Cold sweat matted every inch of my skin during the conversation. I pressed the phone tighter to my ear so as not to miss a word.
“Why does he need to get the answer from Faye?” I asked. “Her parents probably know what that number means too. They’re definitely hiding something.”
Nathan sighed into the phone.
“They haven’t slept in that cabin for years, right? Maybe the Impostor establishes his connection to people through the land. That’s how it works in our tradition, anyway. The mountain anchors the spirits and people together.”
“She’s getting worse, Nathan,” I said. “She’s slipping away. Becca’s son is like… driving her insane. I can’t figure out what it all means.”
“Maybe it’s best you don’t,” he responded. “If you discover the truth, this being could steal it from you in your sleep.”
“I know,” I said. “I worry that I’ll—”
A door creaked open somewhere in the house, followed by the muffled sounds of movement.
“I’ve gotta go, Nathan,” I said. “I need to keep an eye on Faye. Are you gonna be alright? You sound awful…I mean, understandably so.”
There was a long pause. Another door opened in the house.
“It’s not just the child,” Nathan mumbled. “I’m dreaming of my father too.”
“Of his death?”
“No. It’s the cabin. Every time I shut my eyes.”
“What do you see?”
Nathan’s voice wavered. He tried to hold back tears.
“It’s sitting there in the dark, and there’s a bad storm. I’m standing in the distance, near the edge of the woods. A light turns on inside the cabin. I walk toward it. As I approach, the front door opens, and something in my heart tells me not to step inside. But I do. Every time, I do.”
My heartbeat sped up. Memories of that miserable place flooded through me.
“As I enter, the light cuts out,” he continued. “It’s so dark. From the living room I can hear my father…he’s calling out to me from the bedroom. He’s speaking in our language, and sounds happy and peaceful. He tells me to come to him, and that he wants to see my face before he goes to be with our ancestors. He calls me Ha’an’tue – ‘my light’ – the nickname I was given as a child. But when I go to push the bedroom door open, I wake up to the sound of that child crying. Every time.”
“Jesus,” I blurted out.
“I want to go back,” Nathan said, voice cracking into sobs. “I know he’s not there, but it feels so real.”
Someone screamed inside the house. Heavy footsteps thundered across the upper floor.
“I gotta go,” I said, throwing the door open. The knob
pinged against the wall. “Do not go inside that goddamn cabin.”
Chapter 39
“Where is he?!” a woman shrieked. It was so primal I couldn’t tell if it came from Faye or her sister. As if in response, a baby’s cries resounded throughout the house. I raced up the stairs to find Becca rifling through each room with murder glinting in her eyes. Caleb’s crib was empty. His little blanket lay on the floor.
“What’s going on?!” I shouted. “Faye! Where are you?”
“I went to the bathroom,” Becca replied, tears of rage and fear rolling down her cheeks. “I was gone for two minutes!”
The pieces fell together in my head, and a terrifying picture took shape from them. Faye had sequestered herself in our bedroom, waiting to snatch the baby.
“Where the fuck would she go?!” Becca yelled in my face. A gust of cold air licked the back of my neck.
She’d take Caleb outside – to him.
Without a word, I headed back to the first floor. Becca moved even faster, shoving me aside and bull-rushing past me. If the back door hadn’t already been open, she probably would have kicked it down. Caleb’s agonizing cries filled the night air, but the yard was so dark that I couldn’t tell where he was.
Then, a branch snapped. Something moved in the trees that formed a wall around the perimeter of the backyard. Becca rushed out into the grass, causing the automatic lights to flood the scene in a blinding white glow.
Baby Caleb lay on the ground, trying to roll himself away from the blades of grass that poked his face. Faye stood beside him, reaching both arms up at the trees – as if a child herself, waiting to be lifted into the arms of a loving mother.
“Caleb!” Becca screamed. She strode across the grass and snatched her sister by the hair, then threw her to the ground with tremendous force. Faye gasped as she collided with the earth and then lay still. Becca scooped Caleb up and burst into wailing cries, matching his in volume and fear.
