You took care of me all those years ago,
said the head-voice,
but now I’m back, Mom, to take care of you.
“No,” she breathed, shuddering. Her fingers grazed the chain and she closed a fist around it, tugging the light on.
The shotgun no longer hung from the wall. Frantically, she looked around. It was nowhere. She’d put it back here, hadn’t she? Where the hell could it have gone?
She thought she heard floorboards creak above her head.
“No!” she screamed back. “No! Go away!
Please!”
But the “please” came out as a shrill whine, not even a word.
In the face of self-preservation, she reverted to her initial instinct and backed into a corner, crouching down and pulling her knees up to her chest. If it came down here, she’d be trapped. There was nowhere to go, no way to get out.
Suddenly, in her mind’s eye, she was seventeen again and trundling along in a Toyota pickup that belonged to Lyle Pafferny’s father. Steve Miller was on the radio and there was a look of seasickness on Lyle’s face. They hadn’t said more than a handful of words to each other on the drive into Garrett and they’d said absolutely nothing on the drive back.
Maggie blinked tears down her cheeks and shuddered at the memory.
2
A sharp pain raced up her neck as she jerked awake. Somehow, amazingly, she had fallen asleep.
Something had woken her up…
“Evan?” Her voice sounded like the lone wail of a loon reverberating off the basement’s cinder block walls. She waited. No response came.
After several more minutes passed with the lethargy of a steamship on the horizon, Maggie was able to coax herself to her feet. Her entire body was stiff. There were little red welts on her forearms and the tops of her feet that she immediately identified as bug bites.
It seemed to take an eternity to climb the basement steps. Upstairs, the house was as silent as a crypt. Listening, she could hear the hum of the refrigerator and the ticking of the hallway clock. Nothing more. When she crossed through the kitchen and into the living room she spied her broken wineglass on the floor. Shards of glass sparkled like jewels and wine spread from the epicenter like a bloodstain. Beyond the windows the night was still dark, though there was a predawn shimmer of pink light in the fork between the two mountains.
Somewhere inside the house, Maggie’s cell phone rang. She cried out at the sound and felt her heart threaten to push up into her throat. When it rang a second time, she became aware that this had been the sound that had woken her up in the basement just moments earlier.
Having forgotten where she’d put her phone, she wandered quickly through the house, following the digital chirping until she located it on the nightstand on her side of the bed. She snatched it up mid-ring, her blood running cold as she read the name displayed on the screen:
Schuler, Tom
.
She let the phone clatter to the floor. Though it could have been a coincidence, the ringing stopped. She had the desire to kick it under the bed and forget about it. Or take the battery out first.
She didn’t realize she had backed up against the bedroom wall until the phone rang again, startling her into striking her head on a picture frame. From where she stood, she could see the phone’s display with horrific clarity:
Schuler, Tom
.
Shimmering in digital light like an accusation.
Too easily she could imagine the phone ringing and ringing forever until it drove her insane.
Grab it, pop the battery out,
she thought.
And if that doesn’t silence it, flush the fucker down the toilet.
The phone was already in her hands before she’d even finished the thought. Yet instead of prying out the little rectangular battery, she hit the button and accepted the call. It was like someone else was controlling her now.
With an arm that felt like it was made of rubber, she brought the phone to her ear.
“Come out back,” Tom said. It was his voice…but, at the same time, it had changed. Something had turned Tom into something else.
My child,
she thought frantically.
My child did that to him.
The sound she made into the phone approximated a bullfrog’s croak.
“Maggie,” Tom said firmly. It was then that she knew it wasn’t Tom at all. Somehow, it was Evan, her husband. “Did you hear me? Come out back. Now.”
Trembling, she hit the End button. Just moments ago she hadn’t wanted to touch the phone at all; now, walking back down the hall to the living room, she found she could not let go of it, as though it had been fused to her flesh. On the living room wall, she toggled the switch for the floodlights but they did not come on. Either the power had been cut or the bulbs had been removed.
When she reached the back door, her hand paused in midair on the way to unlock the dead bolt. Things were happening too fast; she didn’t have time to think things through clearly enough. How did Evan get Tom Schuler’s cell phone? None of it made sense.
Dreaming,
she thought, undoing the dead bolt.
I’m dreaming.
She opened the door.
3
In the wine-colored light of dawn, Evan sat on the sloping hood of the Volkswagen. The shotgun lay across his lap and he had one boot on the front bumper. His eyes locked on Maggie, who remained standing in the doorway. Seeing him there, coupled with the sheer impossibility of Evan having called her from Tom Schuler’s cell phone number in the first place, Maggie’s hold on reality slipped yet another notch. Absently, she wondered when exactly reality had ended and the nightmare had begun. Had she actually had the affair? Was she still a little girl under the oppressive rule of an abusive father?
“Come ’ere,” Evan called to her. His voice boomed.
Maggie didn’t move.
Evan held up something small in one hand. He kept his other hand around the maple stock of the shotgun. “Recognize this?” he asked her. “Your boyfriend’s cell phone.” He looked at it himself now. “Saw the call log. Read the texts.” Then he fell uncomfortably silent.
Maggie tried to speak but found her voice absent and her throat impossibly dry.
“Just answer me one thing,” Evan spoke up eventually. There was a pathetic crack in his voice this time that jabbed a barb into Maggie’s heart. Mostly masked in shadows, she couldn’t make out the expression on his face. “How long has it been going on?”
She thought she spoke. Her face burned.
“Answer me!” he shouted. “How long?”
“It was just once,” she said.
“What?”
She realized she’d just muttered the words, and that they’d come out in a jumble of nonsense. “Just one time, Evan,” she repeated, more loudly and clearly this time. “I swear it.”
