by Chris Morey
Oh, God. It was all true.
Something shifted in his brain—a huge, burrowing insect, gnawing, tearing, agonizing.
Everything in his field of vision had turned red. For a second, he fancied he was actually looking out of that damned red gemstone in the Christmas ornament.
When he spoke again, his voice sounded a thousand miles away.
“You’re a lying, conniving bitch.”
“Landon—”
He raised the ornament he still held in his hand. Her eyes fell on its sharp, lance-like stem.
Red.
He brought it down and around with all his strength.
Rage.
The tip pierced her neck. He felt resistance and then a sudden yielding as it penetrated flesh and muscle.
The impact toppled her backward into the Christmas tree. The ornament, its blood-red jewel staring at him like a living, accusing eye, remained fixed in her neck, blood from the terrible puncture wound oozing out around it.
“Oh, Jesus.”
LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO!
Her body shuddered several times, and her eyes rolled toward his, brimming with both fury and sorrow. One hand rose as if to pull the object from her neck, but then it flopped like a wounded bird and dropped to the floor. Then her emerald irises rolled upward and she gasped, blood pooling rapidly in her open mouth and streaming onto the polished hardwood floor.
He had rammed the point of the ornament cleanly through her jugular vein.
No! He had not meant to do this!
This was bad. Hannah was dead or dying, and he didn’t dare try to remove the ornament or she would bleed out all over everything. But now a dark euphoria overtook him. First, he ran to the bathroom for a towel, which he wrapped around her neck to keep the blood from spreading any farther. Then he grabbed her wrists and tugged her body through the living room, into the hall, and to the bathroom. Surely, she was dead, he thought, for her body was limp and unresponsive.
Please, don’t be dead.
No. You need to be dead. You need to be.
Hannah’s body was willowy, but lifting and heaving her dead weight into the bathtub required some effort. Her eyes, glazed and glassy, stared sightlessly at the ceiling. Everything she was and had been was now gone.
Gone, her lifeblood spiraling down the bathtub drain.
He couldn’t call the police. He had to think.
Out here, ten miles from Aiken Mill, the nearest neighbor a quarter mile down the road, they virtually never had unexpected visitors. Neither of them had any appointments or other engagements for the next day or two, at least that he was aware of. For the moment, he had a little time to sort things out in his mind. He needed to not panic; to think calmly and rationally.
WHY was he thinking so rationally now? Hannah was dead. HE had killed her.
He owned six acres of land, a large portion of which was wetlands. He could dispose of her body so it would take an act of God to ever be discovered. Still, in the case of a missing wife—and it was only a matter of time before others realized she was missing—suspicion always fell on the husband. He would have to be careful. And thorough. He must leave no trace.
Oh, Christ, her car.
Her brand-new BMW 750i would be difficult to dispose of, but dispose of it he must. He might be able to sink it in the pond at the back of the property, but there would be no way of getting it back there without leaving tire tracks—and there was no guarantee it wouldn’t get stuck along the way. Even if he got it that far, for all he knew the car might end up visible on Google aerial view. No, he needed to drive it somewhere else, which meant risking being seen or captured by a camera somewhere, and then somehow get back home undetected.
So much yet to do. But he had through tomorrow, and likely the next day, to sort it all out.
First things first. Using a washcloth he took from the shelf, he gripped the ornament and gave it a tug. Christ, it was in there good. When it did come free, blood began to gush fountain-like into the bathtub.
Red.
Yeah, this was going to be a real mess.
Rage.
“Look, Hannah,” Landon Grigg said, his voice still somewhere far, far away. “Just look at what you made me do.”
NOW
Lydia hadn’t been asleep long, but she jerked awake as if cold water had spilled over her face. Roger hadn’t come to bed yet, for his side remained vacant and the hallway light still burned. The clock showed it was just past midnight. No sound came from anywhere in the house. What the hell had disturbed her?
There. An odd noise coming from outside the bedroom door. A low, sliding, shuffling sound.
She sat up, listening. A moment later, it came again—the distinct sound of something heavy moving across the hardwood floor, out in the hall.
“Roger?”
There was no answer. Could it be Dylan? With a sigh, she pulled herself out of bed, crept to the door, and peered into the hall. No one in sight, nothing out of place. Then she heard movement downstairs—just a brief creaking of the floor. Pulling a robe over her flimsy nightgown, she went down the stairs to the living room, where she saw Roger, standing before the brightly lit Christmas tree.
She had told him about the smoke. And the unusual ornament. He said he had never seen it before.
How could that be?
No. He must have found it among some old decorations and absent-mindedly hung it in the tree.
“Hey, honey,” she said. “Is everything all right?”
He did not look at her. “Yes.”
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing. Just making sure the lights are all fine.”
“Oh. Okay.”
Then she noticed a brilliant, crimson glow coming from the center of the tree. It was the jeweled ornament. The one she had taken upstairs and placed on the dresser in their bedroom. She hadn’t even told him where she’d put it. Why hang it back on the tree?
“Roger, did you really need to do that?”
“Do what?”
