by Rysa Walker
But it’s not a fair and just world. It’s a world where Ralph Rey exists. Where his wife is unwilling to press charges, even though that’s the only hope of keeping her kids safe. It’s a sucky world, and neither of them can help the way things are. They just have to find a way to live in it.
“Ben? Could we just do this already?”
He turns to see MB holding the jack-o’-lantern in front of her. It’s now lit, and her face is bathed in the glow of the candle. She’s never looked more beautiful.
He takes a step toward her. “I love you. You know that?”
A smile lifts one corner of her mouth as she holds out the pumpkin. Then a cold gust of wind whips around the side of the truck, causing the candle to flicker.
“Careful!” she says. “Don’t let it go out.”
The flame inside the gourd sputters once, twice, and then it’s gone. A thin wisp of smoke curls up and exits through the right eye socket.
Marybeth’s eyes go wide, and then her face twists in pain. She opens her mouth to scream but nothing comes out.
He calls out her name as her body begins to flicker like the candle, in and out, and then she, too, is gone. The smoking pumpkin hangs in midair for a split second before crashing to the ground at Ben’s feet. It lands with a wet plop and splits down the middle.
Ben looks around him, almost expecting to see MB come from behind the truck, laughing at how she scared the holy hell out of him. But she’s gone.
A loud sucking sound draws his attention toward the Grimshaw house just as the door bursts inward. The open doorway is filled with a staticky blue glow, the light shining feebly through the grimy windows as well. Someone stands just inside the doorway, a familiar shape silhouetted against the light.
Chase.
When Ben calls out to him, Chase doesn’t seem to hear. He just steps into the hazy blue light.
Ben stands frozen for a moment, then sprints across the lawn and up the rickety porch steps toward the door where his brother disappeared. The wood groans beneath his weight, but it doesn’t have to hold him for long—two giant strides and he’s inside the foyer.
He hears a slight rustle and turns, expecting to see Chase. But it’s MB—or at least something that looks like MB. Her clothes are in tatters, and her hair lies plastered against her face as if she just crawled out of a lake. She’s also not entirely solid. The weird blue light that fills the room shines through her in patches as she flickers in and out of view.
Behind her is Chase, standing next to a door with his hand on the knob. He is looking at Ben now, and his face wears the same haunted expression it did this morning in their room.
Chase opens the door and goes inside. Ben moves to follow him, but MB steps into his path.
“Make your choice.” Her voice has an odd reverb effect that echoes in the room. “Me or Chase, Benjamin. Make your fucking choice.”
“Move.”
She reaches for his waist. Her translucent fingers brush the front of his jeans and grab for his belt. “No. Stay with me.”
She’s doing her little whine-and-pout routine, the one that works so well on her father. The one that actually turns Ben off, not on, every time she tries it on him. But he always ignores it and gives in, because she’s MB. Because he loves her.
This isn’t MB, though. This is just a fucked-up copy. A paper-thin facsimile. And even if it was MB, even if this was the flesh-and-blood girl he loves standing in front of him, it wouldn’t matter.
There’s no choosing between them. Chase needs him. End of story.
He pushes MB aside, expecting some physical resistance, but his hands sail through her apparition so easily that it nearly knocks him off balance. She falls backward but doesn’t exactly hit the floor. It’s more like the floor swallows her up.
Ben goes after Chase, avoiding the spot on the floor where MB fell through. It looks solid enough, but he doesn’t want to touch it.
That wasn’t MB. It wasn’t.
When he enters the room, he sees Chase sitting on a long sofa, staring down at his feet, which are clad in sneakers Ben has never seen. They look pink or maybe orange. It’s hard to tell which in the bluish glow that permeates the room, reflecting from furniture draped in moth-eaten white sheets.
“What the hell are you doing here, buddy?”
“I don’t know.” Chase’s shoulders sag beneath some invisible weight, and he still doesn’t meet Ben’s eyes.
“You’re supposed to be with Daisy,” he says.
“I am.”
