by Rysa Walker
“I know,” Daisy says. “But the only other explanation I have is a lot more unsettling.”
“And what is that?” Tucker asks.
She sends a pointed glance toward the backseat and then says, “We can talk later.”
“I didn’t eat anything at Miss Martha’s house,” Chase says. “But Tucker’s right. It’s not the cookies. It’s not something in the water or the air or some flu. It’s just this place. This town. It’s out of his control now, and I think maybe there’s only one way—” The boy stops abruptly, shaking his head. Although it’s actually more of a shudder.
Tucker wants to push him a bit, but they’ve arrived at Daisy’s house, so he decides it can wait a few minutes. Maybe he can get the boy alone for a couple of minutes and see if he’ll open up. He thinks the odds are good that Chase doesn’t have any actual information, but you never know.
Daisy swings her legs out and stops, laughing uneasily as she stares at her front door. “Great. My keys are in my bag. Which is at the Hart.”
“Should we go back?” Tucker asks.
“No. There’s an emergency key inside the ceramic turtle. Second shrub on the right. But I’ll go back later. I have to. My jeans are there. I can’t lose them. They’re my…favorites.” She looks down at her feet, almost like she’s embarrassed to have admitted that. “Of course, it’s also possible that they don’t even exist. That my bag doesn’t exist. My keys don’t exist. Maybe that’s not really a door, and we can just waltz straight through without even opening it.”
Tucker reaches under the bush Daisy had indicated and grabs the little green garden ornament. He tips the turtle to one side, and a key falls out.
Chase is standing next to Daisy at the door when Tucker looks up. The boy presses one hand against the wood. “Don’t think we can walk through. It’s seems pretty solid.”
“Are you sure about that?” Daisy says. “Maybe it’s like the entrance at Platform 9 ¾ in Harry Potter, and we have to get a running start?”
Tucker snorts and inserts the key into the doorknob. “Maybe we should patch up your current injury before you add another one by crashing through a door.”
He turns the knob, and they step inside. The first-aid kit is on the kitchen table, right where they left it, along with an empty aluminum pie plate—well, empty except for a few crumbs.
“Dani’s been here,” Daisy says. “That’s her trademark move. Empty the plate but leave it on the table.”
When Tucker disinfects her hands, Daisy barely winces, which is good in one sense but also has him worried. Her face is still slightly dazed, and he’s pretty sure she’s thinking about what they saw back at the theater. The cuts from the sharp edges of the film crisscross her palms and fingertips. He wraps her hands with gauze and medical tape, then applies adhesive bandages to the three deepest cuts on her fingers. When he’s finished, he grazes his thumb along the underside of her wrist and waits for her to meet his eyes.
She does, and her expression is so raw that it twists his heart. He’s seen that look on her face before, nearly two years ago at her mom’s funeral. What he’d wanted then more than anything else was to wrap his arms around her and tell her he understood. That it would get better in time. He didn’t, though, because there were people watching, people he worried might question his motives. And he doesn’t now, because there’s a twelve-year-old kid watching.
But he wants to. Dear God, how he wants to.
Instead, he gently squeezes her two uninjured fingers. “It’s going to be okay. We’ll get this figured out.” He looks over at the piano bench where Chase is sitting and adds, “The three of us—together—will sort this out.”
Daisy gives him a whisper of a smile and nods toward the hallway. “I’m going to rinse off and change. This look might be appropriate for Halloween, but it’s getting chilly out there. And I’d rather not get blood on my jacket.”
Once she closes the bathroom door, Tucker sits on the arm of the sofa across from Chase. “I think you know something.” He holds a hand up when the boy starts to protest. “I’m not blaming you for holding back. But you were kind of evasive, avoiding our questions—”
“Yeah, I know what evasive means.”
Tucker ignores the interruption but makes a mental note that he’s not going to win any brownie points by talking down to this kid. “You were a little evasive,” he repeats, “when Julie Kennedy and I found you on the lawn this afternoon. And in the car, a few minutes ago, you said this town is out of his control now. What did you mean by that? Were you talking about this Raum…person?”
