“They needed to hear it. Sometimes I make things worse trying to pretend everything’s okay,” she admitted.
“Well, I’m also sorry if I didn't take your fears seriously tonight about the thing in the woods."
"No, it's better that you didn't. If we both panicked that'd be way worse."
Ben slipped out of the driver's door. Lori met him outside the car.
"You're sure you're up for driving home? I'd hate for your car to stall again."
"I'm fine. I have my cell phone and if I break down, I won't be far away from your place or my mom's."
"Okay, good night." He leaned in and kissed her cheek, which again surprised her. As she climbed behind the wheel, she touched the spot of warmth where his lips had been. They were friendly gestures, nothing romantic per se, but… they’d still felt good.
Her car did not stall as she drove to her grandmother's house and though the experience in Manistee had unnerved her, she had the niggling sense that it wasn't a mechanical problem that caused the car to die. Something bigger was at work, something that operated outside the laws of ordinary reality.
The house was dark and quiet when she arrived. She flicked on the kitchen light and her stomach grumbled at the sight of the box of mini-chocolate donuts sitting on the table. She moved to her grandmother's wall calendar, where she kept a meticulous record of all her comings and goings.
'Free Night at the Soaring Eagle,' her grandmother had written in neat cursive.
Her mother and grandmother wouldn't be home for the night. Once a month they usually stayed at the Soaring Eagle Casino in Mount Pleasant. Her grandmother enjoyed gambling—her favorite game was Texas hold ’em—and as a result of her frequent visits to the casino, they gave her a free night in their hotel every month.
Lori didn't mind the time alone. Though she wasn't elated about the empty house, her thoughts skittered across the experience of seeing the Silvas. If Lori’s mother were home, Lori would have felt obligated to tell her all about it.
She grabbed the donuts from the table, mentally promising herself she’d eat no more than four. She walked into the living room, going to the selection of DVDs that her mother and grandmother had amassed. There were hundreds of them. Lori searched through the Disney movies, selected a copy of Snow White and slid it into the DVD player.
Lori jumped when someone cleared their voice loudly in the living room doorway.
"Jesus, Henry, you scared me half to death," she muttered when she whirled to see her little brother grinning behind her.
"Okay, this is wrong on multiple levels," Henry said. "First of all, you're watching Snow White. Second of all, you just jumped like you were watching Saw."
Lori released the pillow she'd been squeezing and let it drop to the floor.
"What are you doing here?" he asked. "Mom implied I was going to have this place to myself tonight. How can I have a raging kegger when you're up here getting crazy on Disney movies and donuts?"
Lori grabbed the pillow from the floor and chucked it at him. It bounced off his torso.
He pounded one fist on his chest. "See that? Pecs of steel. Been hitting the gym every morning at six for three months. It's paying off."
Lori leaned forward and grabbed a chocolate donut, took a big bite and smiled through her chocolate-smeared teeth. "I'm carb-loading for the marathon."
He cocked an eyebrow. "For real?"
She rolled her eyes. "Nope. Just doing the thing my therapist told me not to do, eating my feelings." She didn't mention that each of the three donuts she'd eaten had left her racked with guilt and shame. Henry knew little of the binge-eating disorder that had plagued his older sister and she preferred to keep it that way.
He grinned and grabbed a donut. "Sometimes you just need a little sugar, sis, and it's not more complicated than that."
"Easy for you to say," she grumbled. "You've never had an ounce of body fat."
"Bullshit. Look through Mom's albums. In middle school I was a veritable potato with hair. The other kids called me Hippo Henry."
"They did not."
He laughed. "Well, my best friend Brad did a few times, but that's because I called him Bacne Brad."
Lori sighed, finishing her donut and returning her gaze to the movie, where the black-cloaked witch offered Snow White the poisoned apple.
"Joking aside, whatever possessed you to select Snow White as your feature film this evening?"
Lori shook her head. "There aren't enough hours before my bedtime to explain. What are you here for anyway?"
