The Invited (ARC)

by Jennifer McMahon

  “No,” she agreed. “They don’t.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Olive

  S JUNE 8, 2015

  “Wow! Sure is a pricey piece of equipment,” Aunt Riley, eyes wide, said when she saw the metal detector on the shelf. Riley had taken Olive up to the big hobby shop in Burlington after school. They were in the aisle with metal detectors and gold panning supplies. The next aisle had the radio-controlled aircraft and drones, and that was where all the action was. She could hear a kid whining to his dad that he absolutely needed the drone with the Wi-Fi camera and anything else would totally suck.

  “You got enough money for this, kiddo?” Riley asked, pushing her blue bangs back away from her eyes. “I can lend you some if you need it.” Riley looked tired to Olive. Thinner, too, maybe.

  “Thanks, but I’ve got enough,” Olive said. Just barely, but she had it. Riley giving her weird but awesome gifts was one thing, but asking Riley for money was not something Olive ever wanted to have to do.

  “Where’d you get all that money?” Riley asked. “Lift a little cash from your dad’s wallet? Engage in any illicit activities?” Riley said this jokingly, but there was a serious questioning look in her eyes.

  Olive could hide just about anything from her dad—in fact, she believed he was a willing participant in her deceptions—but Riley was another story.

  “No way! I’ve been saving forever,” Olive explained. “Then I sold my old metal detector to my friend Mike. He bought a couple of the old musket balls I’ve found, too. He thinks they’re cool.”

  “So, what are you going to do with this new fancy metal detector you’re spending your life’s savings on?” Aunt Riley asked.

  “Oh, you know. The usual. Look for coins and lost rings on the beach at the lake. See if I can find any old home sites back in the woods. Maybe find more musket balls to sell to Mike.”

  Riley smiled at her. “I thought maybe you were searching for Hattie’s treasure.”

  Olive looked at her aunt, thought of telling her the truth. Riley believed in stuff like ghosts and old folktales. Riley and Mama had loved telling each other Hattie stories they’d heard, turning this woman who lived by the swamp into a witch with superhuman powers, a ghost who could come back and wreak terrible revenge. Mama and Riley agreed that that poor woman who died after nearly drowning in the bog had definitely been lured out there by Hattie, but that she must have deserved it in some way. In their minds, Hattie enacted revenge only on those who had crossed her in some way—maybe simply by trespassing or not giving her the respect she so obviously deserved. And Riley and Mama loved to tell stories of the supposed sightings of Hattie over the years, and, of course, the disappearances. As obsessed as Mama had been with Hattie, Riley might have been more so. She talked about Hattie like she’d known her, like she was an old friend no one but her understood.

  “Nah,” Olive said then, looking at her aunt. “There is no treasure. Mama said.”

  Riley looked at Olive for a few seconds. “She said that, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Olive said. “Mama was pretty sure. And I believe her. I mean, really, what are the chances that it actually exists and hasn’t been found yet?”

  “I don’t know. I just think it seems kind of sad. Finding that treasure was a dream of your mom’s for such a long time.”

  Olive remembered Mama telling her that they were the ones who would find the treasure, that it was their destiny.

  There was this long, awkward pause again while Riley watched Olive, seemed to study her really.

  The kid in the next aisle had won: his dad was buying him the fancy drone with the camera he wanted.

  “Dreams change,” Olive said matter-of-factly, as she reached for the boxed metal detector on the shelf.

  “I guess they do,” Riley said, and she looked so sad for a minute that Olive was sorry she’d said what she had. Sorry she’d brought up Mama at all. It was easier, safer, to not mention her, to pretend she’d never existed. Sometimes Olive got so caught up in her own grief that she forgot other people were grieving, too. Olive wasn’t the only one Mama left.

  “Gonna do some treasure hunting?” the sales clerk asked Olive when she brought the box up to the register, a little gleam in her eye.

  “Absolutely,” Olive said.

  They got into Riley’s car and drove back home. In the car, Riley moved on to asking Olive all about school and how her daddy was doing. And Olive lied. It scared her sometimes, how good she was at lying. Even to Aunt Riley, who was way swifter than Daddy.

