The Unwelcome

by Jacob Steven Mohr

  “Get Ben,” she said at last.

  Alice sniffed mucus somewhere behind her. “Kaity, what—”

  “Get your boyfriend, Alice.” Kait cut her off without turning, her voice sharp and cold as the air she breathed. “And for the love of God, don’t touch anybody—and don’t let anybody touch you. Now go!”

  She heard the other girl scurry away and, seconds later, Ben burst through the cabin’s front door, his face half-lathered in shaving cream, a forest green bathrobe clenched closed over his bare chest. He took the porch stairs in a tumble, landing heavily on his hands and knees on the gravel before scrambling to his feet. Riley pursued—at a safe distance, thankfully, skidding to a halt on the porch when Ben took his fall, with Alice close behind her.

  “What’s going on?” Ben asked, looking around the lot. “Alice said there—”

  Then his eyes fixed on the car. On the face drawn in blood.

  “Oh, God,” he said. “Oh God, oh God, oh God…”

  “The battery’s gone,” Kait reported, watching the color drain from his face. “I don’t know what happened. Alice was in the car. She said it wouldn’t—”

  But before she could finish, before she could even think, Ben had crossed the yard, mounted the porch, and grabbed hold of Alice’s shoulders.

  “Let her go!” he bellowed.

  Kait waited for Alice to protest, to struggle, but she only hung limp in his grip, letting herself be shaken without objection. Her eyes were round with surprise, but there was no fear on her colorless face, which showed every freckle—her mouth was a hard, straight line and remained shut. The pile of crimson hair, matted to one side by sleep, bounced to and fro as her head wobbled around on her neck.

  “You let her go,” Ben snarled again—but there was no biting power in his voice. Fear had stripped it. “You son of a bitch,” he said, “you leave her alone. You don’t get to do this to her, she hasn’t done anything to you. Whose blood is that? You tell me, whose blood is that?”

  “Goddammit, Benjamin!”

  Riley pressed between them, tearing Ben’s hands away by seizing hold of his wrists. They stared at each other, Ben towering over her, red in the face and puffing heavily, his breath fogging the cold morning air. Riley’s eyes narrowed, and suddenly she raised her hand and slapped him hard across the face.

  “Get hold of yourself,” she hissed. “What’s shaking her going to do? Huh? It won’t bring your battery back—”

  “Fuck my battery!” Ben cried, nearly screaming. Riley’s slap seemed not to have reached him at all. “He hurt her. He made her make that… that thing in the car. Where did he get the blood?” He repeated this twice, looking over Riley’s shoulders at Kait, his voice rising with every word. “The blood—where did he get all that blood?”

  “It’s all right, Ben,” Alice interposed at last, raising her voice as well. “I’m… I’m me, for now. He hasn’t got me. And I’m not hurt—at least, I think I’m not hurt…”

  “Damn it all, that doesn’t matter,” Riley huffed, throwing up her hands. “Don’t you understand? We had him cornered. We knew who he was driving. Now he’s in the wind. He could be either one of you.”

  “Any of you,” Kait corrected quietly.

  Three faces turned toward her, slowly and in unison, like satellite dishes rotating.

  “You touched her, Riley,” she continued. “And you touched Ben.” She felt loose, distant, almost weightless, like she was floating somewhere above this scene instead of standing in the middle of it. “You let him in—or you passed him on. Either way, any one of you three could be a Lutz, now. That’s how you said it works, didn’t you? By touch? Skin on skin?”

  For the briefest instant, nobody moved—then Alice let out a high wail, and there was a shuffle of gravel as all three bodies leaped back from each other, eyes wild, throwing their hands out before them in makeshift walls. The scene looked like a Mexican standoff, only nobody was holding guns, though their bare hands, Kait thought, were just as dangerous as a bullet.

  “Well… Well, it’s not me,” Riley said at last. “I’d know. I’d feel it…”

  “That’s what you’d have to say,” Ben argued, taking a step back towards the cabin. He gestured with a pointing finger, poking holes in the air. “That’s just what you’d say. If you were. A Lutz, I mean. You wouldn’t admit it.”

