by Rysa Walker
He’s in Kyle’s apartment—no, their apartment. It’s not a party, really. Just a few friends on a Sunday evening. And yeah, they’re more Kyle’s friends than his, but then Kyle is the social one.
He’s playing his guitar, and no one’s really listening, but that’s okay. Luke is only half listening to their conversation, so it evens out, and he doesn’t mind being their background music. They’re engaged in one of their philosophical debates, tossing around questions that have no answers, about the nature of life, the nature of God, other realities. Someone mentions an article she read suggesting everything on earth is just a highly advanced computer simulation. Someone else laughs and says whoever’s running the thing must have taken a bathroom break and let his kid take over. Or maybe his dog.
Which is funny, but then one guy says if that’s true, he hopes he never finds out. And a few others chime in and agree. What would be the point of going on if nothing was real?
Kyle shakes his head, though. “I don’t think it would change anything for most people. Sure, it would be a shock at first, but then they’d just keep on playing the game. Living their lives. Taking care of the people they loved and finding whatever joy they could in living each day. Like people always do. It would be real to them as long as they were with the ones they loved.”
Luke looks up from the guitar. Smiles over at Kyle and the little girl curled up, sound asleep, with her head in his lap.
“That’s bullshit,” he says to Ben. “If we do nothing, we might as well just grab that gun from the backseat and blow our brains out. It’s the same sort of cowardice.”
Ben bristles at the word cowardice. Luke kind of expected he would, and he doesn’t really want to piss him off, so he shifts to the other point. The reason he’s not willing to just sit it out. “Aali is real. In here. Because she’s real to me. And out there, she’s real to both me and Kyle.”
“Who’s Kyle?”
Luke feels like an ice cube has just slipped down his throat and into his stomach. This is the hardest part, he thinks. Just say it.
“He’s a law student. We met in Atlanta.”
“You mean, here in the game? Or out…there?”
“Here. There. Both, I guess?” He sighs. “I wasn’t quite honest about what happened at the Pinewood. I was there with Kyle. He’s the one who vanished. I think maybe we’re married in the other reality.”
There’s a long pause, and then Ben says, “Okay.”
“Okay? That’s it?”
“Well, yeah. What else do you want me to say?”
“Don’t know. I thought you might be shocked. Disgusted, maybe. Or hell, at least surprised.”
“To be honest, I thought you were at least bisexual. That’s one reason I was surprised when you wound up with Carly. Didn’t seem like a good fit to me.”
Luke feels himself tense up. What had he done wrong? What had given him away? But he’s not sure why it even matters.
“Well, you were right about me and Carly. In more ways than one.”
“So…you made the same mistake out there, too? With Carly, I mean.”
Luke shrugs. “I must have if Aaliyah exists. Only…like I said, she’s older. And I’m pretty sure she was with me and Kyle, so maybe Dani was right. Maybe Carly found someone else over there, too. Someone who didn’t want to be saddled with a kid.”
That feels mostly right to Luke, but also a little off. Like his memory is purposefully leaving out some piece of the puzzle. But he doesn’t have time to ponder it, because they’re turning into his driveway. And looking at the house at the end of the drive, he’d rather be pretty much anywhere else.
He’s already looked here for Aali. As soon as his boss kicked him out, he headed home to find them gone. And the house wasn’t simply empty. It had that stale smell a place gets when it hasn’t been lived in for a while.
“Come on,” Ben says when Luke seems to hesitate. “Might as well get this over with.”
“I don’t think they’ve come back,” Luke says. “The place is dark. Carly never turns out a goddamn light.”
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe they’re not here. But we need Carly’s car, so we need her keys. Your truck isn’t going to roll itself out of the ditch, and mine apparently vanished into thin air.”
Luke knows Ben is right. Hell, he’s pretty much repeating his own words back at him. But he’s still on edge.
The wind whistles across the yard, sending a cluster of leaves scurrying across the gravel drive. Off in the distance, Luke sees the forest, and he’s struck by the fact that most of the trees are bare. Yesterday, as he sat on the deck looking out at those same woods, the leaves had just turned to orange. Someone must have hit fast-forward, because it looks more like the end of November than the beginning.
