Instead

by Jason McIntyre

  From there, her mind worked on Mom. She saw Mom dashing down the gaping path, the dark hole in the woods that led to the clearing where all the remaining snow was dotted in red now. Now it was an image of Mom scrubbing the blood from the kitchen floor, bagging the rags and towels they’d used to sop up the poor animal’s insides.

  She saw Mom’s face, crinkled with the toil of the job. Then it faded and transformed into the face she had—no, the trance she had—when she’d watched Bazzy chase after that large stray towards his own end.

  It’s like—It’s like what, Farrah? Her mind sputtered on this idea. It was like Mom had changed. Well, sure she did. A decade in a mental health hospital with all those awful things they did to treat her, that would change anyone. But what? But it’s more than that.

  Mom was distant, hazy, filled with fuzz when she’d arrived. But after the pills were reduced (Were they, Farrah? Or did Mom just stop taking them?) Mom seemed happier. She seemed more…present.

  But, at the same time, drawn to that madness with the dogs. Drawn to it like a moth to a porch light.

  She couldn’t help herself.

  With these floating ideas and competing voices, Farrah rose back up from the middling place of half-sleep. Tears were in her eyes. She blinked open and her fluttering eyelids caused the crying to start. She sobbed as quietly as she could, careful not to creak the bed springs or grow into the wailing that she felt struggling to rise from within.

  Poor Bazzy, she thought. And poor Mom. She had seen filmstrips at university of how they did electroshock therapy. She remembered the vacant, wide look inside the porthole eyes of those patients. She overlaid that mental image with one of Mom when she’d picked her up at the hospital. It was the same look she’d seen every time she’d visited her there, from the age of 12 up to yesterday. Inside, she thought the same idea again. Poor, poor Mom.

  So much un-fixable damage.

  Her tears eased with the mental repetition from Dad: things will look better in the morning. Things will look better in the morning. Things will—

  She turned to look at the clock on the bedside. In the dim light from the window she saw the scrolling numbers flick over. 11:11. She was fully awake now. The bed springs sighed as she wiped at her face.

  The house had been dead quiet for a long time.

  She knew what she wanted to do—what she had to do. She listened for a long time further, then pulled the blankets off and squeaked to the edge of the mattress. She crept out into the hall, only allowing one tiny click of the door latch.

  Measured steps brought her to the top of the stairs. There were no lights on up here. No movement or sound from either Mom’s room or Grandpa Danny’s.

  She descended the stairs. No lights on down here either. Each step let out a squeak under her. She trod the far edges to lessen them and paused after a few to listen for any disturbance it might have caused. When she got to the bottom, she saw that the fire in the living room was just a hint of glowing embers.

  She passed the living room opening, the floor still making her cringe with each noisy step. The shadows hung heavy. She could see nothing through the black windows; must be overcast tonight and not letting any light in. Still, it was enough. And a week in this house made it feel homey and familiar. She easily made it into the kitchen and over to the phone on the wall.

  Before picking up the receiver, she mentally went through the number she wanted to dial. She remembered it easily, even despite her childish fear of being naughty and how that might make her brain hiccup on basic details. But it was the phone number for the house where she grew up. She’d probably remember it until she was eighty and the worms started crawling around her skull and eating up the digits, one by one.

  She picked it up and put it to her ear, hovering a finger over the rotary dial. There was no dial tone. She tapped the hook up and down three times, waited. No connection.

  From behind her, Grandpa Danny said, “Phone’s been out since October.”

  Farrah whirled around him, dropping the receiver so it bounced on its spiral cord and clacked against the wall and finally the kitchen floor tile. She let out a squeal of terror and clutched at her heart. “Don’t do that!” she scolded. Still wary of Mom upstairs asleep, her admonishment came out in a half-whisper, half-shout. “What are you doing? Trying to give me a heart attack?”

  Danny smiled. “You’re too young for a heart attack. A couple of posts went down before Christmas.”

  Farrah forced a long even breath to try and tame her pumping heart. She reached down to fetch the wiggling handset and put it back on the hook. “Your phone’s been out since then? That’s months.”

