Step Closer

by Scott Cawthon

  “Goodnight, Samantha,” Susie said, but her sister didn’t respond.

  Susie shrugged and curled into a ball facing the window. She looked at the skinny curved piece of the moon that peeked into the room. Its light wasn’t bright enough to see by, but it was bright enough to make a lot of funny shadows. Two of the shadows looked like dancing hippopotamuses, and three of them combined to look like a clown riding a horse. One of them looked a little like …

  Susie closed her eyes. She listened to Samantha breathe, and she wondered if her sister had understood the drawings. Samantha hadn’t said anything before she stuffed them under the covers. Why did she even put them there?

  Outside, a dull thud sounded on the porch.

  Already?

  Susie didn’t want to leave yet. She was hoping Samantha would take another look at the drawings. She just had to figure them out!

  The thud was followed by a faint squeak—the sound of the porch swing moving. Then the thud turned into the footstep pattern Susie was so used to: Thud … tap … thud … tap.

  Why did that sound make her skin crawl?

  Why did she feel like she should know what was out there? Why did she feel like she had to know?

  Susie pushed back the covers and got out of bed as if something was pulling her from its safety. It was like one of those tractor beams she’d seen in the space movies her dad liked to watch. She had no control. She wanted to stay in the nice warm bed. But instead, she walked out of the room and down the stairs.

  At the bottom of the stairs she listened to the footsteps, and she watched a large shadow pass the dining room window. Once it passed, she trotted into the kitchen and opened the back door.

  She waited.

  Sometimes, Samantha would come and slam the back door, and they’d go back to bed. But not tonight.

  Tonight, Susie could only stand there … listening to the footsteps come closer and closer. At the last minute, just before the steps came around the corner, she closed the kitchen door.

  She tried to go back upstairs, but she couldn’t. Instead, her feet took her to the entryway.

  The house had a really big entryway, a “formal” entryway, her mom called it. She’d told Susie that, in the old days, there used to be a round table in the middle of the entryway. The table always held a vase full of flowers from the garden, but Susie’s mom had put the table away when Susie’s first walking had turned into wild running, because Susie kept bumping into the table and knocking off the vase.

  “She broke seven vases before I gave up,” Susie’s mom liked to tell people. She never said it like she was mad. It seemed to make her happy for some reason.

  Now the big entryway held only a maroon-and-navy-blue braided rug. Susie went to the middle of the rug and waited.

  When the shadows shifted outside and the shape circling the house approached the front door, Susie stepped forward and opened it.

  As Susie knew she would be, Chica stood tall and stiff outside the front door. The porch light played with Chica’s yellow body, making it look like the animatronic was breathing. Susie looked up at Chica’s pinkish-purplish eyes. Did Chica’s big black eyebrows just move?

  Susie looked down quickly. Chica’s orange feet were planted on the WELCOME mat, one foot over the W, and one foot over the M. As always, Susie hesitated. But then she did as she knew she must. She held out her hand and let Chica enclose her stiff, cold fingers over her own.

  Chica turned and walked toward the steps leading down to the leaf-covered front lawn. Susie had no choice but to go along. Now the small taps of her own footsteps joined with Chica’s. And leaves crunched under their feet as they left Susie’s house behind them.

  In hushed stillness, Samantha listened to be sure her mother was in her room. She had to listen hard because the thick walls blocked little sounds. Eventually, though, she heard a creak she recognized as her mother’s bed. She waited a few more minutes before turning on the flashlight under her covers and reaching for the drawings.

  Samantha almost didn’t need to see them. They’d been on her mind since the moment they appeared. In that time, she’d let herself admit that she knew the first picture was of her and Susie. But what did it mean?

  Tenting her sheet and blanket, she aimed her flashlight at the drawing of the little girls.