I ran over to help Faye. As I did, a huge mass leaped out of the trees and landed in the neighbor’s yard, then darted off into the night.
“Are you out of your fucking mind?!” Becca shrieked at her sister. Lights flicked on all around us, and concerned neighbors peeked out from their bedroom windows.
Faye groaned as I helped her up, but she nearly fell again when I freed an arm to block Becca from coming any closer. Even with her son in hand, Becca looked like she was about to break my fiancée’s neck.
I guided Faye back into the house. She staggered and stumbled as if she’d never walked a day in her life. She asked, “Did you hear the little birdies? They sing like angels.”
Back inside, I tended to Faye on the couch while Becca stomped around overhead. Within minutes, Becca descended the stairs, luggage in one hand and Caleb in the other, and summarily exited the house. It was only after I heard the screeching of tires that I realized she’d driven off in Faye’s car.
It wasn’t long before a police cruiser lit up our driveway. A fist pounded on the door, and two burly officers greeted me with stoic gazes. The commotion had upset the old lady who lived across the yard. She claimed to have heard one of us rummaging around on her side of the fence. For her sake, I hoped she kept her doors locked.
The policemen were under the impression that a drunken argument had taken place on the back patio, so I went along with it. What else could I have said? I explained that my fiancée had taken a few too many shots and had started a fight with her sister, and that Becca had stormed off and returned to her hotel. Faye sat up on the couch and woozily reassured the cops that her sister was sober as a judge, and that they need not worry that she was out driving drunk. They asked Faye if she was alright a few times, then eyed me sternly and left.
I wanted to scream at Faye. I was so tired of the creature’s relentless intrusions, and I felt the urge to blame her. But at the last moment, I held my tongue. Faye looked up at me with dripping eyes, and in them I could see a misery more profound than anything I’d been through. Her exhaustion was betraying her. While unconscious, Faye was highly suggestible, almost childlike. The Impostor took advantage of this by manipulating her dreams, trying to convince her that he was a friend. The creature was grooming Faye to believe that he could take her away to a beautiful place. But in reality, she was being coaxed out of this world.
After draping Faye in blankets and securing all the doors and windows, I went upstairs. Thoughts of surrender and death swirled in my mind. I couldn’t take it anymore. I pulled out my phone and called Angela, begging her to come and see with her own eyes what Pale Peak had wrought upon us.
She agreed.
Chapter 40
Faye and I spent Sunday out of the house. We window-shopped, saw a movie, and ate at a nice restaurant. I tried my best to cheer her up, but she was still devastated over what had happened. Being away from home, however, seemed to distract her, and that night, she didn’t budge in her sleep.
On Monday morning, I woke to find a missed call on my phone. To my surprise, it was Jennifer’s second husband, Henry Schoeffer. He sounded old and tired, and not at all happy to inform me that Jennifer had passed away more than ten years ago. I hit redial and spoke with a receptionist who reluctantly promised to have the dentist return my call at his convenience. By lunchtime, my ph
one buzzed again, and a grumpy man interrupted me when I answered.
“I’m trying to run a business here, Felix,” he said. “I don’t need your pictures, or your phone calls.”
“Henry,” I pleaded, forgoing the charade about the old photo albums, “I’m sorry about Jennifer. But I need your help. I think what happened to her is happening to my fiancée. Do you understand what I mean?”
The man paused in contemplation, as if considering
whether to open the old wound of his wife’s passing.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he finally said.
“The mountain, Henry. The cabin.”
Henry paused again.
“Please,” I continued, “I need to know what happened. Jennifer sold that place to my fiancée’s parents. Now something terrible is happening to us.”
“The Spencers,” he grumbled.
“Yes. Their daughter and I stayed at Pale Peak. Now she’s losing her mind. Please.”
“I can’t help you,” Henry said. “Take her to a doctor. My wife was ill. Plain and simple.”
