Red Heather

by Aly Noble

  I kicked harder.

  I was afraid to turn away from it, but I was more afraid to keep doing what I was doing and continue the fruitless efforts to get out of the tunnel. It had cornered me. This was what it came down to. Were Connor Price and this thing one and the same? It sounded ridiculous, but—somehow in my addled mind—it made sense that they were one being. It wasn’t a comforting possibility, but if that were true, maybe I had one less thing to be running from.

  I shifted my position again and hurled my hands against the boards one more time. This time, I accidentally hit a latch that caused the door to swing forward, dump me through, and then swing shut again with a click.

  The first thing to hit me was the smell. I gagged hard, putting a dirty hand to my nose and mouth to hold off the stench. The door shuddered behind me as something clawed and rattled it from the other side, unable to get through. That didn't make sense though. He’d walked through solid ground just a moment ago—he could walk through a few planks of wood if he couldn’t work the simple locking mechanism I’d accidentally hit.

  He's not trying to get through, Rationality said. He's trying to scare you.

  “It’s a game,” I whispered to myself, stumbling to my feet and trying to decide what the smell was even as I actively tried to avoid it. The scent was the same one that had come up from the basement when I’d first put the camcorder on the stairs—it smelled rotten mostly, but it was unlike any scent I’d ever encountered before.

  I fumbled with my phone as the door continued to shake and rattle, finding that it was working again although the screen flickered strangely after being waterlogged. I managed to activate the flashlight on it and took a breath before bringing it up to illuminate my environment.

  I hadn’t wanted to admit it, but the rottenness of the room had made me think that—if it were anything—this was what a dead body might smell like. I wasn’t exactly wrong. If killing was a game to him, I’d just fallen into his trophy room.

  White light from my phone bathed a room fit for an obsessive wannabe of a killer, from the body-sized freezer behind me to the long wooden table by the wall to the corkboard of “prizes” just above it. It was nothing like the movies or the shows—it was makeshift and cheap. He was a killer, that was for sure, but he didn't have the resources to make his lair anything but disgusting and strangely desperate. Or maybe this was how he liked things.

  I was smelling a mixture of the corkboard and the table, I gathered, as I not entirely willingly looked over them both. While the ziplock baggies tacked by the lips to the board appeared to be preserving their contents in what I guessed was formaldehyde or some kind of preservative, a few had leaked fluids down the cork surface and onto the table where I could only assume the baggies' contents were carved off.

  This was fucking impossible.

  Keeping my hand over my airways, I glanced over the board and avoided throwing up for the third time as my throat convulsed. There were nine bags tacked up—the first three's contents were indistinguishable and just looked like sacks of sludge. I tried not to think too much about that. The rest held what were clearly body parts. Small ones or chunks of larger appendages to fit in the bags, but still very much body parts. I could clearly make out an ear in the ninth bag, and it looked fresh.

  Against my better judgment, I stepped closer, noticing that the bags were labeled. The sludgy bags had yellowed masking tape across the front with what looked like pencil scratches I couldn't make out. The second bag was also one of the ones that were leaking. I glanced toward the other bags and tried not to focus on what was inside them, instead noticing that they had white masking tape labels with block handwriting done in permanent marker. These, I could read—and it shouldn't have surprised me that they were names.

  I didn't recognize any except for the seventh and ninth names.

  The seventh rang a bell because, in pulling up Connor Price's name on a search engine, more than the murder-suicide of himself and his wife had popped up. Along with that were old articles that detailed a brief period of time in which he was suspected for the kidnapping of Caitlyn Ferris—the daughter of one of the Prices' neighbors out in Arizona who had disappeared, according to the original publication. I also recognized the ice cream cone earring amongst the chemically congealed blood from the attached “missing” poster.

  The ninth bore a label that read, ‘Carla.’

  I hurled that time, close to sinking to my knees until I grabbed the edge of the table to steady myself. My hand nearly slipped off when it hit plastic instead of wood, and I came away with another bag left out and now smeared with whatever substance coated the table.

  I flipped the bag over and read the label. ‘Miri.’

  My phone exploded in my hand, and I dropped it immediately. I focused on the pain lancing through my palm for little more than a few seconds before I realized the door had gone eerily silent. The back of my head throbbed, and I could feel the warm trickle of something running down my neck. I figured maybe it was blood. I hoped it was just blood.

  My free hand shook as I clenched it into a fist. There were two major possibilities here—either he was coming around another way or he was in the room with me. The door hadn’t opened, but he clearly didn’t need doors. The only constant variable in this was that I had to get out of there. The smell was starting to make me lightheaded, there was still a freakish serial killer-demon-monstrosity roaming around, I wasn’t sure where I was in relation to my house or if there was another way out of here, and as long as I could somehow get back into the open, Estelle would be calling the cops any time now.

  Unseeingly, I reached out and touched the wall, my eyes watering and blurring vision I didn’t have at the moment. Wood met my fingertips and I applied pressure as I ran my hand down the wall, scarcely able to breathe and terrified of making a sound. That fear was silly, all things considered—if Price was inside, he knew where I was. I was becoming a strange combination of hysterical and calm simultaneously, and I wondered if I was just starting to accept the fact that I was probably going to die.

