The Willows

by Krystal McLaughlin

  When he locked the front door and started turning off the lights. I shook my head. "No, please, leave them on."

  He sighed and sat back down on the couch. "Come on, let's get you to bed."

  I shook my head again. "Please Mason, just sleep out here with me tonight."

  I didn't want to be alone. I didn't want to go to sleep. I didn't want Mason out of my sight because I was terrified I would lose him too. Most of all, I didn't want to be in my room. I didn't want to be at the back of the house so close to what I had seen.

  Reluctantly, he agreed. I think that not only did he know how badly I needed him, he was also feeling frightened and unsettled. I wasn't sure which was worse. Not knowing what was going on and wondering about it, or knowing and worrying about it.

  Sleep was stop and go that night. It was like subconsciously, my mind would not like me sleep long enough to dream. That was a good thing. Most of the time when I woke up, Mason was snoring on the floor next to me. The sound of his snoring had become a comforting sound. Any other noise, small or big, had me on edge. Jumping each time with my heart racing in my chest and a sheen of sweat covering my body.

  When daylight came, I was happy to see it. My body hurt. My head hurt. My eyes were burning from lack of sleep and I was exhausted, but I was still happy to see it. In the light of day, nothing seemed as scary. There weren't shadows people could hide in. Sounds made sense when you could see what was making them.

  The phone began ringing loudly, causing Mason to stir, but it was me who finally answered it. "Hello?" My voice sounded gruff and scratchy and my lips were dry and cracked.

  "Miss Magwire? This is Officer Sutherland, can I please speak with your brother?"

  "Have you found anything?" Mason was already up and walking toward me, his hand held out expectantly waiting for me to hand him the phone.

  "Really, ma'am, I'd like to speak with your brother. Is he at home?"

  I bit my lip, "just tell me. Did you find Jackson? Is he okay?"

  Mason took the phone from my hand. "Hello?" A pause. "Yes this is Mason, did you find anything?"

  I watched him. I wasn't sure what I was looking for. Some indication that my life, so tentatively pieced together after the accident, was about to be ripped apart again. Maybe vindication that my feeling had been right and that I wasn't crazy, although in the deepest recesses of my heart, I hoped that I was. It's not like I wanted something horrible to have happened to Jack. Whatever it was that I was looking for, I knew the minute I saw it.

  One moment Mason was just as he had been, trying to be the strong older brother. Trying to hold together a family that had it's heart ripped out. The next he was lost. In his eyes, I saw the same despair, the same hopelessness that I had felt when I stood in Jackson's room. The phone fell from his hand. The receiver striking the floor and skidding to a halt somewhere under the kitchen table.

  "Evie?" His voice was cracking. He was losing it. If only I could join him. I longed for the cleansing power of tears.

  "What happened?"

  "What did you see outside?" He was sinking, falling to the ground at my feet.

  "Why? Mason, what happened?" I fell with him, grabbing hold of his shoulders and shaking him.

  "I need to know what you saw, Evie."

  I gulped. "Piper." I closed my eyes, the memory as crystal clear as if I was still standing in front of it. "Piper's dead Mason."

  He was crying. "How do you know?"

  "The blood." I buried my face in my hand. "Oh God, Mason, there was so much blood." I opened my eyes and watched as my brother fell apart.

  "How do you know it was hers?"

  The vision flashed again and I knew if there was anything left in my stomach I would have thrown up again. "There were pools of blood on the ground and a bloody handprint on Jack's window. One of Piper's fingernails was stuck to it." The words came out in a rush and I closed my eyes, picturing that black nail with the stupid pink polka dots. I took a deep breath. "What did they find?"

  Mason leaned forward and pulled me to him, rocking us both back and forth just like our mom used to do when we were children and had a bad dream. "They found your car. It was parked at the Willows." He pulled away from me so he could look into my eyes. "Evie, oh God, Evie, I'm so sorry."

  "Where's Jack?" Bile was rising in my throat. The kind that burned when it came because there was no real substance to it. It was just part of your insides. "What happened to Jackson?"

