He heard the echo before he heard the voice, its sibilant edges creeping up the sides of that frozen inner chasm, slipping out in whispers and tendrils like smoke. The words assembled themselves in strange patterns inside his head, the syllables all out of order, the letters and sounds reversed; but still he heard, and understood.
Hello, Adam.
The boy-thing tried to scream again but found it impossible, his throat locked up against the pain, unable to let any but a small, throttled noise escape. Veins stood out on his forehead. Tendons bulged in his neck like cords. The agony was brilliant, blinding.
The voice reached out to him again, like a beam of white sunlight knifing through an eternal darkness.
Not long now.
The boy-thing ground his teeth to powder, feeling new ones grow into the ragged sockets, pearly white and razor sharp. The sound of cracking bones filled the forest around him, but there was a humming there too—as if he could hear his body knitting itself back together, assembling into something stronger and more terrible than he’d ever imagined.
When it was over, the warped boy-thing could smell blood in the air, rising from the earth with the humidity in great, coppery clouds. In the distance, he could see a dying light surrounded by darkness, frail and red. He was already so, so hungry.
His stalk-like legs didn’t make a sound as they whisked him into the dark.
The sun sank lower and lower still until it dipped behind the trees and vanished entirely, drowning the little town in soft, inky blackness. Parker had originally wanted to explore, look for signs of his dad, maybe even find another carved set of initials, but it was getting too dark for that. Better to call it for the night and have a look around tomorrow morning. He didn’t want to admit it, but the thought of wandering around a place like this in the dark sent a deep chill licking its way up his spine.
Tomorrow. He’d look around tomorrow. For tonight, he’d decided to camp down in the little house connected to the gate, a small, two-room structure with a main room and a dusty, cobweb-draped bedroom beyond that. There was a nameplate bearing the name HARROW posted outside, hand carved into a heavy, smooth slat that hung by the door.
Setting up in a corner of the main room, Parker used his foot to swipe away some of the leaves that carpeted the floor, carefully unrolling his sleeping bag on the bare, rough wood. He’d had to pry his way inside, using the blunt side of the hatchet and his bare hands to pull the boards away from where they’d been nailed into the frame. The gatehouse wasn’t in great shape—the air inside was musty and ancient, its walls heavy with mold underneath a steadily disintegrating roof—but it would do for the night. He stretched out on top of his sleeping bag, feeling every joint in his big body groan with relief, then dug in his backpack for the little flashlight he’d packed away, clicking it on to flood the room with a white glow that cast corkscrew shadows in every direction.
“Probably not a great idea to build a fire in here, huh?” Nate asked from the far corner of the room, pacing back and forth, craning his head to look around in the light burning out of Parker’s pocket Maglite.
“Probably not, no.”
“Sucks.”
“We have light,” Parker said. “And do you even need warmth anymore?”
“Dude, I don’t know. It’s just … campfires are comforting, you know? Something about them just feels safe. Fires mean people, warmth, food. I mean, come on. You remember food, don’t you?”
Parker’s stomach gurgled and growled at the word. Yeah, he remembered food. It had been only yesterday that he’d last eaten, but that was already long enough for him to miss it. He should have brought something for himself, a granola bar or anything. He could have hidden it in the bottom of his pack, secreted away where no one would have even known. He’d learned a thing or two about hiding things in the last year; his mom could probably teach a seminar on that shit by now.
His parents had never really been big drinkers, but Lori had been doing a great impression of one the last few months. It had started out in small ways that nobody would have noticed unless they were really looking—an extra glass of wine at dinner, sometimes two or three. Then Park noticed bottles would go missing from the rack in their little kitchen, only to turn up the next day, bone-dry in the trash cans in the garage, buried under layers of crumpled newspaper. Like she was fooling anybody.
For a while, he thought it was only the wine, but over Christmas break, she’d sent him looking in her purse for her cell. He’d found the phone, but he also found a half-empty pint of Gilbey’s gin tucked away in there too. That was the first one, but it was far from the last. After that, Parker seemed to find the little plastic flasks everywhere, secreted away in the rolltop desk or her jacket pockets or hidden among the cans in the kitchen pantry.
He never said anything about it to her. What could he say? He didn’t have the words to describe what he was feeling, and he wasn’t even sure she’d listen if he tried. She’d gotten lost in herself, falling deeper and deeper into the darkness that had opened up inside her since his dad had disappeared. The woman he lived with still looked like his mom, still sounded like her—and on her good days, even acted like her—but she wasn’t his mom. Not really. It was there in her eyes, a slurry, runny-egg light that made him sick to look at for too long. It danced on her breath, the plastic juniper stink there to greet him almost every afternoon and evening, and sometimes before he left for school too. He saw it in the way her hands had started to shake in the mornings before she had her coffee, even though he pretended he didn’t.
She’d caught him watching her one Saturday a couple of months back, as she uncapped and emptied one of those little airplane bottles into her first mug of the day. She didn’t try to call it medicine, no bullshit clichés like that. She didn’t call it anything, really. She’d just stood there, bottle in hand, and pretended like she wasn’t dosing her coffee, like she wasn’t holding anything at all. Parker knew this move; truth was, he’d sort of expected it. Silence had always been her favorite tool, her sword and her shield. So no, she didn’t say anything about it. Instead, she just locked eyes with her son as they both tried to figure out how much the other one knew.
