The Ragged

by Brett Schumacher

  Of course, that endeavor seemed to be causing more problems than it was solving. It was becoming increasingly clear to Celeste that the old man had more than a few skeletons in his closet, and she wasn’t confident that Andrew would like what he found out. She wanted to shelter him from whatever dirty secrets were waiting for him in the farmhouse, to get him out of there and just let the past die.

  But Celeste knew that wasn’t an option. And as much as she hated to admit it, she didn’t want to let the past die either. She wanted to leave, sure, and she didn’t want to spend any more time in the house, but she also wanted to know what Corvus was up to.

  She finished digging through one pile of junk and moved onto the next, her thoughts shifting back to the paintings in the attic.

  How had she dreamed about a girl with antlers before she even knew about those paintings? She knew there had to be an explanation for it, but none came to mind at the moment. There was simply no possible way for her to have gotten the imagery that perfect in her dream the night before they discovered the portraits. And it wasn’t just about the antlers. She dreamed about the white dress, too.

  It had to be a coincidence, right? Celeste decided that there was simply no possible explanation other than happenstance. Of course, that didn’t mean she wasn’t thoroughly unnerved by the fact that it happened.

  A cool wind blew through the porch, sending a shiver down her spine. Celeste knew that she needed to stop thinking about it; she didn’t want to give herself any more nightmares. She pushed those thoughts out of her mind and focused on sorting through the next pile of junk.

  After a few hours of mind-numbing and monotonous work, Celeste had gone through the entire wraparound porch, finding absolutely nothing of value. She sat down on the most structurally sound chair she could find and let out a long, slow breath.

  She pulled her phone out to check the time and found herself playing a game instead. She didn’t need a cell signal to waste time. After a few minutes of playing though, Celeste started to get the strange and overwhelming feeling of being watched. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up, and she felt a sudden urge to run.

  Keeping her head pointed at her phone, Celeste ran her eyes through the tree line across from her. Leaves were rustling in the wind, but other than that, all was still. Tired of playing coy, she finally just stood up and walked over to the porch rail. She placed her hands firmly on the rail and stared directly into the forest, daring whatever was out there to make a move.

  The wind stopped and a tense, silent moment passed as Celeste scanned the forest again, doing her best to look confident and imposing.

  “Who’s out there?” She asked, trying to sound brave.

  A thick bush at the edge of the tree line started shaking and Celeste’s heart leaped into her chest. She tightened her grip on the railing and poised her legs to run as adrenaline began to course through her system. The shaking moved to the edge of the bush, and Gracie stepped out, meowing happily as she did.

  Celeste almost fell over from relief at the sight of the cat. She chastised herself for getting so worked up as she called out, “Gracie, you stupid cat! You scared me silly!”

  The stupid cat hopped onto the porch and squeezed between two posts on the rail before rubbing up on her legs, purring as she did. Gracie looked up at her and meowed again. Celeste, knowing that meow by heart led the cat over to the back door and let her into the house. She watched Gracie trot over to the couch and hop up into Andrew’s lap as he read, doing her best to distract him.

  Celeste walked into the kitchen to get a drink, still shaking her head at how easily frightened she was. She filled a glass with water and turned around to lean on the counter, surveying the room as she drank. All she could see was more work to be done. The coffee table was still covered with magazines and random loose papers, the bookshelf was still overflowing, and the pile of newspapers by the fire seemed like it had somehow grown since they had arrived.

  It was all simply too much for her to bear at the moment, and Celeste decided that she needed a walk. She tossed back the last bit of her glass of water and marched across the kitchen into the living room. Andrew looked up from petting Gracie, apparently giving up on reading for the moment, and immediately noted the look on Celeste’s face.

  “You going on a walk?” He asked, dipping into that little bit of latent telepathy they appeared to have developed over the years.

  “Yup,” she replied simply.

  He began to get up before asking, “Do you want to walk alone?”