Chase clearly doesn’t want to answer. His eyes travel toward the door, causing Tucker to wonder if the boy is actually considering making a run for it. But then his shoulders slump, and he starts talking. “I don’t know anything. If I’m being evasive, that’s why. I’ve just been seeing things. Same as you. Same as Daisy. I saw messages on the fridge—saying Martha dying was my fault, and then the letters switched and said no it wasn’t. Then the letters changed again while I was staring right at them. They said Raum lies. But I think maybe they lie, too.”
“Who are they? Who is Raum?”
“I’m getting to that part, although I don’t really know for sure. Like I told Daisy earlier, I saw something on the TV at Martha’s house. Someone. There was this guy in a suit and a spinning door and weird music.” He hums a few bars.
Tucker nods. “Sounds like The Twilight Zone.”
“Maybe,” Chase says. “I don’t know. The guy in the suit said my name, but I think someone was just talking through the TV man, if that makes sense. Like those…what do you call them? Deep fakes. It was a black-and-white show, so the actual person has probably been dead like forever. And then later, when I’m heading back outside, it’s not the man anymore and not exactly inside the TV. Just a voice behind the spinning door. Saying I should ignore the messages in the kitchen. That they argued all the time.”
“That who argued?”
“One of them was the…ball of light that spoke to me at Martha’s. She called herself Zophiel. I don’t know anything about the other one, but if I had to make a guess about him, I’d say that he’s the thing with white eyes. The crow. The giant ant. And the guy inside the door blamed both of them. Said that they screwed everything up, that he’d had everything under control. But it didn’t sound to me like he really did. The Door Man was just pissed because they interfered.”
“Interfered in what?”
Chase shrugs. “This. Us.”
“And you think this Door Man…is Raum?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. All I know is that I don’t belong here. I belong in the other place I keep seeing.”
“What other place?” The question is from Daisy, who is now standing at the foot of the stairs.
“Just…the other place. That’s all I know.”
The kid is holding something back. Tucker can tell from looking at him. His instinct says not to push, and under normal circumstances, he’d follow that. But these aren’t normal circumstances. So he goes back to what the kid said on the drive over.
“Back in the car, you were about to say there was only one way out, weren’t you?”
Chase shakes his head. “I don’t remember. We should go. Ben will be at the bonfire any minute now. He’ll be looking for me.”
Daisy’s brow furrows. “Okay, Chase. But if you don’t want to talk to us, you need to talk to somebody. Your brother loves you—”
“My brother?” The boy laughs, but it’s not a happy laugh. It’s more of a right on the verge of losing his shit laugh. “He’s not supposed to be my brother. He’s supposed to be my dad, okay? And yes, I know how crazy that sounds, but it’s like there are these two different realities, and in this one he’s back in high school, and he’s fighting these stupid battles with his mom and his dad, and I’m stuck in the middle. I’ve tried, okay? He’s not ready to listen.”
Tucker and Daisy exchange a look, and Tucker can tell exactly what s
he’s thinking. On the one hand, everything Chase has just said should have them seriously questioning the kid’s mental health. On the other hand, nothing he’s said is any weirder than things they’ve both seen in the past twenty-four hours.
“These two realities,” Tucker says. “Tell me about the other one.”
“I can’t. I can think of it. Sometimes I even kind of see it. But only in small bursts. When I try to pin it down, though, when I try to talk about it, everything goes fuzzy.” Chase squeezes his eyes shut, and a tear escapes. He wipes it away angrily.
“It’s okay,” Daisy says. “You don’t have to—”
Chase clenches his hands and then blurts out, “He doesn’t want to hurt anyone. I know that.”
“Ben?”
“No! Raum. He messes around with our heads sometimes, but this isn’t happening because he wants to hurt anyone.” When Daisy casts a skeptical glance down at her bandaged hands, he adds, “I don’t think that was Raum. That was the thing with white eyes. The one who said all of this was my fault. Could we just go? Please? I’m tired. It’s been a long day.”
