by Aly Noble
In the end, I hadn’t just killed him—I’d unmade him. I’d turned that pompous, chauvinistic horror of a human being only made more horrific by forces I didn’t understand into a thing rather than a person. He was pulp at my feet. I would be the one to walk away.
I wondered if it was strange, how in control I felt now. In the moment, I’d “seen red,” had gone into a rage until he was only a faintly recognizable slab of matter I was watching exsanguinate amongst the dead leaves and snow. After being so enormously out of control, every breath, every flutter of my fingers, every simple motion echoed with deliberation. Every pull of sinew and skin was a reminder that I was always, always in control—even as I revisited the events of earlier and tried to tell myself I hadn’t been then.
In desperate need of something productive to do, I made sure I had everything to get rid of in my trunk and took it to the outskirts of town. I parsed the garbage out in three dumpsters throughout the far side of Grendling’s small perimeter before beginning to make my way back toward more familiar roads. I intentionally drove past my house on the way back to Estelle’s and found myself slowing down to look up the hill at what I could see of it from the road. Would Price’s death have affected the entity Jonah said was latched onto the house?
My pensive moment was short-lived as I noticed Rose pacing around her front lawn with her cell phone in her hand. When she saw me, it took her a minute to place the vehicle, but she started waving me down as soon as recognition dawned in her eyes.
I coasted up to the curb near her mailbox and parked, getting out and stepping around the front end, less shaky than earlier. “Hey, Rose,” I greeted her automatically, absently wondering what was up.
As I waited for her to respond, I became increasingly more self-aware of any chemical smells I may be carrying, any blood splatter I may have missed… My anxiety was escalating until I realized she was talking to me and I wasn’t registering what she was saying. I couldn’t hear her around the white noise in my head. She seemed anxious, too, and that made understanding her harder. I couldn’t hear her around herself. Or maybe it was the sound of traffic.
Wait. Not city. There’s no traffic here, I realized dumbly as I saw the single car that was the source of the noise speed by and skid into a half-assed parking job toward the curb. Blue car. Hybrid.
Fuck.
Estelle lunged from the driver’s seat and slammed her door hard enough for the car to shake. “What. The. FUCK.”
It felt like someone had suddenly pulled cotton from my ears—I was hearing Rose a little more clearly, too. She was looking at Estelle. Her eyes were a bit puffy. She was clutching her cell phone, and her arms were wrapped around herself. I figured Steve was inside with the baby. She began to ask, “Estelle, what—”
However, Estelle wasn’t listening to her. She was in a rage. “Where the hell have you been?!” she demanded, getting in my face. “Do you have any fucking clue what I’ve been through this morning?! I drove through and around town three fucking times trying to figure out where the hell you went or maybe—I don’t know—happen across your fucking corpse after Price tore your face off or whatever-the-fuck he kept saying he’d do to you! Do you have any—“
“Jesus, Estelle, I’m sorry!” I finally exclaimed, somewhat starting to feel again through the numbness. Unfortunately, I was feeling defensive.
She laughed in sheer disbelief. “‘I’m sorry.’ That’s what you’ve got? Are you fucking serious? Where have you been?!”
“What the fuck does it matter? I’m here and in one piece, all right?” I shot back, feeling bad for coming back at her like this—even if she was laying into me a bit hard. I also became self-aware of all the f-bombs in that moment of guilt, thinking that if Rose was outside, Bethaline was probably around somewhere too.
That thought made me pause, and I looked around while Estelle continued to rail at me about my life choices, how much of an idiot I was being, and that my hair looked stupid, I assumed. I was too distracted with trying to get a visual on my second-smallest neighbor. When I looked back at Rose, she was standing by, staring at the turn at the end of the road, her fingertips drumming nervously on her phone. I remembered the look on her face when she’d first seen me and began to recall a random smattering of the words she’d spoken before I was ready to process them.
“Rose?” I began. However, just as I did, a police cruiser pulled up to the turn and signaled its way around the bend, lights cycling without the siren on. I turned to Estelle. “You actually called the police?” I asked. “Seriously?”
