Legend has it great-grandfather fled his hometown because of an affair that ended badly. By this, I mean a relationship outside of his marriage with his own preacher’s daughter; she wound up dead in a cemetery after sex with the man who begot the man who begot the man who begot me. I imagine him leaving her there with her head split open on the side of a gravestone, a thin stain of burgundy slashed across the granite, or perhaps she died of natural causes, or maybe he told her he could never leave his wife, and she died suddenly of a broken heart. The fun thing about any legend is the wiggle room it allows, the way ghosts can be seen but can’t always speak, and so you can ultimately twist their tales in whatever direction you choose.
They left town in a hurry, my great-grandfather and great-grandmother and my great-grandfather’s brother, whatever that makes him to me. They forded a river and raced all the way until they found this new place they thought they could settle in, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, South Carolina, a mere forty miles from their original home. I suppose my great-grandfather thought that this was a safe enough distance, and maybe it was. To my knowledge, no one from Marion, South Carolina, his hometown, ever bothered him much. He spoke to his relatives there occasionally. He was a man I both barely knew, and knew all too well.
My grandfather grew up to be a well-known drug dealer. I didn’t find this out until I was in ninth grade, when my cousin Lorrie told me all about it. She was a vindictive girl, but she favored me. We were close in an odd way, the way a girl can be close to her gay cousin, even if Lorrie didn’t want me to be gay. “Please don’t be gay,” she actually said to me once. “I hear those conversion camps are awful. I’d hate if you had to go to one.” She didn’t want me to be gay for other reasons too, told me about her best friend’s cousin and the relationship that was ruined by his coming out. “He changed, Matthew,” she said. “He changed so that they could never go back to the way they were.”
Lorrie told me other things about herself and our family too: she lost her virginity at sixteen (she was a few years older than me) but claims the boy in question never actually “popped her cherry,” a phrase I tried to research later, only for my mother to discover this in my search history and subsequently punish me severely; Lorrie thought our grandmother was a sociopath, something I couldn’t argue against; Lorrie was afraid her brother Stewart would go to hell because he’d stabbed a cat to death last Thanksgiving, the cat having been partly run over by my grandfather but never taken to the vet or put out of its misery. The stabbing was supposed to be an act of mercy on Stewart’s part, but Lorrie never got over it. In short, Lorrie told me everything, and, in return, I told Lorrie nothing but took her stories and made them mine.
There are stories that I keep close to my own chest. I tell them again and again to my nephews as they grow older, as they learn more about their grandfather who served time in prison, or their grandmother who hoarded everything from children’s toys to cake decorations. The cake toppers still sit in the corner of her kitchen, collecting dust. There are so many histories tangled up in my head like sinews or vines pulsing, alive, and I only want to parse them out and make sense of some of the past I never understood, or chose not to understand. There were times when I chose to turn my head away from the truth, and now, speaking to you, my oldest nephew, I want you to know so many things about our family. I want you to be prepared for when you finally meet them, with all the things they will have to say for themselves, and all the stories I’ll have to tell to fill in the gaps in between.
2.
Lake City, the town where our family came to live, is mostly swampland. There’s no actual lake adjacent to the hamlet where I’ve always lived. Some people say it’s named after Santee, which is a lake nearly an hour away. Santee is all brown water, snakes hanging up in trees, crocodiles waiting to eat your dogs, and (from what I’ve always understood) Francis Marion’s house somewhere under the water, from back when everything was flooded to make the lake in the first place. For most of my life, Lake City consisted of a rundown Main Street, as well as a few fast-food joints and one casual dining restaurant which was always changing its name, ownership shifting, menu transforming. Gentrification changed a lot of that. It changes everything.
There was, of course, a serial killer who lived not far from here. John Rooney Daniels. Growing up, I knew about him. I knew that he would kill anyone he pleased, whether for money or love or the simple enjoyment of killing. Lake City was, at one point, divided neatly by race, class, all the things people never wanted to talk about except in the company of like-minded individuals. He was known to shift between these places you will learn about as you grow older, in part because his parentage was questionable—his mother got around in her own day, and his skin was darker than his siblings, making his ethnicity something that could be challenged, to put things nicely, although this is mostly a myth amongst white people, something they say to soothe their own inner fears about themselves—but John Rooney Daniels was also different because he’d fallen in love with a young Black woman from the other side of the tracks (literally speaking, here—there were tracks involved).
He was eventually caught and from there executed when I was only a kid. His niece, my friend Sally, liked to tell me about how she had a much more violent family history than my own. I told her about the preacher’s daughter and the graveyard, and she told me about John Rooney and the three graveyards he kept neatly organized between the ones he killed for love, for enjoyment, for money. “He killed his sister, my aunt,” she told me once. This was something everyone knew, but I still feigned surprise. It was expected. “He took an axe and cut her all to pieces.”
