by Aly Noble
They only like the front yard, I thought sourly, thinking that I’d heard nothing from Trevor about the maintenance hire we’d agreed upon.
I’d started to rise when I saw it—the porch light spilled past my silhouette and bathed the brush in gold, highlighting a bright spot amongst the brambles. “The hell?” I murmured as I knelt back down and carefully parted the dry foliage with my fingertips, brushing something soft with my nails. Inside the knotted shrubbery were tiny, fresh white buds in the shape of bells on a pale green stem.
It didn’t make much sense. Not in comparison to everything else anyway. Still, something about finding a living plant in that backyard was inexplicably reassuring. I ran a fingertip over one of the buds and smiled before letting go of the shrub. A yawn reminded me that I should be trying to rest, so I stood up and returned to the house, the faint tickle of a floral scent lingering in my nose. After going inside, I stayed up late into the night, the TV on but acting as background noise more than anything as I scrolled through my phone. I read about everything from smallish white flowers—a slew of failed attempts to identify the lone survivor of the not-garden—to a spectrum of absurd to genuinely freaky paranormal theorist blogs.
I decidedly shut my computer when I got to a section on demonic entities, figuring I’d had more than enough for one night. I stared down the video equipment sitting by the armchair, thinking I should set it all up within the next couple of days—in part so I could get the equipment back before it was missed.
I’d been watching an old game show for twenty minutes before a weird noise caught my attention. I muted the television and noticed that it had finally stopped raining after a two-hour downpour. Without the TV, there was an eerie quiet throughout the house. I waited and, just as I was about to unmute my show, the sound came again. It sounded like it was coming from outside.
Footsteps?
I swallowed against a dry throat and stood up, moving toward the window but staying a few feet back just in case. I figured it was just dumb kids again if anything, but it was too soon to tell. The light from the TV flickered through the room, casting long shadows into the hall as I neared the front door, listening with bated breath. When the sound came again, I stiffened. At least the knife block was unpacked and set out on the counter this time.
“It’s a squirrel, it’s a squirrel, it’s a squirrel,” I started to chant to myself as I flipped the porch light on and reached for the door.
I whipped it open to an empty porch.
I blinked and peered around, but it was silent and still beyond the doorway.
Another thud slapped against the porch, and my soul briefly left my body. However, what I had thought were footsteps were actually wet maple leaves blowing around and flopping onto the porch boards, heavy with rainwater.
I rolled my eyes at myself. I shut and locked the door, turned off the porch light and the television, and threw back a sleeping pill before heading upstairs to fall into bed and temporarily die of shame.
Chapter 7
“What do you mean you haven’t set up the stuff yet?”
“I haven’t had time and I’ve just forgotten about it. Besides, I have to look up how to use about half of it, so lay off,” I grumbled at Estelle, who had been on my case since I’d arrived that morning, only deterred when Carla, Steven, or Catherine were around since the video equipment loan was still confidential.
“You’re going to miss something monumental if you don’t hurry up,” she persisted at a normal volume now that everyone else had gone home for the day, her lips pursed into a hot pink line of cosmetic disapproval.
“I hope I do. Actually, I’m hoping to catch something really un-monumental. Like a chipmunk. Or something.”
She shook her head. “I don’t get it. How are you not intrigued by this?”
“Because I’m living it,” I sighed, looking at the clock. “Jesus H. Christ, it’s one in the morning.”
“Well, that’s not His fault,” Estelle pointed out casually.
“Oh, let me just fetch you some pearls to clutch,” I replied.
I heard her laugh after I’d gotten up to get my coat. It was almost surreal to hear that response—I’d expected to make work-friends with Carla or maybe Steven, but certainly not Estelle. Yet we’d both ended up working late and, by this ungodly hour of the night, we had somehow ended up being on okay terms. Not to mention that I’d remembered to read her article before coming in and we’d had a lengthy discussion about it that had put Steven in the doghouse.