“No, I didn’t call the—!” she began but paused when she saw Rose raise her hand slightly.
Rose answered me wearily, “I called them. I can’t find Beth.”
“What?” I asked dumbly. “Since when?”
Rose shrugged, and her lip wobbled as she tried to get the words out. “She’s been gone maybe twenty minutes?”
“Twenty?” Lancer repeated as he strode up to where we were all gathered. “You said it’d been an hour.”
Rose flushed a dark red. “W-Well, I didn’t want you to tell me to wait any longer to see if she came around… She doesn’t do this.”
“Mrs. Roberts, you realize it’s an offense to lie to an offic—“
“Oh, my god, Lancer, her kid is missing!” Estelle snapped, pulling Lancer’s attention her way. He leveled a glare at her and then at me, and my anxiety started crawling back toward the surface.
“Ms. Montecarlo. And Ms. James. Funny seeing you near trouble again,” he remarked.
My jaw clenched the slightest bit at his sheer idiocy. A kid was missing, and he was adjusting the chew in his lip and judging us for being in the right place at the wrong time. “See that house? I kinda live there,” I snapped sarcastically.
Ignoring me, he lazily glanced at Rose. “Mrs. Roberts, if it’s only been twenty minutes, she could easily be around here. Have you checked the area thoroughly?”
“Officer Lancer,” Rose began, her voice shaking but with a new resolve beneath. “My daughter—my six-year-old—is missing. She’s not here. She hasn’t answered me calling, and I can’t hear her. She always comes when I call her. She doesn’t leave the yard. My daughter is missing. And you’re going to stand there and ask me if I looked around instead of looking around, yourself?”
“Listen, ma’am,” he began, faux sympathy a veneer over the condescension. “For me to do my job properly, you need to do yours properly, too, and that—”
“What the fuck did you just say to her?” Estelle demanded.
“Do not speak to me like that, Ms. Montecarlo—you’re only making things worse off for yourself,” he warned, jabbing a finger her way.
The voices kind of blended together as I pivoted, looking around and hoping to see a blond head bobbing somewhere nearby. She couldn’t have gone far. She wouldn’t have. I turned and looked toward the curve in the pavement that fed into Red Heather Road and felt my blood run cold. Leaving the verbal brawl behind, I started walking to the turn, surprised I could walk as steadily as I was. I felt awful. Either the morning’s events or this new horror was eating me up inside, and it was probably both setting in at once.
I heard someone shouting my name behind me as I approached the turn and paid just enough attention to discern who it was before they reached me. “Where are you going—are you crazy?” Estelle demanded as she caught up. “Sure, go to the demon house while your neighbor’s kid is missing, that’s a great…”
She trailed off when we crested the driveway, and the house came into view. It looked the same—worn, stately, and big. Somehow darker than before. There was a terrible wrongness about it that couldn’t be placed just from a glance or gleaned from a listing. You had to know its history to understand.
The front door was hanging open.
I vaguely heard Rose defending herself against Lancer’s accusations behind us, but it didn’t measure up to the dread I felt crawling through me. I didn’t speak, but Estelle summed up an
ything I could have said very concisely when she whispered, “Shit,” beside me. I just nodded and saw her look at me in my peripheral vision. “Maybe she didn’t go inside.”
I wanted to believe that. I really wanted to take that outcome as only one possibility for what may have happened. My doubts about that better outcome, however, were severe.
I crossed my arms tightly over my chest against the cold I was suddenly feeling again and took a step forward before stopping and doubling back to my car. I rummaged through the back seat, my jacket making a clinking sound against the side of the door and reminding me that I still had Jeff’s gun on me. I reached under the back seat and finally found the scythe with my fingertips. I kept it covered up as I backed away from the car, shut the door, and started walking back toward Estelle.
I kept walking once I got to her, only to have her subsequently catch my arm. “What are—”
“I’m just going closer to yell for her,” I said, gently taking her hand off my arm but keeping it in my grasp as I started walking again.
