Now, though, as I walk through the door and flip on the lamp near the entryway, the cabin doesn’t seem so imposing. If anything, it just seems small. It makes the guilt harder to ignore.
I take a few steps in and sets down my bags. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of days to get movers to clear everything out of the cabin and find a realtor. Places up here get offers even when they’re not up for sale. It shouldn’t be tough.
The cabin is musty, so I leave the front door open, welcoming the breeze coming through the screen. I lie down on the couch.
It should probably be a bit more unsettling, knowing that nobody except Mr. Wills is even going to notice I’m gone, but it’s not. The small efforts I’d made throughout the day, putting off coming to the cabin as long as possible have taken their toll. Right now, closing my eyes is the perfect option.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” a sharp woman’s voice comes, piercing the stillness.
I’m on my feet as a pure reflex and I’m peering through the screen door.
“Who’s there?” I ask.
I look a little bit closer at the short, darkened figure.
“How can it be you?” I ask the woman on the other side of the flimsy barrier.
“You should go home,” the voice comes back, this time, a little quieter, but no less severe.
I steel myself and flip on the porch light.
“Mrs. Blaylock?” I ask the old woman. “What are you doing here?”
“I could be asking you the same question,” Mrs. Blaylock responds.
The woman just stands there, unmoving, unblinking. I put a hand on the edge of the wooden door. Mrs. Blaylock isn’t giving any indication she intends to try to come in the cabin, but there’s a noiseless siren still blaring in my mind.
I look the woman up and down. Mrs. Blaylock is wearing a dark blue nightgown. Her gray hair’s a mess. It looks like she’d just crawled out of bed. I say, “I don’t know if you’d heard, but—”
“I’ve heard,” Mrs. Blaylock says. “You can make your calls from home. You don’t need to be here.”
“Mrs. Blaylock,” I say, “I don’t know what the issue is here, but I’d really just like to get some sleep. I’m sorry if it startled you, seeing a light on in here after Gramma—”
“Stay away from the lake,” Mrs. Blaylock says. “It’s not for you.” She hisses, “It’s my lake.”
“Okay,” I say, holding up a hand to the woman. “It’s your lake. I’ll be out of here in a few days, all right?”
Mrs. Blaylock narrows her eyes at me.
“All right?” I repeat.
The woman’s mouth opens a little and she takes a quick gasp of air as if she’s about to speak, but her mouth closes again. Without a word, Mrs. Blaylock slowly turns and walks down off of the porch. I watched until the old woman gets all the way down the driveway and disappears behind the trees that line the street.
I close the door and lock it, trying to swallow my heart back into place, or at least, get it far enough out of my throat that I can breathe again.
“This whole place is pretty messed up,” I mutter to myself, leaving the door and closing the blinds over the windows.
The living room feels small, but I have no interest in leaving it right now. If there’s anyone else hanging around, I’d rather be asleep when they make their move. Unfortunately, sleep’s never going to come now without a little help.
I walk over to my purse and remove the small prescription bottle from inside. The thought of taking sleeping pills used to bother me more than the thought of not sleeping. After recurring bouts of going three, sometimes four days without any sleep at all, though, chloroform started to look like a reasonable option.
Half a pill usually does the trick, but tonight, one’s better. Down the hatch it goes.
For a moment there on the porch, I almost thought the woman on the porch was—but that’s an even sillier thought now than it was then. Still, I’m not leaving this room until the sun is up.
There’s no television in the house, but there’s a radio. That thing was always playing. Gramma never seemed to pay any attention to it, but the most she’d ever do was turn it down before bedtime. I switch it on and turn the old-fashioned dial, trying to find the jazz station, but all that’s coming through is static.
I turn the radio off again and lie back down on the couch, pulling my grandmother’s fading red and blue afghan from the back of it and over myself.
My eyes stay open until the pill kicks in and coaxes them closed.
***
It’s dark inside the cabin.
The lamp next to the door is off. I can’t move. It’s been a while since I’ve taken a whole pill: I’d forgotten about the heaviness.
The problem is that when I go to close my eyes again, nothing happens. My eyes feel closed, but out of my periphery, I can still see the faint, pale blue glow of what little starlight bleeds around the edges of the curtains.
I hold my breath. Someone is speaking, though in my grogginess, I can’t make out what’s being said or who’s doing the talking.
The voice doesn’t seem like it’s coming from anywhere. It’s just sort of all around inside my head. Then another voice joins in, and then another. My eyes finally close.
It’s just the pills.
The first time I took a sleeping pill, I sat on the floor of my tiny bathroom, apologizing to its southern wall for never getting any direct sunlight. It ended up being the west wall, but that couldn’t possibly make any difference. If I had a ranked list of strangest experiences after a pill, this one wouldn’t crack the top twenty.