“I just skim, I don’t read!” he’d defended himself desperately as Estelle gave him the biggest shitstorm for—apparently—not actually reading the Willow when he was a part of its publication process. By said shitstorm’s end, I’d been reluctantly impressed.
“Heading out?” she asked.
“Yeah. You should, too,” I advised. “You’re always here so late.”
“You assume so. This is the first time you’ve stuck around after eight.”
“Well, in the case that you stay so late all the time… Get some rest,” I reiterated. “Night, Estelle.”
“Night, Miri,” she reciprocated absently as she returned to her work, surprising me as I packed up and left the building.
I subconsciously scanned the empty lot as I walked to my car, starting the engine and pulling out of the parking lot. The route home was an easy drive, although I found that it took on a new level of spookiness this late into the night. Traffic was dead and my headlights only reached so far. As I took the first curve past a guardrail-lined stretch of woods, there was a thud as my purse slid to the floor from the passenger seat. “Shit,” I muttered as I reached over to get it, pulling it back up into the seat before it could shift again and spill.
When I looked back at the windshield, it was just in time to see a man collide with the front of my car.
The struck form spastically rolled up the glass before falling off the side of the hood to the asphalt. I swerved and slammed on the brakes too late, throwing the gearshift into “park” and turning on the hazard lights before hurling myself out in a panic. I found myself chanting to myself that I’d hit a tree limb. A flyaway tarp. Even a deer, as much as that thought disgusted me too. For the first time, I found myself hoping that I was hallucinating.
When I turned around, the man was lying on the ground back where he’d rolled off the hood. My heart started throbbing in my ears. Bile welled in the back of my throat. “Shit,” I rasped with feeling, grabbing clumsily for my phone to dial an ambulance.
Initially, my reflex was to walk over to him to see if he was all right. However, I took a few steps toward him and stopped suddenly without entirely knowing why—every instinct just told me to stay where I was. It was all I could do not to throw up at that point, so I let myself keep my distance for now. You’ve done enough, James. Just call the experts. I dialed 911 and shifted between my feet in an anxious dance, pressing my phone to my ear. This is manslaughter if he dies. I could actually serve time for this. I’m such a fucking idiot, my brain berated me, and it put me on the edge of a meltdown.
Still needlessly wary of getting near him, I tried talking to him at a distance instead while I waited for the call to connect. “Uh, sir? Are you all right? Of course not, Miri, you ran him over with your—yes, hi, I need an ambulance. There was a guy out in the road, and I didn’t see him and…” I hesitated. “And I hit him.” Why am I being so stupid? He could be dying and I’m too wigged out to even check, I bitched at myself, despite remaining rooted to the spot. Any reasonable, humane person would have already checked him out and started performing CPR.
“Ma’am, what is your location?” the dispatcher persisted after I’d failed to hear her and answer the first time.
“Oh, uh, hold on.” I turned around and spotted a mile marker up the road. “It looks like… Mile marker forty is up ahead. I’m like a five-minute drive down the road from Willow Press, past the first curve, and before the second curve when you get to the woods.�
� I wasn’t sure if any of this information was helpful, but I wasn’t sure how localized dispatch was in these parts.
“Right, that’s good,” she said, her tone more relaxed now that I was giving her answers. “Stay on the line with me, okay? Are you near the man you hit? Can you tell if he’s breathing?”
“I’m not, but—”
I turned back around and the man was upright.
My taillights washed the road red up to where he stood, tall and perfectly encased in shadow. However, that was all he did—he just stood there, silhouetted by the faraway glow of the moon beyond the trees around us and just out of reach of my car’s pulsing hazard beams. Every time they blinked, the road turned pitch black from where I stood to the edge of the woods. I couldn’t tell if there was blood on the pavement.
“Ma’am?” the dispatcher prompted.
My breath shook when I drew it in. “He’s standing up.”