And so they head to Tower Farm. Daisy is clearly nervous about her sister, and what energy Chase had seems to have drained away. Tucker listens to the lulling road noise and glances at the boy in the rearview mirror.
About halfway to the farm, Chase’s expression changes. He had been staring out the window, but now he’s facing straight ahead. His eyes are moving erratically, as if he’s looking at something other than the backseat, the same way he’d appeared in Martha Yarn’s backyard. And his hands are again clutched in front, propped on his knees, with just his thumbs moving.
Tucker nudges Daisy and motions for her to look.
“Should we…” she begins, whispering.
He shakes his head. “Just keep an eye on him. I need to watch the road.”
And he does need to watch—he’s already missed the turnoff to Tower Farm. Cursing under his breath, he backs up, then puts the car into drive and turns onto the nondescript dirt road. It’s little more than a path, really, with tall rows of corn bordering each side. Off in the distance, a pale red-orange mirage of light hovers over the stalks.
A few hundred yards down, Tucker hits a rut hard enough to throw Chase forward. He’s glad the kid has his seatbelt on, because he’s almost deadweight. His head whips forward, but the jolt doesn’t snap him out of the trance.
Different sneakers.
He’s not sure where that stray thought came from, but it’s accompanied by a thwacking noise, and then a bounce, like someone playing ping-pong. Chase hasn’t been anywhere he could have changed shoes. Tucker doesn’t even remember specifically noticing the kid’s sneakers, and he can’t really see them now in the dim light of the backseat. But thinking about Chase’s expression, and yes, his shoes, gives Tucker the same weird sense of déjà vu that hit him in the lobby of the Hart earlier, as Daisy stared mutely at the carpet.
His tires graze the edge of the corn, the husks whacking against the side mirror. He directs his attention back to the road and the red haze that’s growing brighter up ahead.
A few minutes later, Daisy taps one bandaged finger against his arm and nods up at the rearview mirror. Chase seems to be back in the house, so to speak. His eyes are focused now, and he’s once again looking outside the window.
“Hey, man,” Tucker says. “You okay? It was kind of like you left us for a while.”
“I guess I dozed off,” Chase says.
Daisy’s eyebrows go up, but she doesn’t say anything. Tucker agrees. That wasn’t dozing off. He’s not sure what it was, but it wasn’t sleep.
The rows of corn fall away now, emptying out into a large clearing. Dozens of cars and trucks are parked on the hard-packed dirt, silhouetted by the bonfire up ahead. Except it’s not just the usual bonfire. A large statue, made completely of logs and sticks, stands in the middle of the pyre. It’s huge, maybe fifty feet tall.
“What the hell…” Daisy is staring up at the monstrosity, transfixed.
Tucker shakes his head. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s supposed to be a Viola City Viking?”
“No,” she says. “I know what it is. It’s a wicker man. You’ve seen it, right? British, 1973. The remake was awful, but the original is good. Really good.”
“Was it on The List?” When she nods, Tucker says, “Must be one I couldn’t find.”
She shakes her head, puzzled. “Until a few minutes ago, it just looked like a bonfire. A big one, sure, but…”
Tucker had been thinking the same thing, but he says, “Maybe the corn was blocking our view?”
Chase looks up at it warily. “It’s not going to come marching toward us like the Stay-Puft guy in Ghostbusters, is it?”
“Not if we’re following the movie script,” Daisy tells him.
Tucker parks the cruiser at the very edge of the clearing. Normally, he wouldn’t come down here at all. He’d just patrol the road so that he could pull over any cars that were weaving. Unless they were totally blitzed, he’d offer them a safe ride home. His goal was a safe Halloween, ideally one without any confrontations that left him no choice but to write the kid up.
Daisy has her door open almost before the car stops. She takes off running through the rows of dusty cars and dented trucks toward the crowd gathered around the fire. He wants to follow, but Chase, who has just gotten out of the car, turns away from the fire, looking off into the distance.
Tucker follows the boy’s gaze toward the Grimshaw house up on the hill. The dark shape has taken on an eerie blue glow in the moonlight.
