“It was nothing like you think,” Faith said. “At least, it was nothing like what it must have seemed like to you and everybody else.”
Not wanting to be misunderstood, Sully resisted the urge to smirk. He was all too aware of what it was like to be alone. He knew what it was like to have everyone around you thinking things were a certain way when they were not.
Faith continued. “We had our problems, but I had no intention of leaving the two of you. I didn’t stop loving you, Sully.”
“Okay,” Sully said, knowing he could not say the same. He had never hated her, but he had stopped loving her long before she left. But he would not bring that up.
“It started right after Monica was born,” Faith continued. “Every night, I would have these dreams. And they seemed so real. We’d be at home, just like we were most nights. And then something would come into our house. I don’t know how to describe it. It was just this thing.”
“Like a presence,” Sully interjected, wondering if she could be talking about the same thing that had been there the night before.
“Yeah, I guess,” Faith replied. “But it was more just like knowing. Like it was just there and I somehow knew what it meant.”
“Okay,” Sully said. He didn’t think it was the same thing as the night before. What had been there last night was almost tangible, like an unseen stare can sometimes feel. And it wasn’t a dream.
“It was a warning, Sully. At least, that’s what it felt like. I just knew when it was there that something was coming.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. I just knew it was bad. And I knew that it was coming for you. It only wanted you, but it would hurt anyone that got in its way.”
The idea seemed wrong to him, but Sully asked the next question anyway. “Do you think the dreams could have been foretelling the tornado?”
“Well, I did. But then you had your accident, and the dreams didn’t go away. There you were, dead, I thought. And the dreams that something was on its way to take you still kept coming. I couldn’t take it anymore. I left. And after that, I stopped having the dreams.”
Sully was stunned. He had not known what was going on with who was, at the time, his wife. Of course, he had not been trying too hard at that point. But Anna. He had thought he had known what was going on with her. He hadn’t always known what she was thinking, but he had been fairly sure that she was happy.
But this went way back. All his life, people had kept secrets from him. Important secrets. What was worse was that, in the end, everyone, his dad, Anna, Faith, had to get away from him. Faith’s voice brought him out of his head.
“I had planned to come back for Monica after. . .”
Faith couldn’t finish the sentence. So Sully did. “After I died.”
“Yes,” Faith said. “I was coming back for her, but then it happened. You came back. You were just suddenly alive again.”
Sully wondered how that had been for her. She had made plans for his death. But with the dreams she had experienced, did part of her know that he would return? Fear he would return?
“I couldn’t come back after that. I wanted to be with Monica, and in a lot of ways, I still wanted to be with you. But I couldn’t come back. I knew I would just keep having the dream, and it would drive me crazy. I thought I might be crazy anyway. So I did the only thing I thought I could.”
“You kept away from me.”
“Yes,” Faith replied before she broke down again. She had moved away from the phone, but he could still hear her crying. Sully felt bad for her. He felt bad because he had thought she was a lot worse of a person than she actually was. But more than that, he was scared. What she said confirmed to him a little more that something had come here, and it had come here for him.
After a couple of minutes, Faith came back on and asked, “Do you think I’m crazy, Sully?”
Even as horrified as Sully was, he still couldn’t help but laugh. “No, Faith. Not at all.”
He heard her sigh. His mind went to the ramifications of everything. He went to his first priority.
“Listen, Faith.”
“Okay.”
“I’m not sure that I’ll be able to pick up Monica next Sunday. So I might need you to keep her longer.”
“That’s fine, Sully. Take as long as you need.” There was relief in her voice. She had just told him what might have sounded like madness under a different set of circumstances. That he would let her keep his daughter probably confirmed that he really didn’t think she was crazy.
“I’ll call you and let you know when I coming. Under no circumstances do you give her to anybody else. I don’t care who. Not Anna, not my parents, nobody but me.”
“Okay.”
There was no question of why from Faith. For that, Sully was grateful. Even though she had revealed a lot to him, he didn’t want to go into the details of his current life with her.
Less than a minute later, he hung up the phone. There were now even more questions in his mind. He had no doubt that something had come. Whatever Faith had sensed, whatever had scared her away, had been real. Now it was here. But what was it?
#
Night was approaching fast. Sully felt anxiety over that. But he tried to keep it at the back of his mind, because he had other things to think about now.
He sat in the study on the couch. The playoffs were on again, hockey and basketball, but he was not watching. On his lap was a notebook. In his hand was a pencil. He had to do the math.
At the top of the page he wrote, “the old pattern.” It was his dad who had noted it first. The old pattern was for him to take Monica to her mother on a Friday night. That resulted in the horrific visions. It seemed to result in people dying. But it was more than just dying. They were being charred. Or at least, their cadavers were being charred. Why? Why was it always fire?
