by Ronald Malfi
Becky!
She dashed across the length of hallway and nearly drove herself into the framework of the door. She grasped the knob with an unsteady hand and turned it—
It didn’t turn.
It was locked.
As if swatted by an invisible hand, she took a step away from the door and simply stared at it. She fisted her right hand and knocked twice against the door.
She heard someone moving on the other side of the door.
“Becky? Honey, open the door. Becky, it’s Kelly. Open the door, sweetheart.”
It’s Kelly, her mind echoed in an imaginative impression of her sister’s voice. Who’s Kelly?
“Becky?”
The stairs at the end of the hall creaked.
Fear suddenly hit her, sharp and incensed.
That’s where the dead girls go, she thought, recalling her dream.
A glimmer of moonlight briefly illuminated what appeared to be tiny pale stones lined up on the banister—tiny white stones with eye sockets and teeth. But they were there and then gone, having never existed.
It’s all in my head, she thought. She felt her entire body begin to shake and knew that she was very near collapse, very near the end of the line. She’d suffered through three years at an institution, a loveless marriage and divorce, and had not tamed but at least managed to coexist in New York City…and now her batteries were finally about to die, to burn themselves out. All along, she’d been thinking that she was strong, that she could overcome, that things got better when you decided to make them get better. But no, she’d been wrong. Because nothing got better. Not really. Things kept locked away and forgotten just kept perpetuating themselves until there was no more room in the closet. And then there was nothing left but for those things to blow up.
I’m blowing up, she thought.
And insanely, she thought of Collin. More specifically, she recalled making love to Collin—and Collin making love to her—and the way they moved in bed together, the way he touched her and how she understood that maybe things weren’t perfect but they weren’t bad, either. He’d touch her and she’d shudder and sometimes force him to squeeze her in his arms. And after the truth of his infidelity was disclosed and they continued to make love, he’d felt the same to her—which was wrong. He should have felt different, she knew, should have felt like an immediate stranger, but he didn’t and it was almost as if his affair had never happened. And she knew it. And he knew she knew it. And it didn’t seem to make any difference to either one of them. Not for a while, at least. And although it made no sense at the time, she seemed to zone in on it now and single that moment out as the initiation of her breakdown. It was like proof, like the foreshadowing of an unavoidable mental collapse. What type of woman makes love to a man fresh from another’s bed? What type of wife?
Someone was on the stairwell, hiding in darkness. Kelly could almost hear breathing.
“Beck—”
The latch on Becky’s bedroom door popped and the door creaked open an inch. Kelly felt her heart leap in her chest and nearly threw herself backward across the hallway. She brought a hand up to touch the door. It shook badly. She couldn’t control it—couldn’t make the hand go back to her side. Her hand reached out and pushed against the cool wood of the door. Inside, the light had been turned off. And had it ever really been on?
She thought, Little Baby Roundabout, someone let the Baby out…
Catching her breath, she stepped a foot into Becky’s room. The breathing she’d thought she’d heard—it was coming from in here, from Becky.
“Becky?” Her voice shook the silence. “Sweetheart?”
Across the room, Becky’s window was wide open; the sheer curtain flagging in the cold wind.
“Goddamn,” she moaned and ran for the window—slicing her bare feet on bits of sharp somethings—her lungs aflame—the entire room seeming to spin before her eyes—dizzy. The flailing arms of the curtain wrapped around her body. The wind hit her, frozen and angry, and she brought an arm up to prevent her eyes from watering. Blind and with her free hand, she reached out impulsively, her fingers probing for the raised window. Her hand thumped glass and she leapt forward and slammed the window closed on its sill. The frame rattled and the curtains withered around her.
Catching her breath, she moved backward several paces from the window. The moon was full and pale yellow.
Man in the moon! her mind screamed. It’s a face, just like a face!
And her mind made no sense.
Broken bits of plastic lined the carpet. The shards had cut her feet. And they almost reminded her of something—there and there and almost there—but she couldn’t grasp it.
This is all coming together, all coming down, all starting to reek like two hidden dead girls in the third floor broom closet.
“Kelly…”
And it was a perfect sound, those words—as if all space and time had briefly given way to absolute silence in order for that word—that sound—to justly impress and frighten her…like words spoken in a room filled with no one but the dead…
“Becky,” she managed and sprang forward toward her sister’s bed. In the darkness she groped for her sister’s hand, found it, squeezed it—and recoiled. It was cold and stiff: the hand of a corpse.
A scream threatened her throat. She felt the room tilt to one side, desperate to shake her off balance.
And again that voice: “Kelly…”
She spun around and peered through the darkness. For the briefest of moments, Kelly stood in the darkened bedroom staring at the half-open closet across the room. And the shape inside, pale and moving, nearly squirming…
“They did it in the closet where no one could see,” whispered a voice from the closet. It was undeniably a female voice, yet gritty and baritone.
Kelly couldn’t move.
They did it in the closet…
“Mouse.” The name did not simply issue from her mouth; rather, it was coughed up through her throat and forced through her lips like verbal constipation.