My eyes closed, my mind flashes images of the lake, of the cabin. Even with the dark night, everything looks so clear, like I’m watching a memory being replayed with absolute precision.
In my mind, I’m standing on the old pier on the lake, looking up at the patch of sky above the trees surrounding the lake. In the next moment, I’m somewhere in a fantasy, standing in a room at the top of a tower, overlooking a different world below, but that vision dissolves into another one where I’m standing across from a tall, long-black-haired man. He’s naked, erect. He doesn’t say anything. He just peers at me with aquamarine eyes that seem brighter than anything else in my field of vision.
I finally feel myself drifting back toward sleep.
“We are waiting for you,” the voice says in a clear, soft tone, close enough that its source may as well be whispering the words directly into my ear. Then everything is silent, my mind blank.
I wake up, coated in sweat.
It’s morning.
I wiggle my fingers and my toes just to prove to myself that I can and I slowly sit up, letting the afghan fall from me as I do.
“Maybe half a pill from now on,” I say to myself, rubbing my eyes.
The lamp is still on and the front door’s locked. The voice, the visions the inability to move: They’d been a dream. The visit from Mrs. Blaylock on the other hand…
I fold the afghan before standing up and taking a complete look around the room. In the darkness of the lamplight the night before, I hadn’t realized how shabby things had become in the cabin. Apart from some dust, the place is clean enough, but everything just seems so old, so unused.
As a force of habit, my eyes move over all the hidden spaces in the room. There’s the outlet nothing’s ever plugged into that serves as a cover for a small storage space. There’s the loose stone under the old wood-burning stove. The lamp next to the doorway covers a small round opening where I once happened upon Gramma’s stash of cigarettes a few years back.
There are at least two other spots in the house like that though there may very well be more that I don’t know about. Apart from that pack of cigarettes, I’d never found anything in any of the holes.
A knock on the door snaps me out of my reverie.
“Who is it?” I call out.
“It’s Max, ma’am, county sheriff,” the man responds from the other side of the
door. I walk over and open it.
“Good morning, Max,” I say.
The middle-aged sheriff puts his hand to the brim of his hat. “Saw the car here, just wanted to make sure it was you and not someone else,” he says. “I don’t think anyone ‘round here would mess with your grandma’s place, but you can never be too careful.”
“Yeah,” I answer, yawning.
The sheriff removes his hat and holds it with both hands. “I was sorry to hear when they found…” he trails off. “You know,” he says, “when they found out what had happened.”
“I appreciate that Max,” I respond.
He lowers his gaze, turning his hat in his hands.
I ask, “Is there something else?”
“I suppose not,” the sheriff says, looking at my feet. “I just wanted to say, you know, if you need any help while you’re here, I’m just a phone call away.”
“Thanks,” I answer. “It’s good to know I’m not completely alone up here.”
“So,” Max says, “if you need anything…” He turns to leave.
“Hey, Max?” I blurt.
He turns back around.
“Mrs. Blaylock came over here late last night, after I got in,” I start. “The whole thing was kind of weird.”
“Yeah?” Max asks.
I see the sheriff’s raised eyebrows, his wide eyes. “Never mind,” I say. Suddenly, the whole thing just seems silly. “It’s nothing. Thanks for stopping by.”
The sheriff turns his head a little. “Are you sure?” he asks. “She wasn’t bothering you, was she?”
“No,” I answer. “It’s fine. Say hi to Molly and the kids for me, would you?”
“Will do,” the sheriff says with a smile, putting his hat back on his head. He turns and walks toward his car as I shut the front door.
“Everyone up here is kind of strange,” I say to myself before setting about going through Gramma’s things.
Chapter 3
It’s almost evening when I pull up to the tiny store on the far end of Lakeview Drive, the only road in town.
Lake Vespertine township has twelve full-time inhabitants, though others come through every once in a while to take in the scenery or simply escape civilization for a while. Before there was any kind of law and order in the area, Lake Vespertine was a hangout for gangsters, escaped prisoners and just about every other kind of criminal element you can imagine. When the first permanent settlers came here, though, they only found the remnants of those who had been there before. I always thought the whole story was a little silly, but people love their folklore.
I hadn’t gotten farther than opening the first cabinet before realizing I was going to need more boxes: a lot of them. So now, I’m getting out of my car and just hoping I can get back to the cabin before it gets too dark.
The cupboards at Gramma’s are filled—packed may be the more accurate term—with just about everything in the world other than food. On one shelf would be a stack of stained, ragged dish towels, on the next, old VHS tapes, each labeled with the name of a different Audrey Hepburn movie.
I spent a while just opening doors and drawers, trying to get everything organized in my head so I could simply head down the road, pick up some boxes and get everything done. When I started thinking about the job I’m not going back to, and the apartment I can’t afford any longer as a result; I stopped trying to get everything in the house figured out in one day.
