1. July
The first time Jo Ryan found the red door into Ash House, it was a hot, still day in the middle of July, the kind of day when nothing moved, not even the air.
She was with Ani and Deirdre, Ani’s girlfriend. They’d bought red slushies from the 7-Eleven on Chestnut Street and were sitting on the hill behind Ani’s grandmother’s barn, mixing the slushies with vodka. Deirdre had a clove, which she wasn’t smoking because it was creeping up on ninety degrees. All of them were sticky with red sugar and sweat.
“My dad wants me to get a job,” Ani said. “He said I could work for Mrs. Highsmith until school starts.”
“Cleaning houses?” Deirdre flicked ash into the grass. Matted and green, it was past Jo’s ankles. She dug her bare toes into the cool earth at the roots.
“What’s wrong with that?” Ani demanded. Ani and Deirdre loved to argue more than the old married couples who summered in Coffin Hollow to escape New York. Jo added another half inch of vodka to her slushie.
“It’s just so...” Deirdre sighed and stubbed out the clove. “God, Ani. Why don’t we just go live with my sister in New York? This town is like something out of a horror movie.”
Jo felt sweat drops creep down her back, in time with the buzzing insects in the field beyond. “It’s hotter in New York,” she said.
“See? I don’t want to sleep on your sister’s floor all summer,” Ani said. “Besides, New York is expensive, and I’m paying my own way after next year.”
Deirdre rolled her eyes. She was a summer girl, bringing the sweat and smoke of the city with her every June 20th since Ani and Jo were in sixth grade. She’d been the first one in black boots, the first one to cut the necks out of her brother’s T-shirts and wear them over a skirt from her old prep school. The first girl Ani ever kissed.
“I’m done with watching the cows fart,” Deirdre said. “Let’s go see if my brother has some pot.”
“You said you’d give me a ride to practice,” Ani said, when Deirdre stood up and brushed grass off her butt. “And that you’d talk to Thom about the shirt designs for the gig on Saturday. I hate how you get when you drive around baked.”
Deirdre was pretty, Jo supposed, but when her face got that way, all off-balance, like a toddler about to pitch a fit, she was a doll who’d come out of the mold wrong. “Shit,” was all she said, before she slumped back down.
Ani sucked more of her vodka cherry slushie through her straw. “What should we do?”
Jo looked down the valley. The field ended at a barbwire fence. Beyond that was overgrown, except for a slate roof poking through the trees. It vibrated in the sunlight, spreading an ache behind her eyes. Like a drop of quicksilver on green glass, the roof blurred her vision. The buzzing of the insects grew louder than PA feedback at one of their shows.
“We could go look around Ash House.” The words came into her mind like raindrops, spoke from her mouth like ripples. It wasn’t her idea, but it was in her brain like a seed.
“Yeah,” Deirdre said. “And when we’re done maybe we can tip over some cows and smash a mailbox. God, Jo. You are such a hillbilly sometimes.”
Ani gave Deirdre a hard punch on the shoulder. “Shut up. It’s not like we have anything better to do.”
“I gave you a better idea,” Deirdre said. “Go back to my house. At least my room has an AC.”
Jo stood up and pulled her boots back on. Deirdre and Ani kept arguing. All they did was argue and hook up, when Deirdre wasn’t baked or locked in her room, drawing her creepy pen-and-ink pictures. Bleeding women, vampires, men with raven heads, and children with fish tails. Deirdre’s drawings bothered Jo somewhere low in her stomach, like when her mother had been drinking back in Providence, and dating the guy who liked to open Jo’s door and look at her when he thought she was asleep.
“...And I’m not going to poke around that place and break my damn neck,” Deirdre’s voice rose. “Besides...” her voice slid into that mean, petty register that always reminded Jo of a blade going into something soft. “You know it’s haunted as shit, right? They hanged a guy in the front yard, vigilante style, old Wild West shit. Like, a hundred people have died in there, I bet.”
“That’s just kid stories,” Ani said. She’d had more of the red drink than anyone. Her plastic mini-mart cup was almost empty, and her words were slower than the heat.
“There’s nothin’ in there. Rats and spiders maybe.”
Deirdre’s eyes narrowed. “I dare you to go in. Put a mark on one of the upstairs windows.”
Ani looked sick. Ani hated spiders, had as long as Jo had known her.
“Forget it,” Ani said. “Let’s stay here. Jo and I have to get to practice soon anyway.”
Deirdre opened her mouth to say something else, shrill and nasty as a New York taxi, and Jo spoke instead. “I’ll do it.”
Deirdre stretched, her skinny arms flexing under her tattoos. She’d drawn them herself—an angel with black wings on one arm, a goat-legged satyr on the other, prone girls blond and brunette at their feet, the blood from their wounds running down her arms in dark red ink. “Well,” she said, “you may be a hillbilly, but at least you’re not a pussy.”
“Jo, this is stupid,” Ani muttered.
“Yeah, probably,” Jo said. She was walking down the hill, though, her boots sinking into the high grass. The barrier between Ani’s property and Ash House was a rusted fence, and she stepped on it to get over. It wasn’t like anyone was going to yell at her for letting the livestock out. Ash House had been abandoned for years, probably since the forties, which was when Ani’s grandmother had moved to the farm to marry Ani’s grandfather when he got back from France.
The house appeared and disappeared, peeping through the apple trees and scrub oaks.
The undergrowth wasn’t just grass. Blackberry vines scraped along Jo’s bare legs, drawing blood. Wild roses coated her with pollen and scent, petals sticking to her skin.
She’d look like hell when she came back out. Her Stiff Little Fingers shirt was damp all along the spine, and she peeled it off, going down to her bra. Hell, it was more than Deirdre wore, most summer days.
The orchard ended, fewer and fewer trees, and Jo was no longer walking through brush but a long-forgotten lawn, Queen Anne’s lace and daisies brushing the blood from her thighs.
Ash House was all at once no longer a mirage but solid, tall and black, nearly blotting out the relentless sun. Jo stopped, standing in the tall grass, and wiped sweat off the back of her neck with her shirt.
Ani and Deirdre were probably watching her. She’d be a tiny white figure in the green. The little girl lost. That is, if Deirdre hadn’t gotten bored and gone back to picking fights with Ani or taken her busted-ass Dodge Dart and gone home to smoke pot, which was how Deirdre’s temper tantrums usually ended.
Jo had liked it much better when only Ani would have been watching her from the top of the hill.
Ash House waited, while all around her the insects hummed, air vibrating with their song, sweat and dirt pressing against Jo’s skin.
All of the broken windows stared at her, the biggest insect of all, refracting a thousand tiny, shirtless Jos back into the wilderness beyond the panes.
She picked her way along a pitted path, bricks strewn across the lawn, some upright like tiny headstones, some buried in overgrown grass. Big, shaggy bushes that she guessed had once been topiary animals cluttered the lawn. She could still see a leg and a head, a tail. She’d come up on Ash House from the rear, and when she set foot on the sagging wraparound porch, boards cracked like rifle shots.
The back door was nailed over with plywood, a no trespassing sign turned to metal lace still attached to the center.
Jo picked her way along the side of the house. It was covered in dead leaves and spider webs, but she didn’t see any of the usual stuff—the beer bottles, food wrappers, used condoms—that usually drifted up around an old abandoned place. The town cemetery, most of which was disused and ancient, was littered with the stuff. Ani and Deirdre had hooked up on one of the cool, flat granite sarcophagi that sat above ground in the far corner, back by
