George Martin - Rogues

“You actually are legit. You really did believe that the house was haunting me. But it turned out I’m not haunted, I’m just a run-of-the-mill teen sociopath. You pushed me too hard, I killed you. She and I struggled with the gun, she shot me in self-defense.”

“Why would she want to kill you?”

“She doesn’t like me, she never has. I’m not her son. She tried to pack me off to my mom, but my mom has zero interest. Then she tried to ship me to boarding school but my dad said no. She definitely would like me dead. It’s just how she is. It’s how she makes her living: She finds and eliminates problems. She’s practical in an evil way.”

“But she seems so—”

“Mousy? No, she’s not. She wanted you to think that. She’s a beautiful, successful executive. She’s a goddam overdog. But you needed to feel like you were preying on someone weaker than you. That you had the upper hand. I mean, am I wrong? Isn’t that your whole business? Manipulating the manipulatable?”

My mom and I played that game for a decade: dressing and acting the part of people to be pitied. I didn’t see it coming the other way.

“She wants to kill me … because of your dad?”

“Susan Burke had the perfect marriage, and you ruined it. My dad’s gone. He left.”

“I’m sure a few … liaisons is not the reason your dad left.”

“It’s the reason she has chosen to believe in. It’s the problem she has defined and plans to eliminate.”

“Does your dad know … I’m here?”

“Not yet—he really does travel all the time. But once my dad learns we’re dead, and puts it all together? Once Susan tells him about being so scared, and coming across the business card for the psychic in his copy of Rebecca, and desperately asking her to help … imagine that guilt. His kid is dead because he wanted a hand job. His wife was forced to defend her family and kill because he got a hand job. That horror and guilt—he’ll never be able to make it up to her. Which is the point.”

“That’s how she found me? My business card?”

“Susan found the card. She thought it was odd. Fishy. My dad loves ghost stories, but he’s the world’s biggest skeptic—he’d never see a palm reader. Unless … she wasn’t really a palm reader. She followed him. She made an appointment. And then you walked in from the backroom with his copy of The Woman in White, and she knew.”

“She confides in you.”

“At first I took it as a compliment,” he said. “Then I realized she’s trying to distract me. She told me about her plan to kill you so I wouldn’t realize I was going to die too. “

“Why not just shoot me in an alley one night?”

“Then my dad feels no pain. And if she’s seen? No. She wanted to kill you here, where it looked like she was the victim. It’s actually the easiest way to do it. So she made up that haunted-house story to lure you here. Carterhook Manor, so scary. ”

“But the Carterhooks? I read about them online.”

“The Carterhooks are a fiction. I mean, they existed, I guess, but they didn’t die like you read.”

“I read about them!”

“You read about them because she wrote about them. It’s the Internet. Do you know how easy it is to make a Web page? And then make some links to it, and then have people find it and believe it and add it to their Web pages? It’s tremendously easy. Especially for someone like my mom.”

“That photo, it looked like—”

“Ever been to a flea market—shoebox after shoebox of those old photos, buck apiece. It’s not hard to find a kid that might look like me. Especially if you have a person who is willing to believe. A sucker. Like you.”

“The bleeding wall?”

“She just told you that. Sets the mood. She knew you liked ghost stories. She wanted you to come, and to believe. She likes to fuck with people. She wanted you to befriend her, be worried about her, and then—bam!—have that moment of shock when you realized you were going to die, and you’d been scared of the wrong thing. Your senses betrayed you.”

He smirked at me.

“Who cut off your cat’s tail?”

“It’s a manx, dummy, they have no tails. Can I answer any other questions on the road? I’d rather not wait here to die.”

“You want to come with me?”

“Let’s see: leave with you or stay here and die. Yeah, I’d like to come with you. She’s probably done with her call. She’s probably at the bottom of the stairs. I already hooked up the fire ladder in my room.”

Susan’s heels clattered up the stairs. Two floors below and moving fast. Calling my name.

“Please take me with you,” he said. “Please. Just until my dad gets home. Please, I’m scared.”

“What about Jack?”

“She likes Jack. She only wants us gone.”

Susan’s footsteps one floor down, climbing.

We took the fire escape. It was quite dramatic.

We were in my car, driving away before I realized I didn’t know where the hell I was driving. Miles’s pale face reflected passing headlights like a sickly moon. Raindrops glided from his forehead down his cheeks and off his chin.

“Call your dad,” I said.

“My dad’s in Africa.”

The rain was clattering against my tinny rooftop. Susan Burke (that magnificent con artist!) had infused me with such a fear of the house, I’d been insensible. Now I could think: A successful woman marries a rich man. They have a baby who’s a real charmer. The life is good except for one thing: the weirdo stepson. I believed her when she said Miles had always been cold to her. I’m sure she was always cold to Miles. I’m sure she tried to get rid of him from the start. Someone as calculating as Susan Burke wouldn’t want to raise the oddball, awkward kid of another woman. Susan and Mike muddle along, but soon her cruelty toward his firstborn infects their relationship. He turns away from her. Her touch chills him. He comes to see me. And keeps seeing me. We have just enough in common, with the books, he can trick himself into thinking it’s a relationship of some sort. Things with Susan continue to disintegrate. He moves out. He leaves Miles behind because he’s traveling overseas—as soon as he returns, he’ll make arrangements. (This was pure guess, but the Mike I knew, who giggled when he came, he seemed like a guy who’d retrieve his kid.) Unfortunately, Susan discovers his secret and blames me for the destruction of her marriage. Imagine the rage, that a lowdown woman like me was handling her husband. And now she was stuck with a creepy kid she hated and a house she didn’t like. How to solve the problem? She begins to plot. She lures me in. Miles warns me in his elliptical way, toying with me, enjoying the game for a bit. Susan tells the neighbors something vague—that I’m here to help poor little Miles—so that when the truth comes out—that I’m a former hooker and current grifter—she will seem wretched, pitiful, pathetic. And I will seem ruinous. It’s the perfect way to commit murder.

Miles looked over at me with his huge moon face and smiled.

“You know you’re basically now a kidnapper,” he said.

“I guess we need to go to the police.”

“We need to go to Chattanooga, Tennessee,” he said, somewhat impatiently, as if I were backing out of a long-standing plan. “Bloodwillow is there this year. It’s always overseas—this is the first time it’s been in the United States since 1978.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“It’s only the biggest supernatural convention in the world. Susan said I couldn’t go. So you can take me. I thought you’d be happy—you love ghost stories. You can hit the highway if you take that left at the light up there.”