body into the blood-soaked interior of the carpet roll exactly as it had been fitted previously. We would re-roll the carpet and secure the ends with twine. Clearly, others had addressed the logistics of this problem, or the first stage of the problem; we could not have improved upon their method, and did not try. When Harvey did not respond to my desperate words, my emotion and my tears, I fell silent—like Harvey.
Had Tin’s body been in the apartment, without my knowing? Since when—the previous day? Two days? It had not seemed that he’d been murdered recently. The blood had ceased flowing, and had partially dried. Poor Tin! He’d looked at me with an expression of inarticulate longing, from time to time. Yet he’d never once uttered my name.
Now, it was too late.
“This problem would’ve been dealt with, Lydia, without your interference. But now you’ve interfered . . .”
I had no idea what Harvey was saying. His voice was edgy, not so calm as he’d tried to suggest; his jaws were trembling, as with a spell of extreme cold.
When it was sufficiently night, when Grindell Park was more or less vacated of dealers and customers and only a few homeless bundles of rags slept on the benches, and wouldn’t give so much as a glance to two figures struggling to drag a strangely heavy length of rolled-up carpet across the desiccated grass, we managed to transport Tin’s body into the most remote corner of the park where we hid it amid debris from tree cuttings, as children might try to hide something from the eyes of their elders.
“The freezing air will impede the decay. The Trenton police won’t be able to calculate when he died, or where.”
Harvey spoke shrewdly, as if this were a statement of fact he’d had occasion to pronounce in the past.
When we returned to the apartment it was nearly 4:00 A.M. In two hours, it would be dawn. Though we were exhausted and light-headed we took time to open all the windows, in my bedroom and in Harvey’s bedroom as well. Not soon, but eventually, the putrid odor would fade. Or, the putrid odor would mingle with other, near-similar odors in the old house as in the air of Trenton, New Jersey—smells of smoldering rubber, diesel exhaust from giant rigs lumbering along Camden Avenue, the toxic-sweet odors from chemical companies long extinct. And one balmy April afternoon when I was returning from ShopRite, on a crumbling Camden Avenue sidewalk there stood a brash young man with dreadlocks tumbling down his back and a Maori tattoo on half his face, a velvety-dark-skinned Leander who sighting me shot out his hand, his large thumb, to hitch a ride with me in the Mazda—(only with me, his friend Lydia, for he hadn’t been hitchhiking a moment before, I was sure)—and shrewdly I thought Oh no! not a chance even as my car braked to a stop, yes it was too late, yes but it was an instinctive involuntary gesture and so I heard myself say as Leander in tight-fitting suede deep-purple jacket, vest, trousers opened the passenger’s door and slid his long legs inside with a wide grin and an air of companionable ease—“Well, all right. I can give you a ride. But I’m not going farther than Grindell Park.”
Please enjoy this preview from Joyce Carol Oates’s new novel The Accursed , coming from Ecco in March 2013.
A major historical novel from “one of the great artistic forces of our time” ( The Nation ), The Accursed is an eerie, unforgettable story of possession, power, and loss in early-twentieth-century Princeton, a cultural crossroads of the powerful and the damned.
Princeton, New Jersey, at the turn of the twentieth century: a tranquil place to raise a family, a genteel town for genteel souls. But something dark and dangerous lurks at the edges of the town, corrupting and infecting its residents. Vampires and ghosts haunt the dreams of the innocent. A powerful curse besets the elite families of Princeton—their daughters begin disappearing. A young bride on the
Had Tin’s body been in the apartment, without my knowing? Since when—the previous day? Two days? It had not seemed that he’d been murdered recently. The blood had ceased flowing, and had partially dried. Poor Tin! He’d looked at me with an expression of inarticulate longing, from time to time. Yet he’d never once uttered my name.
Now, it was too late.
“This problem would’ve been dealt with, Lydia, without your interference. But now you’ve interfered . . .”
I had no idea what Harvey was saying. His voice was edgy, not so calm as he’d tried to suggest; his jaws were trembling, as with a spell of extreme cold.
When it was sufficiently night, when Grindell Park was more or less vacated of dealers and customers and only a few homeless bundles of rags slept on the benches, and wouldn’t give so much as a glance to two figures struggling to drag a strangely heavy length of rolled-up carpet across the desiccated grass, we managed to transport Tin’s body into the most remote corner of the park where we hid it amid debris from tree cuttings, as children might try to hide something from the eyes of their elders.
“The freezing air will impede the decay. The Trenton police won’t be able to calculate when he died, or where.”
Harvey spoke shrewdly, as if this were a statement of fact he’d had occasion to pronounce in the past.
When we returned to the apartment it was nearly 4:00 A.M. In two hours, it would be dawn. Though we were exhausted and light-headed we took time to open all the windows, in my bedroom and in Harvey’s bedroom as well. Not soon, but eventually, the putrid odor would fade. Or, the putrid odor would mingle with other, near-similar odors in the old house as in the air of Trenton, New Jersey—smells of smoldering rubber, diesel exhaust from giant rigs lumbering along Camden Avenue, the toxic-sweet odors from chemical companies long extinct. And one balmy April afternoon when I was returning from ShopRite, on a crumbling Camden Avenue sidewalk there stood a brash young man with dreadlocks tumbling down his back and a Maori tattoo on half his face, a velvety-dark-skinned Leander who sighting me shot out his hand, his large thumb, to hitch a ride with me in the Mazda—(only with me, his friend Lydia, for he hadn’t been hitchhiking a moment before, I was sure)—and shrewdly I thought Oh no! not a chance even as my car braked to a stop, yes it was too late, yes but it was an instinctive involuntary gesture and so I heard myself say as Leander in tight-fitting suede deep-purple jacket, vest, trousers opened the passenger’s door and slid his long legs inside with a wide grin and an air of companionable ease—“Well, all right. I can give you a ride. But I’m not going farther than Grindell Park.”
Please enjoy this preview from Joyce Carol Oates’s new novel The Accursed , coming from Ecco in March 2013.
A major historical novel from “one of the great artistic forces of our time” ( The Nation ), The Accursed is an eerie, unforgettable story of possession, power, and loss in early-twentieth-century Princeton, a cultural crossroads of the powerful and the damned.
Princeton, New Jersey, at the turn of the twentieth century: a tranquil place to raise a family, a genteel town for genteel souls. But something dark and dangerous lurks at the edges of the town, corrupting and infecting its residents. Vampires and ghosts haunt the dreams of the innocent. A powerful curse besets the elite families of Princeton—their daughters begin disappearing. A young bride on the
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