Swamp Bromeliad Read online

  Swamp Bromeliad

  by

  Seanan McGuire

  "We got what we paid for. In the end, we didn't deserve any more than that. We didn't deserve any less, either. Let's hope someone remembers that, when we're all dead and gone." –Enid Healy

  Driving toward Buckley Township, Michigan

  Now

  We had left the main highway behind us easily an hour ago, and were now wending our way through dense forest, traveling along roads that could have used some serious repair, and maybe a few closures. The potholes were big enough to qualify as small ponds, at least when they were full of water, and this far into Michigan's Upper Peninsula, they were always filled with water. Michigan might not be on Portland's level when it came to being damp, but it was making a good effort, and I wasn't ready to count it out yet.

  Dominic was asleep in the passenger seat when we crossed the line into Buckley Township. I pulled the U-Haul off to the side of the road and stared into the imposing tree line that surrounded us on what felt like all sides. The sky was a thin sliver of blue overhead, already trending toward sunset. Chicago and the Carmichael Hotel were eight hours of hard driving behind us. If we didn't want to spend the night in the truck, I would need to push on, and soon.

  I didn't move.

  It was strange, being back in Buckley: it was like I was a compass, forever seeking magnetic north, and had just locked on to my target, no matter how much I wanted to go in a different direction. This was where my family's tenure in America had started. This was where, for better or for worse, the majority of our bodies were buried. My grandparents had met here. My great-grandparents had died here. It was impossible to understand the history of the Price family as it currently stood without also understanding Buckley--what had gone right there, what had gone wrong there, and what had gone unbearably weird there.

  Dominic needed to see this. He needed to see what had made us before he got any deeper, because he was rapidly approaching the point of "too deep to get out," and I didn't want him to wind up there without all the facts. I wanted his choices to be based on all the facts.

  And if I was being honest with myself, I wanted him to choose me anyway. I wanted him to look at the complicated, bizarre web of my family's history and say "yeah, that's about what I expected."

  I took a deep breath and started the engine back up. Dominic didn't stir as I pulled back out onto the road, swerving to avoid a large pothole-slash-large pond, and continued on toward Buckley.

  No one knows anymore what made my great-great grandparents, Alexander and Enid Healy, decide to settle in Buckley Township, Michigan. They had just come from England, and it would have made more sense for them to settle on one of the coasts, in a place where foreigners were more common and hence more likely to be accepted by the locals. Or, if they'd been looking for a place where the Covenant was never going to find them, they could have kept on going until they hit the middle of the country and disappeared into the corn. Indiana, Iowa, all those big flat spaces on the map would have been better bets than Buckley, and yet for some reason, it was Buckley that had called them. They'd found themselves a house on the edge of the woods, an old farmstead that was in what could charitably have been called "need of repair," and was more realistically falling down around their ears. And they'd rebuilt it.

  They'd raised a son there. When he'd come home with a woman, they'd done half the raising of their eventual daughter-in-law there. They'd buried a grandson and brought up a granddaughter there, and they'd done it all in the hand of the mountain and the shade of the tree. When my paternal grandmother talked about Buckley, it was always with longing mixed up so tightly with loss that I couldn't see the seams between them. When my father and my Aunt Jane talked about Buckley, it was with the deep relief of people who felt that they'd managed to avoid some terrible fate. As for the members of my generation, we were caught somewhere in the middle--and wasn't that always the case?

  Buckley was in our blood. But not everything that gets into your blood is good for you. A lot of the things that get into your blood can be fatal.

  The sun was losing its hold on the sky when I came rolling down Mill Road. I pulled the truck up in front of an old two-story farmhouse set way back from the street and surrounded by a white picket fence that wouldn't have done any good against anything that really wanted to get inside. I leaned over and shook Dominic's shoulder.

  "Hey," I said. "Hey, wake up. I need you to see this."