“That’s good!” she said with palpable relief and started to rattle off questions for him. I wasn’t listening anymore. He was so still—too still—and I could barely discern by the way the shadows wrapped against his face that he was staring at me.
I took a slow step back, feeling my way along the car until I grasped the driver’s side handle. “Please help me,” I whispered into the phone, startling the poor woman into a new slew of questions.
As soon as I pulled on the handle, the man lurched forward and the unbearable tension of the moment shattered in its entirety. I hurled myself into my car and slammed the door, locking myself inside and gunning it down the road, tires squealing and exhaust huffing from the tailpipe. I was crying—I could feel the moisture burning in my eyes and falling on my shirt. My phone slid from my hand and dropped into an empty cupholder as I hit the gas and sped toward home. Who the hell was that guy? Would he still be standing in the road? Could this have possibly been my imagination?
Clenching my jaw, I made myself look into the rearview mirror and met eyes in the back seat.
I whipped into the shoulder of the road as a hand knotted in my hair and slammed my head against the steering wheel.
• • •
White. Everything was white.
I’m dead, I decided with the best groan I could muster.
“It’s about time,” a familiar voice said. I opened my eyes to see my neighbor Rose checking an IV. My IV. She smiled when she saw my eyes open, adding, “You scared me half to death.”
“What do you mean?” I slurred, wincing when I shifted my neck.
She looked at me warily. “Don’t you remember?”
“Where am I? Why are you here?”
“I’m a nurse, Miri,” she laughed halfheartedly. “I’m your nurse. And you’re in your hospital room. You had a minor accident last night.”
My memory wasn’t connecting with what she was saying—cliche sayings like “it was all a blur” or “and then it all went dark” when things like this happened were surfacing in my head, but those overused statements were terribly accurate. There was just nothing left that related to what she was saying. It was like every time I tried to recall a walk upstairs the morning after a pill-induced sleep.
“What happened?” I finally asked.
“You veered off the road and went into a ditch. You’re lucky you’re not worse off,” Rose admonished me, picking up the clipboard on top of the heart monitor. “Take this as a lesson not to stay so late at work.”
“Is the damage bad on my car?” I asked, the projected hits my bank account could take making my head hurt even worse.
“Not really. You apparently hit the brakes while you were still on solid ground. The EMT said it kind of just rolled in once your foot let off,” she said before asking, “What are all the bruises from?”
I frowned. “Um… Shouldn’t you know that?”
“No, no, I mean the old ones on your arms and legs.” She pointedly lowered her voice. “Is there, um, anything you want to tell me? Anyone who—”
“What? No,” I said quickly after realizing this was her semi-subtle way of asking if I was being abused. “I take pills sometimes for my insomnia, and I’m not smart enough to take them right before bed. They’re probably just from bumping into doorways and stuff on my way upstairs every night.”
Rose’s brow knitted with disapproval. “You know, Miri, I can help you if you let me. You can tell—”
“Rose, seriously. I’m not lying. I appreciate you, but that’s not what’s going on,” I insisted.
“Well, the bruise patterns are consistent with pinching and grabbing,” she mumbled insistently, “but I’ll leave it alone.”
Pinching and grabbing?
She continued down her mental checklist. “Are you having any disorientation or nausea?”
I paused to process that. “No, I think I’m all right.”
She nodded and wrote down a few notes on an actual checklist. “But you don’t remember anything about the accident, right?”
I shook my head. “No, I don’t.”
Rose nodded. “That’s not surprising, honestly. Somehow, despite the slow roll into the ditch, you hit your head really hard. What surprises me is that you don’t have a concussion.” She stopped her questionnaire for the moment when the doctor stepped past the curtain. It sounded like the two of them were going over my chart, speaking amongst themselves.