“Well, I’ll be,” Marty, the current owner, proprietor and sole employee of the Lake Vespertine General Store, says. “Kathryn Taylor, I swear you get lovelier every time I lay eyes on ya.”
I smile and ask, “How’s business, Marty?”
He shrugs. “It’s a good thing Pa had the good sense to pay this place off before he went,” Marty says. “Sellin’ to the same dozen people, year after year, eventually the money starts leaving the till faster than it’s going into it.”
“About the same as usual, then?” I ask, smiling.
“You know it,” Marty says. “Hey, I was sorry to hear about your grandma.”
“Thanks,” I answer quickly. Even after losing both parents, I still don’t know how to respond to a statement like that.
He’s a nice enough guy, Marty, but he must be one of the loneliest men I have ever met. The man has a wife and four children, but Marty just sits in his little shop from before sunrise until after sunset, never quite ready to close up for fear he might miss out on some busload of tourists he must know will never come.
“Are you still working for that impolite fella down at the thrift store?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I answer. “Hey, you wouldn’t happen to have some empty boxes lying around somewhere, do you?”
Wrinkles form outside the corners of Marty’s eyes. He’s very proud of himself for being able to say, “Just unloaded a big shipment. I think there are three, maybe four boxes in the back just waiting for the compactor.”
The compactor is something of a local legend. Marty doesn’t get deliveries all that often as, over the years, he’s learned to stock the store based on the buying habits of his only regular customers. Things are easier when variety isn’t an issue.
“Got some new kind of granola bars just come in,” Marty says. “These ones got ground-up kale right in there with the chocolate chips: S’posed to be some kind of mega food that cures all sorts of everything. Tastes like a bad mix of dirt and vomit to me, but Mrs. Tillman swears they’ve cured her arthritis. Come to think of it, though, I haven’t seen her in here for a while. Nathan’s been doing all the shopping…” he trails off, staring into space. After a moment, he snaps back, asking, “How long are ya staying?”
The problem with Marty isn’t that he’s chatty; it’s that he speaks every syllable very deliberately. He says in a minute what would take others ten or fifteen seconds. After a couple minutes of this, the most ardent stoic would find herself with a handful of her own torn-out hair.
“Do you know what happened?” I ask, having stopped listening somewhere around the word “kale.”
“With your grandma?” Marty asks, scratching the back of his head.
“You said the boxes were in the storage room? Would you mind if I grab them?” I ask, deciding there are other people in town that might be able to give me information without taking the rest of the day to do it. Maybe I’ll give Max a call after I get home. I don’t know why I didn’t ask him earlier.
“I’ll give ya a hand,” he says and walks around the counter.
Marty’s only a little bit older than me, but from the way he speaks to the way he dresses to the premature male-pattern baldness, it’s hard not to think of him as “the old man that runs the general store.” When we were both younger, I had a little bit of a crush on him. It was more to do with the fact that he was the only person in town within ten years of my age, but he took it pretty seriously. I can’t be sure, but every time I’m up here and I stop in at the store, I still get the feeling that he’s carrying a torch.
Marty and I have the few boxes from the storage room in the trunk of my car before Marty’s gotten to the part of the story where Gramma was found. The sun is setting and when it gets dark here, it gets really dark. Even on nights where the moon is full, the countless trees all around the lake make any light seem transient, unreliable.
I don’t want to come across rude, but after glancing down at my watch for the fourth time, it’s clear enough that Marty isn’t getting the point. “Hey, I’m sorry, but it’s been a really long couple of days. I hope you don’t mind, but I think I should get these boxes home before it gets too much darker.”
By the time Marty finishes saying goodbye—and awkwardly offering his assistance if I find packing too overwhelming on my own—the circle of sky above is slowly filling with stars.
I drive back to the cabin, trying to figure out where I’m going to get boxes for the rest of Gramma Ambra’s things. You know, maybe Mrs. Blaylock was right: Maybe I should just call up some movers and have the
m deal with it. Gramma and I weren’t really all that close, and I’m up here all alone.
There’s a pulling feeling in my stomach with the thought of just hiring someone to take care of it. This should be uncomfortable. My grandmother died.
I get out of the car and walk around to the back, pressing the button on my key fob to pop the trunk. The flattened boxes aren’t heavy at all, but without Marty to grab the other side, they are pretty cumbersome. I’ve just gotten all the boxes out of the trunk and into my arms (kind of) when a bright light comes over me, casting my shadow onto the cabin in front of me.
Turning around, I set the boxes down, shielding my eyes. I’m expecting to see Max or Marty parked behind me though I’m not sure how I would have missed hearing a car pulling up, quite literally right behind me. What I see instead is nothing.
Alien Romance Box Set: Alien Heart Complete Series (Books 1-4): A SciFi (Science Fiction) Alien Warrior Abduction Invasion Romance Box Set Page 30