  "Hmm?" Dominic De Luca rolled his head toward me as he opened his eyes. He blinked for a moment, looking puzzled--how did he get here, what was going on, all those usual issues of time and place and memory--and then he sat up a little straighter, stopping only when his seatbelt pulled tight against his chest and pushed him back into his seat. "Where are we?"

  "Buckley. That," I gestured toward the farmhouse with one hand, "is the old Healy place. That's where Alexander and Enid lived after they left the Covenant." That's where they lived until they died. I didn't really feel like I needed to say that last part. Dominic was a smart guy. He'd figure it out.

  Slowly, he raked his hand back through his hair and focused on the house. "It seems pleasant," he said, after a moment to collect his thoughts.

  "I know, right?" I smiled a little. "It's amazing what hard work can do. I've seen pictures of the place right after we bought it. We don't have too many photos from back then, but a lot of them are of the house. My great-great-grandparents rebuilt that thing basically from the ground up, and then, when they realized they didn't know jack about home repair, they hired some people to help them do it all again. Blood, sweat, and tears. That's what that house is made of. Mostly blood."

  Blood in the walls, from accidents during construction, from painted runes intended to keep the darker things the world had to offer at bay. Blood on the floors, tracked in by hunters or escaping from between clenched fingers in the time between slash and stitches. Blood on the grounds, watering every inch of the soil. If the way to own a place was to bleed for it, my family would own that house and the land it sat on until the sun went cold.

  Dominic reached for his seatbelt. I held up a hand to stop him.

  "We're not going in," I said.

  He blinked slowly. "I thought your family still owned the place."

  "We do. We rent it out to people who actually want to live in Buckley, not just visit every decade or so. The folks who live there now have been living there for the past fifteen years. They're the ones who put up the fence." They had sent a letter asking for permission, which had been good of them. They hadn't asked for permission before they started cutting back the forest, thinning the tree line and removing the underbrush. I had been home when they sent pictures for our approval. Grandma Alice had been there, too.

  That had been the first time I'd ever seen her cry.

  "They'd probably believe me if I showed up on the porch claiming to be one of the owners. I have ID, and I have my parents' number in my phone. But we'd be invading their privacy, and that isn't our house anymore. I mean, it's still our house. It's just not our home."

  "But you wanted me to see it," said Dominic.

  I nodded. "It's sort of important, you know? That's where all this started. The Healys in America."

  To my surprise, he smiled. "It's absolutely important. I only wish that I could offer the same to you. The De Luca family roots are scattered across Italy, but I still know how to find them."

  "They're in your blood," I said, and started the U-Haul. It was better if we moved along before our renters noticed that we were sitting on the street like a couple of weirdoes. The poor people were twitchy enough, thanks to living right on the border of a forest that they had never learned to love.

  It was odd, in its wa
y. Buckley Township wasn't a big place. It was one of two Buckleys in Michigan, and almost everyone who recognized the name was thinking of the other one, the thriving town with the healthy economy and the low unexplained death rate. Our Buckley was small and quiet and fading a little more with every year that passed, sliding an inch at a time toward irrelevancy, if it wasn't already there. The people who rented our old house weren't natives and didn't have any family in the township; they were holding on as much from stubbornness as anything else.

  But maybe that was true of everyone who chose to keep on living here, in a place that time had passed by.

  I drove down Mill to where it met with Woodside, and followed that until I came to Old Logger's Road, which was really just a glorified logging trail, already half-returned to the wilds from which it had come. The pavement began to decay immediately after I made the turn, first becoming unstable, then becoming unreliable, and finally giving way to gravel and hard-packed dirt. The truck bounced and jittered all around us. I could practically hear my security deposit being scraped off by the rocky soil as it destroyed our shocks. I kept on going. There was still some light in the sky, and Dominic deserved to see the Parrish Place before he had to spend the night there.

  Old Logger's Road was relatively uninhabited. There had been several houses there once, but most of them had been left to crumble back into the land. A few skeletons still stood sentry over their foundations. They wouldn't last for much longer. The world was working against them, and nothing can endure forever. That's just the nature of entropy.

