The Unwelcome

by Jacob Steven Mohr

  They had to lead Alice to the door. She couldn’t see the cabin or the trees or Kait lying on the ground or even the porch steps under her slow feet. Her eyes had filled up with red, and no matter how much she rubbed them, the red would not go away, and neither would the pricking sensation of Kait’s bloody stare pressing into her, even when she was through the door, even when it was shut and locked at her back.

  Chapter 15

  Riley’s Last Dance

  She could hear their voices through the door. No hushed tones now—they didn’t care if she heard them or not. Didn’t need to hide the fact that they were talking about her, Kait Brecker, good old Heart-Brecker herself. There were curtains drawn over both transoms now, but she refused to press her eye to the glass to peer inside. She imagined the dim forms she would see through the gauze: dark, shapeless, distant. She imagined them moving in the shadows. She imagined the wracking cold of the glass on her skin.

  “All I’m saying is, we shouldn’t rule anything out.”

  Ben talking. Ben always talking—in full lawyer mode, each word sharp and penetrating. It hadn’t taken him long to take command of the situation indoors. She could almost see him pacing in front of the dead, cold fireplace, striding across the burnt-red braided rug, poking holes in the air with his finger, gaining leverage inch by inch. It had to be him. She’d known it all along—when this moment came, it would be him at the other end of the wire. But this wasn’t Ben Alden’s fault. She’d done this to herself. An unforced error.

  And now they were about to call the game.

  She was sitting on the cabin porch, her legs folded sideways beneath her, leaning against the door. The blood from the cut in her eyebrow had dried fast, and when she raised her eyebrows she could feel it crackle and shift. She wanted to pick at it, to tear at the scab with her fingers. To pull and pull until she was tearing away living flesh instead of dead scab tissue, until she was all gone, until she had unmade herself the way Cormac had unmade himself. Until there was nothing left for Lutz to steal away.

  “We’re not going to talk about that.”

  Kait jumped. Alice’s voice was just beyond the door, low to the ground, as though she was sitting against it. Kait could press a palm to the wood and be an inch away from her. The picture of it sank into her heart like strong fingers squeezing a stick of soft butter.

  “Alice, you’re not listening—” Ben began.

  “I said we’re not going to talk about that,” Alice snapped. “I don’t care what she did. We’re not at that stage yet. We can’t just—”

  “I want to know why we can’t talk about it.” Riley now, sounding far off. Kait had to strain to catch her words. “We need to come up with a plan.”

  “That’s not a plan.”

  “It’s a start,” Riley countered. “I want to know how we’re getting out of here.”

  “The station wagon’s toast,” Ben said. “So’s the Jeep—so long as Kait wasn’t lying about that. We’re three miles from the main road, and fifty from the nearest gas station or store, and we’re running low on firewood. It’s time to call somebody. To deal with this.”

  “You mean to deal with her.”

  “Alice, honey,” Kait heard Riley say. “Look what she’s already done. I know you two were close, but that body out there—she did that. Or she helped. No matter what else, that’s on her. We need the police.” There was a pause, like static between radio stations. “I’m sorry,” Riley said, closer now. “I know you two were close. I know she was your friend.”

  “Yes,” Alice said. “She was my friend.”

  Something cold and wet touched Kait’s nose, and she looked up to see the first few fat snowflakes tumbling out of the sky. In moments, the air was thick with it: white whirled and danced before her eyes, and soon it was difficult to see the road from the porch. But she could see far enough—out to where Cormac lay, pale against the dark gravel.

  She stood up so suddenly that blood rushed into her head, leaving her unsteady on her feet. She struggled for balance; she did not want to brace herself against the door, not while Alice was sitting there, not while the others were lurking just beyond the barrier. When her vision stopped swimming, she wobbled to the steps and padded down to the lot. The corpse slid fully into view, and then she was standing over it, peering down the length of the wooden spike shoved into the neck’s oozing stump.

