by Abe Moss
“Will they be okay?” Emmett asked.
Using the new cloth to wipe up the rest, Tyler sighed. “I hope so.”
✽ ✽ ✽
By that evening, both dogs were dead.
The next morning, Tyler and Tobie both dug graves next to Lionel’s. Much like Lionel’s burial, Mrs. Holmes was not present when they filled the graves back up with dirt.
“Stupid dogs,” Tobie said, sticking his shovel into the earth. “You’d still be alive if you didn’t eat every gross thing laying around.”
“They’re just dogs,” Clark said. “They couldn’t help it.”
“You’d think they’d know better than to eat rotten animal guts that would make them sick!”
“It wasn’t a dead animal,” Tyler said. With his shovel in one hand, he pulled Tobie’s shovel out of the dirt and propped them both against the side of the house.
“What else could it have been?”
Plainly, without feeling, Tyler said, “Poison.”
✽ ✽ ✽
Emmett couldn’t sleep that night. Not at all. He tossed and turned in an effort to shake the images which haunted him. So many of them, all unwelcome. All competing for a minute of his time…
Bodies. All kinds of bodies. Warm ones. Cold ones. Living. Dead. Naked, perspiring bodies rolling over one another in the dark. A naked body buried beneath the snow—the vacant eye of an old man staring back, frost in its eyelashes. Bodies of dogs, chests no longer rising and falling. And more bodies still… those bodies he desperately shut out…
…before this place…
He reached under his bed and dragged his bag out from under it. He zipped it open, casting a worthless glance around the dark bedroom with his tearful eyes, and dug for the necklace. Once he had it, he rolled back into his covers, whimpering softly with the stone to his lips.
“Please,” he whispered. “Please…”
Not even he knew what he begged for. Mostly he wished the images would go away. He wished his mind would be calm. He wished he could think of nothing, so long as it meant he wouldn’t have to remember anymore…
That house…
“Please come back,” he said. “Please come get me…”
That basement, and the hole they dug…
“Mom…” He pressed the stone to his lips so that he felt it against his teeth. “Please…”
The blood on their hands…
“I want to go home…”
They’re not sleeping. They’re not…
“If you can hear me… please come get me…”
He shook with sobs, tears gathering under his face against the pillow.
“I don’t care if you’re crazy. I don’t want to be here anymore. Anywhere but here… please. Please come get me, wherever you are. I don’t care. I don’t care…”
“Emmett?”
He turned in place, bed creaking, and looked over his shoulder across the room. It was Clark. He was sitting up, his face invisible in the dark.
“Were you saying something?”
“No,” Emmett said. “Why?”
Clark rubbed his face. “I was almost asleep, and I thought I heard people talking… maybe I was dreaming.”
“Clark…” Tired and upset, Emmett knew the words coming out of his mouth would sound funny in the morning. “I’m scared something bad is going to happen.”
“Like what?”
Emmett hesitated, unsure. It was just a feeling, he supposed…
“We’re all just in a funk right now,” Clark reassured. It’ll get better.”
“But Mrs. Holmes—”
“She’ll get better, too. Things will start to feel normal again. A lot of bad stuff has happened in a short time, that’s all. Soon, even Tyler will be back to—”
Emmett and Clark jolted upright as covers dumped to the floor behind them. As they looked in his direction, Tyler was already halfway across the room, storming irritably to the door. Then he was gone.
“Like I said…” Clark whispered. “Thing will get… better.”
✽ ✽ ✽
Emmett sat on the front porch one afternoon, watching as Tobie and Clark threw a frisbee back and forth in the yard, neither of them very good at catching it—or really throwing it, for that matter. Jackie and Bailey sat with Emmett as well, watching and ridiculing as needed.
The front door opened behind them. Mrs. Holmes stepped out, keys jingling in her hands. Emmett gave her the biggest smile he could muster, hoping to perhaps lighten her mood, but at the sight of him she only sighed.
