Authors: Nick Lake
Hardly anyone stays in these places anymore, but a few years back the town bought a bunch of them, to preserve them, which is about the best thing Oakwood ever did.
That’s layer five of the town, because you think of Oakwood, if you grew up here, like something made of levels, like those cutaway diagrams of the ground, striations of different materials, loam and humus and igneous rock and whatever. There are seven, from land to sea, and they go like this:
— Mall land.
— Crushing, miserable poverty, boarded-up buildings, broken houses, broken people. (Keeping it cheerful!) The rhythm of the waves a background hiss.
— The residential layer. Houses. People live in them. Garages, gardens. Which merges with:
— Two blocks from the ocean: A sudden air of affluence. Vacationing joggers, running past their own parked cars. The ocean louder now, a soundtrack, whispering
fun
, saying
escape
. Even locals start to feel the pull at this point, which is why a lot of them stay in the town and never go near the walk—it’s too painful.
— One block: those crazy pop-art motels, with their art-deco lines and neon. [To complicate matters this layer also includes some crushing poverty, just like layer two, so that the touristy part of town is bracketed by rundown buildings, like this sentence is bracketed by … well, brackets.]
— The boardwalk: pizza slices, girls gone wild, and people with facial tattoos.
— The beach: swimmers, lifeguards, seagulls stealing fries.
And of course there are layers of time too—the ghost town of winter, the crowded madness of summer. This story, since it’s the story of you and me, happens in the summer. But you know that already. It’s weird, telling you what happened, when you know so much of it.
But there is so much you don’t know.
So much.
So, I walked past the crazy motels until I came to the start of the boardwalk, where the wooden struts of it collapse into tufted sand dunes. The way my route goes, I join the walk on the south side, right at the end, so when you come to the sand you have the whole sweep of the bay to your left, the long, wide wooden boards lined with little shops and restaurants, one of which is Dad’s restaurant of course, my restaurant too, I suppose you could say, the family restaurant, where … well, we’ll get to that later; and jutting from the boardwalk, the enormous piers with their roller-coaster rides rising up like the backs of sea monsters, the expanse of gray-yellow sand. The fairground atmosphere.
From that vantage point, it’s beautiful. Which is why I have never tried to draw it.
I scanned the sand until I saw something that looked more promising. Then I walked out onto the beach, checking it out, taking my time. Yeah, it looked good. I went out farther, toward the ocean.
Now I was just past Pier One and a little south, so I could see the curve of the old Accelerator, like a wooden dinosaur’s back, and the slowly turning wheel of the Elevator taking people in their little seats high up into the sky, for a bird’s-eye view of the worst town on the Eastern Seaboard.
What I was doing, I was planning to draw a dead seagull. That was my thing: I don’t think you ever knew that. I don’t remember mentioning it. The thing being: to find the ugly things, the things people don’t usually notice, and draw them in my sketch pad. Like:
Electricity poles.
Trash cans.
Broken windows.
And, in this case, dead seagulls. The bird was just where the water and sand met, way beyond the end of Pier One. I don’t know why the ocean has receded so much here, I—
Oh my God.
I just realized something. My dad with his gross insects. Me drawing the ugly things. We were both collecting stuff other people discounted as unattractive.
We were doing the same thing
. Mom always said we were more alike than I realized, he and I.
So, right here, I want you to make a mental note of this: me and my dad, we’re not too different. We both got threatened, and we both reacted in the only way we knew how, by instinct, like millipedes rolling into balls. He’s not as bad as you might think, you know, from him throwing you out and all. He’s like me—he just faced his anger outward instead of inward.
Of course, when I say he’s like me, you may view that as a bad thing, I don’t know. I guess I’ll see on Friday, from whether you turn up or not.
Where was I?
The beach. I don’t know why the ocean has receded so much and left such an enormous strip of sand—three hundred yards at least. I mean, I read almost anything but definitely not geology or whatever the right -ology would be. Mom said the ocean was scared of the white trash who come here in the summer, so it retreated. That day, there weren’t too many people to retreat from: it was happy hour and the vacationers were already in the bars, apart from a few I could see posing for photos in the just-abandoned lifeguard stands, holding each other, kissing.
