This time it was Sammy that reached out and grabbed Bubba with a look that said, “shut up, now” as they neared the house. Lucas stopped. They were standing in the front yard, but with the mist lying low to the ground they couldn’t see much. The yard itself was as thick with trees and shrubbery as the walkway had been, but there was a long gray porch the length of the house with a wide set of steps that led to the front door above. All the windows were dark except for one. The house rose like a castle from the mist. High in the drum tower at the corner of the house, a light glowed dull orange behind draped curtains.
Lucas took another careful step toward the front porch. Anthony stepped through the last of the brambles that choked the walkway.
A growl came from beneath the porch.
Bubba made a sound like he was freezing to death and dying at the same time. They smelled the piss that ran down his leg and steamed in the cold.
Anthony said, “What the fuck?”
“Throw!” Lucas said. He cocked back his arm and launched five eggs in rapid-fire succession. They struck two of the front windows, the front screen door, and the siding on either side of the door.
The growling got louder. A black shape appeared in the fog near the ground. They could barely see it as it emerged from beneath the porch. It was the size of a dog but it seemed thicker, squat, its rear haunches thicker.
Sammy turned and ran, dropping his eggs. Anthony backed up, falling on his ass into the snow. He scrambled quickly to his feet and ran for the car. Bubba lumbered around, yelling like his ass was on fire, making a beeline for the car.
Lucas faced the shape that advanced through the low-lying fog. Finally he took a step back, no longer certain the thing was just a dog. Some obscure source of light seemed to penetrate the fog, revealing two eyes on the black shape, neither one of which looked much like the other. One side of the beast’s misshapen head, though canine, was swollen and deformed, one eye green, the other flashed red.
It snarled and leapt at him.
Lucas smashed through the brambles and fell onto the street. The guys, just climbing into the car, yelled for him to hurry. He scrambled to his feet. Without looking behind him, Lucas moved as fast as he’d ever moved off the line as he launched himself into the front seat of his car and slammed the door behind him. Flipping the headlights on, the guys yelling like crazy, the interior of the car reeking like weed, spilled beer, and Bubba’s piss, Lucas floored the accelerator and shot down the hill into clouds of darkness. Fog drifted toward them from the lower area of town. Before any of them said anything else, Lucas steered the Mustang, kicking the rear-end sideways on every corner, past the old cemetery and across the old highway, back into the hills that led to the Range.
The roar of the engine lowered as he slowed, heading up into the mountains outside of town.
Lucas started laughing. Anthony joined him shortly. Sammy remained quiet, sunken into a morose silence, and Bubba seemed on the verge of tears, sitting in his piss-wet pants and stinking like a dirty diaper. “Dude, you pissed yourself,” Anthony declared, laughing.
“Fuck you, Tony.”
Lucas was still laughing when Sammy yelled, “What the fuck is that?”
The boys snapped to attention, peering through the windshield of the Mustang as Lucas sent it hurtling into the night. As soon as Sammy spoke, it was as if he’d spoken the magic word that lifted a dark veil. The mist cleared before them. A black strip of rough road curled like a serpent up the side of the mountain. Their newfound clarity also revealed a gathering green energy—a supernatural glow—that seemed to leak through some interdimensional portal. The energy shimmered as though a green strobe shone through it, and then, as it gathered, it gained luminescence.
It hovered like that for a moment in front of the car. Then it took shape.
The amorphous glow morphed into a beastlike phantom—long, gangly arms with misty talons, a shimmering torso that emerged like smoke from nothing where its legs should have been, and yet it hovered in front of the vehicle. Worst of all was its head: wide, misshapen, a cross between a human with bat-like ears, black pits for eyes, and a gaping maw that yawned open, impossibly huge. A vague outline of ragged teeth completed the vision of horror.
No sooner had they seen the vision than all of them—Lucas included—began to scream like cherry soldiers in the face of death.