He pulls the Sorento well past the tree where the white-eyed crow was hiding yesterday. The crow had dive-bombed him, ripping his shirt. He’s relieved to see there are no birds perched on his roof, even if there are thousands of the damn things circling above.
Ben grabs his rifle from the backseat, and they head toward the house. Luke is unnerved to see that the front door is ajar. He’s positive he locked up when he left to meet Kyle the night before. He nudges the door open a bit more with his foot and steps inside. Nothing happens when he flicks the light switch, so he and Ben stand in the living room silently for a moment, waiting for their eyes to adjust to the dark.
“Carly’s keys are probably on the kitchen counter,” Luke says. “Go ahead and grab them if you want. But I have to check upstairs first. Nobody’s here. I know that. But…I’ve gotta check.”
“Sure,” Ben says. “Let’s go.”
They creep upstairs and pause on the landing. Luke’s bedroom door is straight ahead. The room is empty and, unlike yesterday, impossibly neat. The bed is made. All of the clothing on the floor is gone.
The door to Aali’s room is shut. That’s weird, because he’s positive it was open before. In fact, it’s always open. There are few things in life that he and Carly agree on when it comes to the baby, but neither of them likes closing that door.
“Something wrong?” Ben asks, his hand sliding toward the shotgun slung across his shoulder.
“Maybe.”
When Luke opens the door, he can almost feel Aali’s presence. Her crib is against the wall—empty, of course. He steps inside and rests his hands on the wooden railing.
Where are you, baby girl?
Yesterday, the room smelled stale, like no one had been there in weeks. But now, it smells like Aali. Lavender. Johnson & Johnson Bedtime Bath. A faint whiff of her diaper rash cream. But mostly, just her.
“Aali?” Luke turns in a complete circle, taking in the room. The open closet door with only a few baby clothes hanging from their tiny hangers. The wallpaper with zoo animals running amok above the chair rail. Ben, standing in the doorway, looking helpless.
The crib again, still empty.
Luke stares at the ruffled bedding. “This may sound crazy. I can smell her now and…yesterday I couldn’t. Yesterday, it was like she’d never been in this room. She’s been here since then. Jesus fucking Christ, she was here, and I missed her.” He leans against the wall, and tears begin streaming from his eyes.
This is what the end of the world looks like.
“Hey, man, it’s okay,” Ben says. “She was here. That’s good, right? Maybe Dani was wrong about Carly running off with that guy.”
Luke is far less worried about Carly running off with some guy than he is about her being the Elvira-Mistress-of-the-Dark wannabe he encountered in the graveyard last night. If she ran off, the baby is probably okay. If she’s a zombie—dead or alive or something in between—then who knows?
“Hell,” Ben says, “Dani may have lied just to rile you up. Wouldn’t be the first time she’s done something like that. We just need to keep looking.”
Luke nods and follows Ben down the stairs. He grabs the keys, which were on the counter just as he’d thought they�
��d be, but there’s a strange new addition to the keychain. Before, the ring had held the house keys along with an electronic key fob for the Acura, a flashlight that’s not much bigger than the key fob, and one of those squishy rubber puff balls so Carly could find the keyring when it fell to the bottom of her purse. But now, there’s a third ornament on the ring—a crude little statue of broken twigs, wrapped in brown twine.
“Where the fuck did this come from?” Luke asks.
“It’s that wicker man,” Ben answers. “From the bonfire last night. You know, the bonfire I’m supposed to tell Carly you were at if I ever see her.”
“If what Dani said is true, I don’t think we need to worry about you covering for me. And after what I saw in that graveyard last night, I’m gonna say that if you ever see Carly again, you might want to run.” He stops, dropping the keys back on the counter like they shocked him. “No, no, no, no. The wicker man. Isn’t that the thing Daisy said they used for…”
Luke can’t finish the sentence. All he can see is a giant version of this bundle of sticks on that keychain. He can almost smell the wood burning, see the smoke rising, and hear his little girl screaming inside while dozens of high school students dance around the flame.