  We came around the final bend in the road just as the sun was entering its final descent. I stopped the truck at an angle. No one was going to come driving along here, and Dominic needed to see.

  Maybe the Parrish Place would have been more attractive by sunlight than it was by the harsh, artificial glow of the headlights, which were unforgiving of its many flaws. Probably not. The Parrish Place hadn't been a pretty house when it was new, and now, after decades of repairs and tragedies, it looked like the sort of place that should have been dripping with ghosts, so haunted that it ached.

  It wasn't haunted. No self-respecting ghost would have tied themselves to those walls, which were already possessed by the past. But it looked like it should have been.

  From the outside, it appeared to be somewhere between three and four stories tall. No one had ever been able to get a reliable count of the windows, which seemed to shift and change every time they weren't being watched. The porch sat snugly against the front of the house, thanks to some efficient repairs and maintenance, but the porch swing was missing again, and its rusty support chains dangled freely. The whole thing was painted in a streaky, weathered combination of green and brown. It looked infected, like it was so sick that it might collapse inward at any time.

  Dominic was quiet for a moment before he said, "The house does not appear to want us here."

  "Nope, but it's not haunted. I have that on excellent authority."

  That earned me a long-suffering sigh. "The collection of dead aunts, I assume."

  "They both died in Buckley. They keep a very good eye on the local hauntings. Sometimes they drop by and lecture the newer dead about their technique." I opened my door. "Come on. I'll get the mice if you'll get my overnight bag."

  "May I take this to mean that we are to be sleeping in the house that doesn't want us inside?"

  I smiled a little. "I always knew you were a smart one. Now come on. I want to make sure the generator still works."

  The generator still worked, and had been recently topped off with fuel: Alice had been through within the last few months. This was the closest thing she had to a home anymore, the fixed point that she circled when she wasn't running through dangerous dimensions, flipping over rocks and begging my missing grandfather to come home. Mom and Dad had both tried a hundred times to convince her to move to Portland. They could clear a guest room for her, they always said; they could make it her room, and she could be surrounded by her family when she needed to rest. But she'd always turned them down. This was the house where she'd lost her husband. This was the house where she was going to find him.

  I returned from the shed to find Dominic standing at the dead center of the living room, looking around like he wasn't sure whether it was safe for him to touch anything. That wasn't a bad response to the Parrish Place, really. The couch was probably originally red, before decades of use and dust wore it down to a distressing dried blood color. The wallpaper was peeling in archeological layers, revealing the tastes of at least five full redecorations. The only thing in the place that looked like it had been dusted in the last year was the bookshelf, which was loaded down with charming titles like Venomous Spirits of the American Ghostroads and What Just Bit Me? A Guide to Emergency Triage.

  (There was also a short stack of old Trixie Belden books on the bottom shelves, all of them well-worn and marked with multiple slips of paper. This was where Alice went to recover from the sort of things that required trauma kits and toxicology texts, after all, and she didn't have cable.)

  "We're sleeping here?" demanded Dominic, before I could say anything.

  "Sleeping, lying awake all night and wondering what that sound we just heard was, it's all the same." I walked to the bag that contained the mice and knelt to open it. They looked up at me, their tiny, furry faces grave. "We're home. Do you remember the rules?"

  "Do not enter the bedroom where once the Noisy Priestess slept, before she became the Pilgrim Priestess; do not enter the library on the second floor, where once the God of Difficult Bargains and Unwanted Knowledge left us," said the head priest. "Do not run across your face in the small hours of the night, no, not even if we are afraid of the sounds in the walls and hoping that our claws will wake you."

  "Very good," I said, and stepped away from the bag. The mice poured out and were gone, scampering off into the corners and disappearing. I turned back to Dominic. "This is holy ground for them, especially since we started renting the Healy place to strangers. They have relics stored in the attic, and graves all around the foundation."

