but there was fear in his glare. Bo turned his back on him, walking away. “Fuck off, psycho,” Bo said. “Just remember what I said.”

  “You didn’t know this land is magic? It goes back to Indian times. They used to string up their canoes here in the trees, burying their dead. There’s spirits here. Want to see one? Want to see a real magic demonstration for free?”

  Sean tugged his shirt. “Cut it out, man. Let himleave,” he said, his nose plugged with blood.

  “Do it!”Becka screamed, leaning forward from where she sat. “Get himgood, Corey!”

  Corey fell to his knees, breathing hard. He was shaking as badly as Becka had been, but air poured into his lungs, breathing strength into him.

  Please let me punish him. Please show me a way.

  Corey’s fingers knew what to do while his mind was whirling. He fumbled through his paper bag of chicken bones and brought out two drum-sticks, crossing them the way he had the night of the first spell. He saw the film canister with the raven’s blood in it—the blood he’d brought for the cleansing—and he opened it. Corey poured a stream of raven’s blood across the bones.

  Bo had rounded the fire and nearly reached the trail.

  “Hey!” Corey called after Bo, hoarse.

  Bo stopped walking and looked around at him, his head at an angle.

  Corey grinned at him. “Watchthis,” he said. He didn’t know what “this” would be. He only knew he had a simple prayer in his heart, not caring whose ears it reached:Help me punish him.

  The earth tremors began right away.

  That was how mundane it seemed at first. Corey felt the earth vibrate beneath his feet. Sean and Bo must have felt it, too, because they both stared at the ground. Corey didn’t know whether or not Becka felt the vibrations, because Becka was gone. She’d been sitting on the ground a few yards from him, but now there was no one where she had been, an empty space.

  If Corey thought about it, she seemed to have vanished while he watched.

  Bo suddenly screamed in a way Corey had never heard anyone scream. Bo’s body twisted back and forth, writhing. From where Corey stood on the other side of the fire, it looked as if Bo were doing a crazed dance, his arms thrown above his head. Corey took a few steps closer even though he didn’twant to see, because he thought something might beeating Bo, chewing at his legs. But it wasn’t that. Not exactly.

  There had been an accident.

  Bo was sinking into a manhole-sized pool of mud, a perfect ring around him. Somehow, he and Sean had never seen the tarlike quicksand only a few feet from the trail. Any of them could have stepped in it, Corey’s mind told him. Maybe it had been hidden beneath some leaves.

  Bo was already up to his knees in the mud, screaming as he tried to pull himself free.“Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck…,” Bo was saying, yanking at his legs. His face was bright red. The mud had already climbed to Bo’s thighs. Bo screamed and cursed.

  “G-grab him!” Corey shouted at Sean, who was behind him making whining noises. They both raced to reach Bo, grabbing his meaty arms. Something yanked hard at Bo’s weight from underneath the gaping sludge, and Bo’s thick, rigid arm slipped an inch between Corey’s hands.

  Bo wasn’t sinking. He was beingsucked into the ground.

  Corey couldn’t see through his tears. The stink of Bo’s fright assaulted him, a smell that was both primal and unearthly. He felt shudders as Bo’s body jerked downward, and Corey was pulled over into a stoop as he struggled to keep his grip. Bo’s arms thrashed, scratching Corey’s face, grabbing a handful of his hair.How could this be happening?

  “I got you! I got you!” Sean was saying, and Corey prayed it was true, but it was a lie.

  Sean didn’t have Bo. Only the mud had Bo.

  “G-get me out!”Bo said, losing his breath. He had sunk to his chest. He tried to use his arms to leverage himself up, his muscles straining to pull onto solid soil, but everything Bo touched turned to mud. Corey felt his foot sucked downward into warm mud, and he pulled it free with a panicked shout. His shoe came halfway off his foot. The mud smelled like a waterlogged graveyard, worse than mere rot. Worse than death.

  Bo’s gasping became horrible. The mud reached Bo’s neck, but his hands were above his head, grabbing at whatever he could. Feeling Bo’s frantic hands clenching his jersey, Corey realized he and Sean were about to get sucked down, too. They couldn’t rescue Bo. They could only die trying. Sobbing on phlegm and spittle, Corey tried to pry Bo’s fingers away.

  To leave him to die.

  “Help!”Sean cried from the other side of Bo. In his panic, Bo had flung an arm around Sean’s neck in a headlock, and Sean was on his knees, bending over, his face precariously close to the mud. The mud was climbing above Bo’s nose, silencing him at last except for a frantic bubbling sound, but Bo was hanging on to Sean with all his strength.

  Corey slid out of his shirt, freeing himself from Bo. He went to Sean, pounding his fists against Bo’s rigid arm, trying to straighten it enough for Sean to slip away. For endless, terrible seconds, he thought he would have to watch both of them get sucked down. Bo’s head was buried, vanished from sight in the pool of sludge, but his arm wasn’t loosening, as if in a death-grip.

