The Seven Visitations of Sydney Burgess

by Andy Marino

Genres: Psychological Thrillers; Supernatural suspense

Synopsis

From an electrifying voice in horror comes the haunting tale of a woman whose life begins to unravel after a home invasion. 

“Marino offers horrors both existential and visceral. From a stunning opening, the sense of dread just builds and builds.” —M. R. Carey, author of The Girl with All the Gifts

"Odd and dark and fascinating . . . Not quite like anything I've ever read before. A strange, compelling, late-night page-turner. It kept me reading way past my bedtime." —T. Kingfisher, author of The Hollow Places

Possession is an addiction.

Sydney's spent years burying her past and building a better life for herself and her young son. A respectable marketing job, a house with reclaimed and sustainable furniture, and a boyfriend who loves her son and accepts her, flaws and all.

But when she opens her front door, and a masked intruder knocks her briefly unconscious, everything begins to unravel.

She wakes in the hospital and tells a harrowing story of escape. Of dashing out a broken window. Of running into her neighbors' yard and calling the police.

The cops tell her a different story. Because the intruder is now lying dead in her guest room—murdered in a way that looks intimately personal.

Sydney can't remember killing the man. No one believes her.

Back home, as horrific memories surface, an unnatural darkness begins whispering in her ear. Urging her back to old addictions and a past she's buried to build a better life for herself and her son.

As Sydney searches for truth among the wreckage of a past that won't stay buried for long, the unquiet darkness begins to grow. To change into something unimaginable.

To reveal terrible cravings of its own.

Release date: September 28, 2021

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 304

Sample

The man in my house is wearing a mask. Even so, I can tell he’s as surprised to see me as I am to see him. It’s in the way his shoulders jump and erase his neck when I open the door with a triumphant shove, driven by the promise of a rare night alone. With my boyfriend and son camping upstate, I’ll be picking the movie I want to watch, ordering Thai food with the spice level cranked, starfishing out in the middle of the bed, dozing off with the windows open to let in the breeze off the Hudson—

“What are you doing?” I blurt out as if I know him. As if I’ve caught the neighbor kid prowling around the side yard again. He’s wearing gloves and a black tracksuit. The drawers of the front hall credenza are pulled out. He steps toward me.

It happened so fast, say people who have lived through sudden bursts of violence—but for me, time’s a slow drip and I can see everything at once. Black sneakers on our reclaimed tiles, old appliance manuals in the junk drawer, the RSVP to the wedding of my boyfriend’s cousin, a small lace-trimmed envelope waiting to be mailed. The man’s eyes are framed by the slit in his balaclava, a word I know from the tattered paperbacks I tore through in the rehab center’s shabby library.

I take one step back, jam my hand into my shoulder bag, and rummage wildly for the pepper spray. But I’ve never used it before, and it’s buried under travel Kleenex packs and lip balm and generic ibuprofen and noise-canceling headphones and laptop and charger and moleskin notebook and tampons.

His hand closes around the Jesus candle my boyfriend bought from the bodega by the train station. Señor de los Milagros de Buga, $3.99 plus tax. It’s the size of a relay runner’s baton, glass as thick as a casserole dish and filled to the brim with solid wax.

My fingers brush the pepper spray canister. There’s a little rim of plastic that acts as a safety—I just have to flick it to the side. Too slow, Sydney. The candle comes at me in a fluid sideways arc.

Half ducking, half flinching, I twist away. His sidearm swing smashes the candle into my left ear. There’s an unbelievable volcanic thud inside my head, a searing, blinding flash, and time’s not a slow drip anymore, it’s a film reel with missing frames.

I am holding myself up, clinging to the door.

I will stay on my feet.

There’s an electric current buzzing through my teeth. The front hall is full of bad angles, a nonsense corridor in a dream. The coats are swaying on their hooks. I raise the pepper spray, but my arm can only aim it in the direction of the baseboard, the off-white trim that doesn’t quite touch the tile, a haven for crumbs and lost earrings. In the gilt-framed mirror next to the closet door, I see a gloved hand holding the candle up in the air. The man is very tall, and the tip of the candle hits the ceiling before it comes down.

The walls are tinted red and the whole house roars like the ocean. There’s a hot-penny tang I can taste in the back of my throat, a cocaine drip that fills my mouth and overflows. Tissue packs and hair clips are scattered across the tiles, coming up fast.

