by Ania Ahlborn
Abby wailed like a Greek at a funeral. Jack reached for her, but she shoved him away and ran back to the house, pushing passed Aimee, who was standing stunned on the front porch step. Jack stared at Aimee for a moment before she disappeared inside the house, rushing to their daughter’s aid. Charlotte was unmoved by her sister’s tears. She stood expressionless in front of the truck, watching the delivery guy freak out as though Nubs had been his dog instead of hers.
“I’m so sorry,” the guy kept saying. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry, mister.”
The guy eventually ran back inside the truck and grabbed a cell phone with a shaky hand, probably placing a call to his dispatcher. All the while, Charlie stood motionless, staring at the remains of a dog two years her elder without a scrap of despair in her eyes. Jack wasn’t sure she knew he was standing next to her—he wasn’t sure she remembered that anyone else existed at that moment at all. She was in a trance; a tiny zombie examining her handiwork. And as if it couldn’t have gotten any worse—that delivery guy yelling into his phone, Abigail screaming inside the house, Nubs torn in half with his guts spilling onto the road—the corner of Charlie’s mouth twitched, not into a frown, but a smile. And the voice whispered:
You sat there and watched her do it, because you’ve been mine all along.
Walking back inside that house was terrifying. Jack could hear Abby wailing long before he pulled open the screen door. Her sorrow was immense—powerful enough to seep through the walls and into the yard like vapor. Her despair twisted his heart into a knot, pulling so tight that his heart strings creaked. Standing motionless in the doorway, Abigail’s weeping slithered from inside her room and tied itself like a noose around his neck. The backs of his eyes burned. His sinuses sizzled with the sting of saline. All at once he was sure he was about to lose it—about to suffer the emotional breakdown he had feared since he had seen those dark, empty eyes a split-second before their Saturn had flipped through the air.
He turned away from the house, ready to sneak away until the sound of Abby’s tears were something he could handle. Then he saw Charlie standing on the top porch step, and he stopped short. She was staring at him the way she had peered at Nubs before running him into the road.
“What’s wrong, Daddy?” she asked, ignoring her sister’s cries—weeping so loud it drowned out every other sound in the world.
Jack suddenly wanted to snatch her off her feet and throw her down those steps. He wanted to shake her so hard the Devil would scramble away in search of a place to hide. The little girl that, six years before, had redefined his entire life, now made his blood run cold. Everything about her, from her little-girl voice to the artificial innocence she wore across her face, made Jack hate her. At that very moment, had Charlotte turned and ran across the lawn into the trees across the road, he wouldn’t have followed her. He would have turned away and pretended he hadn’t seen a thing.
But Charlie didn’t turn, and she didn’t run; and Jack didn’t make a move to grab her the way he had imagined a second before. She remained on the front porch step, glaring at her father, those doe eyes narrowed into menacing slits. Her mouth curled up into that sickening smile. “Poor Daddy,” she whispered. “Sad about a dead fucking dog.”
Jack didn’t tell Aimee what he had seen—not the way the girls had been playing hide and seek, not the way Charlie had lunged at Nubs just as the delivery truck passed by. He was sure Aimee suspected the worst, but she hadn’t been there: it was his word over hers. For all intents and purposes, it was a horrible accident. Nubs had run out into the road on his own.
He knew it couldn’t go on for much longer. He was at his limit, sure that if things continued to escalate he’d be barring the girls’ windows, just as Stephen had barred his own. He’d blockade their bedroom door with his crappy piano until he could figure out what the hell to do. And yet, in the same instance he knew that would never happen. The longer it went on the less he did to stop it. The moment an exorcism had crossed his mind, he was assured that he wouldn’t be doing anything of the sort. He was nothing but an enabler—a facilitator of his own daughter’s demise.
That’s when the last viable option for Charlie’s deliverance came to him. If he couldn’t stop what was happening, he could reconnect with someone who possibly could. Sitting at the edge of Abigail’s bed, listening to her cry for the loss of her dog, Jack could think of one lone way out.