  Then, at last, Bo’s arm snapped open before it was yanked into the muck. Bo had either passed out, given up, or set Sean free.

  The black Raiders jersey was visible for a moment, half-buried in the mud, and Corey reached for it, hoping it could be a lifeline to Bo if he and Sean pulled together.

  An inch from his fingers, the fabric dove from Corey’s sight, under the mud. Gone.

  Corey and Sean screamed together.

  They patted the ground, searching for the place where Bo and the shirt had sunk. Their digging fingers met dry soil and nothing else. The ground was unchanged, as if Bo had never been. Corey and Sean flung themselves away from the hexed spot, sobbing so hard their bodies heaved even as their shuddering cries were silent, their clothes soaked by what was left of the phantom mud.

  It was nearly dawn. Light was coming.

  All Corey remembered was digging. And more digging. He had a shovel in his hands, and his palms were so raw that cracks in his skin bled. His shoulders and back screamed with each new pitch of the earth. There were holes all over this side of The Spot, most of them several feet deep, as if land mines had ripped the ground to pieces, bringing Bo’s war games to life.

  When possible and impossible had first switched places, Corey had thought if they got shovels and found Bo right away, they might be able to save him. Now, that logic felt dumb. In a full-out run, stumbling in the dark, it had taken him and Sean more than ten minutes to make it to Sean’s house, and ten minutes back. Bo would have suffocated by the time they were halfway there. Before then. Bo had suffocated before they stopped clawing at the ground with their fingers, trying in vain to find him somewhere in the soil.

  But what else should they have done? Called the police? To dowhat?

  Maybe he could try another spell, Corey thought. A spell to bring Bo back.

  He’d thought of that right away, of course. He thought of that before he thought of running back for a shovel. But the first time it had occurred to him to try to resurrect a corpse, the thought had made him vomit, and he’d never been far from vomiting since.You don’t bring back dead people, he told himself. Even if he hadn’t r
eadPet Sematary three times, he knew better than to try something like that. It was wrong. More wrong than killing someone. The dead belonged to God.

  And hehad killed someone. He had killed Bo as surely as if he’d shot him with a gun.

  Corey quivered in the predawn breeze, new tears spilling. His face itched from layers of tears and mucus. His eyes and nose were sore, and he was nearly crippled by the pulsing ache shooting between his abdomen and crotch. His body was almost as miserable as his memories. Almost.

  Sean looked as bad as Corey felt. Sean’s face was grimy, his hair caked with dirt and mud, his eyes as dead as a living person’s eyes could be. He and Sean had not spoken a word in hours, working silently to earn their membership into the macabre club they had joined overnight. They made their holes at The Spot, looking for a body Corey was now sure they would never find.

  They were all dead now, Corey thought. They were as dead as the charred wood and glowing gray ashes of last night’s fire. T. had told Corey his brother died when he had his accident, when he’d hit that pregnant lady, killing her unborn child. T.’s brother hadn’t died in the flesh, but he’d died in his head, T. had said.Like my dad says he did in ’Nam, T. had told him.

  With daylight approaching, erasing the night, Corey felt remade, too. He’d been sucked down into the earth with Bo and his Raiders jersey, and his new mind was finally waking.

  There were things to think about. Things to do.

  “You were never here,” Corey said to Sean. He no longer recognized his own voice. Now he knew how Mom had felt when puberty made his voice change, when she looked at him with such wonder, saying it was as if he’d turned into someone else overnight.

  “I’ll say I was the only one,” Corey said.

  “D-Doesn’t matter.” Sean plunged his shovel deep into a mound of soil, leaning against it with both arms, exhausted. “I can’t keep digging. I’m d-done.”

  “Yeah.” Corey dropped his shovel. Despite his aching muscles, giving up hurt more than digging. Corey felt burning behind his eyes, but no more tears would come.

  Sean was trembling like an old man. He crossed his arms over himself. “I j-just thought…m-maybe if there was a body…his parents c-could, you know…Fuck. What happened, Corey? What happened?” A crazed quality shook his voice, halfway between laughter and tears.

  Corey shook his head. He didn’t know. He’d thrown those bones together and tossed some blood over them, making it up as he went. It had been bullshit. It hadn’t been a real spell, just something from his head, trying to scare Bo. As if it had happened by itself.

  “Maybe nothing really happened,” Corey said, hopeful. “Maybe he’s okay somewhere.”

  He had a cloudy memory of the three other boys coming to The Spot after Bo disappeared, all of them dressed for paintball. Maybe it had been too dark for the boys to see their faces—maybe they hadn’t heard Bo screaming, although howcouldn’t they have heard?—but they’d only asked,Hey, you seen Bo around? And he and Sean must have answered some kind of way, because the boys had left them alone, cursing about Bo leaving them hanging. The boys had not come back. Maybe they had called Bo’s house and found him safe in bed.

  “He’snot okay,” Sean said forcefully. “He’s d-dead.”

  Guilt smothered Corey, dogging his breaths, embers in his lungs. “Yeah. He’s dead.”