  My hand met a different plane of the wall then and, when I pressed in, it gave slightly. I’d no sooner found it than a rumbling growl rose from behind me and the creature in the room hit me with full force, sending us both through the wall.

  I whirled on it and struck out blindly, my spine aching with every strained twist of my body. It was a miracle it wasn’t broken. My fist connected with something that felt like a jawbone and the creature screeched angrily, bearing down on me after recoiling from the blow. I began to flail and hit and kick whatever I could since I couldn't see anything through the darkness around us, grasping its throat once I found it despite being unsure of whether or not it needed to breathe—was it human at all? Was suffocation, or anything that could kill a human, a threat to this thing, too? The mace had worked back at the office. Maybe it had other weaknesses.

  A set of claws dug into my shoulder and I screamed, losing my grip on its neck. I struggled to unlatch the claws, but it was to little avail—they stayed in and dug deeper with every move I made. I had almost resigned myself to this being how the hunt ended when my eyes caught a dim light nearby that seemed to trip over a couple of sharp angles before fading. The angles were stairs—and the light was my kitchen light.

  We were in my basement.

  The desperation that clenched my gut won out. I made a blind guess at the length of its arms based on where it had buried its claws into my shoulder, and I shoved my hands up to where I pictured its face would be. As soon as I had a vague idea of where its eyes were, I hooked my thumbs sharply inward. Claws ripped from my shoulder as a feral wail filled the basement. I shoved it back with all my strength before making a break for the stairs.

  I barely got a head-start. It crashed into the wall I’d just run past and started pursuing me up the stairs after regaining its footing. By some miracle, I got to the door. I pushed it open, hurled myself into the hall, and slammed the door shut again in the crea
ture’s face—not that a closed door seemed to matter, in the grand scheme of things.

  Righting myself, I sprinted down the hallway for the front door only to have the thing lunge through the door and narrowly miss me by a few hairs, if that. Like some petty playground game, I could only think of how unfair it was that it was literally defying reality just to chase me down. Without thinking of an end result, I hurled myself up the stairs three at a time, knowing all I could do was keep moving.

  “Jonah!” I screamed into the empty house as the real predator crashed up the steps behind me. I was running out of options. Even if I did wonder about his loyalty, I was grasping at straws. Maybe even grasping at razor wire. “Jonah, please!”

  Tripping at the top of the stairs but catching myself before I could fall, I raced to my room, willing to hurl myself out a window if it meant escaping. As soon as I was inside, the door slammed shut behind me. I turned to see Connor Price, one eye bloody and deflated, staring at me from the corner of the room.

  We regarded each other silently, my hurried breathing the loudest sound in the room. After a few ragged breaths, I finally found my words. “Is this it, then?” I asked, winded and uncomfortably soaked. “This is the game? Miss this after putting your wife under? After allegedly killing yourself?”

  He snorted softly, and it still unnerved me how recognition welled up for the few instances I’d unknowingly crossed paths with him before then. His voice rang bells I wanted to break. “You act like you know the whole story. Maybe it was the reverse—maybe she staged our deaths to frame me.”

  “That’s not what the papers say,” I argued, buying time. Come on, Estelle…

  “The papers also said I was dead, remember? Never trust the media,” he scolded. I watched his eye slowly reforming in its bloodied socket, knitting back together and righting itself in its proper place. Once it was repaired, it almost seemed to regard me on its own.

  “Then what happened?” I pressed, my brain scrambling through possibilities as I spoke. “Enlighten me.”

  A smile curved Connor Price’s thin mouth. “So maybe I killed her. She got too scared—she would’ve given me away soon if I hadn’t. But then her death became another problem. I needed an ally and a way out—however, I clearly never killed myself.”

  “Your suicide note?” I asked.

  “I wrote it, and it was an honest parting,” he admitted. “If I’d been ready to cross over, it would have been a perfect set of last words, short and sweet. But I wasn’t—just needed an out. And I knew as soon as they found Becca, they’d be comin’ for me.”

  “Why not just blackmail her?” I asked. I kept flashing back to Carla’s mangled, contorted body in the woods and my brain was gradually replacing her face with mine.

  “That would’ve been a cleaner option,” he figured casually. Way too casually, all things considered. “She would have caved eventually though. I don’t like to leave room for error.” Connor Price regarded me, seeming bored with the conversational turn of things. “You’re the new part of that equation.”

  “I’d rather not be, if we’re being honest,” I mumbled. “Why are you here, anyway?”

  He arched a brow at me. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “You moved out to Arizona, right? Why come back here?” I elaborated, wondering what was so hard about the question.

  “We did,” he said dubiously. When he saw I wasn’t connecting the dots, he finally seemed to find the missing piece. “Ah. Right. Well, you saw my trophy room downstairs—I couldn’t allow that to be disturbed. This place would’ve been pulled apart over a crime scene. She followed me out here on one of my ‘business trips’ once, and that was the end of things. I set things back up southwest with my new friend’s help and a fat wad of cash for that realtor of ours. Another loose end to tie up someday.”