Go back and face the demons he’d run from nearly two decades before.
Go back home.
“I don’t understand,” Aimee muttered, gathering a few of Nubs’ chew toys off the floor. “This is really bad timing.” She was irritated; while Jack had been reluctant to seek help for Charlie before, he was suddenly gung ho about it now.
Jack had lied again. He told her that Sam, his boss, had dropped the name of a child psychiatrist, one of the best… one that just so happened to be in Georgia instead of Louisiana.
“It can wait,” Aimee said. “It’s waited this long so it can wait a little longer.”
“Sam already called,” Jack told her. Sam was notorious for taking extra steps to set up dates and meetings. It would be less believable if Sam hadn’t done just that—gone out of his way to schedule something that would inadvertently cause marital strife. Jack was about to use Sam’s good-hearted bad habit to his advantage.
“So call the doctor and tell him we can’t make it. Tell him your all-knowing boss failed to predict the fact that our dog just got flattened by UPS.”
“We can’t make it,” Jack agreed, “but I can.” It was the heart of his argument. There was no doctor, no appointment. There was only Jack’s old house—a trailer out in the middle of nowhere that may have very well been gone for years. All he knew was where it had been. And if it was gone? Well, the town wasn’t much bigger than Live Oak. It would take but a handful of hours to ask around, to find someone who knew Stephen and Gilda Winter.
Aimee grabbed a half-eaten squeaky toy off the living room rug. Destroying stuffed toys had been Nubs’ specialty. He had once eaten all of the polyester filling out of a stuffed hot dog. It had clogged him up for days.
“That’s what doesn’t make sense,” Aimee said. “What’s the point of you going by yourself?”
“It’s just a consultation. You can’t get in to see this guy before you meet with him first. Even if we all were able to go, he wouldn’t see Charlie anyway.”
Aimee looked down at the torn yellow duck in her hand. She frowned at it—partly in reaction to Jack’s explanation, but mostly because she remembered buying that toy for Nubs not two weeks before. It was strange how quickly life could change. One morning you get up thinking it’s going to be the same-ol’ same-ol’, and that same night you hit the bed emotionally devastated.
“And we’ll have to drive to Georgia to see him,” she said. “What, every weekend? How are we going to afford something like that? If he’s so good, how are we going to afford to see him at all?”
Jack exhaled a breath and lifted his shoulders in a shrug. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “But I have to do this.”
Aimee narrowed her eyes in a flash of suspicion. It was an odd thing to say, that he had to do it instead of they having to do it.
“For Charlie,” Jack added. “As her dad.”
“And leave me here with the girls.”
“Just for a couple of days.”
“When Abigail is a wreck, Jack.”
“Just a day ago we were worried about Charlie,” Jack reminded her.
She pressed her free hand to her forehead and squeezed the bridge of her nose, fending off an inevitable headache.
“Everything is falling apart,” she said softly. “Everything is completely fucked up.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s why I have to do this.”
After a moment, Aimee issued a single half-hearted nod.
“Okay,” she relented. “But only for a couple of days.”
“Just a couple,” Jack assured her.
/> “Daddy is going to be pissed,” she told him. “Just wait until he sees his odometer.”
Chapter Twelve
The drive to Rosewood was a long one—over eight hours one way, but Jack decided to get an early start and leave that night instead of waiting until morning. Getting there early would give him an extra half day of daylight, and though Aimee didn’t like the idea of Jack driving at night on his own, she was too tired to argue.
The Louisiana darkness was oppressive. If the night sky had torn itself open and bled ink onto the earth, it still wouldn’t come close to the depth of shadow that swallowed the levies and live oaks. It was liquid darkness: a darkness so heavy it blotted out the brightest headlights. But the weightiness of night was, for Jack, more than appropriate. It was the perfect backdrop to a battalion of unwanted memories; the perfect color for the nightmare that had become his life.