  "He's dead." I shook my head, unwilling to believe what I had already guessed. "He killed himself." There it was. With those words, another piece of my soul was ripped out of me.

  Chapter Five

  Over the next month, details of what I had dubbed the cops version of the truth began circulating. Jackson had killed Piper outside of our house and then killed himself the next day when the guilt of what he had done had become too much for him to bare.

  They had proof. The blood they had found outside of Jackson's window was Piper's. They had also found a pool of blood and a bloody stick out in the woods by our house. The blood on the ground had also been Piper's. The blood on the stick? They weren't sure about it. It didn't matter to them that it wasn't Jack's blood. His suicide had given them all the closure they needed.

  Mason had quit school and moved back home. He was working at a local gas station and keeping close tabs on me. That was fine by me. I wasn't doing anything I shouldn't be. I had just stopped caring.

  It sort of put a damper on your social life when people thought that your brother had gone crazy and killed his girlfriend. That's what they were saying after all. That Jackson had gotten so jealous of Piper's new boyfriend that he had killed her. A man scorned. That's what the papers had said.

  What bothered me the most was the one thing you would think most people would have picked up on. It really amazed me that it was a non issue. They had never found the boyfriend. Seriously, it was like he didn't exist. Only he did. I had seen him. He had been at my parents funeral.

  There was one more thing. This kept me up at night. It gave me the headaches, the nightmares, the dark circles under my eyes. They had never found the bodies. Not Piper. Not Jackson. The only "proof" they had that he killed himself was some bogus note they found in my car and the motive to do it since they were so sure he had killed Piper and hidden her body somewhere.

  What did I think had happened? I wasn't sure. It's not like I was physic or anything, but I knew my brother. You know me Evie. I knew that he was not capable of killing himself and he most definitely wasn't capable of killing Piper. Besides he had been inside the house with me that morning. He had been with me when we heard the knocking noise that the police now believed had been Piper, trying in vain to save herself.

  Hello. If she was trying to save herself why had she tried to get back into her killers bedroom? When I asked them this, they had blown me off and Mason had apologized for me, saying I was still in shock. When I reminded them that Jackson had been the one to go and look to see what was out there that morning, that only solidified their reasoning. They claimed that he had gone back out there to "finish her off".

  The only person who hadn't told me that I was being crazy, that I was in shock, that I needed to accept what had happened, was the young officer, Jake Cole. He was the only one who just listened to me.

  Landon had stopped trying with me. We hadn't broken up, but we also hadn't spoke in weeks. I didn't really need the words to know that we were over. It was sort of a give in. Emma and Jane had also stopped talking to me. Or, I guess, I had stopped talking to them and with no other course to take, they had given me my space.

  So this was my life. I woke up in the morning. I went through the motions, eating breakfast, showering, going to school, coming home, eating dinner, sleep. None of it mattered. If I was emotionally cut off before this, now I was like an empty shell. The lights had gone off and there were pieces of me that were missing now that always would be. I knew that no amount of time or therapy would be able to fi
x me.

  I had started diving Mason's Jeep. Being inside of my car just made me feel weird. Apparently, it did him too, because he had switched to driving our dad's old car. When I pulled up in front of our house that afternoon, I couldn't help the shiver that worked its way up my spine when I saw my old car just sitting in the back of the driveway. We should sell it, I though absently. I wasn't sure exactly what our finances were, but I figured the extra money wouldn't hurt.

  Sighing, I grabbed my backpack and keys and started walking up to the front door. It was Friday night so an empty weekend loomed ahead of me. It was a surprisingly dry November and I wasn't sure if I liked that or not. Something about the snow, about that blanket of white covering everything up, that calmed me.

  "Hello there, Evelyn."

  I turned and smiled at Mr. Gates. He had been a little distant when the news had first come out, but in the past week, he had been making an effort to talk to me. Sometimes I even saw him staring over at our house and I wondered if Mason had asked him to keep an eye on me when he was working. That wouldn't have surprised me.

