Coggins! What the fuck! What have you done?
Deputy Bradley Coggins lay there for a moment, motionless. Then, something answered.
Come.
6.
They Were Cold And exhausted, but their nerves were nevertheless primed. Even Oxford, whose inner turmoil was bubbling like a witch’s cauldron—a torrid mix of emptiness and heroin gut—was somehow ready.
It’s one of two things, Oxford thought, and he knew that Jared was thinking the same. Either we are sharing one delusion, or somebody is definitely calling—begging—for us to come somewhere.
Both possibilities sounded equally dubious, even inside his head, but one thing was certain: the closer they got to Mrs. Wharfburn’s house, the more desperate—no, desperate was the wrong word; excited, maybe, or aroused—the voice or delusion became.
Every time Oxford heard that voice, he thought of the leather case in the breast pocket of his inner jacket, buried under what felt like several tons of clothing. Somehow, that inert black case seemed to be radiating heat, and considering that it was placed just above his heart, it felt like it was powering him. Unlike the uncertainty of the voice, however, that he knew was a delusion.
“Look,” Jared whispered, drawing Oxford out of his own head.
He raised his eyes and followed the imaginary line from Jared’s outstretched finger. There, only a couple hundred yards ahead of them, was the unmistakable outline of a police cruiser.
“Shit.”
At first glance, the police car seemed a blessing; surely the sheriff or one of the deputies could get some help out to the Lawrence home. But there was something odd about the way it was parked, just a little sideways on the road, and the fact that there were no tire tracks in the snow was not a promising sign. Clearly, the car had been there for some time, and on a hellish day like today, the police department must have been overwhelmed; something definitely wasn’t right.
Jared must have thought so as well, as aside from the ominous “Look”, he said nothing further.
When they got closer, they could see a thick layer of snow on the rear windshield and at least three inches of powder on the bumper. Either the police officer to whom this car belonged had decided to take a long nap or… or… or what? Oxford didn’t know.
“Look,” Jared said again, and this time he pointed behind Oxford.
The lawn was covered in branches, most likely having fallen from the two large oak trees that overhung it, their remaining limbs so icy that they reflected the fading sunlight like quartz. Much like on Mama Lawrence’s lawn, most of the fallen branches stood on end like newly planted saplings, their frozen tips so heavy that they had plunged like javelins. But no, Oxford knew that no matter how bizarre, Jared’s whispered instruction was not meant to indicate the maze of sticks that peppered the lawn; no, he was focused on something beyond.
The door to Mrs. Wharfburn’s Estate was wide open.
What the hell?
If the officer was taking a nap, or worse, if he was for some reason engaging with the stubborn Mrs. Wharfburn, they were doing so in the cold—the bitter, bitter cold.
Was that it? Was a police officer trapped inside? Calling for help? Moaning for someone to come and help? Come… Come help me?
A blast of wind hit Oxford square in the face, and he instinctively buried himself up to his eyebrows in the thick collar of his jacket.
Come
The voice was louder now. So loud, in fact, that it shocked Oxford into raising his eyes out of his coat to look around. Even with the wind swirling about them, picking up the snow that was layered on the lawn and obscuring nearly every one of his senses, somehow he knew—he just knew—that the words had originated from that open doorway.
Please be the sheriff.
But somehow, he thought not.
Oxford buried his face back into his collar. Three deep breaths later, he raised his eyes from his shell again and looked at Jared. The man’s wide brown eyes said enough.
“I know,” Oxford said, swallowing hard. “I don’t want to either.”
Both men’s gazes drifted back to the house. Oxford pictured the doily that hung in the oval window above the frame slipping downward, slowly transforming into a set of massive cream-colored teeth, and the doormat, black and red, extending outward like a tongue, slimy and wet as it lapped at the snow on the porch.
“Cooooome!” the mouth implored. “Come inside!”
Oxford squeezed his eyes shut, and instinctively his hand went to the spot over his heart. It wasn’t that he felt the urge to use again just then, but it was more to see if the case was still there and to make sure that he wasn’t high already.
He opened his eyes again and the doorway had thankfully returned to its benign, inanimate self: just wood and aluminum and fabric. Then he turned to Jared, who was staring at him with a queer expression showing on the small exposed section of his face. He pulled his gloved hand away from his chest slowly, trying not to draw attention to the spot. Jared’s eyes remained fixed on his.
“I don’t want to either,” Oxford repeated, clearly meaning entering the house. “But we have to.”
We have to because of Corina.
Jared nodded slowly.
“We have to,” he repeated back at Oxford, his voice tight.
Jared took the first step toward the open door, and Oxford took a moment to adjust the duffel bag on his shoulder before he followed.
We have to, he repeated in his mind like a mantra. We have to. We have to. We have to.
The image of the doorway as a mouth flashed in his mind again, and a single tear rolled down his cheek, freezing almost immediately. Oxford knew that if they entered that house, the likelihood of them coming back out again was as likely as him giving up drugs forever.
We have to.
7.
