He reached down and pried one of the walkway flagstones up out of the dirt. The thing was heavier than it looked and as cold as a thick sheet of ice. Like a discus thrower, Dwight heaved the large flagstone over the fence and into the bushes. The bushes rattled and some of the bamboo shoots bent out at awkward angles. There came a resounding
thong!
as the stone struck one of the galvanized fenceposts.
Frozen with fear, Dwight waited for whatever was back there to spring out and charge him.
But nothing happened. And when he regained mobility a moment later, he ran back into the house, certain that he heard footsteps chasing after him as he sprinted up the porch steps.
5
Some noise woke Bob Leary from a fitful sleep on the living room couch. He roused with a series of meek little grunts, already muttering nonsense to himself, as he swung one leg over the couch and knocked it against the coffee table. Empty cans of Coors Light and a carton of partially eaten Chinese food slid off the table and onto the floor. All around him, the house stank and the smell of it infiltrated his dreams.
Sitting up, he blinked wearily as his eyes became acclimated to the lightlessness of the house. Outside, the wind blew hard and unforgiving through the old trees, a sound like creaking floorboards. Was that the sound that had awakened him?
He staggered to his feet and wended across the darkened living room to the front door. He opened the door and peered out. The wind whooped down and gathered up the dead leaves in the yard into miniature tornadoes. Whistling sounds emanated from the cavernous hollows of the rusted automobiles up on blocks at the side of the house. In a hoarse voice, Bob Leary shouted his son’s name out into the freezing darkness. Then, shivering, he went back inside, bolting the door behind him.
Billy was a good kid, though maybe a little slow. Bob had known that since Billy’s birth—that writhing, pink, hairless, squealing little contraption that had been wrenched from Lorraine Leary’s womb via Caesarian. Their only child, the kid had blinked his gummy eyes up at Bob and had worked its toothless mouth as if desperate to speak but unable to form words. Sounds came from the infant child, but they weren’t the sounds of a living creature. Rather, they were the sounds of Bob Leary’s life being changed for good and permanent, because the eyes that looked up at him had been trusting and needful, and what are you supposed to do with that? And when Lorraine died a few years back from the Big C, it was just the two of them—Bob and his squinty-eyed, puffy-faced son. The Leary men. It was—
A low groan emanated throughout the house, causing Bob Leary to pause in his tracks. This time it wasn’t the wind; this had been the noise of an animal, surely.
It was in the house.
He kept a revolver in the kitchen cabinet. He retrieved it, clicking on all the lights in the house as he went. Then he went down the hall, systematically checking the bedrooms, the revolver shaking in his unsteady hands. “Is that you, Billy-boy?” he called as he stood in the doorway of his son’s bedroom. The room was silent and undisturbed. Bob Leary’s voice echoed off the walls, and if he had closed his eyes, he would have easily imagined himself shouting into an empty bank vault or some underground cavern. “You come home, son?”
No answer.
Back in the living room, he went to the sliding-glass doors that looked out onto the back deck and, beyond that, the dense forest. He finagled the light switch beside the door but the bulb outside did not come on, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d changed the bulb. Beyond the property, tall black trees swayed in the wind.
They’re calling for another storm,
he thought,
and that means another flood. That damn kid better get his ass on home before the waters rise up again, so help him…
Again, that low guttural moaning sound. This time, it came from directly behind him. Bob jumped and spun around, clutching the revolver in both hands while surveying the living room. The sound was not unlike a raccoon. He’d spent his entire life in the hills of western Maryland and knew the sounds animals made when they were frightened, trapped, or angry.
He heard a scraping noise and flung his eyes toward the stone hearth in time to see a cloud of soot drop down into the fireplace. When he rubbed the back of one hand along his forehead, he realized he was sweating. He laughed nervously, though he did not lower the gun. Goddamn animals were always getting caught in the chimney. Just last winter, he had a goddamn squirrel drop down into the fireplace and tear pell-mell around the living room before Billy got the front door open and Bob was able to chase the little fucker out of the house with a couch cushion.