  "Hello Mr. Gates."

  He was walking over to me and I was surprised to see that he was walking with a cane. The years must be catching up to him. In the fading sunlight, he even looked older to me than usual.

  "How are you?"

  He smiled. "Oh I can't complain, my dear. I am more concerned with you." The wrinkles around his eyes crinkled up even more when he smiled and I found myself staring at him, wondering what it would be like to be that old, to have seen as much as he had.

  Realizing he was watching me, waiting for me to say something, I shook my head slightly to jolt me from the daze I had been sinking into. "Oh, well, you know." I answered without really answering at all.

  He studied me and I got that creepy feeling that he was seeing too much. Much more than I wanted to share with anyone. It was unsettling and quickly making me squirmy and uncomfortable.

  "I, um, think I'm going to go on inside." I said, pointing to my house as if he didn't know where I lived. Idiot, I thought.

  I took a few steps, but he stopped me. "Evelyn, can you do me a favor?"

  Figuring he needed something done around the house, I smiled and relaxed, "sure."

  "Stay inside after dark."

  It was so unexpected that I wasn't sure I had heard him right. "I'm sorry, what was that?" I could feel that I was frowning from the wrinkles in my forehead. I took a step back toward him so that I could be sure of what I was hearing.

  Instead of answering right away, he looked off into the forest, a vacant expression on his face. "There are things out in the woods, dangerous things."

  He wasn't serious, was he? Unable to suppress it, I shivered. Pulling my coat closed tighter around me, I looked out into the woods trying to follow his gaze. When he didn't say anything more, nor did he turn and look at me, I started backing away. "Sure," I answered him, "okay."

  It was strange, but as I hurried toward my front door, he didn't even call after me. I waited until I was safe inside behind my double locked door before peaking out through the curtains to see him. He was still out there, just staring out into the trees as if he could see something that no one else could.

  Feeling completely freaked out, I jumped when the phone rang. My heart was beating in my throat and my hands were shaking. I laughed at myself. Get a grip Evie, I said to myself, it's just the phone.

  "Hello?"

  "Evie, thank God."

  I took the phone and sunk down on the couch. "Mason? What's up?"

  I heard him take a deep breath and then laugh when he exhaled. "Nothing, it's just that I've been trying to call you for the past fifteen minutes. I was getting worried."

  I rolled my eyes, this overprotective thing was starting to get a little out of control. I rifled through my backpack until I found my phone and saw that, sure enough, I had five missed call. "Take it easy, I'm home. Mr. Gates stopped me outside."

  "Oh good, I'm glad he's home. Look, April didn't show up for work so I'm going to have to cover her shift. Will you be okay there without me?"

  "Yeah, sure, no problem." I thought about telling him what Oliver Gates had said, but decided against it. I was pretty sure it would only freak him out and I wasn't into adding extra stress on him.

  He breathed a sigh of relief. "Okay, great. Well call me at the store if you need me. I'll call Oliver and ask him to keep an eye on... things." I knew that he had stopped himself from saying 'you' and I would have said something if I thought it would help things. I didn't bother telling him not to call Mr. Gates, that I was fine, because I knew he'd call anyways.

  "Okay, well I guess I'll just see you later."

  After hanging up the phone, I knew that I was faced with a long stretch of nothingness in front of me. I hugged my arms around myself and looking around the living room, decided that I might just go to bed. There was, after all, nothing else to do. The thought of calling my friends passed briefly through my mind, but it just seemed like it was so much work.

  As I was walking to my room, I noticed that Jack's bedroom door wasn't shut all of the way. Curious, I pushed it opened and let the misery seep into me. Just standing in his doorway was agony, so what did I do? Of course, I walked all of the way inside and sat on the edge of his bed.

  Memories washed over me. Playing with my baby brother, fighting with my baby brother, laughing with my baby brother, and crying with my baby brother. Unable to cope with the fact that through all of this, I still wasn't able to express or show what I was feeling, I laid down and curled up on top of Jackson's bed.