  "And this is all fascinating, but why do we need to sleep here tonight?" Dominic was practically pleading. The Parrish Place had that effect on people. It was almost a relief to see that he wasn't immune. "It smells of mold and decomposition. I feel like the walls are watching me."

  "They probably are," said a voice from behind him. I smiled. Dominic's response was a little more dramatic. He whirled around, hand going to the knife at his belt, eyes narrowing as he prepared to fight.

  Then he saw who it was and relaxed again, half-panicked glare becoming a scowl. "Mary," he said, dropping his hand from the hilt. "You shouldn't sneak up on people like that."

  "Technically, I didn't sneak," said Mary. "I just appeared while your back was turned. If you had any ectoplasmic sensitivity at all, you'd know when a ghost was showing up behind you."

  "What did I say about tormenting the Covenant boyfriend?" I asked, putting an arm around Dominic's shoulders as I pouted at my dead aunt.

  Mary rolled her eyes. "I swear, you people are no fun at all."

  "You startled me," said Dominic. "I don't like being startled under the best of circumstances. Here, and now…" He gestured around himself with the arm that wasn't pinned between me and his body, indicating the walls all around us. "This is not a place well-suited to surprises."

  "There were a bunch of murders here before Tommy bought the place, or before the Covenant bought it for him," said Mary, as easily as if she were disclosing a history of termite damage. "I guess they weren't too thrilled with him, since they stuck him as far out in the sticks as they could, in a house that had a history of swamp cultists and slaughter."

  "Fun for the whole family," I said dryly.

  Dominic, meanwhile, was looking around the walls with wide eyes, as if they had somehow become something different while Mary was speaking. "The Covenant bought this place?" he asked. "Why?"

  "They wanted Tommy
to spy on the Healys. Alexander and Enid were still alive back then, God rest their souls, and Fran was relatively recent in her grave." Mary shook her head. "The Covenant wanted to know if the Healys were still a threat, or so they said. Personally, I think they'd heard about Alice, and wanted to bring her back into the fold before she got too committed to the family path."

  "That is…not out of the question," said Dominic, in the slow voice he sometimes employed when he was about to say something about his former employers that I wasn't going to want to hear. "The Covenant has put a great deal of time and effort into the breeding program. It's been the work of centuries for the ones who manage it. They had some of Enid and Alexander Healy's children, but retrieving their granddaughter would have been viewed as a bonus, by some."

  "The more I learn about the Covenant of St. George, the more I wonder how my family managed to leave without setting a lot of things on fire," I said philosophically. "So basically, yeah. Grandpa Thomas was supposed to spy on the Healys, but he was sort of not in the good graces of his employers, for reasons I've never been a hundred percent clear on, and so they stuck him out here."

  "In the murder house," added Mary. She sounded helpful. That was never a good sign.

  My Aunt Mary would have been more accurately described as "my grandmother's former childhood babysitter with nowhere else to go, since her entire family died a long time ago, who now hangs around haunting us out of a lack of anything better to do." Even that wouldn't be completely accurate. There are a lot of types of ghost in the twilight, that hazy post-death layer where the dead go about their business. Mary was a crossroads ghost. No one knew exactly what that meant, because she refused to tell us, and Aunt Rose--usually our go-to source for ghost lore that Mary didn't want to disclose--refused to discuss the crossroads at all. "There are things the living can be spared, and that's one of them," had been her comment the last time I'd asked.

  Mary had been dead for decades before I'd even been conceived, and there were no surviving pictures of her from when she'd been alive, so I couldn't tell if death had changed her. Maybe her hair had always been white-blonde, trending toward actual whiteness when she wasn't standing in deep shadow. But I was willing to bet that there had been a time before her eyes had looked like twenty miles of empty highway, all wasted miles and lonely turns. They probably had a color, and given her complexion and hair, they were probably blue or gray. I couldn't say for sure. I'd known her all my life, and all I knew about her eyes was that they looked like a drive I didn't want to take.