“That sounds awful,” I said seriously. I tried to keep a stern expression, because sternness implied some sort of concentration and dedication to the conversation at hand. I was only ever not interested in talk of John Rooney when she took out her Ouija board and tried to conjure the spirit of her dead uncle, mostly because it terrified me and I had to leave. I didn’t believe in God or heaven or Hell, but I couldn’t help these little superstitions getting to me. Sally had a way of revealing the darker parts of folklore, the kinds of things I liked to hear about from a distance, but never in the same room as her. We couldn’t do but so much at night, considering at thirteen her parents were uncomfortable with me, a boy, sleeping over at Sally’s house, sharing the same bed as their daughter, even if it was a wrongness I couldn’t wrap my mind around. I had no idea why they were so bothered by us spending so much time together. It wasn’t in my nature to desire Sally in that way, although my nature was something I was only loosely tied to. I could barely understand myself on a good day, but somehow I knew I didn’t want to touch Sally in any way other than a brief hug when we squealed and danced around, excited about a concert we wanted to attend or some new friend we’d long desired inviting us over to watch a movie.
All I wanted was for everyone to understand these core parts of myself. They were there, sent out like tiny reverberations, all around the rooms I was in, waiting to bounce off others and be sent back to me.
My grandfather’s sister disappeared late one Sunday night, decades before I was born. She was a pretty young woman—not exactly beautiful, although I suppose that’s some sort of objective truth I can’t entirely claim—a real smartass, if you trusted my great-grandfather, who told me about his only daughter shortly before he died. Her name was Hoyt, a name whose origin remains a mystery to me today (because who would name their only daughter something so cruel and masculine?), and she had light brown hair that she took the time to curl at her shoulders. She walked with a slight limp because of an accident she had when she was younger, which left her with a mangled right leg. Her family loved her. My whole family loved each other with an intensity that was almost permeable, as real as the disdain some family members also shared for one another. The love and the hate split between us taught me a valuable lesson: one person can be two things at once; there were warring dualities in everyone. I hope you’ll learn that too, in time. I hope you’ll see that two people can be the same thing, and one person can be different things.
Hoyt was supposedly coming home one day from school when she vanished from this earth. The school was located near the center of town, a tiny two-room shack that would eventually be torn down in years to come, but at the time held classes for all the white students in town. I sometimes tried to retrace her path, walking gingerly from house to house, tree to tree, as careful with the land as I was cutting out paper for projects at school, wondering the whole time what she saw, and getting the tiniest chills down my spine as I moved, yearning to know everything about Hoyt when there was nothing to know: she was, simply, gone.
My great-grandfather died the autumn before my sophomore year of high school. When I asked him about Hoyt, he sometimes got cagey in the same way as when I asked about the girl who died in the cemetery all those years before. I wanted to ask him about riding a horse and buggy all the way from Marion, South Carolina, to Lake City. He always corrected me in a hoarse, deep-voiced way, saying there were no horses, no buggies, but I told him I simply didn’t believe what he was saying. He was old, and all I’d seen were film adaptations of John Steinbeck novels and old John Ford movies. “You need to do more research,” he said, his voice a mere croak. “You get too stuck in these fantasies of yours, Matthew, and you lose track of reality.”
I asked him if he had ever seen Birth of a Nation.
“No,” he said.
“We watched it in film class,” I said. “It’s a silent movie. It’s really racist.”
“Silent movies were before my time,” my great-grandfather told me. “Never saw one in my whole life.”
I didn’t want to admit that I only asked questions like these because I had a hard time placing him visually in the most accurate time period when I supposed he would have lived out most of his life. I didn’t want much to disturb the fantasies I’d created involving his own youth, his own misadventures.
“Was Great Aunt Hoyt your favorite?” I asked him while I sipped on apple juice through a straw like a child. It was his apple juice he’d been brought with his dinner in the nursing home. He’d told me he didn’t want it. It wasn’t some act of kindness; he hated the food there.
“She was my only daughter,” my great-grandfather said. “Daughters have a way of taking hold of a man’s heart.”
“How long did you look for her?”
“I looked for her forever. I thought I would find her. Still hope she’ll show up and tend to me like any daughter might. But it’s been so long, Matthew.”
“She might have just run away.”
“No,” he said. “She wouldn’t have run away. She would have come back if she did. She had a strange attachment to this town.” He cleared his throat, took another pull from his own apple juice, which he’d opened up only a moment before. There were two boxed juices with every nighttime meal. Dinners for octogenarians and preschoolers are often the same. “She always wanted to be here. Always.”
“Do you think it was John Rooney Daniels?” I asked.
“Could’ve been. He was out gallivanting around town at the time in that hearse of his, taking whatever he wanted—whoever he wanted—and having no qualms about it.”
“Did he confess to killing her too? Before he died?” I knew of John Rooney’s confessions before he went to the electric chair. I’d heard legends of all the deaths he had admitted to, all the lives he had taken. There was no telling why he admitted to everything so late in the day: either because of a guilty conscience or, more likely, for the last bit of fame and control he had been able to exert over the rest of the world.
