The Unwelcome

by Jacob Steven Mohr

  Kait screamed—but the hand over her mouth only tightened. She felt like the blankets were constricting around her, squeezing in like a cocoon. The pressure from above increased, and Kait, now firmly pinned beneath the weight of the intruder, felt a big smooth hand stroking her arm through the sheet, running down to the ticklish spot just inside her right elbow.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you at the gas station,” said Lutz—only it wasn’t Lutz, not his voice, not his weight, not his hands, all wrong, wrong, wrong. “Although, from the looks of things, you’re plenty scared now, huh?”

  Kait’s skull felt like a hive of shaken bees: she couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe around the hand across her face. She could feel the dull pressure of his hand moving down her arm to her hip and across her thigh; the cell phone light was pointed straight up at the ceiling now, swaying crazily with the motion of the bed. His shadow surged upwards, spectral and looming, expanding like a cloud of gas.

  But then his weight shifted just right, and Kait’s right hand squirted free of the blanket. Frantically, she reached down through the darkness, her fingertips dragging along the floor, searching blindly until—yes. Her fist closed around something cold and solid and heavy, and she brought it screaming upwards in a wide crazy arc…

  “We’re going to talk through this like reasonable people,” Lutz said. “I’m going to show you I can be reasonable. I’m going to show you just how reasonable I can—”

  The Winchester Model 94 struck him across the side of the skull with a sickening crack, and Lutz loosened his grip and seemed to drift sideways, moving as though through deep water, uttering only a low moan of pain as he fell. Kait rose, shouldering him off the bed as she swung off it herself, the stock of the rifle cuddling into her shoulder as though it had a mind of its own. Her breath came in sharp, gasping barks, and her chest ached as though there had been tight wire mesh squeezing around her lungs that had only now been stripped away.

  The light from the phone had stopped bouncing, and just beyond its broad beam she could make out a quivering form on the floor just behind the bed, blood matted in the hair and trickling down one pallid temple. Another groan floated up from between the bruised lips, and Lutz’s shoulders heaved as he attempted to stand, but Kait’s fingers found the lever and pulled—and in the tiny dark room, the noise of the gun readying to fire sounded like the hard knock of thunder.

  “Don’t you move,” Kait snarled, her chest heaving. “Don’t you fucking move.”

  The form on the floor obeyed, sinking lower behind the bed as though it could disappear, just sink into the floor and vanish forever. She skirted the bed, circling towards the door where the light switch was. “How’s it feel, huh? I’ve got you, you son of a bitch. How does it feel? How does it fucking feel?” Kait’s right shoulder brushed against the wall; now she’d have to take her hand off the trigger to find the switch. She could hear muffled voices through the door, and the shuffling of sock-feet approaching.

  Here they come, she thought to herself.

  And then, crazily: And a Happy Valentine’s Day to you, Alice.

  Out loud, she said, “Here’s how reasonable I can be. You move, and I’ll blow your fucking head off.” And as Alice and Riley burst through the door beside her, Kait took her hand off the trigger guard just long enough to flick the switch up and bathe the bedroom in light.

  But as her vision cleared, Alice and Riley let out simultaneous gasps of horror and rushed past her into the room—and Kait’s heart dropped in her chest like a lump of lead. The body behind the bed was once again struggling to rise, but as the bruised and bloodied head reared into view, the face blinking in the sudden light did not belong to Lutz Visgara.

  “I promise this isn’t what it looks like,” Ben gurgled through a mouthful of blood.

  Chapter 7

  Ben Alden Walks Under the Moon

  – thirty minutes ago –

  Ben barely made it through the bathroom door before the contents of his stomach churned, heaved, and beat a grisly escape up his esophagus and into the dark bowl of the toilet. He sank to his knees, pitched forward, his hands white-knuckle tight on the rim of the bowl, panting heavily and trying with all his might not to think about the slosh of his vomit hitting the surface of the water seconds before. He stayed there, kneeling as if in worship, for perhaps ten minutes, feeling the cold laminate beneath his bare knees as the dark bathroom swirled around him in dizzying circuits.

