She was at the stove boiling water when she heard someone kick in one of the windows. At first, she thought she was hearing things—a holdover from one of her bad dreams bubbling to the surface to rattle her—especially given the absolute silence that followed the sound. How could she have thought anything else?
But then the people upstairs started to die.
Mr. Ganders got it first, judging from the sound of Mrs. Ganders’s screams, which were silenced as quickly as they’d began. Next it was the children, dashed to death in their beds one after another as they wept and wailed for the parents who could no longer save them from the hatchet. Cowering there by the cupboards, Mary would have guessed it was Simon no matter what. But then he began to sing as he paced from room to room, and in doing so, banished all doubt.
Hymns. He was singing hymns as he killed them.
But she wasn’t dead yet. She could still escape. She could disappear into the night and never be heard from again. The family was already lost—need she be, as well?
Mary’s body turned traitor then, freezing when she commanded it to move, to run, to escape. But she was glued to the floor, locked inside her own flesh, unable even to scream. For a moment, she thought that she might fight back, that she could run upstairs with a carving knife from the wooden block and plunge it into Simon’s chest, to end this here and now. But she knew that was just a fantasy. She wasn’t brave. She’d never been brave. He’d come for her, as he was always going to, and now that the Ganderses were dead, she was going to die, too, just as they had. There was nothing that could change that.
It was the sound of his boots on the stairs that shook her from her horrible trance, the dull and distant click of hobnails against wood growing ever louder. It was so much worse than the screams, or the sobs, or the wet thwacks of metal biting through flesh that Mary had pretended she couldn’t hear.
It was the sound of her death approaching.
That sound charged through her in a wave, her every nerve returning to life in a single rush. Her legs, her entire body returned to her, she didn’t dare waste another breath.
Mary ran. She barely touched the floor as she sailed toward the back door, flying like a gale loosed through the house. She could feel her heart pumping blood through her limbs, she could hear the night throbbing all around her; in that moment, she felt alive, so damnably alive.
She was halfway across the far field by the time she started to smell the smoke. Turning back for just a moment, she could see the first glimmers of flame dancing in the windows of the small estate, little more than lamplight behind the glass. As if the house were still her home, beckoning her back inside with promises of safety and warmth.
But it wasn’t her home, not anymore. The glow was another trick, another one of Simon’s funny games. She had to keep going. She could lose him if she stayed far enough ahead. There was a forest, a great forest, far south of town. She thought that she could make it by morning, lose him in the trees, but she had to go—now.
She wondered if she’d ever stop running again.
For a moment longer, she watched the house burn slowly. Then the front door swung wide open. She didn’t stay to see him emerge from the shadows, carrying that horrible, night-black blade at his side. She knew what wretched fate waited for her on the other side of that.
Spinning on her heels, Mary Kane squared her shoulders and sprinted farther into the dark.
A cold, oily chill shot through Chloe’s body as the dream crumbled around her and she came tumbling back out into the real world.
What the fuck was that?
Sprawled on the ground, she blinked, trying to see more than she already could. Nights in the forest were so dark, and from where she lay, only a scattering of stars managed to poke through the canopy of trees that hung overhead. Things were sharper out here after sunset, all the edges like blades. The campfire that Josh had built so carefully in between them had died down to arterial red embers shot through mostly dead logs. No wonder she was so cold. Chloe dragged a hand across her forehead. Despite the fire having gone out, she’d broken out in a terrible sweat, drenching her from top to toes, wicking deep into the fabric of her clothes. Another fever broken, she supposed. Her head felt clearer, her body aches had gone, even the air around her tasted sweet and fresh. She wiped her slick palms on her sleeping bag and gingerly moved to sit up, propping herself at an angle on her elbows and forearms, trying to ease past the bright hooks of pain that yanked at her midsection.
She couldn’t see her friends, but she knew they were there, could hear them breathing through the dark. Nicky’s mild, droning snore sounded against Josh’s wet, open-mouthed snuffles. She was here, and they were here. She wasn’t alone … as if being together was enough to save anyone in this place.