I shouldn’t be here. These words can’t really form because the darkness is thick enough to stifle thought. It’s more like a sharp sense of injustice wrapped in the fear that throbs somewhere in the void. An impression that I have been cheated by circumstance.

I shouldn’t be here.

You’re a lucky woman,” says Dutchess County Sheriff Mike Butler.

I ride a wave of displacement. Lucky? I don’t feel lucky. I feel like I want to unzip my skin and wriggle out of my body and into another. By what metric is he measuring my luck? I suppose he means that I’m luckier than a woman whose attack has resulted in her murder. I want to tell him: lucky is what you are when you win the lottery.

I calculate how much time has elapsed since the attack. Ten, eleven hours at most. Now I understand all those survivors’ stories on Dateline and 20/20. It happened so fast. It’s amazing what can be compressed into mere seconds of a human life.

Butler takes off his hat and rocks on his heels. I know his face and name from a campaign billboard near my town’s highway off-ramp. On the billboard, his face is somehow both jowly and chiseled, as if the features of a hardass drill sergeant were superimposed onto a mall Santa. In person, Butler’s the kind of guy whose middle-aged weight gain makes him look even more powerfully built, his barrel chest and gut filling out his uniform without seeming flabby.

Behind his shaved head is the classic hospital corner-mounted television. Wan light comes through vertical slats in the blinds and paints staccato lines on the wall. Saturday morning, I think—words that conjure up Pilates for me, a long run for my boyfriend, Matt, and an extended gaming session for my son, Danny. And then, like a ravenous, plundering army, we take our reward: brunch. When my boys and I brunch, we brunch hard. Pulpy juice straight from the gleaming contraption, huevos rancheros, black beans, avocado, crispy bacon, home fries, strawberries from the little roadside stand…

Butler clears his throat. “Okay,” he says. Then he puts his hat back on and studies the cup of water on the bedside table like it holds the key to cracking this case wide open. I think, perhaps unfairly, that he has no idea how to talk to a woman wrapped in bandages lying in a hospital bed. I am his mother, his sister, his wife. My victimhood disturbs him. It’s not what he signed up for.

He takes a step closer to my bed. “You took quite a shot,” he says. From this angle, I can see the landscape of razor burn under his chin. “Lucky lady.”

It’s almost funny, in an existential nightmare kind of way: trapped in a hospital bed while a man reminds me how lucky I am, over and over again.

He glances at my freshly bandaged wrists, and his eyes travel across my older scars, exposed by my short-sleeved hospital gown. Then he looks me in the face. “I was just at your house. That’s quite a thing you did.”

For the first time, it dawns on me that my house is a crime scene. It’s probably crawling with cops and forensic techs. I think CSI is called something different in real life, but I picture a team in HAZMAT suits, spraying luminol. In reality it’s probably two local cops in rubber gloves poking around our dressers and desks, combing through the front hall, the guest room. Suddenly I’m laser focused. I can feel a manic surge begin in my toes and course through my body. The jagged mosaic of sights and sounds from last night comes together in the man’s cold eyes framed in a tight oval of black fabric.

I manage to hold on to it for a second, but then the mosaic goes out of focus. Cobbled-together images of things I didn’t actually see run through my mind. A man in a tracksuit and balaclava walking down the sidewalk in broad daylight. His arms are long, too long, and his shadow pours like oil down the street, up my driveway, through my front door…

“I can come back later,” Butler says. He sounds far away. I realize that my eyes are half-lidded. It’s not just my thoughts that are drifting. I refused the Vicodin regimen the doctor wanted to put me on, three hundred milligrams every four hours for the pain. Opioids were never my thing—I was a fiend for the rush, not the nod—but I’ve seen addicts with decades of sober living fall off because of back pain, grizzled old alkies who figure what’s the harm in a few pain pills if they’re prescribed by a doctor? Or at least, they pretend to think like that. I’d wager most of them know exactly what the harm is, they’re just falling back on the oldest addict trick in the book: self-delusion.

And so, all I’m on is ibuprofen. Four gelcaps. It’s barely enough for a stress headache. I might as well be taking vitamins.

“The doctor wasn’t too keen on me talking to you now,” Butler says. “But I’d really like to take your statement sooner rather than later, if you’re up for it.”

“It’s okay,” I say, gathering my strength. “I’m good. I want to help.”

“Anything you can remember, then.”

