by Hunter Shea
“It’s a hell of a lot of work,” Matt said, remembering how hard his friends toiled away on their family farms. They all envied Matt, who lived a relative life of leisure in comparison, while he would have given anything to be in their mud caked boots.
When no one answered, Matt knocked again. The door swung open before he could take his hand off the knocker, almost dragging him inside. Debi grabbed him by the back of his shirt and belt loop.
“Whoa, sorry there,” the burly man, Gregory Simmons, said, stepping back. “Didn’t realize you were still attached.”
The near face-plant set Matt’s vertigo into a free fall. He couldn’t speak, desperate to stop the world from canting.
“Hi, I’m Debi Ridley. West’s mom. This is my husband, Matt. I hear you two went to school together.”
Matt regained his senses, having to crane his neck back to take in all of Gregory Simmons. He looked like every depiction of Paul Bunyon in the kid books. Matt could imagine him using logs as toothpicks. He’d come a long way from the pipsqueak in grammar school with his odd lunches.
“For a little while,” Matt said, extending his hand. “At least as far as Mrs. Joyce’s class.”
Gregory’s grip was firm but not crushing.
Matt couldn’t tell if he was smiling under his beard. “She was the one who kept the pet turtle in the classroom, right?” Gregory asked.
“That’s the one. It’s been a long time.”
“It has.”
Gregory didn’t invite them in. In fact, it seemed as if he were blocking the doorway, which was easy to do for a man his size.
Debi said, “We wanted to thank you for how you handled everything with West and we apologize for him coming out here when he shouldn’t have. Once they get to their teens, you start to wish for the nighttime feedings and crying again. It’s easier when you have perspective.”
The big man exhaled through his nose, the air whistling.
“I think I put a pretty big scare into him when he saw me. Thought it best to have him come inside and talk a while. He’s a good kid. Faith likes him. I knew this day would come, boys sniffing around. Makes it a little easier when the boy isn’t someone you want to kick in the pants.”
He emitted a low chuckle, which was cue enough for Matt and Debi to laugh along. He was being nice, saying the right things, but Matt sensed something brewing beneath the surface.
“I don’t blame you. I always worried how I’d be if we’d had a girl,” Matt said.
Matt wasn’t sure how long he could keep standing out on the porch. He had to cut to the chase.
“Look, I know we’re basically strangers, but I was wondering if I could talk to you about the whole Guardian thing. I’m sure West told you some of what we’ve been going through. I wasn’t aware your family had been experiencing the same thing all this time.”
Gregory tucked his thumbs in his pockets. “It hasn’t exactly been the same, but I understand.”
“Have the Guardians been… watching your family for long?”
“Long enough. Too long for my taste.”
“I thought we could compare notes, maybe get to the bottom of things.” Matt felt Debi’s hand press against his sweaty back. He finally noticed the cicadas as they serenaded the bleak humidity.
In an instant, everything changed. Despite being outside in the cloying heat, Matt swore he could see his breath turn to vapor, the air between them and his neighbor plummeting to sub-zero, all pretenses at neighborly cordiality evaporating like good will at the tipping point of a hostage negotiation.
Gregory leveled his gaze at him with small, flinty eyes. “You knew about them. You should never have come back. You got away once. I don’t know if they’re big on second chances.”
Matt stiffened. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. Gregory’s hand went to the doorknob.
“Only reason I spoke about the Guardians to your son was because he was talking about them to my daughter. I don’t have any notes to compare. I’ve learned to live with it. Maybe you should too.”
Before he or Debi could say anything, the door was slammed in their faces. They heard the click of the lock, and Gregory’s heavy steps retreating into the house.
Debi looked to him. “What the hell was that?”
“You asked if they’d mind us coming over. I think we got your answer.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Every cell in West’s body screamed, run! Get out of here as fast as you can, find your parents and never come back!
Instead, he stood there, paralyzed, his mouth gone drier than desert winds, limbs numb as a corpse.
The crackling reek of ammonia kept him from passing out. It came from everywhere, was pouring from the stone and soil.
A cobweb so dense it obliterated whatever was on the other side hung in a two-foot span across the boarded window. It looked to be the work of a team of spiders given years to complete their thick, complex masterwork.
There was an ancient coal chute in the corner of the room, with a few lumps of coal scattered around. The opening looked like a dark, bottomless mouth, a swallower of souls from a Stephen King novel.
That’s where all the strange noises were coming from! West thought, remembering hearing the moving about and crying, sometimes seemingly from the walls. Because they had been in the walls. There were probably all kinds of ducts throughout the farmhouse, transferring the sound of the girl to the upstairs, making it sound like the place was truly haunted.
But that wasn’t what rooted him to the dank floor.
“You don’t have to come inside if you don’t want to,” Grandpa Abraham said, shuffling into one of the bleak corners of the room. “But there’s no sense keeping this from you anymore. Not now. Everything’s about to change. I can smell it as good as I can feel it.” His feet scuffled on the filthy floor, his breath heaving in wet rasps. West couldn’t see what he was doing in the dark.
