Creature

by Hunter Shea

  “I think your daddy needs to be cut off,” she said.

  How the hell could a snapping branch get him so riled up? She made her way to the front of the house, standing on the porch, her hips crying out for her to get off her feet and lie down.

  Cupping her hands around her mouth, she called his name.

  When he didn’t reply, she started to get worried.

  Thrashing sounds close by didn’t help matters much.

  Buttons whizzed past her feet, bounding down the steps and into the woods.

  “Buttons! Stop!”

  The dog that had to be coerced to leave her side didn’t even break his stride as he too slipped into the woods.

  “What the heck’s going on?”

  Her heart started to race, and with that came the pain. Her left hand massaged her chest while her right held on to the doorframe.

  “Andrew! Buttons!”

  “Where’s Buttons?” Andrew startled her, popping out from behind a tree as if he’d been hiding there the whole time.

  “I think he went looking for you. Why did you run off like that?”

  He looked in her eyes, and she saw the shine of panic wash over his face.

  “Oh my God, I didn’t mean to upset you.” He ran onto the porch, wrapping her in his arms.

  “Really? You jump off the porch, dash into the woods, ignore my calls and you didn’t think that would freak me out?”

  “I wasn’t thinking.”

  “No, you were thinking, but about what?”

  “First, let me get you inside and I’ll go find Buttons.”

  Kate looked over his shoulder and saw the beagle trotting toward them with a big, broken stick in his mouth. It was a wonder he’d been able to get his jaws around it, much less carry it.

  “I think Buttons found the source of your panic,” she said, not believing it. How could Buttons know that was the branch out of all the branches lying about that had startled Andrew?

  She took it from him, and Andrew took it from her. The splintered ends looked fresh. But that was impossible.

  After they went back into the cottage, Kate said, “Okay, spill it. Why did you get all weird?”

  He told her about the shelter he’d found, and how it was within sight of the cottage. If it had been built by some kids, he and Kate would have heard them playing. Andrew, being a wary Jersey boy, had been worried that they had some strange-o lurking about, keeping tabs on them. When he heard the branch snap, he’d thought maybe he could catch the person.

  Kate shivered. She didn’t like the thought of being peeped on when they were basically out here all alone.

  “Did you see anything?”

  “No,” Andrew said, pouring himself a glass of water. “Shelter’s still there, but it’s empty. I kicked it apart for good measure. Now they know I know, and hopefully they’ll move along.”

  “Should we call the police?”

  “And what? Tell them I found a little shelter in the woods? They’d think I was nuts.”

  “Not if we explain what it could mean.”

  He propped her pillows up behind her. “Even I think I’m overreacting. Imagine how they’ll look at a pair of out-of-towners. Look, it’s nothing. This is what happens to your brain on low-grade whisky. I’ll stick to beer from here on.”

  Kate said, “Do you think an animal could have built it? It could have been a bear den or something.”

  Andrew ran his hands over his face. “What’s with you and bears? The only bear we’re going to see out here is Yogi Bear if you find an old cartoon show.”

  “I did hear that animal outside.”

  “Which was probably a passing moose. And neither animal knows how to build a wooden shelter that looks like a tepee. That I can guarantee you.”

  Now that he had relaxed and they’d talked it out, the balloon of anxiety in Kate’s gut started to deflate. Andrew wasn’t the most observant person, especially on his runs. He didn’t know that she sometimes watched him, nervous that he’d hurt himself with the way he recklessly sprinted around the neighborhood. That little shelter could have been there for weeks, months even.

  “Promise me one thing,” she said, taking a blood pressure pill and her prescription iron supplement.

  “Yeeessss,” he said, cautiously.

  “Next time, before you run off into the woods, tell me what the deal is before you leave.”

  He smoothed her hair from her forehead. “I promise.”

  “Oh, and one more thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Change your shorts.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Andrew had been true to his word and hadn’t drunk any more whisky. But he did have a couple of beers before calling it a night. He was snoring like a lumberjack with sleep apnea, his guttural wheezing loud enough to beat the band and their roadies.

  Needless to say, Kate couldn’t sleep. She’d nodded off and slept through dinner, which from what she saw in the kitchen sink had been soup and a sandwich. The few hours of rest had taken the edge off her exhaustion. Now, between Andrew’s snoring and the pain in her shoulders, there was no way she was going to be able to close her eyes.

  Sometime before morning, she’d be wiped out and would finally zone out, just in time for the day to start.

  Maybe Andrew was right and she was a vampire.

  As impossible as it seemed, she was getting less sleep in Maine than she had back home. At first she’d thought it was because she needed to get used to the new surroundings, but that wasn’t it. No, everything was off with her. That damn treatment was wreaking havoc with her system. If she wasn’t burning up, she was weaker than normal and feeling strange. Being in chronic pain had made her hyperaware of her body. She couldn’t describe the way she’d been feeling. It was if her body had been replaced by another damaged, worn-out model that was completely unfamiliar to her.