“Children, please don’t sit on the steps. If I’d been in a hurry, I might have tripped over you.”
She hurried down the porch. Tobie and Clark paused their frisbee tossing as they watched her make her way to the truck parked near the corner of the house.
“Going to the store?” Tobie called.
Perhaps she hadn’t heard him. She climbed into the truck. Without a word or a wave to anyone, she started the engine, put it into gear, and slowly pulled out, passing through the yard and sloping down the road out of sight into the trees.
She was gone.
✽ ✽ ✽
The afternoon bled into the evening. The sun dipped below the horizon, leaving the yard aglow in the orange-red sunset.
It’d been over four hours and Mrs. Holmes had yet to return.
The children were in the reading room when they heard Tyler coming down the stairs, leaving the bedroom for only the second time that day. They each stopped what they were doing as he reached the bottom step. He paused there, uncomfortable at how they stared.
“She’s coming back, isn’t she?” Clark asked.
“Huh?”
“Mrs. Holmes left hours ago. She still isn’t back.”
Tyler shrugged. “She probably went to the store.”
“For four hours?”
“Maybe she ran into someone,” Tyler said. “Or got sidetracked with something else. I don’t know. Stop worrying.”
“She’ll probably be back any minute,” Jackie said optimistically, though she gazed longingly at the front windows, worried like the rest of them.
“I hope so,” Tobie said. “I’m already hungry.”
“You don’t have to wait for her. There’s food.”
“Like what?”
Emmett stayed in the reading room with Bailey while the other three joined Tyler in the kitchen pantry, deciding on what they’d make for dinner that night. Emmett leaned back, peering through the door where he could hear the others’ voices.
“Why isn’t she home yet?” Bailey asked. Then she yawned, big and wide.
“Probably something came up. Like Tyler said.”
Emmett couldn’t help yawning, too. Bailey, lying on her stomach, put her head on the floor and closed her sleepy eyes.
From the sounds of things in the other room, they would be having macaroni and cheese for dinner that night.
✽ ✽ ✽
“Hey, dinner’s ready.”
Emmett opened his eyes. Bailey was no longer lying next to him. He was the only one left in the reading room. Looking up, he saw Jackie bent over him, smiling.
“Is she back?” he asked. “Mrs. Holmes?”
Jackie frowned and shook her head.
Emmett sat up. He looked to the front door, where the windows were dark with night.
He followed Jackie into the kitchen. The others were just getting seated. Clark handed out plates while Tyler carried a large bowl to the table, with what Emmett recognized as a spaghetti spoon in his hand. It was then the aroma of the pasta sauce hit him, warm and tomatoey.
“I thought we were having macaroni and cheese?” Emmett said, taking his seat between Tobie and Bailey toward the end of the table.
“We were,” Tobie said, “But then these princesses here…” He gestured to Clark and Jackie sitting across from them. “…changed their minds at the last second and now we’re having spaghetti instead.”
“I like spaghetti!” Bail
ey exclaimed.
Tyler served spaghetti onto their plates—steaming hot. Mrs. Holmes had made it a few times before and this smelled just the same. Emmett hadn’t realized how hungry he was until he had a plate of hot food in front of him. He looked around and saw none of the others were wasting time getting started, either.
“She’s still gone?” he asked the rest of the table, knowing the answer but hoping for a comforting explanation all the same. There would be none, of course.
“Still gone,” Tobie said, licking sauce from his lips.
“We think she’s with Eileen,” Jackie said.
“You do?”
“We think she left to go talk to her,” Clark said. “Maybe they’ve been talking all day… making up.”
Tyler was especially quiet. He spooled his spaghetti on his fork in an endless circle, spooling and spooling long after he’d already wrapped all the noodles he could around the fork’s prongs.
“Or maybe,” Tobie said, “she finally got tired of this depressing house and decided to go live somewhere else.”
“Tobie,” Jackie said reproachfully.
“What? She avoids us every day. She probably knows none of us can ever look at her the same. So she ran away…”
“She wouldn’t just leave us here,” Jackie insisted.
