“No,” Sully said, his head in the pillow. “I’ll be fine if I just sleep for a while.”
Anna leaned over and kissed his cheek. A little while later, Monica came in and kissed him goodbye. Two minutes later, they were gone.
#
Sully hung up the phone, not wanting to hear Anna’s voicemail again. It was eight o’clock, and he had tried to call her cell phone four times now. Why wouldn’t she answer? She had her writing place, a place where she would not be disturbed. But how could she possibly have her writing place while driving?
Sully stood there in the dining room, by the little cubbyhole where he kept the portable unit, and tried to calm himself down. Anna may have simply forgotten to turn her cell phone on. And she may not have thought about calling him, because she thought he was sick. She knew as well as he that he didn’t have a fever. But that didn’t mean she didn’t think he was sick and possibly sleeping.
Sully decided he would just wait. That was all he could do.
#
Sully was sitting in front of the television, mindlessly watching the NBA playoffs, around ten o’clock, when the phone finally rang.
“Well it’s about time,” he said out loud, before picking up the portable phone, which he had kept beside him.
“Anna,” Sully said.
There were a few seconds, and then a female voice said, “No, Sully. It’s me.”
Disappointed, Sully said, “Oh, hi Faith. How is everything? Monica get there okay?”
“Yeah, she got here fine. We’re at the hotel. She said she wanted to talk to you.”
“All right,” Sully said, wondering what was up with his daughter. She usually didn’t call until they got to her mother’s house the next day, and that was only because Sully told her to. “Put her on,” he said.
A couple of seconds later, Monica said, “Hi, Daddy.”
“Hi, baby. Are you okay?”
“Just a second,” Monica said.
Sully listened in as he waited for Monica. He heard a door shut. Then he heard what he thought must be the sound of a vent coming on. He realized the four-year-old girl had gone into the bathroom for privacy.
“Daddy?”
“Yes, baby.”
“Anna said she was not going to stay with us anymore.”
Sully, shocked, refrained from revealing too much angst in his voice. There had to be some mistake.
“Are you sure, baby? That doesn’t sound like Anna.”
“She told me goodbye. And she said she was moving away.”
It was harder now. The thought of losing Anna was not something that had occurred to Sully in a long time, at least, not in this way, her skipping out.
“Daddy,” Monica said. “I don’t want Anna to leave. I love her.”
“I know,” Sully calmly said, trying hard to think of his daughter, when on the inside he was worried about himself. Was he really going to lose her?
Sully couldn’t think of what to tell Monica right now. A lie seemed okay. He could correct for it later, if necessary.
“I don’t think Anna’s really going to leave, baby.”
Sully tried to think of more to say. But he decided he shouldn’t overdue it. So he left it at that and hoped this naïve child would, for now, just accept her father’s words.
“Okay, Daddy,” Monica said, to his relief.
“All right, sweetheart,” Sully said. “Now I want you to have fun with your mommy and Scott. And don’t you worry about a thing.”
“Okay, Daddy,” Monica said, her voice a little sad. He knew she would be wondering. But he knew nothing to do about that.
“I love you, little girl.”
“I love you too, Daddy. Bye bye.”
“Bye bye,” Sully said and then hung up the phone.
He immediately started to dial Anna’s cell phone, but then stopped. He had tried that already. He suspected he would get the same results this time. He thought of something else he could do. He could investigate. He went into the bedroom and slid open the closet doors. There, hanging with his, were most of Anna’s dressier clothes. Up on the shelf, there were his and her casual things. If Anna were leaving without telling him first, then she wasn’t going to have much to wear.
Sully rushed to the study. That Anna would not take her clothes was weird, but believable. But she would not leave without her writing things. There, on the desk they had bought together, was Anna’s laptop. Below, in the chair slot, was the stack of notebooks that Anna kept.
Sully was satisfied. Anna had not planned to leave him before she took off with Monica earlier. Maybe she was going to leave. But if so, she was coming home first.
#
The cavalcade of sounds came from outside. They shook the place he was in, a vague place, nearly shapeless. Sully tried to make the sounds go away by blocking them out, but they remained. All he could do was slip back into consciousness.
He came to in his bed, not remembering when he had lain down. The sounds were of dogs barking, like several had been set off in a chain reaction started by one.
Sully started to get up, to check it out, but then he felt his tiredness. It was overpowering. He went back to sleep.
#
With each hour of the next morning, Sully waited alone. All the while, intuition told him he was waiting in vain. She wasn’t coming back.
But that didn’t make sense. Why would she leave him? They seemed so in love, always, everyday, in love. And to leave without notice would be so unlike Anna. Anna was no coward. And her things were still here. Her life was still here.
But there was the intuitive sense. Logic, in all of its good sense and glory, spoke to him, but intuition vetoed its conclusion. She wasn’t coming back.
In the afternoon, there were games to watch. Hockey and basketball to occupy his mind. The hours continued to pass without her return. Several times he called her cell phone. Sometimes he left a beseeching message, asking to understand; other times he simply hung up. The day turned into night. Still, there was nothing from Anna.
