by Ronald Malfi
Or worse, she thought, her eyes already on the garage that faced the back porch. In the daytime it certainly looked less ominous. The bats were no longer dangling like Christmas decorations from the eaves. Matthew’s bike had fallen over on its side—had she done that last night in her panic?—and looking at it again sent a wave of sorrow through her.
Then a piece of last night’s dream returned to her—her eyes opening to a darkened world, where bitter winds whistled through the valley and the mountains groaned like restless giants in slumber. Matthew stood down in the yard, staring up at her. He was nude except for his underwear and his scalp was patchy where clumps of his hair had fallen out in places. His eyes took on the predatory black stare of a shark. He dug his toes into the black soil and spoke to her telepathically without actually opening his mouth. Yet his words—if they could even be deemed as such—were like a thousand bleating trumpets at the center of Brandy’s brain. In her dream, she shrieked into the night. Her brother—or the thing that had once been her brother—fled back through the cornfield.
Sitting here now, in the bright light of day, she wondered if it had been a dream after all…
Also, she had to piss so badly she could taste it.
She crept back into the house, conscious of the fact that her mother was probably still asleep (which she was), and went directly to the upstairs bathroom. She urinated then washed her face and hands before heading to her bedroom. There, she dressed in a pair of running sweats and tied her hair back with an elastic band. She laced on her good running sneakers, too—the Adidas with the cleats. They were a bit dirty and the cleats had been worn to ineffectual little nubs, but it felt good to climb back into them again.
Back outside, she stood for some time, staring at the shards of broken glass in the dirt then up at the small window in the side of the garage, jagged glass spearheads still protruding from the frame. She went around to the other side of the garage, took a deep breath, her hand on the doorknob. Then she shoved the door open, expecting the unexpected.
2
It occurred to her at that moment that prior to last night she hadn’t actually stepped foot in the garage since before her father had left. The small, musty work area was filled with his personal belongings: his tools, his workbench, his lawnmower and Rototiller and gardening supplies, his various automotive supplies, paint cans stacked into pyramids, ancient stereo equipment, including several old turntables blanketed in dust as thick as fur, a Baltimore Ravens cheerleaders calendar pinned to one wall, countless other sundry items. Yet it wasn’t just the items but the place itself that channeled Hugh Crawly. The smell of the wood mingled with turpentine mixed with the overly sweet scent of antifreeze and motor oil…
All of it.
She found herself fighting off tears. And she hated herself for it. She hated her father, too. This has nothing to do with you, her mind quipped, addressing the father who had abandoned the rest of them. This is about Matthew right now. You have no right intruding on me right now, damn you.
She took a deep, shuddery breath and was able to bring herself back under control. Looking around, she realized that she had no idea what she had expected to find coming in here. She considered going to the police, maybe talking with Ben Journell again, but she really had no idea what to tell them. That someone had been hiding in her garage, probably for several days now? That she had the horrific impression that the someone had, for some inexplicable reason, been her brother? No, she couldn’t do that.
Instead, she went back out into the yard and over to where the rickety chain-link fence separated their property from the Marshes’ cornfield. Brandy leaned over the fence and saw a perfectly outlined footprint in the hard soil on the other side of the fence. She looked up and could make out a subtle parting of the cornstalks, which suggested the direction the person might have traveled the previous night as they cut through the field.
Without giving it a second thought, Brandy hopped the fence and proceeded through the corn.
3
Bryant and Sylvia Marsh owned about a hundred acres of farmland, much of it utilized for the growing of maize. The fields abutted the Crawly property, close enough that Brandy and Matthew, when they were younger, could reach over the fence and pluck the ripe ears right out of their silky husks without leaving their backyard. The Marshes, who were kind people, encouraged this and would often bring barrels of the crop over to the Crawly household after a plentiful harvest. The cornfields yawned clear across the southern crook of Stillwater, right out to the bristling green-and-brown foothills of Wills Mountain. To the west, the fields overran the wooded hillsides straight out to Gracie Street, where abandoned farmhouses and barnyards stood eerily like props from some long-forgotten movie set.
Brandy followed the trail of broken cornstalks for close to forty-five minutes before the trail grew cold. Something immense and mechanical loomed just ahead so she continued in that direction. It was a large combine harvester, yellow as a school bus, its reciprocating head filled with rows of metal teeth. She walked a complete circle around the machine, still not sure what she was looking for. Satisfied that she hadn’t found anything out of the ordinary, she pressed on through the maize, leaving the combine harvester to diminish in her wake.
By the time she emptied out onto Gracie Street, the sky had already been grumbling for some time. A light patter of rain fell but it only lasted a brief time. It felt good against her face. She had worked up quite a sweat hoofing it across town. On the shoulder of the road, she scraped the dirt out from between the cleats on the soles of her sneakers then picked aphids, spiders, and stalk borers from her clothes and hair. Across the road stood the first wave of abandoned farmhouses, their roofs sagging or completely sheared off, their windows like holes punched in drywall. Rising above the rooftops and farther in the distance, the crumbling grain silo rose up like a missile. NO TRESPASSING signs were posted everywhere, but Brandy also saw scads of empty beer cans, fast-food wrappers, and tire tracks in the mud. This was where many residents had lived and farmed until years of flooding had prompted their inevitable evacuation. Even now, the damage done to these structures was still clearly evident in the way they slouched and sloped and sank down into their foundations. The earth itself was still a muddy quagmire from the last flood.