“Not that I know of,” my great-grandfather said. “But it was hard to confess to every single one of the killings he did over all those years. It’s hard to believe he had time for that. He’d done so much harm to this town for so long, he likely forgot a few names along the way. Hoyt wouldn’t have meant much to him.”
It was strange to hear my great-grandfather say that. Hoyt, his cherry-cheeked, blossoming little girl. She was only a teenager when she was likely scooped up from the side of the road or stalked into the woods on her way home from school. I didn’t know why her brother, my grandfather, wasn’t with her that day. I assumed they’d gone to the same school, been taught by the same teachers, gone to the same public functions for youth held in town, even if he was a year older than her. Even if he was a young man at the time, wild in his own ways.
When I decided to ask my grandfather, he looked at me and, after a long pause, said only, “Why’re you asking about this, boy?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer. Hoyt interested me, that was all. So I told him. I was intrigued. I wanted to be enlightened. I wanted to know more about our family, so I could stop making so much of it up. I didn’t tell him this last part, didn’t tell him that I engaged in expanding the history of our family beyond mere hyperbole. Family was sacred to every one of my own blood kin, and so I couldn’t admit this truth, that sometimes I besmirched our name by talking about us too much and elaborating on things I didn’t know or understand.
“You ask too many questions,” my grandfather said. “You always ask too many questions. If he took her, we’ll never know. She’s gone. She’s been gone for so long.”
Biting my lip, I thought I tasted blood for a moment. The metallic, coppery taste of it touched my tongue, and I sat waiting for my grandfather to tell me something substantial. He glared at me for a moment longer before saying, abruptly, “Boy, what do you want? An answer? She was taken a long time ago! Taken from us, taken from our family, an innocent young girl who should still be around.”
When I looked at her pictures, lined up in a book my grandmother kept hidden away in her closet in my grandparents’ bedroom, I saw how faded the photos were, how it looked like Hoyt was destined to simply disappear once the colors became light enough, once she blended in and away from everything else around her. There she was on her bike, learning to pedal, and there she was fishing with my great-grandfather.
“She was a tomboy,” my grandmother said. She’d known Hoyt when they were little, had gone to school with her. “That’s how I met your grandfather,” my grandmother often said. She was a serious, sturdy woman who didn’t show much affection, and held family traditions and values very close to what little heart she had.
I barely knew this grandmother of mine, always tending to be a little partial to my grandfather, no matter how much I differed from him ideologically. Emotionally, we were similar. We had the same wide-ranging, quickly changing tempers, unable to keep ourselves regulated even for a moment when under intense pressure, or else when excited by the least little thing.
My grandfather was always the one doing the cooking, and they hired someone else to clean. My grandmother was a nurse, although she retired fairly early on in life, so I wasn’t ever sure what she did with her time. There was so much of it: time. She seemed like she would live forever, like one of the damned, while my grandfather seemed delicate, fragile in his own way, and my grandmother remained sturdy and impenetrable.
“You need to stop asking these questions,” my grandmother told me once. “It only upsets your grandfather. He just wants to move on from the past. He just wants to leave it behind.”
“But he doesn’t want to know what happened to her?” I asked, earnest, steadfast in my dedication to uncovering these little truths.
Little. This might not be the right word for the things I wanted to know.
She waved her arms dramatically past the china in the cabinets and the pastoral wallpaper she had all around the dining room where we were setting the table. All she wanted was for me to help out around the house and learn to shut my mouth. My grandmother had no interest in talking with me, getting to know me, and while it stung a little, what hurt more was being silenced. I hated being unable to speak. All I wanted was to say what I wanted, when and where I wanted.
“He hates talking about it!” she squawked. “He can’t move on with you constantly asking questions. And he’s about to die! Leave him be!”
But how did they expect me to stop asking questions when it was all I wanted to know. We had our own little mystery, a box wrapped neatly with a bow and waiting to be opened, only everyone wanted to keep it shut, and I couldn’t understand why. I had no idea that this was really a Pandora’s box, something that would disrupt everything. I chewed on the dry skin from my lip and gathered the silverware from the kitchen in silence.
Lorrie took me to a party once when I was fourteen years old. “Come on,” she told me, literally twisting my arm with one big grab and turn. “You’re going to learn to have some fun.” She viewed me as her project, someone she wanted to care for and get out of the house every now and then. Maybe she believed getting me out into the real world would make me less likely to be gay, if I was more involved with normal teenagers and their normal parties. So, we drove across town and parked outside a large two-story brick house in the country, sitting on the edge of a dirt road with grass frosted from the midwinter cold. It didn’t snow here, but it got cold enough to turn the lawns icy and brittle.
The party was already busy when we got there. Inside the house, there was alcohol abundant and overflowing, beer and mixed drinks, people drinking directly from the Crown Royal bottles their fathers kept stored over the fridges in their homes. I watched Lorrie blend into the crowd of people, and eventually found her again sitting with some of her friends, her legs bent underneath her, her blonde hair swiped back behind one ear. She kept tucking hair there as she talked to this boy and that girl. She looked calm, at peace with herself, and she glanced up and saw me again, beckoning me over with her hands, but I didn’t obey. I didn’t know her friends, and didn’t want to be a part of their circle. They were the same kinds of people who mocked me incessantly, who judged me, and made Lorrie embarrassed to be called my cousin. I didn’t want to be involved with that tonight.
