by Rysa Walker
The thing she remembers most, though, is the blank, numb look on Tucker’s face as he sat in the chapel. Her father had whispered something to her mother and joined the boy, who was alone on the front row. Daisy had wanted to join them, too, had wanted to find some way to comfort him. Because even then, at age twelve, she had been hopelessly in love with Tucker Vance.
Tucker finished high school and two years at the community college in Woodsboro. Once that was over, he left to attend the police academy in Knoxville. Her father looked after the house while he was gone, mowed the yard and kept the utilities up, refusing to take any money.
“No one’s using anything, for Christ’s sake,” he’d told Tucker on the phone one evening as Daisy hovered in the nearby doorway. By that time, she had given up any pretense of trying to be stealthy. “It’s not that big of a deal, Tuck. You worry about you. I got this.”
And that was the end of the argument. Tucker had learned something Daisy had known for years—when Bill Gray set his mind on something, it was best to let it roll.
Daisy had volunteered to check the mail and water the two houseplants while Tucker was away. Just to help out, she’d told her dad, although she could tell from Bill Gray’s amused look that she was fooling no one. Daisy never worked up the nerve to go farther into the Vance house than the living room and kitchen, but sometimes she would stop briefly in the living room and sit in the recliner, where he sat while he watched TV. It wasn’t much, but it got her through the three long months until Tucker returned.
Once he was home, Daisy fell back into her routine, looking out the window at night before bed, and again in the morning. Even with two other bedrooms in the house, including the larger master, Tucker stayed put in his old room, the one with the window opposite hers. Daisy was just fine with that.
And this is exactly where the one-sided romance of Daisy Gray and Tucker Vance remains. She thinks about Tucker constantly and stares out the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of him, while he goes on about his life. Sometimes she’ll see him in town, and he always smiles. He always asks how school is going, and she always says fine, even though she hates that question, especially coming from him. It reminds her that he still thinks of her as a kid, which is doubly annoying now that she’s eighteen. Just a silly schoolgirl with a raging crush on the cute cop next door—although she really, really hopes he doesn’t know that last bit. Occasionally, he’ll tell her that he’s watched or read another horror classic from the checklist she made for him the year before, when they’d discovered a shared love for the genre while chatting at a neighborhood cookout. Tucker calls it The List. She can hear the caps in his voice when he says the words, and it always makes her smile.
Daisy cuts the water off and dries as quickly as she can, wrapping the towel around herself and stuffing her feet back into the ridiculous pink raccoons. She wipes down the mirror with the end of the towel, managing to knock one of the vast array of bottles off the counter in the process. It’s hard to breathe in the tiny bathroom without knocking something over. Every square inch of space on the counter is taken up by the hair gels, makeup, and various other potions that gobble up most of Dani’s allowance. Daisy stopped buying any of that stuff long ago and just adopts whatever shampoos and makeup her sister abandons in the ongoing quest for cosmetic perfection. They’re twins, but they sure as hell aren’t identical.
Back in her room, Daisy pulls on her favorite pair of jeans, the ones with the butterfly embroidered on the back pocket. They’re worn almost threadbare, and they’re comfortable as hell. But that’s not why they’re her favorites. These jeans were the last thing her mother bought for her, just a week or two before she died. And even though she lives in a house filled with things that her mother bought or created, the jeans are a talisman that Daisy is unwilling to let go. Wearing them is almost like starting the day off with a hug from her mom, and Daisy can’t help feeling that when these jeans finally wear out, she will have lost the last remaining piece of her mother.
Jenny Gray hadn’t even had the common courtesy to haunt her. Daisy had secretly hoped that would happen—especially in the long, bleak months after her mother’s death, when the house was achingly silent. She had wanted that haunting. Begged God for it, even, because that would mean there was something more. That maybe this wasn’t the end after all. That maybe she’d see her mother again one day.