He remembered being locked in his room, but he didn’t remember exactly what had pushed Stephen over the edge. Something had happened to reduce his mother into an emotional wreck of a woman, weeping, trying to talk around the hitching in her throat. He could hear them yelling at one another outside his door, but everything was muffled; underwater. Jack made out a few words, words like ‘safety’ and ‘away’ and ‘not right’ and ‘no choice’. Otherwise, all he could recall was that their argument was stop and go. One minute they were yelling, and the next minute there was nothing but silence—off and on like a blinking streetlight.
Beyond that memory, he had no idea how he had escaped his bedroom. He had been lying on his bed, staring up at the ceiling, and suddenly there was damp grass beneath his feet as he sprinted across the lawn. He had been absent, maybe asleep, but as time had gone on he had grown used to losing time.
At first it had been just minutes. Then, eventually, inevitably, those minutes had grown into hours. Sometimes he’d wake up in random places: parking lots, the football field behind the high school gym. The only time it had thrown him was when he found himself in the graveyard a few acres from home. That was the night Stephen lost his nerve and hammered old boards across Jack’s bedroom window.
Jack hadn’t considered it then, but the idea chilled him as he drove on: maybe his condition was contagious, like smallpox or the plague. Maybe it had gone dormant, but he’d been infected all along.
“Impossible,” he muttered to himself, shooting an arm out to Arnold’s stock stereo. Nothing but talk radio riddled with static. Out in the middle of nowhere, nothing survived—not even rock and roll. He could have pulled the car over and blown his brains out if he wanted. Nobody would be there to hear the gunshot. Nobody would call the cops. He’d just lay there, his brains oozing out of his skull, dead and waiting for the animals to drag him away.
He blinked.
Suicide had never crossed his mind before, and now he was picturing himself mouthing the barrel of a gun.
“What the fuck, Jack?” he murmured, glaring at the road. He punched the gas, challenging the ridiculous thought by blasting toward Georgia’s border faster than before. But speed didn’t keep those thoughts from slithering into his ear like a parasitic worm. It was a story he hadn’t thought of in God knew how long, a story every kid knew; the tale of the phantom hitchhiker sitting in the back seat of a dark car, waiting to be discovered in the rearview mirror. But instead of it being a rotten-faced ghost in the back of Arnold’s Olds, Jack imagined a razor-toothed shadow wearing an ear-to-ear grin.
Mr. Scratch.
That’s what Charlie had called him. Twenty years ago, it hadn’t had a name.
He fought the urge, but his eyes jumped to the rearview. The back seat was empty: nothing. Mr. Scratch had more important things to do than take a road trip back to Rosewood. Mr. Scratch was busy with a six-year-old girl that, for all Jack knew, would no longer be his daughter by the time he got back home.
A few minutes past three AM, the bang of the screen door jerked Aimee awake. Someone was in the house. That serial killer she’d been waiting for had finally found her, and now he was going to murder her in front of her girls.
She heard a quiet bleat slip through the bedroom. Had it not vibrated in her throat, she would have sworn it had come from someone other than her.
“Think of the girls,” she whispered, psyching herself up. If Jack had been home, she’d have sent him out into the hall to investigate, sacrificed her own husband so she could make her escape. But Jack wasn’t there. She was left as the protector.
Grabbing a framed photograph of she and Jack on a trip to Charleston as a weapon, a ridiculous though came into her head: would she beat the serial killer over the head with it, or show him what a nice family she had? As she crept into the hallway with the picture clasped in her hands, she was sure there was something wrong with her maternal instinct. All the things she’d read about mothers protecting their children, her first impulse was to run out of the house screaming bloody murder.
Finally making it to the living room, she nearly choked on her heart. The front door was wide open. She veered around, her eyes as wide as possible to help her see in the dark, but she didn’t see anyone. Telling herself there couldn’t have been anyone in the house because Nubs would have gone ballistic.
And then she remembered that Nubs couldn’t warn them because Nubs was dead.
With the picture frame pressed to her chest like a shield, she crept toward the door. Outside, the wind had picked up. She could hear the branches of the oaks groan and complain as they swayed back and forth. They were the kind of trees you wanted on your property because they were ancient and mystical, but that you regretted having when the rain fell sideways and the wind howled through the leaves.