Wandering off down one of the hallways and eventually meandering up some stairs to the second floor of the house, I found a room that was mostly empty. The bed was neatly made, the walls cotton candy pink, unicorns and rainbows painted across the walls. Collector’s Edition Barbies lined up along the walls, still in their boxes. I couldn’t figure out if this was the room of someone who was still a child and not currently at home or one of the partiers downstairs who had never gotten a room more fitting to their teenage self. I sat on the edge of the bed, too nervous to go downstairs and face the party again just to get a drink. I didn’t really like alcohol to begin with, and it would be a whole thing, looking for a Coke in the midst of all that booze. I hated busy rooms, crowded events, too many people. There were certainly too many people here.
Someone stumbled into the room—two someones, a white boy and a Black girl, kissing and fumbling with one another’s clothes, barely paying attention to me. I watched them, alert, my back erect and stiff with tension. I didn’t know what to do, so I scooted further back on the bed and watched for a moment, imagining myself disappearing into the pink walls. They didn’t seem to mind, or notice.
“Whose room is this?” the girl asked, looking up at the pink walls I’d noticed before, likely going through the same thought process as me.
“I don’t know. Marcy’s little sister’s, I guess.”
“We can’t do this in Marcy’s little sister’s room.”
“Who says?”
The girl looked up and spotted me, as if she couldn’t believe someone else was in the room already, and said, “Jacob, there’s someone else here.”
His face was in her neck like a vampire. He mumbled, “It’s OK, it’s OK.”
“No, it’s Matthew, Lorrie’s cousin. He’s just a kid. Stop.” She giggled, pushing him away. “Stop, stop.”
Jacob looked up at me and the girl, Cora, took a step back from him and crossed the room to the bed where I was sitting. Cora was a beautiful girl, and Jacob was a handsome boy. I was almost jealous of Cora. She was the daughter of the town’s first Black doctor, a man revered in all communities. I’d more than once heard my grandfather say something racist but somehow endearing toward Cora’s father, like, “If all Black men could be like Dr. Howe, the world would be a much better place. Easier to live in.” I always grimaced when my grandfather said something like this, wanting to correct him but not wanting to be scolded by my mother, who didn’t believe in talking back to elderly men in their final years of life. (“Let him be wrong,” my mother told me. “He’s only got so much time left to be wrong, anyways.”)
On the other hand, Jacob came from a farming family. Both sets of grandparents had been farmers, and his father farmed while his mother taught at the local private school in town. They were notable racists, which is why it surprised me to see Jacob and Cora together like this, so unabashedly into one another. I wanted this. I wanted a love I didn’t have to be ashamed of, or something so powerful I didn’t care either way. I envied the two of them, not that I would have ever said so.
Cora blinked for a moment, sitting down on the edge of the bed. She smiled. “You weren’t even going to warn us you were sitting in here?” she asked me.
“I didn’t know how to stop you. I was—I was surprised—”
“Relax,” Jacob said. “She’s just messing with you.”
I tried to breathe, wanting to listen and relax for once. Glancing from Cora to Jacob, and from Jacob to Cora again, I said, “Y’all know Lorrie?”
“Everyone here knows Lorrie,” Jacob said, and Cora nudged him. “I just mean, it’s a small town.”
“Not everyone knows me,” I said.
“Well, you don’t have the same reputation,” Jacob said before Cora jabbed him sharply with her elbow again, ramming it deep in his side. “What?” he said, turning to her. “It’s the truth.”
Cora stared at him in a way that was a warning, but also an invitation. She wanted to be alone with him, I was certain. But there was something between them, an exchanged expression, a brief moment which passed when they made up their mind about something.
“Matthew,” Cora said slowly, a slick smile on her face. “Would you like to come somewhere with us?”
My back tensed up again, even tighter now. I didn’t want to go anywhere, didn’t want to leave this room, but I also felt like I was being invited into something secret and private. It occurred to me I might not get this chance again.
“Where?” I said.
“No,” Cora told Jacob. “Never mind. We shouldn’t. He’s not old enough.”
“I’m almost as old as you,” I said, persistent.
“But you’ll be scared,” Cora said, and when I stepped forward off the bed, she smiled even brighter.
They parked the car down the road from the house and got out before me, leading the way. It was only a couple of miles from the party. Jacob hadn’t driven us far. We stumbled along the dirt road, my feet slipping in and out of ruts in the path. My breath caught in my throat every time I thought I heard something in the trees, every exhale visible in the cold night air. This was dangerous land. This was the home of John Rooney Daniels.
