The Shining Girls

Harper ^{22 NOVEMBER 1931}

It’s like being a boy again, sneaking into the neighboring farmhouses. Sitting at the kitchen table in the quiet house, lying between the cool sheets of someone else’s bed, going through the drawers. Other people’s things tell their secrets.

He could always tell if someone was home; then and all the times he’s broken into abandoned houses since, to scrounge for food or some overlooked trinket to pawn. An empty house feels a certain way. Ripe with absence.

This House is full of expectation that makes the hair on his arms rise. There is someone in here with him. And it is not the dead body lying in the hallway.

The chandelier above the stairs casts a soft glow over dark wooden floors, gleaming with fresh polish. The wallpaper is new, a dark green and cream diamond pattern that even Harper can tell is tasteful. To the left is a bright modern kitchen, straight out of the Sears catalog, with melamine cupboards and a brand-new toaster oven and an icebox and a silver kettle on the stove, all laid out. Waiting for him.

He swings his crutch wide over the blood seeping like a carpet across the floorboards and limps around to get a better look at the dead man. He’s gripping a half-frozen turkey, the gray-pink flesh pimpled and smeared with gore. The fellow is thickset, in a dress shirt with suspenders, gray pants and smart shoes. No coat. His head has been pulped like a melon, but there is enough left to make out jowly cheeks with stubble and bloodshot blue eyes staring out of the mess of his face, wide in shock.

No coat.

Harper limps past the corpse, following the music into the parlor, half-expecting to find the owner, sitting in the upholstered chair in front of the fireplace, the poker he used to bash the man’s head in laid across his lap.

The room is empty. Although the fire is lit. And there is a poker beside the wood rack, stacked full, as if in anticipation of his arrival. The song spills from a gold-and-burgundy gramophone. The label on the record reads ‘Gershwin’. Of course. Through a crack in the curtains, he can see the cheap plywood nailed up over the windows, blocking out the daylight. But why hide this behind boarded-up windows and a condemned sign? To prevent other people finding it.

A crystal decanter filled with a honey-colored liquor has been set out next to a single tumbler on the side table. It’s on top of a lace-doily tablecloth. That will have to go, Harper thinks. And he will have to do something about the body. Bartek, he thinks, recalling the name the blind woman had said before he choked her.

Bartek never belonged here, the voice in his head says. But Harper does. The House has been waiting for him. It called him here for a purpose. The voice in his head is whispering home. And it feels like it, more than the wretched place he grew up or the series of flophouses and shacks he’s moved between all his adult life.

He props his crutch up against the chair and pours himself a glass of liquor from the decanter. The ice clinks as he swirls it. Only half-melted. He takes a slow draft, rolling it round his mouth, letting it burn down his throat. Canadian Club. Finest smuggled import, he toasts the air. It’s been a long time since he had anything to drink that didn’t have the bitter homebrew aftertaste of formaldehyde. It’s a long time since he sat on a chair that had cushioning.

He resists the chair, even though his leg is aching from the walking. Whatever fever propelled him is still burning. There’s more, right this way, sir, like a carnie barker. Step up, don’t miss out. It’s all waiting for you. Keep on, keep on, Harper Curtis.

Harper hauls himself up the steps, hanging on the balustrade that is so polished that he leaves handprints on the wood. Oily ghost impressions – already fading. He has to swing his foot up and round every time, his crutch dragging behind him. He is panting through his teeth at the effort.

He limps along the hallway, past a bathroom with a basin spattered with runnels of blood to match the towel in a soggy twist on the floor beside it, leaking pink across the shining black-and-white tiles. Harper pays no heed to this, nor to the stairs leading from the landing up to the attic, nor the spare room with the bed neatly made up, but the pillow dented.

The door to the main bedroom is closed. Shifting light stripes the floorboards through the gap underneath it. He reaches for the handle, half-expecting it to be locked. But it turns with a click and he nudges the door with the tip of his crutch. It opens onto a room bathed, inexplicably, in the glare of a summer afternoon. The furnishings are paltry. A walnut closet, an ironwork bed.

He squints against the sudden brightness outside and watches it change to thick rolling clouds and silvered dashes of rain, then to a red-streaked sunset, like a cheap zoetrope. But instead of a galloping horse or a girl saucily removing her stockings, it’s whole seasons whirring past. He can’t stand it. He goes to the window to pull the curtains shut, but not before he glimpses the tableau outside.

The houses across the way change. The paint strips away, recolors itself, strips away again through snow and sun and trash tangled with leaves blowing down the street. Windows are broken, boarded over, spruced up with a vase of flowers that turn brown and fall away. The empty lot becomes overgrown, fills over with cement, grass grows through the cracks in wild tufts, rubbish congeals, the rubbish is removed, it comes back, along with aggressive snarls of writing on the walls in vicious colors. A hopscotch grid appears, disappears in the sleeting rain, moves elsewhere, snaking across the cement. A couch rots through seasons and then catches fire.

He yanks the curtains closed, and turns and sees it. Finally. His destiny spelled out in this room.

Every surface has been defaced. There are artifacts mounted on the walls, nailed in or strung up with wire. They seem to jitter in a way that he can feel in the back of his teeth. All connected by lines that have been drawn over again and again, with chalk or ink or a knife tip scraped through the wallpaper. Constellations, the voice in his head says.

There are names scrawled beside them. Jinsuk. Zora. Willy. Kirby. Margo. Julia. Catherine. Alice. Misha. Strange names of women he doesn’t know.

Except that the names are written in Harper’s own handwriting.

It’s enough. The realization. Like a door opening up inside. The fever peaks and something howls through him, full of contempt and wrath and fire. He sees the faces of the shining girls and knows how they must die. The screaming inside his head: Kill her. Stop her.

He covers his face with his hands, dropping the crutch. He reels backwards and falls heavily onto the bed, which groans under his weight. His mouth is dry. His mind is full of blood. He can feel the objects thrumming. He can hear the girls’ names like the chorus of a hymn. The pressure builds inside his skull until it’s unbearable.

Harper takes away his hands and forces himself to open his eyes. He hauls himself to his feet, using the bedpost for balance, and hobbles over to the wall where the objects pulse and flicker, as if in anticipation. He lets them guide him, reaching out his hand. There is one that seems sharper somehow. It nags at him, the way an erection does, with incontrovertible purpose. He has to find it. And the girl who comes with it.

It is as if he has spent his entire life in a drunken blur, but now the veil has been whipped away. It is the moment of pure clarity, like fucking, or the instant he opened up Jimmy Grebe’s throat. Like dancing in irradiated paint.

He picks up a piece of chalk that is lying on the mantel and writes on the wallpaper beside the window, because there is a space for it and it seems he must. He prints ‘Glowgirl’ in his jagged sloping script, over the ghost of the word that is already there.