The Unwelcome

by Jacob Steven Mohr

  Riley winked and skipped around to her side of the station wagon, and Alice climbed into the passenger seat beside Ben and reached for her buckle. “Are we done here?” Ben sighed, rubbing an eyelid with two fingers. “Everybody get their business sorted?” But before Alice could answer, he’d already started the car and cranked the music back up. Riley started singing along to “Run Through the Jungle,” and at the chorus Ben’s colorful baritone joined in, trying his best to harmonize.

  “Oh. By the way. Here.” Kaity tapped Alice’s shoulder, tossed a plastic shopping bag into her lap. “For the rest of the drive,” she said in a whisper that cut through the music.

  Ben, still singing, trundled the station wagon out of the gravel lot and back onto the side road, and Alice rustled open Kaity’s gift: a pair of ruby-red sunglasses stared back at her from the bottom of the bag. Alice smiled and slipped them on, her heart feeling like a gooey candy-apple in her chest. It was a cheap, brittle set of glasses, tight around her ears and across the bridge of her nose, and the lenses fogged up every time she exhaled. They could not have cost more than five dollars.

  But that didn’t matter. Not to Alice Gorchuck. She turned back in her seat, stealing a last glance at Kaity’s nose and mouth nodding silently under the flap of her hood, then turned bravely back into the sun. They were just right. They would always be just right.

  Chapter 3

  Skin

  The sun screamed across the sky, and before long it trespassed the western horizon, throwing long fingers of shadow across the road in front of the station wagon. Kait smooshed her cheek against the cold glass, staring sidelong at the bare trees and empty gray fields whipping by in arrhythmic blurs. Powerlines did their dip-and-rise dance on their poles, and in the far distance, the pale form of a Simmes Creek water tower rose against the sky like an enormous fist, raised to strike the world a blow. Across the back seat from her, Riley had her window cracked and was trying to smoke a cigarette through the narrow slit between the glass and ceiling. Frigid February road winds blew her long blonde hair around like a checkered flag; to Kait, it looked like a huge moth with big blonde wings had mistaken her face for a lightbulb and was trying to dash itself to pieces against her cheeks and neck.

  Kait shook herself, made fists with her eyelids, shook herself again. The hours between then and when he’d shown up in the gas station were a damp and shaky blur, but the Polaroid image of Lutz coming through the door—just appearing there, like a magician’s final showstopper trick—made her fingers tremble and her stomach knot every time she called it up. There had been no fanfare, no creeping dread or tingling suspense to herald his entrance. He simply arrived, just as he always did, breezily and utterly careless, like he owned the joint or didn’t give two shits who did. Right back inside of her world and inside of her life with a crooked smile and a wave. Hi there, didja miss me?

  In a moment of acute panic, Kait wondered if she could ever look at a door the same way again, without fearing that Lutz Visgara would just waft through whenever he wanted, wherever she went. After all—how, exactly, had he found her? What had given her away? Could he do it again? Did he know where she was right now?

  But the feeling passed as quickly as it had come, bubbling away to nothing in the pit of Kait’s stomach. She was better than that, wasn’t she? That was the point of tagging along on this fucking trip. Wasn’t it? To prove she could be better? That she could keep herself in line?

  But who are you going to prove it to? wheedled the dark little voice inside of her. There’s nobody here but us, Heart-Brecker. And we both know it’ll take a whole hell of a lot more than a change of scenery to cure you.

  “Cure me of what?” she snarled back, almost out loud but without moving her lips.

  The voice chuckled. Of you, silly. Always of you.

  “Shit, that was our road,” Ben groaned. He turned down the music, bumped onto the shoulder, and pulled a sloppy U-turn onto an unmarked dirt road leading straight on into thick forest. “Won’t be long now—Riley, dammit, put that out, this isn’t my car…”

  Riley smirked at Kait before flicking the smoldering butt out the window. Kait tugged her hood off her head and shouldered her headphones, then scrubbed fog off her window and pressed her nose to the glass. There were no leaves on the trees outside, but they stood close enough together that their branches filtered out the sun’s fading light almost entirely, forming a wall of sheer darkness only a couple dozen feet beyond the edge of the road. And as the station wagon trundled deeper and deeper into the woods, the shadows constricted into a narrow tube around the vehicle until there were no woods anymore, just the twin yellow ovals of the headlights pushing back endlessly against the black.