“I wasn’t supposed to be there,” I say. “Home, I mean. I was supposed to be camping with my boyfriend and my son, up at Cedar Valley. Taking a long weekend. But I got called in for a last-minute pitch at the agency I work for. In the city. Matt and Danny”—my heart quickens as I try, and fail, to sit up—“the park’s a total dead zone, there’s no way to call them, they won’t know—”

Butler holds up a hand. “We’ve got state police out of Poidras Falls tracking your family down.”

Your family. There’s a deep, sweet hurt behind those words.

“Tell me about the man in your house.”

“He was tall,” I say, flashing to the candle hitting the ceiling before it came down and the house roared and the walls turned red. “Taller than Matt, and he’s six-one.” I pause. “Taller than Trevor, too.”

“Who’s Trevor?”

“My ex. Danny’s father.”

“Okay,” Butler says, flipping open his notebook and jotting something down. He’s not using one of those standard-issue cop notepads, but a green moleskin.

“I have one of those,” I say.

“My daughter works in a coffee shop in Poughkeepsie,” he says. “They sell these things by the register.” He shakes his head. “Kid drops out of SVA, down in the city, after her freshman year, says school is sucking the life out of her painting. So now, you know what she does? Brings home a bag of the day’s used-up coffee grounds, smears them on canvases. Not my thing, art-wise, but she’s saving me forty grand a year, so I can’t complain.”

I don’t know what to say to that. In the moment of silence, I can feel myself drifting again. “Gray eyes,” I say.

“Gray?”

“They were cold. Like the winter sky.”

“Winter sky,” he says.

I suddenly recall hurried questions from a different cop in the more immediate aftermath. A woman. Severe ponytail, wine-dark lipstick. My neighbor, the pediatrician, who found me on his lawn, hovering awkwardly in the background, holding a mug in two cupped hands. I am disturbed by how the memory comes on: from nothing to something, a bucket of paint splattering a blank wall.

“I remember,” I say, “I told all this to somebody at my neighbors’ house.”

“You were in shock,” Butler says. “This isn’t going to be like it is on TV, where you give your statement and you’re on your way. It’ll be a process. You’ll remember new things days, weeks from now. But this is a good time for us to talk. Most people…” He trails off with a frown and lowers the notebook. “Most people would be doped to the gills after what you just went through, but the doctor said you refused the heavy-duty painkillers.”

I hesitate. I don’t hide the fact that I’m an addict in recovery from anyone, but I don’t ordinarily talk to county sheriffs. It feels like I’m planting an asterisk in our conversation, something for Butler to come back to later, casting a pall over everything I tell him.

“I’ve got nine years clean,” I say. I know that this is admirable, that I have nothing to be ashamed of. But talking to cops twists my thoughts. It’s like putting my bags through the scanner in airport security. Of course I know there’s nothing in there, and yet still, after all these years, anxiety engulfs me and my heart pounds and I think, what if—what if they find something?

“Good for you,” Butler says. He sounds different now—guarded, maybe. I wonder about his daughter, behind the counter of that coffee shop. Is she an Oxy fiend? Is Butler’s father an alcoholic, dying of cirrhosis? Addicts orbit everyone’s life, and a person’s reaction to addiction in general—whether they believe it’s truly a disease or just an excuse to stay high all the time—tends to be reflected through the lens of their own experience.

Is Butler himself a clandestine pill-popper, a raider of confiscated evidence?

His eyes flit once again to my scars. I don’t volunteer any information about them.

“So, I’m sticking with ibuprofen,” I say, trying to end this conversational tack. But I can see something in his hooded eyes, and a knot forms in my stomach. I know what Butler is thinking. He might not even know it yet, but the kernel of an idea is forming.

Nobody’s as clean as they say they are. We’re dealing with a drug thing. Some dealer who didn’t get paid, some old city debt getting settled up the river, darkening our quiet suburban doorsteps.

I keep my mouth shut. I don’t want to protest too much, before he’s even brought it up. But the way my mind is working now—telling me I have to manipulate, steer the conversation—makes me feel like I’m a suspect being grilled in a stuffy, windowless interview room.

There’s a sharp pain in my head, a cold needle piercing the dull, pounding ache. The edges of the room are fuzzy, lenses smeared with grease.

Butler glances over his shoulder at the door. When he looks back at me, his gaze is unclouded. “The doctor also said you refused a rape kit.” His tone is as matter-of-fact as ever.

“I wasn’t raped.”

“No sexual assault.”

“No. I told you guys what happened.”

“You told Deputy Carlson, back there at your neighbors’ house.”

“Right. I remember. Sort of.”

