He waved as I came out to meet him. Bongo remembered a friend and demanded petting, which was duly provided.
“Living out here?” asked the cop, gazing at the porch.
“Well, for a couple days. Or weeks, I guess, until I get the house cleared out.” I stifled a sigh at the thought of more weeks spent in the house, living on a steady diet of ramen and public radio.
“The old lady called us out a few times,” he said, still rubbing Bongo’s ears. “Wanted her neighbors arrested.”
“What neighbors?”
“Place across the street.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “To hear her tell it, they were throwing all-night parties with drugs and rock ’n’ roll.”
I groaned. Something else to apologize to Foxy and crew for. “They’ve been so nice to me.”
Officer Bob chuckled. “Yeah, they’re nice folks. But you know how it is. Some people just like to complain.”
“Lord, ain’t that the truth!”
This pretty well hashed out the conversation. I tugged Bongo’s leash. “Ready to go?”
“Lead the way.”
9
We couldn’t find it.
I swear that I combed every inch of ground for half a mile around, and it wasn’t there. I found the cows. I found the fence. I walked to the end of it, I walked past it, and there was nothing in the trees.
“I know it was here,” I said to Officer Bob. I felt a strong urge to cry, which was stupid. I should have been glad it wasn’t there. I should have been thrilled that there wasn’t a horrible monstrous art project made of dead-deer bits dangling from a tree.
Instead I would have given all the money in my bank account to find the damn thing again.
Bongo was no help. Bongo just about knows sit on a good day. He wandered around, snuffling at the leaves with enthusiasm.
I knew Officer Bob probably thought I was a liar or seeing things or making stuff up for attention. He was being very nice and very professional about it all, but I was sure that I was being mentally shuffled from reported a problem to is a problem.
“I swear it was here…,” I said, probably for the hundredth time, as we slogged back toward the house.
Bob nodded. “It’s all right,” he said. “It might still be. All these trees look alike if you’re not used to them, and it’s easy to get turned around.” He waved vaguely into the woods. “If you do run into it again, take a photo. That’ll help us find it again.”
“But who could have put it there?”
He shrugged. “Without seeing it, I can’t really say. I don’t know. Kids, maybe.”
Any kid who would make the thing I saw was on their way to being an avant-garde artist or a serial killer.
He was very polite and he didn’t make me feel like I was wasting his time, and after he left, I went into the house and cried into Bongo’s fur for twenty minutes anyway.
The rest of the evening was uneventful. Foxy came over to ask if I wanted dinner, but I told her I wasn’t feeling great.
She left and came back twenty minutes later with a Tupperware container of enchiladas.
“Tomas swears by ’em,” she said. “If your innards are giving you trouble, these’ll blow the sick right out of you.”
“High praise,” I said, taking the enchiladas. “Thanks, Foxy.”
She fidgeted for a moment. “You need anything, hon? Saw there was a cop here earlier. You in some kind of trouble?”
“Oh. Yeah. Him.” I sighed. “No. I called him. I thought I saw something in the woods.”
“Something?”
“There was a dead deer in a tree,” I said.
Her hot pink lipstick skewed sideways as she frowned. “That’s weird. We don’t got any cougars around here. I mean, people say they see ’em, but it’s always just some big house cat or a coyote they didn’t get a good look at.”
“No, this wasn’t a cougar.…” I tried to explain what I’d seen, while downplaying how scared I’d been. No, of course I didn’t run away screaming and crying. Why do you ask…? “Officer Bob said it was probably just kids.”
“Yeah, sure,” said Foxy. “Kids always stick dead deer in trees with their heads on upside down. It’s the next thing they play with after Legos.” She rolled her eyes.
“Thank you!” I felt more vindicated than I’d like to admit. “That’s what I was thinking!”
She shook her head. “Nasty things out and about,” she said, half under her breath. Then, louder, “You be careful, hon. Lock your door at night.”
“I always lock my door.” I glanced around. “Although with this place, I’d be grateful if someone broke in and stole some stuff.…”
She laughed at that. “Fair enough. I’ll let you alone, then. You have any problems or just get spooked, come on over. We got a spare room.”
She left, and I stood over the sink, eating the enchiladas, while the radio told me how grateful they were for listeners like me.
* * *
Bongo woke me up in the middle of the night again, baying. I nearly jumped out of my skin.
I sat up and looked out the window, on the off chance that it was whoever was hanging freakish effigies in the woods. (Kids. Right.)
But no, it was deer again.
“Dammit, Bongo…”
“Hrrruuuwwuuuuufff…”
Two of them bounded across the yard. A third followed slowly, hugging the woods. Probably the one I’d seen before. Poor sod was lucky it hadn’t been hung up in a tree. We killed the wolves and then the apex predator was cultists or artists or dangerous lunatics.
My apex predator bounced on the bed, stomping on my calves.
“Go to bed.”
He tried to pretend that he wanted to go outside, but I was fairly sure that it was in order to find a deer to bark at, so I glared at him until he flopped back down on the bed.
“You’re a wretch.”
