“Jeff! Chloe!”
The scene inside the cottage was confusing at first. Ethan burst through the door with a flurry of flakes to find Jeff lying on the floor under a thick sleeping bag and a blanket. He did not move at the sudden noise. Chloe sat beside him, wrapped in a bed cover. Logs burned in the fireplace, providing the glow Ethan had seen from outside. The rest of the cottage was dark, as if the world ended outside of the fire’s light. The shadows were large on the world’s edges. Yet the sense Ethan had—that of being watched—returned once more. It had vanished after his fall in the woods to be replaced by naked panic.
“What are you doing on the floor? Get him on the couch.” Ethan rushed to his brother’s side. Jeff was shivering and unconscious.
Chloe looked at Ethan with an expression she had never given him before: hope. “He fell. I couldn’t lift him back up. Help me?”
Jeff groaned a little as the two positioned him back on the couch. An arm slipped out from the sleeping bag and Ethan saw the long, jagged scratch marks on Jeff’s forearm and then corresponding marks on his face and neck. They looked deep and scarring. Ethan looked to Chloe in horror and accusation.
“He won’t stop. He itches all the time. I’ve even tried to wrap him, but he tears the bandages and tape right off.”
“Maybe he’s allergic to something.”
“Maybe.” Chloe sounded doubtful. From the ferocious look of the scratches, so was Ethan. These were not the scratch marks to quell some itch. These were excavations. Ethan began to think the source might be something more psychological.
“What happened here, Chloe? Tell me everything.”
“You would not believe me, Ethan.”
Ethan rolled his eyes in exasperation. “Is this more of your religious crap? Is that what you think this is all about? Some evil demon?”
“I’ve seen it,” she hissed, her lips curling. “So has Jeff.”
He held her gaze momentarily and tightened his jaw. “Okay, then,” he finally said. “Tell me what happened. What boogeyman is haunting you now?”
“As long as you don’t interrupt me with your stupid questions.”
“Then I’m going to need something to drink.”
“The liquor cabinet is in the kitchen.” She pointed into the dark.
Ethan readied his flashlight.
“The kitchen floor squeaks something awful,” Chloe said. “But don’t worry. It’s
only
a kitchen floor.”
Under the covers, Jeff itched at his groin.
“We’ll need to get something for his scratches as well,” Ethan said. “Some Neosporin. Where’s the bathroom? I’m not afraid of the dark.”
***
The snow stopped falling just before dawn. Ethan was drawn to the breaking light at the window. The world outside had been erased and all that remained was something bleak and bare. Shades of white, gray, and blue met the shrouded sun as it rose over the sea.
Ethan had listened to Chloe tell what she knew. Or what she thought she knew. Ethan was now more convinced than ever that she had something to do with all of this. He no longer thought she was an outright bitch. He thought she was insane, maybe having experienced one too many falls from mountaintops.
She was silent behind him, perhaps waiting for a response. But what could he give her but applause at a tale well told. And it
was
a good tale. She had delivered it with earnestness. A+ for effort. He knew now she thought it was true. But there were no such things as ghosts. At least, not the kind to which she was referring. There were many dangerous invisible things in the world. Things that needed warning signs. But what was dead was dead.
Ethan watched as the wind whipped the snow into the air. He could almost make out figures in the chaos. Patterns in the morning light. Patterns everywhere. The human eye loved patterns. They were easy to understand and relay. Jeff was part of Ethan’s life pattern. It was always all about Jeff.
When they were kids and Jeff came down with the flu, the world might as well have stopped. Ethan was on the outside looking in as his father and mother tended to the Golden Boy. They fussed over him ridiculously. Ethan was only let in to see his brother when they needed a washcloth or cough medicine. And here he was again—on the outside as Chloe tended to Jeff on the couch. Ethan looked at her as she combed back the hair from Jeff’s damp forehead.
“The sun is up. We should try to get him to a real hospital. I don’t trust small-town doctors.”
“Where’s your car?” Chloe asked.