  “Two for two,” she nodded as she passed by without breaking her stride, then turned around at the front door. “Can you clean this room up before I get back?”

  “Sure,” he said, a little caught off guard by the brevity of their interaction.

  She threw on her jacket and stepped out, blowing a quick kiss to Andrew as she did. He barely had time to mime catching it before the door closed behind her.

  Being back outside was nice. Celeste could feel the walls in the house closing in, threatening to bury her in an avalanche of unfinished tasks and terrifying keepsakes, most of which she did not care for at all. If she never saw another picture of that monster thing again, it would be too soon.

  It honestly wasn’t much better being outside surrounded by all that forest though either, especially after her dream the night before. Celeste shivered as she relived it again. It all felt just a bit too prescient for her taste, and she decided that maybe she would feel better if she avoided walking through the woods. That left the driveway as the only viable option, which, while creepy, would take her out to the field, which was the least unnerving place on the whole property. Just a few scarecrows and a lot of dirt.

  She half-walked, half-jogged the length of the driveway, doing her best to keep her eyes forward and to ignore the looming shadows that danced around her. It became harder and harder to keep her cool as every gust of wind became a portent and every rustling leaf became a pursuer. She was practically running by the time she reached the main road.

  She crossed the road into the field and leaned on a fence post to catch her breath, reminding herself to get back in shape when they got back to Boston. She put her hands behind her head and walked toward the barn, coming to terms with the fact that she wasn’t in her twenties anymore.

  The endless marching of time notwithstanding, it was a beautiful evening. The sun was just starting to set over the horizon, painting the clouds with a thousand shades of orange. The deep blue that was creeping in on the other horizon bringing with it a brilliant blanket of stars, each twinkling silently as it took its place in the approaching night sky.

  From her vantage point by the barn, Celeste felt small and insignificant in the best way. It felt like the universe was pulling her into an embrace and whispering gently that there was far more out there than she could ever know. For just a moment, her worries felt small.

  And then she saw the headlights.

  They were still a little bit down the road, but something in the back of Celeste’s mind screamed for her to get out of sight. She ducked into the barn and peered around the corner, watching as the vehicle approached. Through the light of the setting sun, Celeste could see that it was the same blue truck that she had been at the funeral.

  Her mind reeled with absurd fear and outlandish scenarios as she watched the truck near the turn onto Corvus’s property. Was someone following them? Were they an enemy of Andrew’s grandfather? Was there a secret small-town conspiracy to destroy the property and embezzle the insurance money? She knew she was being ridiculous, but there was something about staying in the farmhouse that seemed to breed that paranoid brand of irrationality within her.

  Celeste breathed a sigh of relief when the truck passed by the driveway and continued onward. Creeping around the side of the barn to get a better view of the vehicle as it moved, she watched as it pulled over and parked in front of a house down the road. An old man got out of the rusted truck and walked slowly up to his p
orch. He opened the door and paused, looking surreptitiously over his shoulder. Celeste pulled her head back out of sight and waited a moment before peeking out again, just in time to see the door to the house shut.

  For the third time in a single day, she grumbled to herself about getting so worked up. There had to be something in the water at the farmhouse. She peeled herself off the side of the barn and started walking back toward the driveway.

  It had been the old man’s neighbor the whole time. He must have just been driving by the cemetery to pay his respects. Still, Celeste couldn’t help but feel like something was off about the guy. The way he scanned the area before going in the house was odd, to say the least.

  She crossed the road and started walking up the twisting path of the driveway, the hairs on the back of her neck standing at attention as soon as her feet hit the gravel. Maybe teenage Andrew was on to something.

  She only managed to walk for a few more seconds before taking off running toward the house.

  ***

  Not too long after Celeste left for her walk, Andrew decided that it would be best to take a break from reading and clean the living room as she had asked. He grabbed a trash bag and walked over to the mountain of newspapers by the fireplace, ruminating on the journal as he did.