  “Alice, Kaitlyn, check it.” Cranked to max brightness, Riley’s phone screen lit up the back seat like a flashlight blasting in Kait’s eyes. She squinted into the antiseptic glow as Alice craned her neck around to see Riley’s home screen, cluttered with social media alerts and with a photo of a fat orange cat as her background.

  “What am I looking at?” Kait asked in a monotone. Her headache, forgotten through the afternoon, was beginning to resurface, pulsing like a kick-drum just behind her right ear.

  “Who’s Cormac?” Alice cooed.

  Riley flipped her phone around and flicked a text alert away. “None of your business, sweetie,” she scolded, slapping Alice playfully on the shoulder. “Anyway, lookit.” She tapped the upper left corner of the screen. “No bars… Data service’s getting spotty… And there’s the small matter of that it’s dark as shit outside…” She grinned wickedly, holding the lit screen under her chin. “I think our Benjamin Alden’s brought us out here to kill us. Oh-ho-ho-ho.”

  “Thwarted again,” Ben deadpanned. “And I only needed a few more square inches of skin to finish my Buffalo Bill suit. Ohho-ho-ho.” Alice and Riley giggled, but Kait felt a muscle tighten in her midsection. She tried to smile, but the most her face could manage was a lip-twisting grimace. Pain twinged in her head, flashing like a warning.

  “But give it to me straight, is Ted Levine not a hunk in that movie?” Riley said, rolling her window up at last. “Honest to God. I’d let him kill me. Wear my skin, I don’t care. I just want to look at him.”

  Kait’s face went rigid, the Halloween half-smile frozen on her face. “Buffalo Bill was not a hunk,” she said, her voice shaking.

  “That’s so gross, Riles,” Alice agreed, but she was stifling a laugh just the same.

  Riley tapped her phone a few times, then showed the rest of the car a picture of a stringy haired man with eyes like glacial ice. “But you can see it, right?” she urged. “In the eyes? Man, talk about intensity—”

  Kait’s hand lashed out, snatched the phone out of Riley’s hand and pressed it, screen-down, against the seat between them. Then everything in the station wagon seemed to freeze. Riley and Alice stared, their expressions terrifyingly unreadable in the darkness. A silent moment passed. Then two.

  “Kaity…?” Alice began.

  “What’re you all looking at back there?” Ben asked.

  “Buffalo Bill… James Gumb… killed women,” Kait said, every word quivering. You can stop talking now. “He kidnapped them…” Stop any time. “Kept them in a well for weeks…” Just shrug and say you were wrong. “And then he took their skins.” You didn’t know what you were saying. “He wore them like costumes.” Still not too late, Heart-Brecker.

  But no, onward, forward to the big finish:

  “…and you, you want to fuck him.”

  Too late. Now, let’s see what you’ve won…

  Slowly, almost warily, Riley retrieved her phone, tugging it free of Kait’s grip. Kait folded her arms, her face stiff as a mask and hot as a stove. “So you did see the movie,” Riley said at last. She mirrored Kait’s posture, her arms folded across her chest, the phone buzzing dully in her left hand. “Guess I figured you wrong—I had you pegged as more of a chick flick kind of girl.”

  “Yeah,” Kai
t said, staring at her knees in the dark. “You had me wrong.”

  “Then let’s talk about it.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about.”

  “Kaity—”

  “Don’t call me that,” Kait snapped. “I told you not to call me that anymore.”

  Alice leaned forward to protest, but Riley put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Hey, you heard her,” she said. “There’s nothing to talk about. Let’s leave it, huh?” Alice tried to shrug the hand away, but Riley leaned in quickly and whispered something in her ear. The two girls stayed frozen like this, locked in a strange half-hug, until Alice nodded silently and slowly returned to her normal sitting position.

  “How much further, Ben?” she asked.

