by Peter Swift
* * *
Where is it?
Awakened from a surprisingly dreamless sleep, Stevie's eyes shot open. At least, he thought it was dreamless. And he was pretty sure he'd been asleep. Had he heard the voice? Or was his subconscious just reminding him of what Emily had said in the forest?
Something was wrong about what had happened in The Grove with his sister. Something nagging that, in his grogginess, he couldn't quite put his finger on.
Stevie's room flashed with bright, white light. Thunder boomed. The storm his father mentioned had arrived. The wind howled as it blew against the house, sending waves of rain slamming against his bedroom window with each gust.
Stevie sat at the edge of his bed, fixed his pajama top that had twisted around his body, and rubbed his eyes with the palm of his hands. Again the lightning came, and a moment later, thunder. Sounded like a good storm. He slid his feet into his slippers and pulled his desk chair up to his window so he could watch the lightning.
His mother, a nurse, had to work second shift at the hospital tonight. He looked at the clock. Almost eleven. Was she home yet? He hoped so. He didn't like the idea of her driving home in this storm.
The house sat at the end of a long, winding driveway that was pretty, as long as you didn't have to shovel the snow off of it—something that Stevie and Emily had to do routinely during the frozen Vermont winters. Much of their yard was grass, but a number of large oak trees dotted their property. When Stevie's dad had the house built, he'd wanted to pull them out and build a straight driveway from the road, but his mom had put her foot down.
"If those beautiful old trees go, so do you," she'd said. She was joking, of course, but the trees had stayed and the driveway went around them.
Stevie was just about to check if his mother had made it home when another lightning bolt lit up the sky. When it did, his breath caught. Near the mailbox he thought he'd seen a shape in the driveway! Something dark and bent over. Was it some kind of animal? From this distance, and in the quick lightning flash, he hadn't seen it clearly. It had looked like an animal, but with long hair. A mane?
The lightning flashed again, and again he saw the figure. This time it was much closer, though. It stood perfectly still. Had it moved? No, there hadn't been enough time for it to get that far. Even if it ran. Maybe there was more than one.
Stevie leaned forward, his nose pressing against the glass. He squinted, trying to see the thing in the darkness, but it was impossible.
WHERE IS IT?
The voice pounded painfully through his mind, and his hands clutched at his head. It wasn't something he heard, but rather something he knew. With it came a sense of anger and frustration. Hatred!
Three quick flashes of lightning struck and thunder boomed at the exact same moment. The thing he'd been watching was now at the nearest bend in the driveway, standing between the largest of the oak trees and the house. Stevie clearly saw what it was. A young girl!
But not exactly a girl. She was a broken creature, twisted up like a rubber band. Her one leg supported her weight, and the other jutted from the knee in a useless direction. Bent sideways at the waist, her chest pointed up toward the sky while her stomach wrenched toward the ground. Her broken neck twisted from her shoulders at an unnatural angle, attached to a head that dangled limply. Snapped and shattered bones had torn through her pale, nearly translucent skin, and in places ripped through the thin, tattered nightdress that she wore. Dark stains covered her dress and surrounded the protruding bones. In the pale, flashing light Stevie couldn't see the color, but he knew the stains were red.
Her long, black, knotted hair hung over her face and fell to the ground. Stevie saw leaves and sticks and mud in the rat's nest of hair, and above one ear, her head was flat and caked with blood.
Bent and tangled arms twisted up in front of her, but it was the fingers that were most horrible of all. They came from her hands, each broken and pulled in different directions. They seemed to reach out for him.
RETURN THAT WHICH WAS STOLEN!
Stevie screamed, and screamed, and screamed again. His father and sister ran into the room almost instantly. As they did, the lightning flashed again, and the thing was still there, but they were focused on Stevie.
"Stevie, what's wrong?" his father asked, gripping Stevie's shoulders with both hands and giving him a firm shake.
He pointed, and his father and sister turned toward the window. He could still see the horrible creature dimly in the night, but just then, his mother's car came up the driveway toward the house. When she turned around the big oak tree where the girl had been standing, her headlights shined directly into Stevie's room. The lights caught the dark shape for an instant, but then Stevie, his sister, and father were momentarily blinded.
His mother's tires squealed on the driveway, followed by a loud crash!
