by Hamill, Ike
Amber saw the sunlight flicker and worried that the angle was changing too quickly. Before the job was done, the beam would be gone. Then, she realized that the light was flickering because there was another light coming from below that was nearly as bright.
Ricky let out a sigh.
George lost his grip on the mirror and pulled back. The mirror crashed back down to the sticks they had laid to cradle it. George slowly moved to the edge and looked down again. When he looked back to Amber, his face was lit up with wonder.
“Come look!” George said.
Amber looked down at the rope and then quizzically back at George.
“Oh. Right,” he said. He pulled himself back from the edge of the hole and untied the rope as he crossed the distance. He handed the loose end to Amber.
“No,” Ricky said. “I want to look.”
Amber and George looked at each other for a moment and then he said what she was thinking.
“It’s okay,” George said. “We’ll have the rope.”
Amber nodded.
She watched George tie the knot around his brother’s waist and saw what he was doing. George tied the final knot and looped it through Ricky’s belt loop, so he wouldn’t be able to easily free himself. Then, the two of them carefully doled out enough slack for Ricky to slowly approach the hole.
“What did you see?” Amber whispered to George.
“The sun burned him out. He looks like an electrical circuit that’s been fried from too much current. His eyes are just two scorched holes.”
Ricky looked over the edge of the hole for a long time and then reached out to firm the position of the mirror. He moved the sticks a little too, so that when he flopped the door back over on its hinges, the mirror stayed in place, pointed straight down.
“Just in case,” Ricky said.
When the door was shut, the three of them went to it and got down on their knees to push dirt back over it. They ended up mounding dirt, sticks, and leaves over the site.
“Is it enough?” Amber asked.
“I think so,” George said. “I really do.”
She took a deep breath and closed her eyes before she let it out. Amber thought about all the times she had sensed the creatures. There had been such a heavy feeling of dread associated with that patch of forest when they started. It seemed like it was gone now, but she didn’t want to trust that feeling.
“There has to be something more,” she said. “Something we can do to be sure.”
“Water?” Ricky asked. “Fire?”
“Concrete,” George said. “Turn this whole place into a parking lot.”
Amber smiled.
Forty-Three: Alan
By the time they pulled onto Route 6, Alan had fallen in behind Mary and Vernon. They seemed to understand that he was back there, following them. Alan’s fingers tapped on the steering wheel and his left foot pounded out a staccato rhythm on the floor of his car. He kept checking his rearview mirror, telling himself that the kids were going to be okay.
His phone lit up as soon as he was in range of a tower. He had to wait another five minutes before he had enough signal to make a call.
“Are you okay?” Liz asked.
“Yes. I’m fine.”
“Ricky? Amber?”
“They’re good too. I mean, they were when I left them. They’re going back to the gravesite. We rescued them from Libby. He’s dead. We’re going to have to talk about how to deal with that. Oh, and he killed another woman. It’s a whole thing. There are a lot of details to sort.”
Liz was silent for a moment.
“And they went back to Prescott’s grave? That’s where they were headed this morning, right?”
“Yeah,” Alan said. “I’m coming home—to you guys, I mean. They’re continuing on.”
She waited. He imagined that he could hear her holding her breath.
“I am,” he said. “We talked about it, and they wanted to keep going, but I have to come home.”
After another long pause, she said, “Good. I think they’ll be okay. And if we don’t hear from them before dawn.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll be heading back this way to find out what happened.”
Just saying the words aloud, preparing for that possibility, he felt the weight of it in his chest.
He thought that Liz could feel it too.
“Stay up there,” she said. “You want to?”
“Huh?”
“Stay with Mary and Vernon. They’re at Amber’s house, right? It will be safe there, and you’ll have a jump on getting up there in the morning. A lot less time on the road.”
“Are you… I don’t know if I should.”
“I’ll feel better if you don’t have to drive all the way down here and then go all the way back. If they were okay in Amber’s house last night, you’ll be fine tonight.”
“I’ll call them and see what they think.”
# # #
Alan woke before dawn. Tiptoeing, he tried to not make a sound. Before he reached the bathroom, he realized that someone else was already awake. He met Mary in the hall.
“Can’t sleep?” she asked.
“Actually, I was about to hit the road.”
Mary smiled. “Good. North?”
He nodded.
“We can ride together.”
Twenty minutes later, they were driving north again. This time, they took Mary’s SUV. It was easier to fit the dogs. Alan turned to look at them back there, side by side. They almost looked like brothers—one dark and one light. Tucker and Albert sat side by side, both looking through one window and then turning to look through the other. At the same time, they both decided it was time to settle down for a nap.
“Liz has some ideas about what we can say,” Alan said.
“About?”
“Romeo Libby and Jan Libby. The kids were in Jan’s house, so we might need to explain that, although Ricky said he was careful not to disturb the crime scene. There’s evidence of us all over Romeo’s house. Not to mention that we have his dog.”
“From the looks of his place, it could be years before anyone notices he has passed,” Mary said. “Did you see all the food he had stockpiled.”