Snapping, she scrambled toward the closet door, grabbed the knob, and—
—ohGodohGodohGodohGodoh—
—flung it open, prepared for the worst.
The closet was empty.
Kelly stood there in the darkness, her chest heaving, sweat sliding in large rolls down her ribs, her eyes wide and staring.
I heard you. My God, I really heard you…
I’m losing my mind here…
Yet now, all she could hear was the sound of her sister’s labored breathing from halfway across the room.
And, of course, her own.
Chapter Eighteen
“Time’s catching up to me,” the hermit Graham Rand said, sizzling sausage links over a flame on his range. He dropped several pats of butter into the pan. From over Graham Rand’s shoulder, Sheriff Alan Bannercon watched as grease from the pan spat and exploded like miniature fireworks. “No spring chicken, that’s for sure. You can tell everywhere you look at me—I see my hands shakin’ and I know. Like some sort of warning, some way of God’s, tryin’ to tell you your time’s almost up. Better make the goddamn beds and milk the cows, because it’s about to fall to dark.” The old man turned and faced the sheriff. “There’s chairs around th’ table for sitting, you know.”
Five minutes ago, Alan had been standing outside Graham’s secluded cabin, staring at the peeling siding and splintered roof with passive deliberation. In short, Alan had no patience for the old hermit—considered him more a nuisance than anything else, really—and regretted having to speak with him. That Graham Rand was the last person to see Felix Raintree was unfortunate. If he could coax even the slightest suggestion of helpful information from the old recluse, Alan Bannercon could go home a happy man. But he hadn’t counted on it; there’d simply been too many phone calls in the middle of the night, too many occasions where the old fool had seen—allegedly—the apparition of his dead wife floating among the trees of the surrounding forest.
He was a lonely old man that, over time, had managed to trick himself into believing in the purely absurd.
“Mr. Rand, I need to ask you about Detective Raintree.”
Graham swiveled the pan on the burner, skirted to his left to retrieve one final pat of butter, and dropped it into the sizzling grease. He turned around and faced the sheriff, his face looking hollow and malnourished.
“That man is a good man,” Graham said, wagging a tree-branch finger at Alan. “He knows about these woods, I think.”
“You spoke with him two nights ago at the station? He gave you a ride home?”
“It’s considerate.” He said this with an unflinching air of stateliness. “And don’t think I don’t know about some of you boys.”
“What was it you spoke with Detective Raintree about the other night?”
“Specters,” Graham said, and flared his nostrils. He half-grinned.
“Beg pardon?”
“Things out there.” The half-grin widened. “Do you know something, Sheriff?”
“What?”
“You think things are peaceful here, but they’re not.”
“Is that right?”
“In real life, things are mostly just up and down. Straight up—and straight down. No in-betweens. But around here—and most especially recently—things is all up and down and left and right and side to goddamn side and no one knows which damn way they’re turning.”
Alan crossed his arms and leaned back against the wall. The kitchen was small and rustic, empty except for a badly marred clapboard table and a water-stained refrigerator with a busted door handle. Only one of the three light fixtures worked; it cast an ominous luminescence along the filthy counters and scuffed tile floor.
“Mr. Rand, you’re going to have to answer my question, please.”
“Oh?”
“What did you go and see Detective Raintree about?”
“The detective.” Graham shuffled to the refrigerator, opened it and selected a pitcher of milk, and placed it on the counter. He stared at it for some time. When he spoke again, his tone was oddly sober. “I’m dying, Sheriff. I feel it more and more every day. Mostly in the mornings when I wake up. And if I wake up too early it seems all the more closer, d’you understand? Like I’m waking up too soon and catching death sittin’ right there on top of my chest. Too early, catching the dirty bastard in the act.” He turned and looked at Alan. His eyes, clear and lucid, were nearly frightening. “A man who can sneak up on death like that every damn day of his life, and for the rest of his life, ain’t afraid of much, Sheriff. But recently…you know, I been seeing some things and I been hearing some things and…shit, I guess I been feeling some things too. Scary things. And I know that. Scary to me—to a man who don’t think twice ’bout sneakin’ up on death in the early hours of the morning.”
“What have you seen, Graham?” Though he didn’t realize it then, it was the first time Alan had ever called the old hermit by his first name.
Graham’s eyes shifted around the kitchen—and finally rested on the rectangle of black glass over the kitchen sink. He was looking beyond, out into the night.
“I ain’t sure,” he mumbled.
Jesus Christ, he’s playing games with me, Alan thought, and I don’t have time for that bullshit.
As if having read Alan’s mind, the old man said, “I went to see Detective Raintree because he’s the only fellow around here who gives a bloody goddamn. Maybe he just likes humoring an old fool, but I don’t mind it even if that’s the case.”
The old man’s hands were shaking.
“I went to see him because I saw something in the woods the other night and it scared me real bad.”
“What was it?”
“I don’t know. I mean, it was a man…”
“A man?”
“I think so. I’m sure of it.”
“Who?”
“Can’t tell—”
“This is a small town, Mr. Rand.”
“Weren’t nobody from town, Sheriff.”