She hesitated but came with me. “Didn’t Jonah tell you not to pass the property line?”
“We passed that about ten feet ago,” I murmured.
“Wouldn’t he have told Bethaline not to go in the house? Wouldn’t he get her out?” she asked fretfully.
“I told Bethaline not to go in there,” I said quietly. “I’m sure he would’ve done the same.”
The problem was that I wasn’t sure if Jonah would still be there. The gaunt, pale state of his features kept ghosting back to the forefront of my thoughts. Based on what he’d said, it had sounded like the entity latching onto the house was draining his life (or afterlife?) force, but I didn’t know the mechanics of that or if it was even possible for him to die. It made more sense to me when a human was involved somewhere—at least I knew how we worked.
When we got close to the porch, I was a little surprised that I didn’t feel anything different. Jonah had acted like I’d expire on the spot if I even entertained the thought of passing the property line, but I felt fine. Cold, but that was winter. The wrapped blade radiated its gentle heat in my hand. Was the scythe somehow holding off whatever evil he’d been worried about?
I let go of Estelle’s hand and adjusted the bundled weapon in my arms so I could bring my hands up to cup my mouth. “Bethaline!” I shouted toward the door. We waited a moment to see if anything changed, but the air remained just a little too still around us and silent. I tried again. And again, nothing.
The commotion, however, had attracted Rose and Lancer’s attention. The crunch of gravel announced their trek up the walk behind us and immediately, Rose was pushing at false hope. “Did you find her?” she asked a little hysterically, grabbing onto my arm in a way that almost made me recoil. It wasn’t her fault, but I was already on edge.
“No,” Estelle said, reluctant to take her focus off the house. “The door was open though.”
Rose latched onto that ray of possibility harder than she’d latched onto me. She immediately stumbled toward the stairs. “Beth!” she called toward the open door. Estelle and I both grabbed her and pulled her back, and she fought us reflexively. “What are you doing?! If she’s in there, I’m going in!”
“We need a plan first,” I said, not letting go of her arm.
“What the hell are you talking about? It’s your house!” she shouted, desperation making her angry.
“What exactly is going on, Ms. James?” Lancer asked warily, watching us struggle with Rose and standing by like nothing was wrong—no surprise there.
“There’s a reason I haven’t been back there in weeks, all right?” I said, starting to get a little mad, myself. “It’s not safe in there. So I’m really hoping she didn’t go inside. Maybe she just—”
And yet, as soon as I started to say all the things she may have done, someone small with blond hair passed by a window upstairs.
Rose saw it, too, and her desperate anger rekindled. “Beth!” she shouted, but scoldingly now as she thought she’d found her kid and this was all over. “Get down here right now!”
Estelle grappled with Rose as I watched the window, feeling uneasy. Was that intentional? The timing had been perfect. It made the whole situation feel stranger than it already did.
A dark shape caught the edge of my vision, and I tore my gaze away from the window. My shoulders slackened with relief when I saw it was just Jonah. He’d appeared out of thin air and was carefully perched on the eave over the porch.
Bits of him were nonexistent. One of his legs just disappeared above the ankle. His right eye and the area around it was entirely transparent and yet still part of him. His hair was dull, his skin sallow, and he looked beaten without the bruises to prove it. He regarded me right back and then glanced at the group behind me with an equally weary glance.
I addressed him, beyond caring that he’d be invisible to the others. “Jonah, is Bethaline in there?”
Estelle, Rose, and Lancer all whipped around to look at me and then followed my gaze to the roof. To my surprise, they all reacted.
“Wh-Who is that?” Rose asked, on the verge of frustrated tears after fighting with Estelle for a solid five minutes. “Why is he up there?”
“What the hell’s wrong with his eye?” Lancer asked tersely, his hand positioned at the ready on his gun.
“Holy shit,” Estelle mumbled, the only one who had more questions answered by Jonah’s surprise appearance than born of it.
Jonah looked like he may have smirked at Estelle’s reaction had he not been in the process of fading out of existence. He looked down at me. “Bethaline? I…” He frowned deeply. “I’m not sure.”
