Three Incidents at Foster Manor

by P. T. Phronk

  The Bear laughed maniacally. “They’re everywhere at once! How can you hide when they’re everywhere at once? All we can do is run. All we can do is run!”

  “Down, blow your house, huff ‘n puff, huff ‘n puff, down,” Caleb muttered. I felt him convulsing in his chair.

  Wind filled the room. Leaves and branches scraped at my face and my lungs burned from the acrid air. A drop of water hit me in the eyebrow and I instinctively twitched to get rid of it, and without thinking, opened one eye.

  Dark shapes were all around. The sun had started to rise, but something blocked it, keeping the room and the laneway out front dark. A smaller shadow skittered closer to the ground outside on the laneway, where The Pig fell to the ground, screaming, before the shadow overtook him.

  Flames licked at the walls, but I knew that wasn’t real. I knew that was just me.

  The Bear stumbled just before reaching the window, the gust of wind too strong. The gun fell from his hands. He pinwheeled backward, toward Marcus. Then he regained his footing and stepped forward again.

  A loud snap came from Marcus. He’d found the strength to break the zip ties holding his arms, which were soon wrapped around The Bear’s neck. Marcus’s shoes flew off as he kicked to break the legs off the chair and escape the ties around his feet. As The Bear tried to escape, they both toppled forward, through the remaining shards of the broken window, glass slashing at them both.

  I squeezed my eyes shut before I could see more. I wished I could close my ears against the warbling wail from outside. Was it only the wind? Or was Marcus somehow making that inhuman sound?

  The Snake shouted for his son. “Come back, Aiden! Where are you going?” His voice got further and further away.

  Tears streamed down my face. I thought about Todd. What were the last things he heard as he burned? Did he die with his eyes open or his eyes closed?

  I concentrated on what his face looked like. I held that in my mind’s eye to block out the sounds and feelings around me—the screams, the thumps, the wind, the heat, the rumbling of the Earth.

  I don’t know how long it was before I allowed the world back in, and there was finally silence.

  When I opened my eyes, Jasmine and I were the only conscious beings around. Caleb had passed out. Ash was gone.

  Chapter 12

  My wrists ached. The trick to escaping zip ties is to keep your fists clenched tight and palms facing down as your captors put them on—it hurts, but it creates more room between your wrists. You keep your arms flexed in this uncomfortable position no matter how tight they squeeze, struggling right from the start so you don’t have to struggle later.

  That didn’t always work out so neatly when it came to other parts of my life. Here, it was struggle all the way down.

  As if sensing my pain, Jasmine briefly squeezed my arm.

  At least the sun felt good on my face. The rain had finally stopped beating down, and the house seemed oddly peaceful in the morning light spilling through the shattered windows.

  “It’s over,” Jasmine said. She couldn’t take her eyes off the unmoving lumps outside. One of them could have been her father, but she was in no rush to confirm that. I could already tell that he was gone, in the same way I could tell that Caleb’s assault was done—the rumble and buzz from just a few minutes earlier was absent, though my ears still rang.

  “It’s not over,” I whispered. “I have to show you something.”

  We untied Caleb, laid him on the ground, and put a bunched-up table cloth under his head. A trickle of blood fell from his nose as his eyes gradually opened.

  “You did it,” I said. “They’re gone, Caleb. The house is ours.”

  “Our turn.” He smiled, but he wasn’t happy.

  I brushed a curl of hair back from his face and fought back tears. “We’ll get you out of here soon. Just rest for a minute.”

  He shook his head and glanced at his father, still slumped in his chair. “I’ll stay. I’ll protect Dad. And Trista. Get help and I’ll stay.”

  I nodded and wiped snot from my nose. “Okay, honey.” That’s what I’d called Todd, but only when he was very young. “We’ll get help.”