  At first, Samantha thought the flying-haired girl, Susie, held a mirror, but she quickly realized it was a magnifying glass. It looked like the one her dad used to have in his desk drawer in his office, the one he sometimes let the girls use to look at things up close. Samantha had never forgotten seeing Oliver’s wood bark up close. It was like seeing a whole other world. Susie could name things all she wanted, but Samantha would rather study them. That’s what she used the magnifying glass for—close-up study. Susie, though, used it to hunt.

  After Susie used the glass to look at a caterpillar up close, she decided to use it to find “teeny-tiny” insects in the lawn. She was sure she was going to find something no one had ever seen before. When Samantha used the glass to look at Oliver’s bark, Susie grabbed it and aimed it at a different part of his trunk. “Maybe we’ll find some elves,” she said.

  Okay, so if Susie was holding a magnifying glass, she was looking for something.

  But what? The floating baby?

  Oh. No, not a baby. The floating thing was a doll.

  Samantha frowned. If Susie was looking for a doll, there was only one doll missing.

  It had to be Gretchen. So Susie wanted her back.

  But what about the chick? What was that? Samantha didn’t understand the toothy chick.

  And what did the other drawing mean?

  Samantha aimed her flashlight at the second drawing. It was just as she remembered: three panels with the flying-haired girl walking away from a door in the first two, just the door in the third, and moons that were a little bigger in each panel. What did that mean?

  What if the moons getting bigger meant that each panel was a different day? Like tonight, tomorrow night, and the next night.

  Samantha thought about her sister, the doll, and the moons.

  She got it! Turning off the flashlight, she thought, Susie’s only going to be here for two more nights.

  She was pretty sure she had it right. But the chick … “What’s the chick there for?” she whispered.

  Susie, of course, didn’t answer, because she was gone.

  Samantha’s alarm woke her before the sun came up. Thankfully, she was a light sleeper, so it didn’t take much volume for her to hear it, and she was sure it wouldn’t disturb her mom. Her mom had trouble going to sleep, but once she was asleep, she had just as much trouble waking up. Samantha had overheard her mom telling Jeanie that she could only sleep with the help of pills. The pills seemed to make mornings really hard, and Samantha had learned not to talk to her mom before school.

  Once, Samantha had forgotten part of a school project. She and her mom were rushing around already because her mom had overslept. They had finally run out of the house and to the car, and her mom had driven only as far as the bottom of their driveway, when Samantha realized what she’d left behind in her room.

  “I have to go back,” she said.

  Her mom hit the brakes so hard Samantha’s head shot forward and back. She figured her mom would quickly drive back up to the house. Instead, her mom bent over and pounded her head several times on the steering wheel. She whispered something over and over while she did it. Samantha thought it sounded like, “I can’t do this.”

  Now Samantha laid in the dark, holding her alarm clock for several minutes. She didn’t like getting up early. Susie had been the one who always wanted to hop out of bed and start playing before the sun was up. Susie was like their dad, who said the best part of the day was just before dawn when everything was in a “state of possibility.”

  “Smell that air,” he’d say to Samantha on the few mornings he was able to talk her into getting up early. “Look at that pink light.”

&nbs
p; “It’s so pretty,” Susie would squeal.

  Not pretty enough to get up early for, Samantha thought.

  This morning, though, it wasn’t the smell or the color that got Samantha out of bed. It was what she needed to do.

  She only had two more days to find Gretchen.

  She didn’t know what would happen if she didn’t find Gretchen. She didn’t understand why a missing doll could mean so much to her dead sister. Susie was a ghost … wasn’t she? Why would a ghost want something like a doll?

  But it didn’t matter. Susie wanted it, and after what had happened to her, she deserved to get what she wanted.

  Samantha threw back the covers.

  Cold air hit her bare legs, and goose bumps prickled her skin. She ignored her desire to dive back into bed. Instead she stood, letting the thick, soft material of her blue flannel nightgown block some of the cold air. She stuffed her feet into the leather moccasin slippers Jeanie had gotten for her (Samantha didn’t like fuzzy animal slippers like Susie did), grabbed the clothes she’d laid out during the night, and trotted into the bathroom on tiptoe.