“At the bottom of the hill. It didn’t make it past the creek.” He walked over and sat in the rocking chair.
“You walked up the hill?”
“Of course.” He was shocked that
she
was shocked. “He’s my brother. Why do I keep having to remind people of that fact? No. We didn’t talk, but dammit, he was my
brother
.”
“I stand chided,” she said. She fixed Jeff’s covers and sat against the couch on the floor. “So, what do we do?”
“Dig out the Jeep.”
“No good.” She shook her head. “It’s not starting. I think it’s finally died for good.”
“Shit.” Ethan hit the arms of the chair. He thought for a moment, chewing on his fingernails. “We could try to get my car started again. Last night I just wanted to get up here as quickly as possible. I didn’t spend too long at the ignition. If we could get it going, then we could drive into that little town and get some help.”
“There’s little alternative, is there?”
“Whatever illness he has, it’s wrecking him. We can’t wait for someone to climb the hill and find us.”
“It’s not an illness. It’s—”
“Let’s just get him out of here, okay? We can talk about all of this later.”
Jeff turned in his sleep and let out a long, cold whimper. Chloe’s hand went to her throat.
“Whatever we do, we need to do it now.” Frozen, Ethan sat in the chair, the whimper temporarily having destroyed any resentment he still held toward his brother.
There was a brief moment when neither of them moved. They played a waiting game. Who would volunteer to leave Jeff’s side? Chivalry had no place in the cottage, and though she had hated every second of it, Chloe had hiked through a blizzard or two in her travels.
“You go,” Ethan finally said. “I’d like to spend some time with him.”
Chloe stood and let her blanket fall from her shoulders. “Keep him warm and stay close. Having someone near him seems to keep away… It seems to calm him.”
She went to the bedroom and layered herself. She did not plan to be out in the cold for very long, but her career—and her life—had taught her to always prepare for bitter surprises.
Ethan tossed her the keys as she headed out the door. He did not rise from the chair. Chloe gave one last look at Jeff and then quickly left, making sure as little cold air as possible was let into the cottage.
Ethan watched Jeff, who trembled miserably beneath the coverings. “Well, Brother,” Ethan said. “It’s you and me. And I haven’t the first idea as to what to do.”
He decided to see to the washrag that lay across his brother’s forehead. After that, he tried to get Jeff to take a drink of water, sitting him up so that he would not choke and stroking Jeff’s throat to relax it so that at least a gulp of water would be swallowed. This was a trick his mother had taught him in those brief episodes when Jeff’s sheen was nowhere to be seen. Ethan was hesitant to admit it, but when he was growing up, he looked forward to the days when Jeff was gone to football camp or some such bravado-making institution. Ethan found that his mother paid him more attention then. She loved him, and he knew this, but she did not show it the way she did with Jeff. Jeff sucked up every ounce of attention. Ethan ground his teeth as the memories seeped back.
“We should probably talk, huh?” he said as he dabbed some of the deeper scratches on Jeff’s face with Neosporin. “Or else I’m going to become a bitter alcoholic and Kel will divorce me.”
He rose once Jeff showed no signs of waking, and took a walk around the cottage in the light. The kitchen, he found, did not look half as creepy as it sounded. In fact, it was rather quaint. Just very old. Old things complained not from pain, but from uselessness.
Ethan tried to call Kelton again. No service. Kelton was probably worried sick by now. He always thought too much. He worried too much. Like a good mother. Perhaps that was why Ethan fell for him: his caring, his gentleness. Ethan longed for that now, to be held in Kelton’s arms. He regretted not spending just a few more moments in an embrace before he sped out the door for Wicker.
He noted the computer sitting idle on the kitchen table. Chloe’s story had been absolutely beyond sane, but Ethan could not explain the image he had seen behind her when they had been chatting online. He looked at the kitchen doorway where the strange figure had stood. It was assuredly not Jeff, and after a few slight investigations of the cottage, he decided Chloe wasn’t cheating again. So then, who
was
that? They hadn’t made friends with any of the townsfolk. That was certain. They were very much alone there. And in fact they seemed, by the tenor in Chloe’s voice, to be rather miserable there as well. At least, Chloe did. The only company had been Lana Pruitt, and the image Ethan had seen on the computer screen was certainly not that of a faded film star.
