The Unwelcome

by Jacob Steven Mohr

  “Kaity…” Her mouth barely moved to form the words. “I… I don’t understand.”

  “I warned you,” came the reply in a tight breathless voice. “I told you what was going to happen.” Kaity’s eyes finally met hers, but they seemed not to see her, looking through her, filling up with red as well. “What do you all want from me? Didn’t I say this would happen? Didn’t I tell you what he was going to do?”

  Without warning, she turned, balled her fist, and struck at a sheaf of pine branches hanging close to her head. Her first blow flailed pathetically through the empty space between the needles, and she struck them again and again, grunting with effort.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” she repeated with every whiffling blow. “Didn’t I warn you? What do you want from me? What do you want?”

  “Kaity, stop,” Alice cried out in desperation.

  But then came a horrible sound: Kaity’s choking, sobbing laugh seemed to trickle out of her like sewage from a rusting pipe. Her face pinched up, flushed with cold, her jaw tight and her teeth clenched together in a rictus of mirth, but all Alice could see were her glassy eyes—dark and smooth, like a doll’s eyes. And she could see the hunting rifle, cradled under her friend’s arm, the barrel shaking as Kaity shook. Alice looked away, but there was only Cormac rotting in the gravel and the empty, bloody space where his head should have been. Even in the depths of their revelry the night prior, before things had soured, Kaity did not laugh like that. She had never laughed like that.

  Alice had never heard a human being make a noise like that before at all.

  She shook herself, shivering. No—she wouldn’t allow herself to think like that. The fear, the cold, the fatigue from the hike, it was turning the inside of her head to candy-floss, scrambling her thoughts, stretching them thin… Kaity was her friend, wasn’t she? Kaity was trying to protect her. If Lutz had left this for them to find, it had to be a message for her, not Alice. You’re next. This was what she’d prepared herself for, wasn’t it? What she’d been dreading these past months?

  Wasn’t this what she’d prayed would happen?

  Don’t deny it, spoke a voice from the bottom of Alice’s mind. You wanted this—to believe it was a monster that took Kaity from you, instead of a man. That’s easier, isn’t it? A monster you could fight and beat and kill, and take his head back to your friend on a dish. And when you did, even while you were wiping his blood off your sword, she’d be so goddamn grateful that—

  Again, she shook herself, banishing the thoughts. Her phone buzzed three times—a missed message. She thrust a mittened hand down into her parka pocket. A text from Riley: see you soon. So they’d heard the car horn too. Well, that was good. She and Ben would be back soon, and it would be so good to see Ben now. Good to share this abominable feeling with another person—for even though Kaity was close by her, now leaning against a tree with her arms wrapped to the elbows around herself, the feeling that she was utterly alone in this wilderness would not stop pawing her.

  Just when the thought occurred to her that perhaps she should warn her friends about what they would encounter upon their return, Ben came crashing through the tree-line on the opposite end of the lot, hollering her name.

  “Alice!” At first he appeared not to see her, scanning first the porch, then the clearing itself, his eyes unfocused. “Are you hurt? Where’s Kait? I heard screaming, and…”

  His voice dropped away as his gaze fell to the ground. Alice watched his lips move, forming indecipherable phrases—perhaps a prayer, or something like it.

  “Oh, God,” he managed to murmur at last, almost inaudible at that distance.

  Then he pitched forward and emptied his breakfast out onto the gravel at his feet.

  Riley emerged next, panting from the run, so the howl of terror that flew from her lips escaped half-formed, an aborted wheeze crawling from her lungs. A host of emotions flashed across her face—horror, confusion, disgust, fury. She tried to scream again, and then again, but no sound emerged at all. So instead she brushed past Ben, still bent forward and retching horribly, and rushed forward to kneel beside the corpse.

  “Don’t touch it!” Kaity cried out, pushing past Alice to join the others in the clearing. But it was too late. Riley was nearly on top of the body, pulling at one splayed arm as though she would turn him onto his back, both hands already slick with blood.

  “What happened?” she screamed up at Kaity.