  She tried to feel something. To dig down into herself, to conjure the appropriate sentiment. She scowled at Mister Face, then peered around at the surrounding trees. She wondered if she would hear Lutz coming. She hadn’t before—he’d appeared in the door, unspeakably quiet, like dying in your sleep. She wondered what she would say to him, and what he would say to her. She wondered what they would do to each other when the time came.

  On a mad whim, she angled her head down once more, regarding the body.

  “Do you think I killed you?” she said.

  I don’t even know who you are.

  Up floated a deep clear voice that sounded like it had emanated from deep within the chest cavity of the corpse. Kait’s lips kinked in disgust, imagining the neck hole flapping like articulated lips.

  “I’m Kait Brecker,” she said. “Lutz Visgara is my boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend. The boy who… did this.”

  Oh. The syllable appeared in her ears like a sigh. Well, I was holding the saw.

  “But you wouldn’t have done this to yourself.”

  That’s true. I didn’t want to do this.

  “Lutz made you do it. He can—”

  Don’t you think I know what Lutz can do?

  Kait fell silent. The snow beat tiny frigid blows against her face.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Lutz didn’t want to do this, either.

  Kait’s nose twitched. She’d seen it through the cover of the snowfall—the neck had moved that time. In her mind she took a step back, but the foot didn’t move. She imagined looking down, seeing Cormac’s huge hand wrapped around her ankle.

  “Lutz never does anything he doesn’t want to do,” she said.

  Not this. He’s never done something like this.

  “You’re wrong.” She looked back at the cabin’s dark windows, feeling eyes pressing into her back. The curtains over the transoms didn’t move, but she thought of dozens of faces swarming behind the glass. Hundreds of eyes, teeming like fish.

  Never like this, said the deep empty voice. Never this far.

  “You’re wrong,” she repeated. “You don’t know what he’s done, how could you know?”

  He wouldn’t unless you pushed him. The voice grew, reverberating like an empty room, spilling up and over like a pot of water on full boil.

  And you pushed him hard, Cormac said. And now look what happens. Look what happens when you put him in a corner. Look what you made him do—

  Kait lurched back as the corpse heaved forwards into a sitting position, every bone in the spine snapping like walnut shells under boot heels as the torso bent up and backwards, the wrong-elbowed arms rotating around to lunge towards her, the backwards-facing hands snapping open and closed as they thrust towards her to grasp and snare and crush…

  Kait’s mouth fell open in a soundless scream, but when her eyes finally flickered open, she was back on the porch, curled against the door, tears streaming down her face. Her lips were moving, and when she had finally shaken off the dream’s cold, bloodied hands she realized that she was mouthing words as the real snow swirled around her. A single phrase, repeated over and over, like a curse: “I’m sorry—I’m sorry—I’m sorry—I’m sorry.”

  Somewhere deep in the trees, she could hear Jill Cicero laughing.

  * * *

  “Does anybody have eyes on her?” Ben called out.

  Kait hadn’t slept long—not long enough for the snow to pile up, but long enough for her lips and fingers to stiffen and numb. Perhaps she had only dozed off for a moment or two. Perhaps she had not been asleep at all.

  “Where’s she
going to go?” Alice huffed from the other side of the door. “Without the cars, she’s trapped here just like us.”

  “I don’t like not knowing where she is,” Ben replied. “That’s all. Who knows what she could be getting up to out there?”

  “Oh, put that thing down,” Alice sniped. “You’re making me nervous walking around with it like that.”

  “I don’t like not knowing where she is,” Ben repeated. But through the door, Kait heard the unmistakable sound of him laying the hunting rifle aside. Against the back of the couch, she thought. No—that was a chair moving. He put it on the breakfast table. Where was the barrel facing? Toward the door? Toward the kitchenette?

  Was it pointed out into the middle of the room?

  Kait flexed her fingers, then reached into her sleeve and peeled the glove off her right hand, her trigger hand. She examined the skin on her knuckles, which had split from cold; when she closed her fist, blood oozed up from the split, thick and slow. There was no pain, now, only a dull ache in the knuckle-joints, and the tight, stretched feeling of the dried blood on her eyebrow. She could still do it, she realized. For now. The motion was still there. That hand could still kill.