Cora had suggested we come here, or maybe it was Jacob, I couldn’t be sure. Either way, they were almost gleeful in the choosing, completely fine with wandering over the land a serial killer had once used to bury all of his bodies. I thought about how often kids came here, and how they didn’t turn up for years, for decades. People my age were too busy racing cars while they were high or drunk, taking the dangerous drugs that pumped through their veins to begin with, playing Russian roulette with their lives—in short, there were bigger, more terrifying things to be worried about. Why was I so afraid of a piece of land that was nothing but trees and fields for days, empty holes where the dead had been exhumed long ago?
Except, there was a house. It was planted along the edge of the road, a few yards back from the road actually, with a small yard with yellow grass grown tall in the front of the house, and a fence all around the sides that looked like it was about to cave in. The house was crumbling, made of bricks which were missing or chipped in places, the roof missing shingles here and there. I walked slowly, carefully across the tall grass, looking at Cora and Jacob in the hopes that there would be some sort of sign between them, something that would clue me into their way of thinking. They looked at one another, Cora swiping a loose strand of hair back behind her ear, Jacob chewing his lip in an almost alluring way, but there was no fear shared between them.
“This place is deserted?” I asked.
“You don’t think anyone would still be living here all this time later, do you?” Cora looked at me like I was wild, full of jokes.
Shaking my head, I said, “No, but then again, I don’t know why people do some of the things they do. They might be crazy, or someone might be homeless, or—”
“Homeless people don’t live in Lake City,” Jacob said confidently. “Homelessness is a myth, especially in small towns like these. You haven’t ever seen a homeless person around these parts, have you?”
“No,” I said, “not here, not really, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”
“Don’t be so gullible, Matthew,” Cora said. I couldn’t tell if she was referring to me believing Jacob, or not having considered homelessness a myth before tonight. Either way, I wanted to fit in, and even in that moment, I hated this quality of mine. I always needed to be liked, to feel wanted by someone.
“Come on,” Cora said, walking directly up to the house. She tried the door, but it was locked. I glanced over my shoulder at the trees behind us. It was pitch black dark and we were all using the lights from our cell phones, careful where we stepped, always looking around us with the thin beams of light spread out over the grass and the bricks of the house, the ivy growing up over everything.
I breathed in, breathed out, watched as Cora pried open a window on the side of the house. She was more in control of things than Jacob, who seemed to be lingering behind, waiting.
“Why’d you bring me out here?” I asked for maybe the millionth time that evening.
“Because it’s fun,” Cora said, and she turned to glance at Jacob, exchanging another one of their knowing looks. “Do you want to go in first, Matthew?”
I stared at them, wondering if they were insane. All I wanted to do was turn around and head back to the party, beg Lorrie to let me go home early. She could always drive me home and go back to the party, although she was likely too drunk to even sit up straight anymore, let alone maneuver a car along dirt roads out in the country.
When I looked at Cora and Jacob, I saw a certain eagerness on their faces. They wanted me to get inside the building swiftly, to ignore every bone in my body which told me to go home and simply climb inside. I watched them both for some sort of hesitation on their ends, or perhaps a sign they had changed their minds. They remained unflinching. What they wanted was for me to crawl in through this window. What they wanted was a show. And I couldn’t deny them this, not after they’d used gas money and made the actual effort of getting me out here. They wanted to see something interesting, and maybe that interesting thing was inside the house.
But they wanted me to go first, and I wasn’t sure I could do this.
Only, I had to, if I wanted to fit in with the rest of them. If I wanted Jacob and Cora to go back and tell people how awesome I’d been at John Rooney Daniels’ home. If they were to stay endeared to me, perhaps later inviting me to their own parties, involving me in different social events. Making a love like this possible for me, too. I had to swallow my fear whole.
Jacob took a step closer to the window, holding out his hand like he was going to assist in boosting me up over the window ledge. It wasn’t pried high enough for me to squeeze through easily. I’d have to inhale, hold my breath, and pray they didn’t change their minds about me when they saw how I wouldn’t fit through an old window in a serial killer’s house. John Rooney Daniels might even be chuckling, watching from afar, undead or perhaps simply viewing me from a Dish TV in hell.
I nodded and set my foot in Jacob’s hand. He quickly shifted his whole body and began to boost me up over the window ledge and in through the house, headfirst. Fear seized up inside me as I pushed the window a little higher to slip into the house, somehow finally fitting right through the opening before falling onto an old, dirty carpeted floor.
This isn’t my proudest moment.
Picking myself up, I realized I’d dropped my phone and knelt down again immediately., . I found it after a moment, the light shining down into the carpet, and when I straightened my back again, I noticed all the wood paneled walls, the places where photos might have been hung once upon a time. I thought of Sally and wondered why we’d never come here. But this was home for her in some way, much like my grandparents’ house was so familiar to me. There was little interest for her here, and I couldn’t blame her for that.
I reached for the nearest light switch, but when I flipped the switch, nothing turned on. Of course, Matthew. The lights would have been turned off for years by now, the electric company writing this off their map entirely.
I peered out through the window and saw there was no one standing behind me out in the yard, the night having sunk in a little deeper, pressing harder on the back of my eyes and in my shoulders, making everything cramp up inside me. I took a step closer to the window, my heart in my throat, but I didn’t see Cora or Jacob anywhere.