That doesn’t make any sense at all, but Ben doesn’t press the point.
“You didn’t go back to the house on your own, did you?” Ben drops to one knee and tilts his brother’s face toward him. He doesn’t see any bruises, not at first glance, but he knows that doesn’t prove anything. Ralph Rey is a seasoned pro. He doesn’t leave marks where people can see them.
“No,” Chase says. “I’m not stupid.”
“I know that. But it’s pretty clear that something is wrong. I need you to talk to me, kiddo. Did you have another episode? Like at school today?”
Chase stays silent.
“Let’s go, okay? We’re done here.” Ben’s mind strays to Marybeth, who is also apparently done here, too. Done in here, by this house, but if he stops to think about what he saw he will scream. He will lose his fucking mind, and he has to focus right now on getting Chase to safety. “Come on. Let’s head home. Mom will be worried.”
Chase shakes his head. “No, she won’t. She’s not even my mom.”
“Yes, Chase! She is your mom. She’s got her faults, but she loves you. We can talk about this on the ride home.” He reaches down to pull his brother to his feet.
“I’ve tried to talk to you!” Chase wrenches away, gripping the edge of the couch. The cloth falls away from one arm, revealing a worn velvet tapestry with dark tassels along the edge. “I’ve tried over and over. But you never listen. She’s not real, just memories in your mind. Why can’t you let it go?”
Ben sighs. “I’m trying to get you out—”
“No! You’re not listening.”
“I’m listening, but you’re not making any…sense.” Ben pauses at the sound of familiar footsteps above them. Steel-toed boots. Work boots, which is ironic since their owner hasn’t worked in years.
“That’s not real,” Chase says. “He’s not real, and you’re still not listening.”
He’s right. Ben can’t hear anything other than those boots. He’s pretty much forgotten everything else—MB disappearing, the house, the stupid leering pumpkin shattered in front of his truck. Ben Rey is nearly eighteen, three inches taller than his father, and thanks in part to Coach Willis, his weight is muscle, not the beer flab his dad carts around. But the sound of those boots still turns his bowels to water, and he hates himself for that.
Ben takes his eyes away from the doorway for a moment. “We need to go,” he tells his brother in a low voice. “Not the way we came in, though. There has to be a back door, right?”
“It won’t matter,” Chase says. He doesn’t look frightened, just resigned, and Ben is struck for the first time by how frail and thin the boy is. No, not just thin. Chase looks used up, emaciated, barely alive. Almost transparent, the way MB looked outside, right before she disappeared. The way she looked in the foyer.
Two things stand out very clearly, though, and Ben would swear that neither of them were visible a moment ago. There’s a deep purple bruise on Chase’s left jawline, in almost the exact spot where Ben touched him just now. Even more alarming, however, is the rope tightening around Chase’s neck.
The footsteps are no longer above them. They’re off to the side, coming down the stairs.
Ben grabs for the noose, trying desperately to slip his fingers beneath the rope. He’s having no luck at all. The rope pulls tighter and tighter, and then he’s grasping at nothing but air. Chase is gone. The rope is gone. The cloth-draped sofa remains, but it’s empty, and the edge of the sheet th
at Chase had tugged loose while angry is back in place.
“Chase?” Ben yells, frantically checking behind the couch, the chair, even though he knows it’s pointless. Chase is gone, vanished like MB.
And the room has changed, too. All of the dust covers are gone. For that matter, all of the dust is gone. It’s still bathed in that odd blue glow, but there are books on the shelves that line the walls. A ping-pong table is in the back corner, and there’s a chess set on the coffee table that’s now in front of the couch. Above the door, someone has painted a small mural. A hill rises up from the lintel of the door frame, with the sunrise—or maybe it’s the sunset?—peeking out on the right side. The words Every Day a Brighter Day at Hillcrest are painted in white on the grass-covered hill.
But there’s still no sign of Chase. And Ben can still hear those boots on the stairs.