As the rest of the table continued talking heatedly, Emmett simply ate and listened—something he and Bailey had in common. Her mouth was a saucy mess. She took another bite, eyes bulging wide at the sound of all their chatter. Tyler ate with little interest in their squabble. He sighed heavily, likely irritated by just the sound of it…
As different as the house seemed, some things never changed.
At the end of the table, Emmett could see the front door from where he sat. Without the dogs, the rug there appeared especially bare. Outside, the yard was black against the window glass. He thought they should turn the porch lights on, for when Mrs. Holmes did come back, whenever that would be…
Just then, something in the window grabbed Emmett’s attention. Something glorious and hopeful which filled him instantly with giddy glee. A bright light swept through the trees in the clearing. Headlights.
He turned to the others, still tangled in their argument—now a completely different argument he couldn’t have recognized if he tried.
“Guys,” he said. But they didn’t hear him. “You guys.”
He looked to the window again, wishing they’d pay attention because if they saw what he did, it would end their fight in an instant.
“You guys, she’s home!” he said.
Like a shroud falling over them, their voices fell silent, and they each turned their heads to see for themselves. The headlights, bright and gold and triumphant, swung into the yard that very instant, casting their beams through the dusty windowpanes as they approached.
“Everybody stay put,” Tyler said. “Please.”
“I want to greet her when she comes in!” Jackie said, about to stand.
“You don’t know what mood she’ll be in,” Tyler told her. “We don’t actually know where she’s been.”
Thinking it over, Jackie slouched back into her chair.
The children waited.
The headlights shut off. The car door slammed. Emmett watched the windows by the door, wishing they’d turned the porch lights on for her. What if she was hauling groceries, he wondered? Up the steps in the dark. What if she slipped and fell, hurt herself… or worse…
Worry-wart, worry-wart.
What if she complained about the mess they’d made, cooking their spaghetti? Or the books and games left out on the reading room floor?
Worry-wart, worry-wart.
Suddenly she was at the door. The doorknob rattled. They all held their breath, waiting. It rattled some more. Perhaps her arms were full of groceries. Wiggling in her seat, it took all the restraint Jackie had not to fling herself into the foyer to help her. Finally, the deadbolt thunked open. The door opened ajar. Then a kick to the door, opening it wider, as her hands were busy with something else, too full to properly let herself in… carrying something… something…
Worry-wart, worry-wart.
It took the children a moment longer to realize what was happening. A moment longer for the smiles to disappear from their faces. A couple moments more for any of them to utter a sound, even if only a pitiable, confused whimper.
A man walked through the door—shuffled in, black Sunday shoes covered in dirt, weedy burrs in his shoelaces, wrinkled black slacks, a black tie, a white dress shirt…
…once upon a time it’d been a white shirt…
Now it was red. Dirty and red. Covered in red.
“Tyler,” Tobie said, petrified in his chair, voice nothing more than a thin rasp. “Tyler. Tyler…”
Perhaps Tobie believed Tyler would be able to do something about the terrible ghoul making its way toward them. Perhaps he thought Tyler stood a chance against the shotgun swinging beside its leg.
“Tyler, it’s him.”
The man’s eyes crawled over them like insects. As they landed on Emmett, his stomach dropped out of him through the floor under his feet, into another world entirely. Cold terror. But those deranged, insect eyes didn’t rest on him for long. He was here for something else. Someone else. Emmett’s scrambled brain finally put itself back together, and he recognized the man as Tobie did.
Him, indeed.
At the sight of Bailey, her father’s face brightened. The heaviness of his gait lifted, his shoulders relaxed. He appeared on the edge of tears.
“Oh…” he said. “Sweetheart.”
Bailey, in stark contrast, hitched with rising sobs.
He stood at the threshold between the kitchen and the foyer, taking in the room, the table and their dinner. His eyes glistened.