There was a flashlight on the mantel. He crept over to the hearth, his footfalls silent on the carpeted floor, and snatched it up. He clicked it on and saw that it held a strong and steady beam. He eased himself down on his knees in front of the fireplace, the gun in one hand now, the flashlight in the other. There would be no chasing any oversized rodents around his living room this evening; if he got a bead on the fucker, he’d pull the revolver’s trigger and blow it to pieces.
He swiped aside the chain-link curtain just as a second plume of soot rained down from the chimney. Bob could taste the soot at the back of his throat. It made his eyes water. Crouching forward, he propped one shoulder on the ledge of the fireplace then scooted himself up so that his head was inside the hearth. He brought the revolver and the flashlight up beside his head as he peered up the pitch-black channel. The revolver shook. The flashlight beam swung along the brick wall of the fireplace’s interior then angled straight up through the open flue.
Bob blinked.
What in the—
A jumble of wiry, black fur vibrated within the beam of the flashlight, no more than four or five feet above Bob’s head. It took him a second or two to realize what it was he was looking at—
bats that’s bats Jesus fuck that’s bats up there—
but when he did, he felt his heart stutter in his chest.
Rabies!
screamed his next immediate thought.
Just as he began to inch his retreat back out of the fireplace, the bats began to flap their wings, causing great roiling clouds of soot to rain down on Bob Leary’s face. He sputtered and coughed, swiping absently at his eyes with the back of the hand that held the flashlight. When he blinked his eyes back open and repositioned the beam back up into the flue, he found his son’s slack face staring back down at him. The skin fish-belly white, the eyelids purple and swollen shut, Billy Leary hung upside down in the flue, his body wreathed in bats.
Bob felt his bowels loosen.
And just as he opened his mouth to scream, young Billy’s eyes flipped open.
Chapter Thirteen
1
It had been Brandy’s intention to stand watch throughout the night, yet despite her terror, the long and lumbering hours had ultimately conquered her and put her down. She awoke hours later, in the stillness of a Wednesday morning that already promised rain, asleep in the wicker loveseat on the back porch.
The first thing she realized was that she was freezing—her teeth chattered, the sound not unlike someone tap-dancing across her skull, and the exposed flesh of her arms and legs was broken out into hard little knobs of gooseflesh. Stupidly, she’d fallen asleep out here in nothing more than her nightshirt and panties. It was a wonder she hadn’t frozen to death in the night.
Or worse,
she thought, her eyes already on the garage that faced the back porch. In the daytime it certainly looked less ominous. The bats were no longer dangling like Christmas decorations from the eaves. Matthew’s bike had fallen over on its side—had she done that last night in her panic?—and looking at it again sent a wave of sorrow through her.
Then a piece of last night’s dream returned to her—her eyes opening to a darkened world, where bitter winds whistled through the valley and the mountains groaned like restless giants in slumber. Matthew stood down in the yard, staring up at her. He was nude except for his underwear and his scalp was patchy where clumps of his hair had fallen out in places. His eyes took on the predatory black stare of a shark. He dug his toes into the black soil and spoke to her telepathically without actually opening his mouth. Yet his words—if they could even be deemed as such—were like a thousand bleating trumpets at the center of Brandy’s brain. In her dream, she shrieked into the night. Her brother—or the thing that had once been her brother—fled back through the cornfield.
Sitting here now, in the bright light of day, she wondered if it had been a dream after all…
Also, she had to piss so badly she could taste it.
She crept back into the house, conscious of the fact that her mother was probably still asleep (which she was), and went directly to the upstairs bathroom. She urinated then washed her face and hands before heading to her bedroom. There, she dressed in a pair of running sweats and tied her hair back with an elastic band. She laced on her good running sneakers, too—the Adidas with the cleats. They were a bit dirty and the cleats had been worn to ineffectual little nubs, but it felt good to climb back into them again.