While they talked, I flexed my hands, which were stiff with split knuckles. Whatever was in the IV was making a light fog in my brain, but I was sure whatever cocktail they were feeding into my veins was staving off a killer headache. I touched my forehead, and the flesh felt tender and swollen. Of course, it would be after I—
It all came back at once after I recalled slamming my head into the steering wheel. Or, correction, my head being slammed into the steering wheel. And the eyes in the mirror…
The man.
Suddenly Rose was back at my side and clutching my hand, the doctor looming over the machines. The monitor nearby was beeping spastically and the sound in the room had dulled into a vague, meaningless mess of noise. It took me a few seconds to realize it was because of me.
Unable to hear over my blood surging through my ears, I watched the words Rose’s lips were shaping, making out what looked like, “Miri, breathe!” I obeyed her and tried to get my lungs to work. I had never had a panic attack before, but this seemed like one. “Look at me,” Rose ordered and I heard her this time. I complied. “Breathe in with me now.”
I watched her and copied what she did, doing my best not to overthink it and let my body take what it needed. Soon, I was breathing again—sharply—and immediately began coughing. “What’s wrong?” she asked once I was breathing regularly again, although I could tell by her expression that she at least thought she already knew.
“I, um—” I sucked in a breath, but it didn’t feel like it was helping. I was a balloon with a hole in it, taking in air and deflating again within seconds. Were they sure there was nothing more wrong with me? Had they checked everything? “There was a man.”
“A man?” Rose repeated.
I nodded, and it made my head throb. “He was out in front of me on the road and I… I hit him, but while I was talking to the woman who sent the ambulance, he stood up and just stared at me,” I explained. Rose shared a glance with the doctor, but remained quiet, letting me talk. “And then, I got back in the car, and he was in the back seat and…” I paused, reaching toward the back of my head. “And he grabbed my hair and hurled my head against the wheel… And now I’m here.”
Rose looked doubtful—seeing that doubt on her face felt like a kick in the gut. “Miri, I think you might be a little disoriented. Could you have swerved for a deer or a squirrel? That may explain why you went off the road…”
“No, I saw him! He attacked me!” I insisted, but I was already realizing that they—really anyone—weren’t going to believe me. I was equal parts scared and angry. The combination created a surge of adrenaline in my battered body that I didn’t k
now what to do with. “Did you check—“
“Miri,” Rose interrupted me gently, taking my hand. “They already went over your car. The doors were all locked when they found you and there was nothing of note in the back seat, trunk, or passenger side. No cracks in the windshield—which there definitely would be if a fully grown man had rolled up your hood—and no dents in your bumper. You didn’t hit whatever you might’ve been trying to avoid.”
I struggled for words at first, and then looked around desperately for something, anything to help me prove my case. “But…my phone. It’ll show that I put in the 911 call. Where is my phone?”
Even as I asked, I knew that wouldn’t really prove anything. The recording of the call might show that my story was consistent, but all my cell phone could provide was a timestamp and confirmation that I had, in fact, called 911. They weren’t interested in that side of things though—their job was to patch me up and ship me out.
The fact of the matter was that there would be no convincing them of what I saw. At least not yet.
• • •
I was released from the hospital the same morning. There was little they could do for me aside from making doubly sure that I didn’t have a concussion. I’d swiftly given up on convincing my caretakers that someone had attacked me in my car the night of my accident—it was clear that the whole thing sounded fabricated to them, and it didn’t help that my car didn’t show any signs of the damage my story implied. I’d begun to worry that they might commit me if they started to take my insistence as mental instability, so I promptly shut up and let them think they’d successfully calmed me down.
Before I left, Rose informed me that my car had been towed back to my driveway on Red Heather Road, suggested that I keep to the sleeping pills to make sure I was staying healthy while whatever post-traumatic symptoms I was experiencing passed, and instructed that if any issues resurfaced, I should get in touch. Just like that, the paperwork was filed and I was free. Instead of explaining that I didn’t have any family or friends in town who I felt I could call for a ride, I opted to walk back home.