The Madness Underneath. Maureen Johnson

      “I didn’t do that,” Sam replied. “Those weren’t there a few minutes ago.”

      “Are you feeling all right?”

      “I’m telling you, those weren’t there.”

      This was not good, not good at all. The glasses clearly hadn’t fallen off a shelf—they were in the middle of the room. The X was shaky, like the hand that had drawn it could barely hold the chalk. No one looked healthy in the basement’s faintly greenish fluorescent light, but Sam looked particularly bad. The color had drained from his face, and he was quivering and glistening with sweat.

      Maybe this had been bound to happen. Charlie had always known the risks, but the risks were part of the agreement. He had gotten sober, and he trusted that others could as well. And you needed to show that trust.

      Charlie said quietly, “If you’ve been taking something—”

      “I haven’t!”

      “But if you have, you just need to tell me.”

      “I swear to you,” Sam said, “I haven’t.”

      “Sam, there’s no shame in it. Sobriety is a process.”

      “I didn’t take anything, and I didn’t do that!”

      There was an urgency in Sam’s voice that frightened Charlie, and he was not a man who frightened easily. He’d been through fights, withdrawal, divorce. He faced alcohol, his personal demon, every day. Yet, something in this room, something in the sight of Sam huddled against the wall and this crude X and broken glass on the floor . . . something in this unnerved him.

      There was no point in checking to see if anyone else was down here. Every business in the area had fortified itself when the Ripper was around. The Royal Gunpowder was secure.

      Charlie bent down and ran his hand over the cool stone floor.

      “How about we just get rid of this,” he said, wiping away the chalked X with his hand. In cases like this, it was best to calmly get things back to normal and sit down and talk the issue through. “Come on, now. We’ll go upstairs and have a cup of tea, and we’ll talk this out.”

      Sam took a few tentative steps from the wall.

      “Good, that’s right. Now let’s just get rid of this and we’ll have a nice cuppa, you and me . . .”

      Charlie continued wiping away the last of the X. He didn’t see the hammer.

      The hammer was used to pry open crates, to knock sticky valves into action, and to do quick repairs on the often unstable shelving units. Now it rose, lingering just long enough over Charlie’s head to find its mark.

      “No!” Sam screamed.

      Charlie turned his head in time to see the hammer come down. The first time it did so, Charlie remained upright. He made a noise—not quite a word, more of a broken, gurgling sound. There was a second blow, and a third. Charlie was still upright, but twitching, struggling against the onslaught. The fourth blow seemed to do the most damage. An audible cracking sound could be heard. On that fourth blow, Charlie fell forward and did not move again.

      The hammer clattered to the ground.

      Out flew the web and floated wide;

      The mirror crack’d from side to side;

      “The curse is come upon me,” cried

      The Lady of Shalott.

      —Alfred Lord Tennyson,

      “The Lady of Shalott”

      ACK AT WEXFORD, WHERE I WENT TO SCHOOL BEFORE all of this happened to me, they made me play hockey every day. I had no idea how to play hockey, so they covered me in padding and made me stand in the goal. From the goal, I could watch my fellow players run around with sticks. Occasionally they’d whack a small, very hard ball in my direction. I would dive out of the way, every time. Apparently, avoiding the ball isn’t the point of hockey, and Claudia would scream, “No, Aurora, no!” from the sidelines, but I didn’t care. I take my best lessons from nature, and nature says, “When something flies at your head—move.”

      I didn’t think hockey had trained me for anything in life until I went to therapy.

      “So,” Julia said.

      Julia was my therapist. She was Scottish and petite and had a shock of white-blond hair. She was probably in her fifties, but the lines in her face were imperceptible. She was a careful person, well spoken, so achingly professional it actually made me itch. She didn’t fuss around in her chair or need to change over and cross the other leg. She just sat there, calm as a monk. The winds might blow and the rains might fall, but Julia would remain in the same position in her ergonomic chair and wait it out.

      The clock in Julia’s office was hidden in plain sight; she put it behind the chair where her patients sat, on top of a bookcase. I followed the clock by watching its reflection in the window, watching time run backward. I had just managed to waste a solid forty-five minutes talking about my grandmother—a new record for me. But I’d run out of steam, and the silence descended on the room like a vague but ever-intensifying smell. There was a lot going on behind her never-blinking eyes. I could tell, from what now amounted to hours of staring at her, that Julia was studying me even more carefully than I was studying her.

      And I knew about her relationship with that clock. All she had to do was flick her eyes just a tiny bit to the left, and she could see both me and the time without moving her head. It was an incredibly small move, but I had started to look for it. When Julia checked the time, it meant she was about to do something.

      Flick.

      Time to get ready. Julia was going to make a move. The ball was heading for my face. Time to dodge.

      “Rory, I want you to think back for me . . .”

      Dive! Dive!

      “. . . we all learn about death somehow. I want you to try to remember. How did you learn?”

      I had to restrain myself. It doesn’t look good if your therapist asks you how you learned about death and you practically jump off the couch in excitement because that’s pretty much your favorite story ever. But as it happens, I have a really good “learning about death” story.

      I wasted about a full minute, grinding away the airtime, tilting my head back and forth. It’s hard to pretend to think. Thinking doesn’t have an action stance. And I suspected that my “thinking” face looked a lot like my “I’m dizzy and may throw up” face.

      “I was ten, I guess. We went to Mrs. Haverty’s house. She lived in Magnolia Hall. Magnolia Hall is this big heritage site, proper antebellum South, Gone with the Wind, look-at-how-things-were-before-the-War-of-Northern-Aggression sort of place. It has columns and shutters and about a hundred magnolia trees. Have you ever seen Gone with the Wind ?”

      “A long time ago.”

      “Well, it looks like that. It’s where tourists go. It’s on a lot of brochures. Everything about it looks like it’s from 1860 or something. And no one ever sees Mrs. Haverty, because she’s crazy old. Like, maybe she was born in 1860.”

      “So an elderly woman in a historical house,” she said.

      “Right. I was in Girl Scouts. I was a really bad Girl Scout. I never got any badges, and I forgot my troop number. But once