  But the rifle was behind the door.

  That didn’t matter. Lutz would not come for her now, she knew. Not when he could simply watch from the trees or from inside the cabin as she slowly froze to death. A slow end. That would interest him. She wondered if he would feel anything when she crossed the threshold or if she would become like the others—empty meat, discarded, forgotten.

  The cold was reaching long-fingered hands into her bones now. She quickly slipped the glove back onto her hand, jamming it down over stiff, numb fingers, then stuffed both hands under her armpits. What had Lutz called it? She shivered, struggling to remember. She could see the dance floor when she closed her eyes: there had been a masquerade on campus in November, a week before Thanksgiving, and she remembered a hundred dressy forms whirling around them as bleary orchestral music fell upon them like waves. One two three, one two three—the forms paired off, the girls in sequined dresses, the boys in sport jackets and dark pants.

  Lutz was a bad dancer, but anybody could rock back and forth to a waltz. He led her slowly across the floor, occasionally treading lightly on her bare toes—she had kicked off her high heels an hour ago, the high wedges borrowed from Jill Cicero’s closet. Lutz was still wearing blue jeans, but she had persuaded him to put on a brown suit jacket over his black T-shirt, and a handful of styling grease gleamed in his hair. Around them, bodies twined and whirled like water draining, and colored lights flashed in arcane symbols on the ceiling, switching to the gentle rhythm of the music.

  Then like a clap of thunder, she remembered—a forest, he’d called it.

  A forest of bodies.

  That night the music never seemed to end. Her feet never got tired, even after dancing with a hundred partners. They were boys and girls, and they appeared in an endless queue, an identical question on their tongues: “May I have this dance?” And then their lips would kink up a Lutz Visgara smile, a Jill Cicero smile, and they would whirl her away, cloaked in sweat and music and flashing rainbow lights.

  “We’re like hollow trees,” said a blonde footballer with a square jaw.

  “He lives inside us,” said a nursing student with stripes dyed in her hair.

  “We don’t feel a thing,” said a tall senior with a basso voice and thick dreadlocks tied back behind his head.

  “We love him,” said an Asian student with very red lipstick.

  “Like the wood loves the carpenter,” said a hundred shining faces.

  “We are empty without him,” said a hundred grinning mouths.

  “We don’t feel a thing.”

  “We don’t feel a thing.”

  “We don’t feel a thing.”

  A forest of bodies.

  She remembered, briefly, seeing Alice Gorchuck among the masked dancers that whirled like sand in water around her, identified easily by her cloud of crimson hair—but she could not remember if she had danced in her arms that night. After a time, the faces had blurred together under the colored lights, the voices merging under the liquid rhythm of the waltz. After a time, all she saw was Lutz—and to her shock and horror, although a part of her hoped she had not danced with Alice Gorchuck that night, there was still another part of her that wished she had.

  * * *

  Time passed—the snow whirled, piling on the roofs and hoods of the two cars in the gravel lot. Kait strained her ears, but she could no longer hear the voices of her friends through the cabin door. Only the clinking of glass and the shuffling of feet, and occasionally a cough or a burp, coming from Riley, and the crackle of the fireplace. The new-fallen snow had silenced things, inside and out. The landscape was still, as though it had been smothered.

  Then Alice’s weight shifted against the door and she said: “Somebody should go check on her.”

  “Hey, whoa,” Riley protested, her voice oddly thick. “You can’t go out there—you know that, right? She’s out there, probably right outside the door. It’s too risky.”

  “I’m not gonna go outside,” Alice fretted—Kait could almost imagine her knotting her fingers together in her lap or wringing them. “I’m just gonna look through the window. I wanna know what she’s doing. We should be doing that, right? Keeping tabs on her?”

  “What do you care what she’s doing?” Ben muttered from further in. He had been pacing, stalking circles inside the cabin, the floorboards complaining under his heavy boots. “That’s the whole point of her being outside, isn’t it?”