When she tried to laugh the incident off a long, agonizing moment later, the sound came out so fake and forced, it made Parker want to scream. But he didn’t scream. He nodded and smiled and pretended that everything was okay. Everything was just fine.
He hadn’t even said goodbye to her before he left the house yesterday morning. He would have liked to, but she was asleep, curled up in a snarl of sweat-stained sheets in a T-shirt and underwear, the door to her bedroom hanging half open like a broken jaw. Briefly, Park had thought about going in to try and rouse her, tell her that he loved her, but at the last second decided against it. The half-naked woman tangled up in those blankets, with her head buried under the pillows—that wasn’t his mom. She was just some stranger wearing her skin.
Somewhere far off, Parker heard a soft whistling, and a moment later, a breeze blew through the shabby old gatehouse, chilling him through his clothes. He rolled onto his side, nestling farther down into the sleeping bag, while across the room, Nate watched him, his eyes darkened by the shadows, unblinking.
“What are you thinking about, Parker?”
The big kid shook his head. “Nothing. Nothing.”
“Doesn’t look like nothing.”
“Yeah. No. Sorry. Did you say something?”
Nate shook his head, making his jowls wobble.
“Nope. You just looked real far away there for a minute.”
“I guess I was, yeah.”
“Where?”
For a second, Parker thought about lying to him.
“My house. My mom.”
“Do you think she misses you?”
Parker shrugged. “I kind of doubt she’s even noticed that I’m gone. My problems don’t really register with her anymore.”
“Double sucks.”
“What about you?�
�
Nate shifted in place. “What about me?”
“Do you think your parents are worried?”
“Doug and Cathy don’t really worry about much,” he said. “But I don’t know, they might’ve changed their tune in the last thirty-six hours. Stranger things have happened, right?”
“Stranger than your parents worrying about you?”
Nate cracked a grin and blasted him with a finger-gun. “Exactly.”
Parker supposed it made sense. He’d met Nate’s parents only twice since they’d been friends; perhaps three times. They’d always seemed, well, fine. They were fine. Maybe a bit preoccupied, distant … he might even go as far as calling them cold. They always just seemed like they wanted to be anywhere but where they were.
“Do you miss them?”
Nate scoffed. “I dunno. Not really. There wasn’t a whole lot of them to miss, you know? Past few years, the three of us mostly communicated through texts.”
“And you were okay with that?”
“It was simpler that way. Easier for everybody to not have to actually talk to each other.”
Parker felt a cold twinge dagger his heart. “I miss talking to my mom about things,” he admitted. An enormous, awkward silence settled between the two of them.
Nate squatted down and knelt forward, hands laced together between his knees.
“Look, you’re tired, man. I get it. Maybe just try and sleep some, huh? You’re no good to anyone if you’re a zombie. We can start fresh in the morning. We’ll go check shit out when it’s light out, maybe go and see what that old church back in the trees is all about.”
Parker rubbed at his eyes and nose. Despite the sorrow coiling in his chest again, he could feel sleep lurking in the wings, just waiting for its cue to come and swallow him up. He buried himself even deeper into the sleeping bag, reaching down to pull the zipper up and around his broad shoulders, trapping all the warmth he could inside.
“Nate?”
“What?”
“Are you going to be here when I wake up?” His friend eyed him from across the room, dropping both arms down to rest on his thick, cross-legged knees. He nodded his head.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Okay. Good.”
Nate didn’t say anything else, so Parker clicked off the Maglite, drowning the room in darkness so complete, it was almost obscene. He plucked his glasses off the bridge of his nose and folded them up, but didn’t, wouldn’t, let his eyelids slide shut just yet. He kept them open, gazing into the nothing, listening to the little movements in the air and the woods surrounding the house. He wondered if Nate was still sitting there, in the corner of the room, staring at him with those dead, unblinking eyes that did such a good job of pretending to be alive. He wondered if that’s what death really was—just a long, unbroken stretch of consciousness, unable to sleep or eat or touch anything to break up the monotony. Just trapped awake, forever. If that was death, Parker thought it sounded more than a little bit like hell.
Parker’s consciousness had already started to ebb away in little tidal surges, tiny pieces of him lost to the sea of sleep for the night. The waves were warm and comforting, quiet and dark, and he gave himself over to them.
But …
The thought floated up from the darkest depths of Parker’s mind, a coffin unchained from the sea floor, breaking the surface with a hiss and spray of toxic, moldering air. I didn’t tell him about the church.
Parker’s eyes were open for a long, long time after that.
Josh fed the fire while Nicky lay on her side, pretending to doze inside her sleeping bag. Chloe didn’t know exactly what the hell had happened to them in the time that she’d been out, but whatever it was, it must have been bad. Neither of them spoke to each other after they got the fire going; hell, they barely spoke to Chloe, either, but at least they bothered pretending. Nicky had passed out food—another shabby dinner of cold Pop-Tarts and crushed potato chips, but it was better than nothing. Not long after, Chloe had slipped back into sleep with relative ease, but there were nightmares waiting for her underneath the surface.
