The rest of the trip to Manistique was far more pleasant. Nadine opened up about graduating from WMU that winter and about her search for a career to justify the debt. She’d been working two part-time jobs in the meantime, both at restaurants. A degree in business administration meant little without a business willing to hire her, she joked. She vented a little about her brother, Syd (four years older than her), whose own debts were mostly from high interest credit cards and whose gambling addiction had long been a source of family drama. But lately, he’d taken to communicating less and less often. He lived in Traverse City now, a decent drive from where she was staying with her mother in Lansing. From all this, Eli couldn’t help gleaning that she wasn’t the sort of person to do anything reckless or unplanned, as though her father’s hard drinking (despite maintaining a job for many years in retail), and her brother’s drug and gambling issues, were a powerful counterweight that she was honor bound to balance, as much for herself as for her mother’s sake.   

But the closer they drew to the port town of Manistique, the more he found himself preoccupied with what she’d said about her father’s madness. What could she possibly have seen to prevent her from dismissing Sullivan’s story outright? Or was it only grief for her father clouding her judgement? In any case, the allure of a mystery, however far fetched, had begun take hold of him. 

After passing a sign for the city limits, Eli peered curiously down potholed streets at white painted houses, at rows of shops, a few of them vacant, none of them bustling. A slow life by the lakeshore. Although the town’s logging days were long behind it and the population had steadily declined, tourists were still a commodity worth catering for. But the blue and white marble of the sky dwarfed everything eternally, and the massive plain of Lake Michigan was on the doorstep, dropping the temperature by several degrees and promising harsh winters to anyone who lingered. 

They reached the short driveway of a squat white rectangle of a house wedged between two larger houses of similar coloring, both of which were wide-footed with add-ons and both of which had more substantial and well cared for lawns. She killed the engine.

“This is it.” She paused, not opening her door. “There’s quite a bit of material inside. You probably won’t have time to go through everything, but I really thought you should see some of it first hand. I’ll show you the highlights of what I’ve found so far. It’s interesting. I would have been a lot further along with cleaning it up, but I’ve been holed up in there, reading. He’d become totally obsessed with that cabin. Anyway, I’m sorry for the mess ahead of time. I haven’t seen any rodents.”

Calling it a mess was an understatement. The empty front entry room gave way to chaos. Her father, it seemed, hadn’t believed in putting things away, nor in throwing them out. Eli couldn’t imagine there was a single occupied cupboard or closet in the entire house (he saw, reinforcing the idea, mostly emptied cupboards hanging open as they walked by the kitchen). An overlay of laundry, dirty dishes, stacks of old papers, cardboard boxes, empty bottles, scribbled notes, plastic bags, dead flowers, tissue, boots, books, blankets, shoes, tools, umbrellas, and god knows what else, was left haphazardly on every available surface, including the floor, with the exception of certain pathways through the house. He wasn’t sure if Nadine had made the paths herself or if they’d existed before his death. The state of the house made one thing very clear: her father hadn’t had visitors in a very long time. 

They passed through a main living area (more accurately, a dump) into a hallway, and entered the first door. He assumed it was the bedroom she’d been using, as it was cleared out for the most part, or kept, at least, deliberately empty. The wall around the window in this room looked damaged, with enough wood boards stacked on the brown carpet below it to have covered it over completely. The comforter on the queen bed was ruffled, but relatively clean and neat, in defiance of it’s surroundings. On top of it lay a stack of notebooks and papers. But the most shocking feature of the room was a pair of heavy slide bolts fastened to the inside of the door, apparently for barricading oneself inside. A plastic stool was positioned by the closed double door of the closet, which she opened. Inside was a makeshift floor table, a battery powered lamp, and several cardboard boxes filled with paper. 

“He seems to have spent most of his time in the bedroom. It was the only livable space left. I cleared out the liquor bottles.”

Eli didn’t know what to say. It was less like a hoarder’s house than the house of someone incapable of walking three steps out of his way. 

“He wasn’t found in here. His body, I mean. He was found in the front entry, slumped against the wall there. Syd is the one. I asked him to drive up here and check on dad. He wasn’t happy about having to go. For him, I think, finding dad’s living situation like this was about as bad as finding his body. He’d been dead for a few days by then. Used a handgun.”

“That’s awful.”

She shrugged, having recited the facts with the precision of a diagnosis. She reached for one of the notebooks on the bed, and flipped through it, scanning the looping, erratic blocks of writing, before tossing it aside for another. On the third one, she slowed down, turning back to the first page.

“His first entry. Here. It gets sort of hard to follow later, but it’s very straight forward to begin with.”

The handwriting was legible, but showed many signs of correction and minor revision, as though proofread by the author.

February, 2017 [Tom Watowski]

I’m writing this to keep straight what really happened. I’m also writing it to leave behind a shred of the truth. It’s not a journal so much as an accounting. I find if I write things down, they don’t slip as much. But how can I know anything for sure? Is the monster feeding on my perceptions, or has reality changed? The most important thing, I think, is that from now on, I can reread this, and hopefully it helps to prevent the creature from sinking its claws into me the way it did before. I remember how I first discovered the effects that writing had in reinforcing those tattered versions of my memory. It began with scribbling notes to myself (drunk, of course), putting them everywhere, trying to jog loose those confusing flashes brought on by the alcohol, and always having to ask myself, is this clarity or fantasy? I soon found I have two sets of memories, those that are deteriorating, and the ones the creature feeds on. It’s parasitic, I’m convinced of that much. Maybe it’s my despair that nourishes it. Or the dead realities themselves, if the alternate memories are really a fading and lost version of the truth. I will attempt to put down and preserve as completely as possible what I know and what I’ve seen, as disturbing as it may be.

All this filled up the front and back of the first page, without regard for the neat, light blue lines printed there. Not disorderly, but pressed down with conviction, in black pen. Eli’s eyes slid from the notebook to Nadine, who was staring blankly through a sickly lilac bush outside the window. She looked tired.

“This is surprisingly interesting. Are all these filled up?” he asked her, gesturing to the stack on the bed. 

She nodded, breaking away from the light and yawning.

“You could take a nap or something if you’d like,” he said. “I can go elsewhere to read it. I saw a nice empty spot on the sofa. I won’t steal anything from you, I promise”

She smiled, beaming out hazel-green and warm for a promising moment. But a cloud of other concerns quickly took its place.  

“Actually, there’s an errand I’d like to run this afternoon. If you’re ok with being on your own for a little while. After that, I can take you wherever you need to go. The closest car rental place is in Escanaba, a forty-five minute drive, I think.”

“Alright. I’ll be here.” He fanned through the notebook, trying to gauge the time required. She picked up another. 

“This is the second I think. Here’s the third. After that, it gets more erratic.”

Eli perched himself on the plastic stool next to the closet, eager to delve back into the man’s thoughts, despite earlier pronouncements. He loved stories after all. It hadn’t been a bad start, even if this fiction of her father's was, as Eli took for granted it was, the ramblings of a madman. He waited until she returned with the remainder of the morning’s drinks and the leftover fast food. Sure he was alone again, her engine tumbling to life outside, he flipped the spiral notebook back on itself to read the next page.