“If you’re worried about your brother,” Tucker says, “he’s probably back by now and bragging about how brave he was to the rest of the team. Let’s go see if we can find him.”
Chase doesn’t look convinced, but he follows Tucker toward the fire. Music blares from unseen speakers mounted on someone’s truck. Tucker can’t place the music at first. He’s not even sure it is music. It sounds like a bunch of angry bees, or maybe static. How could you even dance to that? But if the gyrating shadows are any indication, they’re dancing. He feels out of place and wishes he’d thought to change out of his uniform.
Despite the racket, Tucker can still hear the tall stalks whispering in the wind. He thinks of an old movie, Children of the Corn. Chase looks a little like the kid from that movie. Ivan, or maybe it was Isaac. Is He-Who-Walks-Between-The-Rows watching them?
They catch up with Daisy at the edge of the bonfire. She circles the crowd until she spots her sister at the far side, dancing with Chad Voorhees, quarterback for the Howlers. Both of them are decked out in fifties greaser costumes. Dani is wearing a blonde wig and a leather catsuit that shows off each and every curve. Tucker wonders how she’s able to breathe, let alone dance, in the thing. Her body is pressed against Chad’s, moving together as if they were a single organism.
Daisy lets out a sigh, managing to sound both relieved and annoyed. She takes a few brisk steps forward, then halts when Dani turns to face them. For a split second, Dani’s face is transformed by the glare of the fire. It’s almost a kabuki mask, and her smile is eerily reminiscent of the clip they saw at the Hart, when the camera closed in on Dani’s aged, heavily made-up face, laughing as she tormented a wheelchair-bound Daisy.
Tucker is apparently not the only one who sees the resemblance, because Daisy stops cold. He grabs her for support, and then the light shifts again. It’s just Dani, dragging Chad behind her, both of them looking like they’re about to break into a rousing chorus of “You’re the One That I Want.” And just as that thought runs through his head, the music actually does shift into a sort of generic bop with do-wahs, although he can’t really place the song.
Daisy pushes past. “Where the hell were you? You said you’d come to the show.”
“Sorry,” Dani says. “Something came up. But I see you got a ride.” She winks at Tucker, not even bothering to hide the beer she’s holding.
“Cut the shit,”
Daisy says. “You’ve been acting weird all day. I leave you a note, saying I can’t get in touch with Dad. That I’m worried. And you can’t even take a minute to stop by the theater and check in?”
Chad backs away, standing off to the side with both hands shoved into his pockets. What’s really weird, however, is the rest of the crowd. They’ve shifted toward the other side of the fire, and they’re still dancing. That could be because they spotted a cop in their midst, but it’s more like they’re just…supposed to be in the background. He can’t even make out any faces.
And they’d be gathered around by now. Some smart-ass would have made a crack about a catfight or started placing bets on which sister would win. But they’re just hanging out on the far side of the bonfire, like shadows behind a movie screen.
Dani sighs dramatically and takes a pull from her beer. “News flash, sister. The world doesn’t fucking revolve around you. I don’t have to check in with you. You’re not my mother.”
On the last word, Daisy recoils, almost as if she’s been slapped. After a moment, she gives Dani a hard, tight smile. “You’re right. And for once, I’m glad she’s not here. At least she doesn’t have to see you looking…like this.”
“Like what?” Dani says, getting right up in her sister’s face. “Like a whore? Little Miss Innocent can’t even say it. You, on the other hand, look exactly like someone who would bring a cop to a party. No offense, Tuck.”
Tucker doesn’t respond. His attention is now on the far side of the circle, where the tall corn stalks are jittering back and forth wildly. A few seconds later, Ben Rey stumbles out, trips, and falls flat on his face.
Chase runs toward him as Ben gets slowly to his feet, dusting off the front of his shirt.
Tucker considers running after the boy and pulling him back. Alarm bells are sounding in his head. Something seems off about Ben’s expression, almost as if he’s not even seeing Chase.
In the end, he doesn’t exactly run after Chase, but he does head toward the two of them, on alert. Daisy follows. Dani has drifted off again, apparently reabsorbed by the faceless crowd.