The answer seemed simple enough. He said it out loud. “So any damage done to them before the fire would be erased.”
Somebody, or what seemed more likely, something, wanted no traces left of its presence, and from the smallest germ to the biggest cities, nothing could take away like fire.
That was the old pattern. But why?
And the new pattern. One time he had driven and none of the horror had taken place. What was the difference? What was the common factor in the first three trips that was not present during the last trip?
Monica? The absence of Monica? Monica hadn’t been with him on the way home during the first three trips. But she had been there during the last trip. But what could she have to do with it? She was a child. And if it did have something to do with her, then it probably had to do with him leaving her. And if that were the case, then it probably wouldn’t have just been on the return trips he had made without her that he would have had the visions. It seemed likely that they would have continued throughout the week while she was gone. Monica was ruled out.
“I made the trip straight through the last time, but I stopped during the first three trips,” Sully said out loud.
But that didn’t seem like an important factor. Because it hadn’t been that he stopped, then had the visions. No, when he had stopped, it had been because of the visions. The visions came first.
“I stopped at night because of the visions. I had the visions at night.”
Sully had it. Sully had his common factor.
“Night.”
#
After a simple dinner of canned stew and crackers, Sully picked up the pen and notebook again. It was just so much easier to think that way. He was a teacher. He wrote down what he thought. At least, when the thinking was complex, he wrote down what he thought. And this was a real mind puzzle.
The next thing he wrote at the top of the page was the word, “Night.”
He wracked his mind on that. Something about being gone at night was associated with all the madness he had experienced on the road.
And what was the madness? First, there were the visions. They horr
ified him. They made him stop.
Was that it? Was he supposed to stop? For some reason, did he have to be afraid to drive home at night? Was there something at home he wasn’t supposed to see?
No. Because the visions ran deeper than that. Their message wasn’t stop driving now. The worst of them, though it occurred at night, had its setting as day. It wasn’t that he was supposed to stop then and there. But maybe it was that he was supposed to be afraid of traveling all together.
Sully smacked himself on the forehead. “Think,” he demanded.
The semi scene had been at day. The scene had been his would be trip in March. In March, he would have left in the afternoon and dropped Monica off.
“Then I would have driven home at night. I’m not supposed to drive at night.”
But he did drive at night. He drove a lot at night, and yet rarely had any kind of angst at all. But that had only been around Little Axe.
“I wasn’t away long. I was always back early. I’m supposed to be here early and sleep here at night.”
#
It was dark. Sully suspected he would soon grow tired, and like the nights before, he wouldn’t be able to resist sleep.
At the top of the page, three linked words were written: “night-deaths-immortality.”
Sully, if what his father had said was true, was, if not immortal, nearly immortal. He would live a long time. He had a great deal of life.
And the deaths. They were all fiery deaths when he had been gone at night. He wondered if it could be that he was some kind of supplier. Did something feed off the abundance of life inside of him? When he was not there for it, did it take surrogates?
But there were other nagging questions. Questions he didn’t want to consider. Faith had dreamt that something was coming for him. Something that wanted only him. What had come after Faith left? What needed Faith out of its way? What remained here when Sully was gone at night?
The answer was clear. He hated to believe it. But he couldn’t deny it. The answer to all three questions was the same.
She had all but begged him not to leave. She had not wanted him to take the trips that would keep him away at night. But when he left on the Sunday morning to go pick up Monica, she had not protested.
“Because I would be home early that evening.”
The answer was clear. The answer was Anna.
Sully grew tired. He went to bed.
Chapter Eight
Sully would not neglect his classroom duties on Monday. With all that was happening in his life, he didn’t want that to be impacted too. That he was a good teacher was something to hold onto, when so much else was slipping away. But in the times that he was not dealing with students or their work, he thought of Anna. He kept his notebook handy, jotting down notes throughout the day.
Sully was surprised about how little he knew about this woman. He knew that her dad had died when she was young. Her mother had left, and Anna was raised by her aunt. She spent a couple of years in college before she decided there was very little she could learn about writing there. She had then begun traveling about the country, taking waitressing jobs to get by, all the while observing, recording what she saw. After she had published her first novel under a penname, she had made enough that she wasn’t rich, but could get by for a while without the waitressing jobs. That’s when she had come to Little Axe. She had been there a few months, a strange woman in town who nobody knew anything about, before she met Sully.
The rest was just not there. Sully didn’t know about specific places she had been, just that she traveled a lot. He didn’t know about past friends or significant others. He didn’t even know the name of the aunt whom had raised her.