  Kait regarded her stolidly. “I think it’s fairly obvious what happened.”

  Riley sent up a yowl, and Kaity stalked away towards the second vehicle in the lot, a white Jeep Grand Cherokee with a blue stripe painted nose-to-tail along the hood and across the roof to the back hatch. “Hood’s warm,” she remarked, laying a palm to the metal. “He hasn’t been here long. Lutz was here—maybe minutes ago. We can still catch him.”

  “But how?”

  Alice almost clapped a hand over her mouth. The sound of her own voice frightened her—she thought the sight of Cormac’s headless, naked bulk had killed it away. She forced herself to take one step forward, then another, advancing slowly across the lot towards the body until it stretched out before her, limp and massive, like a beached whale. Cormac could have been over six feet, she thought. Even without the head. Maybe close to seven.

  Almighty Christ—it was already starting to stink.

  “How? How what?” Ben asked, wiping sick and spittle off his chin.

  “How did Lutz… get him?” she replied. She could not make herself say ‘kill ’. “How could he? We said he could only control one of us. And how could he possibly do… this?”

  She gestured vaguely to the corpse. Riley wailed, swatted blood off her hands, wailed again, but nobody answered. Kaity kept inspecting the Jeep, circling it, peering into fogged windows and putting probing fingers under the lip of the hood.

  “Engine’s cooked,” she remarked, heaving the hood up and peeking down beneath it. “Same as the other one. That’s why he had to—”

  “Urm… Guys?”

  Ben circled the station wagon, knelt out of sight, came up with something balanced in his hands. Alice looked, and quickly looked away again: the teeth of the hacksaw were stained in blood, but worse were the pale chunks of flesh and skin nocked in the corners of the saw, bunched like sheets piled at the foot of the bed. Instead she focused on her boyfriend’s face, but the disgust and anguish painted there was almost as horrible as the sight of the blood and offal on the blade of the saw.

  “It’s mine,” he said in a sickly voice. “I… I brought it for firewood. I didn’t know how much we’d have, or if the heat would work. I… I thought…”

  His jaw kept moving several moments more, but his lips formed no words, only flapping like a puppet’s mouth with a hand inside. The hacksaw slipped from his blood-slick fingers—Alice heard it clatter against the gravel over Riley’s thick, wet sobs.

  “I think he made him do it,” he said at last. “He took the saw, and…”

  “Don’t say it.” Riley lurched to her feet, wobble-legged, almost drunken in her movements. “Don’t you dare say those fucking words, Benjamin Alden. You’re the one who didn’t want him here. I don’t want to hear you talk about him.”

  Ben stiffened, revulsion spinning swiftly into anger. “You’re right,” he said. “You’re the one that wanted him here. And look what happened to him when he arrived.”

  “You son of a bitch—”

  Riley advanced on Ben with a snarl, her fists raised, but Kaity cut them off with a shrill whistle through her teeth. One by one they turned to her—she was sitting cross-legged on the hood of Cormac’s jeep, the winter sun over and behind her. In that light her face was little more than a black spot coming out of the sun, but Alice thought she caught something almost disdainful in the lift of her head and the queenly arch of her back.

  “Do I have your attention now,” she said.

  They all stared, but Kaity looked away from them, the fingers of her right hand drum
ming against the Jeep’s hood. The rifle lay across her lap, the barrel pointed off into the trees. Alice thought of an old soldier, staring off into a bloody, booming past, recalling various frantic, kinetic terrors with cold regard. A soldier, yes—a soldier, or a stone idol. Something unmovable. Something ancient. Only an image, an emissary of a greater, unknowable whole.

  “You knew what he could do,” she said, still staring impassively out towards the road. “You knew what he wanted. What all of you mean to him now. And I told you what it would take to stop him. Did you think there wouldn’t be blood by the end of this?”

  “You knew this would happen?” Riley scuffed her heel in the gravel, pointing one manicured finger at Cormac’s body. “You knew he’d…”

  “I didn’t know he was coming here,” Kaity shot back, her head whipping around so quickly that her hood flew off. “I’m not the one that gave him the address. But you saw the blood on the ball and on the car. Where do you think he got it? He’s already hurt somebody else—we just haven’t found that corpse yet.”