He punches his fist into the wall.
“Calm down.” Ben moves forward and picks the keys up. “We’ll go check, but there were people everywhere last night. They’d have heard a baby. And I mean, I’ll be the first to admit I don’t like her, but…you know Carly wouldn’t do that.”
But Luke doesn’t know that. Maybe in the real world. But here? Who the hell knows?
“You drive,” he says. “I can’t.”
A line of crows is waiting on the roof of the shed over the car. Five of them. They begin to caw as they approach, although it sounds more like a cackle to Luke. A very human cackle.
It must sound that way to Ben, too. He stops a few feet away from the shed, whips the shotgun up to his shoulder, and aims at the crows. “Something strike you as funny?”
“Whoa,” Luke says. “Probably not a good idea, man. They’ve got friends.” He nods up at the cloud of black feathers in the sky above them.
The birds begin to caw again when Ben lowers the rifle, louder now.
Luke slides into the car and slams the door. He can still hear the crows laughing as they drive away.
Four
BEN
Ben sees the wicker man as soon as he rounds the curve approaching Tower Farm. The tall altar of sticks and firewood stands at the base of the hill on the other side of the cornfield. Beyond the statue, at the very top of that hill, is the Grimshaw house.
The house continues to lurk in his field of vision as he maneuvers the car along the dirt path between the rows of corn. It occasionally dips below the tall corn stalks and pops up again like a foul black jack-in-the-box.
His gut tells him that he shouldn’t even bother with the farm. He knows Chase is up there.
But the farm is more or less on the way. It’s Luke’s car. Plus, Chase is twelve, and Aali is a baby. If she’s somewhere on her own—or even with Carly, from what Luke has said—she can’t take care of herself. Which serves as a guilty reminder that Chase had to take care of himself last night. Had to take care of both of them, since Ben let Ralph get the upper hand.
As they draw closer, the wicker statue blocks his view of the Grimshaw place. The thing reminds Ben of a taller, thinner version of the gingerbread man from the Shrek films. Or maybe a more sinister version of that Groot character.
Something about it is off, and it tugs at the edges of his mind as they drive closer. When it finally sinks in, he slams on the brakes.
Luke jerks forward against his seatbelt. “Why’d you stop? What’s wrong?”
“That statue was burning last night. I saw it in flames as I ran down the hill from the Grimshaw place.”
“You sure? Maybe it was just the bonfire, and you were seeing the flames through the wicker.”
He hears a note of hope in Luke’s voice. If it was never on fire and Aali is inside, then maybe she’s okay. But he’s not going to lie to him.
“No. They were both burning. I didn’t exactly stay to see it turn to ash…but it was definitely on fire when we left. Now it’s not even scorched. It’s regrown an arm, too.”
“Okay. So it was burning, and now it’s fine. Not the weirdest thing either of us has seen in the past twenty-four hours,” Luke says. “Not even close.”
That’s true. It’s barely even the weirdest thing about the wicker statue. Like Daisy said back at Tucker’s place, it strained the imagination to believe this thing could ever have been built by the crowd that puts the annual bonfire together. Party prep usually involved a few dozen people showing up early to drink beer and gather sticks from the woods nearby, along with dried corn husks from the fields to help get the fire going. The final step was syphoning off a bit of gas from someone’s tank if the weather had been at all damp. You could always spot the bonfire prep crew for the year, because they were already drunk off their asses when the party was just getting started. No way those dipshits built this thing.
So. None of what you’re seeing right now is real, Ben. None of it. Focus on what’s important. On the only thing that’s real.
Ben puts the car into park and pulls out his list of not-real things. He hadn’t even jotted this monstrosity down. Minor crazy seems to be blending into the atmosphere, much like those damn birds swooping around in the sky above the cornfield. They’re not normal. Ben’s pretty sure they’re not even real. But a massive crow cloud is low-level, penny-ante crazy compared to white-eyed demons, Freddy Krueger impersonators in the locker room, zombie ex-wives, or giant insects climbing out of movie screens.