West felt himself slipping free from his body. If not for his unwavering perspective, he would swear he had stepped from his mortal constraints, the tether to this world fraying with each agonizing second.
Grandpa Abraham emerged carrying a metal serving tray, a bent and rusted spoon sitting atop an indescribable goop of mush that more resembled a watery termite mound than food. He bent close and took a sniff, crinkling his nose.
“Thought it had gone bad when I opened the can. Guess I was right.”
He bumped into West as he left the room, mumbling to himself.
West couldn’t take his eyes off the sleeping girl.
She lay on a thin mattress, the sheet and bottom of her feet stained black. One wrist and one ankle were wrapped in iron manacles, chained to a massive plate in the wall. She was dressed in a long pink shirt, the kind his mother would sleep in. It was almost as filthy as the sheet.
Despite all the commotion they’d made, she hadn’t so much as twitched.
“Is… is she dead?”
He didn’t feel the sensation of the words as his mouth formed them, his breath expelling from his lungs up through his nonexistent throat. Hearing them, it didn’t even sound like his voice. It was too high, a pre-pubescent squeak with nary a hint of testosterone.
Had someone else asked the question?
Were they alone?
Was this the ghost his grandfather had warned him about? Or was it his grandmother, her soul trapped in the farmhouse where she’d been murdered, unable to move on, choosing to stand vigil over this strange, ragged girl?
“No, she’s not dead, though she has gotten quieter lately,” Grandpa Abraham replied, going back into the room with a white, plastic pail. He put it next to the mattress, grabbing a tin watering can and inspecting it. “I just wish she’d use what I give her for pissing and shitting and stop decorating the room with it. Fucking kids. Always gotta rail at something.”
Breaking his faraway gaze from the girl, West stared at his grandfather. He was no longer a flesh and blood man.
He was every m
onster West had read about or watched in the plethora of horror movies he and Anthony devoured like buttered popcorn. Grandpa Abraham was the beast in the basement that sent children scurrying to the safety of well-lit rooms and the comforting press of family and friends.
“Who is she?”
Grandpa Abraham cocked his head. “Not able to put two and two together? I understand. This is a shock. I get it. Hopefully you’ll understand the why of it when you settle down. That girl Faith you’ve been talking to, she ever tell you she has a sister?”
West could barely hear him over the swoosh of his thrumming heartbeat.
A sister.
A sister.
Yes! Faith did say she had a sister.
But she was away at camp.
This couldn’t be her, then. Why would Faith tell him her sister was at camp if she were actually here?
Unless she didn’t know.
“Y-yes,” West answered, trying to swallow and nearly choking on his own Adam’s apple.
“Her name’s Rayna. You know what that means?”
“No.”
Why are you talking to him? Get the hell out of the house! Run down the driveway and keep running until you find Mom and Dad!
“I looked it up. It means, one who is pure. That family doesn’t just pick names out of a hat. They always have to mean something. Crazy Bible thumpers.” He squatted down and almost tenderly shifted her stringy auburn hair from her face. She looked older than Faith, but not by much. Then again, she could be younger, her imprisonment in this hellish cell prematurely aging her.
“Well, she’s not as pure as they’d like to think.”
West felt like he was about to throw up.
His grandfather saw the expression on his face and scowled. “I haven’t done anything to her, idiot. She’s just a damn kid. But word travels, and I heard she’s got a wild streak in her. Her parents were going to send her to some Christian camp. School principal comes down to the Post every now and then. Told me all about her. She was quite the handful in school. Well, at the very least, I got her to settle down. She can’t get in much trouble down here.”
“You kidnapped her?”
There was a tingling feeling in his hands and feet, as if his spirit were returning to its home, nerves flaring from the invading pressure.
“I killed two birds with one stone. I’ve kept her out of trouble, and her family from going too far, from doing what they did to your grandmother.”
The girl moaned softly, her mouth opening and closing. It was the first real confirmation that she was alive.
“But the Guardians watch them, too,” West said.
His grandfather snorted derisively. “That’s what they want you to think.”
“You can’t keep her like this. You have to let her go.”
Even if it means you have to go to jail, which is exactly where you belong.
“Trust me, son, you don’t want me to let her walk away. Not yet.”
West considered rushing his grandfather. If he could somehow take him by surprise, find a way to overpower him, he could free the girl and call the police. Grandpa Abraham may have been thick as a Clydesdale, but he was also old, and drunk.
But how would he get those manacles off? He couldn’t just leave her down here with him.
“It’s not time for her to go,” Grandpa Abraham said. “For now, she’s serving a purpose. If they so much as touch a hair on your head, well, things won’t end well for their model of purity. And they know it. Same goes if they try to break her out. The room is rigged. She’d live long enough for them to see her die.”
West cast nervous glances around the dim room, but could see nothing. That didn’t mean the crazy bastard didn’t have a booby trap somewhere.
Or he could be full of shit.