  When his stomach quit tossing, he thought to himself, he was going to strangle Riley Loomis for doing this to him. Twice, if he could manage it.

  Finally he stood, stifling a groan so as not to wake Alice, who was snoring in the next room. He hadn’t heard her come in; he’d gone to bed in a blue drunken haze, his senses and passions dulled as though beneath a carpet of thick foam. But now that his belly was empty, the fog began to clear, and fractured images from the evening before began to creep in, each poking at the dying fire that was all that remained of his anger. Names rolled around in his head like small steel bearings, colliding, clacking together, sending off showers of sparks: Riley. Alice. Kait. Lutz Visgara. This last name he mumbled aloud, which sent up alarm flares. Why should he think of him now, of all times? When the name tumbled from his mouth, it was like finding a gun you didn’t remember buying stashed in your sock drawer. Alarming at first, perhaps—but perhaps oddly fortuitous as well, if you were looking for a gun.

  Ben flushed the toilet and staggered sideways to the sink, first running cool water over his hands, then cupping them and sucking the water into his mouth and swishing. It came to him just as the first needle of pain skewered his temple—the beginnings of what promised to be a barnstorming hangover. Where, exactly, had things gone volcanic last night? He could remember the sounds of shouting, feel them ringing bright and sharp in his ears, but he could barely recall a single word that had been thrown against him. Every minute past nine wavered in limbo, lost in the plane between memory and invention, a stark photographic negative of a night.

  But still those four names rattled in his head, around and around and around.

  Riley. Alice. Lutz.

  Kait fucking Brecker.

  He spat, cupped again, swished again, spat again. Kait—he could picture her clearly, standing on tiptoe, turning around with the hunting rifle cradled in her arms. He could feel, again, the drop of his stomach as she’d thrust the gun into his hands, his arms going numb with fear as he felt the terrible weight of the weapon in his grip. He saw her smirking across the dinner table at him, then again across the circle of bodies at Truth or Dare, saw it so clearly he could swear she was there with him in the bathroom, close enough to touch…

  And now she was sleeping. Sleeping, while he shivered in the darkness, puking and trying not to wake his girlfriend—if she was his girlfriend anymore, after last night.

  Ben’s stomach churned, but the wave of nausea was quickly swept away by a new sensation: though the bathroom and the water on his hands and face were very cold, a small ember of warmth was beginning to glow deep in his guts, smooth and fluid and probing, pushing small tendrils of heat into his darker corners. Ben stood frozen, exploring this new feeling—but as the minutes passed, he began to struggle against it, though it was like wrestling with a bonfire. This warm thing inside of him, it wanted to grow. It wanted to take him again.

  It wanted to show him something.

  Ben’s hands rose, switched off the faucet, wiped his lips. His eyes had adjusted to the dark at last, and the room suddenly swung into sharp focus. There was a mirror hanging just above the sink, and Ben could see the entire bathroom rendered in the reflection. But he could not see his own face. Only a dim blob where he knew he stood, only a vague shadow where his features ought to be. His limbs felt thick and heavy, as though his flesh was a suit of clothes one size too large, and there was no feeling in them anymore. But he could see, or at least sense, when his right hand swung up slowly, open palmed, and when
it was right in front of his face it squeezed into a tight fist.

  Never stop making her pay, Benji-Boy.

  “Who’s there?” he cried out—but the sounds would not come up. His lips rebelled, his tongue lay dormant in the groove of his jaw. But his body was in motion: He took two soft steps back from the mirror and turned, padding back into his bedroom, a passenger within his own flesh. The warmth had spread, pushing out into his arms and legs, rising even to the surface of his skin as it surged through him.

  Alice had stopped snoring. As Ben moved past their bed, she let out a low sigh and mumbled, “Ben?” her voice thick and hoarse with fatigue.

  “Go back to sleep.”

  Alice sat up—out of the corner of his eye, Ben could sense her broad silhouette rising from the bed, her hair clown-crazy as she yawned and rubbed her eyes. “Did you throw up?” she asked. “Sounded pretty bad in there.”

  “Go back to sleep, Alice,” he repeated. His hand was inches from the doorknob.