  “Somebody should go check on her,” Alice repeated. “Anyway, it’s started to snow out there, and—well, you saw how she’s dressed. I just… I just want…”

  “Just what?” Riley snapped suddenly. “Alice, for the love of God…”

  But she trailed off, her protest left unvoiced. For a moment there was only heavy silence.

  Then Ben heaved a sigh and his footsteps tromped back toward the door.

  “You can give her my coat if you want,” he said in a thin, flat voice.

  Kait’s ears pricked up as Alice sucked in a breath.

  “Ben… Are you sure?” Riley asked.

  “No,” came the reply. “I’m not. So be quick, huh? Before I change my mind.”

  “Oh, Ben…” Alice breathed gratefully, and Kait scooted away from the door on numb hands and knees, emotion turning slowly within her. There was a shuffle of movement behind the door, and a tangle of whispered voices, but Kait couldn’t discern the words. Her head was suddenly humming, and the light through the bleak snow clouds seemed to nearly blind her. But one idea cut through the noise inside her, over and over, like a heartbeat:

  Even after everything I’ve done to them.

  The words jumbled like puzzle pieces, rattling inside their box.

  Even after everything I’ve done to them.

  Even after everything we’ve done to each other.

  For just a second, she let the hard knot in her stomach loosen and unravel. She let go, allowed her heart to soar, to hope—

  Then Riley’s voice rang out. “You’d better let me give it to her,” she said. “Or at least, let me check through the window first. I don’t want her to jump you when you open the door.”

  “All right,” Alice replied slowly. “You want me to move?”

  There was a smirk in Riley’s voice as she said, “Well, I can’t see through you, girlfriend.” Suddenly, the squeal of flesh on glass—Kait turned to see one transom curtain pulled aside and Riley’s face peering through, her nose pressed against the window glass. “She’s still there,” Kait heard her say. “Just sitting by the door. I think I woke her up.”

  “That’s good…” Ben began to say, but then Kait heard Alice gasp in horror.

  “What happened to your neck?” she cried out. “Riley—you’re burned.”

  The picture of Riley’s face in the window froze a moment. Her
eyes locked with Kait’s; she could see tiny, inscrutable thoughts flicking across her features. She wondered what Riley saw on her own face, what horrors were written there.

  But then Riley grinned at her, and Kait stopped wondering. Through the glass, she watched the other tug down the collar of her shirt, revealing a puckered, oozing wound under the cradle of her chin, a cigarette burn. Kait scrambled to stand, and she saw Riley mouth something at her, six words, her lips smeared against the window.

  You don’t want to miss this.

  “Did Lutz do that to you,” Alice continued unnecessarily.

  Riley shook her head once, very slowly, her eyes never leaving Kait’s.

  “No,” she said soberly. “You did this to yourself.” Then, her face expressionless, she turned away from the glass and covered the transom with the curtain once more.

  And then the horror began.

  Kait was on her feet, mashing her face against the cold glass, trying to peer through the gauzy curtain. But all she could see were vague forms—the couch, the deer’s head hanging on the wall, Ben’s shoulders heaving as he stretched, and Riley’s lithe silhouette padding away towards the center of the room, where Kait lost sight of her.

  Then a dull thud, a muffled crack. Like an egg being crushed in a velvet glove.

  At first, the cabin was silent—then the noise came again, and Kait felt all numbness drain from her like blood from a slashed artery. She had seen Riley’s head wind back and whip forward, her hair fanning out like a fringe as she drove her forehead into a support beam running floor-to-ceiling near the center of the cabin.

  Alice began to shriek.

  “Riley, stop…!” Ben cried out.

  There was brisk movement behind the door, but Kait put her lips to the keyhole, screaming through hoarse lungs. “Don’t touch her!”

  The movement stopped—Kait could hear panicked breathing through the door.

  “Don’t touch her,” she said again. “He’s got her. That’s what he wants. You touch her, and he’ll get you, too…”

  “Shut up,” Ben bellowed, his voice breaking like a stick underfoot.