Whatever the reason he didn’t want to let her in, it was not hard to hide his inner turmoil from Anna. She was passionate when he got home, and in that passion, what he had been through and the repercussions he was suffering, were lost. Then, after so much making love on Saturday, she entered her writing world on Sunday, leaving Sully alone. He stewed by himself, waiting for Monday to come so he could be lost in his work.
#
When Sully walked into the teachers’ lounge Monday morning, he saw the school’s principle, Kyle Edwards, and the vocational agriculture teacher, Flip VanHouse, having coffee at the square table. Both Kyle and Flip, like Sully, had graduated from Little Axe. Kyle, a bald businesslike man and retired Army Captain, had graduated many years before Sully. Flip, a lifelong redneck that somehow managed to earn a college degree, had been a sophomore when Sully was a senior. It was always comical to see the two of them together, Flip going on about adventures that a person probably shouldn’t share with his boss, rambling like he couldn’t control himself. Kyle, always nodding, an expression on his face that Sully thought had to be half disgust, half pretended interest. Flip was the son of Art VanHouse, a long-time Little Axe native and owner of the town’s granary. Politics would not allow Kyle to fire Flip. But at the same time, Flip gave out enough information for Kyle to justify passing him up for the local-initiative-tax-driven merit raises that he distributed. It was a balance. And Flip wasn’t that bad of a vo-ag teacher.
“Hey, Sully,” Kyle said, as Sully got his coffee. “How was your trip?”
Most everybody knew about Sully’s trips by now. His fear of traveling had not been something he could hide in this small town, so most people knew that he had anticipated for the trips to be difficult. Of course, Caitlin Barr’s death had taken the town at the time, and the townspeople hadn’t asked much about his first trip. But he knew he would have to deal with questions a little more this time.
“Pretty uneventful,” Sully lied. It was the exact same lie he had told his mother when she had called and asked.
“Oh yeah,” Kyle said. “Old Flip here can’t say the same about his trip Friday night, can you, Flip.”
“No, sir. I can’t.”
Sully pivoted with his cup of coffee to see both men turned in their chairs, looking at him. He supposed he was going to have to hear about it. “What happened, Flip?” Sully asked, just to get it over with.
Flip half tilted his head and leaned back in his seat, the redneck version of a ponderous pose. “Well, me and old Joe Berry drove up to Elk City Friday night. We just did a little bar hopping, tried to pick up a couple of gals there. Didn’t work out. No big deal. Anyway, we got headed home. And long about the time we were to hit Thirty, I rolled the window down and could smell smoke. I didn’t think much of it and neither did Joe. Thought maybe someone was burning off a field. No big deal.”
Flip nodded as if to ask if Sully understood what he was saying. Sully nodded back, not really thinking there was much about this story that could have lost him yet, but humoring Flip.
“Anyway, a little bit after we exited onto Thirty, we got passed by a fire engine. Old Joe was driving and didn’t want to fuss with it. But I was pretty hammered still, so I got him talked into following that fire engine.”
Flip folded his hands behind his head and looked up at the ceiling. “We followed that fire truck about a mile down a dirt road. And we come upon this farmhouse that’s just a blazin away. Hell, looked kind of like the homecoming bon fire, only twice as big. There were a couple of cops sitting there already. Old Joe told me I shouldn't get out on account that I was drunk. I told him I probably knew the cops anyways, and I did.”
Flip smiled proudly. “One of them was Claude Allen from over in Erick. He told me that he thought people was inside. I asked him if there was any way we could help and he said no, just to stay back. So I got in Joe’s truck and we pulled down to the road out of the way. We sat there and watched the whole show.”
“My, God!” Sully said. “Are the people all right?”
Sully had intentionally looked at Kyle when he asked the question. If people had been hurt, he didn’t want Flip to have the sick pleasure of being the one who told the story, at least not this time.
Kyle seemed to understand. He shook his head. “Whole family’s dead. A fifteen-year old girl and her parents.”
“Girl went to school in Erick,” Flip added.
Sully shook his head. They were quiet for a few seconds, and then Sully asked, “Do they know what caused it?”
“Propane tank exploded,” Kyle said.
A lot of the country houses ran their stoves and heaters on propane, the natural gas lines not out that far in the country. It seemed strange to Sully, though, that the family would not have heard the blast and gotten out on time. Still, that depended on how close the tank was to their house.
“Damn,” Sully said. “That’s just terrible.”
Sully walked out, not wanting to hear Flip go on about his various theories about what ought to be done or whose fault it was. As he walked to his classroom he thought about how the people in Erick, just down the road, would be facing something a lot like what had happened in Little Axe two months earlier.
#
The next Sunday, Anna left in the morning to pick up Monica. They arrived home a little after eight that evening. Sully, having been deprived of his daughter for over a week, was ready for a kid fix. But Monica couldn’t deliver. She had not slept on the trip home and didn’t have the energy left to entertain dad. They put her to bed together and then walked into the dining room, where Anna patted the manuscript on the table.
“Well,” she said. “What did you think?”