Evan stood the shotgun up, the butt planted firmly on one of his thighs. He looked like the photograph of a prideful hunter slouching over a kill. Looking at him turned Maggie’s blood to ice.
“Went by his house earlier,” Evan said. “Son of a bitch wasn’t home. I waited for a while but he never came. Lucky motherfucker.”
“Evan, please—”
“Shut
up!”
It came out as a partial sob, as if something vital had just broken deep down in his throat. “You just shut the fuck
up,
you
whore!
”
She took an instinctive step back into the house.
Her husband leveled the shotgun at her. “Don’t you move.”
She froze.
“I bust my ass at that fuckin’ factory while you sit home, and what do I get for all my trouble? A cheatin’ goddamn whore of a wife and a friend who sticks a knife in my back. A so-called
friend
who sticks it wherever he wants.”
She wanted to tell him he’d misunderstood the situation. She wanted to tell him that it wasn’t how he thought it was and that there was nothing—no feelings at all—between her and Tom Schuler.
Tom Schuler is dead,
said the head-voice.
Tom Schuler is—
A slight shape materialized out of the darkness behind Evan. Maggie’s heart seized. The shape shuffled its small feet through the dirt, its body pale and exposed and seeming to glow in the moonlight that still spilled over the peaks of the mountain that bordered Stillwater to the west. Maggie shook and found herself powerless to move. Evan caught her gaze and spun quickly around, the barrel of the shotgun swiveling away from her and over to the frail shape shambling out of the shadows. Even from such a distance, Maggie could hear the shotgun begin to quake in her husband’s unsteady hands. Then he lowered the shotgun and muttered, “What the hell is this?”
It was the boy. His pale skin bluish in the cool predawn, his knobby little knees practically buckling beneath him, he managed yet another step closer to Evan. He wore no clothes, and his abdomen and hips appeared to be dappled with something that could have been—
(blood)
—dried mud. His eyes wandered, like great roving searchlights, beneath a perfectly smooth, white brow. The boy’s scalp was not completely hairless—strands of tawny gossamer sprang out in sparse patches. He was a boy, but not wholly…more like the skin left behind after a reptile molts.
“Who’re you?” Evan barked at the boy. “What are you doing here?” And then he actually laughed, possibly at the child’s nudity and overall awkwardness.
The boy took another awkward step closer to Evan. Maggie watched, unable to move, unable to scream.
“You hurt?” Evan asked.
The boy staggered right up to the side of the Volkswagen and gazed up at Evan. When he turned his thin little body just the slightest bit, Maggie could make out a quartet of what looked to be tiny puncture wounds moving vertically down the center of the boy’s back.
Evan extended one leg and thumped the boy’s chest with his boot heel. The boy rocked unsteadily but his large, black eyes never left Evan.
“Hey,” Evan said to the boy. “I’m talking to you.”
Maggie saw it begin in the boy’s pale and narrow chest—a gathering of essence, followed by a fullness, a welling, in the breast. Something akin to a bubble of air seemed to rise up through the boy’s chest where it fattened the stovepipe of his thin, white neck, bulging it out like the throat of a bullfrog. The boy’s lips formed a perfect
O
just as his large eyes rolled back into his head like those of a great white shark preparing to strike. The boy’s cheeks quivered as—
(oh god something is going to come out something is about to burst right out of that)
—Evan scooted backward on the hood of the Volkswagen.
“Hey,” Evan said. His voice quavered then broke like glass in the night.
A gout of greenish fluid burst from the boy’s mouth. It arced through the air like a party streamer toward Evan’s face. Evan bucked his hips and jerked his head back but he wasn’t quick enough—the liquid pattered across the upper portion of his face.
Evan cursed and backed up till his spine struck the Volkswagen’s windshield. His boots scrambled blindly for purchase on the sloping hood of the car while he pawed frantically at his eyes with one hand. The shotgun’s muzzle waved like a white flag back and forth, back and forth. The boy leaned against the hood of the car just as his small and inadequate chest swelled once more. His neck fattened, engorged with the greenish, snot-like substance, and his head tipped back slightly on its thin stalk of a neck.
A second ribbon squirted from the boy’s mouth, splashing against the side of Evan’s face while droplets pattered down into Evan’s lap and along the hood of the car. Again, Evan cried out…and now Maggie thought she could see steam or smoke rising from the snot-like sludge stuck to her husband’s face. Evan screamed and rolled off the hood of the car and, a second later, Maggie also screamed as the shotgun exploded and fire belched from the muzzle. In the sudden flare of firelight, the boy’s profile flashed into quick relief—his pale, almost hairless body and indistinct features reminiscent of the blind creatures that live deep underground or on the floor of the deepest oceans.
Again, Maggie saw the barrel of the shotgun wave back and forth in the air. One of Evan’s boots kicked out from behind the car.
“Evan!” she screamed, suddenly finding her voice.
Evan sprang up from behind the other side of the car, his face a mask of steaming, disintegrating tissue. Somehow he managed a strangled noise that sounded as if he were trying to mimic birdcalls; the sound still hung in the air as a section of his skull slid away in a bloody mudslide, taking the gelatinous white orb of one eyeball with it.
Evan threw himself over the hood of the car. Scrambling like a cat looking for purchase, he bucked and kicked and groped blindly at the windshield wipers. His fingernails sounded like creaking hinges as they scraped down the hull of the Volkswagen’s hood. Bits of Evan’s face puddled in the windshield-wiper well.
That was when Maggie ran back into the house.
She slammed the door then spun the dead bolt. Peering through the crescent of glass in the door, she was horrified to find her husband’s body on the ground now, having been dragged off the car by the pale-skinned boy. Evan had stopped struggling and now lay like a sack of wet grain in the dirt beside the car.