by Rysa Walker
Two
JULIE
“You’ll need to turn left about a mile up ahead,” Scott says. “Slow down or you’re going to miss it.”
Julie, who has lived in Haddonwood for several years and has driven to Viola City countless times, doesn’t respond. She knows she has only herself to blame. Once she finished speaking with Barb Starrett’s daughter, she could have kept driving. No one forced her to stop by Scott Jenkins’s house and ask him to come along to visit Martha Yarn’s family. It just felt like the right thing to do. Martha’s niece moved out of Haddonwood before Julie took over as pastor, and she doesn’t really know Julie. She’d remember Scott, though. And this isn’t the sort of news that should come from a stranger.
Julie knew Scott would be pissed when she insisted on driving. Truthfully, she’d probably have given in on that count if Marybeth, who had been arranging a newly cut jack-o’-lantern on their porch step, hadn’t taken her side. Apparently, Ben failed to pick her up this morning, and she wanted backup transportation if he was a no-show again, since her own car is in the shop. Scott caved at the first little pout from his daughter and climbed into the passenger seat of Julie’s car without complaint. But not being the driver clearly bothers him, so he’s decided to pretend he’s running the show by being the world’s most annoying GPS.
To be fair, though, anything Scott Jenkins says would set her teeth on edge. She shouldn’t let him get to her this way.
Love thy neighbor.
Love thine enemy as thyself.
Patience is a fucking virtue.
She gives a half chuckle, imagining Scott’s expression if he heard that last bit.
“Something funny?”
“Not really. Just an odd thought.” She leaves it at that, knowing it will bug the hell out of him. That probably isn’t very charitable, but it’s been a long, long day.
“Can’t see what there is to make light of. Not given where we’re going and why. Her suicide didn’t really surprise me, of course. I saw it coming. This town has been sliding into godlessness since Reverend Crowe passed.”
Julie tries to think of a civil way to make the obvious point that Reverend Crowe was, like herself, only one of five preachers in Haddonwood. It seems unlikely that either of them held the fate of the town’s collective soul in their hands. But Scott, as usual, doesn’t pause long enough for her to reply.
“Perhaps Martha’s death is not a direct reflection on you,” he says, shifting in his seat. “But people need a strong hand. Tough love, as it were. Especially in perilous times—end times—like these, Ms. Kennedy.”
She has told him repeatedly to call her Julie. He never does. In the past, it’s always been Reverend Kennedy, with a slight sneer on the Reverend. But now he’s apparently decided she doesn’t merit the title at all. On the plus side, he seems to be blaming her for Martha’s death only. She’d been fairly certain that Barb Starrett’s suicide would be added to her list of crimes, as well, especially since she’d been in the room when it happened.
“People have been talking about the end of time since the very beginning of it,” she tells him. “Surely you know that, Mr. Jenkins.”
He ignores her comment. “The devil comes in many guises. Adultery, homosexuality, false idols…and yes, even suicide. Haddonwood was once an oasis in a world of sin. But it slides closer to Sodom and Gomorrah every day.”
She flips on her turn signal just before he says, “That’s the left I mentioned, coming up.”
No shit, she thinks. “Sometimes,” she says, “people focus so hard on identifying every little thing that’s bad in the world that they fail to celebrate the good.”
He snorts. “As you’ve said many times before. I do listen to your sermons on Sunday, even if I don’t agree. But here’s the thing—and please, don’t take offense.”
Julie believes please, don’t take offense may be one of the most offensive things anyone can say, but she holds her tongue.
“You’re good with the encouragement stuff. I think you would’ve made a great kindergarten teacher. Leading a congregation, though…especially in times like these? The town is falling apart. Soon, there will be a reckoning. And you’re out of your depth.”
That’s when Julie finally realizes something crucial—something she probably should have understood the very first time she met Scott Jenkins. She will never win him over. Leaving aside his sexism and his enormous ego, there is simply no common ground upon which they can build. His god of reckoning cannot coexist with her god of reconciliation.
