Tuesday Mooney Wore Black. Kate Racculia

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      Tuesday had always been spooky. Even before Abby Hobbes moved next door when they were both twelve and Tuesday’s horror movie literacy shot through the roof, the youngest Mooney had a reputation. While her older brother, Oliver, did everything in his power to distance himself from their townie-weirdo parents – wearing a tie for fun, printing out business cards on their ink-jet that read OLIVER P. MOONEY, STUDENT, YOUNG ADULT – Tuesday wore fake plastic fangs to school every day. She loved to play witch: flying around the playground on an imaginary broom, casting spells on unsuspecting teachers, and keeping track of the names of dozens of black cat familiars. Some kids were into it, though she usually lost them at the burning-at-the-stake-while-hurling-defiant-invectives-at-your-accusers stage of the game. When she was in fourth grade, her teacher warned her parents that their daughter was dangerously morbid.

      “They think you’re unhealthily fixated on death,” her father told her later. Her mother had made a beeline for the box of wine in the fridge. “I told them America is unhealthily fixated on death in absentia. America pretends we’re all gonna live forever. That everything is a sunny Coke commercial, that this grandiose experiment of a nation isn’t built on blood and bones and broken bodies. Moonie, you look the dark in the face and still you dance. You are healthily fixated on death.”

      It was the most grown-up compliment her father had ever paid her.

      She didn’t have friends, really. Before Abby, other kids hadn’t seemed worth the effort. She had her dog, a mutt named Giles Corey, who was too dumb to be a familiar but super-cute. She had her parents, and her parents had the shop – Mooney’s Miscellany, which sold games and souvenirs on Essex Street, snug in Salem’s touristy heart. She had her brother, who was wicked uptight but would at least play Monopoly with her. Most of all, she had books: she had Bunnicula and Bruce Coville and Susan Cooper and John Bellairs and William Sleator and Joan Aiken; later, she had all Stephen King, all the time. She had bedraggled collections of ghost stories she took out of the library again and again, and, yes, one collection of stories by Edgar Allan Poe. “The Cask of Amontillado” gave her a nightmare. She could think of no death more horrifying, more mortifying, degrading, or dreadful, than to be bricked up alive in a cellar while wearing a clown suit.

      Tuesday hated – hated – clowns.

      But she had always loved a sick thrill. Any thrill, really, but the sick ones – the ones that gave her vertigo, that raised her pulse and her gorge, that made her realize there was an awful lot of darkness beyond her own flickering flame – made her feel the most alive. It was why she found horror movies so comforting. Her adult life had turned out to be a series of patterns and routines. She knew what to expect of a given day, but that didn’t always mean life was particularly interesting, or that she was particularly fulfilled, or that she knew what the point was, other than moving from one space to the next. At least when a guy with a butcher knife is after you, when a werewolf is loose or a poltergeist is messing with your furniture and your head, you know what you’re fighting for.

      So she got it. She got why this guy – this Vincent Pryce with a Y – would go nuts over occult junk. Over Poe. Would spend his life and his money collecting manuscripts and letters, rare bits and bobs from the author’s own sad, melodramatic, and substance-addled life, and a whole castle’s worth of funky crypto-junk. His “collection of haunted matter” was replete with mermaid remains, yeti print casts, spell books and charms, and, he claimed, “more than ten thousand haunted artifacts – objects housing the spirits of the departed,” including paintings, photographs, jewelry, pipes, slippers, watches, aviator goggles, typewriters, paperweights, one toaster, and a pince-nez that once belonged to Lizzie Borden, and presumably contained her forty-whacked stepmother and/or her forty-one-whacked father.

      She clicked from article to article on the web. He’d been profiled in Town & Country, Mental Floss, Architectural Digest. He’d made his billions as the founder and sole owner of the Vincent Mint, which sold commemorative collectible coins and plates, movie reproductions, games, and other tchotchkes by direct mail: Neil Armstrong on a spoon. СКАЧАТЬ