  It didn't take long to fall asleep. I'm not sure how long I slept. It could have been minutes or hours. I didn't dream, at least not one that I remembered. One minute, I was remembering Jackson and me growing up together, and the next I was jolting awake, sitting up and instantly alert.

  It was dark outside and since I had fallen asleep when it was still light, it was dark inside the house as well. I was shivering. The air around me was frigid. Something had woken me, but I wasn't sure what it was. All I knew, was that my heart was beating ridiculously fast and my imagination was in overdrive.

  I saw shadows moving against the walls. I imagined someone hiding in the darkest corners of the room. I heard whispers in the wind that was blowing just outside of the windows. I swore they were calling my name. A tree branch scraped across the window and I imagined Pipers bloody fingernails making the sound.

  "Get a grip, Evie," I whispered out loud.

  In a moment of sheer bravery, I jumped off of Jack's bed and ran as fast as I could out of his room and into the hallway. My heart was thumping in my chest and I plastered myself against the wall hoping that if I wasn't alone, they wouldn't be able to see me where I was. The whole house was dark. I cursed myself for not turning on any lights earlier.

  Then I laughed at myself. Seriously, I was almost an adult and I was afraid to be home alone? I was afraid to be alone in the dark? Stupid, Evie. The only thing that would have made me even more scared was if there was a lightening storm going on outside. My imagination was in tact enough to know that would probably send me completely over the top.

  I walked to the kitchen, turning on lights as I went, eager to calm my heartbeat and beat my imagination back into submission. After downing a full glass of water, I figured that I was just about back to normal. It was almost midnight.

  Sighing, knowing I wasn't going to be able to go back to sleep, I grabbed a blanket off of the chair and curled up on the sofa. There wasn't much on the television. Mostly re-runs of old sitcoms. I settled on one that I recognized and zoned out, not really paying attention to what was happening.

  Knock. Knock. Knock.

  I sat up on the couch, my heart going all River dance in my throat. I strained my ears, but all I could hear was the laughing and applause coming from the television. Maybe I hadn't heard knocking at all. Maybe it had been from the show and I just thought it was real. I muted the sound and strain
ed harder.

  Were those footsteps on the porch? A crash at the back of the house had me on my feet in seconds. Crap! I looked around frantically for my phone, but couldn't find it. In those moments I wasn't sure where I had left it in the first place.

  The grandfather clock in our living room chimed midnight and I think I probably jumped three feet. Were those whispers coming from outside or was it just the wind? My head told me one thing and my imagination told me another. I ran my hands down my face, trying to calm myself down. There had to be a rational explanation right?

  Yeah, like the rational explanation of blood all over your yard and Piper's handprint on Jackson's window.

  Feeling exposed in the open living room, I tiptoed back toward my bedroom. My blinds were closed, thankfully, so I crept toward one of my windows, keeping the lights in my room off. Peeking carefully out between the blinds, I strained my eyes to see if there was even anything to see.

  Shadows played across the yard. The trees in the forest towered over the house spilling inky black strips across the grass. Anyone could be hiding out there. As soon as the thought came, I knew I wouldn't be able to get it out of my head again. That was the problem with imagining things, sometimes they began to seem real.

  Something streaked across the grass, causing a ripple in the shadows that were already there and I had to bite my tongue to not scream out loud. It looked like whatever it was had been heading in the direction of Mr. Gates house, but as hard as I tried, I couldn't see what it was. Everything seemed almost too still.

  The porch light was on at Mr. Gate's and I waited, with my breath held, for something to happen. To see something, anything that would make sense to me and put my fear at ease. Seconds ticked by, I let out my breath and took another one, holding it until my chest hurt. Nothing happened.

  The front door creaked open. OMG, this was not happening. It was cliché, and I wasn't afraid to admit it, but I grabbed the first solid thing I could think of; a baseball bat. My feet were covered in warm fuzzy socks and they masked any sound as I walked back toward the living room.