Stopping at the threshold of the door, her toes brushed the frame of the screen door as she looked out into the yard. Out on the road that ran in front of the house, in the exact spot where Nubs had expired, a shadow lurked in what looked to be a crouch, hunched over something unseen. It looked like an animal—maybe a wolf that had crawled out of the trees to sniff at the blood-soaked road. But when it moved Aimee knew she was wrong. The shadow shifted its weight with jerky, unnatural motions, like an old movie reel hitching on its spokes. She drew in a breath—silent beneath the whisper of wind and shivering leaves—but the small sound of drawing in air did something to that blotch of darkness. It froze as if listening. Aimee’s eyes went wide when it went static, knowing that she’d been heard. The idea of this thing, whatever it was, knowing that she was standing in the doorway made her blood run cold. She pressed her hand over her mouth to muffle her breathing, but the shadow liked that even less. It bristled when it sensed movement. It reeled and shot a stare across the lawn, its black eyes unspeakably dark—twin black holes, devouring light.
Aimee’s breath caught. Her heart ceased to beat. She stared at the thing that was leering at her and stumbled away from the door. It had fangs—cannibal teeth as sharp as the points of her best kitchen knives. As soon as it saw her step back, its mouth twisted, those jagged teeth shining red with blood. Beyond its shoulder she could see the remnants of what could have only been Nubs’ body, torn to pieces, glistening against the asphalt.
She exhaled a yelp and shoved the front door closed, throwing the dead bolt into place. As soon as the door slammed shut, she ran to the window to see if the shadow was still out there, still eating her dog.
It was gone. So was Nubs: he had long since been buried in the backyard. Aimee squeezed her eyes shut.
“You’re seeing things,” she whispered, pressing her forehead against the cool glass. But the longer she stood there, the more reality drummed at her brain. The door, she thought. That wasn’t my imagination. The door had been open; she knew this because she had just slammed it shut. Her body went tense at the thought; she had assumed someone had come in, but the more she put it together the more it seemed like someone, or something, had gone out.
Jack pulled over at a gas station just shy of the Georgia state line, drawn to the place by its cold fluoresc
ent glow. The place looked out of business, like a photo out of a ghost town picture book—the kind of place you put behind you as fast as possible because the vibe is wrong; the kind of place that, if you ever caught a flat, would be the last place you’d want to stop to ask for help. But Jack stopped. He didn’t need gas—he had a half tank that would take him well beyond Rosewood—but he stopped anyway, drawn to the place by some unexplainable pull.
Fluorescent lights buzzed over two rusty gas pumps in the middle of the cracked parking lot, flickering and popping, giving the place that classic horror movie vibe. There was something cinematically surreal about it, something that matched his situation to a T.
Loose gravel crunched beneath his shoes as he walked toward the building he hoped at least had a working soda machine. He was fiending for a Milky Way but doubted he’d get lucky. Passing a grungy window, he spotted a guy sitting behind a counter—mangy beard, bushy eyebrows, wild eyes and a trucker’s cap. A bolt of anxiety shot through his veins, then subsided. Déjà vu. He’d done this before; maybe in another life.
The guy didn’t say anything when Jack stepped inside, but he did move a hairy arm to tip the brim of his hat in greeting before spitting a wad of black tar into a plastic drink cup. Unease churned in the pit of Jack’s stomach. He turned to search the barren shelves for a snack and found nothing but lukewarm bottled water and a pack of pink snowballs, half-crushed and two years beyond their expiration date. He grimaced and slid his hands into his pockets. He’d have to drive through half of Georgia on an empty stomach.
Just as Jack turned to shuffle out of the place, the guy behind the counter stopped him with a few gruff words.
“What’cher lookin’ for?”
“Just a candy bar.” Jack focused his full attention on the guy. He looked more like a trucker than a gas station attendant. He was huge: probably towered close to seven feet.