Brandy crossed Gracie Street and trod across the muddy field, surveying the closest farmhouses with something akin to reverential silence. For the first time, she could understand why her father would have wanted to get out of a town as desolate and ruinous as Stillwater. These people had left, hadn’t they?
He could have taken us with him.
Again, she chased the thought away. This had nothing to do with her father.
As she crept closer to one of the farmhouses, she was overwhelmed by the smell of the Narrows coming off it in potent, suffocating waves. It was the smell that, following the flood, had permeated the whole town, including the Crawly household. It was stronger out here, however, and Brandy had to hold her breath when she peered into a doorway that no longer had a door hanging from the hinges.
Inside—crumbling darkness and warped, waterlogged floorboards. Animals had made nests and dens, and the vaguely sweet perfume of feces mingled with the reek of the flood. Great streamers of moss, as lush as carpeting, crept up and down the walls. Large rents in the roof showed the iron-colored sky and allowed rain to spill in. With one hand she reached out and touched the doorframe. It was spongy and forgiving. She thought she might be able to shove the entire structure over on its side with one sturdy shove.
She crossed between two dilapidated barns where weathered beams and struts poked out from the walls and through the roof like ribs through a rotting carcass. Between the two crumbling barns, a structure slightly larger than an outhouse gathered her attention. There was something rusted and metallic inside—some piece of farming machinery she didn’t recognize—and there was what looked like a bloody handprint on the outhouse’s open steel door. Brandy veered clear of i
t, cutting through the marshy ground to a small, square little house made of white brick. The roof was furry with moss that dripped over the front windows. There was a little porch off to the right where a door was set into the front of the house, off-center. The door itself looked like something scavenged from a junkyard. Determined weeds sprang up between the porch’s floorboards.
Something moved in one of the house’s windows. Brandy jerked her head and peered at the window, trying to see past the film of muck on the glass, but it was impossible. When the thing moved again, she was startled to find that the movement hadn’t been coming from inside the house, but from right above the window itself. Two bats, their wings intertwined about each other, dangled upside down from the drooping eaves of the house.
A second later, it seemed she was suddenly allowed to see the rest of them. They were clinging with clawed wings to the walls, scrabbling along the rooftop, hanging precariously from a slouching brick chimney, huddling together in damp, hairy pods beneath the porch…
Even as she moved toward the house, she couldn’t comprehend exactly what she was doing. Had she been watching herself on some instant reply, perhaps projected onto a movie screen, she would have denied that the figure moving slowly toward the house was her—surely she would have no intention of going up to that run-down, bat-infested shack. Yet here she was, and she moved with the silent and unwavering determination of a wildcat stalking prey through the underbrush.
The bats nearest the porch did not move as she mounted the waterlogged stairs and arrived before the closed front door of the abandoned house. She was suddenly alive, more alive than she had ever been, and she could feel the blood whooshing through her veins and the sweat bursting through the pores on her face and the agitation tickling the back of her throat. Her heart pumped like a piston.
She pushed against the door and it opened.
Chapter Fourteen
1
When Maggie Quedentock finally opened her eyes, she could see the soft glow of daylight behind the drawn shade of the bedroom window. Stiffly, she sat up. She was on the floor of the master bedroom, curled in a fetal position like a child who’d fallen asleep on their parent’s lap. What time was it? When was it?
The next thing she noticed was the blood on her left forearm, tiny crimson pinpricks that wiped off when she pawed at them.
Her throat felt sore and abraded. Moreover, it felt like someone had run a metal rod straight down into her head, through her neck, and down through her spine. Moving hurt. She looked around the room, strands of hair wafting like cobwebs in front of her eyes. The bedroom looked untouched and perfect—yet almost alien to her. She struggled to assemble the events of the past seventy-two hours (or had it been longer?) in her head but found it as fruitless as tossing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle into the air in hopes that they would assemble themselves before striking the floor.
A part of her recalled with perfect clarity what had happened to Evan out in the backyard. However, a wholly separate part of her brain countered that event with falsities and sparkly, curtained gauze, forcing her to question the authenticity of such an incident, which in turn allowed her to function without completely breaking down. That brick wall was rooted firmly at the center of her brain and she was torn about whether she should knock it down and bulldoze straight through it or just pretend it wasn’t there, content to walk around in circles like a blind cat.
She stood on legs that felt as unsteady as broomsticks. Her mouth tasted stale, and her tongue was a swollen lump of cloth. At the window, she peeled away the shade and looked out on the backyard. It did not make her feel any better that there was no evidence out there of what had occurred two nights ago. Either that thing had been real…or she was quickly losing her mind. Either way, there was no positive outcome.
The Pontiac and the Volkswagen both glistened in the silvery light that managed to peek out from behind dark clouds. Now, with the darkness of night behind her, it seemed possible and even plausible to believe that everything had been a dream, a nightmare. It hadn’t been real.
