An hour passed before Kim stopped crying. When pressed, she still couldn't bring herself to share with Julian the specific reasons for her freak-out. She mentioned that she'd been having dreams, that she'd seen and heard things that'd convinced her of a threat, but when Julian gave a piteous look she dropped it at once. It's just like I said it would be. He doesn't care. He doesn't believe. He thinks I've gone crazy. Her tea grew cold and she spent a good while in the kitchen, shivering beneath her knitted throw.
Wanting to support her and evidently feeling guilty for her episode, Julian tried to act jovial. He joked constantly, prepared a nice dinner and sought to comfort her at every opening. Despite this facade, Kim could see in him a great discomfort any time he looked upon her. He didn't know what was going on, had no idea about the thing that the Amber Light would court. But he was frightened all the same.
Kim frightened him.
Julian looked at her the same way he might look upon a fevered stranger. His concern and sweetness was tainted by apprehension and revulsion. It was clear that he thought her insane, and was probably praying that a trip out to the mall would set her straight. Of course, it wasn't so simple as that. The isolation was disorienting, it was true, but it was only because Kim now understood their remote plot of land to harbor other, malevolent things that she had gone to pieces. If only she could have attributed her outburst to a case of cabin fever, she thought.
Julian guided her to the couch as though she were an unsteady patient in a nursing home and brought her food to her. Then, he switched on a movie, sat beside her and, when she showed no interest in food or drink, took her into his arms and caressed her head as she began once more to sob.
These were the only comforts he could afford her.
But it was pointless.
Nothing he could do would stymy the emergence of this yet unseen thing from the woods. It was all she could think about. The sun had begun to set. And then, in seemingly the next moment, the fading oranges and yellows were torn from the sky and the Earth was plunged into darkness. Outside, she knew, without even looking, the Amber Light was glowing. Would this be the night? The night she'd meet, face-to-face, with the cause behind Marshall and Dakota's disappearance?
The evening wore on. Minutes turned to hours. Julian began to doze off, the warm blanket draped over the two of them.
Sitting up in the house, looking around the dim living room as the credits began to roll on the television, she thought she spied queer shapes in amongst the fixtures of the room. Unfamiliar things, things that didn't belong. An odd shadow sandwiched between two pieces of furniture, a bit of movement in the corner of her eye.
Holding tightly onto Julian, she buried her face against his neck and heaved a sigh.
Yes. Tonight would be the night. She knew it. And, in the way the wind crashed against it and forced it to utter a groan, she realized that the house knew it, too. The house was preparing for this new visitor.
She trembled. No, the visitor was already there with her. It was in the house, had been since the night before when they'd foolishly opened the door. Now she had only to stumble upon it.
It was a landmine, a booby-trap lying in wait.
Sooner or later, she was going to trip the wire.
Still as a statue, Kim sat with Julian on the sofa, closing her eyes and pretending that the room around her had dissolved into nothingness. If she couldn't see her surroundings, then they didn't exist.
That was what she told herself.
Thirty-Three
She awoke with a start.
A sleep-heavy glance at her surroundings revealed nothing had changed in the space since she'd dozed off. The television had transitioned to a power-saving mode; the scene outside looked a little darker, if it was possible. She squinted, trying to decide whether the glow given off by the scattered lamps had been dulled or she was simply imagining it. Looking hard to the lamp beside her, she sensed that the light had been diluted, weakened somehow.
A creak sounded from the upstairs.
Tensing immediately, Kim groped through her mind, still powering up after her nap, for an explanation. The house is settling. The floor boards always do that. It was the wind.
This was the same script she'd been reading from for ages now. Somehow, it helped. It made her feel like she could reach out and regain her power in a situation that felt otherwise hopeless. You don't have to be scared, she told herself. Even if something does happen, it's ultimately up to you how you choose to approach it. You can confront it in another way, if you really want to. Fear is unnecessary. This is your house, after all.
When she'd waited for several minutes and nothing happened, she loosed a sigh of relief. Maybe she'd overreacted earlier, she thought. Given Julian a scare for no good reason. She felt his weight against her body, his soft breaths stirring the hairs on her arm. Slowly she unearthed herself from the blanket and stretched, pausing only to smile down at Julian as she did so. He was peaceful, his ankles propped up on the armrest and his belly rising and falling. He looked like a child, completely tuckered out.
Kim felt a little guilty. She'd caused a lot of trouble for him that day, had stressed him out unnecessarily with her outburst. Her nerves somewhat relaxed, she reflected on the day, on her fear, and let it all go with a sigh. Mood swings and terrors had been the order of the day for her as of late. She'd grown sick of it. Her fear had won her nothing. Instead, it'd put a considerable strain on her marriage.
When she'd collected their plates and thrown them into the sink, which was still stationed within the only remaining piece of cabinetry to be found in the kitchen, she paced upon the half-finished floors and took in his handiwork for the first time. Things were taking shape. He'd laid about a third of the new flooring and had removed all of the old, baring decades-old grime on the solid layer beneath. The old cabinets were all out, and he'd already begun to assemble some of the new ones. She could picture it now, the finished product. They'd cook so many meals there, would probably entertain someday. It was a pleasant thought.