  “Yep,” Danny said, having a sip of his Scotch. Farrah wondered how many he’d had. “They don’t pay much mind to me out here. That’s the last time I talked to your Dad. Right after the storm, begged him to pull some strings and get my phone back up. He didn’t give two shits. Sorry.” Danny looked briefly self-conscious for swearing in front of his Littlest Lady. “He didn’t care. Here we are in the new year. No phone service.”

  Danny’s tone was one of disgust. He leaned on the kitchen counter with one hand and took another swig. Farrah didn’t bother asking how much he’d had already. Maybe this is the moodiness that Dad had told her about. Maybe Danny used to be a drinker.

  Once a drinker, always a drinker, Dad would say.

  Still, she wanted to scream. How on earth does one live without a phone? What if there was an emergency? Gramps was no spring chicken. What if he got hurt? He could be—to use his own words—a bump in the snow for three months by the time anyone came calling in person.

  Wherever this was going, Farrah wasn’t going to argue. She loved her Grandpa. Her heart had calmed. She went over to Grandpa and put her arms around him. This immediately disarmed the man. What was once a grizzled war veteran and explosions man instantly became the teddy she knew from childhood. “I’m sorry,” she said. “About Baz. About this. It’s hard.”

  She stayed in the embrace. He returned it.

  “We should head to bed,” he said at last. She couldn’t be sure—since she couldn’t see his face—but she thought his voice was thicker than usual.

  He sniffled, as if he was sucking tears back in. He cleared his throat. Then he gently drew away from her, still hiding his face. “Love you, Littlest,” he said, giving the Scotch bottle a shove away from the edge of the counter. He turned away entirely and headed for the hallway and the stairs.

  Farrah followed. They went up to their rooms and tried to sleep.

  7

  At a quarter past two, Farrah woke to the silence of the house. She’d not been dreaming. Her mind was a clean, blank slate. Yet she didn’t feel rested. She let out a huff of irritation, frustrated that she was awake despite all the sleep she really needed.

  This sleeplessness had begun in the final two months of her last semester. She’d wake for no reason and simply stare at the ceiling, praying for more sleep to come and then beginning to fret about papers that were due, exams that were approaching, or, as was the case then, more ominous things.

  Right now, she turned her attention to the window. A cloud was cruising across the tiniest sliver of a new moon.

  Then Farrah heard what had likely woken her.

  It was the scritch-scratching noise from the night before, the one that had at first sounded like Bazzy wanting to be let into the room, or out the kitchen door downstairs.

  Last night it had not been Bazzy. And it wasn’t him tonight. Farrah was lucid enough to remember that. It felt strange to think that the dog was gone. Just last night he’d been sleeping soundly on his bed in the den.

  It hadn’t been Baz doing the scritch-scratch on a door. It had been Mom.

  And now, remembering that awful moment of discovering her mother out in the hallway desperately scratching at the linen closet door to be let in, Farrah froze.

  She strained to see if the noise would come again.

  It did.

 
; It was faraway and quiet, definitely not out in the hallway and not likely the thing to have woken Farrah. Scritch-scratch.

  She had an awful mental image of Mom’s muddy feet, caked and dry halfway up her calves after what must have been a second bout of sleepwalking last night. It chilled her to imagine Mom out there in bare feet, walking through the snow and freezing her feet and legs to their very bones, all the while heading for what? That dark hole in the thicket where the path wound itself into the clearing. The dogs had gone after and killed poor Baz in that clearing. And Mom? She’d gone into a trance or something and headed for it last night in the dark, wearing only her nightgown and a pair of panties.

  What had been pulling her there? Memories of the redheaded man, Mr. Ketwood? When Mom evened out some and got her medications reduced significantly, it was Farrah’s genuine hope that they could hold an honest conversation about Mom’s relationship with Sean Ketwood. For starters, had there even been one? Nine or ten years ago?