“Did she ever do anything unusual?” I asked. “Sleepwalk, hear voices, things like that?”
A muffled crackling noise emitted from the phone, as if Henry were trying to crush it in his grip.
“Leave me alone!” he shouted. “Don’t ever waste my time again!”
The phone clicked, and he was gone.
A few hours later, I received a series of text messages from Becca. She had gone to a hotel the night of the incident, then booked an earlier flight back to Arizona. She left the car at the hotel and taxied to the airport. We’d have to go pick it up.
Becca’s final message read simply, Ask our mom about 5. She knows.
The message infuriated me. I knew Becca was hiding something, but the fact that Lynn bore the knowledge of what drew the Impostor to Faye was outrageous. Her duplicity had endangered her own child. I picked up the phone and called her immediately. When she didn’t answer, I called again. And again. And again.
After some time, she answered with a frightened “What do you want?!”
There was no irritation in her voice. Only guilt. She’d lied to me about something in the past, something important – and had been dreading I’d discover the truth ever since.
My words came out sharp and unmeasured.
“I flew all the way out there to hear your bullshit.”
She didn’t make a sound.
“I took time off work,” I continued, “time I didn’t have. I risked my life up at that cabin. And you knew something all along. Something you didn’t tell me.”
“I told you everything,” Lynn said meekly. The show had ended; she couldn’t act anymore.
“You know something about that mountain, and about Faye, and why this is all happening. Why you’d go this far to protect your lies is beyond me. Your daughter’s life is in danger. At best, she’s going to end up in a nuthouse.”
“N—No,” she replied, “I don’t know anything about the mountain – I swear to God. I know bad things happened to Tom and Jennifer, but I don’t know what it is. I’m telling the truth, Felix. I swear.”
“What makes five?” I demanded. “You know what that means. Your daughter draws that number all over everything in her sleep, and she can’t remember doing it when she wakes up. You’re a liar, Lynn. Look what it’s cost us.”
Lynn whispered something, and then I heard Greg’s voice.
“Oh just tell him already for Christ’s sake,” he grumbled. “He’s family. He needs to know.”
They bickered for another moment, Lynn trying desperately to conceal what she was saying from me. Greg became upset. His voice rose.
“You were pregnant, Lynn. Just tell him, okay? She was
pregnant, Felix.”
“You fucking asshole!” she yelled. A door slammed, and then her voice calmed. After a moment she took a deep breath and said, “Felix…I’m going to overnight a box out to you. Call me when you get it. And whatever you do, keep it between us. Don’t let Faye see it. She doesn’t need to know.”
I didn’t have time to express my shock. The sound of Greg thumping on the door came through the phone, and then Lynn promptly hung up.
Chapter 41
Hiding this revelation from Faye proved to be a difficult task. She was naturally perceptive and could read me like a book, so I decided not to masquerade as though nothing was wrong. Instead, I pretended to have a bad stomach ache and went to bed early to avoid talking with her altogether. Millions of questions swarmed my mind as I lay in the dark. Did Lynn have a miscarriage? An abortion? Did she give the baby up for adoption? Was it not Greg’s child? The possibilities were myriad, and my desire to know kept me awake for hours.
A day and a half later, a package arrived in the mail. As I carried it inside, my phone beeped from upstairs. I hid the little box behind the TV stand and raced up to the bedroom, hoping that Nathan had tried to reach out. My heart sped up when I saw that the voicemail was from Henry.
His melancholy words seeped out of the phone. He slurred and paused from time to time, probably drunk, and seemed on the verge of tears. He apologized for attacking me and proceeded to mumble bits and pieces of a ghastly story.
“My wife lost her child to cancer,” Henry reflected. “You never move on from a thing like that. She never talked about Kayla, or kept any photos around…that’s why I didn’t want the albums you found. I guess I figured if Jennifer wouldn’t have wanted ‘em, I shouldn’t take ‘em either. Outta respect, that sorta thing.