"Lasagna, duh. I spent my entire check on fifths for a party last weekend. You think I had money for groceries?"
"You realize you're twenty, right? In the future, food will probably need to take a slight precedence over beer. Not to mention rent."
Henry waved a dismissive hand and walked to the kitchen. "Mom and Grandma would happily give me my old room back. I can be the professional jar-opener and dude who carries wood from the shed to the fireplace."
Lori listened to him opening cupboards and drawers. He waked back in with a heaping plate of lasagna and three pieces of garlic bread stacked on the edge of the plate.
"I hope you're not serious."
He laughed. "Not if every house on the planet burned to the ground. I'd live under a tree before I'd move back in. No offense to Mom and Grandma, they're the bee's knees, but living here…" He shook his head. "The knitting and the vacuuming and the Lifetime movies? Nah, no thanks. Really though, I didn't blow my check on beer. I'm saving for a loft in Detroit. I met this woman." He closed his eyes as if talking about her caused him physical pain. "She's a mortgage broker down there, thinks she can get me an interview at her company." He forked a bite into his mouth. "She's twenty-four, a total cougar."
"I'm pretty sure twenty-four does not a cougar make."
He laughed. "I know. She wants to strangle me when I call her that, but seriously, I'm crazy about this girl."
“‘Drop out of school’ crazy?” Lori asked.
“I’d transfer, do part time to finish my degree, work full time.”
"Why not just move in with her? Why save for your own place?"
He stared at her. "This coming from the woman who's been with her boyfriend four years and you still haven't moved in together. Where is Stu? He didn't join you on this fabulous adventure at Mom’s?"
Lori almost grabbed another donut at the mere mention of Stu. Instead, she clenched her hands together in her lap. "I caught Stu cheating on me last week. It's safe to say we're over."
"No shit?" Henry used a piece of garlic bread to wipe up the sauce and cheese still clinging to his plate.
"None, unless you count the shit I've been eating as he lied through his teeth to me for the last however many months or maybe years."
"What a dickwad. What happened?"
"I don't want to talk about it."
"You are so much like Mom." Henry sighed.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
He shrugged and licked his fingers one by one. "That's just something she does whenever I bring up… complicated things."
"And by complicated things you mean Dad?"
"Mostly Dad. Yeah."
"It's not surprising, is it? He cheated on her, pretty much abandoned her with two kids. You were only five."
"I know. I do. I know all of that, but I'd like to know other things too. I'd like to know what life was like before… all of that happened."
"They fought a lot. We've talked about this."
"Come on. That's it? That's all you remember?"
Lori grabbed a blanket from the back of the couch and wrapped it around her. "No. There were good years when I was little. When Dad was still working at the appliance store. But then he got that marketing job and he started being gone a lot. By the time they had you, Dad was like an idea more than a reality. He was there for big stuff, Christmas, Easter, but… not the normal day-to-day stuff. He was gone a lot. For the first six months after you were born
, he was around, but then it started all over again. Working late, weekend business trips. Mom just seemed to get more and more sad, stressed, fed up."
"What did you guys do? You and him during the good years?"
Lori smoothed her hands over the pilled blanket. "A lot of putt-putt golf. That was one of his favorite things. And he loved dogs, but Mom was allergic so we never had one, but we'd go to the animal shelter and look at the dogs or we'd go to his friends' houses and play with their dogs. He'd roll in the grass and the dogs would pounce on him and lick his face."
Lori smiled, remembering her dad with his ash-blond hair and his pale blue eyes. Henry looked a lot like him. She remembered the sheepdog his dad's best friend had owned, named Hooligan. Her dad had loved the dog and once after a drunken bonfire he'd even crawled into Hooligan's doghouse and spent the night with him. That was a story Lori had heard about later. She'd been too young to attend that party and had spent that weekend with Grandma Mavis.
"I love dogs,” Henry said. “When I have a house someday, I want a German shepherd."
"That's a big dog."
"Go big or go home."