“Put that ornament back on the tree.”
“I did no such thing.”
“But it was upstairs.”
At last, he turned to look at her. His expression was strange. Blank. “Are you sure you didn’t put it back on?”
“Of course I’m sure. You’re making me feel kind of weird, honey. I don’t get this.”
“There’s nothing to get. You’re making a big deal out of nothing.”
“Now, that’s not so. I took that thing up to our room on purpose. I know Dylan didn’t do it. You must have.”
He turned back to stare at the cheerful, blinking lights. “I didn’t.”
“You weren’t just upstairs, were you?”
He shook his head.
What was wrong with him? He had never acted so distant, so cold.
He leaned forward, staring at the burning eye in the silvery sphere. Then he muttered something. Something she didn’t quite hear. Or didn’t hear properly.
It sounded like “He killed her.”
No, he didn’t say that. He could not have said that.
She did not ask him to repeat it. It was late and she was too tired to press the matter. Praying his strange mood would straighten itself out quickly, she turned to go back upstairs, a little shaken and greatly disheartened. Things would be better in the morning, she thought. Late at night, things always seemed worse than they really were.
Tomorrow.
THEN
Landon had wrapped Hannah’s body in an old plastic shower curtain, sealed it with duct tape, and dragged it down to the bog beyond the pond. Using a couple of cinder blocks as weights, he had sunk her in it—along with the deadly Christmas ornament. The bog was so thick and deep that he had almost gotten himself stuck, resulting in a moment of near-panic. But he managed to keep his cool. Now he had to keep his cool. Except for a few footprints at the edge of the yard, the bog had swallowed every trace of his passing. Inside the house, he scrubbed away the blood on
the floor with soap, water, and mineral spirits, and then bleached the bathtub. It stung his injured hand, but that was nothing. Nothing. He burned both his and her bloodstained clothes in the fire pit out back and scattered the ashes in the woods. For good measure, he packed some of her clothing and personal items in her suitcase, which he would take with him, along with her purse and all its contents, once he determined what to do with her car.
At the end of all this, it would appear that she had simply gone out of town and then dropped out of sight. She visited her parents regularly, often without advance notice, so her leaving on the spur of the moment wasn’t particularly suspicious, especially since it was nearing Christmas. She had simply gone to deliver their gifts.
Yes, that was the perfect answer.
Tomorrow, getting rid of the BMW must be his sole focus. Now, his body was bone-tired, his mind fried, but his hand hurt and sleep was proving elusive. It was after midnight, the house dark and quiet, and his heart was a jackhammer in his chest.
Eventually, he would face questioning from the police. Before then, he would have to prepare himself for every eventuality. He did not intend to be punished for his wife’s sins.
It was cold in the house—freezing, it seemed—yet he was drenched in perspiration. Lying in bed without Hannah next to him did feel odd. Even knowing of her infidelities, he had always found her presence comforting, especially late at night. Sometimes they would talk, usually about trivial things, but sometimes about deeper issues.
Though never about her apparent dissatisfaction with him.
He guessed, in a way, he would miss her. Whatever her faults, she had possessed a unique charm, an enjoyable wit. And, physically, she was such a beauty.
He sighed, trying to push the more pleasant memories of her out of his head. Succumbing to sentiment would undermine his resolve. His only means of getting through this was to hold onto his anger. He lay listening to the sound of his heart, willing its pounding to ease up and offer his nerves some chance to recover.
It took a long time, but his eyelids finally began to get heavy, his breathing and heart rate slowed to normal, and the throbbing in his hand eased.
Consciousness departed.
§
Sometime later, a shuffling noise downstairs drew him back to awareness.
A tingling sensation passed through his body, and a high-pitched whine rose in his ears.
Calm down, for God’s sake. It wasn’t anything.
He heard it again: a slow, sliding, scuffling noise. Something moving across the hardwood floor of the living room.
Like the sound of Hannah’s body being dragged through the house.
He sat up, cocking his head to catch any further sound. For the moment, all was silent. He hadn’t imagined the noise, though. Something had moved down there.
It wasn’t the heat pump. No ceiling fans were running. Definitely not the refrigerator.
Something outside, maybe. Trees rustling in the wind?
A sudden scraping, scratching sound came from downstairs. From the living room, he thought.
Then a low mewling sound.
Cat!
The neighbors’ cat must have had second thoughts about him and returned. But could it have somehow gotten inside? He pulled himself out of bed, worked his feet into his bedroom slippers, and made his way down the stairs to the living room. The little lamp in the far corner, which he left on every night, gave off a warm, golden glow, and the curtains over the windows danced slightly, swayed by air from the heat registers beneath them. The scratching came again, from the front-facing window. And then a low, coarse “Meow.”
He stepped forward and drew back the curtain. At first, he saw only dense darkness beyond the glass panes. Then, down low, a pair of bright green eyes appeared, staring in at him, unblinking.
He leaned forward to gaze at the animal.
There was no cat out there. Just eyes.
“God!”
He let the curtains fall back together, feeling a prickling at the back of his neck, as if bees were crawling on it. His eyes were playing tricks on him.