The next consideration for Sully, as he made his way home from school, was why he knew so little about someone that he shared his bed with. It wasn’t a hard thing to understand. Part of it was Anna. She had two states, one where she was writing and he just left her alone. In the other, she was so intense for him in the here and now that there was very little desire for him to even think about her past. Besides, her mysterious nature did have a certain appeal. He liked reading her stories, and slowly learning a little bit more about her through each one, even if what he learned was that she was even more of a puzzle than he had thought.
Another part of the reason was Sully. He spent a lot of time and energy analyzing the intellect of each of his students, not their personal lives but the way they best went about solving math problems. Otherwise, probing into the lives of other people was not his nature. He hadn’t even known the details of his own birth.
At home, Sully decided it was time to find out the details of Anna. He started with her personal things: her clothes, jewelry box, dresser drawers and a few other things. He searched thoroughly, digging through pockets of folded clothes, looking under the bed, searching every place where it would be possible to hide something.
A part of him thought this was crazy. Maybe, instead of looking through her things, invading her privacy, he should put out a missing person’s add or call the police. But a bigger part had given up on the hypothesis that this was all in his head. It was time to focus on looking around him, instead of looking inside.
After about an hour of searching, Sully had found nothing more than personal items of hers that he had already seen. But he wasn’t done. What was next was the violation of all violations. He went to the study, to Anna’s workstation. He started with her laptop. He looked through her document files. There, he found all of her novels and short stories. There were also files containing notes Anna had taken. It would have taken him forever to search every page, so Sully just scanned them. Again, there was nothing out of place, just the notes of a horror writer, nothing to implicate her of wrongdoing.
He searched through Anna’s notebooks. What was written in ink was similar to what was on her computer. He found one notebook titled travels. Inside were the places she had been and descriptions of them, what the people were like, what the terrain was like.
Again, the best Sully could do was scan. In the end, he was amazed. Anna wrote things about people and places. She wrote down observations about the world. She delved into speculation about the unknown. But what wasn't contained in the computer files or in the notebooks were observations about Anna.
There had to be something, Sully thought. A person as incisive as her had to engage in self-reflection, in self- speculation. But that would be hidden. That would be the most protected of her writings. Maybe she kept the Anna files with her.
If there were Anna files, they weren’t here. He had searched the entire house. Except. . .
#
There was one way into the attic. It was through the closet in Monica’s room. The sun had set, and soon it would be night. Sully wasn't sure how much time he had before the tiredness overwhelmed him and put him to sleep. He took a flashlight and a chair to the closet. He got up on the chair. He stood there scrunched over and went to undo the latch that would let the little flap door fall down. But before he could slide the latch, he heard the fast reverberating noise, and he jerked his hand away.
At first, it was just one, then several more joined in, as if daring him. Sully was not ready to take that dare. He jumped from the chair and into his daughter’s room. He slammed shut the closet door.
The sounds were unmistakable. He had heard one of them on a few occasions. He had seen the source of such a noise before and known to stay clear. The sounds that had come from the attic were from that source. There were rattlesnakes in his attic.
Sully stood there and thought for a little while. He considered his shotgun. One good blast would clear the path, but only in one direction. And they would be quick. From the sounds of their rattles, they were highly energized.
“Wait a minute,” Sully said out loud. Logic came, and it made his fear subside a little.
A rattlesnake took its energy from sunlight. It was dark in the attic.
“They’re not real.”
#
He opened the closet door, and that set the rattlers in motion, loud, daring him once again, triggering in his head the images of green reptiles baring their fangs. He inched forward and they grew all the louder. He crept up on the chair and thought he could hear their bodies, right above him, slithering over the door, waiting for him.
Yeah, Sully. Go ahead. Think that we’re fake. We’ve been waiting for you. Now you think what we want you to think.
Sully put his hand on the latch. There was a cacophony of light thumps, and then there were more rattles going off. He withdrew his hand from the latch. But he stayed on the chair. His heart pounded like a drum in his chest. His air felt diminished, and he was sweating, but he had to do it. He lifted a heavy shaking arm up to the latch. There were more thumps, but of a different quality. In his mind, Sully saw the snakes trying to bite through the wooden door. In his mind, he saw their beady reptile eyes. He could now imagine their fangs striking him. He shivered.
Again, Sully had to get down.
#
Yet another thing occurred to Sully. He had not always been a good sleeper. He had never been an insomniac, but some nights he had lain in bed for thirty minutes to an hour before he fell asleep. But at some time, that had changed. He couldn’t pinpoint the time for certain. He thought it might have been shortly after coming out of the coma. Or maybe it had started when Anna came into the picture. Whenever the onset, for some time he had been falling asleep very fast. He thought maybe it was because he and Anna had sex most every night and that wore him out. But considering it a little further, he realized that he and Anna often had sex after waking up in the middle of the night instead, and on the nights they didn’t have sex as soon as they got into bed, he fell right asleep anyway. When had it started?
Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner Page 26