And then there was something else about Chloe, altogether more personal, that bothered Ethan. When she was telling him what had happened and she spoke of her ‘feelings,’ her premonitions, it had made him very angry. It had been her premonitions, after all, that had nearly cost him and Kelton the adoption of Bug. Sure, the bridge had collapsed, but coincidence did not excuse bigotry.
Yet Ethan wondered…
His own ‘feelings’ that something was wrong, that something terrible was happening to Jeff, they had seemingly been accurate. What if these were along the same lines as Chloe’s own premonitions?
“We’re all psychic in some way,” she had once said at a dinner when Jeff first introduced her to Ethan and Kelton. They were at a bar and grill in the middle of a shopping plaza. Jeff had seemed uncomfortable with the subject, looking around as if waiting for the opportunity to excuse his wife’s quirks. But what if she was right? What if the entire planet was like a big ball of string, everything truly connected to everything else, like some New Ager’s dream?
Ethan shook his head at the thought. Proof. That’s what he relied on. Things that could be broken or bruised, mended and embraced. Prove to him that a ghost exists and then maybe he’d believe it. At the moment, however, the solid world was causing quite enough problems without adding the invisible to the mix.
The sound of Jeff’s voice brought Ethan back to the couch. Jeff mumbled and groaned. With wide strides, Ethan was at his brother’s side in no time. But Jeff lay still and undisturbed.
“Pull out of it,” Ethan said. “Mom’s the resident vegetable of our family.”
He felt Jeff’s forehead again, then sighed and looked around the room. His eyes rested on a baseball bat against the wall.
“God, I hated baseball.” He spoke to battle the silence, which was becoming increasingly unbearable. “I mean, I hated all sports, but especially baseball. Maybe because Dad expected me to like it so much. But I wasn’t you, and he wanted a whole yard full of Jeffs.”
Jeff moaned and turned his face to the back of the couch. Ethan picked up the bat and studied it.
“Do you remember when he decided he was going to teach me baseball if it killed him? He dragged me outside and
made
me play, thinking me an idiot of the game. I knew the rules, though. I had seen you play enough. But I wanted to see him frustrated. I wanted his face to explode in red. I think it was because that was the only time I ever got his full attention—when I pissed him off. That’s what my inner psychiatrist tells me anyway. Well, finally, after an hour of me holding the bat intentionally fey, he got so fed up, he took it from me and he hit my shoulder with it.” Ethan laughed. “The look on his face—the shock at what he had done mixed with rage—that was priceless. Completely worth the pain in my shoulder. And then when he turned around and saw that you had seen him hit me… He never bothered me again after that. He never so much as talked to me. And you became my protector, though you didn’t know it. God, I hated baseball.”
How easy it would be, he thought, to swing. To bash his brother’s head in. What poetic justice!
Ethan put the baseball bat back in the corner. He returned to the couch and adjusted Jeff’s covers. Jeff’s eyes twitched and raced beneath their lids. His skin was pale and broken. Ethan bent down and whispered in his brother’s ear, “What are you thinking, Golden Boy? What are you thinking right now?”
***
Jeff’s fever dreams, like all hallucinations, incorporated some of the images and sounds happening around him. He lay on the couch, but he felt he was no longer in the cottage. Instead, he was in a hospital room so dull and white and clean he felt nauseated. Fluorescent lighting washed out everything, even the smallest hint of color. Blue was not blue. Red had no strength to be red.
People or staff came and went. Chloe was there at first as a nurse. Her voice was a far-off thing, sifted clean of emotion. Then, in some strange hallucinatory shift change, Ethan took over. They were both dressed in white uniforms, crisp and pressed. Jeff tried to say something more than once, but neither of his nurses heard him. They were only there to keep him alive. Not to converse.