Anna had taken a break from her novel to write a short story. She had left it for Sully to read while she was off to pick up Monica. It, like any of her new works, would not go out under her name, Anna Streets. Instead, it would go out under her penname, Taylor Wolfe. Anna had written under her own name until she published her first novel at the age of twenty-four. The publisher told her it would be better to use a fake identity, because readers liked to think the books they read came from middle aged to old writers, who, because of their advanced years, could be considered wise. It would probably be another ten years before she could come out and say, “It was really me.”
“I liked it,” Sully said.
Anna looked at him warily. “How much?”
Anna had told him the most important rule of being her first reader was that he could never lie. And Sully never had.
“Well,” he said. “I didn’t like it as well as your books. But it was at least as good as the other short stories you let me read. I couldn’t put it down.”
Anna nodded. “Yeah. It wasn’t really good enough to be a book idea. But I thought it would be fun. And if I send it to a magazine, it will get my fake name out a little more before I publish book number two.”
Anna had actually written three novels, all before she met Sully. Sully had read and loved them all. Evidently, the publishers didn’t agree with his sentiments, at least not on the first two, which had gotten Anna nothing but two stacks of rejection letters. The short story he had just read was about the twentieth she had written as his girlfriend, and this one had set him to thinking.
“Anna, let me see if I got this straight. In the story, this guy murdered his wife, then buried her out in the garden. Then, that summer, the garden grew this incredibly big tomato. He ate it, then died.”
Anna sat down at the table, and Sully followed suit.
“That about sums it up,” she said.
Sully thought for a few seconds, then asked, “So the woman reincarnated as the tomato?”
Anna smiled. “I guess that’s one possible explanation.”
Sully knew the question was stupid. Anna had told him before that in some short stories it was good to leave things vague. That way the reader could fill in for themselves, making the story more exciting.
But the explanatio
n of the story’s end wasn’t really what he was after. He was serious about Anna now, way more serious than he had ever been about a woman, even the one he had been married to and had a child with. Yet there was so much mystery to her, mystery he loved to gradually understand, not for the sake of probing, but for the slow trip itself.
“So do you believe in that sort of thing?” he asked.
“Reincarnation?” Anna said.
“Yeah.”
Anna seemed to consider the question, but briefly. “I don’t disbelieve in it.”
“Oh,” Sully said. Then he laughed. “Just don’t tell my mom. She’ll smack you upside the head with her Bible.”
Anna smiled, then shook her head. “I don’t see why. I don’t disbelieve in that either.”
Sully was a little perplexed, but more than that, intrigued. He expected that Anna would be famous some day. And she was his. He got to read all of her stories first, and then he got to pick at her mind. “Go on,” he said.
“Well, the two basic ideas are not necessarily contradictory. Say western religions are right. We are endowed with one body. And once that body dies, the spirit is set free.”
What she said left a lot of things open. But Sully could go with it. He nodded his head.
“Well, consider this possibility. For some reason the body dies. Maybe it grows too old, becomes sick, or some jerk with a knife renders it unlivable. And the spirit remains. It no longer has a body to dwell in, so it can either enter the spirit world or start from scratch.”
“Okay.”
“Well, in most cases, I would think the spirit world would be the obvious choice.”
Sully nodded. Then he smiled. “But not in the case of our tomato woman. She has unfinished business, so she enters a seed and becomes a poison tomato.”
Anna, across the table, pulled her shirt over her head. Sully’s mind split between the pink brazier and the discussion at hand.
“So do you think it’s possible that if a person died, he or she could enter the body of a baby?”
Anna reached around and undid her bra, leaving the cups hanging from her swollen breasts. “Yeah, but that would be possession, not reincarnation. A baby already has a spirit. To reincarnate as a person is very hard, because you have to go to the very basic level of an organism, which has not yet been invested with a spirit.”
Sully watched the cups, waiting for them to slide. It wasn’t so much to see, though, so much as that when they came down he would be that much closer to what Anna had planned for him.
“You see, sweet Sully, a sperm or an egg is not a life but a lifeforce. It is when they become one that they are invested with a spirit.”
Anna’s bra came down. She arched her back and held her breasts out, as Sully savored his anticipation. He liked being lustful and thoughtful at the same time. But he wondered how long it could last. Something would have to give.
“That must be why people don’t often reincarnate as people. Because most zygotes don’t become babies.”
“Right,” Anna said, as she slid her bottoms off right there in her chair.
Sully felt like the luckiest person alive, like a child given carte blanche in a candy store, but he was still fascinated by the conversation. “So, when we die, it is because our bodies have lost this lifeforce that you speak of.”
Anna nodded. Then she got up on the table.
“But the spirit still remains,” Sully said.
Anna, now on all fours, nodded her head one more time. Then she crawled toward him, and Sully didn’t want to talk anymore.
He would think a little more, though, as she came across the table. Then, before she took him to the back and blew his mind, he considered how Anna had merely been speaking of possibilities. But he wondered if at least a part of her truly believed that what she was saying was true.
Death happens, but life goes on.