He consults his moleskin. “Approximately seven forty-five p.m., you open your front door and interrupt a robbery in progress. The perp bashes you in the head with a”—he flicks his glance to me—“Jesus candle. The next thing you know…”

The ground has swallowed me. A great physics-defying hole stretches up through the house. The pain in my head is pure compression, like I’m being squeezed in a vise clamped over my ears. A high-pitched mosquito whine surrounds my head.

I’m swamped by a rush of bone-deep shame—the feeling when you wake from an uneasy dream convinced that you’ve cheated on your boyfriend, crashed your mother’s car, covered up a horrible crime. I have done it again. Clean for nine years, seven months, twenty-two days. Detox, rehab, halfway house, then meetings like clockwork. Almost a decade of building a real, solid life for Danny and me. Ditching the old cycles of manic pleasures and hurts for hard work and discipline. And now, in one colossally stupid night, all of it has been erased.

They’re going to take Danny away from you.

I shudder. That’s as much movement as my body will allow. I try to retrace the steps that brought me back to this place—the time-smeared bewilderment, the icy-hot gasp of my body clawing its way to the surface. Coming back from an overdose is still a familiar sensation, even after so many years. Whom did I call to get drugs? It should have been impossible. Forget about cocaine—I don’t even know where to get weed anymore. Was it somebody from the agency? Did we go out to celebrate after the pitch? Where did I get a rig? But maybe I didn’t take a shot. Maybe I just did too many lines. That makes more sense—social cocaine, ad agency cocaine, upwardly mobile cocaine—not shooting-up-in-a-stairwell cocaine.

The problem is, for me it’s all the same. And I am insatiable.

I reach in a direction I believe to be up. My arm weighs a ton, but my hand is strangely weightless—the balloon on the end of a heavy tether. I manage to curl my fingers over the rim of the impossible hole. I’m deep within the guts of my house, a between-place, and my thoughts flash wildly to the special effects in Doctor Strange, Danny’s favorite Marvel movie. I remember watching it with him and being a little nervous that he favored the trippy visuals of that film over the straightforward heroics of Thor and Captain America. He’ll be in middle school next year, walking the halls with kids who have already started smoking pot and drinking and probably dropping acid.

They’re going to take him away, away, away from you…

Danny in a foster home, Danny all alone.

Danny with a new mother.

I cry out and a gurgling sound escapes my throat. There’s a metallic taste in my mouth, a rusty mélange of blood and saliva. I try to hook my fingers as best I can over the rim of the impossible hole. My arm feels unwieldy and wrong, and I think it must be more than just a malfunction in my motor control.

That’s when I realize that my “arm” is actually both my arms bound together—hence the heaviness. My fingers are numb. My thoughts grind helplessly against this new confusion. What is this around my wrist?

Duct tape. The gray kind that screeches when you pull it from the roll.

I blink and the rim of the impossible hole gets closer. I am rising up through the between-place. High above, a ceiling fan is a small black cross in a vast white sky.

I am on the floor in the downstairs guest room.

With dizzying clarity, the memory clicks into place: the man in my house, the candle, the red walls, the floor tiles.

Is there a name for the feeling of being relieved and terrified at the same time?

I haven’t relapsed and overdosed and taken a blowtorch to my life with Matt and Danny. I’ve been attacked. And now my wrists are bound with tape.

I clamp my eyes shut against a wave of nausea, a queasy conspiracy between my head and my stomach that makes it impossible to think. At the same time, I hear a man’s voice in the hall and some part of me screams MATT even though I know it’s not him, it sounds nothing like him, and anyway I can’t scream, I can only gurgle wetly.

The man’s voice is raised in anger. He’s talking to someone else.

“Because there wasn’t supposed to be anybody fucking home!” he says. And then, less vehement. Chastened. “No. I’ve been over every inch of the place. It’s not here.” Pause. “I know. I realize that. And I’m telling you, it’s not.”

Something like despair presses down on me. It’s not here. The black cross shrinks to a dot and then disappears into all that endless white. I’m sinking softly back into darkness. I try to fight my descent, clawing weakly at the rim of the hole, but it’s too far away and my arm weighs a ton. The white sky diminishes to a distant point of light and blinks out.

Butler looks startled. He lowers the notebook. “There was a second person in your house?”

I try to slip inside my memory, to let the man’s voice come through, but the sounds are all part of the cracked mosaic. The voice is garbled and indistinct, like a back-masked recording, Abbey Road played in reverse. Paul is dead, Paul is dead, Paul is dead.