She’d been working in the Ganderses’ home for almost three months when the reverend started coming around. Mary Kane, from all the way up in Ipswich and barely a hair over twenty, had grown up poor, like her parents and their parents before them. Given that, she counted herself lucky to have found any position at all, but that she’d found one with a family as kind and generous as the Ganderses was doubly fortunate. They were good Christian folk. They took care of her at least as much as she took care of them. She really thought it could last forever.
It was a Friday morning the first time the reverend came calling. Dressed in black, he was tall and thin like a scarecrow, with hollowed-out cheeks and a thin, sharp jawline like a viper. He stood outside the front door of the modest little estate house with his back rod-straight, head and shoulders taller than anyone else Mary had seen around the township of Mount Holly, even taller than Anders the blacksmith. He greeted her with a slow, deep bow, this strange, skeleton man, and when he rose again, she could see that his smile was gray and oily to match his eyes. He wasn’t old, he was just … withered. As he stood there, the rough, thick fabric of his cloak whipped and danced in the wind, as if it were trying to break free of him.
“Reverend Simon Phipps, come to share the word of the Lord with the master and the lady of the house,” he said, extending a hand Mary did not take. “And who might you be, my dear?”
“Mary Kane,” she said, looking anywhere but his awful, viscous eyes. “The Ganderses’ maid.”
Far across the fields, on the well-trod paths behind him, she could just make out people in the distance, walking along, shielding their eyes from the sun as they made their way toward town. In this moment, more than anything else, she wished she were walking with them, or anywhere else in the world—anything that didn’t involve standing in this doorway, trapped under his creeping gaze.
“Lovely to meet you, Miss Kane,” he said, moving his tongue around her name as if it were a spoonful of honey. “Would you mind fetching your master for me? I would speak with him.”
Without another word, Mary nodded and then turned and fled back deeper into the house to find Mr. Ganders, hoping to keep her distance from the strange, looming reverend.
Later on, as he was about to leave, Mary heard Phipps ask the Ganderses one last question.
‘Your maid … does she often receive gentleman callers?”
The reverend’s visits soon became a regular occurrence, at least once a week, but sometimes more. He came preaching his good word and leering hungrily at Mary from around the corners when he thought she wouldn’t notice. He would read from the Bible; he would show the children magic tricks (his funny games, he called them); he would even help out with the chores, chopping wood and starting fires in the hearth with that damned black hatchet of his, the one he had made special with the flint along the blade edge. He liked them, and the Ganderses him, though every so often she thought she could catch a look of—what, distrust? Unease?—flit across her employers’ faces when he spoke. But still, he was the town’s reverend. He was owed some measure of respect, no matter their personal feelings. Wasn’t he?
It wasn’t long before Simon broached the subject of marriage. He was quite taken with their housemaid, he confessed to them one sunny morning. Through his ashy, uneven smile, he told tale of a life she wanted no part of, a house she didn’t want to live in, children she had no wish to bear. He spoke of it as if it was a foregone conclusion—of course Mary and he would be wed. What other option did she have? What other suitors were there?
And Mary endured it. She smiled patiently at every sweet-bitter comment. She shied politely away from his long, grasping fingers when he attempted to pray with her. She waited for him to understand his cause was lost, demurring from his every attention.
And for a while, demurring was enough.
Until it wasn’t.
Wh
en the day came that he cornered her long enough to ask for her hand, Mary did the worst thing imaginable.
She told him no.
She tried to be kind about it, gentle even, but she was unequivocal; she was firm. She didn’t tell him “Not now” or “I’m not sure.” She did not waver. She told him no. No, there was no changing her mind. No, she did not love him. No, she could never—would never—love him.
She would not marry Reverend Simon Phipps, in this life or any other.
But still he came calling, week after week, under the thin auspices of ministering to the Ganders family. To the family’s credit, they stood behind her decision. They pulled her aside one evening and told her as much, though it seemed as if it pained Mrs. Ganders to do so. They made it clear to her: Mary’s life, inasmuch as it could be, was her own to live, no matter how Phipps had pleaded or tried to convince them otherwise. They would not force Mary to change her mind.
The last time Reverend Phipps came to preach, she could see that something had broken loose from inside of him, some vicious, slavering thing that had been only barely restrained before. She could see it in the way he watched her with his dead, colorless glare. Before, she had been a curiosity, or worse, an obsession; now, she was food.
There wasn’t any reason for it, not that she could see; no root cause to explain it all away. He’d always been this. Maybe the voices in his head had gotten too loud to ignore. Maybe the fires that he so loved starting had finally overtaken his heart. Whatever it was, it was plain to see, scribbled all over him in his expressions, his movements, the things he said and the way he said them. Simon had snapped for good, and there was no coming back from that.
It was pure, stupid luck that she was awake when he came for them. She’d been up half the night already, tossing and turning from nightmares she couldn’t remember. Surrendering to insomnia, she dressed quietly and headed to the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea.
The Night Will Find Us Page 13