“And this man frightened you? Did he attack you, threaten you?”
“No…but I felt something threatening from him, you know?” Graham’s eyes ran the length of the sheriff. “No,” he added, “I don’t suppose you would.”
“So you got spooked and went running to your good buddy.”
“Not empty-handed,” Graham said. “Them hunters? I found one of their hats. Hunting cap, initials right on the inside tag.”
“You found what?”
“Don’t you hear, son? Cap-cap-cap. Checkered hunting cap. You live around here and never seen a checkered flannel hunting cap?”
“How do you know—”
“I gave it over to the detective.”
“What did he say?”
Graham shrugged. “Didn’t say nothing, I don’t think. Just wanted to see where I found it.”
“Where did you find it?”
“Out back my house.”
“And you showed him the spot where you found it?”
“I did. Stayed in the car while he looked around,” Graham said. “Still spooked by that ghost-man, didn’t feel like leaving the car, ’specially steppin’ out in them woods. Not at night, anyhow.”
“The detective find anything else?”
“Not that he said to me.”
“Then he drove you home?”
Graham nodded. “Straight home.”
“That was all?”
“Everything you’d want to know.” He moved back to his stove and lifted the pan of sausage. He dumped the links into a filthy plate, grease and all. “There’s a problem with Detective Raintree, ain’t there?”
“He’s missing,” Alan said. “His car was found abandoned out on North Town Road last night. No one’s heard from him since he’d driven up here, just after dropping you off.”
“Had me some feeling,” Graham said. With an unsteady hand, he clutched at a glass and poured himself some milk. His arms trembled.
“You had a feeling the detective was in danger?” Of course, he knew he was shooting at shadows: the old fool couldn’t really possibly know anything, could he? And even if he did, Graham Rand’s mind was so frazzled that it would probably require a team of top government cryptologists just to decode his rambling applesauce.
“I told you, Sheriff, but you just don’t want to listen.” The old man turned on him, faced him with impulsive tenacity. “Something’s going on around here and it ain’t good. Something in the woods. It got those three hunters and it nearly killed that little girl, too.”
Before Alan’s eyes, the room appeared to shake. He almost felt something click over in his head, like a puzzle piece snapping into place…but the feeling passed like a lumbering wave of nausea: there and then gone. There was still some anger left in him—irritation, really—but that was quickly being displaced with a strong and alien sense of urgency. It was a feeling akin to the anticipation he’d associated with Christmas mornings in his youth…only much darker.
No, not Christmas, nothing like that. It’s like being a child and sitting in the doctor’s waiting room, he quickly realized. It’s like sitting there knowing there is no place to run…and knowing damn well what is in store for you behind the doctor’s closed door…
Graham’s eyes appeared to soften. “And you feel it too,” he said. “Maybe just for a second there, right? I can see. Maybe it’s gone now but, goddamn it all, it was there, wasn’t it? Like something big about to fall from the sky and crush you.”
It was all Alan could do to regain composure. “Where is the hunting cap now, Mr. Rand?”
“Detective Raintree had it.”
“And the man you saw in the woods—could it have been one of the missing hunters, do you think?”
Graham tipped his narrow head back and barked a laugh at the ceiling. When he looked back at Alan, his mouth was stretched in a wide grin, his rotted teeth protruding from his gums like gnarled and twisted vines.
“Specters!”
the old man howled, caught in the throes of hilarity. “Specters, Sheriff!”
“Mr. Rand—”
“You see,” Graham said, “you truly ain’t from around here, Sheriff. If you were, you’d know about this godforsaken weather, and you’d know that it happened this way several years back. The winter came early, the sky turned an evil dark, and hail the size of golf balls fell from the heavens. I felt it then, felt the wrongness of it all at the time, but didn’t know any better. Something evil was prepared to happen here those few years ago but, for some reason, it didn’t. Well now it’s back, and this time it’s damn anxious to happen. Damn hungry.”
Alan only stared at the old man.
“Winter came early to Spires once before, Sheriff,” Graham said. “And now it’s here again.”
After several moments, Alan made his way to the door.
Chapter Nineteen
From the eye of some remote nightmare landscape, Nellie Worthridge felt something immense begin to tug at her subconscious while she slept. Harassed by the manipulation of actual fingers—fingers that bent and twisted her mind, tore at the gray bands and sinews of her brain—the old woman felt her heart hitch, her chest heave, her pulse race, explode, then petrify with startling submission. Had she been awake, she would have made the immediate association between the influx of this grasping, new emotion and what was surely the imminence of her own death, yet such concepts held no relevance to her while she slept.
The feeling started as a faint breeze, pushing against her mind as if through the thicket of a forest. Yet hardly before she could even register its presence, its power multiplied almost instantaneously, and she could actually feel its freezing residence soak through the pores in her skin and throughout her entire body. The sheer magnitude of the holocaust rendered her docile and useless. Yet it could reach only her mind—and somehow, even in her dream-state, the old woman recognized this and saw it for what it was: not a threat at all, but the strengthening connection of lines, of walking mental lines, of the steady-steady, the walk-run.