She smiled. "Hmm, what else? He made these really delicious homemade pizzas with all kinds of funky stuff on them—pickles or taco fixings. They were crazy good."
"I think I've tried a few like that when I was stoned, but I'm not sure I'd go for pickles on a pizza sober."
"Don't knock it til you try it,” Lori said.
"I wonder about him sometimes,” Henry admitted. “Why he so completely erased himself from our lives. If it's what he wanted or if—"
"Mom made him?"
"Yeah. I know that's a shitty thing to say."
"It wasn't her. I contacted him twice. He moved to Florida, got remarried, had two new kids. He replaced his whole life. Her, us, and he even got the dog he always wanted."
"How do you know that?"
Lori sighed. "I took a Greyhound bus there right after I finished my senior year in high school. I missed him being at my graduation. I had a birthday card he'd sent me for my sixteenth birthday with his address on it. I took the bus and I called him and he came and picked me up at the Greyhound station. It was surreal. He lived in this neat little Cape Cod with his pretty blonde wife. They had a two-year-old and a six-month-old. Lola and Harvey."
Henry's face darkened. "That's a joke, right? You're not telling me he had two children and named them—"
"Variations on our names. Yeah, that's what I'm saying, and that's why Mom doesn't like to talk about him and that's why I don't like to talk about him. I lost all faith in him the instant I set foot in his new life and realized how much I was not welcome. He had me on a plane back to Michigan before dinner."
Henry leaned his head back. "Screw him. What a bastard."
"Pretty much."
He puffed up his cheeks and blew out a loud breath. "Want a beer?"
Lori cocked her head. "You actually think Mom and Grandma have beer?"
He chuckled. "I leave a secret stash in the garage fridge tucked way in the back. I'll get us one."
"Thanks." Lori grabbed the remote control and powered off the TV.
Henry returned and handed her a beer. She popped the top and took a sip.
"What's with Snow White, for real?” Henry asked, gesturing at the now-dark screen. “Not plunging back into your witch fixation, I hope."
"What do you mean?"
"The witch thing. Remember? When we were young. You kept reading all those stories about witches and watching the movies, but then you'd be scared and want to sleep on Mom's bedroom floor. She finally forbade it."
Lori frowned. Much like the revelation of the dreams, the story struck her as true and yet not solid, a memory that had slipped between the cracks and could not be easily wrenched from beneath the floorboards. "I remember that, kind of anyway. When was that? Was it—"
"After Bev," Henry said quietly. "Those months before we moved to Grandma's. I'm not surprised it's a blur. That was a weird summer. I have some really clear memories, but then nothing about other things. I don't remember packing our stuff to move here to Clare to live with Grandma Mavis. I don't remember the last time I saw Dad."
"Do you remember the day Bev disappeared?"
He nodded. "Our neighbor Charlotte came over to watch me and brought her daughter, Daisy. Ugh, I couldn't stand her. She was so bossy and always stole my toys. I remember you coming home and then you and Mom going back out. After that it's blurry. I'm not sure if it was all one day or a series of days. People coming and going, police, Bev's parents."
"It's a blur for me too," Lori admitted. "The day itself is crystal-clear, but everything that came after is a haze."
30
Lori turned the doorknob, warm and pulsing beneath her hand, and drew it slowly open. The familiar hallway of her childhood home did not lie beyond the bedroom door. Instead, she stared into the forest off Tanglewood Drive. Though she knew it was that forest, she also saw the lighting wasn't right, and the trees weren't right either. Everything had a reddish hue. The trees did not merely cast a single shadow, shadows surrounded the trees, and they did not match the trees at all, but seemed to wriggle and twist though there was no wind.
The crunching started again, more frenzied now, a slurping sound accompanying it. Lori walked forward, her bare feet sinking into the ground that too was unlike the forest by Tanglewood Drive. It was soft and mushy and though the air seemed full with a wet chill, the ground was warm and wet like the earth in a tropical rainforest.