Alice Opened One Eye and cautiously looked around, making sure not to move her head in case something was broken. It was oddly bright in the vehicle as the sunset reflected off the broken glass that was scattered across the dash. Confused, she opened her other eye, or at least tried to, but found that her lids were stuck together. Instinctively, she brought her left hand up to her head and her fingers met a tacky substance that could only be one thing: blood. Her breath caught in her throat, but she relaxed when her probing fingers found only a small cut about an inch and half above her right eye. She did her best to wipe the blood away from her eye with her hand, and was further comforted by the fact that she could see just fine—aside from the bright light that pierced her retinas.
Alice used both hands to cautiously search the rest of her body for injuries, starting from her neck and working her way downward. Her right side was tender, as if she had fielded a stiff kick to her ribs, but she didn’t think anything was broken. A little further down, she found that her left shin was also sore, but it was nothing serious, either. Content that she was physically okay, Alice shifted her attention to the inside of the vehicle.
The cabin seemed to be in pretty good shape, which was not unexpected considering that she mustn’t have been driving very fast. Too fast for the conditions, no doubt, but not fast on any global scale. Alice had, however, been traveling fast enough for the airbag to deploy, and now it hung limply from the steering wheel like a giant condom, a thin streak of blood from the cut on her forehead tracing a line down one side of the spent nylon. The windshield had also been smashed, but she could see no other obvious damage.
It took her a few moments before realizing that she was squinting, and only an instant more to notice that she was shivering. A gust of wind blasted the car, spraying the fragments of shatterproof glass across the dashboard and onto her lap. Confused and disoriented, Alice, clad only in a thin black t-shirt, immediately started to panic. She twisted against her seatbelt, trying to open the door and rise all in one motion. A searing jolt of pain shot up her bruised ribs, and she slumped back into the driver seat, wincing. She was going to freeze to death.
Think, Alice.
/>
She calmed herself with three deep breaths.
Think, goddamn it. Think!
She squinted against the bright light flooding the car.
Why is it so bright in—?
Then a foggy memory of yesterday, or maybe it was the day before or the day before that, came to her. Blurry patches of having gone to work and fielding calls from desperate old ladies worried that the power would cut out if the storm amounted to anything near what the weatherman predicted. But when she again looked down at what she was wearing—just a thin black shirt and a pair of jeans—it hit her.
Slowly and methodically, Alice unclicked her seatbelt and then unlocked the door. Thankfully, whatever she had struck had not damaged the door, and it swung open with ease. Before stepping outside, she reached down the side of the seat and popped the trunk. Then she slowly slid her body out of the car, wincing again with the pain that wrapped her right side. The cold slapped her in the face, and her shoes—thin loafers—were immediately engulfed by the snow. Her feet, which she thought had been numb in the cool car, suddenly came to life as if thousands of tiny tacks were embedded in her flesh.
“Fuck!”
Quickly, trying to hop her way through the thick snow, Alice moved to the rear of the car and flung the trunk open. Inside was a duffel bag, unzipped, one leg of a pair of slacks hanging out like a black tongue.
Yes!
Alice reached into the bag and rifled through the contents: her black slacks, a long-sleeved dark blue cotton shirt with the words “Property of Askergan County PD”, and a small black pouch.
Her smile vanished when she saw the pouch and she swallowed hard, images of the nude man with the beard stroking himself coming back to her.
Where is my case! Where’s my H!
Had she...?
Her hand shot out and she snatched the small black case, keeping it at arm’s length as she squeezed the fake leather once, then again. Then she brought the bag closer to her face and relief washed over her; it wasn’t the pervert’s heroin after all, but just her makeup case.
The wind blew, and this time she shivered violently. Pushing the duffel bag to one side, she caught a glimpse of her Canada Goose down coat, and inside the sleeve she found her mitts and hat. Before putting on her clothes and jacket, she glanced around quickly out of habit, and, for the second time in less than a minute, her body seized.
Oh my God.
It was at that moment that Alice realized that the strange bright light flooding her car wasn’t the sun’s reflection off the snow or the shattered windshield, but the headlight of another vehicle.
I hit another car?
Her heart was pounding in her throat as she quickly pulled her slacks over her jeans, the police shirt over her black t-shirt, and then put her jacket on.
She didn’t remember hitting a car; she remembered speeding up a tad before going into a spin and then jolting against a median. Had it been a car that she had struck and not the median?
Alice didn’t even bother tying the laces of her large and rather ill-fitting work boots—police issue, even though a policeman she was not—and tossed her loafers into the trunk before slamming it closed. Then she ran to the other car.
The other vehicle was angled thirty degrees to her own so that one of the headlights, the protective cover of which lay smashed in tiny glittering pieces on the snow, shone toward what was most likely the other side of the road while the other was like a spotlight, shining directly onto the driver’s seat of her car.
The light made her think of the cheesy 1980 cop dramas that seemed to always involve the interrogation of a cocky suspect, one bright light shining down—the fucking Gestapo—trying to sweat them.
The driver’s side door of the other car was open wide and the chime was going off, a ping ping ping ping that was barely audible over the blowing wind.
Fuck, it’s cold.
She leaned into the car, quickly scanning for any passengers. There was a car seat in the back, but like the rest of the vehicle, it was empty.