  “Did you…” Alice paused, seemed to steel herself. “Do you feel better now? After all that?” she asked. “To get it all out?” And when no reply came, she sighed again and sank back to her pillow. “I want us to talk to them tomorrow,” she murmured. “Riley and Kaity. To apologize to them, y’know? I can’t get what Riley said out of my head.” Still Ben said nothing. “Anyway, I’ll talk to Riley, but you and Kaity…”

  Another pause followed, but when Ben’s fist tightened around the door handle, Alice said, in a small sad voice: “I want you to promise me, Ben.”

  At this, Ben turned, feeling his cheeks push up in a lopsided smile. “I’ll talk to her,” he said. “You’re right. It’s the right thing to do.” He shuffled around the corner of the double bed, sitting down on the comforter next to Alice as she slid her feet aside to make room for him. His hand snaked under the sheets, found hers, squeezed the fingers affectionately.

  “You know I love you,” he said, “don’t you, Alice?”

  Alice shifted on the bed, her hand going clammy in his. “You’ve never said that to me before,” she murmured. “You… I mean, do you mean it?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “All right.” She pulled her hand out of his grip, only to thread her fingers through his. “Then… Then I love you, too, Ben.” And with that her grip slackened, and she rolled back over as if to sleep, though her breathing seemed to catch in her chest. “And… you’ll talk to her tomorrow?” she asked, more confidently this time.

  Ben leaned down and kissed his girlfriend on the cheek. “It’s tomorrow now,” he replied. Then he rose from the bed and padded silently out of the room.

  The time was 3:08 a.m.

  The den was gloomy but not dark as he swung the bedroom door closed behind him, easing the catch into place so as not to disturb Alice or wake Riley. There was a moon in the back window, a frowny-faced sliver of white, flooding the back half of the cabin with dull silver light that seemed to suck the color out of everything it touched. Riley lay sprawled on the leather sofa, a throw blanket with a fringe covering her body to the waist; even in the gloom, Ben’s eyes could make out the swell of her bosom rising and falling as she slept, lying there on her back with one arm flung up just behind her head. Her blonde hair, rendered silver-brown by the moonlight, fanned out across her pillow like a hand of cards, and her other arm dangled off the sofa, trailing on the rug with her fingertips inches from a crushed beer can lying on its side.

  But all this Ben took in with a mere cursory glance as he crept forward, shuffling his feet, avoiding creaky boards and crumpled empties with a cat’s grace, even though his limbs felt like soft lead. In moments, he had crossed the entire room and found himself standing before the other bedroom door, staring above it at the empty gun rack. Then he leaned forward, pressed his ear to the cool wood of the door, and listened.

  He could hear her breathing through the door.

  Passion sprang up in him; his heart beat very fast, and chills scurried down his flanks and the insides of his legs, though the core of him, the warm point of twinkling light holed up in his gut, remained unaffected, like a candle shielded from the wind. His hands twitched. He wanted to throw the door open, to tear it off its hinges with all the cruel leverage his body could employ, but instead he pressed a palm to the knob, teasing the door open with only the quietest of clicks. Behind him, Riley stirred but did not wake, and no cry of alarm rose up from the bedroom beyond—and now he was staring into the darkness, at the double bed that stretched nearly the entire length of the tiny cabin room, and at its single occupant curled up in a tight ball beneath the sheets and breathing softly…

  There he stood: framed in the open doorway, the moon at his back, cooling his heels on the bare boards. As the silence settled, he became aware of a clock ticking somewhere else in the house, and a little later, an owl hooted out in the forest. Soon his legs began to ache, but he did not lean against the doorframe or even shift his weight from one foot to the other. He let his breathing slow, matching the rhythm of the soft, steady breaths that rose and fell from the bed not four feet from where he stood. Time passed in easy silence. He breathed in; Kait Brecker breathed out.

  And then, as if at some secret signal, he strode forward and shut the door behind him.