As he turned back toward the stairs, something else struck him as unusual. Wrong. A light where none ought to be.
There, on the Christmas tree: a single, blazing pinpoint of fiery red.
What the hell?
Surely, it was just a reflection on an ornament. But no. It was a brilliant, burning red bulb.
No, not a bulb.
When he realized what he was seeing, his heart stopped for a second before racing into overdrive.
Not possible.
NOT FUCKING POSSIBLE.
It was the spherical, jeweled ornament with the long, pointed stem at the bottom. The red glass gem in its hollow center was glowing blood red, as if an intense fire burned inside it.
The ornament he had used to kill Hannah. The ornament that right now lay deep in the bog at the farthest end of his property. It had been the only one of its kind in the house. Yet this was, without question, the ornament.
Slowly, the sphere rotated until the smoldering gem faced him.
It was an eye. A staring, crimson eye, with a cut, beveled iris and a fiery, dilated pupil.
The eye blinked.
Every nerve in his body misfired. He wanted to flee, to rip the ornament from the tree and smash it, to laugh, to scream.
He could only stand and stare at the thing in stunned silence.
He smelled something hot—something electrical, he thought. Electrical, yes, but blended with a fetid, fishy odor. The stench of something dead.
Black smoke appeared to be dribbling from the cavity that contained the gem. Tight black coils unfurled and became wriggling streamers that reached the floor, dancing over the hardwood boards like questing fingers. His rigid muscles yielded enough for him to take a few faltering steps backward. His every instinct screamed for him to go for his guns, which—above all else—had always represented security in this house.
But what he was witnessing was the impossible, and the idea of confronting it with a pistol almost sent him into a fit of raving laughter.
What else could he do?
His paralysis broken, he turned and ran. He ran as fast as he could up the stairs, to his bedroom, to the nightstand where he kept his 9mm Glock 19. Grabbing it, he rushed back into the hall, closing his mind to the impossibility of his situation, refusing to cower up here in nameless terror.
As he reached the top of the stairs, he again heard the sound of something moving in the downstairs hallway. He stood there peering into the dim emptiness, until his eyes finally detected movement below.
A shadow.
A long, steadily lengthening shadow.
Lengthening toward the stairs.
The shadow was tall, ill-defined, but recognizably human. Cast by a warm red glow issuing from the living room.
Independent of his will, his feet began to carry him backward, and then he was in full retreat, racing back to his bedroom, where he slammed the door and crouched next to his bed, brandishing the Glock as if it might ward away the awful, advancing shape.
The rough sliding sound came from the hall, just beyond the door.
There it stopped.
Underneath the door, the dim light from the hall disappeared. Now a great weight seemed to be pressing against the door, for the wood creaked and groaned, and he swore he saw it beginning to bulge inward.
He couldn’t take this anymore. He had to do something.
He pointed the gun at the door and pulled the trigger. In the confined space, the shot nearly shattered his eardrums. When the smoke cleared, he was looking at a jagged hole in the center of the door.
The ringing in his ears gave way to the rapid pounding of his heart.
No more shuffling, creaking, or groaning at the bedroom door.
For an endless age, Grigg remained frozen in a crouch, staring sightlessly at the bullet hole in the door.
Be gone. Be gone. Be gone.
NOW
The glowing clock face on the nightstand read 3:00 AM.
The room was otherwise dark, though she could see a dim light in the hallway, coming from downstairs. Roger’s side of the bed was still empty.
She was freezing, even under the blankets. Had the heat gone off? Clearly, the house still had power.
A low sliding sound came from nearby. That same sound she had heard earlier, like something heavy moving across the floor.
It was in the room.
Right next to the bed.
She rolled onto her side and was about to peer over the edge of the bed when a dark shape rose above it. A solid black silhouette.
The silhouette of a woman’s head.
A pair of eyes flickered open in the black space where the face should have been. Blazing emerald-green eyes.
Then they turned red. Brilliant, blood red, like the jewel in that Christmas ornament.
Lydia screamed, flung the covers back, and began flailing at the silhouette with her fists. Her hands met only frigid air. Painfully frigid. As if powerful claws were gripping her arms, she felt herself being dragged from her bed, into an icy, pitch-black maw that stole her breath, her consciousness.
§
A panicked cry brought her back to herself.
“Mom!”
It was Dylan’s voice. Faint. Far away.
She didn’t know where she was, what had happened to her. Darkness and icy cold surrounded her, and she could hear a low rush of wind.
She was outside.
The last thing she remembered was being in her room. She had seen—felt—something, something awful. Something impossible.
“Dylan?”
She was upright, her feet wet and frigid. A pale sliver of moon cast just enough light for her to make out her surroundings: the edge of the bog, back by the pond. How had she gotten here? How?
Dylan had called her. Where was he?
Above the low rush of breeze, another sound rose—a voice. It sounded female. At first she couldn’t make out any words, but then she realized it was saying “He killed me.”
“Mom, help!”
Panic.
“Dylan, where are you?”