“You’re not?” I asked. That’d been the last thing I’d expected to hear for an answer.
He shook his head the slightest bit. “No. I didn’t see her… But I can’t feel her here. I can’t feel much of anything anymore.” Jonah swallowed. “You told her not to come here, didn’t you?”
“I did, but…” I ran a hand roughly through my hair. “She said she talked to someone in there before when I was babysitting, and I thought it was you, but then she said it was someone else. She may have come here because of the de—”
I was interrupted by a shrill scream from inside the house.
Lancer finally moved in to help Estelle restrain Rose from sprinting inside, realizing that the situation was more perilous than he could comprehend. Above my neighbor’s screams for her daughter, I shouted to Jonah, “You have to help us get her out. Please. I don’t think we can get her out without you.”
Jonah was rigid in his position on the shingles, staring toward the porch below his dangling legs with a mixture of fury and fear. It was the first time I’d ever seen him look anything but human since he’d saved me from Price. He hesitantly tore his gaze from the porch boards to look me in the eyes. “I don’t know how much I can do. Of course, I’ll help, but… Even before, I don’t know if I could have done much. This is beyond me as I am.”
I glanced toward the door before looking back at him. “What if you had your scythe back? Would you go back to what you were? Immediately?”
The question threw him off, and he didn’t seem to like entertaining the possibility. “If I had it back by some miracle, it wouldn’t be immediate. I’d need to reabsorb the power it lends me.”
“How long would that take?” I persisted.
Jonah’s eyes narrowed incrementally. “I… Don’t know.”
I didn’t like that answer, but it had paid to trust him so far. Just don’t let this bite me in the ass, I broadcasted to the universe as I adjusted my grip on the bundle and hurled it toward him. The pillowcase unfurled around it and fluttered sideways through the air as the scythe shimmered in its last arc toward its owner.
Jonah snatched it from the wind, and his gaze turned ravenous—and then disappointed. “The stone’s missing,” he murmured distantly and, when I continued to stare at him, he turned the weapon and presented the small crate
r in the side of the blade. “A stone goes in this cavity.”
I started to ask what he could do without it when I remembered the stone I’d found while talking to Trevor over the phone the other day. I extracted it from my pocket and held it up. It caught the light and Jonah’s attention. “Is this it?”
He nodded quickly, and I tossed him the gem as well, which he caught deftly before setting it back into the scythe. “Start recharging,” I said hesitantly, wary of the look in his eyes. “I’m really counting on you this time.”
He took his gaze off the weapon, but reluctantly. “Just this time?”
“Just fix your face,” I muttered without my usual gusto. The air felt worse around me now. Maybe the scythe really had been holding off the worst of the aura or whatever was radiating from the guts of Red Heather House.
When I turned back to the group, Estelle was looking my way. “So… We’re going in there?”
“I’m going in there,” I corrected her. “I can’t speak for any of you. Can’t leave her in there.”
“What if she’s not in there though?” Estelle asked in a lowered voice after she approached me, letting Rose and Lancer’s bickering be what distracted them from what we were saying. “What if it’s a trap?”
“What if she is?” I countered softly, not liking this any more than she did.
Estelle frowned and glanced at the open door one more time. “Okay. Let’s go before I change my mind.”
“You’re coming?” I asked, surprised.
“Don’t play this game,” Estelle snapped, but her delivery was on the gentle side. “Yeah, I’m going in. I don’t want to, but I can’t stand out here while that kid’s in danger and I’m not leaving you to do it alone. I don’t know if I trust your housemate to be your backup and I’ve already weathered this much with you. Hell, Price could be in there, too, for all we know.”
I briefly entertained the idea of not telling her—however, she’d never feel safe until she knew. I gave her a meaningful look and shook my head once, wanting her to understand without my verbalization of the incident. She looked back at me, confused until something started to click. Estelle glanced over my head to take note of Rose and Lancer still going back and forth before looking back to me. “What did you—”