  Maybe it would explain how and why her dad had sent Mom away. Sure, there were other pieces to the puzzle of why she’d gone. Mom had been…not right for a while. But a relationship with Ketwood, that would explain things, at least on Dad’s side.

  After the second insistent scritch-scratching noise, Farrah launched up from the bed. It sounded like it was coming from downstairs. Farrah’s heart pumped hard.

  She got out into the dark hall. Mom’s door was closed. That was a relief, but just as she confirmed this, she heard a fourth iteration of the scratching noise. It was definitely coming from downstairs. And it was louder out here, on this side of her bedroom door.

  At the end of the hall, Grandpa Danny’s door was closed too. She supposed he could have doubled back downstairs for more Scotch, but she doubted it. He was probably dead to the world after how many drinks he’d had.

  She was going to head downstairs and ensure it wasn’t Mom, ensure that she hadn’t walked downstairs in a fugue after closing her bedroom door behind her. It was probably just a branch against the side of the house. Maybe the wind had picked up and snapped it off, letting it hang down against the dirty siding.

  Holding her breath, Farrah padded down the creaky stairs and looked from the main trunk of the hallway in all directions. Shadows played tricks, but there was no sign of Mom or Gramps. She paused to be sure. And in that pause, another scritchy-scritch-scratch came. Louder than it had sounded upstairs.

  She crept down the hall and towards the broad opening that led to the kitchen and dining room, half-expecting a drunken Grandpa Danny to speak to her and make her jump from her skin like she had when she’d tried the telephone. She whirled at one point, certain that she felt someone breathing hot on the back of her neck. Of course, it was an empty hallway with no one behind her. Again, the scritch-scratch sound came. Compelled to discover it and silence it, Farrah rounded the corner into the kitchen.

  It was coming from the kitchen door, a half pane of glass up top and a solid wood door below, painted white and dinged up from years of Bazzy making his case to be let out.

  That spot where hot breath seemed to flow across her neck, now it went cold. Her skin turned to prickles. She squeezed her eyes shut and instantly saw Bazzy overwhelmed by the seven or eight wild dogs out in the snowy clearing. Again, she saw all that blood.

  A strange thought occurred.

  It was Baz. The lab wasn’t really dead. The strain of sleep from the night had claimed her sanity for a moment. The whole day—omelettes and perfect bacon, snowball fight and the showdown between the dogs—it had all been in her head. A dream, a hallucination. Bazzy—poochers to Grandpa Danny—was alive—and they’d left him outside by mistake before retiring for the night.

  It seemed amazing, impossible—and in that instant, absolutely true.

  Farrah hurried to the door and pulled aside one half of the yellow curtain that hung there.

  Of course it wasn’t Bazzy out there scratching at the door.

  Of course it wasn’t.

  The mangy interloper with patchwork coat stood there and looked up at Farrah through the door’s dirty window. It bared its teeth and reached a front paw out to offer another insistent scritch-scratch at the door.

  As the image became clear, the interloping, wild dog leapt at the window, pounding into it with a thud so hard, the door shook. Farrah jumped back and let out a yelp of terror. Her heart thudded and her vision became as mottled with colour as the dog’s coat was with off-colour flesh.

  Farrah fell back against the wall where the coat hooks and Bazzy’s leash were. Piles of bottles and trash and magazines rattled and clattered over in a noisy scatter.

  The dog leapt again and she saw its wild, intense eyes hover at the middle of the window, giving fog to the glass just as Mom’s breath had in the Brougham two days ago.

  Farrah hollered for her gramps. “Grandpa Danny!” she roared. But she knew instantly that he’d likely popped out his hearing aids when he’d gone to bed. He’d never hear Farrah from down here. Not if he was in a deep Scotch-induced slumber.

  The dog didn’t jump a third time. Farrah stayed where she was, half leaning against the wall, half propped on the heap of bottles and beer cases.

  An empty moment passed. Then: scritch-scratch.

  Her eyes tried to focus on the door knob. Was it locked? A ludicrous, dumb question—dogs couldn’t turn knobs. But still, in the grey light of the middle of the night, she angled and tilted her head to ensure it was locked.