“I’ve been looking for you all this time.” Everyone tensed as he gestured around them with the shotgun in his one hand. It was in that moment they noticed he held something else as well, in his other hand. Something dark and dripping. He swallowed a lump in his throat. “You’ve been here this whole time. Hidden from me by this… this…” He gritted his teeth, cheeks red and hot. “This cunt!”
He tossed the object he held onto the table. It landed with a meaty thump, rolled a couple times before resting just next to Emmett’s plate, wobbling. Getting a good look at it—better than anyone else at that moment—the blood drained from his body and left him cold as snow, cold as the face staring back at him with its dead, hollow eyes.
On the table, appearing more serene than he’d seen her in a long while, was Mrs. Holmes’ head.
CHAPTER TEN
LAMBS TO THE SLAUGHTER
Emmett screamed his throat raw, pressing himself into his chair.
“Everyone stay where you are.” Bailey’s father lifted his gun toward them, sweeping it over the table. Bailey shrieked, bawling her eyes out and for a moment the man faltered. “Don’t cry, sweetheart. Everything is going to be fine.”
He frowned as he moved his insect eyes over the table, their half-eaten dinner. Then he noticed something beyond them: the phone on the wall next to the hallway entry. Swiftly, he rounded the table, casually pointing the barrel of his gun at each of them as he passed.
“No, no, no. Can’t have that…”
He bashed the entire phone with the butt of the shotgun, knocking it halfway down the wall, dangling by its wires. He grabbed the wires and yanked them, dumping the phone to the floor in a heap of broken plastic. Then he lifted his foot, prepared to stomp.
With his back to them, balancing on one foot, distracted by his intense determination to destroy the phone, Tyler saw an opportunity—a small opening for survival. Holding his breath, a cold sweat beading from head to toe, he lunged from his seat.
“Gah!”
Tyler charged against him, toppling him off his foot against the wall where the phone had once been. Bailey’s father grunted, sandwiched. Tyler’s hands fumbled around his body, his arms, trying for
the gun in his hands. The children watched in a terrified stupor as the man got his feet under him again, pushed himself away from the wall, driving them both back on their heels. Tyler stumbled, fell backward. He caught himself on his own chair. The man spun toward him, bringing the shotgun in a wide arc like a sword held at his hip. Tyler picked himself up off the seat of his chair just as Bailey’s father pulled the trigger and a bright, thunderous blast shook the room. The children screamed. Tyler let out a squeal, barely audible under the explosion. The gunshot carried him backwards off his feet against the kitchen counter.
“Oh!” Jackie wept. “Oh!”
Tyler slumped to the floor, back against the cabinets, a hole the size of a cantaloupe blown through his belly. A smatter of blood traveled up the countertop behind him, speckles on the ceiling.
Somehow, he was still alive. He coughed. Delirious, he tried to pick himself up, tried to lean forward but only managed to lift his arms. He rested his head back against the cabinet, eyes rolling side to side in their sockets.
“Now you know what happens,” Bailey’s father said. He was still holding the gun upright, the butt held against his side. It rattled in his grip. He passed the gun over the table, and each child flinched as its hot barrel met their eye. “If any one of you moves, someone else will pay the price. Do you understand?”
Strangely, it was only Emmett who didn’t cry. He was too shocked to cry. His mind didn’t know what to think, and so it thought nothing. He remained still, like a wooden copy of himself, stuck to his chair, unable to do much else besides wait to see what happened next. The other children covered their faces, their eyes—bowed their heads toward their laps, as though to pretend it didn’t exist, or to shield their precious minds from further horror.
As Bailey’s father moved around them, back to the other side of the table, Emmett avoided his gaze by focusing instead on the table in front of him, on the bodiless head sitting there with its greasy, bloody hair plastered to the side of its sleeping face. His eyes dared studying it, what used to be Mrs. Holmes…
“They’re gone now,” his mother whispered to him. “Their bodies are here, but their souls are somewhere better.”
Emmett fought the memory. That was a different time. A different place…