It was a little after 9PM when he heard the car pull up. Sully rushed to the door, so he could meet her outside. But it wasn’t Anna who came up the sidewalk. It was his father. He was carrying a six pack of beer. Curiously, the old man didn’t say anything. He just walked right past Sully and inside, like he was walking into his own house.
Sully followed. His dad sat at the dining room table, and Sully joined him. His dad took two beers from the pack and slid one to Sully. The old man’s eyes were intense, glimmering. He stared off above Sully’s head, with an expression like he was looking at nothing on the outside, but into his own head.
Sully knew he would have to wait. He cracked open his beer. It tasted flat. He didn’t really want to drink it. He didn’t want to do this at all. By his look, the old man had something very strange to tell, a little bit more madness to add to Sully’s upside down world. Sully didn’t want to hear it. But he would anyway. He would because he knew it all had to be connected. What his dad had to offer would be another piece in this terrible puzzle.
His dad drank three beers, very fast, before he spoke. “I think it’s time you knew where you came from,” he finally said.
Sully nodded, but he didn’t think the old man saw it. He was aware that Sully was his audience. Aside from that, he was barely attending to him.
“As you know, your mother and I weren’t capable of having a baby on our own. We’d tried for years before we got checked out. As it happened, your mother’s uterus wasn’t capable of supporting a baby. She was devastated, of course.”
Sully had known they couldn’t have a baby. He had never known why.
“Well, we decided that we wanted a child, no matter what. So we went to an adoption agency. We had high hopes. But as it turned out, adoption wasn’t a simple thing, especially if you wanted a newborn, and your mother and I weren’t going to settle for anything else. So we put our names on a list, and we waited, but a couple of years passed and we had
n’t heard a thing. Your mom was becoming more and more inconsolable. I was growing impatient myself. All the people we knew our age had kids, most of them in their teens. We couldn’t wait to have one of our own. So I made a trip to the city. I met with an attorney there who specialized in adoption. It cost me a pretty penny, but he guaranteed he could find me a newborn within two months. And he delivered. It wasn’t three weeks later that he set me up an appointment with a social worker.”
His dad suddenly stopped and looked about the room.
“What Dad?” Sully asked. He thought he felt it too. It was as if something had come into the room with them, just a vague sense. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” his dad finally replied. Then he went back to his story.
“I drove back to the city. And I met with this social worker. She told me that she had a pregnant girl who was unfit to be a mother. Said they didn’t know much about her. They didn’t even know her name, but everyone called her Tela. Couldn’t say how old she was but said she looked fifteen or sixteen. The police had brought her in a few months before. They found her at this whore house.”
His dad paused and looked at Sully as if for reaction. But Sully didn’t know how to react to this information. He just wanted to know more. “Go on,” he said.
His dad frowned and sighed, then said, “They kept your mother in the back of that place. I guess young girls brought more money than their older counterparts. That social worker told me such a thing wasn’t so uncommon.”
His dad sat there with a look on his face that was half sadness, half disgust. Then he seemed to shake it off.
“She wanted to give me some time to think it over, but I told her I didn’t need it. We just wanted a baby and it didn’t matter where it came from. She was okay with that, but she wanted me to meet the girl first. I agreed.”
The presence in the room was stronger, and Sully felt a strange drowsiness falling over him.
“They brought that girl in. And it made me feel just terrible, sick to my stomach. She was a pretty girl. But there were no two ways about it. She was crazy as can be. She talked in gibberish, like there was someone else in the room who understood what she was saying. And she didn’t look at me at all. Her eyes kind of floated around as she spoke.”
Sully felt pulled two ways. He wanted the end of this story, but he was growing more tired, as if he had been drugged. His dad seemed to be looking around more and more as he spoke, but Sully wasn’t sure if it were real or just his tired head playing tricks on him.
“I couldn’t get out of my head how awful this poor girl had been treated. She barely even knew where she was, and men would pay money to go back into a room and have their way with her. Then I had this sick thought. I wondered to myself who the father was.”
His dad stopped talking. Now, Sully didn’t think it could be in his head. The old man’s head was darting around frantically. He was trying to find what had come into the room.
When his dad was finally able to stop looking around, he said, “And that’s when she said the one thing that made any sense at all. And she looked right at me. She said it like she had read the question right out of my head. She said, ‘All of them.’”
And with that, the tiredness completely overwhelmed Sully. He felt himself slipping off into oblivion. Then he felt the hand hit his face. He opened his eyes to see his dad standing in front of him.
“You’re fading fast, Son, and something I don’t understand is spooking the hell out of me. I have to go, but I want you to hear this first. You have many lives in you. You can live over and over again. You’ve got to start thinking of what might take advantage of that.”
That was the last thing Sully remembered before waking up in his bed.
#
The dogs woke Sully again. And again, he was too tired to get up.
Chapter Seven
Sully woke up the next day, and the fear seized him immediately. Something had been there last night. And this time, it wasn’t just him. His dad had noticed it too. That made it more real. He couldn’t be alone.
