Red Heather

by Aly Noble

  She tossed me a look. “Morning, pleb.”

  “Coffee?”

  “Is that even a question?” Estelle groaned, stretching. “Shower?”

  “You can use mine upstairs,” I replied on the way to the kitchen. “You can borrow clothes and whatever else you need, too.”

  “Thanks,” I heard her mumble as I took the coffee from the cupboard.

  She came back down five minutes after the machine stopped percolating, wearing a Batman shirt and a pair of red sweatpants. I looked over her outfit choice before smirking and presenting her with a cup of coffee. “Wouldn't have guessed you were a DC fan.”

  “I like a few characters,” she reasoned, sipping the coffee and looking at the counter like she had too much of a headache to absorb anything but granite. I was tossing the filter when I heard her ask, “What’s this?”

  I looked over and saw the SD card from the fourth camcorder I'd never watched pinched between her thumb and index finger. “It’s one of the cards from my surveillance kick.”

  Her eyes widened. “Really?”

  “Yeah,” I replied warily. “I haven’t watched it though. It’s not the one that the weird shit happened with. Remember? I forgot that there was a fourth camera until after all that and just kept the card for later.”

  “Let’s watch it,” she said excitedly.

  “Why?” I whined. “Speaking of poor choices, where the hell is Carla?”

  “That’s harsh,” Estelle chuckled.

  “I meant with the spirit board and you know it,” I said.

  “I don’t know that, actually,” she pointed out. “She dipped out way early, I guess. Her car’s not outside.”

  “It’s not?”

  “You didn’t even check the driveway when you didn’t know where she was?” Estelle wondered, toying with the card between her fingertips.

  I felt sheepish—of course she’d left early. “I guess I didn’t think about it. It shouldn’t surprise me that she didn’t say goodbye. She was pissed last night.”

  “She was pissed,” she agreed. “I’m glad it’s a weekend so that steam has time to dissipate before Monday.” Estelle reverted back to her original point, waving the card in her hand. “Come on, please?”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I sighed and snatched the card away, going to get my laptop. “If you get stalked by a weird TV girl because of this, that’s on you. And if it fucks up my laptop again, you’re buying the replacement.”

  “What if something’s on it though?” Estelle persisted.

  “Yeah, exactly—what if something’s on it?” I shot back as I took my computer to the counter and opened it, pushing the card into the slot on the side. “You’re not the one who’s been seeing weird shit lately.”

  Appeased that she was getting what she wanted, Estelle didn't argue—instead, she just came around to my side of the counter and looked at the screen while the card was read. A window opened up with the video file, and I retracted my hands to stare at her expectantly. “This is going to be your fault,” I informed her after she gave me a bewildered look.

  “Oh, please,” she admonished me. “It’ll probably just be hours and hours of nothing. Maybe a sighting of your resident ghost, which is all I’m hoping for. Besides, you said I could have the footage if you found something.”

  “Please. Have at it, if that’s what you want,” I said, but my nerves shot back to life when she opened the video and pressed “play.”

  “Where was this camera set up again?” she asked, glancing over the dark screen with just the blink of red light to illuminate the topmost of my basement stairs.

  “The basement,” I intoned ominously, laughing at the look she gave me. “But seriously, the basement stairs.” I refilled my mug while she watched the footage intently, and I saw her slowly growing bored as she realized it was just blackness and faint house noises like footsteps or a creaky floorboard past the basement door. “More coffee?”

  “Sure,” she said, looking away to hold out her mug. I heard her clicking the video forward some, and I’d just tipped the pot back from the lip of her coffee mug when she half-shouted, “Jesus!”

  I nearly dropped her mug and the pot, only to realize that what had startled her so badly was when I’d jostled the camera to plug in its charge cord. Sure enough, I saw my shoes and then my legs as I descended the stairs afterward, mumbling about the house being cursed and messing with my phone. “That’s me, you goof,” I smirked.