Lucas cranked the wheel of the Mustang out of instinct. The wheels screeched across the rudimentary pavement of the back road, but then the tires grabbed and shot them off the edge of the roadway into a field.
The green nightmare surged through the windshield of the car and flayed the skin from Lucas’s neck and face. It continued ripping the skin until it formed a giant flap that slipped away from his skull in a bloody fold of hair which landed in a wet heap in Sammy’s lap. Lucas felt a second blow strike him from the other direction, dislocating his jaw. As the incorporeal spirit somehow became more solid, it struck again from the same angle and ripped the jaw from the lower half of his face. It left behind a dangling hunk of meat and his tongue. A mess of gore spattered the inside of the windows as the others hung on without the ability to do anything else. Finished with Lucas, the awful being flowed through the car in a flash of searing heat that curled the flesh from the bones of the other teens in the car, leaving their thrashing nervous systems twitching in raw carcasses as the Mustang launched off of the side of the road.
The car bounced nose-first into Guy Prater’s field. It tangled in the barbed wire and took fifty feet of it with the vehicle as it flipped forward and then on its side, bouncing time after time into the field. The top caved in and glass exploded. A second bounce took it onto its side and the momentum was almost enough to carry it over again one more time onto its wheels ... but not quite. The vehicle fell back onto its top and rocked, metal creaking as if in pain.
The fog that swirled in the crash’s wake settled like drowsy phantoms.
The driver’s side headlight, still shining into the field like a lighthouse beacon, was the only thing that gave the crash away to the next driver that came by.
Otherwise, the mangled bodies might have lay scattered across the field all night long before they were discovered.
CHAPTER NINE
“Are you sure, Dad?” Carly sat on one end of the couch with her feet tucked underneath her. She was munching on a box of graham crackers and flipping through channels on the TV. A crocheted blanket that Beth made years ago was draped over her legs.
He looked over his daughter with an appraising eye, feeling pride at how smart and independent and compassionate she was, feeling fear at how grown up she was beginning to seem. The thought of her leaving home touched him with desolation. She was a beautiful girl, and he could see every bit of Beth in her. It made him glad to recognize the gentle slope of her mother’s fine cheekbones, the long lashes and mischievous look that sometimes glimmered in her eye. And there was the way she swept locks of her long hair behind her ear and cocked her head just slightly when she was distracted and trying to listen to two things at once. That much of Beth had survived in her daughter, and more. Thankfully, Carly didn’t seem to have inherited any of the darkness that had haunted her mother for so many years before she ended her life. Even so, his relief that Carly wasn’t like Beth in that way, brought a pang of sadness to his heart. As if Beth had been flawed. Broken.
She was. She was deeply broken, and nothing either of us could do would have fixed it.
The therapist had tried to drill that into their heads. It was meant to absolve them of guilt. A litany that, if repeated enough, they were supposed to believe. It just wasn’t that easy.
“I’ll be fine, sweetheart.” Gavin sat next to her. “I knew you planned on staying at Abigail’s tonight, so Karen’s coming over. We’re going to have dinner here, start a fire, maybe watch a movie and just ... talk.”
“I think it’s awesome you’re having her back over, Dad.”
Gavin gave her a bemused look. “You’ve changed your mind about her a bit, huh?”
Carly shrugged and watched television with a vague smile on her face. “I never really disliked her, I guess. It was just kind of awkward between us. We had a good talk when you were gone on Sunday, though. She’s pretty cool.”
“Ahh.” Gavin nodded and studied his daughter. “Okay.”
Carly caught him looking at her weird and kicked his thigh with her foot. “Cut it out!”
Gavin smiled. “So, you’re doing okay?”
“Yeah, I’m doing okay.” He continued to study her as she talked, because somehow the years of being a cop had given him the power to elicit deeper truths from people’s body language. She shrugged and crunched another cracker. “I mean, it’s been six years, and most of the time I feel like I should have come to terms with it, you know. But, well ... I guess it still hurts. It catches me off guard at the weirdest times. Sometimes I’ll be sitting in study hall and wish that she’d be here when I get home, and I ... I get a little messed up. And it hurts when I see you alone, and I can tell you need her. I still miss her, but I know there wasn’t anything I could do.”