  “Well—neither would you! Maybe you’re the Lutz,” Riley protested, “and you’re just trying to throw suspicion on me.”

  “There you go again,” Ben sneered, panic darting across his face like a lizard scrambling across a brick wall. “How did you get past Kait, huh? Your room’s got a window on it. Maybe you didn’t need to sneak past her at all.”

  “Your room had a window, too, you bastard,” Riley shot back. “And yours was closer. I’d know if I was a Lutz. I told you, I’d know—”

  “But how, Riley?” Alice put in, straining to be heard above the other two. “You keep saying that—but I didn’t know. And I did all this without even realizing it. There’s no reason to say it’s not still me.”

  “Wonderful,” Ben said. “Just-fucking-wonderful.” A crazed grin was spreading his cheeks, and he pressed his fists against his temples, leaving his bathrobe hanging open and his torso exposed to the air. “So you’re saying there’s no way to tell now?” he asked. “No way at all? That’s great. That’s just perfect.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Kait said quietly.

  “And now, and now we’re stranded here in the middle of the fucking forest with—what?” Ben made a face like he’d caught a nose-full of something rotten. “All right. So what’s that supposed to mean?”

  Kait shrugged, twitching with cold. “Okay, so yes—there’s no way to tell who’s who,” she said. “There was never going to be a way. He’s been all three of you, and each time, we haven’t been able to tell.” She heard Alice start to protest, but Kait powered through, drowning her out with her own voice. “But it doesn’t matter,” she repeated. “Alice didn’t do this. She didn’t take the car battery out, and she definitely didn’t draw anything in her own blood.”

  Ben squinched his eyes, searching her face. “How do you figure that?”

  “Because…” Kait wrapped her arms around herself, looking again at the ghastly face grinning at her from atop the bloody spear. “Because Lutz would never let anybody but him draw Mister Face.”

  Riley, Alice, and Ben turned toward her, looked at each other, and then turned back to her. Somewhere deep in the forest, a squirrel chattered at a hawk.

  “Mister Who?” Riley said at last.

  Kait looked at her bare feet. “It was stupid. Just another stupid thing we did. My old dorm room had a white board on the outside of the door, and sometimes Lutz would come by to see me and I wouldn’t be there—out at a class or something. He started drawing this stupid cartoon face on the board, always in red, and when I asked him what the fuck it was, he said, That’s Mister Face. Like that was supposed to mean something to me. But it was cute, you know? He started drawing it everywhere, places I’d see it: classroom whiteboards, on the sidewalk in chalk… And every time, it meant the same thing. I was here, Kait. Missed you by a minute. See you soon. I think that’s what it means now.”

  Riley crossed her arms across her stomach, lips twitching. “You think he’s… here?”

  Kait nodded. “And I think he wants me to know he’s here.”

  “But why? And—and how?” Alice clasped her hands, unclasped them, and knotted them together again. “He couldn’t have followed us from the gas station. We’d have seen him.”

  Kait shook her head. “He didn’t need to follow us. He always knew where we were.”

  Ben’s jaw worked; the cords of his neck stood out like ropes on a suspension bridge.

  “You knew,” he said.

  Alice sucked a breath.

  “Ben… Think about this…” Riley said, but Ben only shook his head, growing pink in the cheeks, his glasses flashing.


  “No. You knew all along,” he repeated. “You had us for a while, playing dumb last night, letting us explain the whole thing to you—but the way you talk now, you know way too much. You’ve seen this before. You knew what he could do this whole time.”

  For a moment, Kait couldn’t speak. The air froze in her lungs. Every eye was on her—including the bloody eyes of Mister Face. She could feel them, boring holes in her flesh.

  “I’m trying to protect you,” she said at last.

  Alice’s face crumpled like foil. “Kaity…”

  “What was I supposed to say?” Kait exploded. “What was I supposed to tell you? That my ex-boyfriend was some kind of movie monster? That he could ride you around like a stolen horse just by touching you? You’d think I was crazy. That I was lying to your face.”

  “Because you’ve been so fucking honest with us already,” Ben retorted.