That’s a tradition: to sit in the stands and watch the sunset, with a boy or a girl. It’s like our version of the overlook in those movies where people drive up to the vantage point above the town, and make out on car hoods.
Something else you already know, I remind myself, and the thought of it, of you and me pressed against each other in that deep, wooden lifeguard’s seat, the warmth of you … it makes me almost come undone, slide into loose disarray, like untied laces.
Deep breath.
Another.
Apart from that, the only people on the beach were a couple of runners and a kid flying a kite shaped like Olaf from
Frozen
.
Whatever the reason for the ocean pulling away, it’s one of my favorite things, the way the long piers with the amusement park on them have gotten stranded on the wide, wide beach, barnacled struts resting on dry land—the way you can walk around them and under them, into the dark spaces.
The shadow of Pier One was behind and to the left of me; it was almost like I could feel the cool of it. I walked toward the gull with my sketchbook under my arm, two HB pencils in my pocket.
If you didn’t know already, which you do, you would guess from this that I was not the most popular kid at Oakwood High School. I mean, sketching dead birds is not what gets you voted homecoming queen. And of course there was the piñata thing. I might tell you about that later.
Anyway, I’m delaying.
Here’s what started everything:
I was getting closer to the seagull now, and I could see that there were crabs eating it. Hermit crabs, some of them. People think hermit crabs are cute, but I can’t think of anything creepier. Some dead thing’s shell, with legs poking out of it. Scuttling. Feeding on corpses. Living in a borrowed skin of death.
When you see them eating a bird, it gives you a whole different idea of them.
Then, I saw movement a little farther out, where you get that sheen of thin water between the surf and the dry sand. I realized there were more crabs down there, and one or two were making their way from the gull to something else. As if it was more tempting.
You know when someone has left a door open and you feel the draft? I felt something like that, only inside. I knew whatever it was the crabs were interested in, half-submerged, washed up on shore, could not be anything good.
The water was making a soft sound, like it was hushing me because it had something important to say.
I turned and squinted at the sun. A cloud was just passing over it, and it was turning orange already, low above the buildings of town, nearly sunset. Then I walked a little closer. It sounds stupid, but I remember having a very conscious thought, which was,
oh, so this is what people mean when they use the word “dread
.”
But it wasn’t so bad—I saw as I approached that it was just a sneaker, one of those ankle-high basketball shoes. It was standing upright in the shallow, foamy water.
I took another step.
Gulls swooped in the air above me, calling, calling my name it almost seemed,
Cassie, Cassie, Cassie
.
I saw bone, glowing white, inside the shoe.
There was a foot in there.
An actual, severed foot. I could see a glimpse of flesh, purple as canned cat food, the bone protruding from it. You heard about the foot, of course, everyone did, but I don’t think I ever told you it was me who found it.
In a movie, I would have gagged or shrieked. I don’t think I did either of those things: I just stood there, staring.
And at first, I didn’t even think about the Houdini Killer, I didn’t see that it might be connected. The truth is that the first word that crossed my mind was an ancient Greek one:
Sparagmos.
It means: the act of tearing a person or an animal to pieces, usually for sacrificial purposes. The followers of Dionysus were big on it. The reason this word crossed my mind is that I am a weirdo and a freak and the public library is like my second home. But then, knowing you, I didn’t need to tell you any of that.
So I looked at the man’s foot, in the shoe, on the beach, and I thought of sparagmos. I was remembering Orpheus, being ripped to shreds by furious Thracian women.
You know the story, probably. Orpheus could charm all creatures and even objects with his music, and because of this and his beauty, he was much desired by almost all women he encountered. Yet after his wife, Eurydice, died, he forswore all others, and this so incensed the women who surrounded him that they began to throw rocks and stones at him. But the rocks and stones loved Orpheus’s music, and they would not harm him; they turned away at the last. And so the women took him with their hands, and tore his body apart.