The names from her—what would she even call it? A dream? A vision?—came back to her in a rush, and she clutched them desperately, trying to keep them from evaporating again.
The Ganders family.
Mary Kane.
Reverend Simon Phipps.
The names, and the bright, brutal images they carried with them, hung in front of her face, as familiar to her as her own reflection, or the woods that she’d seen—felt—the Kane girl run through, praying madly to some invisible, whispering god for salvation. The forest had changed in the interim centuries, but not so much as to render it unrecognizable. What she’d seen was true. It had happened. She was as sure of it as she was that there was ground underneath her and a sky above. That psychopath had slaughtered that family … and the Kane woman had let him, sacrificing their lives so she could turn tail and run. Chloe’s skin still pulsed and buzzed with Mary’s fear and shame, a hideous, borrowed sensation she couldn’t seem to shake herself free of.
It was that fear that made it hard to condemn her outright. Chloe had never felt a paralyzing fear of her own like that; that kind of fear warped reality around it, bent it to suit its will. Mary Kane could have no sooner ambushed Phipps as take flight by flapping her arms like wings. Chloe knew that. She knew it as well as she knew that Phipps had been a monster, and in the real world, fighting monsters only ever made things worse. She was starting to realize that herself now.
Sleep tugged at the corners of her eyes, but some part of her knew they would need another campfire if the three of them were going to get through the rest of this chilly night without everyone waking up sick. The light and the warmth would do them good. It would see them through until dawn.
Carefully, she rolled onto her side, picking up a small handful of the dry twigs and branches Josh had left beside the rocks. She slid them underneath the scorched, still-glowing logs that had been their campfire until not too long ago. She considered the knot of branches, then added more to it. She didn’t know what time it was, but wanted to make sure the fire would last them through the rest of the night.
Nicky’s lighter was on the ground beside her, a cheap yellow BIC with a cartoon baseball printed on the side. She really hoped this would work. She’d never built a campfire before. She thumbed the lighter to life with a skritch and held the little flame to the fresh kindling, holding as still as she possibly could so the wood would catch. A second later, fresh flames swept through the dead branches with a soft rush, and Chloe pulled her hand back quickly. Flickering yellow light filled the little area around them, and Chloe glanced over at her friends one last time, meaning to let sleep take her again.
For a moment, she didn’t understand what she was seeing. It didn’t make sense. But even lacking sense, she couldn’t stop herself. She screamed.
The figure that stood on the edge of their camp in dirty, destroyed clothes was tall and rangy, totally devoid of all the muscle he’d spent so many years building up at football and baseball practices and gym trips and track meets. He was almost spiderlike now, his limbs drawn long and thin, as if he’d been stretched out by some dread medieval torture machine.
It looked like Adam, but it wasn’t Adam. Not anymore. It wore his skin,
but it was a bad costume, rendered in tattered cloth and loose loops of fish-pale skin that hung off him in ropes and rags. His eyes—its eyes—were dull and milky and shone with a kind of yellow wetness, while his mouth hung agape to reveal rows of broken, splintered teeth, streaked with thin pink mucous that dribbled farther down its chin with every strangled wheeze. Whatever had grown under Adam’s skin and warped him into this, it wasn’t him. This wasn’t her friend at all.
On the far side of the fire, Nicky and Josh tore free from their bags, knocked clean out of sleep by Chloe’s shriek. She couldn’t see the expressions on their faces; she didn’t know what they looked like when they first saw the Adam-thing. She just heard Nicky moan oh no oh Jesus oh my god as Josh stepped forward with a hand outstretched, a fake, forced calm in his voice that Chloe thought for a second might actually work.