Wandering through the house, she felt a great sense of ease. They were some hours into the night and nothing had happened. Though it might've been premature for her to throw out her apprehensions, Kim felt good. In the morning she would apologize to Julian, though she still planned to take him up on the offer of a trip. Passing through the living room and heading towards the stairs, she hiked to the second story, pausing in the bathroom. In the sink she found her brush, the tangles of dark hair still clinging to it. Clearing them away, she returned the brush to its proper place and then removed her sweatshirt. Looking herself over in the mirror, she found she looked far more refreshed than she had before. Maybe she'd just been tired, in need of a brief sleep.
She was preparing to cross the hall towards the bedroom in search of pajamas when something made her suddenly take pause.
From the direction of one of their unused bedrooms came a curious sound, a vocalization. A wheeze. Thinking she'd misheard, Kim paused in the hall, her ears perking up to listen. It sounded once, twice, a definite pattern of labored breathing issuing from the doorway of the room at the hall's end. She hadn't hardly set foot in that room since moving in; it was empty, except for a couple of odds and ends they couldn't find space for elsewhere. Was it Dakota? What might Dakota be doing in that room, left completely unused? She took a step forward, placing one hand against the cool wall, and attempted to investigate.
She did not make it much farther, however.
The door had been left ajar; by whom she could scarcely guess. She surely hadn't left that door open, and she had a hard time imagining that Julian had done so, since he hardly spent any time in the upstairs. The only remaining possibility then, which was presently borne out in plain view, was that some agency on its other side was slowly pulling it ajar. But it was not solely the sight of the open door that gave her pause. It was the emergence of something unexpected, hideously frightening under the circumstances, that stole her attention and deman
ded the whole of her focus.
A long, slithering tendril of black hair escaped through the crevice between the door and its frame.
Then another.
Another.
Like pitch-black snakes the lengths of hair struggled from some unseen point in the dark bedroom. They explored the walls, the molding around the door and clung there like invasive vines while still more of the stuff began to burst from the opening. The door gave an unnatural shake and was opened further.
Frozen in place and positively sick to her stomach, Kim could only think to run when the owner of those ebony locks began to exit the bedroom and enter the hallway in earnest. The thing that emerged did so with a shambling, reaching motion, as if it were struggling against some unseen barrier. Clawing at the air, white hands bereft of fingernails feeling out the walls, the thing loosed a wheezy precursor to the nightmarish wail she knew so well. This was the thing that had made the terrible sound in the woods so many nights ago.
And it wasn't Dakota.
She was racing across the hall before she even realized it, ducking into the nearest room and slamming the door shut behind her. It was the study, Julian's room, still filled with unpacked boxes and boasting no light of its own. There was no window there, either, from which she could gain even the slightest hint of moonlight. It was beyond dark. Her heart convulsed, ready to give up on her at any moment, while she tried to find a place to hide within the dark space. Even as she did so she knew it to be futile. This thing had been here long before she and Julian had arrived. It knew the house well, knew it better, and could not be so easily fooled. This encounter, this brief hunt that would go on within the walls of her home, had been fated. She'd poked and prodded incessantly, dredging up things she had no business with. This, then, was the sum total of what her curiosity had won her.
As she threw open the sliding door of the closet and dove inside, it was clear that she was only prolonging the inevitable. Had she been wise she might've cast herself at the creature forthwith, accepted her fate and embraced it, rather than increasing the suspense. The thing, which could now be heard to amble through the hall, to fill the walls with a dull banging, was almost certainly savoring her terror, basking in it. It had laid in wait for so long in anticipation of this moment, and she, through her own foolishness, had given it the means necessary to stage its return. Throwing the closet door closed and crouching against the wall in the perfect darkness, she pawed at her knees and lowered her face in a wince. It was all she could do to hope that the clumsily-carved leaf motif on the outside of the door would act as a totem to ward the thing off.
It was coming.
The door to the study opened slowly. She could hear the coarse, searching hairs as they slivered about the walls, as they eased the door open. The hinges creaked loudly, sending pulse after pulse of terror through her. And then the wheezing, the gasping breaths, coming in clearer than ever before. Bare, white palms searched the walls and floors blindly. She'd seen those hands, once, in the cellar. It had been on the night when the door to the hidden nursery had first been opened. She'd thought them Dakota's hands, but now she knew she'd been mistaken. The thing that stalked the study was the child the Reeds had picked up in the woods, the monstrosity that Marshall had tried to bury. This was the thing that had escaped its tomb through the underground, its fingernails missing for the tremendous effort.
Trembling, Kim tried to keep her voice down, to stop herself from whimpering. Tears spilled from her eyes like they'd never spilled before, in hot torrents. Her heart was beyond the point of racing, but instead hopped unsteadily about her chest like a rabbit staring down the barrel of a hunter's gun. Her fingertips dug into the tops of her knees and she felt a stinging in her injured finger as the wound was opened afresh.