“… rrrfff.”
* * *
“Hi, Bongo!” said Enid, when I dragged into the coffee shop the next morning, probably looking like death warmed over. And then, as something of an afterthought, “Hi, Mouse. Coffee?”
I was not offended, as of course you greet the dog first and the human later. “Yes, please.”
She brought the coffee over and sat down at the table across from me. Bongo put his head in her lap and looked tragic. “So I had a thought,” she said, rubbing his ears.
I gazed into the coffee. “Ah?”
“You couldn’t find the thing again, right?”
I looked up from my coffee. “How’d you know?”
“Officer Bob came by this morning for coffee,” she said. “So I asked—yes, you’re precious, puppy dog—and he said you’d gone looking but couldn’t find anything.”
I sighed. It was still embarrassing. “I know it was there,” I mumbled.
“Hey, no question. Either it got taken down or you got turned around. Woods are like that. Anyhow, if you go on the county’s website, you can look up who owns the property behind you. That way you get an idea whose land it was on, and then you can ask them about it.”
The idea of tromping up to a stranger’s door and saying, Hey, did you know there’s a horrible vanishing dead-deer sculpture on your property? was distinctly unappealing. Still, it was a good idea. I pulled up the county website and went to work.
It was a pretty fancy website. It had topography maps and property line maps. It also had a crappy user interface if you actually wanted to find out any real information, but that’s government for you. You could click the property maps and get a reference number, and then if you dug around the website long enough, you found a place to enter your reference number and it would tell you what name the property was registered under.
There were three people who could conceivably have owned the property behind my grandmother’s house, and two of them were holding companies that were, Enid told me, just waiting until Pondsboro became big enough so that they could develop exclusive housing communi
ties and charge a million dollars an acre. No luck there. I looked up the third property, and it belonged to a neighbor whose property abutted hers. (Dad’s property now, I guess. Eventually mine. What a dreadful thought.)
I stared at the topographical maps for a while. There were no hills behind the house. The hill with the white stone was not there.
Well. Of course there weren’t. I’d known it at the time. I just had tried not to think about it, because thinking about it was too hard.
I went a long way, that’s all. I went a long way around. The map is old. The satellite photos were taken in a different season.…
Even I didn’t buy that one. Hills aren’t like trees. They don’t subside in winter and come back in spring. The National Geological Survey, or whoever does these things, had been tromping around with their little survey tools before I was born, and there hadn’t been a hill there, and there still wasn’t a hill there, except that I’d been on the hill.
Sometimes it’s there, and sometimes it ain’t, Foxy had said.
and I twisted myself around like the twisted ones
My grandma, she’d say there were devils up there.…
Tomas’s grandma was, it was almost certain, a better person than my grandma. Mine had been wicked enough that even devils would stay clear of her.
That thought rang around in my head a lot longer than it should have.
Cotgrave had said something about that, though, hadn’t he? About how they avoided her like the smell of a dead skunk?
He hadn’t been talking about devils, though, had he? Plat-eyes and poppets and them, whatever they were—
Stop. This is stupid. You’re working yourself into a fit because a poor old man wrote down his dementia in a journal.
The dead deer effigy hanging in the tree hadn’t been dementia.
Bongo, generally as perceptive as a cinder block, flopped his muzzle over my foot and began licking my ankle. Probably he was just hoping that there was food on it, but it did make me feel better.
Don’t start crazymaking. You’re alone in a house in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of dolls. If there was ever a time to not start down the horror-movie road, this is it.
Besides, my grandmother’s presence was still all over the house. If it had kept the… the twisted ones… away in life, I couldn’t imagine it had dissipated just yet.
Enid refilled my coffee. “No luck?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. It was a good thought. Does”—I checked the name—“A. Chandler seem like the sort of person who would hang dead deer from the trees?”
Enid snorted. “She keeps cows.”
I digested this. Were dangerous people who make deer effigies allowed to keep cows?
“I mean, I don’t know her well, but I’m pretty sure she’s not the type. She has sheep, too. And I think some kind of endangered chicken.”
“Endangered chicken,” I repeated. Well. Of course there would be endangered chickens. Everything’s endangered these days. Why not a chicken?
“There’s a lot of that around here. Rare-breed livestock stuff, you know.”
I nodded glumly. Another dead end, then. I closed the topography website.
“Maybe I’m nuts,” I said.
“Sure, that’s possible.” Enid seemed untroubled by this.
I tried to focus on work for the next few hours, for all the good it did. It was too easy to lose my place and read whole passages without absorbing any of it. I think it took me an hour to edit a single page, and it wasn’t the sort of page that would normally require an hour of work, just some rogue commas and a spot where the word flow was choppy instead of smooth.
Eventually I closed my laptop and took Bongo home.
* * *
I woke up very slowly. There was a sound that I had been hearing for some time, and gradually I came awake, still hearing it.
It was Bongo. He lay flat at the foot of the bed, his fur standing up in spikes, and he was growling.
His growl was harsh and awful, like nothing I’d ever heard before. I could see the square of moonlight coming through the window reflected in his eyes.
