DIY

Mark and Mary Bryant were the richest couple living in the town of Three Hill, but Paul wasn’t surprised when they started cutting corners on their new house.

“There’s no fucking world where I am paying full-price for these shit counter tops,” Mark told Paul the morning after the material was delivered. “Look at that. That’s a crack. Why the fuck would I want cracked marble?”

Paul squinted. “I think that’s part of the pattern.”

“Are you trying to take me for a ride, Paul? Are you buying garbage, charging me full price, then pocketing the difference?”

“No.”

Mark rapped a knuckle against the sheet of statuario. “Then get me a discount. Go back and tell the supplier this is unacceptable.”

“Alright. You’re the boss.”

“Yeah, no shit.”

Outbursts were a daily occurrence for the patriarch of the Bryant family. It was almost always over money. Material costs, permit fees, wages; Paul even suspected that Mark may have reported some of their day laborers to ICE to avoid paying them a promised weekly bonus.

“There are plenty of people looking for work,” Mark said when Paul pointed out several members of the crew were vanishing each week. “You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a few at the Home Depot.”

While it was true there was no shortage of labor available, Paul stopped mentioning a weekly bonus and warned anyone he hired that his employer regularly checked documentation on Fridays, leading to more than a few folks not returning after getting paid Thursday.

The rotating crew presented a logistical challenge for Paul but ended up working out for the best. No one stayed on long enough to notice the updates Paul made to the house’s floor plan.

All of the cheapskate behavior, the demands for discounted materials, even Mark haggling over Paul’s own weekly bonuses didn’t bother the contractor. Paul loved his work and would have happily built the Bryant’s new house for free. The five-bed, four-and-a-half-bath Tudor was going to be glorious. Mark had paid a celebrity architect to design the structure; Paul knew the blueprints must have cost a boatload (and not a small boat at that) but he had to admit that the architect knew what he was doing.

The house would be all soaring towers and sweeping views. Full-wall bay windows would frame sunrises over the water while a massive clerestory would drag in the purple-orange of Maryland sunsets into a sunken living room the size of Paul’s entire house. Angled skylights were positioned to catch every minute of light between dusk and dawn.

Pexels/Brett Rogers

Inside the three-story mansion there would be marble counters, oak floors, vaulted ceilings, a study, a drawing room, more artwork than a small museum and a kitchen with sleek, chrome appliances so smart they can order your groceries before taking your SATs. The hallways were generous, the staircases numerous, and the entire property sat on four water-front acres complete with a five-car garage, personal dock, swimming pool, and pool house.

It would take most project managers a year with a professional crew. Paul was nearly finished after six months with an ever-changing team of day laborers and a boss who despised paying subcontractors full-price. And as cheap and shady as Mark could be, Mary Bryant was an ever greater obstacle due to her philosophy that the people building the house were also her personal assistants. She would send workers on errands to pick up dry cleaning, or lunch, or to chauffeur her and her friends all over the county.

The union guys–the plumbers and electricians and other specialists–mostly ignored the hard-eyed, acid-tongued woman, but she bullied the general labor crew into chore after chore by fear of firing and a blacklisting from future jobs. Mary even pressured Paul into running errands. But Paul didn’t mind. Driving around town with Mrs. Bryant’s To-Do list gave him more time to make his little edits to the floor plan. A shallower angle here and a diverted beam there might not look like much on paper, but the math required to keep the house structurally sound with all of Paul’s alterations was taxing.

Even with Mark’s inconvenience and Mary’s imposition, Paul remained ahead of schedule until their son Raymond returned from his summer abroad. The Bryant’s only child was a perfect chimera of his parents. He had his father’s height, blue eyes, brick jaw, and utter self-absorption. From his mother, Raymond received black hair, a striking fox face, lithe limbs, and a certain kind of blindness that made it impossible for him to view people as anything other than objects.

Raymond’s return from terrorizing Spanish pubs and Italian hostels hit Paul’s project like a cinderblock thrown from an overpass. The younger Bryant openly stole materials and tools from the worksite. He threw parties in the half-finished bones of the house that resulted in damaged drywall, endless trash, and puddles of every variety of bodily fluids that had to be cleaned before they could stain.

The delays mounted, but Paul doubled down; he started working nights, using halogen lamps to light the area as he carved the symbols from the red book into the framing before nailing in drywall over the studs. He hid the small, carved totems that he’d found in the same box as the book in the necessary places: one sunk in the foundation, four more in the walls, and a final pressed deep into the pink attic insulation.