West’s brain fired off neurons, sparkling tendrils of thought, of possibilities, of fight or flight. His head ached.
“You understand, don’t you?” his grandfather asked, and in his face was true concern. He really wanted West to believe him. Because he believed that what he did was right.
All to keep the family safe.
“Help me.”
They looked to the girl. Her eyes were closed, but her chapped lips parted, repeating ‘help me’ over and over again.
West turned and ran, hitting the basement steps hard, the wood cracking under his weight.
“Come back here!” Grandpa Abraham wailed.
West didn’t turn back, didn’t slow down.
Rayna’s frail help me looped like an ear wig spinning round his eardrum, propelling him forward, into the kitchen, crashing into the back door, fumbling with the lock until he hit the humid air, as desperate and crazed as any horror movie final girl had ever been, only this time, the terror was real.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Debi pulled up to the farmhouse, feeling more apprehensive than before they’d set off for the Simmons farm.
The way he’d looked at them.
He was frightened.
And angry.
But why was he angry? What had they done? Weren’t they both being victimized by the same sick people?
Every time she thought Buttermilk Creek was as strange and threatening as it could possibly be, it sunk down to even creepier levels.
“We’re going back to the motel,” she said to Matt. He needed her help getting out of the car.
“We can’t afford it.”
“I don’t give a damn if we lose every penny we have in our bank account. We’re getting West and leaving.”
Matt reached out for her and missed. He staggered, planting the cane deep to keep from falling. “Then we have to take my father, too. You read the note.”
Debi thought about it. Would Abraham even come with them? She doubted it.
Then there was the bigger question: would the Guardians hold true to their promise and follow them? She couldn’t take that chance. The Motel 8 wasn’t far enough.
She grabbed her cell phone from her purse.
“Who are you calling?”
“Monika. I know she’ll let us crash at her place tonight. We can look for something else tomorrow.”
“My father isn’t going to go all the way to New York to cram into a studio apartment.”
Debi’s temper flared. “Then the hell with him! I don’t care anymore! All that matters is that our son is safe…with his parents! If you so much as try to stop me, I’ll punch your fucking lights out.”
Matt stared at her, jaw open far enough for birds to settle in and build a nest.
They’d fought plenty of times. More times than she could count. But she’d never, ever threatened physical violence.
What scared her even more – she meant every word of it.
In her anger, she accidentally disconnected the call.
She stormed to the house, fumbling with the keys to get the front door open.
“West! Honey, I need you to pack a bag.” She ran through the living room, then trotted upstairs. “West? Where are you?”
Answer me, dammit!
She made it back downstairs just as Matt came stumbling in. “I can’t find West,” she said, frantic.
“He can’t be far. West!”
Debi bolted for the kitchen. The back door was wide open. She ran out back, calling his name until her throat was raw. There was no sign of him. Or Abraham.
“Matt, he’s not here.”
He was at the back door, both hands wrapped around the cane’s handle. He looked as dreadful as she felt.
“Where could he have gone?” she asked, shoving Matt aside.
“I don’t know. My father’s truck is still outside, so he didn’t take off with him anywhere.”
Debi thanked God for that.
She was about to go back outside when the basement door opened. Abraham emerged from the darkness, looking the worse for wear.
“He left,” he said matter-of-factly.
“What do you mean, he left?” Matt said, his shoul
der’s stiffening.
“He just took off out the back. I thought for sure you’d run into him. You didn’t just pass him?”
“I’ll get in the car and check,” Debi said, sprinting through the house.
Why would West do such a thing? Was he that desperate to see that girl?
Or had something scared him so much, he couldn’t stay in the house one second longer.
Debi cursed herself for letting him stay behind with Abraham. If anything happened to West, she’d never be able to live with herself, much less Matt.
***
West ran heedless of direction or endgame.
Now in the middle of the field, the scorched sky giving way to the moon and pink prelude to night, he had no idea how he’d ended up here.
Panting, sweat pouring down his face and into his mouth, the salt tang turning his stomach, he dared to glance behind him.
The farmhouse was long out of sight.
When he’d hit the ground, he had a burning need to just run straight and fast. That would get him furthest away from the house, and his insane grandfather. He should have taken the driveway, hoping to catch his parents coming in the opposite direction.
That would have been the logical thing to do.
But logic had pointed its thumb out and hitched a ride to a place called Anywhere But Here.
And just like in his horror movies and books, people did stupid things when faced with overwhelming stress and fear.
Standing here in the middle of nowhere was plain evidence of that.
“You are one dumb asshole.”
His breath was returning, but he couldn’t stop his heart from pounding away.
Help me.
Even if that wasn’t Rayna Simmons back there, she was still a girl that needed help desperately.
The high, steady screech of crickets was all around him, so loud, he could barely hear himself think.
Maybe he was right to come this way.
If that was Rayna, he had to tell Faith and her parents. And maybe there was a chance his parents were still at their house.
He took off running, hoping to beat the dying light. He’d never traversed this way in the dark, and he was less than confident he’d find his way if he wasted one more second.