When he reaches the foyer, his father stands at the foot of the staircase, in jeans and a flannel hunting jacket. Or at least, he thinks it’s his father. The man looks a bit thinner. Younger. Somewhere between Ralph Rey and the older version of himself that Ben saw in the locker room earlier.
The eyes are wrong, though. His pupils are entirely missing. All that stares back at him is bloodshot whites.
A rifle is strapped across the man’s chest, and he caresses the walnut stock with his free hand. Even without pupils, it’s clear that those eyes can see just fine. He racks the slide and aims the gun straight at Ben.
Or at least, he aims at where Ben was the second before. As soon as he saw the gun, Ben stepped backward into the parlor.
Except it isn’t a parlor anymore. Not the version with the ghostly white-draped furniture or the one with the oddly cheerful mural over the door. That room has vanished completely, replaced by the battered sofa Aileen Rey has patched so many times it’s mostly duct tape. The entire room has morphed into the living room of his parents’ trailer out in Sycamore Meadow. Ralph’s voice seems to come from everywhere at once, echoing in the cramped space littered with beer cans and greasy crumpled chip bags.
“There was a farmer had a son and Bingo was his name-o.”
Ben runs. Even though logic tells him he should run to the front door that he clearly sees off to his right, or the back door, which is to his left, he does neither. Because Chase could be here, too. And so he runs through the crushed beer cans that scatter like roaches beneath his feet, down the small hallway toward the bedroom he shares with Chase.
“B.”
The crack of the rifle is followed by particle board splintering to the right of Ben’s head.
“I.”
Ben trips and sprawls to the floor, landing hard on his jaw and sending his teeth through the side of his tongue. He draws in a sharp breath filled with the pungent scent of spilled beer and piss.
“N.”
The ceiling above him explodes in another gun blast.
“G.”
Ben rolls over and crab-walks backward to the closed bedroom door, quicker than he’d ever have thought possible.
“O.”
As he reaches up for the doorknob, the rifle cracks again. A thick, heavy ringing fills Ben’s ears and rattles his teeth. The door behind him gives up the ghost, just as the ceiling had before it, shattering into a storm of wood shrapnel that falls from the frame like rain from a summer sky. The splinters slash into his palms as he crawls backward through the rubble.
That gun can’t do this much damage. No way.
But it can, and it does here in this trailer. No. Not in the trailer. He’s still in the Grimshaw house.
The man—who might be his father, or who might be some fucked-up version of his future self—stands smack in the doorway. He lowers the gun and aims. This time, Ben knows he won’t miss.
The white-eyed thing laughs, shaking his head. “You’re poison, boy. Just like your goddamn father.” He raises the gun and finishes the song, “And Bingo was his name-OH,” as the rifle explodes one last time.
Five
TUCKER
Tucker takes a deep breath of the night air as he kicks away the last fragments of glass and plywood blocking the window. Then he turns back to the others. Chase is wasting no time heading for the exit, but Daisy stands frozen, her eyes fixed on the water-stained carpet. She’s clutching a film reel from the projection room to her chest. Her hands and shirt are smeared with blood, but that worries him far less than the look on her face.
He could have sworn he’d seen and mentally catalogued all of Daisy’s expressions. The smiles are his favorite, of course, but he’s seen her anger—usually directed at her sister—and he saw plenty of grief after her mom died. There had even been a brief period where he’d thought she was slipping into the same depression that hit him hard after his parents’ wreck. But much to his relief, she’d snapped back.
This look frightens the hell out of him, though. It’s almost like Daisy’s body is a shell she’s left behind. There’s no light in her eyes as she stares down at the carpet. And her lifeless, hopeless expression is triggering a memory.
Daisy sits behind a wall of glass, in a chair painted that horrid shade of pale gray-green that hospitals and schools seem to buy in bulk. Her face is slack as she stares toward, but not really at, a TV where several people are watching Family Feud. He wants to go in, to talk to her and try to snap her out of it. But he can’t risk it.