  “School’s great,” she said. “We’re learning about this thing called natural selection. Do you know about that?”

  “Sure” Riley said, getting on the on-ramp for the highway. “Survival of the fittest. Charles Darwin and his finches, right?”

  “It’s all about adaptation,” Olive said. “I like that.” She loved this idea that some humans might be evolving right now, in minuscule ways, ways you couldn’t even see at first.

  “I guess when you think of it, that’s what survival is really all about, right?” Riley asked. “I mean, not just as a species, but on a mundane, day-to-day level. Life throws shit at us and we roll with it. We adapt and evolve.”

  Olive nodded. Riley got it so completely.

  “Of course, some people are better at adapting than others,” Riley said, giving Olive this knowing, laser-eyed look. “Your dad, even when we were kids, always had trouble with change. He’d pretend to be doing okay, but when things changed, when something upset him, he’d get thrown off, sometimes go into one of his funks where he wouldn’t leave his room, didn’t want to eat or talk to anyone. Sometimes he’d get so mad, he’d punch holes in the walls. He broke his hand once, hitting the wall so hard.”

  Olive nodded, she’d heard this story a hundred times. She tried to ready herself for what she knew was coming.

  “How’s he doing?” Riley asked, glancing at Olive in the passenger seat beside her. “The no-bullshit answer, please.”

  And there it was. But Olive was ready with a smile.

  “Dad’s doing okay, really,” Olive said. “He makes dinner every night. Helps me with my homework, even. He’s getting me a computer of my very own soon.”

  “And the renovations? Is he still spending all of his time with that?”

  Olive shrugged. “Sure, we’re working on the house, but it’s not too bad. The living room’s nearly done. And I’ve decided to go ahead and do some work on my own room. Make it a little bigger, you know? So there’ll be room for bookshelves and a built-in desk for the new computer.”

  Was being a really good liar a form of adaptation? Olive wondered.

  Cleverness was, she believed.

  But was Olive really being that clever? She wasn’t sure if Riley bought it, but her aunt pretended to, at first, and said, “That’s real good, Ollie. I’m glad things are going well. I know high school can be tough—it definitely was for me.”

  “Really?” Olive asked.

  Riley paused a minute, keeping her eyes on the road ahead, then said, “Yeah, you know, not everyone is designed to fit in. For those of us who don’t, those of us destined to blaze our own paths, well, other people can be downright shitty to us. Especially in high school.”

  And Olive almost told her then. Almost confessed everything—how school really sucked, how she skipped more often than went these days, how her dad had started tearing her bedroom apart, how she really was looking for the treasure and hoped it would help bring Mama back.

  But then Riley turned and smiled at her, and it was a genuine smile, radiating happiness and relief.

  “I’m really so happy you’re doing well, Ollie. I think a computer’s a great idea! Let me know if you need any help picking one out or setting it up or anything. I’m not an expert, but I know enough to get by.”

  Olive nodded.

 
“And you know,” Riley added, putting her hand on Olive’s shoulder and giving it a gentle squeeze. “If things ever weren’t going well at home, you could always come talk to me. And my guest room is always open, you know that, right? You can stay with me any time.”

  “I know, thanks.” Olive loved the idea of staying with her quirky aunt, but she knew she couldn’t leave her dad for long. She was all he had left. “But things are fine at home now. Really.”

  Riley gave her a smile. “Just keep it in mind, ’kay? My door’s always open. And we’re still on for this weekend, right? Bride of Frankenstein and a double pepperoni pizza?”

  “Absolutely,” Olive said, giving her aunt the best happy, well-adjusted, I’m doing fine really smile she could muster. “And don’t forget the Swedish Fish!”

  CHAPTER 9

  Helen

  S JUNE 9, 2015

  Something was eating the trailer.

  It was a little after two in the morning and Helen had just come to bed after sitting in the kitchen, doing research on the computer, reading her library books, and drinking two cups of herbal tea liberally laced with brandy to help her get to sleep. Country living was not doing wonders for her insomnia. Back in the condo, there had been hundreds of channels of cable TV and the constant noise of traffic from the highway to help lull Helen to sleep.