“But then after a couple years, she started dreaming about Kayla. She’d dream of her ex-husband Tom, too. Really bad nightmares. Jennifer never told me what was in the dreams, but she’d wake up screaming. We got her back on her old medications, but over time it only got worse. One morning she was talking about hearing their voices, Kayla and Tom’s, out in the woods. Hearin’ ‘em while she was awake. They wouldn’t let her sleep, she said. They were calling to her all the time, trying to get her to come out. But she knew it was wrong. Scared her to death.
“One evening I came home from my office and she was gone. Just gone. The back door was open, but all her stuff was still here. She didn’t take a jacket or shoes or anything. And it’s all woods up here, Felix. Hundreds of miles of it. They searched for a month and found nothing. They investigated me…accused me of murdering my wife. I thought about killing myself. I swear I never hurt her. She just left. And she took my world with her.
“Then one day, I got a call from the sheriff’s department. Some campers found Jennifer’s remains, about forty miles away from our home, way up in the mountains.” Henry paused to choke back tears. “She’d been buried upside down with her legs stickin’ out of the ground. Some animal chewed ‘em all up.”
Henry apologized once again, and asked me not to return his call. I understood, and sat there on the bed in silence for a moment, mourning all the people the Impostor had brought to ruin. Although I tried to resist it, a horrible thought took root in my mind: I imagined Faye’s slender legs caked with soil and jutting from the earth.
Since learning of Lynn’s mysterious pregnancy, I
struggled to act normal around Faye. I kept my lying eyes averted whenever my fiancée was near, and hoped she wouldn’t notice the fact that I was hiding something big from her. I had no idea why Lynn would be so secretive about the pregnancy, but she had endangered her own daughter’s life to hide it. That night, I worked late into the night on my laptop, and got into bed only when I felt certain that Faye was sleeping.
Her body was stiff beneath the sheets. As I slid under the covers, I noticed her legs contorting in an awkward position.
She rolled her head toward me and smiled with her eyes closed, then asked if Caleb was still awake. I hesitated.
“Ugh, he’s crying again,” she went on. “I’ll get him.”
Faye tried to sit up, but I gently pulled her back down. She offered no resistance.
She furrowed her brows and pursed her lips, as though she’d just realized I was lying.
“He’s…not here,” she said. She gazed around the room, eyes still peacefully closed.
“Who is here, Faye?” I asked. “Do you know?”
She paused for a long moment, then let out a sigh.
“You.”
“Who am I?”
“Felix.”
“And who are you?”
“…Faye.”
Her head cocked to the side. She listened for something.
“What do you hear?” I asked. “Is there someone else here?”
“There’s someone outside,” she said, “…hanging something up in the trees.”
I wanted to get up and look out the window, but I feared it might wake Faye.
“Is it a dreamcatcher?” I asked. “Do you know what they’re for?”
She smiled and laid her head back on the pillow. Her eyes were open now, and rolled back in her head so that only pale white showed.
“I found one outside the old house,” I said gently. “I never told you. It was made with your hair, Faye. Did you make it? Do you know who makes them? Is it him?”
Faye’s eyes rolled forward and her little green irises finally showed. Even in the dim light, I could see the fear that glinted in them. Her gaze snapped to the door that led into the hall, and she said, “No. No. He’s listening now.” She began hyperventilating. “He’ll find out. He’ll hear.”
“It’s okay, sweetie,” I whispered, brushing her chin with my fingers. “It’s alright. Just calm down.”
Faye’s breathing slowed and her eyes fell shut, but her body still trembled.
“He’s gonna kill you,” she whispered back. “I saw him. He’s gonna hang you up in the trees. Real soon. Just a little longer now.”
My phone vibrated on the dresser, igniting the room in a blueish glow. I reached for it, wondering if Nathan or Dr. Schoeffer was trying to get a hold of me. It was after 2 A.M. Whoever it was, I knew it was bad news.
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