#
Had he been dreaming? Yes, he thought so. The coma men had been there, watching him as he suffocated. But that had been a while ago. He had slept more since then. But there was something wrong now. He could sense something. He was afraid to open his eyes. He knew it was madness. But what he knew didn’t seem to matter at all. What he felt was that something was with them. What if it were the thing that had come out of the sky? He felt the talons. No, just the memory. He was doing this to himself. He had to stop. But then he heard something. Breathing. Near them. And something else. Something was moving around in the house.
Stop it! he told himself. He was making himself crazy. He had to find a way to stop.
Anna. She would make him feel better. Just to know that she was there would make him feel better, to know that he wasn’t alone. Sully reached out for her but felt only air. He realized that he was facing away from her. He rolled, then with his arm, felt her body, which was turned away. She nestled her back into his body. So warm, delicate but strong. But he still did not feel safe. All wasn’t safe. Monica was out there with it. Sully opened his eyes and saw the human figure a few feet away.
He gasped at the sight of it, standing beside the bed, looking over them. Anna awoke and sat up. She took only a couple of seconds to orient herself.
“Monica,” she said.
In that instant, Sully felt two things at once. He was still anxious, the shock of awakening to something staring at him not worn off. But he also felt guilty, because that something had been his daughter.
“What’s wrong, baby?” Anna asked in a tender voice.
“I heard something,” Monica responded, after a few seconds of hesitation.
“Come here,” Anna said, extending an arm.
Sully got up, as Monica crawled into the bed beside Anna.
“Where are you going?” Anna asked.
“I’m sure it was nothing,” Sully said. “But I’m going to check it out anyway.”
Sully, clad in his boxers, left the room. Was it nothing? No, it was something. At least, that was what his intuitive sense was telling him. It couldn’t have been just his daughter that he had sensed, that had scared him.
He checked the insides of the house first, going from room to room, looking in closets and under things. He grabbed a flashlight from the foyer, intending to do a visual sweep around the house. But as soon as he got outside, he just stood on the small porch there. He couldn’t leave them alone. If there was something to fear, then all that he really needed to protect was in the bedroom. And in the bedroom there were guns.
Sully went back inside. He crawled into bed and wrapped an arm around his two girls.
#
It was a rare day that Sully didn’t like his job. Whether it was the simple tricks of solving an equation or the complexity of fractals, he loved opening young minds to things they hadn’t known they could understand. But on Monday, the day seemed to drag on, his mind on home, where there was his girlfriend, and his daughter, who had been gone last week.
He rushed home after school. Anna was sitting on the front porch, leaning against the house, her legs out in front of her. Sully was glad to see that she was reading the book of another writer. She did that a lot. Like in any field, a writer needed to keep up with contemporaries. Sully was just glad she wasn’t in her writing place. They could all play together tonight.
Anna sat the book on her lap as he walked up. “You have returned, my sweet Sully. I knew that you would.”
“Why? Because I do every night.”
Anna gave him an inquisitive look and then said, “Pretty much.”
Sully leaned down and kissed her. Her cold lips told him that she had been outside for a while. November was a fickle month in Oklahoma. It could act like winter and it could act like fall. Today, it was somewhere in between.
“Where’s Monica?” Sully asked.
Anna half smiled and answered, “Last I saw, she was patrolling.”
“What?”
Anna pointed behind her. “I think you better go check it out yourself.”
“All right,” Sully said
. “But afterward, do you think you could join us for a drive? I thought we could all go to Dairy Queen in Erick.”
“Sounds delicious,” Anna said. “But your mommy called and said she wanted us to come out for dinner.”
Sully shook his head. “Mommy misses her granddaughter. But she’s going to have to wait until tomorrow, because I plan on hogging you two tonight.”
Anna gave an exaggerated nod. “Maybe she can pick up Monica from school tomorrow.”
“Maybe,” Sully said, knowing Anna was just offering an alternative to the three of them going to his parents’ house tomorrow, trying to get out of having to put up with his mom, something he could sympathize with.
Anna rolled her eyes and said, “Go talk to your daughter.”
Sully left her sitting there. He went around the side of the house and found Monica in the backyard. She was standing still, a broken tree branch, half as long as she was tall, in her hand. She didn’t seem to notice when Sully walked up, her face serious and intent on looking up at the roof of the house.
“Hi, baby,” Sully said, as he knelt down beside her.
“Hi, Daddy,” Monica said, her gaze not wavering from the roof.
Sully looked up at the tiles. “What are we looking at, hon?”
“I’m waiting for it,” Monica responded.
Sully thought of the night before. How terrifying was this child’s world right now? He made up his mind, then and there. He would take her into his room tonight.
“What, Mon? What are you waiting for?”
It took her a few seconds to answer. Then she whispered, “It’s the sand monster.”
“The sand monster?”
“Yeah,” Monica said, still whispering. “The sand monster comes into my room sometimes.”
Sully thought for a few seconds. Then it occurred to him what she might be talking about. “Does the sand monster make you sleep?”
Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner Page 20