  I handed him The Snake’s discarded pistol, in case any of them came back, even though the gun seemed tiny and ineffectual in his hands now. He had power greater than any gun. I didn’t know how it worked, but he’d summoned something that protected us all. Perhaps it was only imagination he summoned, provoking something already inside the people around him, but it had done the job. The unmoving lumps outside could attest to that.

  I grabbed the rifle The Pig had abandoned, then took Jasmine to the safe room. She hesitated at the top of the stairs to the basement. “I don’t need to see her.”

  “Sorry, but you do. You’d never believe me if I told you.”

  “You already did. Trista is in there, bludgeoned to death with a hammer by those men. I already know too much.” She shook and whimpered as she exhaled. “I’ll already see that every time I close my eyes for the rest of my life. I love her so much, Amy. Dad didn’t like it—he’s traditional like that—and Craig didn’t like it much either, because of how much she loved me. We were going to run away together. Just a few more months here, then we’d have been off to university together, past all this jealousy, away from this place. Those men ruined it. I’m guilty too, though.”

  I tensed. “Why would you feel guilty?”

  Tears sparkled on her cheeks in the rising sun. “She sent me a text message just before she came home, a few days ago. Her university trip was supposed to last all week, but she said she only needed to see one campus to make her decision. She started with a tour of Queens, but she knew that if she went there, it would be just like it was during the tour—without me. I’d already accepted my offer from Western University. She said that the beauty of the campus meant nothing to her without me.” Jasmine sobbed. “I should have told her to keep going, make the right decision for her career, but I was selfish. When she said her mind was made up, and she’d be going to Western with me, I told her how happy that made me. Selfish! She came home right away. And if she hadn’t, if she didn’t love me like I love her, she’d have still been touring those universities alone when those men came for her.”

  I let her cry until she couldn’t anymore, then waited a minute longer, but there was no right time to say it, so I just said it: “The men didn’t do it. They didn’t kill her.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  We descended into the basement once more. The power was back, but the lights only made it more horrible to step past the rubber castle, where small pools of blood were dry on the edges but still wet in the middle, resembling suckers on a rubbery tentacle. And had the door to the safe room always been such a sickly yellow? Or had I just never seen it so clearly before?

  I tried the family’s passcode again, just to test if having the power back would somehow reset it, but no dice—as I knew now, someone had intentionally changed every passcode. So I typed in the failsafe passcode of my dead family’s birthdays, looked around to make sure nobody was following us, then opened the door.

  Jasmine recoiled from what she saw, just as I had. Trista was there. She was dead. But she hadn’t been killed last night.

  Trista almost appeared peaceful on the bed. Jasmine covered her nose and stepped inside. “No. Someone moved her? But …”

  I let her draw more conclusions on her own. Trista’s skin was blotchy and had a sheen to it. She was a slim girl in the photos I’d seen on the Fosters’ fridge, but now her belly had bloated so much that it stretched the buttons of her flannel shirt. It was marked by a single stab wound on the left side.

  “But where did …” Jasmine stammered, looking at the clean white floor. There was no blood, and no message scrawled in it. Trista’s final message was gone. Long gone.

  I checked behind us again to make sure we were alone.

  “He cleaned it up,” I said. “He had a few da
ys to do it.”

  “No. No, I saw her, just last night. She was fine until I stepped out, and then she … wasn’t. That was last night.”

  “You only saw her last night on the cameras.”

  “But that’s the camera right there,” she said, pointing to the black hemisphere in the ceiling.

  “They’re live when it’s working. When the whole system hasn’t been hacked. He rewound the security tape to hide what he did. I don’t know if he meant for us to see her dead, or if he thought we’d all be gone by the time the tape got to that point. He knew when that point was; I saw him checking his watch all the time, though I didn’t know why. At the exact time when the tape got to her killing, that’s when he distracted you, to make sure you didn’t see him. But if you did, you’d be seeing into the past. She was killed three days ago.”

  “Ash. Of course.” She shivered. “He’s been with us all night, hiding this. But why? Why would he do this? Where is he now?”