“Hey, man, it’s okay.” The way he said it sounded like he was talking to a rabid dog that had gotten too close. “It’s going to be okay, Adam, I promise, we’re gonna get you help—”
Chloe didn’t even see the Adam-thing move. It was too fast, the night too dark, and she was too sleepy. All she knew was that one second, Josh’s face was attached to his head, and the next, it wasn’t. A heavy wing of blood, almost black in the darkness, floated away from his skull, and he screamed—good god, did he scream, loud enough that it seemed to shake the whole forest. Josh stumbled back, both hands drawn to the place above his neck, the delicate flesh there sheared apart by the gnarled hooks at the end of the Adam-thing’s hands. He hit the ground with a heavy, graceless thump, and the Adam-thing followed him down, dropping onto his body with a wild screech, ripping and gnashing at him and staining the air with the smell of burning copper.
Nicky didn’t even hesitate. She howled and leaped at the Adamthing as it dug savagely into the soft flesh of Josh’s throat, sweeping a burning branch from the fire like a flail, swinging it wildly, her screams filling up the night around them.
“No no no no NO NO NO, JOSH, NO!”
The Adam-thing sprung off of Josh, its sharp, hooked hands and razored maw soaked in red, but Nicky didn’t stop. She sprinted full tilt at the thing that used to be their best friend, slashing the flames at its face, leaving orange brushstrokes hanging in the air after each swing. The Adam-thing made a wet, choking sound and reared back on its heels, letting Nicky press in closer; Chloe could see exactly what was going to happen next, but she was powerless to stop it.
Nicky took another step closer—too close, Chloe thought, way too close—and the Adam-thing whipsawed forward, burying one red-stained claw into her chest before savagely raking it back, carving deep, bloody gashes through her shirt and shoulder. The tall, redheaded girl screamed and tried to swing the burning branch again, but it was no good. The Adam-thing ducked out of the way and then handily batted it from Nicky’s fist. Yowling, Nicky fell back and hit the ground, and the Adam-thing reared up to fall on her like he’d done to Josh.
So Chloe did the only thing she could think of.
She shouted at the top of her lungs, “Adam, don’t!”
And to her surprise, the Adam-thing actually paused, turning its red-smeared head to regard Chloe with those horrible, rheumy eyes. It was like looking into a spider’s eyes. There was something primal in the revulsion she felt holding his gaze, but she knew that if she looked away now, Nicky was dead. So she held fast, no matter how much doing so made her want to scream and vomit and then scream some more.
“Don’t do this,” Chloe begged. “Please.”
The Adam-thing watched her, and for a moment, she could see the boy underneath the monster, his handsome, delicate features eroded, but not totally gone yet. She held out a shaking hand to him, wishing she could somehow bridge the distance between them. Wishing he wasn’t too far gone.
That’s when Nicky struck.
The branch on the ground had nearly gone out, but one end still glowed red with heat, and she jammed it into the Adam-thing’s long, distended neck as hard as she could. The tall, pale creature shrieked and recoiled, thrashing its long arms in wild windmills, then twisted free and dashed away into the darkness, crashing through the trees until the sound of it faded completely away.
But it was already far too late. The damage was done. Even in the low glow of the campfire, Chloe could see there was too much blood coming out of Josh. It throbbed from the gaping holes the Adam-thing had left in his body and pooled in a black lake underneath him. Nicky, wounded as she was, crawled over to her boyfriend and crumbled, pawing at him, soaking herself in his blood, the sobs pouring out of her like a freshly loosed waterfall. Wordlessly, Chloe slumped back onto the ground and started to cry, her bleary eyes turned toward the sky, and didn’t stop for a long, long time.
SUNDAY
11
Dawn tore through the town in a slow wave, leaving it drowned in dead, gray light. The cold was everywhere now. The night’s chill had sunk deep into the nameless little town’s slats and corners like stubborn, icy hooks, refusing to be burned away by the little sunlight that managed to filter through the scudding shell of clouds that had overtaken the sky since sundown.
Inside the gatehouse, Parker’s eyes slid open as consciousness returned to him in broken pieces. He’d lay awake on the floor for what felt like hours after killing the light, listening to the house around him, straining his ears until they rang trying to hear if Nate was still there or if he’d vanished when Parker wasn’t looking. He shifted in place, and his giant’s frame cried out in protest. His muscles ached horribly, either from bedding down on the bare wooden floor or from the tension hard-knuckled into his body and bones from the noisy, bloody nightmares that had chased him all night, now receding back into the black drift of sleep.