  “I realize that now. What were you doing?” Estelle asked a little breathlessly since no other sounds were coming up. At first, I hadn’t a clue, but when the light from a flashlight bulb brightened the screen momentarily and the camera refocused, I remembered all too quickly. “What’s wrong?”

  She’d turned to look at me when I hadn’t answered, and I swallowed thickly before answering her. “Um, well… The power was being weird. And I went downstairs,” I said quietly, unable to keep my gaze from sliding back to the screen. “But there was something—”

  Before I could finish my sentence, I heard myself scream on the recording. A beam of light spun around, silhouetting the stairway railing for a few quick seconds as the flashlight shot out of my hands. When the beam moved again, it was because I’d grabbed it and my footfalls echoed up the staircase, including the two heavy thuds on the couple occasions I’d stumbled. Light flared across the screen when the flashlight met the lens, and I watched myself scramble up past the camcorder. After I was out of frame, the sounds of the door opening and slamming shut again were all that remained.

  Estelle and I sat in stoic silence for a few moments after the recording ended and I had to remind myself to breathe. Finally, she spoke. “Can I rewind it?”

  “Why would you want to?” I asked, frowning at her.

  She looked older than usual as she murmured, “I’m pretty sure I saw something.”

  “My clumsy ass falling up the stairs?” I guessed, trying to cut the tension so I didn’t continue to shave years off my life expectancy.

  Estelle shook her head and put the recording back a minute and a half. I saw my shoes disappear off screen again and she paused it, staring at the screen. After drawing in a long breath, she clicked around in the settings panel until she found a way to adjust the brightness and began raising the bar.

  I wasn’t so sure I wanted to watch—however, I couldn't turn my eyes away. And then I saw what she'd seen. A pit opened in my stomach. Halfway up the staircase, something crouched in the midst of a manic crawl.

  “What the fuck is that?” Estelle whispered.

  “I don’t know,” I said softly, staring at the frozen screen, “but I saw it in the office the other night.”

  Estelle seemed afraid to take her eyes off it, like it might burst out of the laptop. “You’re not serious.” I couldn't tell her I wasn’t. It was doubtlessly the same thing—whatever it was. A shuddering sigh eased from her lips as she sat back from the screen. “This isn’t what I wanted.”

  I knew what she meant. Silly ghost footage was one thing. Whatever this thing was happened to be far from “silly.” We both screamed when my phone rang.

  As she rattled off a stream of creative curses and slammed her coffee, I answered it. “Hello?”

  “Out for a jog?” Graham asked, referring to my shortness of breath.

  “Yeah,” I said quickly. “Call you back later?”

  “Sure thing. Later!”

  I hung up and heaved a breath out just as Estelle came around the corner with her purse. “I’m out. I need alcohol now, which you don’t have here.” I closed the window on my computer after taking a screenshot and walked her outside, neither of us really knowing what to say. Finally, she said, “See you Monday, if not before,” and gave me a hug before walking to her car.

  “Hope so,” I joked halfheartedly. She laughed nervously and soon pulled out of the drive to head home.

  I watched her go and then started to backtrack into the house until a little white square on
the corner of the porch rail caught my eyes. I felt my brow crease as I approached it—it was Carla’s pack of cigarettes and her lighter. I picked them up as nerves fluttered in my stomach. Why the hell would she forget her cigarettes of all things? The woman smoked like a chimney.

  “Hmph,” I uttered indifferently, putting them in my jacket pocket to set by my purse so I could return them at work the next day. My phone rang again when my fingertips brushed it, and I took it out, wondering if Graham was already calling me again. He wasn’t—the screen read Carla's name. “Hey,” I said when I answered. “Your cigarettes and lighter were on the porch. If you want them now, I—”

  The line cut and I pulled my phone away from my ear in bemusement. Maybe the touchscreen had come back on and I’d hit a button with my cheek to end the call? I grimaced at the gadget and tried calling her back, waiting as it rang a few times without an answer. “Come on, you just called me,” I complained to no one, kicking some debris off the porch. Maybe her phone had died.