  “I told you, I’m trying to save you!” Kait cried, her hands shaking. “Look, this doesn’t change anything. He’s still got hold of one of you—but he’s here in person, too, and for some reason, he doesn’t want us to leave. I think whatever he was planning, we fucked it up, somehow. We can fuck it up again, but that’s only if we don’t tear each other to pieces first. And that means no matter how much it sucks for you, you’re going to have to trust me.”

  “And what if we can’t,” Ben said.

  All eyes swiveled towards him. He met their gazes, each in turn, but his expression did not change.

  “Ben…” Alice pleaded.

  “I mean it,” he said. “What if we can’t trust you. What happens to us? If… If you’re the mole, somehow. That you’re working with him on this. If what you said is true, that he’s really after all of us, and you’re working with him… Then we’re in danger, right now. You’re the one who knows how to use that gun, not him. Wouldn’t we be safer if we just—”

  Kait felt muscles flex in the backs of her knees and below her shoulders. “I really don’t think you want to be talking like that, Ben,” she said in a low voice.

  But he only gestured to the bandage wound around his temple. “I think I’m exactly the person who should be talking like this.”

  The others looked at her, but Kait only saw Alice, her eyes wet and round and wavering at the corners. She was shivering, teeth rattling against each other in the cold. Or was it fear that shook her? How had Alice looked that first time Kait picked up the gun? At the time, her bead was drawn on Ben, but now the afterimage of Alice’s face emerged from the fog, frozen, a snapshot of a single instant. Memory stretched her features: surprise became shock, fear congealed into stark terror—and why shouldn’t she tremble? Kait’s guts twisted like a pit of snakes. Why shouldn’t she be scared? Hadn’t she come clean to them? Torn the mask away, shown them exactly what writhed beneath?

  Hadn’t she just proven them all exactly right?

  She drew a breath, resolve hardening like cooling iron in her stomach. She should have seen this coming. All this, it was inevitable, all from the start. She should have known there would never be a chance that people like these could ever look at her again, not while this knife was twisting inside her. What did they see? A shattered vase, lying on the floor. Jagged edges. Busted glass, ground into the carpet. Well, all right. She’d show her breaks. She’d be busted glass. She would rescue them from this—then she would disappear.

  This was what they all deserved.

  “You know damn well,” she said, “that can’t be true. If I was really working with Lutz—Ben, I wouldn’t have stopped you last night.”

  The others gasped—Riley swore hideously, Alice raised her voice to protest, but Kait silenced them all with a look that had all the recoil of a gunshot.

  “Shut up. All of you,” she barked. “I’m done explaining myself to you. I’m not working with Lutz. I was never working with Lutz. But I know him. I know what he can do. I’m not going to waste time telling you what kind of a monster he is—you’ve all drawn your own conclusions already. But he’s here. And he’s inside one of you. There’s nothing I can do about that by myself. But together, we can find him. Track his ass down to the ends of the earth and put an end to this. But I can’t do it alone. You’ve got to save yourselves.”

  She paused for breath, feeling tears in the air like the threat of rain, phantom moisture on her cheeks. But she wasn’t ready to cry, though she felt spider-webbed with cracks. Like the air itself might be ready to shatter around her.

  “Riley?” she asked. “Alice?”

  “You’ve got a plan, then?” Riley uttered sullenly. “How do we stop him?”

  Kait shivered, feeling her stomach drop away. “The only way,” she said simply. “With the gun. With a bullet.”

  “Jesus.” Riley looked away, folding her arms under her chest. “Jee-zus, I don’t know.”

  “He had you too,” Alice said suddenly. “All that time—for four months. That’s what he did to you. That’s why you wouldn’t tell me.”

  Her brows were up around her hairline and her mouth hung open, but Kait could detect something incongruous in her tone—a kind of lightness, almost approaching glee.

  “You were a Lutz too,” she said. “Weren’t you, Kaity?”

  Oh, is that what she thinks? clucked a quiet voice—but not so quiet Kait couldn’t hear or almost feel cold breath brushing against her ear. Oh, no-no-no. Tell her, Heart-Brecker. Set the record straight. Not you—it was never you…

  But Kait pressed her lips together and nodded once, then again vigorously, tears finally breaking surface, spilling between her fingers and down her cheeks.