Alan shook his head.
“I think he has been isolated there for a while,” she said.
“That fits with what Ricky said.”
# # #
When they pulled past Jan’s house, it was just a few minutes before dawn. Mary’s headlights reflected off of Romeo’s truck. Amber’s car was just beyond it. Mary stopped long before the vehicles and they sat, looking at the empty truck while they counted off the time until sunrise.
Alan took a deep breath. The dogs were sitting up in their seats. Tucker had his nose to the window, even though it was up.
“Sometimes I think that they don’t know much,” Mary said.
“Huh?”
“Tucker, for instance. When Ricky leaves for work, he looks through the window for a few minutes, like he’s waiting for Ricky to turn around and come back for him. Then, he gives up and I think that all is forgotten. He’s ready to move on with his day and he’s already adjusted to the idea that Ricky is no longer in his life. But sometimes I catch him looking off at nothing and I think that maybe he’s thinking about Ricky again. I know he’s happy to spend the day with me, but he remembers.”
“Of course,” Alan said.
“We adjust so fast, but we lose pieces of ourselves along the way.”
Alan looked at Mary and the way she was staring at Romeo’s truck in the distance.
Outside, they heard a distant screech echo through the woods. Mary reached for her door handle.
“It’s not safe yet,” Alan said.
She put her hand back in her lap.
“It’s all just an experiment, right?” Mary asked.
“What is? Life?”
“Yeah. We want to put meaning to it, but it’s all just a set of circumstances that we find ourselves in. A tho
usand people can die on the other side of the world and it doesn’t mean anything to me. It’s a tragedy for them, but nothing to me. But I accidentally ran over a rabbit last fall and I cried all day. I’ve killed rabbits, chickens, deer, even a moose one time, but this one wild bunny—it was so sad the way he looked at my car bearing down. He saw it all coming but there was nothing he could do. Nothing I could do, either.”
“They’re okay, Mary. I’m sure of it.”
“Oh, I know they are. You don’t have to tell me. This is not how my experiment ends.”
Alan nodded.
They passed another couple of minutes in silence and Alan’s eyes wanted to drift shut. It was so peaceful there with the sound of the dogs quietly breathing in the back and the sunlight just starting to warm up the world.
He blinked.
The morning rays were beginning to light the tops of the trees.
“Ready?” he asked.
Mary opened her door.
After a bit of sniffing by the side of the road, the dogs led the way down the path. The morning dew clung to Alan’s shoes as he walked through the grass and down to the dirt trail. Tucker found Ricky’s trail and then Albert picked up on the scent too. The dogs raced ahead, stopping when they got to the stream.
Mary and Alan stared across the water at the carcass there. It looked like something that had been decaying in the elements for decades, but Alan doubted that was true.
“I’m glad we didn’t meet that thing when it was still up and moving,” Mary said.
Alan nodded.
After they crossed the stream, the dogs circled wide around the creature. Albert had his tail tucked so hard between his legs that Alan thought the dog might run off. Tucker sniffed from a distance and his hair was standing up until the thing was far behind them.
Mary moved through the woods almost silently. Alan kept looking back to make sure she was still following.
“It’s not much farther,” he said, swallowing and taking a deep breath.
She nodded.
Alan recognized the area before they reached the little Prescott cemetery. The dogs froze. When Alan stopped, he could hear strange sounds through the woods. It was a rhythmic scraping, mixed with weird grunts.
Tucker took off, running between the trees. Mary followed fast and Alan had to sprint to catch up.
The three young people were on their knees, covered with dirt. They were rolling a big rock into place on top of a pile of dirt.
Their three startled faces turned at the sound of Tucker bounding up.
Mary said, “Always playing in the dirt. Time to go home.”
# # #
Ricky gave him a quick rundown of the night.
“And you think he was dead?” Alan asked when the story was over.
Ricky tilted his head back and forth and bit his lip before answering.
“We think so. I mean, he looked… I don’t know—burned out, maybe? Either way, like I said, we left the mirrors pointing at him and now we’ve put a bunch of rocks over the door. We’re just trying to get a little weight on top of it, just in case.”
“You think the door will hold?”
“It seemed really solid, yes.”
Alan folded his arms and looked at the cairn.
“The downside is that it might attract attention,” Ricky said.
“I don’t know that I’m worried about that,” Alan said. “How long did this little cemetery go unmolested?”
Ricky nodded.
“Come on, you two,” Mary said. “We have things to do.”
George was standing at the far edge of the cemetery.
“This way,” George said. “We’ve already left enough footprints leading to and from Jan’s house.”
Forty-Four: Amber
Amber kept putting one foot in front of the other, but it felt like she was half asleep as they trudged through the woods. It wasn’t just because she had been up all night—it was the crash after all that adrenaline. Her body was ready to call it quits.
She practically ran into Alan’s back.
Amber stepped to the side and saw that everyone was stopped. Even the dogs were frozen in place. The carcass was stretched across the path. It looked like a horse skeleton, wrapped in old leather and beef jerky.
“Three legs,” George said.