Gavin looked at the floor.
Carly went to him, slipped an arm over his broad shoulders. “There wasn’t anything either one of us could do.”
Gavin nodded. “No, you’re right about that. I just ... I don’t want you to remember the pain and the hard times. But I do want you to remember her. I’m sorry if all this comes off weird or awkward.”
“No, Dad.” Carly smiled and kissed him on the cheek. “It comes off sweet, and I love you. And I’m glad you’re finally opening up to Karen again.”
He arched one eyebrow. “Opening up?”
“Well, you know, I mean, having her over. Talking again.”
“Oh.”
The doorbell rang. Carly shot up from her seat. “That’s Abi.” She hurried to the door and swung it open. Abi stood there in a rainbow colored stocking cap that barely contained her wild black curls, her field jacket, and loose jeans with boots. Breath plumed from her lips as she stood on the front stair. An engine rumbled in the driveway.
“Are you ready? I’ve gotta keep dad’s truck running or the battery might die.”
“Let me slip on my shoes and coat. I’ve got my pack upstairs.”
Gavin stood and went to the door. Carly stood on her tip-toes and kissed him on the cheek, running past him, her feet thumping on her way up to her room.
“Hi, Abi.”
“Hi, Mr. Wagner.”
“Step on in for a minute if you’d like.”
“Thanks.” She stepped inside but stayed on the tile in the foyer, hugging herself for warmth.
“How are your folks?”
Abi shrugged, likely remembering the time he’d been over to settle a domestic dispute between them last summer. Her dad ended up drunk one night. Not an irregular event for Landon Holman by any means, but when he’d lost it that time, he’d lost it all the way. Landon had thrown all the upstairs furniture downstairs, and the neighbors thought he was killing Rebecca, Abi’s mother. Turned out she’d gotten pushed down half a flight of stairs, but caught herself and stayed out of the path of his rage long enough for the cops to arrive. Gavin and Oliver had toted Landon off to cool his engine in the holding cell at the station overnight. Later, he confessed he thought for sure that Rebecca had been out with another man she met selling real estate in the next town over. There hadn’t been any trouble since, but Landon was apologetic and thankful at the same time whenever he saw Gavin from then on.
“They’re okay, I guess,” Abi said. “No worse than usual.” She brightened. “But I do appreciate you letting Carly stay over on a weeknight.”
“You guys are going to be working on your Science project, right?”
“Oh yeah, we’ve got a great idea for this year. We’re using the kinetic theory of matter to demonstrate heat transfer. We’re going to figure out the fastest way to get a can of warm soda cold—freezer, refrigerator, ice bath, ice water. We need to record our experiment and then do our results with pics on some poster boards, discussing conduction, convention, and evaporation. I’m going to take some videos of us doing our experiments and have them playing on my laptop when we display it.”
Gavin nodded and smiled. “Well, you’ll have to let me know how it works out so I can benefit from your studies. I’m sure Sergeant Oliver would be glad to know the fastest way to get a six pack cold before the Broncos game this Sunday.”
Abi smiled back as Carly pounded down the stairs in her pull-on boots and white jacket. The fabric made a swishing sound as Carly swung the strap of the backpack over her shoulder. She stood on her tiptoes again to give her dad another kiss and he leaned over to give her a big hug.
“You guys be careful out there. There’s lots of fog, and it’s dark tonight. Use your low beams.”
“Will do, Mr. Wagner.”
“Do you have your phone, Carly?”
“I do. ’Bye, dad. I love you. I’ll see you tomorrow. Tell Karen I said hi.”
“Okay, sweetheart.”