“You’re too weak to do the job. As Reverend Crowe once said, the fires of hell burn hot for the leader who delivers his flock into temptation.”
Julie is surprised that her voice remains level when she responds. “If you’ve really been listening to my weekly messages, you know I don’t believe in a physical hell. We each make our own hell, in our own minds. Hell is living in the absence of love and kindness.”
“And you’ve just proved my point. That kind of talk is the reason you and I are in this car. If you had made it clear from the pulpit that suicide is a sin, a sin with actual consequences, you might have spared that poor woman’s soul. Add to that the torment of her family knowing that Martha cannot enter heaven, and we are in a—”
“Hold on! Wait just a damn minute, Scott. We’re not going to have any of that talk in front of her family. I mean it. Our purpose tonight is to give comfort, not for you to bombard them with your twisted interpretation of scripture. If you’re not down with that, I’ll turn around right now. It’s getting late, but I can go see them tomorrow.”
“Don’t be stupid. We’re halfway there. Do you really want them hearing about Martha’s death through the grapevine?”
Julie doesn’t, although she has a sense that the grapevine might be out of commission tonight. “Fine. But here’s the thing,” she says, mimicking his words from earlier, “and please…don’t take offense. The flashlight in my coat pocket doubles as pepper spray. One unkind word from you, and as God is my witness, I will unload the thing square in your eyes and give you a nasty little preview of that hellfire you keep talking about. Are we understood?”
Silence falls over the car, although Julie is pretty sure she can hear Scott’s blood boiling. This outburst will not make her life easier in the long run. She’s certain of that. But damn, it felt good.
And it shut him up, which should surely count as a miracle.
Julie relaxes a tiny bit, watching the road stretch out before her with gentle rises and falls, dips and hills, almost as if she is driving on the spine of some long-buried creature. Off in the distance, she spots the large oak tree she’s always used as a visual warning that the turn onto the main highway is coming up. The tree sits off to the right just as the road curves sharply to the left. There are several dents in the tree, gouges in the bark left by the cars of distracted drivers who kept going straight instead of following the road. Bill once called it the killer tree—it took the lives of two of his friends back in high school—and said he wished whoever owned the property would cut the damn thing down.
The tree is pretty, though, especially in the summer, when its long thick branches extend over the road to provide a canopy of dark-green shade. Tonight it shows a different kind of beauty—a stark, skeletal lattice backlit by the glowing moon.
As Julie draws closer, she spots the first car they’ve encountered since leaving the Haddonwood limits. A sick feeling spreads through her stomach.
It’s not. It can’t be.
It is, though. At first, she thinks that he actually hit the tree. But as she pulls up next to Bill’s SUV, she sees that there’s a good four or five feet between the bumper and the tree trunk.
“Why are you stopping?” Scott asks.
“That’s Bill Gray’s car,” she says, flipping on her high beams as she cuts the engine. “He left this morning for a convention in Atlanta.”
“Why would he be parked all the way out here?”
Julie is out of the car before he finishes the question. Her legs shake beneath her as she peers into the passenger side of the SUV. It’s too dark to see the inside unaided, so she fishes the flashlight out of her coat pocket and aims the beam through the window. The first thing she sees is Bill’s iPhone lying face down in the passenger seat. She looks through the backseat next. His briefcase is in the floorboard. The keys are in the ignition.
Bill, however, is nowhere to be seen.
“Damn,” Julie whispers, her eyes stinging with tears. But she’s not going to cry. Not here, and definitely not in front of Scott Jenkins, who is now standing next to her.
“Maybe he had a medical emergency,” Scott says as he leans down to look inside the car. “Chest pains or something, and he wandered away from the car.”
“I need to call Tucker,” Julie says. “Or maybe the sheriff’s office. Is your phone working?”
Scott looks surprised. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
It isn’t working, though. She knew it wouldn’t be even as she asked the question.