Sully refrained from rushing out of his home. He took the time to get cleaned up and put on slacks and a nice shirt, an outfit suitable for church. He would spend the day with his parents. Or, at least, he would stay with them until the fear decreased. Then, maybe, he would come home.
By the time Sully got to his parents’ house he had calmed down somewhat. The prospect of spending the day with them eased his angst a little. Whatever his dad remembered, Sully still felt he was safe with them. Nothing bad could happen with good old Mom and Dad around.
But what he saw at the farm shocked and angered him. His parents’ RV was not parked in the yard. He thought of the last time he had been there. It had been on Thursday to pick up Monica. With her going away for a week, he had succumbed to his mother’s request to let Monica stay Thursday with Grandma and Grandpa instead of at daycare. In the picture of memory he could see the RV when he had pulled up on Thursday. So it should have been there now, unless they were gone too. But they had said nothing to him about going anywhere.
Sully walked up to the front door, thinking maybe there was some explanation that he wasn’t considering. His dad wouldn’t leave him. Not now.
On the door he found the note. It was in his mother’s handwriting.
Sully, there’s roast in the fridge. Help yourself. We love you. And we’ll see you when we get back from the hole.
Sully crumbled the note in rage. How could his dad do this to him? The hole his mother referred to was Trout Hole in New Mexico. It was a rustic lake resort, set in the lower Rocky Mountains. His parents made quick little fishing trips there once or twice a year.
By the note, his mother had fully expected him to come here. That meant she had been tricked. One of them usually called before leaving, just to say how long they would be gone and ask if Sully would check in on the farm. No doubt, his dad had told his mom that he had made that call. That way she wouldn’t talk to Sully and let the cat out of the bag. His dad was getting them away from him.
Sully shook with anger as he walked back to his car. It was just easier to feel angry than afraid right now. How could he have known this would happen? Three days ago he would have thought it impossible. But as it stood, the two people in the world he trusted the most had abandoned him.
Abandoned.
#
Sully waited until late in the afternoon to make the call. He had struggled for hours with what to say. But he knew his struggles didn’t matter. There was no right way to pose the question. No matter how he asked, it would come off as crazy.
Faith picked up on the third ring. “Hello.”
“Hi, Faith. It’s Sully.”
“Oh, hi. Do you want to talk to Monica?”
Sully paused. Did he really want to do this? He hated to. It had all been left unsaid. It had been easier that way. He had gotten what he wanted when she left. The rest hadn’t mattered. But now, he had to know.
“Actually, Faith. I need to talk to you. It’s important.”
“Okay,” Faith responded, hesitancy apparent in her voice.
“Are you somewhere private?”
“Well, Scott went to the store, but Monica’s right here.”
“Can you move away from her, so she can’t hear?”
“Well, yeah. I guess. Just a second.”
Sully waited as Faith moved to wherever she was going. It felt so weird to talk to her like this. And he knew it was going to get worse, way more awkward. Even in their marriage, especially in the later part, they had not much opened up to each other.
“Okay,” Faith finally said.
“All right. Now I have to ask you a question. It may seem kind of strange for me to be asking it now. But it’s important.”
“Okay,” Faith’s shaken voice said. He wondered if she knew. For years, it was a question left unasked, and finally it had come home. Sully wanted badly to leave the question as it was, just an occasion tingle in his head, ju
st a question left to his mother’s brooding on right and wrong. But now he couldn’t ignore it. Given the circumstances, it just seemed too relevant.
“Faith. I need to know why you left.”
There was a long pause, and then he could hear her crying. He felt a tinge of guilt. But mostly, he just hoped that she would be able to talk about it, willing to talk about it. “We weren’t happy,” she finally said.
“No, Faith. We weren’t. But I know you. That wasn’t enough reason for you to abandon us, not under the circumstances.”
She began to sob loudly. She tried to say something a few times but couldn’t get it out. Sully wondered if she were capable of having this conversation now. Maybe he should give her time to think about it. Maybe he should call back later.
“Why, Sully?” Faith finally asked. “Why do we have to talk about this now?”
Sully took his time, not sure of how to answer Faith’s question. How much explanation should he give her? She had his daughter. Should he say that people had died? Should he say that people he had trusted had left and that some scary presence had entered his home? Could he say these things and still expect her to send his daughter back to him next week?
Sully formulated what he thought were the right words. He hoped she would accept them and not inquire for further details.
“Listen, Faith. There’s something very strange going on around here. I don’t know how to explain it, because it’s beyond what I understand. And I just think that if I know—”
“I was afraid!” Faith said, interrupting him. “I knew something was coming, and I was afraid.”
“What? I mean, how?”
“Just a second,” Faith whispered.
It took a couple of minutes for Faith to come back on the line. When she did, her voice was calm but had a forced quality to it.
“Sully, are you still there?”
“Yeah, I’m here.”
“I’m sorry, but this is hard?”
“I know,” Sully said. “It’s fine.”
In a way, he was glad it was difficult for her. It would have been a lot worse if he was the only one who felt weird about this conversation.
Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner Page 25