“I don’t think so,” I say. “I only heard the one voice. I’m pretty sure he was on the phone.”

“He took a call or made a call?”

“I don’t know. I woke up and he was talking to someone.”

“What was he saying?”

My heart races. I wonder if it would be okay to ask for some Xanax. I made a deal with myself long ago that a strict No Benzos policy would be part of my recovery, but surely these are extenuating circumstances. I let the man’s voice unspool through my head. I’m back on the floor, and he’s out in the hall.

“He was looking for something,” I say.

“He said that over the phone?”

“It’s not here. Something like that.”

A three-note chime rings out and a tinny bluegrass guitar begins to play. Butler mutters under his breath, fishes in his pocket, and pulls out his phone.

“I hate this thing,” he says, as if we are on the cusp of the great mobile phone era and he has just been forced to get one of the infernal devices. I wonder if he says that every time his phone rings.

He answers it with a terse “Butler.” Then he holds up a finger, gives me a nod, and goes out into the hallway. My heart surges. They caught the guy! Or they found a clue—a dropped wallet, an abandoned car, a mask and gloves in a dumpster.

Of course, it could be Mike Butler’s daughter calling to let him know that the cat puked on the kitchen counter again, and no way in hell is she cleaning it up this time. The moments that send our lives off course—the traumas it takes us forever to come to grips with—are the moments that cops and doctors brush up against in a normal workday. They’re scoffing at political memes on Facebook and texting friends about the bar last night between encounters with shell-shocked people who will never be the same.

I test my ability to sit up. The ringing in my head sharpens, the point of the needle extends, and I lie back against the pillow. My wrists sting when I move them, little jolts of pinprick pain that float atop the bruising. I will myself to heal. Surely my junkie days left me with freakish resilience, some kind of mutant healing power. I vow that I will not let my son see me like this. I will tell the nurse to notify me when Matt and Danny have arrived. I will get up from this bed and walk out to them in the waiting room. They will see me on my feet.

I press the call button and wait. The ambient noise of the ward drifts in. Some things never change: the clacking footfalls of harried staff, the ceaseless chirping of machines nobody ever seems to check. It feels like a hundred little alarms are going off at once, and nobody’s running to hit snooze. My head is aching. I close my eyes.

Fucking hospitals.

I open my eyes to find Sheriff Butler sitting in a chair, which he’s pulled up close to my bed. One hand is wrapped loosely around a Styrofoam cup, the other cradles his phone in his lap. We lock eyes and he shifts in his seat, a big man in a tight space.

“Did you find him?” I say. My voice is a croak. Butler picks up a water bottle with a plastic straw, like you’d stick through the bars of a hamster cage, and puts the straw to my lips. Gratefully, I suck down a little water.

“We—yes,” he says. But there’s a hitch in his voice, an odd hesitation, like he’s not quite sure. Seems pretty binary to me: you either caught the guy or you didn’t.

“Where?”

Butler sets his coffee cup on the floor and leans forward in his chair, elbows on his knees. He lets out a long, audible breath. “Ms. Burgess…”

“Sydney.”

“Tell me exactly what you did after you regained consciousness.”

I’m out of the impossible hole. Awake. I don’t know how long I was out, but the man is still talking on the phone in the hall outside the guest room. I lift my head and wince at the pain. I take a moment to focus my eyes. It hurts.

The squat little stained-glass lamp I bought in a furniture shop in Cold Spring is on, casting its orange-and-green autumnal glow from atop the dresser. I scan the room through what looks like a fish-eye lens. The damask curtains are drawn across the big picture window that faces the water. There’s a rolltop desk, a framed print from Lobsterfest, an old iMac we’re going to donate one of these days, the collapsible drying rack where Matt drapes his sweaty running clothes because throwing them directly into the hamper breeds bacteria.

“That’s out of the question,” the man in the hallway says. He’s sort of whisper-screaming into the phone. I’m staring at Matt’s limp blue shirt with corporate logos on the back, swag from a 10K he ran last year. My brain wants to make some kind of connection, but it’s like the power lines are down in my head.

“I’m not doing that,” the man says.

Then it hits me: the guest room is where Matt’s entire running wardrobe lives. He hangs his windbreakers in the closet, keeps his spandex tights in the dresser, slides his shoes under the guest bed. Among those shoes are his racing flats. Screwed into those racing flats are metal spikes.

“You want that done—no, you listen to me, all due respect—you want that done, you do it yourself.”

Panic spurs me into motion. I glance up at the open door to the bedroom an. . .