  Thankful for the little space heater that sat on a sturdy footstool by the bathroom door, Samantha turned it on and stood in front of it a couple minutes to warm up. Then she did a short version of her morning routine before getting dressed.

  After she realized what Susie’s drawings meant, Samantha had tried to stay awake long enough for her mom’s pills to work so she could start looking for Gretchen. But she kept hearing her mom’s bed creak, which meant her mom was not deeply asleep. Samantha’s eyes had started to close, so she’d set her alarm for the morning.

  When she finished in the bathroom, Samantha turned off the heater and opened the door. Stepping into the hallway, she stood on the dark-green braided runner and thought about where Susie might have hidden Gretchen.

  Samantha glanced at Susie’s closed door. She shook her head. The doll wouldn’t be in there.

  When Samantha and Susie had fought about Gretchen, Susie was as upset as she could possibly get. She wouldn’t have put the doll in her room, where Samantha could easily find it. And even if it was in there, that was going to be the last place Samantha looked. She hadn’t been in Susie’s room since that horrible night when …

  Samantha went down the hall toward the stairs. If she was going to look for the doll, she would do it in an organized way. It made sense to start at the bottom of the house and work up. Besides, on the first floor, there was less chance she’d wake her mom.

  The porch light’s pale yellow glow stretched up the stairs through the lead-glass window in the front door. The light was mottled and eerie.

  “How can glass be lead?” Susie had asked when their dad told them what the glass in the door was called.

  Samantha smiled now as she walked down the stairs. Susie was always asking questions like that. Samantha was never really sure if Susie was being funny or dumb.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Samantha looked both ways. She could go either into the dining room or the living room. Besides the kitchen, the only other rooms on the first floor were a small bathroom and her dad’s office. She doubted the doll would be in either of those rooms, because there weren’t any hiding places in there.

  She started in the dining room.

  This dining room was at least double the size of any dining room Samantha had seen on TV. She couldn’t really compare it with other people’s dining rooms because she hadn’t seen any others. She didn’t have any friends. When Susie was alive, Samantha was sometimes invited to parties that Susie went to, but she stopped going after attending a couple. They were stupid and boring, and the kids were always mean to her.

  Samantha wiped her forehead to brush away her memories. She turned on the wall switch so the light fixture over the table would come on low. The light was a big metal wheel with fake candles along its rim. Jeanie said the light fixture was “farmhouse style,” which made sense.

  “Why is it called a fixture?” Susie asked when they were little. “It doesn’t fix anything.”

  Samantha crossed to the tall, carved hutch that sat behind one side of the long, dark dining table. She opened the lower doors. The hutch was full of china and crystal—dishes and glasses their family never used. She peered behind the stacks of plates and bowls. No Gretchen.

  Moving on to the long low cabinet at the back of the room—the “sideboard,” Jeanie called it—Samantha opened all the compartments and found lots of serving platters and vases. No Gretchen.

  She went to the front of the room and opened the lid of the window seat. It was filled with tablecloths and napkins. Just to be sure, she dug under and between the stacks. No doll.

  She went into the living room next. Outside, on the street, she heard the roar of the garbage truck emptying trash cans in front of all the houses. She chewed her lower lip. Would the garbage truck wake up her mom?

  She’d better hurry.

  The living room was big and filled with puffy, comfy furniture. It was too bad they hardly used it.

  Samantha looked longingly at the long plaid sofa that faced the stone fireplace at one end of the room. Two solid burgundy loveseats joined the sofa to make a U shape. Filled in at the corners with chunky oak end tables and centering around a square green ottoman, this was the place where the family used to play games by the fire.

  At the other end of the living room was another big sofa, and a couple of recliner chairs faced a flat-screen TV. Sometimes, her mom would let Samantha watch that TV, but most of the time, she was supposed to watch shows on the computer in her room.

  Around the edges of the room, built-in oak shelves and cabinets were stuffed with books and pictures in frames. Samantha remembered Susie’s feelings about those shelves and some of the other furniture.