  She slid down off the hood of the Jeep, hoisting the rifle in her arms. All three others jumped a step back, Alice included. She could feel something stirring within her—not fear, there was plenty of that already, but a deeper dread, clear and cold like snowmelt. She still could not see Kaity’s face. It was a black, shapeless shadow framed by her dark hair.

  “This doesn’t change anything,” she continued, her voice beginning to wobble slightly. “We still know he’s here. And he’s close. If we stick together this time, maybe we can—”

  “Shut your mouth,” Ben growled.

  Kaity coughed, shook hair out of her face. “What did you say?” she said.

  “You heard what I said.”

  Alice gaped at him—his eyes were opened so wide they seemed to bulge, like he was in a trance. “I don’t want to hear another one of your fucking speeches,” he uttered. “A guy just died here—doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  For a moment, Kaity didn’t speak. “I didn’t know him,” she said, a shrug in her voice.

  “None of us knew him!” Ben waved his hands at the rest of the group. “Nobody except for Riley. Have a little fucking humanity, huh? He’s dead. Your ex-boyfriend killed him.”

  He flapped his hands as though he were drying them, pacing backwards a few steps towards the cabin, then back again.

  “Tell me something,” he said. “If you know so much about this—how’d he kill him? You said he was controlling one of us already. Do you expect us to believe Lutz talked him into, what, into sawing his own head off?”

  Riley gagged, clapping a hand over her mouth as she glared at him, but Ben didn’t even look her way. “I mean it,” he insisted. “Tell the class—how’d he make it happen?”

  Again Kaity was silent. Her hands twisted around the rifle, white-knuckled. Alice looked from her face to Ben’s and back, feeling her heart shrinking into her chest like an eel vanishing down a hole. She wanted to tell Ben to stop, to beg him to stop—but another part of her wanted to hear the answer. Another part of her wanted to know for certain. Strange anger was rising in her gorge whose source she could not trace. But it felt old, older than herself, older than the hundreds of trees swaying in the cold wind around them.

  It was old, and it demanded satisfaction.

  “I’ll tell you what I think,” Ben said, his voice pitching up wildly. “I think you’re wrong. I think he let us go a long time ago. We split up for forty minutes—he would have been alone with one of us all that time. Why didn’t he attack then? I say…” He shrugged, an expansive gesture. “I say he wasn’t there. That’s how he tagged Cormac. That’s how he took care of the Jeep. It’s more important to him to keep us here than to kill us. It’s all some kind of game to him—him, and whoever he’s working with.”

  “Whoever he’s working with,” Kaity parroted. The shadow on her face squirmed. “All right, then. If you’re so smart. Who’s his man on the inside, then—me? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

  Ben shrugged, an awful sneer carved across his face. “You’re obsessed with him,” he stated. “He doesn’t need to touch you to control you. You stripped the car. You put that volleyball on a spike. You sent us on a wild goose chase out into the woods—”

  “Ben, this is insane,” she interrupted. The shadow had melted away, but Alice could barely recognize the girl beneath: Kaity’s face seemed to be twisting in on itself, her mouth corkscrewing downwards in disgust and rage, her eyes so wide and wet that they shone.

  She looks like January Kaity, she realized. The Kaity on my doorstep.

  The Kaity that Lutz sent me.

  “If what… if that’s true,” she was saying, her voice like creaking wood. “Then I led you away… so Lutz could kill Cormac. Then it’s like… it’s like I killed him.”

  “Well. You are the only one holding a loaded gun.”

  Kait coughed again, and her grimace flashed quickly into a pained grin and back again. “Christ, you’re serious,” she said. “Christ, you’re…” Cough, cough. “Guys, I would never…”

  Her voice failed, and for the next few seconds, the only sounds she could make were panicked wheezes. “C’mon. No, c’mon, really. Tell me you don’t believe it.”