  * * *

  He heard the crack—and the pain that exploded in his left temple shook him like the impact of a tremendous wave. Ben tumbled through open space, feeling weightless and adrift until his shoulder bounced hard off a wall and he crashed, face-first, into the floor. Darkness pressed in from all corners: he tasted copper and something like sunscreen, and when he moved his lips to taste them they cleaved together, sticking like licked stamps. There was something tacky and stiff in his hair; his ears crackled and hummed every time he moved or twitched his head to the left or right. And though his skull felt like a bowling alley on league night, he could hear voices through the roar of agony—somebody shouting, screaming in a high ragged voice, the words crashing like surf over his head:

  “Don’t you move… Don’t you fucking move…”

  Ben’s eyelids flickered: he’d had them squeezed shut and hadn’t noticed. The room was beginning to take shape around him, slowly, as though through condensation that was just beginning to burn off under the sun. There was a bed, a nightstand, a window with the curtains drawn and only a wafer-sliver of moon slicing through beneath the gap. His body was wedged down between the bedframe and the wall, with the floor pressing up under his cheek and his legs all jumbled like a marionette’s, and somebody was standing above him. Her breathing was raspy, almost shuddering as she moved towards him, inching along the wall on the opposite side of the bed from where he lay.

  Kait—he knew at once it was her, both by the sound of her voice and by the feeling of her eyes on him. There could be no mistake. He’d driven ten hours with the girl staring holes in the back of his head. He knew the pressure of her gaze now, but never before had he felt such an abominable chill when she looked at him. And he couldn’t even properly see her; the room was dark, and her body was only a shadow floating above him.

  Ben’s shoulders heaved upward as he struggled to rise, but the sound of a bullet chambering sent him sprawling once more. Chuk-chok! A noise he’d only ever heard in movies before this, but the sound was unmistakable—so quiet it was almost a whisper. Like the sound of a key turning inside a well-geared lock. And he’d seen the barrel of that hunting rifle out of the corner of his eye as he slumped to the floor, seen the moonlight glinting off the oiled tip.

  The muzzle had been pointed directly between his eyes.

  Ben’s mind raced, but his thoughts were scattered by fear and the thudding pain in his head. He flicked his eyes from Kait’s planted feet to the bedroom door, both dimly visible under the bed skirt. Have to get away from here. Have to—no. No, have to warn the others. Have to wake Alice and tell her. Tell her that—unless…

  Terror struck him like a fast-acting poison.

  Unless she got
Alice already.

  Unless she’s saving me for last.

  Ben pressed upwards once more, struggling to climb to his feet, but his trembling muscles betrayed him, refusing to lift his weight more than a few inches off the floor. Hot tears of pain and terror welled up—but even this response failed him. His body simply refused to cry. Instead, he lay twitching beneath the bed, a hundred terrible thoughts pinging through his mind like ricocheting gunfire, but none were louder than the voice of his father, repeating the words he’d said the afternoon Ben learned his high school girlfriend had taken up with another woman:

  You should have seen this coming, Benji-Boy.

  “Here’s how reasonable I can be,” Kait was saying. And the last thing that flashed through Ben’s head was the ridiculous question of whether or not he should put his hands in the air while he waited for the end to come.

  But the end didn’t come.

  Instead, the room exploded with light—and at first, Ben thought this was the impact of the bullet ripping through him, but then the door banged open and there were warm hands slipping under each arm and dragging him awkwardly upward. The hands struggled with his weight and only managed to hoist him into a half-crouch before he collapsed sideways on the bed, and there he lay in a stupor, his head reeling. The air was full of a thick soup of female voices, all talking at once very loudly, mixing in the air like a flock of startled birds.

  “…get some water and paper towels, he…”

  “…just came in and got on top of me, like…”

  “…you could have killed him, Kait. You’re…”

  “…bleeding everywhere. Might even have…”

  “…not listening to me. I couldn’t stop him. I had to…”

  From there, the conversation was largely muddled: there was blood drying in Ben’s ears and over his eyes and lips, but now somebody was sponging it away and putting firm pressure on the cut above his ear, keeping his head still between gentle hands. He was staring straight up into the light on the ceiling, and with the pain in his head and the constant dizzying motion of the room, he felt like he was staring straight into the blinding eye of heaven.