  “That’s it up ahead,” came the reply. And indeed, the station wagon came to a stop in a small grassy lot in front of a one-story cabin, the narrow front porch all lit up in the headlights’ forceful beam. Ben threw the E-brake, popped the trunk, and swung his legs out on his side. Riley threw open her passenger door and thumped the roof with her fist.

  “All ashore who’s going ashore!” she sang out. Alice climbed out silently without so much as a backwards glance. Kait felt like crying.

  Too fucking late, Heart-Brecker.

  By the time Kait emerged from the station wagon, the others had almost finished tussling their bags and backpacks out of the trunk. Kait’s things—one small airport suitcase, a parachute duffel, and a pillow with no pillowcase—were piled on the ground by the back bumper. She mutely gathered them up in her arms and followed behind Riley as Ben led the group up the porch steps and hunted for the key along the top of the doorframe, using his phone as a makeshift flashlight. The temperature had dropped again, and Kait pulled her hood’s drawstrings, constricting her field of view to a misshapen oblong. She tried not to shiver; her headache was getting worse by the second, and even the impact of her footsteps sent bolts of pain scurrying across her skull.

  At last Ben got the door open. “Let’s get some lights on,” he said, holding the door open for the girls. Riley and Alice stumbled through, but Ben stopped Kait at the door with a jutting shoulder.

  “You listen to me carefully,” he told her through a toothy smile, his voice so friendly it was almost sing-song. “I don’t get it. Why you’re here. Alice begged and begged me to bring you along, but…” He sighed, glanced over his shoulder, returned his gaze to Kait. “Look—do you want to be here or don’t you? I honestly can’t tell.”

  Heat rose in her stomach. “I want to be here,” she said, but her hands curled into fists inside of her baggy Arm-C sweatshirt sleeves.

  “Then cut that shit out,” Ben hissed. “Back in the car… I can’t take any more of that. This whole thing was supposed to be for me and Alice, but if you make this suck for me, so help me God, I’ll make it about you. I’ll turn it around on you so fast it’ll make your head spin. Now, look me in the eye and tell me we’re not going to have any more problems here on out. Tell me, Ben, it’s gonna be smooth sailing.”

  The heat was a cauldron boiling inside her; her fists shook at her sides, and she had to grind her teeth to keep her face from twisting into a rictus of disgust. It’d be so easy, she thought. Alice had shown her the way not a few hours before, to deck this ass, with his cabled sweater and his Patrick Bateman horn-rimmed glasses… To wipe that fucking grin off his face, at least, that smug, lopsided grin that suddenly reminded her of Lutz, so very much like Lutz…

  But then she thought of the silence in the back of the station wagon, of the way Riley had stared at her pityingly in the dark. Of the tears in Alice’s voice when she turned away, how her shoulders had trembled. One finger at a time, her fists uncurled and her brow smoothed. Her teeth still ground in her jaw, but she was able to look Ben in the eye without sneering.

  “Aye-Aye, Captain,” she said, clicking her heels and throwing up a snappy salute, nearly dropping her pack in the process. The two stared at each other a long moment, and when Ben finally frowned and broke the look, Kait realized she’d been holding her breath.

  “Fine. After you,” he said, propping the door for her as well.

  Kait squeezed past him with a sigh of relief. The interior of the little cabin was already warming up with two bodies moving around inside; Alice had disappeared through one of the two bedroom doors, and Riley had dumped her bags across the cracked leather couch that faced an empty fireplace and a huge oil painting of an America Indian waving solemnly. The floors were old hardwood, but an impressive array of braided rugs covered nearly every inch, like moss on a forest floor. A sliding glass door with thick tan curtains over it led out the back of the cabin—presumably to the lake Ben hadn’t stopped crowing about before they left—and above this, a ten-point buck’s head gaped at them from a fixture on the wall.

  Kait looked around, scanning near the low ceiling, and spotted several sets of antlers set in the walls, one of which had been converted into a light fixture near the little kitchen area. A hunting cabin, then. Ben hadn’t mentioned that—but Ben hadn’t told her much of anything about the trip. And Alice, she imagined, couldn’t have known. But it was just as well. If they were really going to do the whole rustic thing for three nights, they might as well go whole hog.

  “Kaitlyn! Yo!”