The wind whistles through the trees around them, an audible reminder to Julie that the wilderness spreads for miles in all directions. Off in the distance, an owl hoots, as if to hammer the point home. Driving this far would have taken Bill less than ten minutes, which means his car has been sitting right here all day. If he had a medical emergency this morning, the odds that he’s still alive are very slim.
Unless someone picked him up. Took him to the hospital in Viola City. With the phones down, the hospital wouldn’t have been able to reach her or the girls. He could be okay.
Scott is still fighting with his phone, clearly pissed that yet another thing isn’t bending to his indomitable will. “Doesn’t matter anyway,” he says finally. “They won’t do anything until he’s missing for forty-eight hours.”
Julie glares at him. “He isn’t just missing. His car is right here. I think that’s suspicious enough that they’d at least check the hospitals.”
Scott looks up from his phone, and she can tell that he’s planning to argue the point further, because he’s Scott Jenkins, and of course he’s going to argue. But then his eyes narrow, fixing on a point behind her.
Julie turns. Something sways from the large branch that extends out over the curve in the road. It looks like a bag of some sort, jostling and twisting in the wind. And it wasn’t there a moment ago. She’s quite certain of that. It would have been right in the path of her headlights.
Cold dread washes over her, because it really doesn’t look like a bag. That’s just a lie she’s telling herself to keep from freaking out.
It looks like a body.
From this angle, however, she can’t really tell for certain. Not with the tree trunk blocking her view.
Scott holds out his hand. “Give me the light.”
Julie ignores him and begins moving forward. Scott huffs and follows, muttering under his breath. She wouldn’t have given it to him even if it was just a flashlight, but after their conversation in the car, he knows it’s also pepper spray. So he can fuck right off.
Had it been any other person standing next to her, however, Julie would have handed the light over and done so gladly. She really doesn’t want to see what’s hanging from this tree. When she awoke this morning, she would have sworn that her worst nightmare would be to see that damned scarecrow coming at her. It would be far worse, however, to step around this tree and see Bill’s body at the end of a rope.
But in the end, she has to know. So, she angles the light upward once they reach the tree.
Her first emotion is relief. The body isn’t Bill’s. It’s much too small.
What’s hanging from the tree is actually worse. The coarse rope snakes down from the lowest limb of the oak to grip the neck of a child. Gravity tugs at the bright-orange sneakers, pointing their toes downward toward the double yellow line. His head is bowed, loose hair falling over a face that is splotched purple and black.
“Chase!” Julie runs toward the body, moving so quickly that she doesn’t see the object in her path. A bolt of pain shoots up her leg as her shin connects. She pitches sideways, trips, and lands on her back on the grassy side of the highway.
As she stares upward, she realizes that the moon, which she had just spotted behind the tree, is now gone. So are the stars. The sky is utterly black. There are just two points of light in the unrelenting darkness—the flashlight she’s holding and the faint glow of Scott’s cellphone.
Scott’s hand appears above her. Reaching up, she takes it, and he pulls her to her feet.
The thing she tripped over is a small red table with yellow legs. It looks vaguely familiar and yet completely out of place sitting in the road. It also looks exceptionally lightweight, and she’s amazed it didn’t go skittering across the road when she collided with it.
It’s like the table Dani and I had, Julie thinks, and then shakes her head.
Like the table DAISY and Dani had, she corrects, only that’s still off. There’s no way she could know about this table. She hadn’t met them as children. In fact, she’s never even seen any of the toys they owned. They were well past that stage by the time she first visited the house.
And yet, the memory is there—faded around the edges and foggy, but still stuck inside her brain like an old film clip playing on loop. It’s there as surely as the stray thought about the jeans this morning, the ones with the butterfly.
This was…mine. Mine and Dani’s. LEGOs and Play-Doh and My Little Pony. Dad gave it away after the acci…dent…
What accident? Julie tries to latch on to the memory, to search it for details, but she can’t. It’s not her memory. It’s—
Daisy? Are you there? Can you hear me?