  I pulled my phone away from my ear to end the call and try again when, in the absence of the dial tone sound, I heard something else.

  The call ended on its own when no one picked up. I waited to listen for the other noise to continue, but it didn’t. Experimentally, I redialed, and the distant sound picked up again. It was a ringtone. Did she leave her phone, too?

  I walked down the front steps and faced where the ringing was coming from, torn over whether I should go find the phone or not. Carla would naturally want it back, but if it was just lying somewhere nearby, who had called me on it?

  Regardless of the consequences, my curiosity won out, and I stepped forward to follow the sound. It led me past the side of the house, which didn’t make any sense. I’d figured maybe (and that was a weak maybe) Carla had knocked it off the porch rail while she was smoking. Instead, the ringtone was blaring past the house and sounded as if it were coming from the edge of the woods near the river.

  I shook my head—this didn’t make sense. Her car was gone, and that meant she was too. I walked back around the side of the house to look again. The driveway was definitely empty out front, but when I went to the top of the driveway near the side of the house where my Jeep was parked, I found that Carla had parked right behind me. Her car was still here. We just hadn’t been able to see it from the window.

  The call died in my hand, and I deliberated before resending the call, making up my mind to keep looking. Mixed verses of “you’re walking into something terrible” and “what if she’s hurt” were my brain’s favored chants as I grabbed shoes from inside the front door and slipped them on to follow the keening cry of the missing phone. The closer I got to the tree line, the more the anxiety that she'd called me for help and had then passed out or gotten attacked took root, and I felt myself gradually speeding up.

  I paused at the river, listening to the rolling current before ending the call to Carla’s phone and texting Estelle. Carla didn’t leave. Phone ringing from woods. If I don’t call you in half an hour, call the police.

  Now that I was on a time crunch with a backup plan, I rushed through the water into the brush on the other side and called Carla’s phone again, following it more deeply into the trees than I’d expected. “It must be on full volume…,” I murmured under my breath as I un-snared my pants from a patch of nettles. Anxiety told me that because Carla was hurt and seemingly couldn’t speak, she'd turned her phone up in hopes I’d locate her. Realism told me that I was just lucky, and so was she.

  Fear and experience told me that neither of those were true.

  Once the sound got loud enough that I knew I had to be in the near vicinity, I started calling her name. Once. Twice. Three times. The stupid phone was too loud now to pinpoint a direction. I ended the call and shouted for the fourth time, “Carla!”

  I groaned when I heard nothing, weighing my options as I continued to pick my way through the woodland debris. Maybe a text alert? Typing a quick few letters and sending them, I heard a bell tone from a few meters away at my two o’clock. This is better, I decided as I worked my way toward the sound. Like Marco Polo. “Carla?”

  I yelped when a fallen branch caught my foot and took me into a pile of leaves, swearing as I pulled myself up. As I regained my footing, I sent another text. “Carla!” I shouted again. A bell tone sounded from straight ahead.

  I thought about her reaction to the mirror shattering at the club, to hearing my house was haunted, how she’d brought a spirit board into said haunted house, and how mad she’d been when I’d destroyed it—was this some kind of elaborate payback? I’d just settled into the probability of her jumping out to scare me when a disturbance in the brush caught my attention. I called her phone one more time, and the screen lit up in front of me on the ground. My throat felt tight and I tried to swallow through it, stepping through dead leaves toward the discarded gadget.

  It wasn’t until I reached for the phone that I realized I’d found Carla, too. She was barely Carla though—the body was still horrifically fresh but mangled nearly beyond recognition. Every joint of her skeleton was dislocated and bent back unnaturally, her jaw sideways against her face, eyes rolled blindly back into her skull. Even as the shock set in, I knew she shouldn’t have been able to be posed the way she was, should not have been able to look the way she did—it should’ve been physically impossible.

  I wasn’t breathing. My chest shook as I forced air in. The phone continued to blare where it was set neatly atop her twisted gut.

  I don’t know what made me look up. I don’t know how I looked away from her. I don’t know how my brain pulled itself out of the pit it’d fallen into. But I did look up. I did look away. And conscious thought did return.