It came to me, rather distantly, that Bongo was terrified.
My first instinct was to sit up, put my arms around him, ask him what was wrong. Being only half awake may have saved me.
I did not move my head. I looked over to the window, where Bongo was staring.
There was a white face in the window.
I didn’t scream. That’s the thing that’s still the most astonishing to me about the whole terrible encounter—I didn’t scream.
It was horribly misshapen. The eyes were huge and dark, it had an impossibly thin, vapid smile, and the forehead jutted upward.
It took a moment, as I lay there not screaming, to realize that it was an animal skull, upside down, and what looked like a smile was the suture between plates of bone. The jutting forehead was the skull’s snout, flipped over. Teeth gleamed at the top and the eye sockets were laced with black.
It was the effigy.
I don’t remember what I thought in that moment. Something that allowed me not to scream or go mad, I suppose—it’s not real. I’m dreaming, or if it’s really there, it’s someone trying to scare me, they’ve dragged that awful thing on the porch as a prank—
It turned its head.
It moved like a living thing, like a great bird, turning the skull head on the hanging folds of neck. It turned and looked at me.
I knew it couldn’t possibly see me. I was lying in the deep shadow of the wall, and my eyes were slits. Even if it could see me, it couldn’t know that I was awake. It was very important, somehow, that it not know I was awake.
Because it’s a monster and monsters can’t get you when you’re asleep and if I pull the blankets over my head it can’t get me but I don’t dare move because I can’t get the blankets over my head fast enough and it could still get Bongo if I move it can come through the window but as long as I stay still it has to stay out there—
It turned its head again, sideways, so that one dark eye socket stared in the window. Bongo’s growl was so loud that I could feel it in my teeth.
Tap. Tap. Tok. Tappa-tap. Tok.
The hollow woodpecker noise. Right outside the window.
Caused by the stones hanging from the effigy’s rib cage knocking together.
The sound I’d been hearing for days now.
I stopped thinking in words. My mind was a pure white terror.
The skull tilted sideways, still birdlike, as if it saw something that interested it. Bongo’s fur stood up in spikes.
And then it left.
I heard it drop to the planks of the porch, heard unsteady footsteps going away, down the steps. (Two feet or four? I couldn’t tell.) Heard the tok-tappa-tok of the holed stones. One knocked against wood—probably the railing post—and the sound was loud, as loud as I had ever heard, and that means it’s been here before
it’s been here all along
oh God
the twisted ones are here
the twisted ones were always here
The front door was locked. The back door was probably locked, but even if it wasn’t, an intruder would have to move a few hundred pounds of newspapers to get to it. The windows were all shut and had screens. If it tried to take the screens off, surely I would hear it.
What felt like a long time later, Bongo stopped growling.
I finally moved.
I rolled off the bed, pulling the blankets with me, and dragged them into the closet. I crawled to the bedroom door on hands and knees and locked it. I didn’t take my eyes off the window. I had no way to barricade that, but at least I could hide.
I pulled Bongo into the closet with me and slid the closet door shut. It was one of those stupid sliding doors that are basically fiberboard panel and laminate fake wood on a little rail.
Don’t think about the closet door sliding back don’t think about looking up and seeing the effigy standing there w
ith the hagstones knocking don’t think it don’t think it don’t—
I leaned down and gripped Bongo’s collar and buried my face in his ruff.
“We’ll leave,” I whispered. “Tomorrow morning. We’ll get out of this horrible place and I’ll call Dad and he can burn this awful house down and we’ll go home and never, never come back again.”
He licked my face. I took this as approval.
I don’t know how I slept. It seems insane that I could sleep, but terror is exhausting, so somehow I did. I don’t remember dreaming, or if I was dreaming, it was about sitting in a closet, so there was no real difference.
When I woke, it was morning and the thing was gone.
* * *
The door was still locked. The window was unbroken.
I looked out the window with my heart in my throat, and I saw the porch and sunlight and nothing more. Bongo pawed at my leg, making his want-to-go-out noises.
“Yes,” I said. “We’ll go. We’ll go for good.” I could not spend another night here, of course. You didn’t spend the night in a place with monstrous deer creatures staring in the windows. I didn’t care about the manuscript or the book or the potential money from selling the house. I wanted out.
I picked up my purse and my laptop bag. I snapped Bongo’s leash onto his collar. I did this all as if it were normal, as if I were packing to go to the coffee shop. I would leave my suitcase behind. The suitcase didn’t matter. Clothes could be replaced. All I needed was my wallet and my phone and my computer and my dog.
Opening the front door took more courage than I have ever needed in my life.
I looked through the screen and waited for the thing to get me.
Nothing happened. The sun was shining. I heard birds singing. I wanted to scream at them, because how dare there be birds singing when the woods were full of monsters?
Bongo shoved his nose against the screen and whined.
Twenty steps to the truck. Twenty steps, put Bongo in, and then another half dozen around the front to the driver’s side. Twenty-six steps. I could do this.
The Twisted Ones Page 12
