“You’re smart, Will. He was, too. Smart and sneaky. I didn’t understand what he wanted until it was too late. I thought he would be my forever man, and he was. But not in the way I expected.”
He shivered, his fear like a cold, living creature inside the coffin with them.
She reached out and pressed her palm against his cheek. It was cold at first, then turned warm. She was, he realized, drawing the warmth from him.
“No,” he said, his voice raw and full of the effort to speak.
“But yes.” She leaned forward, then kissed him softly. “Forever,” she whispered. And then, as he watched, she started to fade, her heat evaporating, her body disappearing, as if it had never existed at all, but was just light and shadows and the hint of color.
“Forever,” she repeated, her disembodied voice now filling the casket. “But not together.”
And then, alone in the space with his useless phone and his bullshit memories and just a few cubic feet of breathable air, Will screamed.
Aimee had been right.
William Underwood had come home.
The Playhouse
Bentley Little
It was a new listing, a foreclosure that had fallen into her lap only because Walt Lee had quit on Friday, and while Lois had read the stats and looked at the photos, she hadn’t had a chance to visit the property until now.
Nice neighborhood, she noted, driving up Brookview Street: single-family dwellings, the majority of them two-story; well-maintained lawns. She knew from her reading that there were no rentals on the street, and that it had been nearly a decade since any properties had been up for sale within a two-block radius. The flyer description practically wrote itself.
Lois pulled up in front of the property and got out of the car. Typically, Walt’s poorly framed photographs had not really done it justice—that’s what came from taking pictures with a phone instead of a camera—and she took her own photo of both the newly landscaped front yard and the exterior of the house, before letting herself in and finding the best angles to showcase each room’s most marketable feature.
Opening the kitchen blinds to let in more light, she was shocked by the state of the backyard. In contrast with the perfectly manicured and precisely placed native flowering plants in front of the house, the backyard was a flat mess of hardened dirt and overgrown weeds. Clearly, the landscapers had not worked their magic back here, and as soon as she returned to the office, Lois was going to find their phone number and get on their case. This needed to be completed yesterday, because she couldn’t start to show the house until the backyard was finished, not unless she wanted to knock a good five thousand off the price.
She opened the sliding glass door and went outside. In the center of the weedy backyard was a child’s playhouse, a homemade wooden structure with peeling paint and a window box filled with faded plastic flowers. That thing would need a new coat of paint as well. Briefly, she considered having it torn down, but in an upscale neighborhood like this one, a permanent playhouse could turn out to be catnip to parents with young children.
Peering through the window, she saw a wooden shelf on which sat plastic pails filled with mud and leaves. In the center of the room was an overturned child-size chair, and in one corner a broken Easy-Bake Oven.
Wait a minute, she thought. Mud?
Lois frowned. The property had been foreclosed on close to two months ago. It was summer. The mixture of dirt and water should have long since dried out.
Were neighborhood kids playing in here?
She needed to make sure there were locks on the gates. The last thing she needed was for some local brat to screw up her perfectly staged show home.
The playhouse was as tall as she was, and though she had to duck pretty low in order to make it through the doorway, once inside, Lois could easily move around with only a slight ducking of her head. There was no floor—the sides of the structure rested flat on hard dirt—but otherwise the playhouse seemed sturdy and well constructed. Light came in through the open doorway and a window in one of the side walls, illuminating the solid wall opposite the entrance, where the pails of dirt and leaves sat upon an unpainted board held up by metal brackets.
She picked up the overturned chair and put it down in front of the shelf. There were three pails altogether, one purple, one red, one yellow. Sitting down, she reached out to the one on the right, the purple one, and put her hand inside, feeling the cool squishiness of mud.
Immediately, she pulled back. What was wrong with her? Why had she done that? She hadn’t intended to do any such thing.
In fact, why was she sitting here in the first place? Why had she come into the playhouse at all?
Frowning, she got out of the chair, walked back outside—
And the light was different. It looked like afternoon instead of morning, and she glanced down at her watch and saw that it was after one o’clock. Three hours later than it was supposed to be. A chill took hold of her, an icy shiver that started at her spine and reached around her midsection until she was enveloped in it.
What had happened?
Lois didn’t know, but the word in her mind was haunted, and she hurriedly made her way out of the weed-covered backyard and through the house. Locking the front door, she wasn’t sure if she had closed—let alone locked—the sliding glass door in the kitchen, but she wasn’t about to go back and check, and she strode quickly out to her car, got in, and took off, allowing herself to breathe only when she had turned onto another street.
—
Back at the office, at her desk, Lois found herself wondering why she’d been so frightened. Although she’d lost a couple hours somehow, there’d been nothing threatening about it. In fact, the sensation of touching mud had been pleasant, and, surprisingly, the mud had not attached itself to her fingers. There’d been a slight stickiness, but her hand had been clean when she’d pulled it from the pail.
Now here, away from the playhouse, having had time to absorb what had happened, she thought the entire experience seemed not scary but simply…odd. No, not even that. More unusual than odd, as though it was not a peculiar occurrence but merely one that did not often occur.
