Ashes to Ashes (Experiment in Terror #8)

by Karina Halle

  No matter how the dream starts though, how wonderful the memories are, I can never enjoy them. I know they are about to be ripped from my heart. In a matter of seconds, the picture changes. In the river, he jumps into the water to join me – but never surfaces again. On the road, he drops my hand and runs away into a cloud of dirt. The worst one is what happens to him while we spend the evening hours on the porch. A low, guttural growl emerges from the surrounding pines, as if the trees themselves have unfinished business with him. Pa gets to his feet slowly, hesitantly, and walks straight into the forest. He doesn’t even send me a backwards glance. Then the pines shake, their silhouettes frenzied against the moon, and I hear him for the last time.

  One final scream.

  Like always, I woke up covered in a thin sheen of sweat.

  As I poured my bedside water jug onto my rag and wet my face, the reality sinks back in. I’m alive, in my bed, but my father is not. He really is dead and the irony is that I sometimes wish those nightmares were real. At least then I would know what happened to him. Either he drowned, or ran away from me, or the trees ate him. I’d take any of those to at least have an answer of why he left on that tracking expedition and never came back.

  This night though, I had no time to feel the heaviness in my heart. Far away hollering interrupted my sleep and brought myself to my feet without thinking. I fumbled to light the candle in my stall-sized bedroom then quickly slipped on my robe and opened the door into the main room. It was dark and no one else in my uncle’s house was stirring.

  I paused, feeling slightly foolish at my impulsiveness and listened for a few beats, trying to catch my ragged breath.

  The hollering again, coming closer to us. My uncle’s ranch was on the far outskirts of the settlement. Our closest neighbor was miles away. Whoever was out there was in serious trouble.

  I gathered my robe closer to me and made my way to the front door, about to open it, when someone on the other side started pounding on it wildly. I nearly screamed. I waited for a break before I opened it and saw our neighbor, Ned Kincaid, on our porch, looking like he’d seen something worse than a ghost.

  “Eve!” he managed to croak out before collapsing into a coughing fit. I put my arm around him and began to lead him inside the house. He shook his head and leaned against the doorframe. “No, it’s still out there.”

  “What’s still out there?” I looked past him but only saw darkness cloaking the nearby acres and the pinpricks of stars in the sky. There was a strange pounding noise though, faint but wicked, off in the distance. Like Ned had, it was also coming in our direction.

  “Nero!” he yelled and glanced behind him, his eyes glowing white from fear.

  Nero was Ned’s horse. A magnificent coal-colored stallion that I’d often see trotting proudly in his pasture.

  “What?”

  “Evie, what are you doing, who is that?” my uncle Pat’s voice boomed from behind me. He was standing at the foot of the stairs, lantern in hand, my frail Aunt June cowering behind him and holding onto his long johns.

  Ned stepped clumsily into the house and looked at my uncle imploringly. “It’s Nero. He’s sick, Pat. He tried to kill us!”

  The corner of my uncle’s mouth turned up at Ned’s outburst.

  “Now, Ned, let’s calm down a bit here before we –”

  “I’m serious!” he screamed so sharply that Pat’s mouth was replaced with a hard, thin line. I sucked in my breath and took another look outside.

  “Perhaps we should close the door,” I said quietly, reaching over for the handle. Whether Nero was actually trying to kill Ned or not, the late September night brought a chill with it.

  “No,” said Ned, turning around and placing a wet hand on mine. I looked down at it. He was covered in blood. “I need you to see this, I need you to believe me. Martha didn’t, she didn’t and now I don’t know where she is, my God, I don’t know…”

  He trailed off. There was a loud, solid thunk on the porch, followed by another. The house shook slightly. I kept my eyes trained on the outside but couldn’t see anything.

  But I could smell it. And knowing my tracker skills, I should have smelled it before. It was blood and sweat and hay and horse and something unfathomable. Nero was here, a few feet away from us, hidden by the black night, half-way onto the porch.

  A severe chill threaded down my back. My lungs refused to exhale.

  I thought about throwing Ned’s hand off mine and quickly shutting the door but everything happened so fast.

  Nero snorted.

  Ned gasped.

  A flash of red eyes and the horse lunged forward towards the door, his long muzzle snapping at us like a wolf, all white, powerful teeth.

  Uncle Pat dropped the candle in the surprise, and joined me at the door, trying to shut it on the horse who was trying wildly to fit inside the frame, his wide girth only allowing him to come in halfway.

  Ned covered his eyes and shrank to the floor, while June scooped up the candle before it managed to catch on the nearby rug. Pat and I kept trying to slam the door in Nero’s face, something that, naturally, only made him angrier.

  The sides of the door frame began to crack under the horse’s pressure, the wood splintering. Between my uncle’s grunts, Ned’s child-like wails and June’s quiet repetition of the Lord’s prayer, I kept focused on Nero’s head. It should have bothered me to be beating a horse in such a way, but this was no horse. Its eyes were blood red and surrounded by yellow discharge, its mouth was a foaming, angry mess, and its only intent was to do what Ned had said. To kill him. To kill all of us. No, this was no horse. It barely even smelled like one. My father would have known what it was.

  Finally, Pat and I did one powerful heave in unison and the result appeared to shatter the bones in Nero’s once handsome head. He screamed, a mix of anguish and frustration and then retreated, almost taking the door with him as he went. We slammed it shut and locked it, as if that would prevent Nero from coming in again.

  “June!” Pat yelled. “Go wake up Rose!”

  “I’m already here,” was his daughter’s reply. I looked to see Rose standing beside June, staring at us in horror.

  He nodded, both of us keeping our bodies against the door. “Good, now go get the piano and move it over here. We have to make sure he doesn’t try and get in again.”

  June and Rose scampered over to the grand piano that rested in the corner of the room. Rose loved to practice on it after dinner in the evenings and you could see the reluctance on her fair face as she and her mother leaned against the piano and slowly pushed it toward us until it was in place.

  We stepped back and looked watched the door carefully, our breaths held in our mouths, our fingers twitching nervously. The piano was barely moveable to June and Rose but they were both small women and Nero was a thousand pound animal. He could easily destroy it in a few seconds.

  We waited for a good few minutes, all of our ears tuned carefully, none of us making a sound. Even Ned had stopped his blubbering and was listening in-between sniffs. Rose made her way to him and placed her arm gently around his shoulders. I breathed in deeply through my nose and closed my eyes, concentrating on the animal. I couldn’t smell him anymore.

  He was gone.

  “I don’t think he’s coming back,” I said quietly, my voice sounding deep in the stillness.

  “How do you know that?” Pat asked scornfully. “Don’t tell me it’s your half-breed mumbo jumbo.”

  That was precisely why, but of course I didn’t say that. I learned a long time ago that talking back to Uncle Pat got you nowhere, and if it did, it was usually a slap across the face.

  Pat looked down at Ned on the floor, who was now staring mindlessly at his bloody hands, and calmly said, “Now Ned, let’s start from the beginning.”

  “Yes,” I said. “What on earth were you feeding that thing?”