A crow is just outside her window, peeking in with unabashed curiosity. Daisy pulls back the curtain to get a better look, smiling at the creature, which stares back at her with intent gray eyes, its tiny head cocked slightly to one side. This time last year, Daisy would have wondered if the crow was her mom. Jenny Gray had always enjoyed watching birds, so it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine that she’d come back as a bird to watch over Daisy and her sister.
But if a haunting, befeathered or not, was in the cards, Daisy’s pretty sure it would have happened already. She once made the mistake of telling Dr. Norcross that she hoped to see her mom’s ghost. That she thought maybe if she wished hard enough, it would actually happen. He’d smiled patiently and told her that it was normal to miss someone you loved. But, he added, magical thinking wasn’t healthy. So she hadn’t mentioned it again, although she couldn’t really see how wishing her mom would come back as a ghost or a bird was all that different from wishing she’d be reunited with her in heaven if she prayed hard enough. And Daisy doubted the doctor told people who believed in the power of prayer that they needed to avoid magical thinking.
She lets the curtain fall back into place and takes a deep breath, shoving all the troublesome thoughts into the NOT TODAY closet. There’s an excellent chance she’ll see Tucker tonight. Why jinx the day with depressing thoughts?
It’s gotten easier to keep those thoughts at bay. In the months after her mom died, even getting out of bed felt like an insurmountable chore. Her sister seemed to snap out of grief a little faster, but then Dani had always been the more social one. The one who had a cluster of friends, not just a select few. Maybe that helped her deal with the loss. Dani had only gone to one session with the grief counselor, and she’d never needed anything to help her sleep or to get through the day. Although, maybe that’s not entirely true, since Dani drinks herself into a stupor on a fairly regular basis.
After three sessions with Dr. Norcross, Daisy’s dad had agreed to let the doctor prescribe some pills. “Just to take the edge off. To give you space to heal,” the doctor had said.
And it helped. Slowly, but surely, things got better. Daisy still has the little bottle of Xyleva in the drawer of her nightstand, but she hasn’t taken one in nearly six months. They helped her cope back then, but they also made her feel a little loopy and detached.
She steps out into the hallway, thinking she should probably tap on Dani’s door, just in case she forgot to set her alarm again. But as she turns, the mirror at the end of the hallway catches her eye.
There has always been a mirror at the end of the hallway, and one half of her mind insists that it has always been this mirror—this large, ornate monstrosity with its intricately carved wooden frame that twists and winds around the glass. It seems to hulk over her, sucking all the oxygen from the corridor.
The other half of her brain, however, remembers a very different mirror. A plain rectangular mirror in a narrow gold metal frame.
Daisy squints as the reflection changes around her. She still looks the same, in her well-worn jeans and a sage-green sweater. But instead of the hallway, with the door to Dani’s room and the staircase beyond, she sees a different door behind her. Painted above it are the words Every Day a Brighter Day at Hillcrest, written backward.
Redrum, she thinks automatically. Then she takes a step backward and feels the doorknob to Dani’s room against her wrist. It’s cold. It’s real. It’s…there. Not in the mirror, though. The mirror still shows the other room with the backward motivational sign painted above the door.
Looking back over her shoulder, she sees the hallway o
f her house. Dani’s door. The door to the bathroom. The staircase. Everything exactly the same as it’s always been. Well, except for the floor, which used to be carpeted.
When she turns to face the mirror again, the backward sign is gone. The reflection shows only Daisy, standing in the hallway of her house, her wrist brushing against the doorknob, her sneakers bright against the dark wood floor. She reaches out toward the mirror, her hand shaking. As her fingers tentatively brush against the glass, she half expects her hand to disappear inside. Or for something to grab her arm and yank her clean through the mirror, through the wall, and into that other place she’d just glimpsed.
But it’s just a mirror. A mirror that has always been there. It had to have been, right? Otherwise, why would it look so familiar?