The shotgun was out there. She could see it in the dirt, its inky-black barrel sticking out past the VW’s front tires. She stared at it for a full three minutes, until her eyes burned from not blinking.
Trembling, she went into the bathroom. The visage in the mirror grimaced at her. There was blood on her lower lip where she had apparently bitten down too hard in her sleep, which accounted for the patter of blood on her left forearm. The wine stain was still front and center on her tank top with the Crossroads logo emblazoned across the top. Vaguely, she recalled spilling her wine last night…or two nights ago…
What the fuck day is this?
Beneath a spray of lukewarm water, she washed her face and hands then pulled her hair back and manipulated it into a hasty ponytail with a fabric hair tie.
She’d wanted to call for help the past two nights but couldn’t. This realization rushed back to her now like a tidal wave. They didn’t have a land line and she’d dropped her cell phone out in the yard two nights earlier, before running back into the house. Trapped. Helpless. She could risk going back out there to find her phone, sure…but that thing might still be out there…
She stripped off her clothes, needing to get rid of that accusatory wine stain, and dressed in a pair of jeans and a halter top. Back at the bathroom sink, she brushed her teeth, nearly sobbing the whole time. It was such a pragmatic and domesticated thing to do, brushing one’s teeth in front of the bathroom mirror, and she thought it would help calm her down, but all it did was make her more anxious and upset. She spit into the sink and threw her toothbrush into the basin then rushed out into the hallway as if someone were chasing her.
The hallway clock ticked ominously. She listened but the rest of the house was incriminatingly silent. At the far end of the hall, where shadows shifted and twisted and looked nothing like the objects which they belonged to, a shape ambled into view, large and hulking. Maggie felt her throat tighten.
It was her father, as big in death as he had been in life, standing there in the suit she and her mother had buried him in. His face was a peeling mask of flesh through which the ridges of his cheekbones protruded. His eye sockets were hollow pits at the bottom of which issued a faint red illumination. His nose was gone, revealing in its absence a spade-shaped cavity that reminded Maggie of hands pressed together in prayer.
—You hated me but all I ever did was try to prepare you for the hardships of this world, he said. His voice was clogged with dirt from the grave.
“I didn’t hate you.” Tears stung her eyes.
—Things you do come back to haunt you, he said. Things you forget about never forget about you.
She cried out then, grabbing the sides of her head while her tears burned hot rivulets down her cheeks. A moment later, when she opened her eyes, her father was gone.
Losing my mind, losing my mind, losing my mind…
In the living room, the broken wineglass still sat in a puddle of spilled wine. She went quickly to the back door and peered through the crescent of glass. It provided a slightly different perspective of the yard than the bedroom window had, but she could still see no more than the tip of the shotgun poking out from behind the Volkswagen. Her cell phone was out there somewhere but she couldn’t see that, either.
Daylight is my best chance. If I keep myself holed up in this house, that thing will come back when it’s dark—it always seems to come back when it’s dark—and then I’m a goner. Daylight is my best bet.
A part of her brain was still trying to convince her that none of this was real and it was all a nightmare and Evan was out working at the plant and he would arrive home tonight in time for dinner and maybe she should shoot out to Lomax’s for groceries…
It was the same mantra she had convinced herself of last night. Now, she tried to recall specific details of yesterday but found that, aside from brief and flashy snapshots of jumbled, nonsensical images, she could remember very little. She had
slept most of yesterday away, hadn’t she? She’d been practically unconscious with fear for a full twenty-four hours.
Or possibly longer, she thought now, trembling all over again. I could have been asleep for days. Or even a week…or a month. What if everyone else in Stillwater is gone? What if I’m the only one left and that thing is still out there, waiting?
Ceiling beams creaked. She froze, petrified. Could something be on the roof? Christ—in the fucking attic?
Can someone die from fright?
From the kitchen window, she could see a scrabble of footprints in the dirt. They were erratic, like those of some frantic animal. Sunlight angled off the dent in the Pontiac’s hood and winked at her. That damn shotgun barrel seemed to be pointing straight at her.
She forced herself under control. Closing her eyes, she grew conscious of her breathing and forced it to regain some semblance of composure. From the roll of paper towels on the wall, she ripped off a streamer of paper and went into the living room, where she cleaned up the spilled wine and collected the pieces of broken glass like someone hunting for treasure on a tropical beach.
Through the window over the sink, she could see the fenceposts and, beyond that, the backyard. The wet grass rippled in the wind.
You can’t stay in this house forever. It was the head-voice again, although this time she couldn’t tell if it was her unborn, undead child or some other ethereal voice booming down on her from the heavens. She couldn’t be sure. Nothing was real and nothing made sense. If she stayed in this house, she was certain she’d crisp up like something excavated from a fire…that she’d blacken and turn to a heap of muddy soot. Her soul was shrinking.
“Daddy?” Her voice carried down the hallway and echoed through the empty house like someone shouting down into the belly of a mineshaft.
Momentarily, she was confused again…uncertain about who she was and where she belonged…