Unlike her own car, the windshield of this vehicle was still intact, and she instinctively reached over and turned the key that still hung from the ignition. The car sputtered, but didn’t start. She tried again, and there was a sudden hiss and a sharp pop that was quickly swallowed up by the wind, and she decided that it was probably best not to try a third time.
Where the hell did the driver go?
She would be lying if she said it didn’t bother her that while she was wasting time looking around this car in the freezing cold, the other driver had not extended her the same courtesy.
Maybe he had been drinking? After all, it was Christmas. Or maybe the car was abandoned?
But she had caused the accident, of that she was sure; her car had spun out.
The wind gusted again, and she pushed more of her body into the car to shield herself.
Come
Alice whipped her head around.
What the hell was that?
“Hey!” she shouted. “Anyone out there?”
She waited for a moment, listening for the sound again, but when all she heard was the wind, she chalked it up to her imagination and turned her attention back to the car. Only then did her eyes slowly begin to focus on something on the steering wheel just mere inches from where she gripped it. Instantly, her hand recoiled and her body stiffened, causing the back of her head to smack painfully against the roof of the car. It wasn’t the blood that bothered her—Lord knows she had seen plenty of that at the station, usually in the form of men with broken and bloody noses that Sheriff Drew dragged in after a bar fight—but it was what was in the blood, stuck to it, like the body of a miniscule rat, that gave her pause: a tuft of grey hair.
Jesus.
Alice pulled back further, looking around frantically for more blood. There was a splash on the edge of the seat, so dark that it was almost black, and a larger puddle on the floor mat.
How did I not see this before?
The wind slapped against her exposed body and she whipped around, having thought she heard a voice again. She half expected to see a man with a head injury stumbling towards her—perhaps a man in a grey suit and a loose dark blue tie who had been stuck in the storm and was trying to get home to his suburban wife and kids—but instead she saw nothing. Nothing except for the blanket of white broken only by the dark impressions her car tires had made when she had spun out, and even those were starting to fade.
“Hello?” Alice shouted, but her words were seized by the wind and dissolved like snowflakes on a warm kettle.
She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted again, but her efforts were fruitless; it seemed the louder she yelled, the harder the wind blew and the colder it got.
Shaking her head in frustration, she looked down and realized that between her feet was a trail of blood, but unlike the dark stain on the driver’s seat, this blood was bright red. Alice allowed her gaze to follow the trail for maybe ten or fifteen feet into the distance before it disappeared into the blowing snow. Then, as if clearing a path, the wind suddenly stopped and she noticed a green roadside sign not a quarter a mile back indicating an off ramp. She couldn’t remember passing an exit for some time; in fact, she couldn’t remember seeing much of anything since talking to Deputy Coggins—just the blinding white. She looked back at her car and tried to determine how far she had skidded. Unbelievably, the snow had already started to fill her tire grooves to the point that they were nearly indistinguishable from the rest of the road. The wind picked up again, and as Alice watched, the tracks disappeared entirely.
Come
She turned her head downward again and stared at the splattered blood for a moment, watching as it too was whipped away by the snow and wind. The wind gusted again, and Alice made up her mind.
Come.
8.
Oxford Let Jared Enter Mrs. Wharfburn’s house first before following, bag over one shoulder, gas can clutched in the opposite hand, even though every fiber
of his being was screaming for him to turn and leave. It wasn’t so much that he walked over the threshold, but rather like he was guided inside the house, as if the voice, which had slowly but consistently escalated in both volume and frequency inside his head—Come, Come, Come, Come, Cooooooooooooome—was a vortex or tractor beam, and Oxford was helpless to resist.
He was only two steps into the house before Jared stopped abruptly, causing Oxford to bump into his back, and he almost slipped on the dark red tongue of an entrance mat.
“Keep moving, Jared,” Oxford muttered, adjusting his cap, which had been knocked low on his brow.
“You feel that?” Jared whispered over his shoulder.
“Feel wha—?”
But then he paused—he did feel something. Oxford gently nudged Jared forward, and his brother took two more steps so that he could fully enter the house. And then it hit him like a wall. It was warm inside Mrs. Wharfburn’s house, warm and humid.
Oxford’s skin, which had stopped bothering him on their trek from Mama Lawrence’s house likely due to the cold, suddenly became unbearably itchy again. It was all he could do to resist stripping down to his bare skin and tear at the pinkish membrane with his fingernails. Instead, fighting the urge, he slowly and methodically reached up and pulled the turtleneck from his nose and mouth, hoping that the deliberateness of his actions would prevent him from succumbing to his desire to scratch. Immediately, a sickly-sweet smell like overripe fruit filled his mouth and throat and he gagged.
What the fuck?
Oxford quickly pulled his turtleneck back up.
“Why is it so warm in here?” Jared asked.
“Don’t know,” Oxford answered, his voice muffled through the fabric. He gulped hard, trying to keep whatever little food still rested partially digested in his stomach where it lay.
“Generator, maybe? Better yet, what the fuck is that smell? It smells like baby dia—”
Insatiable Series Omnibus Edition (Books 1-3) Page 14