“Guys!” I called out, feeling more terrified than ever before. “This isn’t funny! Please come back!” I was begging, and I hated that I was begging. I needed someone to hold my hand. Always, I’d been so codependent, so needy and selfish, and now was no different. I’d come to this house on a half-dare, crawled in through the window because it felt like I was playing chicken.
They were gone, long gone. But of course they were. I tried to shove the window open a little higher, thinking I might slip back outside, but the window wouldn’t budge.
I turned and began pushing my way down the hallway, feeling along the walls to make sure I was going in the right direction. Stepping a little closer to the center of the house, moving a little more quickly with each subsequent footfall, I wondered how long this house actually was, and if he’d truly kept bodies here. I wondered if there were somehow still bodies on the premises, if maybe they hadn’t all been recovered. Supposedly, there had been a great number of bodies that remained undiscovered at the time of John Rooney Daniels’ execution. Supposedly, he’d offed so many people it would have been hard to nail down an exact body count. All of this seemed to be building from my stomach up to my chest, causing the walls along my heart to close in slowly and with great pressure, my skin and bones constricting and pushing everything up through my throat and out my mouth. I wanted to vomit I was so frightened. I walked closer and closer to something, to nothing.
There were rumors, and there were legends, and then there was the truth. What scared me so much was not what might have been made up, or what I was currently conjuring as myth in my head, but all the stories of the dead boys and girls, the grown men and women who’d gone missing. Their voices screamed at me as I walked, my walk turning into something close to an actual run as I rammed into wall after wall.
Everything in this house was dated, frozen in time like Pompeii or an insect in amber. The light from my phone flashed everywhere, like a strobe light all around me. I walked wildly, staggering, my feet pounding on the floors until I worried the floorboards might be so old and untended they could very well give way. It hurt me that Jacob and Cora would desert me, would treat this like some practical joke and bolt, but I couldn’t feel hurt for long: I was terrified. The whole house seemed to be shrinking, throbbing around and against me, the walls brushing against my skin as I looked desperately for the front door. Old furniture was turned over inside the house, fabric ripped to shreds, feathers and stuffing everywhere. People had come here to trash the home of John Rooney Daniels, to sully his memory. We weren’t the first people to venture out to this house, and I imagined we wouldn’t be the last—especially if something else happened to me tonight, if I was somehow turned into another urban legend, something to be gawked at and discussed over campfires and cold beers.
A large staircase led up to the second floor from the foyer—the house was convoluted, ugly, large, the staircase itself like a giant tongue—but it had a foyer, and that meant something, I suppose. I pulled at the door, twisting the knob before remembering it was locked. Of course, it was locked. I tried to turn the bolt lock, but it was a deadbolt, requiring a key. I wouldn’t be getting out this way.
I stepped on something hard and heard abeer bottle shatter beneath me. Teenagers had been in this house, likely often, possibly on dares like this, although this dare felt unfair. It felt cruel. I kicked some of the glass off my shoe and looked out one of the windows, hoping to see Cora or Jacob standing outside, waiting on me. With my luck, they were gone. My heart remained in my throat. There was an echoing cave where my chest used to be.
Turning and bolting toward the opposite end of the house, I ran into more furniture collecting dust, the shredded fabric lifting off the couches and armchairs like the spirits that wanted to claim me. I ran all the way back past the old dining room table and into the kitchen in the rear of the house, all white and turquoise tiles, a wooden table with three overturned chairs. There I found another door, locked but with only a chain bolt attached. I jerked the door hard, forgetting to undo the chain, but when I turned, I thought I saw her in the light from my phone, standing only a few feet behind me.
The girl I’d seen in those photos all these years: Hoyt Turbeville. She was wearing a summer dress, her hair down to her shoulders and curled gently, folding and flowing, tucked in part behind her ears. There was blood clotted by the side of her head, cementing her hair flat against her skull. Her mouth opened as she begged me for something, but I couldn’t hear her. The yearning sounds she made, the things she wanted from me, from the living: I couldn’t hear her over my own screams.
I jerked the door so hard the chain snapped. The door flew open, and I stumbled out onto the back porch, running straight for the fields, the cold air not nearly as cold as it had been in that house where death had lain like snakes down a snake hole, slumbering away from the cold, not needing to be disturbed but ready to strike when necessary. Clots of dirt kicked up around me as I chased through the field, searching desperately, the light bobbing around me. I looked for Cora and Jacob somewhere in the darkness, but I supposed they had already left, which didn’t break my heart so much as make me quake with a quiet rage.
6.
You have to understand, stories aren’t always told to entertain.
Stories can be told to preserve, to survive.
At the party, I found Lorrie sitting in the living room, sipping a beer and talking to some boy. I must have looked a fright, for when I grabbed at her shirt sleeve and she looked up at me, she jumped like how I must have moved when I saw Hoyt Turbeville’s ghost in the Daniels house.
“What happened to you?” she asked.
“Can we go? We need to go.”