  That lying little fuck, I swore, thinking back to Trevor’s reassurance that no one had died in this godforsaken house. Not that it mattered much now. “What about the other ghost here?”

  “Other ghost?” he chuckled. “I’m no ghost, sweetheart. I’m as alive as you are. More alive, in fact. As for your roommate, he’s as good as purged from this place. Sage works wonders, especially when you corner them with salt lines. It would’ve become harder for him to stick around and, after your little fight, why would he?”

  “That was you, huh?” I asked, realizing I was the one cornered now.

  “Sure. I preferred it just be us when this happy day came up, and it was easy to make it look like a novice had done it,” Price said evenly, the tone that normally accompanied small talk lacing his damning words. He smirked slowly and measured me up. “What's your favorite part?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Of you. Your body. What’s the best part?” he rephrased, smiling as his baby blue eyes seemed to shimmer in the light.

  “Probably all of it. I’m kind of attached,” I retorted as dread set in more deeply.

  He looked surprised at first, but then he chuckled. “Fiery. I like it. I think I’ll keep your lips… No, maybe your jaw. Maybe even while you’re still alive. I’m interested to see what you look like without that smart mouth of yours.”

  Price decided then to pull a Bowie knife from his back pocket and start in toward my corner of the room. I grabbed a dictionary from my bookshelf beside me and hurled it at his head. He nimbly ducked, his progress unhindered.

  “Stay the fuck away from me!” I yelled, digging my fingers between the bookcase and the wall to try to tip it, only to have him grab my arm before I could budge it an inch. I screamed for help as I grabbed for the hand holding the knife, desperately evading something I knew I could only hold off for so long.

  My head pulsated with a stabbing pain that originated from the scab on the back of my skull. I wailed for aid. Called out for a ghost. Dealt with the knowledge that no one was coming as Price's eyes ceased to hold a reflection and darkened to black in his human face.

  And then he started to shred apart right before my eyes.

  A screech unborn hung half-raised in the vacant air.

  I tottered once on my feet as I was released, looking down at myself. I was covered in blood. It wasn’t mine though.

  Slowly, my eyes lifted.

  Jonah stood just paces back from where Price had been standing seconds prior, and we locked eyes. His were dark with resolve and a wariness that spoke of a secret unearthed.

  Predator.

  Part Three

  “Two places exist where the horizon meets the sky.

  I fly because I want to be that line between the finite and the infinite.

  Between the grand trap and absolute freedom.

  It’s there, where nothing lasts, that I will live forever.”

  —Pilot Patch and the Disastrous Downpour

  Chapter 20

  I was too numb to feel concerned over the fact that I was standing on the property line of a house I now officially knew to be possessed. In fact, it was surprising to me that it was only at this stage in the events of the past two and a half months that I was beginning to feel a sense of burnout.

  I shifted my gaze behind me—past the tree line—where I could make out the fluttering strip of excess caution tape wrapped around the trees where Carla's body had been through the skeletal reaches of the December branches. My jaw clenched some at the sight, and I turned back toward the house to wait.

  And wait.

  • • •

  Two weeks earlier.

  “What did you do?”

  My voice was shaking. My whole body was shaking, and all I could smell was blood. I was dripping with it. I looked like Carrie on prom night—kind of felt like her, too.

  When he didn’t answer me, I asked again and tried unsuccessfully to keep the tremors from my voice. “What did you do?”

  Jonah regarded me warily and stayed where he was—where Connor Price had been standing just seconds ago until he’d decided it was time for me to die. And then where I’d watched some unsee
n force rend him apart.

  At least until he'd loped toward the wall and shattered one of my brand new windows, a long and unsightly gash from whatever Jonah had done to him roped over his shoulder. Regardless of the “how,” Jonah had managed to hit and cut into Price so hard and with such precision that the result had been an arterial shower for which I’d been in the undesignated splash zone. And it had all happened in a matter of seconds.

  I was ready to yell my question at him this time when he shook his head. “Don’t. Just listen.”

  “I don’t think you’re in any position to tell me what to do,” I pointed out shakily. “Where the fuck have you been? Are you and that—that thing—”

  “Stop,” Jonah said calmly. “Just stop. Miri, you need to go wash up, change clothes, and then you need to go back outside.”

  “What are you talking about?!” I half-shouted.

  “There’s a body behind your house, and you’re covered in blood,” he pointed out more aggressively. “Don’t pack a bag until the cops are gone. They’ll be on their way if Estelle paid attention to your text, right?”

  “How did you know th—”

  “Give me some credit,” he muttered. “Get in the shower. Now.” His shout jolted me into motion—especially considering what I’d just seen him do. Brooding ghost, my ass. Still though, if he wasn’t a ghost, then what the hell was he?

  I sped through washing the blood off my skin and hair, paranoia making me thorough as what he’d said sunk in. They’d know that I couldn’t possibly contort a corpse like that though, right? That took brute strength I didn’t even look like I had a fraction of. After pulling my hair up and walking out of my bathroom, I started to hear siren wails in the distance, moving to the window to look out.