  I thought of Trista’s diary—the HE who smelled like cherries and stood outside her room at night. “More jealousy? Did he love her?”

  Love was powerful. Didn’t Trista’s diary say that SHE—Jasmine—was just as frightening as Ash?

  Jasmine shook her head, then kneeled beside Trista and took her pale hand. “He’s about the only one who didn’t actually love her. Oh he’d say he loved her, if you pressed him. Maybe he even believed it. But he didn’t love her. He just wanted her. She was an object to him—I could see it in the way he looked her up and down when she walked into a room. She defended him, said he was practically a part of the family, but when I suggested we move away, far away, she didn’t protest, and I think getting away from him was part of why she didn’t even consider staying here.”

  I put it together, but there were still missing pieces. It couldn’t have been a coincidence that the intruders came to the house tonight, just after Ash had done his business with Trista. I speculated out loud about what could have happened—Ash had planned on giving the house, with its safe room, to the intruders. They were some of the growing number of cultish true believers fearing the end of the world, desperate for somewhere safe, so they could have promised Ash anything in return. Money, their old homes, maybe even a spot in the safe room.

  HE is planning something, her diary, her ghost, had said.

  “She must have caught him planning this. She went to investigate what he was up to, in the safe room, and he locked her in there. He went back to talk her out of revealing what he’d been planning—or do something even worse to her—and she wouldn’t.”

  “Of course she wouldn’t. She was so strong,” Jasmine said, squeezing Trista’s cold hand.

  “So he killed her. He got scared, ran off, but then came back later to clean up. Maybe he was planning on hiding her body, too, but Craig and Caleb came back home from their vacation before he could. The attackers were watching the house, and all the activity accelerated their plans to move in. They tried to scare us out, with the writing on the window, but when that didn’t work, they took a more direct approach.”

  Jasmine stood. She leaned forward and kissed Trista on the forehead. Then she seemed to become aware of where she was, glancing at the space behind me. “So where is Ash?”

  I squeezed the rifle. “They probably never even tied him up properly in the ball room. Let’s hope he ran away and isn’t planning on coming back. I’m not sure how much he saw. If he opened his eyes, his mind might be mush, just like those men.”

  “It was Caleb, wasn’t it? We’ve always seen things when he’s around. When he’s emotional, it gets worse. None of us said it out loud, because that’s crazy, but it was him, wasn’t it? He made them see things. He saved us.”

  “I think so.”

  “And you provoked him. You lied about what you saw down here. You barely know us; how did you know what would happen?”

  I turned away. “I didn’t know for sure. But I tested him, before that. I told him Mae was wearing an orange hat. It wasn’t orange—it was green, I’m sure it was—but when Mae appeared again, well, you saw it.”

  Jasmine gasped. “Mae was never really here.”

  “No,” I said. My bottom lip trembled as I thought about it all—Mae, the dog, the flying glass in the séance. Would I be able to go home and live life as if the world made sense? As if anything were really real?

  We embraced, then, and cried for a long while, letting all the hurt and confusion release itself, until we were, at least temporarily, able to function again.

  My phone still didn’t function, however, so we’d need to get out of here to find help. I locked the safe room, then, upstairs, reset the system so only Jasmine and I could alter any settings. The camera went back to the live view of Trista, terrible but true. Caleb would stay and guard the house from any more tampering. If it came to defending himself, he probably wouldn’t even need the gun.

  I felt like the house was secure again. I’d done my job. It wasn’t a fairy-tale ending, but it would have to do.

  They’d slashed my tires. I gained a small comfort in knowing that if I’d tried to abandon the family and drive away, as my natural inclinations would have led me to do, it probably would have ended up with me dead. There was storybook justice in that.

  But during Caleb’s defence of the home, I’d heard something about keys. The Snake had yelled at The Pig for keys, presumably the ones for the big white truck semi-hidden off the laneway, blocked by trees enough that it would have been invisible in the dark, but in the morning light it stood out against the natural backdrop like a rotting thumb.