  She looked from face to face in turn, her head whipping back and forth so quickly Alice thought her neck had to break, and she longed to comfort her, to tell her, Of course. Of course we know you couldn’t… But the anger stopped her. Strange, alien anger that clamped her tongue and sewed her lips shut. Anger made her wait and see, to hold out for a terrible miracle...

  “Alice?” Kaity said. “Riley?”

  “You don’t care that he’s dead,” Riley said suddenly. “Lutz got him because of you—and you don’t even care. I can see it on your face. Goddammit, I tried to help you…” She kneaded her temples with her palms, her breath seeming to catch in her lungs. “What did we ever do to you, Kaitlyn?” she continued. “What did the world ever do to you? I can’t even see you anymore. I mean, I’m not even supposed to be here…”

  She trailed off, her hands falling helplessly to her sides, her face turning a sickly lime-green. “I didn’t want to say anything,” she continued at last. “But last night—I saw you get up. You came right past me, you had to, to reach the door. You had the gun. You didn’t come back for an hour, and when you did, I heard the sink running. I heard you scrubbing something off. I didn’t want to say anything,” she repeated. “I really wanted to be friends with you.”

  “No. No.” Kaity was shaking her head, slow movements, her eyes dead in their sockets. “No, tell them I wouldn’t. I, I sleepwalk. Alice knows. Alice’s seen it…” She was hugging the rifle to her now, cuddling it against her like a favorite plush bear.

  Ben stepped forward, his mouth set in a hard line. “Give me the gun, Kait,” he intoned. “It’s over.” And to the others, out of the corner of his mouth: “Get on either side of her. Be ready to catch her if—”

  “I said no!” Kaity screamed. The words were barely words—what flew from her friend’s lips was an animal shriek, the rabbit that sees the trap’s teeth closing. “Alice, tell them. You know me. You know they’re making a mistake. Just, just talk to them.”

  Now the mask broke. Now the tears rushed down, smearing down her face so that it glistened under the shadow of her hair. Her whole face seemed to split open, and Alice could feel tears welling in her own eyes, hot tears, the kind that stung and made you blink.

  But the trap was already sprung. She opened her mouth to comfort her friend—but instead the horrible, ravenous anger seized hold of her, rushing up her throat like molten lava. And when the words came at last, they stung worse than the tears. They stung worse than anything had ever stung her before.

  “You abandoned me,” she wailed. “You abandoned my friendship—for him. Why?” She wrung her hands, tilting her head to peer under Kaity’s bangs at her tear-streaked face. “What could he possibly do for you that…”
Her breath caught in her throat as wind like razors ripped through her. “…that I couldn’t?” she continued. “Kaity, I didn’t hear from you for months. But I didn’t care. When you showed up at my door, I thought this was finished. That you’d come to your senses, that we could go back to the way things used to be.”

  Alice sniffed, wiped her eyes, stared at the back of her hand and wiped again. Her lips cracked into a misshapen, painful grin, dry and sticking from the cold. “The way things used to be,” she repeated mirthlessly. “What the fuck is that? You slept in that monster’s bed for four months. I don’t even know who you are.”

  The wind howled. The trees creaked and bent. Kait didn’t move—not at first. She blinked tears away, her breathing loud, full of snot. Her hands tightened around the barrel of the gun, her knuckles standing out pale on her hands, and as one man Ben and Riley surged forward, each grabbing hold of an arm.

  “Drop it!” Ben was saying, “Drop it!”—like he was reprimanding a dog, Alice thought. Like he was ordering a beast to heel.

  And when they got the rifle away from her and tossed her to the ground, she did not struggle or even cry out, not even when her head bounced against the gravel, opening a red seam along her right eyebrow. The blood trickled down, mixed with the tears on her face in streaks of pink and pale crimson. But no more tears flowed. Kait was silent, staring up at them, not even trembling in the cold now. If it wasn’t for the movement of her eyes and the dull gleam of the blood on her face, she might have been dead, another corpse beside the headless horror lying not fifteen feet from her.

  “Get inside,” Ben intoned, his breath fogging. “We’re done here.”