  Of course her research hadn’t exactly helped. She’d done a search on Hattie Breckenridge and discovered a brief entry from a collection of Vermont ghost stories written in the 1980s:

  Hattie Breckenridge, legend had it, was the wife of the Devil himself, with a beauty no man could resist, even in death. To this day, residents of Hartsboro claim to see her in the woods and bog where she once lived, and some have been unlucky enough to follow her, to answer her siren’s call, and never find their way out of the woods again.

  Helen had switched off the computer, thinking the story utter nonsense. Where were the facts? Where were the names of people who’d seen her, people who’d supposedly gone missing? She crept into the bedroom and lay down, closed her eyes, took a deep sighing breath, willing herself to fall asleep quickly—and then she heard something scratching and chewing. It seemed to come from directly beneath her pillow.

  “Nate,” she said, shaking him. “Wake up.”

  “What?”

  “Do you hear that?”

  “Mmm?”

  It was a scrabbling, gnawing sound coming from under the bed. Steady and grinding.

  There was something down there. Something with sharp teeth. Something chewing its way up to them. It would eat through the wooden slats of the bed frame, then the soft organic cotton mattress, and then—

  She shook him harder, gave his shoulder a not-so-gentle punch. “Nate, there’s something here, in the trailer!”

  “Ow! God! What? Where?” he asked, sitting up, listening as he rubbed his shoulder.

  “Don’t you hear it?” she asked.

  “Hear what?” He looked at her, puzzled. “Have you been drinking?”

  “Just shut up and listen!” she hissed. This was not going to be like the scream their first night.

  They sat together under the covers, listening.

  Gnawing. Definite gnawing. Not the soft chewing of a mouse, but something much louder, much larger.

  “You hear that, right?” Helen asked.

  “Yeah, I hear it.” He sounded worried.

  “Well, what the fuck is it?”

  “I don’t know. Some kind of animal.”

  Helen remembered the library woman’s words: “You stay out there long enough, you’ll see her. Go to the bog at sunset and wait. Just as the darkness is settling in, that’s when she comes out.”

  And Helen had thought of going last night after supper, of walking to the bog by herself, but she’d been too frightened.

  The mad chewing got louder, more insistent.

  My, what big teeth you have.

  All the better to eat you up.

  She hadn’t gone to Hattie. Perhaps Hattie had come to her.

  “I think she’s under the bed,” Helen whispered.

  “She?” Nate said, grabbing his glasses, flipping on the light.

  “It. Whatever.”

  She shouldn’t have been reading the ridiculous Hattie story online and the witchcraft books from the library before getting into bed. Next time she couldn’t sleep, she’d pick up one of Nate’s science tomes—study the anatomy of an earthworm or how evaporation and condensation cause rain.

  “Hand me the flashlight,” he said as he slid off the bed and dropped down to his knees. She passed him the big yellow light and he flicked it on, shone the beam under the bed. Helen stayed on top of the covers, legs tucked under her, half expecting a gnarled hand to reach out and pull him under.

  “What is it?” she asked. “What do you see?”

  “Nothing here,” he said. “But I still hear it. It sounds like it’s right underneath us.” He stood up, his white boxers and T-shirt glowing as he moved down the darkness of the hall.

  “Where are you going?” Helen’s voice was squeaky and frantic and she hated herself for it.

  “Outside,” he said. “To look under the trailer.”

  She scooted out of bed, padding behind him down the hall to the front door. She stood in the open doorway while he made his way down the steps. It was a clear night, the moon hanging low in the sky, the stars looking bright and close, the air damp and cool. Goose bumps prickled her skin.

  “Be careful,” she said as Nate crouched down, shone the light into the crawl space beneath the trailer, which rested uneasily on crumbling concrete blocks.

  “Oh!” he said, startled. He stood up straight and took two steps back.

  If whatever was under there scared Nate, it had to be bad.

  “What is it?” Helen asked, nearly frantic now, and not really wanting to know what he’d seen. She wanted to grab his hand, yank him back into the trailer, bolt the door, turn out the lights, and hide.