Gavin stood on the front step in the glow of the porch light. Carly blew him a kiss as she hopped in Abi’s dad’s truck, reminding him they needed to work on getting her a car this year. He waved and watched Abi, studying her closely as she backed out carefully into the street, brake lights flooding the fog with a blood red glow, engine rumbling like a WWII bomber as they took off down the street. Darkness had fallen completely, and the car was swallowed by the thick fog in moments. He could hear them go as they turned down the lane toward Abigail’s.
He stood out in the cold, breathing the crisp, pine-scented air and scanning the neighborhood with a careful eye. He couldn’t see far. A few of the houses had porch lights glowing beneath the trees. The giant black walnut tree in his own front yard seemed a shadowy invader in the mist, cold and quiet, its skeletal branches looming above. Breath plumed from his lips as he stepped back inside. He closed and locked the door and went upstairs to freshen up before Karen arrived in a few minutes.
In his bedroom he stripped, tossing his clothes into the customary pile in the closet, but then thought better of it and gathered them into a laundry basket and set them just outside the walk-in closet. After a quick shower and shave, he was applying a light spritz of cologne and making sure he didn’t have any stray nose or ear hairs when the bathroom door swung open.
He didn’t react, he didn’t feel threatened, and in fact the first thing that occurred to him was that it must be Karen.
Gavin turned and faced the open door, the light still on in the bedroom, mist from the hot shower curling from the room. No one was there.
Downstairs, the doorbell rang.
CHAPTER TEN
Abigail lay across her bed, propped up on her elbows, hovering over her Biology book. Carly sat on a beanbag next to her nightstand, jotting down the procedure they’d use for their experiment by the light of Abigail’s succubus reading lamp, where two gray succubi figurines held a glowing globe between them.
Abi’s room was something else—no ordinary girl’s room, but then that’s one of the things Carly had always loved about her friend. She was her own person, and whatever was expected of her because she was a girl was probably the last thing she’d do. Half her room was lined with bookshelves stuffed with horror and fantasy novels and piles of manga. She had a shelf of graphic novels, a small TV with a PS3 and a crooked stack of DVDs. Another shelf was nothing but figures from classic movies like Metropolis, and Halloween, and Godzilla, and This Island Earth. Her room was on the top floor of the old house, so her ceiling was at an angle with the roof, and posters plastered on the ceiling were everything from Bela Lugosi as Dracula to Christian Bale as Ba
tman. Carly was always partial to the Christian Bale poster, herself.
“So, how have your parents been doing? Have things calmed down since the screaming match last week?” Carly dropped the pencil and stretched her aching fingers.
Abigail kept studying the book and alternately making notes on her laptop while she talked.
“Well, the guy—Mom’s beau—called Mom at the house here last week. Apparently he’s got it pretty bad. Mom keeps telling Dad that she’s broke it off with him, but the guy won’t step off.” Abi shrugged and looked over at her friend, face glowing with the reflection of the laptop screen. “Dad says he’d be happy to help him figure out what it means to ‘step off.’”
“So, you think your mom’s still seeing the other guy?”
Abi shrugged. “Probably. She dresses up every day in heels and skirts a size too tight. Smells like a cloud from the May D&F perfume section. She leaves early, comes home late most of the time. Supposedly they’re working on things, but even I can see her heart’s not in it. Dad’s pretty much worn out through the whole thing.”
“You don’t think she’s just out working a lot of hours?”
“I don’t know, Carly. I don’t know what to think anymore. My parents are crazy. The past year, it just seems like everything’s come unraveled.” Abi sniffed and reached for a tissue from the box near the bed. “My dad had to go get his thumb stitched up earlier today, right after you called. He fell off a ladder. Drunk as usual. About tore down the stupid wall trying to hang a picture frame. He smashed his thumb so hard it split to the bone, then he fell backward. Blood everywhere.”
Carly noticed Abigail’s eyes had filled with tears. “Oh, man. I’m glad he wasn’t seriously hurt! I’m sorry for prying, Abi. It’s none of my business. I shouldn’t have asked.”
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