  Those entries were from back when his grandmother was still alive; back before Andrew had come to live with Corvus. Had his sanity been slipping that far back? And if it had, why hadn’t Andrew ever noticed? He admittedly wasn’t the most observant guy in the world, but he figured he would have been able to tell if something was off with the man he was living with.

  But maybe Corvus knew to keep it hidden. After all, if the journal entries were reliable, then Eileen had made it very clear that his delusions weren’t acceptable. There was always the chance that Corvus kept it all under wraps out of fear that others would react like his grandmother.

  That thought wasn’t much better for Andrew. He hated the idea that Corvus would’ve been even more ostracized if he had been open about his superstitions. Of course, Andrew had to admit that he would have been amongst the people to label his grandfather a freak, which made the train of thought even worse.

  He decided to shake those thoughts off and focus on the work.

  After he tied the strings on the trash bag full of unopened newspapers, Andrew turned his attention to the kitchen table. Held loosely in his right hand, the second garbage bag filled up almost as quickly as the first one as Andrew loaded it with plastic bags from the groceries they had bought for the week. Throwing the bags away made Andrew die a little bit inside, but he was willing to bet money that there wasn’t a recycling facility for fifty miles in any direction. He didn’t think Dry Creek even had recycling bins.

  Next came the counters, which were sparsely populated. The only trash Andrew found was the paper sack that had held Celeste’s inhaler. He picked it up and grinned a little bit at the smiley face that Jax had drawn on the receipt. After throwing that away, he went back into the living room to clean the coffee table off. He knew that Celeste would want to be the one to look through the bookshelf though, so he left it alone.

  He carried the bag over in his good hand and set it on the floor next to the table, liberally sweeping the magazines and loose papers alike into it. The magazines ran the gamut from hunting and outdoors books, to farming catalogs, and even a home improvement one, like it did him any good. On a whim, Andrew checked the date on the back of the farming catalog and saw that it was fifteen years old. It was starting to seem like Corvus never threw anything away.

  As entertaining as the shockingly old magazines were, Andrew was far more intrigued by the scribbled papers. There was no rhyme or reason that he could find as he shoveled them into the bag, and he was prepared to shrug it off and forget about them until he saw the last piece of paper. Sitting in the negative space on the center of the page were two empty holes that looked suspiciously like eyes.

  Following a hunch, Andrew carried the trash bag over to the kitchen table and started digging through it for the rest of the papers. He placed the page with eyes near the head of the table and laid out all the rest of the papers as spaced out as possible. It was tough to find anything to work with on the full pages, so Andrew focused instead on the pages with fewer scribbles.

  The pieces with less drawing on them all had a defined sort of shape to them, typically a long curve or a line going longways across the sheet. Andrew used the curves as the outline of the strange puzzle, helping him set the boundaries of the figure. Then he noticed that the pages with lines seemed to connect as they tapered down into a thinner shape. A small pit formed in his stomach as he worked, growing deeper the more he figured out.

  Andrew had just put the final piece in its place when the front door opened and Celeste came in. She was breathing heavily as she shut and locked the door behind her.

  “You know, I think I judged teenage you too harshly,” she said in between massive gulps of air. “Being on that driveway alone at dusk was legitimately one of the creepiest experiences of my entire life.”

  “You ran for it, didn’t you?” He smirked, his mind going back to all the nights that he had done the exact same thing.

  “Absolutely,” she replied before noticing his project on the table. “What’s that?”

  “Apparently Corvus did charcoal drawings as well,” he stepped back and gestured to the completed image. “Fair warning, though. You’re not gonna like it.”

  Celeste’s eyebrows furrowed as she crossed through the living room and entered the kitchen. She stopped a few feet away from the table, apparently having seen enough.

  “You have got to be kidding me! Another one?” She threw her hands in the air and started walking back toward the stairs. “Just throw it away already.”

  “I told you you weren’t gonna like it,” he called out as she made her way upstairs.