  “Oh, Kaity…” Alice pressed her hands to her face as well, but steel sparked in her eyes. “Get the gun, then,” she said. “And I want you to promise me you’ll get him. Promise me I’ll see it when you… stop him. I want to see you pull the trigger. I want to see him die.”

  Kait shivered again, but she nodded, feeling numbness creep across her body.

  “All right then. Riley, what about you?”

  “Jee-zus,” came the reply. The blonde shrugged, her face still smeared with makeup and set in a sagging mask of fatigue. “Jee-zus, Alice…” She shrugged again, shaking her head in resignation. “What other choice we got…” she said at last—or something like it. She bit down on each word as she said it as if she were trying to crush a wriggling insect inside each one.

  “You’d better know what you’re doing,” Ben muttered. He had his bathrobe tucked around him, one fist holding it closed, the other stuffed down in a big pocket. He was staring up into the skirts of the pine trees, watching the sky—for what, Kait couldn’t say. Perhaps he thought it would fall on his head. Perhaps he was praying for it, like she was. “You’d better be right about this—because if you’re wrong, it’s all on you.”

  “I need you with me, Ben,” Kait said. But she couldn’t look him in the eye, and when he opened his mouth to respond, no sound seemed to come out at all.

  Instead, she heard another voice:

  It doesn’t matter, it said. How long do you think you can lie to them? You cannot change. You know it in your heart now. Eventually the other boot has to drop—and then they’ll find out. And they will find out. Soon they’ll see just how much of you really is busted glass, and they’re going to sweep you under a rug. They’re going to grind you under their heel, Heart-Brecker…

  She wanted to protest. To object—but her strength was gone, crushed under by the cold. She had fought as long as she could, but there was no silencing this now. Maybe that, too, was inevitable. There was no way to shut her up, this ghost, this constant parasite, this passenger inside her empty inside world.

  It was always there, this voice. The voice of that girl.

  All that remained of Jill Cicero.

  “You’re right,” Kait whispered. “I know you’re right.”

  But I’m not going to let anybody else bleed because of me.

  Chapter 12

  Happy Campers

  Riley di
dn’t know when she stopped feeling the cold.

  Somewhere things had got out of sync. There was a cigarette between her lips but she hadn’t lit it, but she’d smoked it almost down to the butt, but she’d just ground the ember under her sole on the gravel. Everybody was talking at once, their voices jumbled, clanging against each other like pots and pans in an overstuffed cubbie. Kaitlyn said something in a low voice that got Alice and Benjamin nodding, and Riley sensed her neck moving her head as well, her field of vision bobbing and ducking as motor neurons fired in eldritch sequence. Overhead the wind rattled dry pine branches together, sending down showers of bark fragments that tumbled around their heads and rattled against the roof of the station wagon. But Riley couldn’t feel the wind’s cold breath, or the bark’s weight tangled in her long hair.

  She couldn’t feel anything at all. Anything but the warmth.

  She wasn’t afraid anymore, not really. She was safe. Safe by this warm fire. Safe in the arms of a shadow, a shadow that bore her face and her form, that moved her and within her with the languid grace of a candle flickering under glass. Its embrace was soothing, almost soporific, its voice mellow and smooth.

  It wanted to show her something.

  “So—where do we look?” she heard herself say, noting with some dull surprise how her lips clung together on each word, sticking in the cold.

  “North is to the lake,” Benjamin replied. He hugged the bathrobe around his shivering shoulders, clenching his jaw to stop his teeth chattering. “We could make a fire-line in the woods. Trap him against the water—”

  Kaitlyn shook her head, cut him off: “What else is out there? Besides forest, I mean.”

  “We’re pretty much alone out here,” he replied, eyeing her warily. “You saw that as we drove in, trees go on for miles. There’s another cabin, but it’s in the opposite direction. My parents say nobody’s gone there for years. I’ve never even seen it—it mighta burned down, or got a tree dropped on it.”

  “He could be there,” Kaitlyn said. “That could be Base Camp One. He wouldn’t just camp out in the woods, he’s too vain for that.”