  Kait’s headache flanged. Riley was waving her over from one corner of the leather couch, sitting with her long tan legs kicked over one broad sofa-arm. “Got a weak signal .” She beamed, showing Kait her phone. “But I still bet they won’t deliver us pizza out here, huh?”

  Kait shrugged, resisting the urge to massage her temples. “We should get our stuff to the bedroom, right?” she said, easing her backpack to the ground to rest her shoulder. “Make some room out here for when we start eating.”

  Riley’s eyebrows jumped up. “Oh. Oh, no, don’t worry about that. The bedroom’s all yours. This couch is just fine for me.”

  Kait’s heart sank, though she couldn’t place why. “I mean…” she began. “I wouldn’t make you do that. I know we don’t know each other that well, but I’m sure there’s room enough for both of us, and it’s not for very long…”

  “Trust me—you don’t wanna bunk with this Loomis,” Riley assured her. “I snore. I drool. I toss and turn. You’re better off shacking up with Rudolph over there.” She angled her head at the deer head on the wall. “Don’t worry,” she continued warmly, though her smile didn’t reach her eyes. “We’ll still have plenty of time to hang out. We just won’t be getting as friendly with each other as Benjamin and Alice, right?”

  Kait shrugged and grabbed her pillow and duffel, then tromped over to her bedroom door. She’d known all along she wouldn’t be sharing a room with Alice, but she hadn’t figured on getting… penned up like this. But that would solve everybody’s problem real nicely, wouldn’t it? Nail some boards over the door from the outside to keep good old Heart-Brecker from ruining their good time. She opened the door and tossed her things onto the double bed inside. Fine, then—Riley could have her couch. There wasn’t enough room for three people in the bed anyhow.

  Riley, Kait, and Buffalo fucking Bill.

  She crept from the room just in time to see Alice and Ben emerging from the opposite door, Ben’s arm around her shoulder and hers about his waist. “We were thinking of going down to see the lake before we start cooking,” Ben announced to the room. “Or at least, before we get too deep into the—Holy Mother of God, where did that come from?”

  Kait followed his pointing finger: right above her head, a wooden rack was fixed to the wall above the bedroom door holding a long, well-polished hunting rifle. How had she not noticed it before? Dangling above her like the Sword of Damocles itself? This was a hunting cabin, after all—it stood to reason the place should be armed to the teeth. Kait took a step towards it, sweeping her eyes up and down the weapon’s length. It was a beautiful piece: smooth wood stock, polished so bright it almost looked like horn, and a black, oily muzzle. Whoever had owned the rifle ha
d taken immaculate care of it, or had never handled it at all. Kait wondered if the gun had even ever been fired.

  “Who’s the hunter in your family, Ben?” Alice asked. “You didn’t mention it before we got up here.”

  “I… don’t know,” he replied slowly. “I haven’t been here since I was a kid. The place looks completely different than I remember.” His head cocked to one side, like somebody admiring a display of pinned butterflies, though his eyes were wide and his brows held high.

  “Maybe it’s your famous Uncle Theodor’s?” Riley offered from the couch.

  “Oh-ho, I doubt it. Ted’s a big gun control nut. He used to push for those neighborhood-by-neighborhood buyback programs you’d hear about sometimes. He’d go house to house with his kids made up like corpses to raise awareness about school shootings.”

  “I assume,” Kait put in, not taking her eyes off the rifle, “that this was before your Uncle Ted went to the meth.”

  Kait didn’t turn around, but she knew Ben was rolling his eyes. “Yes. That was before he went to ‘the meth’.”

  “I wonder if it’s loaded,” she said.

  Everyone went quiet. Kait turned around to see the other three staring at her, equal mixes of shock and fear on their faces. Alice and Riley’s eyes were round, but Ben looked as though he’d bitten into something sour—or something with a bug in it.

  “Of course it’s not loaded,” Alice broke the silence with a nervous giggle. “Nobody would leave a loaded gun above a bedroom door—would they?”

  “That’s a good point,” Ben replied. “Why the hell is it above the bedroom door? Seems morbid, right?”

  Riley righted herself on the couch and crept up behind the rest of the group. “Benjamin, you should check,” she said, grinning maliciously.

  “Check what?”