There was a flowerpot on her desk, a blooming chrysanthemum given to her by one of her recent clients, and it occurred to her that the flowerpot would look nice in the playhouse. She often picked up decorative items from thrift stores or outlet malls, using them to set a mood or create atmosphere in the houses she was trying to sell, but Lois was well aware that she’d given no consideration to the flowerpot’s impact on the property’s marketability. Her only thought was that the chrysanthemum looked like it belonged in the playhouse.
On impulse, she picked up the flowerpot, told Beverly that she was going to show a condo and could be reached on her cell, and drove back to the foreclosed property on Brookview. Bypassing the house entirely, Lois unlocked the side gate with her key and walked into the backyard, where she brought the flowerpot into the playhouse, placing it on the shelf next to the pails. As she’d known, it cheered up the interior of the small room immensely.
Filled with pride, she glanced around the playhouse. One of these things is not like the others, she thought, and picked up the broken Easy-Bake Oven from the corner. It didn’t belong here. Not only was it an eyesore with its cracked, dirty plastic, but it was far too childish for the room. Carrying the toy outside, she saw that the sun was going down.
What time was it?
She dropped the oven on the ground and checked her watch. It was nearly six o’clock!
Lois shook her head, feeling disoriented. The chill she’d experienced last time was gone, but it was replaced with a confusion that was somehow worse because it implied an interference with her faculties, as though something had meddled with her mind.
Leaving the oven in the weeds, she exited the backyard, closing and locking the gate behind her. Checking her cell, she saw that she had missed thirteen calls. How was that possible? Her phone had been on. She s
hould have heard it ring.
Haunted.
Scrolling through the messages, she saw that six were from Beverly, five were from clients, and two were from her husband. It took her only seconds to decide what to do. Rather than call everyone back and admit that she’d received but not answered their calls, she decided to tell everyone that she’d lost her phone. Unlocking and opening the gate once again, she walked up to the playhouse and placed her phone carefully between two faded plastic roses in the window box before heading back out to her car.
Thom was angry when she got home.
“Where’ve you been?” he demanded. “I tried to get ahold of you and you weren’t at the office and you didn’t answer your phone or call me back—”
“I lost my phone,” she told him. “I was looking for it.”
“Yeah? Well, my car died on the 405, and I had to call Triple A, and then I had to have someone from the dealer drive me home because you weren’t around.”
She hadn’t even noticed that his car wasn’t in the driveway. “I’m sorry,” she said, honestly apologetic. “It’s my fault.”
“Damn right it is. Where were you?”
“I told you. Looking for my phone.”
“All afternoon?”
“And I was prepping a new listing. Nice house, foreclosure, good neighborhood. It should sell quickly.” But she didn’t want it to sell, Lois realized. She thought about the playhouse.
“Well, we need to rent a car tomorrow morning.” Thom’s voice took on a sarcastic edge. “If you’re available, that is.”
She called the office, left a message, then drove Thom over to Avis the next morning. “Buy a new phone,” he told her. “And check your messages at work. I’ll need a ride when the car’s done.”
“I’m pretty sure I know where I left the phone,” she told him. “I’ll call you if I find it.”
The cell was exactly where she’d left it, in the window box of the playhouse, and when she turned it on to see if she’d gotten any new messages in the intervening hours, she saw that she’d received—
Three million six hundred and fifty.
That was…impossible.
It was a glitch of some kind. It had to be. Lois looked at the screen. None of the new messages listed an accompanying phone number, but she listened to the first one, holding the device up to her ear.
Nothing.
She checked five more, at random, and all of the messages were the same.
Silence.
A shiver of fear passed through her. She didn’t like this backyard, Lois realized. The weeds were too high, the ground too hard, the fence too old. She didn’t like the house, either. From the front, it looked like all the other ones in the neighborhood, but from the rear there was a shabbiness to the structure, an air of imminent dilapidation, and the windows seemed dark and black and empty.
Her flowering chrysanthemum, yellow and bright on the shelf inside the playhouse, looked welcome and inviting, and Lois walked around the corner, ducked her head, and walked inside. The small room was comforting and pleasant. She felt at home here, and she sat in the chair, scooted over to the shelf, and picked a brown oak leaf out of one of the pails. She placed it on the wood in front of her, then withdrew a small handful of mud from the adjacent pail. Rolling it into a ball, she placed it on the leaf. She did this again and again and again, until there was a row of mudballs on leaves before her.
Lois stood up, her neck stiff. It suddenly felt as though someone else was in the playhouse with her, and she immediately turned around, but the small room was empty. The feeling persisted, and she hurried outside, moving quickly as though being pursued. Once in the open air, she straightened to her full height. The sun was warm, but she felt cold, and she jumped when she heard the sound of the sliding glass door in the kitchen opening.
“…and as you can see, there’s a nice-sized backyard, perfect for a growing family like yours.” It was Janet Kwon, and the other Realtor stopped in her tracks, startled when she saw Lois. She blinked. “What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing here?” Lois countered. “This is my listing.”
Janet put on a fake smile. “Excuse us a moment,” she said to the couple behind her. “We’ll only be a minute. Why don’t you take a look upstairs and check out the extra bedrooms?” Janet slid the door shut behind her and strode across the lawn—
Which was green and freshly mowed.