She needs a cup of coffee to clear the cobwebs out of her head. A tiny voice tells her that she might also need one of those pills stashed away in her nightstand, but she shuts it down firmly. The mirror has always been there. Whatever else she thought she saw was a trick of light.
A trick of light that forms words on a wall. Yeah, right.
In the next room, Dani’s alarm clock begins to wail. After a few seconds, it stops, either because Dani turned it off or threw it against the wall hard enough to shatter it. Daisy continues toward the stairs, and as her ears adjust to relative silence, they pick up a familiar and far more pleasant sound. This is a sound she hasn’t heard since her mother died, and it pushes aside all thoughts of the mirror and the bottle of Xyleva.
Downstairs in the parlor, someone is playing the piano.
The crow takes off when the first notes from the piano begin. She follows the river, stopping at a modest two-story brick house with a lawn that needs mowing. The Reverend Julie Kennedy has been thinking for the past month that she should hire one of the boys from church to take care of the damn task, but she promptly forgets once she pulls out of the driveway in the morning. And the chore doesn’t register again until she pulls back into the driveway at the end of the day, usually carrying a takeout bag from Chickwich or Viola’s Bakery and realizes once again that the grass is halfway to her knees. It doesn’t help that lately she’s had other things on her mind. Those things are far more pleasant to contemplate than an overgrown lawn, especially for someone who was right on the verge of thinking that romance was not in her cards.
Julie is dreaming of these far more pleasant things when the crow perches on the oak limb just outside her window. For the first few moments, a tiny smile plays on the woman’s lips. Then she startles, which in turn startles the crow. Julie clutches the covers to her chest as the pleasant dream of a moment ago slips into a nightmare. A very familiar nightmare.
She’s a child again, sleeping in the loft of her grandparents’ farmhouse in Oklahoma. The loft is dark, but she isn’t scared. Her grandfather is nearby. She can hear him below, softly snoring.
The bed is familiar, and her grandmother’s quilt wraps around her body like a favorite pair of blue jeans.
Jeans her mother bought. The ones with the butterfly embroidered—
That odd thought very nearly pulls her out of the dream. Julie’s mother never bought her jeans, and certainly not jeans with an embroidered butterfly. She tosses again, uneasy, now in that half-dream state where she’s in two places at once—here, in her own bed, and there, a thousand miles and thirty years away, with her grandparents sleeping below.
When the dream takes her again, it quickly goes sour. She feels a presence. Hovering over her. Watching.
Adult Julie, the Julie Kennedy who will be late if she sleeps much longer, whimpers and kicks away the quilt. It’s the same quilt she clutches in the dream, now worn at the edges, but still her favorite possession.
Something is different. Something has changed.
The darkness is scary now, too quiet. It takes a moment to figure out what’s missing, but she finally nails it down. Pa isn’t snoring.
Don’t you want to know why, Julie? Come see. Come see.
She wants to scurry down the ladder and crawl into bed with her grandparents. They’d grumble, just as they always did, and then make room. But the half-window above her bed—where the glass is now dirty and streaked in a way that her grandma would never have allowed—seems to be beckoning.
Julie obeys the call. Rising up on one elbow, she looks out on the empty backyard below. Pale light washes over her swing set, standing guard against the dark cornfield and even darker night. The swing moves slowly, gently in the night breeze, as if the ass of some unseen phantom has just vacated the narrow seat.
Of course it’s moving, Adult Julie thinks. Is there ever a swing in a horror movie that doesn’t move?
But as little Julie looks out the window, she realizes something is missing, and it’s not just the sound of her grandfather snoring. This time, it doesn’t take nearly as long for her to pinpoint, because the thing that’s missing is the thing she hates most in all the world—the scarecrow.
“But why?” her grandmother had asked. “You liked the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz.”
Julie had liked the Scarecrow, in both the movie and the book versions. This scarecrow looked nothing like that one, however. Julie was pretty sure this one already had a brain. A very devious one, too. But like the Tin Man, he wouldn’t have a heart if he got her in his clutches.