  It was how I realized I wasn’t alone.

  Far enough away that I had a head-start. Close enough that I could make out his face.

  A bundle of realities crashed in on me at once.

  One, the man I was looking at had undoubtedly killed Carla, and he was more than likely going to try to kill me, too.

  Two, that the distance between us was intentional. The head-start I'd calculated was somehow part of the plan.

  Three, his figure matched the silhouette from the road the night of my accident.

  Four, I had been right, which meant Jonah had lied.

  Five, I was staring at the allegedly dead Connor Price.

  Chapter 19

  Six—I needed to start running.

  I half-fell into a dead sprint back the way I came, my mind racing faster than my feet.

  This wasn’t possible—Connor Price was dead. He’d killed his wife and then he’d offed himself just like every article, every late night news story, every blog post detailing every piece of repeat evidence the author had dug up on the murder-suicide said. He had an obituary for God's sake.

  And yet, here he was. My eyes overruled the Internet—there was no mistaking that face. Worse still was that this wasn’t the first time I’d seen him. His face was scattered through my memories—at Jill’s, at the grocery store, in the club the night before—and I just hadn’t realized it until now.

  I felt my chest start to constrict and just pushed harder. Instinct pressed for me to look back and see where he was. Rationality told me that it would slow me down. I clambered through dense thatches of trees, skidding down a small hill before taking off again. I couldn’t hear him following me, but that wasn’t enough for me. What I could hear was the river—if I just kept going, kept in an open space where there could be witnesses, maybe he would go away. Was he a ghost, too? He sure seemed alive, but so did Jonah to an extent.

  I finally gave in to the urge to look back and found that he was maintaining the same distance from me yet barely seemed to be jogging so much as taking long, slow strides. His eyes bore into my back until I turned, at which time those empty orbs shifted to mine and he smiled. I quickly looked back to where I was running, feeling like he was herding me rather than chasing me at this point. How is he keeping up?!
He’s not even running, and I’m d—

  There was no time for me to coherently finish the thought as the ground seemed to give out from under me when I was ten feet from reaching the river. A shriek left me as the earth opened up and I landed in a heap at the base of a sharp incline I hadn’t seen, only thankful that I hadn’t broken something. I rooted through the leaves to find my footing, new cuts on my hands slicking the dead leaves with blood as I stumbled upright and went to try climbing out. Just as I went to grab the side of the drop-off, a face protruded out of the earth in front of me.

  I shot backward and watched as Connor Price’s face materialized from the dirt, his body following. Definitely not alive-alive… But there’s something different, I thought as I looked for another way out before he was completely reformed. When my eyes fell upon a dark hole just behind me, dread fell heavy in my chest. All the same, I didn’t have much of a choice.

  I angled my body and slid down into the stream of runoff. It sloshed violently when I hit it, and I began crawling, not knowing where I was going or what the hell I was moving through. I snatched my phone from my pocket and tried to dial 911, but it was inexplicably dead and wet on top of that. Of course.

  “Shit!” I shouted, fear fueling my anger as I hurled my phone into the narrow tunnel, where it hit something with a hollow clunk that sounded more like wood than the dirt I was crawling through. Not exactly encouraging, but it was definitely enough to make me crawl faster. Unless it was a boarded-up something. Then, I was still fucked.

  I groaned at my own theories and kept crawling, pressing muck out of the way to make room as the tunnel got tighter toward the end. Panic welled up with sweat at the nape of my neck and bile in the back of my throat. My heart was hammering, my lungs were too small, and everything just hurt.

  When I reached the end of the tunnel, I picked up my ruined phone and shoved it in my pocket, testing the boards before throwing my body weight against them, only to have them shudder lightly and remain intact. “Come on,” I gritted, shoving again. I shuffled myself around and kicked the boards again and again with everything I could muster—and then I made the mistake of looking back. Crouched at the end of the tunnel was the thing from the basement video. From Willow Press.