Paul had found the red book when he was cleaning out his garage after the funeral. It might have belonged to Maddie, though he had no idea why his wife would have such a strange, secret thing. Or it could have been something one of the kids found hidden on some otherwise normal shelf at the library, or at a yard sale, or just abandoned in the road. But Paul suspected that the book found him, attracted by his rage and grief. However the red book ended up in his possession, Paul knew from the first moment he opened it–from the way the letters made his eyes burn and his stomach sink–that it could give him what he needed.

There were rituals in the red book for almost any wish. Paul wasn’t an idiot; he knew what was offered wouldn’t come for free. Any gift given would come with costs and consequences. So Paul didn’t use the red book to try to bring back his family, though the temptation was always there, a second shadow that he would drag behind him the rest of his life. Judging by what the book required for that ritual, Paul suspected that he’d only get part of his family returned, and that they’d be missing too much to truly be alive again.

But, if the red book couldn’t provide resurrection, at least it could offer revenge. Revenge for three lives ended early. Revenge against the drunk, drugged, remorseless thing behind the wheel and against a family who turned its privilege and influence into a shield to protect a monster. For the Bryant’s, Paul’s world ending was an inconvenience, a feeble fire they could smother with a flood of lawyers and money and handshakes on the golf course.

Paul heard about the Bryant’s building a new house a year after he found the red book. A lifelong contractor, he figured it must be a sign from someone above, or maybe below. He came up with a fake name and wildly underbid on the project. Mark hired him immediately.

Each morning for the first week he worked on the mansion, Paul expected one of the Bryant’s would recognize him. Sure, he’d lost thirty pounds since they’d last seen him and he’d grown a beard, but Paul was still the same man who sat glaring in the front row of every one of Raymond’s hearings, the same man who had to be restrained by three bailiffs when the judge read Raymond’s ridiculous sentence.

How could they not remember him? How could they not see the quiet murder behind his watery eyes? But they never did.

Despite all of the setbacks, the house was finished a month prior to Paul’s already optimistic timeline. He wanted to be there the night the Bryant’s moved in but he knew he’d be the first person the police talked to after. While Paul didn’t have any interest left in life, he did take a petty pride in knowing he’d get away with what he was doing, so he decided to establish his alibi, more out of spite than anything else.

The carvings, the totems, even the odd angles built into the framing of the house; all of those things were required by the red book, along with a final trigger for the ritual. Mary had wanted a custom dining table made from an exotic–and endangered–wood. Paul carved the gigantic slab himself, creating a table that was as big as a garage door. He supplied the candles that graced the center of the table, too, and it was lighting those candles that would complete the summoning.

As expected, two detectives knocked on Paul’s door the morning after the Bryant’s moved into their dream house. He was happy to answer all of their questions, though the interrogation didn’t last long. His alibi was absolute and, while the cops never provided details about what happened to Mark, Mary, and Raymond Bryant, Paul got the impression they didn’t believe he was involved. At the end, as they were shaking hands and apologizing for wasting Paul’s time, he decided to press to see how much they would tell him about the investigation.

“It’s ongoing, so we can’t really comment,” the first detective said.

His partner, older and leaner, turned off the recorder he’d placed on Paul’s coffee table when they started.

“Mr. Bowman, if you breathe a word of what I’m about to tell you, you’ll never be able to so much as jaywalk without me coming down on you,” the older detective warned.

“Jamie-” the younger detective interrupted.

“Relax, Dan, I’m not spilling state secrets, I just think he deserves to know why we’re here.” Jamie looked at Paul for a long moment. “I know what happened to your family, Mr. Bowman. What was done to them…and to you. Never sat right with me that little Richie Rich got away with everything. Only, well, I guess he didn’t. They’re dead. All three of them.”

“How?” Paul asked.

The detective shrugged. “That’s what we’re trying to find out. I’ve never seen anything like it. The…mess. Torn apart. Like wild animals got in there but there’s no sign-”

“Jamie,” Dan said sharply.

The older man nodded. “Yeah, sorry, Mr. Bowman, he’s right, I can’t go into it further. We’ll check to confirm your alibi but I doubt you’ll be hearing from us again. Have a good day.”

Paul would have a good day. There’d be a price still to pay for what he’d done; Paul accepted that and would pay it, gladly. If he couldn’t bring three good people back above the ground, at least he could send three bad ones down. It wasn’t legal, and maybe it wasn’t even right, but the way Paul looked at it, sometimes, if you want justice, you have to do it yourself.