While her grandmother had been sympathetic, she was also practical. The corn needed a guardian. But she made a few concessions to Julie’s fear. Who could be scared of something named Mr. Giggles? She even stitched on a big, supposedly friendly smile to make the creature less scary.
It still made Julie nearly pee her pants every time she saw it.
The scarecrow always seemed to watch as she played in the backyard. Even at night, as Julie tried to sleep in the loft, she could feel him out there. Most of the time, Mr. Giggles wasn’t even watching the cornfield. No matter how many times her grandparents turned the creature back toward the corn to ward off the crows, Mr. Giggles would pivot back around on his spike so that he faced the house. Some nights, when Julie dared to look out the little window, his head would be turned upwards, the large straw hat hiding the flat black eyes that she knew were fixed on her window. Watching. Waiting.
Julie tells herself that the stupid thing just fell. The wind knocked it down. She doesn’t want to check to see if that’s true, though. What she wants is to slide back into the bed and pull the quilt over her head.
But her feet seem to have a mind of their own. They swing over the side of the bed and carry her across the room, the floor cold and rough beneath her bare feet.
Why did Mom yank up the carpet? Where are my pink raccoons?
These two questions appear out of nowhere, and neither makes any sense to the logical, adult Julie. The loft was never carpeted and…pink raccoons?
But her younger self is climbing down the ladder now. In the silent, snoreless night, each creak of the rungs echoes loud enough to wake the dead.
With that thought, a chill hits Julie so hard that she almost lets go of the ladder. She clutches it tighter after that, her breath coming in gasps that hurt her throat and chest.
It’s too quiet. And the scarecrow is gone.
Another thought tickles the back of her mind. Mr. Giggles pushed the swing as he walked by. Or maybe he was swinging, trying to get a bit higher so that he could see in her window while she slept. If she had looked ten seconds earlier…
I’m watching you.
Come out, come out, little Julie. Don’t you wanna play?
Now the house reeks of him—a moldy, slightly sweet scent that she has caught faint whiffs of when she’s outside and the wind blows in from the direction of the cornfield. There’s another smell, too, even more familiar. But she can’t quite place it. Each time she comes close, her mind snatches it away.
She knows why the scarecrow isn’t in the cornfield.
He’s in the house.
Adult Julie whimpers again in her comfortable bed. Her bedroo
m, in the home she has built for herself so far from Oklahoma and the plains, smells distinctly of old straw at this moment, wet and decaying. The scent will be gone by the time she wakes. Almost. A trace always lingers after these dreams, like perfume from an unwanted night guest.
As her feet hit the floor beneath the ladder, she hears a gurgling sound like water bubbling up from a choked drainpipe. It’s coming from her grandparents’ room. Ma and Pa Kennedy are asleep just beyond the darkened archway on the other side of the wide living room. Even in the darkness, Julie knows the path—the steps to take around the low coffee table so she doesn’t bump her shin, the floorboard to skip because it screams like a banshee, the steps (four little girl ones) from the arm of the couch to the lamp on the table against the wall. She knows all of this, but that noise…it’s new. It sounds like water, but there’s no sink in their bedroom.
Adult Julie thrashes in her bed. “No,” she mumbles. Her head jerks from side to side on her pillow. “No!”
The sound of water bubbling up. The scent of Mr. Giggles in the darkness. And now, growing stronger, that other smell, the one her mind won’t let her remember. Her grandfather’s pipe, making s’mores—
NO! Danger, Will Robinson. Here there be dragons. Do not enter. Keep out!
She obeys the warning, shoving the thoughts down deep, but she can’t block the sound of Mr. Giggles, still coming toward her—shuffling across the living room on stick feet, dragging himself forward. The floorboard, the one she knows to skip, lets out a half moan even though the scarecrow is light, mostly clothes and the blackened straw that pokes out of his sleeves as he grabs her neck and—