  There was no way she was going to tell Andrew. What could he do about it anyway? She just had to hope it passed and she could get on with enjoying their magical summer.

  She watched Cary Grant in Topper and sucked on some candy to help her nausea. When the pain got this bad, it always turned her stomach sour. Candy didn’t make it all better, but it helped, sometimes more than medication.

  A chilly breeze floated through the open windows. Kate snuggled under the blankets. Buttons lay on his side by her feet, snoring as well.

  When she was a kid, Kate had been terrified of the dark. To make matters worse, she’d been plagued by night terrors between the ages of five and seven. Not only were there boogeymen in her closet, child-munching beasts waiting for her foot to slip out of the tuck at the end of the bed, and red-eyed creatures floating outside her window, but even her dreams, her only means of escape, were to be feared. Telling her it was time to go to bed was like informing an inmate that old Sparky was waiting for him to take that long walk.

  She’d spent many a night frozen with fear in her bed, mouth open wide but no sound coming out, praying to God that her mother and father would somehow sense her distress and come to her rescue. The mere thought of walking down the hall to their bedroom in the dead of night gripped her with incalculable fear.

  She wasn’t afraid now.

  The irony was not lost on her that the dead of night had become her ‘me time’.

  Now the dark was about candy and old movies.

  And sometimes bad feels and shadows.

  With the onslaught of the microwave feels she was getting up here, she almost missed the familiar bad feels.

  Almost.

  She checked her tablet, saw it was time for a pain pill. Swallowing it down, she nestled her feet under a snoozing Buttons so he could warm them up.

  A gusting wind was kicking up small waves breaking on the shore. The crickets, perhaps agitated by the wind, were chirp
ing louder than a Metallica concert. Kate was tempted to turn the TV up and drown it all out, but she didn’t want to wake Andrew.

  Better close the windows, she thought.

  Leaving the comfort of the bed (not that she was ever truly comfortable), she slipped on some socks and padded in the dark to the kitchen. Buttons woke up and joined her. She gave him a doggie treat, thanking him for the company.

  Still thinking about her old night terrors, perhaps because she’d had quite a few reminiscent episodes as of late, she cringed remembering how some of the kids used to call her Katie the Coon. She was the only kid in third grade with dark circles under her eyes.

  Kate often wondered if those years spent walking around in a fog – two crucial, formative years at that – had permanently altered her body chemistry. The nightmares ate away at her psyche and health, and when they left, her body needed something to replace them. So, rather than wait for her to become exposed to a strange disease (and who knew how long that could take), it decided to rebel against itself.

  Her mother thought her ‘little theory’ was ridiculous, but her father, well, it gave him pause.

  “It could be all those night terrors were the broken cells growing in your body,” he’d said to her one night over pumpkin pie and coffee. Her mother had been in the kitchen, cleaning up. Dad hadn’t looked so good himself. He’d been talking of early retirement a lot, though Mom pooh-poohed it, telling him he still had a lot of earning to do if they were going to have golden years, not bronze years.

  Kate had just been diagnosed with lupus, and she was terrified. Her father’s hand felt cold, clasped over hers. “The mind is the most complex and mysterious organism in the universe,” he’d said. “There are parts of it that know more than it will ever let on. Maybe it does that to protect us. It could be that those night terrors were created to shield you from the truth. The autoimmune diseases wanted to be heard. But something in your mind, the Wizard behind the curtain, since you loved Dorothy so much, refused to let them. Now, it couldn’t silence them entirely, but it could mask what they were trying to say. By not knowing what was going to come for you as you got older, you were able to live a more carefree life. You were a real spitfire, you know that? The unstoppable Kate. I don’t think you would have been the unstoppable Kate if you’d known this was always waiting for you. You wouldn’t have had all those wonderful experiences, and maybe not even Andrew.” He sipped from his coffee and stared at his pie. “Funny to think that we should be grateful for those night terrors. Life is like that. Funny. Even when you think it’s serious as a five-alarm fire.”

  Kate had had to use two napkins to soak up her tears. She’d loved her father more than she ever thought possible at that moment.

  Less than a year later, he was gone after a quick but ignoble dance with pancreatic cancer. He never did get to retire, those last days neither golden nor bronze nor tin. He went from the office to the hospital to the hospice, all within the span of five weeks. Death had given him a fast pass, but he’d suffered so much those last two weeks. The phrase white-hot agony hadn’t even put a dent into what he went through, at least until hospice took over.

  She missed him so much. More so now that it felt as if she’d also lost her mother. Their relationship had never been the best, but without her father to mediate, it was a disaster.

  Buttons nudged her calf, banging his tail against the cabinet.

  “You want to close the windows for me?” she said softly.

  Buttons put his paws on her thighs, waiting for his ears to be scratched.

  “Yeah, I guess you’re too short anyway.”

  She leaned over the sink and grabbed the lip of the window, pausing. Kate looked through the screen, the darkness so complete, she couldn’t even see the car parked in front of the house just fifteen feet away.