“You got a pen or pencil in here?”
Luke arches an eyebrow, but he finds a pen in the console and hands it to him. Ben writes Wicker Man under the last entry, Birds. Then he holds the pen and paper out to Luke.
“There’s room if you want to write yours down. All the not-real stuff. So we don’t forget.”
Luke shakes his head. “Don’t need it. I’m not gonna forget anything I’ve seen in the past day. I’ll be lucky if I don’t dream about it for the rest of my damn life. And if there’s some sort of reboot to this little game, I’m pretty sure that envelope will be back on the kitchen table or wherever you grabbed it from without a single word written on the back.”
Even though he knows Luke is probably right, Ben gives him an annoyed look as he shoves the envelope back into his pocket. “Seem to remember you saying something about how we couldn’t just do nothing. Even though all of this might not be real. Even though this whole thing might get rebooted or whatever. Well, this list is me doing something.”
“Fair point,” Luke says as Ben begins driving toward the statue again. “But I don’t need a list.”
When they reach the edge of the clearing, Ben parks between the wicker creature and the barn. Last night, both sets of double doors on the barn had been propped open, and he vaguely remembers seeing people inside as he hurtled down the hill toward the bonfire. It was more shapes of people, really, silhouetted against the raging fire as they danced to some weird techno-shit he wouldn’t even call music.
Someone had left the double doors on this side open to the wind, but the doors on the other side are closed, and the place is pitch dark. It’s not a quiet darkness, though. The space seems to churn and move, at least to his tired eyes.
Chase isn’t in there. He doesn’t think they’ll find Aali in the barn here, either. In fact, he has a very strong feeling that this search for the baby is nothing more than a snipe hunt. She probably isn’t real. Luke even said she’s older outside the game, so how can this version be real?
Then Chase’s words from yesterday pop into his head. You’re supposed to be turning thirty-four. That pokes a pretty sizeable hole in his logic.
And even though Ben’s mind keeps inching in that direction, he’s not going to start down the ro
ad of questioning whether he himself is real. Because if he’s not real, none of this matters. Like he said to Luke earlier, if that’s the case, they might as well quit. Curl up into a ball and wait for the damn game to regenerate him or turn him into one of those stupid Pokémon creatures.
Focus on what’s real.
As soon as he puts the car into park, Luke pops the trunk, pulls the keys from the ignition, and gets out of the car. A flashlight is tucked behind the jack inside the trunk. He tosses it to Ben, who clicks it on. Luke does the same with the little LED flashlight on the end of Carly’s keychain. Both beams are bright and clear, the little keychain light almost blinding.
“Should we check the barn first?” Ben asks, even though he doesn’t think either of the kids are in there. They have to start somewhere, however, and a barn seems like the sort of place someone might abandon a baby. But there’s something about the blackness inside the place that he doesn’t like, even with their flashlights in hand.
“I guess,” Luke says. “Not even sure how we’d get into that wicker thing.”
Ben points around to the side of the barn. “There are doors in the back. They were open last night. Maybe we can get a little sunlight in there.”
“A little is about all we’ll get.” Luke casts a wary eye upward. “Not much coming through the bird screen right now. But opening up a second exit seems like a good idea to me.”
When they get around back, however, they find the doors padlocked. Why would someone lock the back and leave the front doors wide open?
It makes no sense from a practical standpoint. But it makes perfect sense if the place is a trap.
“It’s a trap,” Luke says, echoing his thoughts.
So they head back around to the front, and Ben starts walking toward the wicker man. Luke, however, heads toward the open barn doors.
Ben grabs his shoulder. “What are you doing, man? You said it yourself. It’s a trap.”
“Yeah. So if you’re setting a trap, where do you put the bait? Inside the fucking trap. If that is a trap intended for me, then there’s only two things they could use as bait. Aali or Kyle. And either way, I have to go in to save them. Chase could be in there, too, you know…”