  Now alone in the kitchen again, Andrew took one last look at the finished puzzle in front of him. Spanning the length of the table was a crude, life-sized sketch of the same menacing figure that was the focal point of every painting in the attic: The dark thing in the woods that Corvus called the Ragged.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Celeste stepped out of the shower, once again thoroughly disappointed in the lack of heat and water pressure. The mirror above the sink was completely clear of steam as she toweled off and did her skincare routine. All the myriad horrors of the farmhouse paled in comparison to the dismal quality of the shower.

  Andrew had warned her before they even got to the house that the pressure and temperature were bad when he had lived there over twenty years before, but she had no way of preparing for the weak stream of water that trickled lazily out of the shower head. A long, hot shower was at the top of Celeste’s list for when she got home.

  She exited the bathroom and threw on her pajamas before heading downstairs to find Andrew, who was strangely absent from the bedroom. As she rounded the corner at the bottom of the stairs into the living room, she saw him sitting on the couch with an empty cup, the bottom of which had the telltale tawny brown of his favorite whiskey. Andrew looked up at her and flashed a great big, dopey smile with half-shut eyes. She gave him a quizzical look in return.

  “How many glasses of that have you had?” She asked, astonished at the speed with which Andrew had gotten drunk. Her shower hadn’t been that long.

  “Just the one,” his words slurred as he spoke. “But it’s really good.”

  “Sure sounds like it.”

  Celeste made her way to the bottle on the counter to check it out. It was 80 proof, which wasn’t out of the ordinary for Andrew’s taste. Not to mention that the bottle was still mostly full. A concerning thought passed through her mind.

  “I’m fairly certain you’re not supposed to drink alcohol with pain meds,” she said as she made her way to the couch and took a seat next to him.

  “I mean, it’s just the over-the-counter stuff,” he said. “And I didn’t even ha
ve a full cup. But you sure have a couple of full cups on you, baby.”

  She batted his hands away as he leaned forward to cop a feel of her chest. Great, horny Andrew was there. She loved horny Andrew.

  “Okay,” she said, standing up and pulling him off the couch. “Let’s get you to bed.”

  “I bet you’d like to,” he put on his best attempt at a sexy voice.

  “Oh yeah, you know me. You’ve really got me pegged.”

  He giggled at her poor word choice. “Maybe if I play my cards right.”

  She had to admit that she set him up for that one. It was a slow pitch over home plate. Any idiot could’ve swung at that, especially a drunk idiot.

  One step at a time, Celeste managed to haul Andrew’s increasingly loopy body up to the bedroom, his one-liners getting worse by the minute. By the time he was lying in bed, his seduction tactics had devolved into him simply spreading his legs and raising his eyebrows repeatedly. She threw the blanket over him and turned off the lamp before walking away.

  Andrew was a wonderful man with an amazing heart, but Celeste absolutely could not stand him when he was drunk. She looked back at him when she reached the bedroom door and saw that he was already asleep, his mouth hanging open and a gentle snore escaping his lips. As frustrated as she was with his drunken antics, Celeste couldn’t help but smile when she saw that his legs were still spread wide open under the blanket.

  She pulled out her phone and snapped a quick picture of him for blackmail later. Drunk Andrew may not have been her favorite person, but hungover Andrew was a delight. He was always a precious bundle of apologies and small gifts, tied up with a lovely bow of ‘please don’t send those pictures to anybody.’

  With her future bargaining chip stashed away on her phone, Celeste got her inhaler out of the bathroom and took a big puff. She breathed in deeply as she watched Andrew sleep for a few minutes. From drunken frat boy to complete angel in record time.

  She left the room and went downstairs to turn the lights out, worrying as she went about the fact that her husband was dumb enough to drink while taking pain medicine. Thinking back through what little she could remember about mixing alcohol and analgesics, she was fairly certain he would be okay as long as he didn’t drink too much.