  “Oak?!” Susie said one day when she was about six. “Oak, like Oliver?”

  “Furniture is made from wood,” their dad said, “and wood comes from trees.”

  “So they kill trees to make furniture?” Susie squealed.

  Their parents had spent most of an hour trying to convince her the trees didn’t feel pain when they were cut down. They never succeeded. Susie was sure the trees hurt.

  Samantha started searching all the cabinets, beginning at the front corner and working clockwise around. When she didn’t find anything, she felt behind all the books on the shelves. But she could only reach the bottom three rows.

  She trotted into the kitchen pantry and got the stepladder that was kept in there. Defying her orderly plan, she searched the pantry while she was there. She found evidence that someone, other than her, had been hiding sweets: an old hardened bag of marshmallows, two half-eaten packages of chocolate chip cookies, an unopened box of old-fashioned donuts with a sell-it-by date that was a year ago, and a metal container of hard butterscotch candies that were all stuck together. But she didn’t find Gretchen.

  Dragging the stepladder back to the living room, she climbed up and down it fourteen times to look behind books and pictures. She found nothing but a lot of dust, which made her sad, because her mother used to want the house to be “spic-and-span.” She remembered how the house used to smell like lemons from the spray her mom used when she dusted. Now, it just smelled like dust.

  When she’d exhausted all the living room hiding spots, Samantha looked at the big wooden grandfather clock in the back hall. She had to get ready for school soon, and she had to wake her mom.

  Before dragging the stepladder back into the kitchen, she peeked her head into the office. The only potential hiding place here was her dad’s empty desk. She hurried in and opened all the drawers and looked in the cubbyhole where she’d once hung out by her dad’s knees when she was really small. Nothing.

  There was nothing to see in the entire room—just the desk and the empty shelves. The only other thing Samantha saw as she rushed from the room was a funny little piece of carpet stuck under the front edge of one of the shelves.

  Risking a search o
f the kitchen before waking her mom, Samantha opened one cabinet and drawer after another, feeling behind dishes, pots and pans, plastic containers, baskets, and utensils. Gretchen remained hidden.

  Samantha felt Susie’s presence as soon as she got into the minivan after school that day. How did Susie do it? Samantha was sure Susie hadn’t been around that morning, and she knew Susie was never in school.

  Samantha ignored her sister’s insistent presence and stared at the back of her mom’s messy hair. Did her mom know Susie was here?

  Samantha wondered if she should ask.

  Maybe not while her mom was driving.

  When her mom pulled into the driveway, Samantha turned to stare at Oliver, almost as if someone was making her do it. Usually, she ignored Oliver. Was Susie making her look? How?

  Oliver only had a few leaves left. Maybe she’d come out and count them before dinner. No. She had to keep looking for Gretchen.

  “Beans and franks for dinner?” her mom asked.

  Something that felt like a wave flowed through Samantha. The wave was dark and kind of oily. It wanted to cling to Samantha the way sadness had clung to her since Susie was gone.

  She thought the wave was emotion. But was it hers or Susie’s?

  Susie loved beans and franks. Was she sad that she couldn’t have any? Did they have food where she’d gone when she died?

  “Beans and franks are okay,” Samantha said. “Can we have pineapple, too?”

  In her mind, she saw Susie screw up her face in disgust. Did Susie put that image there? Samantha had always liked pineapple with beans, and Susie thought that was gross.

  Their mom gave Samantha a half smile. “Sure.”

  Susie followed Samantha as she hurried from one room to the next in search of Gretchen. Samantha had been searching for Gretchen ever since they’d gotten home. Susie’s drawings had worked!

  Unfortunately, Samantha wasn’t having any luck. This was partly because she was looking in dumb places.

  For instance, Samantha had tried to find Gretchen in the hole in Oliver’s tree trunk. Shining her light into the hole and muttering about elves, Samantha had held her breath and stuck her hand deep down inside the tree. Susie was laughing the whole time. Samantha had believed her when she’d talked about elves!