  “Nate?” she asked, voice shaking. “What do you see?”

  He laughed, relieved. “It’s a porcupine!”

  “What?”

  “A quill pig, that’s what some people call it. But it’s actually a rodent, of course. It’s so much bigger than I thought! And he’s kind of cute, honestly. Come see.” Nate was talking in that fast, excited way he did when he encountered a new creature.

  A porcupine. Only a woodland creature, not the wild witch of the bog. Her shoulders relaxed, and she let herself climb down the front steps.

  “Will I end up with a face full of quills?”

  “Not if you don’t get too close,” Nate said.

  “Don’t they shoot them out?”

  “No, that’s a myth. You’d have to touch him to get quilled. The quills are hollow and have little barbs. Come on, hurry up! I think I scared him off. He’s heading out under the other side.”

  She joined him, took his hand, and together they circled around the trailer, the blazing bright beam from the flashlight illuminating everything in their path.

  “There he is.” He pointed. “See!”

  She looked and saw a thick, squat animal the size of a large cat lumbering along. She could make out its quills. She laughed at its clumsy waddle, its complete lack of grace. Nate put his arm around her, and together, they watched it disappear into the woods. “So cool,” he said, and Helen turned and looked at him, saw his huge, excited smile.

  “I love you,” she said, kissing his cheek.

  Nate went back to the trailer, got down on his knees, and peered underneath.

  “Man, those teeth do a lot of damage. If he’d kept at it, he would have gone right through the floor and ended up cuddling in bed with us.”

  “God, I hope not!”

  “I’ve heard they like plywood. It’s the glue
, I think. They also like anything people have sweated on, like ax handles.”

  “Glue and sweat, great tastes.”

  “To a porcupine, yeah,” he said.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get back to bed.”

  On the way in, he stopped in the kitchen, grabbed his nature journal to write down the details of the porcupine sighting. So far he had several pages of notes and sketches, mostly of birds, including the great blue heron.

  “Come on,” she said. “You can document your Mr. Nibbles encounter in the morning.”

  He crawled into bed beside her, put his arm around her. “Nothing like that at the condo in Connecticut,” he said, clearly still excited. A supersized rodent that ate plywood and ax handles might be a nightmare to some, but to Nate it was a thrill.

  She kissed his neck, gave it a gentle nibble as she pushed her body against his, heard his breathing quicken. “Still thinking about the porcupine?” she whispered.

  “Not at all,” he said, his hands moving up under her nightgown, tugging it off.

  . . .

  An hour later, she lay awake thinking of the porcupine, remembering the terrible, grinding sound of it chewing. Nate, of course, was out cold, naked beside her, his limp arm draped over her stomach.

  She closed her eyes, willed herself to sleep.

  But she couldn’t get the chewing noises from her head.

  She imagined an old woman with pointed teeth chewing her way up through their floor.

  My what big teeth you have.

  She woke to sunlight streaming in through their small, narrow, prisonlike rectangular bedroom window. God help them if there was ever a fire in another part of the trailer—they’d never get out.

  Nate was not beside her. She looked at her watch. Nearly nine o’clock. How had she managed to sleep so late? And how had she not noticed Nate getting out of bed?

  She crawled down to the bottom of the bed, slid off, and grabbed her robe from the door. There was a pot of coffee waiting in the kitchen. She poured a cup, pulled on her sneakers, and went outside to find Nate. The sun hadn’t come up from behind the hill yet and the air felt cool. But the black flies were out: tiny, godforsaken creatures that swarmed, found every patch of exposed skin and left bites that itched like crazy. They’d already gone through three bottles of eco-friendly DEET-free bug repellent (which Helen was convinced the little bastards actually liked the scent of) and Nate was finally at the point of agreeing to try something a little more hard-core. As they swarmed her face, Helen vowed to go buy a can of OFF! today. And maybe a hat with an attached veil made of fine mesh netting—she’d seen one at Ferguson’s in the hunting section. She’d look like an idiot, but she was sick to death of being eaten alive.