  Sean’s eyes gleamed with weary satisfaction, as if everything else would grow from that admission. “It’s n-not your fault,” Sean said. “The Old Testament t-talks about lying. B-bearing false witness. B-because it’s evil. It’s evil, Corey. You got t-tricked by something evil. Me, too.”

  Even her name, Becka, sounded like thebaka . She’d been playing with him the whole time. Corey bowed his head, sobbing a rough sob. “You warned me,” Corey whispered.

  “Yeah, but I thought she was just a freak. I d-didn’t know she was…” Sean’s voice died.

  Corey’s eyes rose to gaze at the woods where Becka had come bounding out in her torn dress. He probably would faint in terror if he saw her, but what he felt wasn’t only fear; it was fascination, even now. A bruising kind of longing. If he’d been able to, he would have killed Bo with his bare hands because she said Bo had touched her. Becka had taken control of him, like it was no work at all. And he had let her touch Gramma Marie’s ring. Corey’s skin went cold.

  He had to go home and take a cleansing bath. But how could he go home now?

  “Finish it,” Sean said. “Tonight. We have to.”

  The thought of another spell made Corey’s limbs shake. He sat beside one of the holes he and Sean had dug and felt nauseated again, beyond tired. He leaned over and spat into the hole, clear saliva. His stomach, like the rest of him, was empty.

  “He burned it,” Corey said. “It has to be on that paper.”

  “We’ll get more paper. Let’s do it tonight.”

  Corey shook his head firmly. Once he left this place today, he could not come back so soon. He might not be able to come back at all. “I can’t.”

  “Youhave to!” Sean said, a roar.“Somebody else might die.”

  “Well,fuck you! I saidI can’t!” Spittle sprayed from Corey’s mouth. A horde of wings flapped from the treetops behind them, birds disturbed by the noise.

  Corey was more grateful for the dawn light than he could say, but he had to leave here. If he sat here another minute, he might lose his mind. Even with the light making last night feel more dreamlike, he couldsee Bo flailing in the ground, his face beet-red. Mud up to his neck, then up to his nose. He could hear Bo’s screams, the hysteria and disbelief and terror all mingled, useless.

  He could not come back here tonight. He could not.

  “We can try tomorrow night,” Corey said. “The Fourth of July.”

  Sean nodded, satisfied. “Let’s fill up these holes and p-pack up our stuff. It’s almost six. If we get b-back before seven, maybe we can sneak in before my d-dad gets up….” Mr. Leahy went to bed early most nights, but hemight already know he and Sean had not come home last night.Last night? Last night was a lifetime away. What could they say to him?

  For the next half hour, Corey and Sean filled the holes the best they could, scraping dirt into the hollowed ground. Whatever he had done here, Corey knew The Spot had been changed by it. He could tell by the way it looked, wasted and perverted.

  He had given thebaka a human sacrifice.

  And it would not want him to come back. It would try to stop him.

  Corey kicked the crossed chicken bones into the fire-pit. Then he shoved his other ritual items into the duffel bag, taking care only with Gramma Marie’s satchel and the papers inside. At least Bo hadn’t burned those, too. He collected the index cards and wrapped a rubber band around them, then shoved them into his back pocket. His photograph with Gramma Marie went into his other pocket. Then, one by one, he picked up the three paper bags; the raven feathers, the soil, and the remaining chicken bones. He’d take those bags home with him later today, but he’d leave everything else at Sean’s.

  “I’m gonna keep most of this at your place,” Corey said. “Gramma Marie’s papers, too.”

  “Why?”

  Because he didn’t trust himself, Corey realized. Because if he couldn’t make himself come back to The Spot, he might give up and try to destroy all of it. Gramma Marie said she’d thrown her ring away, and now he understood why. Corey thrust the satchel into Sean’s waiting hands. “If something happens to me,” Corey said, meeting Sean’s eyes, “you have to burn those papers. Understand?”

  “Burnthem? But…”

  “It’s not about your family, it’s about mine. I’m the last one. Burn them.”

  “What about your mom?”

  Thinking of his mother, Corey pursed his lips to quiet a moan in his throat. He had tried to convince himself he didn’t need Mom while he’d been living with Dad, but he did. She brought out some of the best parts of him, and soothed him in a way no one else could. What if he went straight home, fell on
the floor at her feet, and told her everything? What if he could tell her the truth?

  She would know her son was a murderer, he thought.

  “Gramma Marie kept this a secret from her for a reason,” Corey said, deciding. “She kept thebaka away from Mom somehow. Mom says she hardly ever dreams, and I think that’s why. I don’t think it knows how to find her. Gramma Marie wrote about how some people are more open to forces, good and bad. I’m one of those people who’s open, maybe. Mom’s closed to it, and that’s better for her. I’ll give her the ring back. Maybe it’ll protect her, and she’ll never have to know.” It was the most Corey had spoken in hours, and the effort of speaking parched his mouth and throat.

  “Nothing’s gonna happen,” Sean said. “You’ll banish it.”