  She summoned the mental strength to lunge up and go to the door.

  She lay against it, as though heaving her weight would stop the interloper. The door was locked. It was confirmed then, and her chest felt a weight lifted. The cylindrical handle was depressed and she wiggled it to ensure it was true—and not a dream made up of faulty guesses and assumptions from her tired mind.

  She breathed in relief but that was cut short when the interloper launched up against the glass again. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw his teeth and his pink-black throat and gums. He barked a series of piercing deep blasts against the glass. The door shook.

  Farrah peeled herself off the cold panel of the door and hurried to the big picture window over the kitchen sink. She craned right to get a good look down the length of the porch towards the kitchen door.

  The front and two sides of the house were wrapped in a deep verandah, covered by roof. There was the wild dog, still waiting at the foot of the kitchen door.

  The interloper settled. Like a child, it sat again and gave a scritch-scratch at the door with one set of unkempt claws. Panting, it cocked its head then looked over at the window where Farrah now pushed her face up until it was nearly touching the glass.

  Her heart stuttered when it looked like the interloper that helped kill Baz was staring directly into her eyes.

  She pulled back, self-conscious, as though the interloper could read her thoughts, as though the animal truly was staring her down and would make use of her thoughts against her.

  Looking out across the black expanse of the yard beyond the verandah’s railing, Farrah saw flowing portholes in the emptiness. There must have been a dozen pairs. Some of them blinked.

  Farrah swallowed hard. She went back to the kitchen door and flicked on the porch light before hurrying back to the big window over the sink. The light gave a radius of extra footage and shone out into the blackness, turning some of it to shades of steely grey.

  There were more dogs out there, all sitting and standing apart from one another.

  Each of them stared in the direction of the house.

  Farrah realized she was holding her breath.

  She ran out of the kitchen to the front door where she flicked on the porch light out there. She looked through the drape. More animals. Two dogs on the generous front porch, each sitting five feet apart like guard sentries and staring directly at her.

  Beyond those two, down the front steps and out in the yard near the Brougham, another half-dozen animals waited in the d
ark.

  Farrah let out a squeak before dashing to the living room.

  She hesitated in parting the curtains. This was turning into a cavalcade of obscene images. Out every window, the same morbid, stomach-churning scene.

  And here it was again.

  More of the wild pack were out there, spread across the front yard, their eyes flashing like when a headlight catches them on the road at night.

  Slowly, the sitting animals started getting to all-fours.

  Then, the unthinkable: they each started towards the house in a slow, deliberate walk. Their rhythm was perfectly timed.

  Farrah’s face flushed with heat. Her heart flitted. She had to get Gramps.

  8

  She didn’t knock, only burst through Gramps’ bedroom door and went to the bed where he lay across it on his belly, one arm dangling over the edge.

  She kept saying it over and over again. “There’s more, there’s more.” He was snoring. Beside him on the nightstand, his two hearing aids lay in flecks of earwax inside a glass ashtray.

  She turned on his beside lamp, bathing him in it and said his name now, mixing it with the warning that there were more dogs than before. She said it over and over. She shook his shoulders to rouse him as gently as she could. A minute or so of this and Grandpa Danny stirred and snuffled. He gave out a snort and started to cough as he reached for the first hearing aid.

  “Gramps,” she said over his hacking, still nervous from having seen the pack return, but eight or nine times the size it was before. “You need to come.”

  Danny opened his eyes, confusion and blood in them, and looked up at Farrah, squinting against the pain of the bright lamp, and maybe even the start of a hangover. His hearing aid howled. “What, Littlest? What is it?”

  “The dogs, Gramps. They’re back. And there’s way more.”

  9

  She hurried Gramps out into the hallway as he struggled against a coughing spell. She saw it first: Mom’s bedroom door was open. Farrah’s stomach fell like a boulder. She looked at Danny as if to confirm that he saw it too—that it wasn’t a hallucination. Then she brushed passed him and hurried down the stairway. There at the front door, Kathy had her back to Farrah on the stairs. She was just opening the front door.