  No bears. No moose.

  No shadows. It was too dark for shadows.

  Andrew let out a whopper of a snore.

  “Someone’s going to have a sore throat in the morning,” she said to the beagle.

  Closing the other window by the dining area, which was just an extension of the living room, she paused again, enjoying the cessation of jagged cricket legs.

  She was just about to go back to bed when a high, piercing scream cut through the closed windows as if they were made of onionskin paper.

  Kate reflexively flinched, hunching her shoulders as if something had flown into the house and was circling around her head.

  She tottered into one of the dining room chairs, heart doing a madman’s samba.

  What could have made such a noise?

  It sounded as if it had come from both outside and within the cottage, like it was everywhere at once, the blaring of Revelation’s trumpets.

  Kate’s back flared and her knees turned to water. She had to pull the chair out from under the table and sit before she fell down. The fiery sensation went all the way to the top of her head. She grabbed at her hair, expecting it to come away in clumps from having been burned from her scalp.

  Hands shaking, she looked over at Andrew, who was still snoring.

  How could he sleep through that? It sounded like someone was being killed.

  I have to get my phone.

  She saw it across the room, the divide stretching out before her like taffy.

  I have to wake Andrew up and call the police. Whoever made that noise is hurt, if not dead by now.

  Kate sat and listened for it to come again, knowing if it did, she might pee herself. Taking slow, steady breaths, she concentrated on expelling the heat within her body outward with each exhalation. She pictured Ryker beside her, his hand on her shoulder, encouraging her. After a minute or so, she started to feel more in control of herself.

  There was another screech, but this one not as loud, not nearly as close. It sounded as if whatever had made it was heading away from the cottage.

  And it was most definitely not in the cottage.

  She should have been relieved at that, but she wasn’t.

  Buttons looked up at her, breath huffing from his open mouth, as if nothing had happened. Andrew rolled over on the bed, still very much asleep.

  Did I imagine that?

  It was so, so loud. Buttons barks at cats when they meow by our windows at home. He didn’t even react.

  Andrew might have been sleeping off a day and night of drinking, but even that wouldn’t explain how he could not even stir after that first scream. She could still hear it, reverberating in her brain, an echo from the cauldron room in hell.

  What disturbed her most was her inability to figure out if it was a person or an animal. Something about it made her think it was both. But that was impossible.

  She prayed it was an animal. Because if a woman had made that noise – that fading, horrid scream – someone had done terrible things to her, carrying her into the night.

  Rubbing her arms to chase the chill away, Kate got up, her body demanding she sit back down. Biting her bottom lip, she stutter-stepped into the living room and collapsed on the bed.

  Andrew snapped awake.

  “What happened? Are you okay?”

  His voice was gruff, strained, made raw by the booze and snoring.

  “Shhh,” Kate said, hand over his mouth.

  “What are you doing?” he mumbled.

  Whispering, she said, “I need you to open that window.”

  “Why did you close it?”

  He slipped out from under her hand, rubbing his eyes.

  “Please, just do it. And try not to make any noise.”

  Andrew looked at her, confused, but did as she asked.

  “A little more,” she said.

  He opened the window all the way, visibly shivering.

  “You want to freeze me out?”

  “Shhh. Just listen. Do you hear anything?”
>
  He paused, listened, scratched his head.

  “No.”

  Neither did she.

  “You mind telling me what this is all about?”

  Feeling like a fool, she sighed and said, “I…I thought I heard someone screaming.”

  “When?”

  “A couple of minutes ago. I can’t believe it didn’t wake you.”

  He got a bottle of water from the refrigerator, taking a long draw. “You sure it was a person?”

  “Yes. No. It was loud and it scared the shit out of me.”

  Kate pulled the covers up to her chest, a thin fabric shield against the things that went shriek in the night. Buttons jumped up on the bed.

  Andrew looked at the dog and said, “Man, I must have really been out if Buttons didn’t wake me up.”

  Smoothing the covers, suddenly nervous to look Andrew in the eye, she said, “Buttons didn’t bark.”

  “But you said you heard someone screaming. I can’t imagine Buttons keeping his big mouth shut.”

  Kate ruffled his fur. “I know it’s weird, but he didn’t react at all.”

  The mattress shifted when Andrew settled in. The look he gave her now made her feel like a world-class ass, not to mention angry.

  “Didn’t you put a new fentanyl patch on before we went to bed?” he said.

  Her blood immediately went to full boil. “I’m not some addict having hallucinations.”

  Putting his hand on her leg, he said, “Come on, you’ve had episodes in the past. It’s not your fault. Those are powerful drugs they have you on.”

  Through gritted teeth, she said, “Do I look and sound like I’m out of it?”

  Yes, there had been times when she imagined all sorts of things. But it was very obvious when the medication had her in its grip. Those times, she didn’t even recognize her husband or surroundings. She recalled tattered bits of those moments, Andrew filling in the rest. It always made her uncomfortable, face in her hands, exclaiming, “Did I really say that?”