His eyes go back to the group around the TV, and he sends out a silent prayer that Macy, the bossy one with a nasty temper, will decide she wants to watch something else today and snatch the remote from whichever person is holding it. That would certainly start a fight, and if there’s a fight, he’d have a logical excuse to go in. Break it up.
And then on the way out, he could say a word or two to Daisy, to see if he could spark a bit of light in her eyes, since no one else seems to be trying today. He’d also speak to the kid by the window, mostly for cover, even though he knows it’s pointless in that case. If it’s one of his gone days, nothing you say will snap him out of it.
Tucker shakes his head, shoving the weird thoughts away. Or was it a vision of some sort? Either way, he’s certain it has never happened. It’s just his imagination playing tricks. He’s never been in that place, wherever it may be, and right now, he needs to focus on getting them out of this place, which seems to be ground zero—or at least he hopes it is—for whatever is causing the group hallucinations.
Daisy’s eyes are still locked on the moldy carpet below her feet as he approaches. She doesn’t respond when he says her name, so he bends down a bit to look her in the eye. “Come on, sweetie. Let’s get you home. Get those hands patched up.”
She blinks and then finally looks up. He tugs at her arm, and she follows him outside.
Except for the window that he kicked open on their way out, the Hart is the same dark, abandoned hulk that it has been for most of Tucker’s life. As he taps the button on his keys to unlock his car, however, the marquee above the entrance lights up, so stark and vivid against the otherwise darkened Main Street that Tucker has to squint.
The words have changed. Instead of the sign announcing FrightFest, it now reads:
COMING SOON
THE BIRDS
Daisy gives the marquee a venomous look. Then she slides into the passenger seat and checks her phone as he cranks the car.
“Still not working?” It’s a dumb question, and he knows that even before the words leave his mouth. But he has to say something. Daisy is on the verge of tears. Maybe even outright panic. It’s better than the blank, empty expression she wore in the lobby, but it still worries him.
She’s gripping the cuffs of her blue denim shirt to stop the bleeding from the cuts on her palms. The one film reel that remained in the projection room when everything changed is in the floorboard by her feet. There’s no label, just a bloody handprint from where Daisy picked it up.
“I can’t reach Dani,” she says, her voice tight. “I can’t reach Dad. I can’t even reach Julie.”
“I’m sure Dani’s at the bonfire,” Tucker says, pulling away from the curb. “We’ll head out there and check, but first, we’re stopping by your place to bandage your hands.”
Daisy looks numbly down at her blood-soaked sleeves. “Okay. But…what the hell was that, Tucker? I’ve worked to get this theater ready for over a month. I watched the construction workers come through and repair the place. Chase swept up the damn sawdust from that same construction today. This doesn’t…it just doesn’t make sense!”
Tucker thinks it’s a bit odd that the theater being closed up is the thing that jumps out at Daisy as not making sense. Personally, his brain is having a harder time reconciling the appearance—and disappearance—of an ant the size of a city bus, not to mention the entire theater full of screaming people who vanished along with it.
“It’s not real.” Chase stares out the back window at the empty sidewalk as he speaks.
This isn’t the first time the boy has used that phrase. He’d said the exact same thing earlier in the day when Tucker and Julie found him sitting on Martha’s lawn. Tucker suspects it might just be a mantra Chase is repeating to keep himself from freaking out, but he says, “You said that before, Chase. At Martha’s, after you went back inside to fetch those cookies. Yes, they’re damn good cookies. But going back into a house reeking of gas to get them wasn’t what I’d call a smart move. The place could’ve gone sky high.”
“I didn’t go back in for the cookies. They just sort of…came along for the ride when the house blew up.”
“Except…it didn’t blow up.”
Chase gives him a weary look. “It did. And then it unblew up. It was like the giant ant. Like Barb Starrett being dead and then not dead.”
Daisy looks back at the boy and asks, “Did you eat or drink anything at Martha’s house?”
Tucker shakes his head. “That can’t be it. The whole Pinewood thing was before I had any of the cookies. And I’ve never even heard of a drug that can make people share a hallucination—”