He rose slowly, fitting his glasses onto his face to look around the small old room for Nate, finding himself alone. Fine by him. He wasn’t any good at talking to anyone first thing in the morning, anyway. His brain was too muddled by sleep, the words always coming too sluggishly to make him any kind of decent company. He’d heard coffee helped people with that kind of thing, but he’d never developed the taste for it.
Rolling up his sleeping bag in silence, Park took a look around the little gatehouse, noting how different it looked in the wan morning light. Last night, it had been spooky and ancient, but now it just seemed dilapidated and, honestly, a bit sad. Parker’s heart sank at the thought that this had once been someone’s home, and that, for whatever reason, they’d just left it behind one day without any explanation.
He packed up the rest of his things—flashlight, hatchet, gun—and slung his pack around his shoulders, fitting his arms underneath the heavy nylon straps. Then he turned and threw open the front door, filling the front room with that peaky gray morning light. The chill in the air licked along his bare skin with the wind, a soft, gentle sensation that made his body feel cold and hard.
Christ, but he ached. Maybe he’d slept even worse than he thought.
Overhead, the sky seemed closer than it had been the day before, the cloud cover drawing the earth nearer to the heavens and the dead oblivion that waited beyond them. Like the gatehouse, the town was a little sadder this morning, a little shabbier, a little more broken. The roofs seemed to sag a bit more than they had the day previous, the walls bowed with deeper curves, and the fences leaned at more extreme angles, where they still stood at all.
Stepping out of the house and onto the rough, dust-blown trail that passed for a main road in whatever this place used to be called before it had died, Parker’s neck crawled with the sensation that he wasn’t alone—that there were eyes on him from every house and outbuilding. Turning back to close the gatehouse door, or at least wedge it shut in its frame, he nearly jumped his skeleton from his body when he saw Nate standing behind him, hands jammed deep in his pockets, another version of his same old shitty grin pressed between his round cheeks.
Above that, his eyes were beady and black. Rat’s eyes. They hadn’t been that black when
he’d been alive, had they? Parker wondered.
“Hey, man,” the ghost said. “Sleep okay?”
Parker rolled his shoulders against the spike of nerves Nate’s sudden appearance had driven into his spine, tried to play it off like he was adjusting his backpack.
“Yeah. Fine. I guess.” He gestured toward the gatehouse. “Were you in there the whole time?”
“I don’t know. I guess I was, sure.”
“What does that mean?”
“I mean, it kind of feels like I’m a little bit everywhere all the time now. Like I got spread out way, way further than I used to be. It’s like I’m stitched into the fabric of this place. I can feel all sorts of strange shit. Little tremors and shakes in the forest floor, the wind through the trees … Like, right now, I can tell you that there’s a family of deer on the edge of town, drinking from the lake. The mom’s heart is running a million miles an hour because she’s nervous. I don’t know why, but I can feel her pulse racing.”
Parker stared at him. “That’s fucking spooky, man.”
“You’re telling me.”
“So like, you know everything about the whole forest now? You can see everything?”
Nate shook his head. “No, it’s not like I suddenly got connected to the forest Wi-Fi or whatever. It’s more like … a feeling. I can feel the woods around me. Things ring off of each other, like a harp. Strike one string, and the rest of them vibrate back.”
“And that seems normal to you?”
“Man, none of this seems normal to me,” Nate fired back. “Does any of it seem normal to you? You’re the one standing here talking to a dead guy.” He stepped out of the gatehouse to slip past while Parker pulled the door shut.
“Point taken,” said Parker.
“That’s what I thought. Now, let’s go have a look around. Place isn’t gonna explore itself.”
Park turned and followed his dead friend at a short distance, keeping his eyes pinned to the spot between the ghost’s shoulder blades, staring knives into him, trying to figure out if Nate could feel it, or if that was all bullshit too.
The Night Will Find Us Page 14