All these things tried to distract Lori from that steady crunching, but she could not ignore it. She continued, though she was so terrified her entire body shook. It did not merely tremble, but quaked, her hands slapping against her thighs, her knees clacking together painfully.
She grew closer to the sound, closer still, and saw the oak tree Bev had climbed into. A creature hulked beneath it, bent over, eating and crunching and swallowing with that wet gulping sound. Its back was covered in mismatched animals’ pelts. Black tangled hair protruded from the top, human hair. It was not an animal, but a person standing there, eating.
Lori took another step and something squished beneath her feet. The soft flesh of a crimson mushroom oozed between her toes and discharged a scent like rotted meat. Lori froze as the thing at the tree slowly straightened and turned.
The woman, if she could be called that, had a face so lined and grooved it nearly blended with the bark of the tree beside her. Her hair was as twisted as branches, her eyes two black pits in her gruesome face. Blood coated her chin and ran from her lips. Bones and flesh filled her cupped hands.
Lori looked down at the woman's feet, at the thing lying there, the long blonde hair and the red and white striped shorts. Everything else was a bloody blur and she opened her mouth and began to scream.
"Lori! Wake up!"
Lori's eyes shot open and she gasped for breath.
Henry, looking terrified, stood above her, a pitcher of water in his trembling hand. It was tilted at an angle as if he were about to dump it on her face.
She put her hands up to block him. "No. Don't. I'm awake."
He set the pitcher on the dresser and then offered his hand to help her sit up. "Jesus," he muttered, raking both hands through his hair. "Holy Christ, you scared the living shit out of me. I walked through the front door and you were screaming like... like..." He shook his head.
Lori leaned back against the headboard, her dream raw and real, the room around her slowly sinking into focus. "It's okay," she whispered, her voice raspy.
After Lori reassured Henry multiple times that she was fine, he retreated to his own room. She sat and remembered the dream, the woman devouring the girl on the ground. It had not been Bev, but Summer Newton lying on the ground. Summer with her blonde hair and her red and white shorts.
In the morning, Lori ate a quick breakfast of instant oatmeal, treading lightly through her mother's house so as not to wake Henry. She left a note th
at she wouldn't be back later as she had to go home and check on Matilda. First, however, she wanted to visit Manistee, the place where Ben had spent his youth and where Summer had gone missing.
Lori walked through the quaint downtown of Manistee. Purple flowers hung in overflowing pots descending from the antique-looking light posts.
The sidewalks were abuzz with people, mostly tourists, Lori assumed based on their flip-flops and beach bags. Not to mention it was midday on a business day when most people were chained to their desks for another five hours.
After walking the length of the town, she doubled back and walked into a hip gastropub with gleaming wood floors and waitstaff dressed in craft beer t-shirts. The smells were intoxicating, but she turned and left. She needed someplace older and less appealing to visitors. She wanted a locals’ place, a dive.
She found it the next street over—Moriarty’s Pub, a bar and restaurant that occupied the lower level in a building that looked like it had been built in the early 1900s and not cared for much since. The windows were dark except the glowing ‘Open’ sign.
When Lori pushed through the door, the bar was dark and filled with shadows. Smells of warm wetness assailed her—spilled whiskey and puke and sweat. Six people were seated at the bar, four men and two women, and not a single one of them wore beach shorts or had sunglasses propped on their heads.
Lori chose a seat, self-conscious, an outsider who'd walked into their lair, but the people at the bar paid her no mind. The counter was sticky and Lori pulled her hands away too late, because both palms had the gooey residue lingering from where she'd touched the surface.
The bartender, a grizzled, pot-bellied man somewhere in his fifties, slapped a paper napkin in front of her. "What'll it be?"
"Um… a beer," she said, searching for the most relaxed drink. The 'you can trust me with your secrets' drink.
"Which one?" He gestured at the tap.
"The blue one." She squinted at the tap. "Budweiser."
Darkness Stirring: A Troubled Spirits Novel Page 20
