For the first part of my life, I grew up in a family that, to the casual onlooker, resembled a Norman Rockwell painting. Dad was a senior partner in a Boston practice who could afford not only an apartment on Beacon Hill, but the beachfront house in Maine where my sister and I spent the best summers of our childhood. Mom was a part-time paralegal secretary and domestic goddess of Martha Stewart proportions. My sister, Claire, and I were brats: she the mean teen homecoming queen; me the band-camp-loving nerd.
The summer I turned thirteen, a letter arrived. I never knew exactly what it said, but I remember Dad’s hands shaking as he read it, Mom’s angry nagging curdling the hot August air. I was used to their ups and downs. I think I took my bike out for a ride around the coast instead of worrying. In any case, the malpractice suit that ate up everything we owned took its sweet time. It was another year before we’d gone from living like princes to crowding into my Jewish grandmother’s stuffy brownstone, torturing her cats. When she threw us out and we began a stint with my Catholic paternal grandparents in Boston’s South End, I began to notice the comments friends and relatives whispered as they sat around the big kitchen table: “Col’s losing his way and he needs our prayers”—a Catholic way of saying that my father had gone nuts.
We moved back to Maine, to the northern woods that smell of hemlock and balsam, the setting for Dad’s new purpose of refashioning his bankrupt life in the image of Thoreau’s. By which I mean that he tumbled, babbling, into Grandpa Swift’s old timber cabin on Chesuncook Lake and used what money remained to stockpile AK-47s and all the canned creamed corn you could stand. Out in those woods, while Dad snared rabbits and speared trout, Mom discovered a taste for home-brewed beer and I became a delinquent. It was easy to do since my dad’s transformation into a wild-eyed survivalist meant that the materials for mischief—knives, rope, power tools—were all around me. By the time I was Quinn’s age, my favorite hobby was stealing weed killer and a bag of sugar and rolling my own fuses from cigarette papers so I could blow the fuck out of the earth that trapped us in that madhouse. My sister—through a rock solid combination of grit and conformity—came out of that life pretty normal. She learned to blend in, to agree, to hide the crazy. I didn’t, or couldn’t. I’ve always been the black sheep, though over time, life has sanded the rough edges off me.
On the positive side, Dad’s questionable parental supervision taught me three crucial things: how to blaze a trail, how to hot-wire a car, and how to pick the toughest locks. Joyriding in cars, carving arrows in trees, and breaking into barns to scare sheep haven’t been all that useful in furthering my journalistic career, but the ability to pick locks? Handier than you might think. Filing cabinets, abandoned warehouses, creepy Silence of the Lambs lockups are not a problem as long as you’ve got a bobby pin, or in my case a little black bag of hook picks, pins, and paper clips. I pulled it out, ready to take a look in the Blavette house.
I needn’t have bothered. My evening’s trespassing was made a whole lot easier by the fact that either the police or the caretaker had left the back door open. It was pitch outside now, the stars sharp and bright as police spotlights. It didn’t quite look like a crime scene yet, but you could tell the police had been poking around from the big-booted footprints scattered around the floors, the occasional coffee cup left to stain surfaces. Once I was sure Monsieur Raymond wasn’t still lurking around, I took a deep breath, peeled away from the doorway, and crossed the hallway to the stairs.
At the top of the stairs was a bedroom. The large bed told me it was probably the master, and the matching rose-pattern wallpaper and curtains suggested a woman had decorated it. I tiptoed over the pastel rug towards the bed, as cautious as if I might find someone sleeping there. On the nightstand sat a framed picture of the Blavette family, when the husband was still on the scene. I snapped an iPhone photo and moved on, flicking my torch over the ointments and powders on the antique dresser, illuminating the dark spots freckling the mirror. Without its people, the house felt frozen in time, like the ballroom of some lost ocean liner.
I crept out into the dark well of the hallway and walked on, identifying the various bedrooms, all with objects and clothes left strewn across beds and floors. First was what I decided was the son’s room, the door decorated with a photo of twenties Paris and a map of the stars; inside, a guitar, a basketball hoop, and thick textbooks. Save the French titles of the books, it could have been the room of any American college-age boy. Next was a young girl’s innocent bedroom: a world map dotted with photos of pen pals decorated one baby-pink wall and the shelves were crowded with pony figurines and books about ballerinas.
The guest room was bigger but had less character, its floral walls and drapes echoing the master. It smelled of lavender and cigarettes. Weirdly, the wardrobe and desk were clean; where had Quinn’s clothes and things gone? I snapped a few pictures but found nothing more useful than some old book about the history of the local caves and a half-written postcard addressed to someone called Kennedy. “Hey, dude!” it began. “Missing your face. So awesome …” My heart sank a little at the way it tailed off mid-awesome, as if something had interrupted the writer. On impulse, I stuffed both the book and the card in my bag.
At the end of the hallway was another door I hadn’t tried yet. I twisted the handle. It moved, but the door didn’t open. I had just knelt down to look through the lock when there was a noise downstairs, like the scrape of a chair. My hand fumbled my keys from my pocket. I pushed my sharp little front door key between my forefinger and middle finger, straining my ears towards the stairs. As I tiptoed down them, I heard a noise from outside, a sharp bark, like a fox. Maybe it was that I’d heard. In a place like this, it wasn’t surprising my mind was playing tricks on me.
I was just creeping back into the front room when I heard tires gobbling up gravel and saw the lights of a car. It pulled to a halt. The thrum of an engine stopped and the headlights went out. A door slammed. I stopped in the hallway, just listening. A ring tone sounded outside, then stopped and a man’s voice began speaking rapid and low in French.
I turned around in a slow circle, thinking about the house, the windows, the doors, the ways out. The only option was that back door. I tiptoed to it, trying to keep my steps light, my breathing calm. Outside, the voice stopped talking and the man cleared his throat. I glanced behind me to see the front door handle beginning to turn.
JULY 13, 2015
Blog Entry
Back home in Boston, this blog is all about coming up with creative ways to make my boring life seem interesting. I:
tell weird stories that are semibased on my antics
post bloodthirsty stories about zombies and hell beasts
quote lines from classic horror movies of the ’80s
write trashy tabloid headlines to caption my most awkward moments
I guess it’s how I met you all, horror fan friends, who always write bloodthirsty comments on my Monsters of New England posts: My Rockport Devil Sighting, What Mothman? and my most popular post ever, Lizzie Borden and the Fall River Witches! Earlier in the year, I had so many great chats with talented writer friends like PoeBoy13 and dreamswithghosts that I got up the nerve to send some of my horror stories out to zines and even got “Lila on the Ceiling” published in Splatterpunk! (It’s that one you all said reminded you of early Stephen King—oh, how I would love to be Stephen King one day!) I thought my travels in France would give me the perfect chance to develop my skills with some travel writing, and find some new spooky places to do a little urban exploring,