She looked at the boy she was talking to, a handsome young man with a camouflage hunting hat on, sitting in a camouflage coat. I wanted to ask him where his rifle was, if he was planning to go deer hunting after leaving the party with the way he was dressed, but I didn’t bother. At that moment I only wanted to leave. I wanted to go home and hide under the covers in my own bed and not smell like weed and beer and fear and sweat from this night.
“Sorry,” she said to the boy, along with several other apologies. He nodded at her and looked at me like I was crazy.
In the car, I brushed some dirt from my face. I stared at myself in the vanity mirror above the passenger seat but didn’t look at Lorrie the whole way home. She drove with a certain intensity, a fury simmering behind her eyes. I could see her glaring at me in the rear view mirror.
“Where were you?” she asked me. “Rolling in the dirt? You look a mess. You made a fool of me back there.”
“Some people took me to the Daniels house and left me,” I said, too tired to make up anything, too angry to resist answering with the truth. “I—I ran all the way back from there. From that house.”
“Who?” Lorrie asked, her tone venomous. She was going to find out who, no matter what, but I didn’t tell her. She’d have to figure out from somebody else, not me.
“I think I saw something,” I said dumbly.
“What?”
“I think I saw something in the Daniels house.”
“Like what, Matthew? Sorry, I’m a little buzzed, you’re going to have to be more specific than—”
“Hoyt, I saw Hoyt.”
“Hoyt?”
“Papa’s sister.”
“Papa’s sister,” she repeated, sounding dumb, but maybe trying to gather her own thoughts.
“The one who disappeared all those years ago. I think I saw her ghost.”
“You sound like a fucking idiot, Matthew,” Lorrie said, suddenly angry with me for some reason or another. Perhaps I sounded as crazy as I felt a lot of the time, talking about ghosts, but I wanted her to understand how afraid I was. How I’d seen something even I didn’t believe, but she’d been there in that house, begging for release. Hoyt. The dead girl I only knew from fading photographs.
Lorrie drove in silence for a while. We didn’t say anything. Her words rung in my head, rebounding and colliding, everything around me threatening to erupt in a mess of words and spit. My brain felt hot. Maybe I was coming down with something. Maybe I really was insane.
For years, I’d been treated for different mental illnesses. My parents had taken me to a number of doctors and admitted me to a few hospitals for treatment and careful observation, especially given my suicidal ideation. It was one of the main reasons Lorrie had wanted to get me out of the house, one of the reasons my parents likely had urged her to bring me along to a party. Maybe they’d bribed her with something. Maybe she’d done it out of the kindness of her heart. I would never know for sure.
It runs in our family, this dreaded curse, this sickness in our blood. I want you to know that too.
“Hoyt isn’t dead,” Lorrie said when we pulled up into my front yard. Lorrie didn’t bother with the driveway. She was too drunk. She was so drunk she was willing to tell me this, ready to spill the truth about something she’d been holding in for a while.
“She’s been disappeared for years—for decades—”
“She never—she disappeared, yes, but she never—she wasn’t taken, Matthew. It wasn’t John Rooney Daniels.”
“I saw her tonight.”
“No, you didn’t. She’s alive. She’s doing well for herself. She ran away when she was younger. A little older than me, in fact.”
“No,” I said, thinking of her summer dress, the way it had moved around her, almost like ghosts could be affected by the winds of winter, the way that house had seemed alive.
“Yes,” Lorrie said. “You’re embarrassing yourself now, talking about seeing people, seeing ghosts. You can see her on social media if you want. I’ll—I’ll send you links. She’s married now with kids who have kids our age.”
“But why didn’t they ever get her back? If she’s been alive all this time, I mean. She should have come back to us. Was she brainwashed or—”
“Stop with the melodramatics, God. You are so over-the-top sometimes.” Lorrie sighed pitifully. “It’s because her husband was Black. I think he died a few years back, but he was Black, and all of her children are, obviously, mixed. That wouldn’t have been welcomed here, not by our family, not by Papa or his father, especially not his father.”
“Daddy would have—”
“Your dad might have welcomed her back. My dad might have welcomed her back. But it’s different now.”
“She doesn’t want to have anything to do with our family?”
“I think it’s the opposite of that. I think the other way is true.”
I tried to grapple with this fact, something I wasn’t used to facing: the truth. My aunt had been disowned because of someone she’d chosen to love, if loving can be a choice at all. I tried to wrap my mind around all of this, around her being erased, chalked up to being the victim of a serial killer rather than just gone. Simply gone.
“Oh,” I said, a little sadly. It stunned me, to know that there was this woman I’d always told for years and years had disappeared, only words had been left out, facts omitted to create a narrative that fit my family’s idea of love and sacrifice, tragedy and overcoming. I chewed on my lower lip and stared at the dashboard, wondering what all I’d been told that was only a half-truth, what stories had been built up in my head and in my life to make up for the truth that simply wasn’t there to begin with. I sighed deeply, mournfully.
Lorrie looked at the time on the radio. “Does that say it’s midnight?”