  The Pig lay on the ground between the house and the truck. His mask had been torn off and tossed beside him. Little rivers of red dried around the driveway’s cobblestones, spreading like veins away from his faded pink hazard suit. The cartilage of his Adam’s apple showed under the gouges criss-crossing his neck. I’d seen a shadow overtake him, but could Caleb’s apparitions kill? Or were The Pig’s red fingernails proof that he had done this to himself?

  I heaved as I undid his suit to reach the pocket of his jeans and pull out a key. I clicked the unlock button and the truck’s headlights flashed.

  “Jasmine?” I shouted, turning toward the house.

  She came out a moment later, gently closing the door behind her. She shook her head as her shoes clomped across the driveway. “Caleb won’t come. I explained what happened with his sister. He said he’s staying with his family, and staying with the house.”

  I understood. Even though the family would have seemed normal to anyone else, doing normal family things, I couldn’t picture Caleb in particular outside of the house. When I tried to imagine the Fosters out at a restaurant, maybe celebrating Trista’s birthday, there was a blank space where Caleb should have been. Instead, he was back at the house. Part of the house.

  Jasmine let me use her shoulder to take some weight off my knee. She offered to drive, but I told her I’d be fine once I sat down.

  I thought I heard a distant thumping. It could have been a neighbour clearing brush, but my mind heard the beat of another song from Graceland, even filling in some of Paul Simon’s lyrics. When we reached the truck, I turned back for one last look at the Foster Manor. It seemed to writhe with life, breathe with Caleb’s breath, as it whispered Craig’s music. Shadows moved in the windows, and if I squinted I could make out Mae’s hat—green or orange, I couldn’t tell—and a pair of canine eyes peeking over the windowsill. Despite all the death in that place, it buzzed of life.

  Jasmine got in the passenger seat of the truck and drummed her fingers on the dashboard. I got the hint and pulled myself into the driver’s side.

  “Seatbelts,” I said.

  Jasmine rolled her eyes, in a way that Todd and Wes did sometimes when I was overly cautious with them.

  “It seems ridiculous, doesn’t it? A seatbelt, after all this. But you know, safety is what I do. For better or worse,” I said, thinking of the safe room.

  I got a sad smil
e out of Jasmine, and she did follow my lead to strap up.

  We pulled away and drove through the forest, back to civilization. As the thump and buzz of life from the house faded, we kept an eye out for other signs of life—Ash, or Marcus. There was no sign of them in the forest, which was incongruously beautiful in the translucent mist from the previous night’s storm, highlighting shafts of light beaming from space to the Earth.

  Jasmine slumped in her seat and wept quietly.

  Something was wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on what.

  Relax, Amy, you’re free, I told myself.

  Perhaps it was the storm. They had never lasted so long before. I could see puffs of red clouds over the tops of the trees lining the country roads, which were a sign that the environmental catastrophe was not over, and was instead getting worse. Maybe the men who attacked the house for its safe room had the right idea. Maybe there were no rules when the end of the world was coming.

  Don’t be ridiculous, I thought, there is still time. There is still beauty in the world worth preserving.

  Jasmine’s puffy brown eyes drooped shut—her body needed sleep after being awake all night, despite the thoughts that must have been torturing her mind. There was beauty in that. There was beauty in the little smear of grease from where her forehead rested against the window. There was even beauty in the red clouds that had appeared in the world, threatening to end it, but adding a darkly sweet smell to the air.

  I inhaled. That’s what was wrong.

  The truck smelled like cherries.

  I checked the rearview mirror. The road behind me was clear. But my gaze lingered on the back seat, and I thought I heard a scratch of fabric against fabric.

  Jasmine sensed my tension and snapped to attention. I put my foot on the brake, swiped the turn signal, and began to pull over.

  Ash—HIM—thrust up from the floor of the back seat. Suddenly he had an arm around Jasmine, and one of her father’s kitchen knives to her throat.