That’s the version I like best anyway.
I looked at the foot in the sneaker, thinking of that story, like, here was the Chuck Taylor shoe of a vacationer who was just
too
good at karaoke and his friends had ripped him apart. I figured it was very unlikely that whoever it came from had been torn to pieces by Thracian women. I was thinking lucidly and crazily at the same time, and the weird thing was that I knew it—it was like there was a part of me standing outside myself, observing me.
I took out my cell phone, and I dialed 911. I said, “There’s a human foot on the beach and I don’t think it belongs to Orpheus.” At least, that’s what they told me I said, later. I don’t remember doing it.
Then I guess I must have fainted—which is exactly what would happen in a movie—because the next thing I can remember I was in a squad car. They took me to the station and asked me questions and gave me very sweet coffee with lots of sugar and cream in it, and I’ll get to all that later because it’s important. But, for now, two observations:
1. Looking back, I think maybe seeing the severed foot, plus some associated memories to do with blood and bone, caused some kind of psychotic break pretty much straight away. The clue is that I was looking at a body part and all I could think about was Greek myth. Which probably partly explains all the really terrible things that happened soon after.
2. I assumed it was a man’s foot in the sneaker. Because of the style, because it was relatively large, I don’t know. That was why I was thinking about Orpheus. But perhaps if it had crossed my mind it might be a woman’s, then I would have thought about that other famous victim of sparagmos: Echo, and the way she was torn to pieces by Pan’s followers, leaving only her voice in the rocks and trees. And if I’d thought about her, then maybe I’d have gotten to voices sooner, and the idea of a murdered woman. And maybe things would have turned out differently, or at least I would have been more prepared for what happened afterward.
But then again, maybe not.
Like I said, they took me to the police station and we sat in what looked surprisingly like a normal office. They asked me a bunch of questions, what I’d been doing, whether I’d moved the foot, how long I’d been there, that kind of thing. They gave me sweet coffee, I already said that didn’t I? I was there an hour or more.
There were two guys, one in a suit and one in uniform. Agent Horowitz, who was clearly some kind of Fed, and Sergeant Kennedy or Officer Kennedy or something, I don’t know, I don’t remember. Kennedy was big and fitted badly into his blue shirt; Horowitz was skinny and young, with wire-framed glasses and a smile that actually seemed genuine. Though he was younger, he was clearly the one in charge—you would have known even if he weren’t in plain clothes.
Eventually, my dad turned up.
He came into the room and said, “Do you really need to keep my daughter here?”
“We’re not detaining her,” said Kennedy. “We’re just asking some questions.”
Horowitz nodded. “But I think we’re done here. You can take Cassandra home. She’s had a shock—I’d prescribe sugar if I were a doctor. Ben & Jerry’s, M&M’S. You know, chocolate.”
“She has a peanut allergy,” said Dad. “A severe one. Most chocolate could kill her.”
Kennedy slapped the side of his head. “Oh yeah. The guys from the squad car saw the bracelet when they were reviving her. Almost dosed her with epinephrine before they realized she’d just fainted. Candy, then.”
“My daughter found a human foot on the beach and you’re suggesting candy?” said Dad.
Horowitz shrugged and gave that slight smile. I noticed his cheeks dimpled and fine lines appeared around his eyes; it made me like him even more. “It works,” he said. He turned to me. “Also, we can offer counseling. Put you in touch with someone. Something to think about.”
“I don’t think so,” said Dad. He hated counselors—he said the ones in the Navy were worse than the people shooting at you, that they just wanted you to write down what happened to you over and over again so that you were always reliving it, always scared, always in pain. Yeah, I sometimes felt like saying. Because pushing it all down and basically going around with untreated PTSD is working
so
well for you.
“Well, Cassie, you call me if you’d like to talk to someone,” said Horowitz, gliding over Dad’s death stare, which made me think there was steel underneath his smiles.