Then, in the pitch darkness, the only reprieve from which was a thin band of light that came in from underneath the closet door by way of the hallway, Kim thought she glanced something in the closet before her, squatting in a similarly frightened position. Had the thing gotten in? She shook, gasped at the discovery, but then leaned forward to investigate when it did not move to strike.
It was entirely too dark to know for certain, but a brief, frightened pass of her palm against the figure in the closet before her revealed hands fraught with deep ridges.
Dakota. It could be no one else.
Her suspicion was confirmed as the closet door was thrown open and the dull light from the hallway penetrated the study. It was indeed Dakota, her body squeezed into a stiff, tight configuration as of the greatest fear imaginable. It was vaguely fetal, and if not for the obvious age of her body, she would have seemed like little more than a scared toddler. In the brief flash of light before Kim met her pursuer, she noticed Dakota's cloudy eyes were thrust wide open, her mouth drooping into what amounted to an eternal expression of fearfulness. A master sculptor could not have improved upon the intensity of her twisted visage and its conception of sheer terror. The woman was still, a corpse, the paper-thin skin settled close to the porous bones.
This was where Dakota had met her end.
Like Kim, she had gone running from her precious baby. She'd taken refuge in the closet of this room and had, as Kim would soon do, met face-to-face with the thing.
The closet door had been pulled open from above, and as Kim's eyes were inadvertently distracted from the corpse, she noticed the pale, bare figure of the abomination clinging to the ceiling as if by some supernatural magnetism. Its hands searched the ceiling, the figure defying gravity, as its tendrils of long, black hair drifted downward to probe the ground and search for prey. It gave the impression of a spider, of an enormous pest, but operated in thick lengths of hair rather than webs to trap its victims. And the two, large, dead eyes that festooned its stunted visage were every bit as nauseating to her as the eyes of a massive insect.
She sank further against the corner, pressed her body into the wall like she could somehow disappear into it altogether.
But it didn't work.
The hair slithered into the closet where she crouched, taking firm hold of her like the grasping tentacles of an abyssal titan. Then the thing dropped down onto the ground, secure in the knowledge that its prey was held fast.
Unnaturally, slowly, the monstrosity leaned down towards her, its dead eyes seeing nothing but the fleshy nubs answering for nostrils flaring up wildly as it did so.
It leaned further.
Further.
It was face-to-face with her now, and the thin line of a mouth, delineated only by a streak of flabby, white flesh, could be seen to part. From behind it there rang a series of discordant wheezes and hushed vocalizations. And then, full-force, came the screaming, gasping cry she'd heard in those night-sainted woods so many nights previous. The sound hit her like a train, sending a shudder through her body like a seizure. Her limbs were splayed out, slapping stupidly against the inside of the closet door. She felt suddenly drunk with fear, incapable of controlling her body.
Kim couldn't pull her eyes away. Her mind, scrambled and rapidly racing away from her, conjured a final thought before she was ushered into peaceful oblivion.
What they found in the woods... it wasn't a baby. Marshall was right.
With her last breath, Kim gave a scream that shook the walls of the small room.
Then, in the next moment, silence.
Perfect silence.
Thirty-Four
At the sound of the scream, Julian bolted up from the sofa. “W-what the hell?” He exhaled sharply, struggling to stand and nearly toppling over a coffee table. “B-babe?” he called, pawing at his eyes and searching the room.
There was no trace of her.
Feeling a wave of panic strike him head-on, he worked a hand through his hair and tossed the blankets aside. Her spot on the sofa was cool; she'd been gone from there a while. “Fuck,” he muttered, kneading at his brow and glancing into the kitchen. “What has she gotten into now?” He cleared his throat and jogged to the foot of the stair
s. “Babe? Are you up there? What's wrong?”
Silence.
Julian gripped the bannister, appraising the stare of the carved cherubs with disdain. “Honey?” He screamed it more than anything, sure in some innate way that she was too far away from him to hear. She didn't go outside, did she? If she got into trouble out in the woods, then there's no way I'll find her at this hour. He hesitated on the first step for a time, wondering if he'd even heard a scream to begin with. Had it been a dream, maybe? The sound of some bird or animal?
No. He gulped, knowing fell well that it'd been Kim screaming. It'd been too real to be a dream, too raw. And it'd come from somewhere in the house. The basement, maybe? Slowly climbing the stairs, he resolved to have a look around the upper story first.
“Kim, babe? Are you up here? What's the matter?” His voice wavered, catching in his throat as he rounded the top of the stairs and peered down the hall. Everything was still, quiet.
Too quiet, maybe.
Licking his lips, he did his best to keep his head on straight. Don't go to pieces, acting paranoid like her. She probably got hurt. Maybe fell, or cut herself again. Saw something through the window that spooked her. Carefully, as if expecting someone to jump out at him at any moment, he started down the hall, fists balled.
Black Acres- The Complete Collection Page 20