Back outside, she stood for some time, staring at the shards of broken glass in the dirt then up at the small window in the side of the garage, jagged glass spearheads still protruding from the frame. She went around to the other side of the garage, took a deep breath, her hand on the doorknob. Then she shoved the door open, expecting the unexpected.
2
It occurred to her at that moment that prior to last night she hadn’t actually stepped foot in the garage since before her father had left. The small, musty work area was filled with his personal belongings: his tools, his workbench, his lawnmower and Rototiller and gardening supplies, his various automotive supplies, paint cans stacked into pyramids, ancient stereo equipment, including several old turntables blanketed in dust as thick as fur, a Baltimore Ravens cheerleaders calendar pinned to one wall, countless other sundry items. Yet it wasn’t just the items but the place itself that channeled Hugh Crawly. The smell of the wood mingled with turpentine mixed with the overly sweet scent of antifreeze and motor oil…
All of it.
She found herself fighting off tears. And she hated herself for it. She hated her father, too.
This has nothing to do with you,
her mind quipped, addressing the father who had abandoned the rest of them.
This is about Matthew right now. You have no right intruding on me right now, damn you.
She took a deep, shuddery breath and was able to bring herself back under control. Looking around, she realized that she had no idea what she had expected to find coming in here. She considered going to the police, maybe talking with Ben Journell again, but she really had no idea what to tell them. That someone had been hiding in her garage, probably for several days now? That she had the horrific impression that the
someone
had, for some inexplicable reason, been her brother? No, she couldn’t do that.
Instead, she went back out into the yard and over to where the rickety chain-link fence separated their property from the Marshes’ cornfield. Brandy leaned over the fence and saw a perfectly outlined footprint in the hard soil on the other side of the fence. She looked up and could make out a subtle parting of the cornstalks, which suggested the direction the person might have traveled the previous night as they cut through the field.
Without giving it a second thought, Brandy hopped the fence and proceeded through the corn.
3
Bryant and Sylvia Marsh owned about a hundred acres of farmland, much of it utilized for the growing of maize. The fields abutted the Crawly property, close enough that Brandy and Matthew, when they were younger, could reach over the fence and pluck the ripe ears right out of their silky husks without leaving their backyard. The Marshes, who were kind people, encouraged this and would often bring barrels of the crop over to the Crawly household after a plentiful harvest. The cornfields yawned clear across the southern crook of Stillwater, right out to the bristling green-and-brown foothills of Wills Mountain. To the west, the fields overran the wooded hillsides straight out to Gracie Street, where abandoned farmhouses and barnyards stood eerily like props from some long-forgotten movie set.
Brandy followed the trail of broken cornstalks for close to forty-five minutes before the trail grew cold. Something immense and mechanical loomed just ahead so she continued in that direction. It was a large combine harvester, yellow as a school bus, its reciprocating head filled with rows of metal teeth. She walked a complete circle around the machine, still not sure what she was looking for. Satisfied that she hadn’t found anything out of the ordinary, she pressed on through the maize, leaving the combine harvester to diminish in her wake.
By the time she emptied out onto Gracie Street, the sky had already been grumbling for some time. A light patter of rain fell but it only lasted a brief time. It felt good against her face. She had worked up quite a sweat hoofing it across town. On the shoulder of the road, she scraped the dirt out from between the cleats on the soles of her sneakers then picked aphids, spiders, and stalk borers from her clothes and hair. Across the road stood the first wave of abandoned farmhouses, their roofs sagging or completely sheared off, their windows like holes punched in drywall. Rising above the rooftops and farther in the distance, the crumbling grain silo rose up like a missile.
NO TRESPASSING
signs were posted everywhere, but Brandy also saw scads of empty beer cans, fast-food wrappers, and tire tracks in the mud. This was where many residents had lived and farmed until years of flooding had prompted their inevitable evacuation. Even now, the damage done to these structures was still clearly evident in the way they slouched and sloped and sank down into their foundations. The earth itself was still a muddy quagmire from the last flood.