Julie? Where—
And then the voice, the connection, is gone, and she’s staring at the table. It was empty only a moment ago, but now an ancient-looking Ouija board sits in the middle. It’s not the standard out-of-the-box Ouija she’s seen in stores. This board has been carved out of a block of wood, with each letter of the alphabet burned onto the face. The planchette looks hand carved as well, and the words MYSTICAL EYE are stenciled carefully just below the small viewing window.
“Where did that come from?” Scott says, his voice rising. “It wasn’t there a minute ago. There was nothing on that table. Did you set this up? Trying to creep me out on Halloween? Test my faith with an occult prank?”
“If it’s a prank, it’s on me as well.”
“Oh, sure. You suddenly decide to extend the olive branch, to actually allow me to take a tiny part of my rightful role in this congregation, and this just happens—”
“Shut up,” Julie says flatly, and walks back toward the tree. The body can’t be Chase. He’s at the Hart. It’s a prank all right, and in really poor taste. She risks another look upward, cringing at the sound of the rope creaking in the wind.
The child’s hand is directly over the board, one finger pointing at the table below. Julie takes a step forward and touches the planchette. A cold tingle runs up her arm.
“Stop that!” Scott says, using much the same tone as he would with a three-year-old. “Why would you touch that tool of the devil? We need to leave right now.”
But she doesn’t listen. The wood grows warm beneath her fingers and begins to vibrate.
“Is anyone there?” Julie doesn’t know if this is the right way to approach a spirit board. She never played with one as a child. The planchette moves, gliding as smoothly as a bird around the edges of the board. Then the glass eye begins to pause over certain letters.
“C-H-A-S-E,” Julie spells out aloud. “W-A-S. N-E-V-E-R. H-E-R-E.”
The mystic eye grows warmer, until it’s too hot to hold. When she’s finally forced to let go, the planchette continues to move.
DAISY
DANI
WHERE R THEY
“Bill? Is that you, Bill?”
The heat is so intense now that Julie begins to sweat. She takes a step
away from the board, but not so far that she can’t see the letters.
GAME OVER
Then the glass eye zooms toward the bottom half of the board, running back and forth over a single word.
GOODBYE
GOODBYE
GOODBYE
Scott is mumbling something. A prayer, probably, but Julie isn’t paying attention. Her eyes are still on the board where the planchette now glows a hot reddish orange. The glass in the middle of the eye shatters, and then the wooden spirit board snaps and bursts into flames. Scott screams, stumbles backward, and lands on his ass in the middle of the road.
The table beneath the burning board begins to melt. Julie backs away and watches the red plastic bend and curl, folding in on itself and sending the Ouija board tumbling onto the asphalt.
Above, a cold wind whistles through the branches, causing the rope to creak loudly. Julie looks up an instant before it snaps. The body comes crashing to the ground on top of the flaming board. As it falls, it morphs into an almost-weightless mass, and then it’s nothing but a heap of clothes and two orange sneakers draped across the smoking remains of the table.
“Scott?” Julie senses movement to her left and shines the light in that direction. He’s standing in the middle of the road, looking straight at her. His face is pale, but not nearly as pale as his eyes.
His eyes have gone white.
“Scott?” She takes a step toward him, moving the flashlight down slightly so that his eyes don’t reflect back the light. But the color barely changes at all—still white, with faint streaks of red.
Like the crow in the library.
Then Scott’s entire body begins to flicker, in and out, glowing brighter until he’s nothing but a streaky white mass hovering above the pavement. Julie covers her eyes to shield them, and when she moves her hand away, Scott is gone.
But not just Scott. Everything is gone.
Her car. Bill’s car. The killer tree.
Julie now stands in the middle of a void as black as the starless, moonless sky she noticed moments before. The ground below her feet is pitch black, and there’s absolutely nothing visible aside from her body. She whirls around, pointing the flashlight frantically in all directions, but the beam just extends forward until it fades into nothingness.