“No, it says two in the morning.” I stared at her for a long while. “You shouldn’t drive,” I said, taking the key from the ignition before she could object. “You can sleep it off inside.”
Lorrie groaned with more fury, but slid out of the car and walked behind me up around the house and in through the back door. We were quiet, silently climbing the staircase, keeping our heads low and using our flashlights to light the way. I didn’t want to wake my parents, who would be grumpy for any reason being woken up at this hour, even if it was because their son had just returned from his first high school blow out party.
I changed my clothes, but Lorrie was already in my bed, turned over on her stomach, snoring into the pillow she used when she slept over. She hadn’t removed a lot of the make-up she’d worn, much like she often forgot to do when it was late and she was sleepy. She was young and believed that the more make-up she wore, the more beautiful she’d be. She thought she could trick people into seeing someone more adult, more astonishing than how she felt. The foundation had rubbed all into the pillowcase, and although I washed it after every use, the stains were there, tan and streaked deep.
Poking her in the shoulder, I hoped she would wake up. I hoped she would move and turn back toward me, her eyes open, her breath hot with the foul smell of beer and smoke, but she was so deep in her dreams I couldn’t hope to wake her now. I decided, in the morning, I would ask her more about Hoyt. I would ask her more about what had happened between my great-aunt and the rest of our family, although the story seemed as simple as could be.
When I woke though, she was up and gone. She’d left like how I would be left in future years by boys who slept over with me, boys who became men, men who became long-term lovers, long-term lovers who became boyfriends, boyfriends who became partners, and one day, I hoped, a partner who would become a husband. I still hoped for husbands then, at that young age. Now, as you’ll find when you get older, I’m more realistic. But I didn’t have anything to compare her leaving to at the time. I only knew she’d left me in the early morning, ready to return to her own bed, or perhaps to go talk with some other boy, someone she could love in a different way.
Lorrie avoided me for almost a week before she answered my calls. “Are you angry with me?” I asked.
“No,” she said, “I’ve just been busy. I’ll see you at Christmas, I promise.”
I didn’t ask her if I could go to another party. I didn’t want to go to another party. I supposed she’d told her parents how I’d embarrassed her, and maybe her parents told my parents, because I wasn’t forced to go to any other social events against my will. There were no more excursions to late night cookouts and bonfires, not for a long while. Not until I began making friends of my own and began going to high school and college parties of my own free will.
And Lorrie did talk to me that Christmas, our voices broken by the static of crinkling gift-wrap, our throats warm with hot cocoa, but eventually things grew different between us. We drifted, our relationship shifting like tectonic plates until something quietly ruptured between us. She didn’t like seeing me with men, her own worst fear of me being gay coming true, some sort of prophecy she was sure she could have prevented. I wanted to tell her things, ask for all the family secrets, all the things I hadn’t been told all these years, all the stories that were being kept from me, but I’d decided sometime after she told me about Hoyt that some stories were best kept mythologized. It was hard to decide if I’d rather have seen ghosts or known that someone was living happily miles away, and I wondered if maybe I’d seen some real manifestation of her in the house that night, but that was silly. Only kids believed in ghosts. Kids and heathens, and I supposed I could grow out of at least one of those states. The other would take some time.
The grass in the front yard is frosted over again. The tree limbs look so stiff they could just crack in two.
How many years did I stay away from them? Through grad school and living in different states, I kept close to my parents, to my sister, but never anyone else. I crossed the street when I saw them ahead of me, I walked carefully, almost diligently, with my head down. For years, I avoided the holidays because I didn’t want to face their judgment, or to know that I’d been written out in the same way as my great aunt, the phantom Hoyt. This Christmas is different. The surface of the pond out in front of my grandparent’s house is iced over, almost like you could skate across it, although that would be a mistake to try here in the middle of South Carolina. It’s my grandfather—your great grandfather—who’s dying now, having suffered his third stroke and barely managing to get around his own house. This is the same man who lost his sister in a thousand different ways, and I’m coming back to see him, likely for one last time. I’ll see them all too: Lorrie, her brother Stewart (still damned, for killing that cat), their father the drunk, their mother a pill-popping loon.
If this were a movie, I’d take him evidence that Hoyt was still alive and well, with her husband and her children and her grandchildren, too, just like him. I’d tell my grandfather there was still time, if he’d only try and heal things. Time can only be stretched so thin before it finally tears at the edges. But he’s a proud man. He’d never listen to my rationalization. He’d rather argue her fate dead, gone, disappeared by a serial killer executed years ago, rather than face up to the fact of things: she decided to venture out on her own and live.
Of course, he won’t change his mind. He’s stubborn. He’s a man.
Still, I go. We go, together.
Mostly, I want to own up to every way I’ve ever stretched the truth. I promise, I do it for one of two reasons: out of the goodness of my heart, or to spare you something. But you don’t need to be spared any more than I did the story of Hoyt and her own love affair. I suppose in someone else’s story I’m a phantom too, maybe even in the narratives my own family recollects. Don’t worry. I’m no longer afraid to correct them.