Lois looked around, confused. The weeds were gone, the grass was beautiful, and roses had been planted against the fence. Most shocking of all, the playhouse had been newly painted.
She suddenly found it hard to breathe. What is going on here?
Janet was striding toward her, the smile gone. “Listen, Lois, I don’t know what you think you’re doing—”
“This is my listing!”
“Was your listing,” Janet said. “Brent gave it to me when you failed to generate even a single offer after three weeks for what should have been a cakewalk.”
“Three weeks? I just got the listing on Friday.”
“Three weeks ago.”
The cold was back.
“You don’t even work at the office anymore. You can’t expect to just disappear for weeks at a time and then come waltzing back with no consequences.”
“Brent fired me?”
“Nine days ago. Don’t you even check your phone?”
Lois was afraid to look at her phone. She didn’t know how many messages would be on there now.
Thom!
If she really had been out for three weeks, what had happened to Thom? Had he called the police and filed a missing-person report? Had he thrown all of her belongings onto the street? She needed to call him. But first she needed to get rid of Janet.
“Get out of here,” Lois ordered.
Janet was incredulous. “What?”
“You heard me.”
“This is ridiculous. You’re trespassing. Leave, or I’m going to call the…What are you doing?”
Lois had backed up to the playhouse and was reaching her hand through the window behind her. Her fingers found what they were looking for and closed around one of the mudballs she’d made. It was hard and dry, the leaf beneath it brittle. She withdrew her hand and threw the mudball. Her aim was true, and it smacked the unprepared Janet hard in the forehead. There was a too-loud crack, a too-short scream, and then the other Realtor was falling backward.
Panicked, Lois ran. There was a couple in the house to whom Janet had been showing the property, and Lois didn’t want either of them to be able to identify her. She opened the side gate, ran out to the front of the house—and her car was gone. She didn’t hesitate, though, just kept running, turning left on the next street, then right on the street after that, exiting the neighborhood and arriving at a corner with a 7-Eleven. Breathing heavily, she took out her phone, calling Thom.
“I need you to pick me up!” she managed to get out.
“Lois?” He sounded incredulous.
“Of course!”
“Where the hell have you been? I’ve been—”
“I’ll explain everything. Just pick me up. I’m at the 7-Eleven on Central, at the corner of Rosewood.”
There was a beat, a moment of silence, and she was afraid that he wouldn’t come for her, but then he said, “Okay,” and hung up.
She’d never felt relief so intense, and she walked into the convenience store and bought herself a Big Gulp Sprite. She was still drinking it ten minutes later when, standing on the sidewalk, she spotted Thom’s Lexus and waved him over.
Lois understood that, to him, she had been gone for three weeks, though it felt like only an hour or so to her, and she began by apologizing, not letting him get a word in edgewise until she had completely told her story. The second she mentioned the playhouse, she knew she had lost him, but she kept on.
He had no reaction, simply stared at her. “I didn’t know where you were,” he said. “I didn’t know what had happened to you.”
/>
“Well, now you do,” Lois said, frustrated.
“You expect me to believe that?”
She sighed tiredly. “Where’s my car?”
“At home.”
“Will you take me there?”
He put the Lexus in gear. “I almost called the cops, you know, filed a missing-person report.”
She looked at him. “Almost?”
“Yeah, well, I thought you were…” His voice trailed off. “I don’t know what I thought,” he admitted. “I guess I didn’t really think you were missing. I thought maybe you’d bugged out, were taking a break, wanted to clear your head, something like that.”
“Just take me home,” she said.
“Home? Is that what it is? Whose home? Yours? Mine? Ours?”
She didn’t really want to go home, Lois realized. She just wanted to get to her car. She wanted—
To go back to the playhouse.
Was Janet still there? Had the prospective buyers called an ambulance? Had Janet recovered enough to drive herself? Was she dead?
Lois didn’t know and didn’t care. All she knew was that she needed to get back.
But first she wanted to pick up a few things from her own house. Lois and Thom weren’t speaking by the time they reached their street, and Thom didn’t even bother to put the car in park as he pulled up to the curb, merely braked to a stop. “I need to go back to work,” he said curtly.
Lois didn’t respond, but got out of the Lexus, slamming the door behind her. She strode up the walk to the front door without looking back, hearing Thom speed away. Inside, she picked up the items she’d come for: a framed Georgia O’Keeffe print from the hallway; a plant stand from the living room and a Hummel figurine to go on top of it; a potted palm. It took her three separate trips to load everything into the car. Her Big Gulp cup, left on the kitchen counter, was empty, and she filled it with water, pressing down on the lid as she walked out to the car.
She drove to the house on Brookview Street.
A red-lettered metal placard with a contact number for Janet Kwon was bolted to the bottom of the FOR SALE sign in the front lawn, and before going into the backyard, Lois pulled up the sign and threw it into the bushes bordering the house next door. She was carrying the plant stand in her right hand, and with her left hand was holding the Georgia O’Keeffe print by the wire in back of the frame. She put the plant stand down to open the gate, then walked into the backyard.
Dark Screams, Volume 5 Page 10