“It’s one of Prescott’s experiments,” Amber said.
“What killed it?” Mary asked.
“Everything,” Ricky whispered.
Everyone was silent for a moment.
“This could be a good sign,” Alan said. “Romeo said that Prescott was the father of all those monsters. What if killing the father took out all of them?”
“That’s too much to hope for,” Amber said.
They veered from the path to give the carcass a wide berth.
“I suppose we’re going to find out,” Mary said.
“How’s that?” Alan asked.
“We have to go back to Romeo’s, don’t we? You people are talking about sending the police over there after his body, right? Are you going to do that without us first letting the sunlight into that second floor?”
“Oh,” Alan said.
“Good point, Mom,” Ricky said.
Amber took a deep breath and let it out slowly as they walked. When they saw her car through the woods, Amber could hardly believe it. It seemed like years since she had come back to Maine, rented a car, and started on this path. The idea that the vehicle was still sitting there by the side of the road seemed preposterous.
“So, to Romeo’s then?” Amber asked as she climbed the bank to the road.
“Romeo’s,” Ricky said. “Mom, can you take…”
“The dogs? Yes. Come on, Tuck. You too, Albie.”
Amber hit the button on the remote and was pleased that the doors unlocked.
# # #
The lights were still on. There were no shadows in Romeo’s garage, just an empty place where the truck should have been and the overturned tables. Amber pulled to the side so George could put Romeo’s truck back in the garage. Before he got out, George wiped the truck down with a rag that he had found in the back.
Before they drove away from Jan’s place they had done the same thing—they tried to remove most of the evidence that they had been there.
Amber got out slowly, looking at the upper windows of Romeo’s house and wondering how they were going to tackle it.
From the back of Mary’s SUV, Albert whined to get out. Mary kept the dogs in the car and she came up to where Ricky and Amber were standing. From her pocket, she pulled a handful of nitrile gloves. They were Mary’s size. Ricky struggled to put his on.
“Mom, they’ll find our hair and skin everywhere in there.”
“Just wear the gloves,” Mary said.
“I will,” Ricky said, “but I’m just saying that this isn’t going to help all that much when they decide to investigate.”
Amber put her gloves on while Ricky led the way into the house.
In the kitchen, Ricky found cleaning supplies under the sink. He sent George back to the garage with a bottle of disinfectant and a roll of paper towels.
“Wipe down those tables as good as you can,” Ricky said. “Maybe stack them up somewhere.”
“Watch out for the tripwire,” Amber said.
George nodded.
Ricky found another bottle and started on the floor.
“I think this is my blood from when I got into a fight with Romeo,” Ricky said. “I can’t remove all trace, but I can make it hard to find.”
Amber made sure she had a flashlight before she went to the bottom of the stairs. There was light up there in the hallway. A patch of light on the wall was growing and shrinking. Amber kept her eye on it as she climbed the stairs. Alan was right behind her.
“What is that? A curtain?” he asked.
“I’m not sure.”
She found out at the top of the stairs. In one of the rooms, the plywood door over the window was
blowing in and out with the morning breeze. She and Alan stood in the doorway. Alan pointed at a corner.
“Point your light over there?”
She saw what he was looking at. At first, she thought it was a towel or something. The dark spot turned out to be a discoloration of the paint on the wall and baseboard. The room was empty. Amber swung the light up to examine the chipped plaster ceiling. It looked like the place over the discolored spot had been a perch. She could see claw marks up on the ceiling above it.
Alan went to the window and lifted the plywood door so the room was flooded with light.
“They could have gone to the woods to hide,” Amber said.
Alan nodded.
They checked the rest of the rooms. In each of them, they found at least one discolored spot. Amber struggled to remember if they had been there before. Alan touched one of the spots that they found.
“It’s dry. At least I think it is.”
“You believe that they all died and that’s some kind of residue,” Amber said.
“I never said that.”
“But you were thinking it.”
“Hoping, I guess,” Alan said.
Amber was about to argue, but realized that she was just trying to impose her pessimism on him, while he seemed hesitant to impose his optimism on her. She decided to leave her arguments unsaid. It was safer to be pessimistic, but definitely not happier.
“It’s like a monster dormitory,” Alan said. “I bet those things were asleep up here that day Romeo talked to me and Ricky downstairs.”
“We all hide things,” Amber said.
She led the way back to the stairs. They found Ricky and Mary down in the basement, cleaning up any spots they might have touched the night before. Romeo was still lying there, looking upwards with unseeing eyes. There was a familiar odor to him. The memory of Cousin Evelyn popped into Amber’s head and she hated that her dear cousin had anything in common with Romeo.
“Can’t we cover him up?” Amber asked.
“Best not to,” Mary said. “Are we finished here?”
Ricky wiped down the light switch and nodded. They all headed up to the first floor.
# # #
Amber walked down the driveway until she found a patch of bright sun to stand in. It was amazing, the temperature difference between the sun and the shadows. It was the difference between life and death. George had Albert on a leash. He came over to stand near her. The dog sat down, staring back at his former house.