Kill Creek

by Scott Thomas

  He tapped a key with his right index finger. His nails were too long. He usually cut them when they got long. He hated the feeling of long nails against the keys of a computer keyboard.

  The cursor blinked at the end of that sentence, begging him to move it forward.

  The first brick broke free.

  Behind him, a dark shape moved into the edge of his vision.

  He became aware of raspy breathing.

  Daniel didn’t know what frightened him more: the thought of it being gone as it was every time he spun around to look, or the thought of it remaining, of it standing there before him.

  It wheezed as it drew breaths into wet lungs.

  An image suddenly filled his mind: a creature born prematurely, sitting on trembling stalklike legs, a slick sheen of afterbirth glistening on its gelatinous skin, its paper-thin lungs threatening to tear with each raspy breath.

  It has no eyes. It has no eyes and yet it sees.

  Beneath his motionless fingers, the keys began to click all on their own.

  Letters tumbled across the computer screen.

  We have her.

  An invisible hand reached up into Daniel’s chest and gripped his heart, ripping it free and pulling it down, down into hell below.

  He should have known all along what the thing at the edge of his vision looked like, a twisted shape, blond hair matted to its crushed skull with thick black blood.

  He jerked his hand away from the keyboard, yet the words continued to race across the screen, over and over and over:

  We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her

  “Stop it,” he whispered.

  We have her We have her

  “Please, stop.”

  We have her

  Without warning, he grabbed the keyboard and yanked it, hard, pulling the cord free from the back of the monitor. He flung it across the room. It smashed into the wall and plastic keys rained down on the floor like hail.

  Still the words streaked across the computer screen, faster and faster:

  We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her We have her

  The eyeless thing was right behind him. He could see it without even turning. It was standing directly over his right shoulder.

  Not a thing. It’s not a thing. It’s your daughter, goddammit.

  Cold, lifeless fingers grazed Daniel’s neck.

  And he screamed.

  Sam and Moore heard the muffled shriek from above. They were halfway up the staircase when Daniel came rushing down. He slowed at the sight of them, his fear momentarily overtaken by confusion.

  “Sam? Moore? What are you . . . ?”

  God, he looks so thin! Sam thought. He’s wasting away!

  He wasn’t thin, exactly, but compared to the massive man he had been last year, this may as well have been a living skeleton.

  “What happened?” Sam asked. “What did you see up there?”

  Daniel shook his head, unable to put it into words, and he pushed past them.

  Sabrina was waiting at the bottom of the stairs.

  “You brought this into our house!” she yelled as Daniel pushed past her too. There was such anger in her voice, months of obedience cast aside as she unleashed her fury. “You did this to us! I told you not to go! I told you not to go!

  Daniel threw open the front door, and the humid Chicago air grabbed him in its fist.

  They met in the middle of the front yard. Daniel was sucking in great, desperate breaths.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry about all that.” He shook his lowered head like he was apologizing for an unruly dog or misbehaving children.

  “What happened, Daniel?” Sam asked.

  Daniel’s clothes were too baggy. He was still much larger than Sam, but he had lost an alarming amount of weight in the past year.

  “There was . . .” Daniel began, and then he fell silent.

  They waited.

  After a moment, he continued. “Upstairs, in my office. There was a girl.”

  An image appeared in Sam’s mind. The burned woman. The thing that crept through the empty halls of his house.

  The last shred of hope that he might be losing his mind was ripped from Sam.

  This was not the result of childhood guilt. This was not mental illness or a delusion.

  It’s visiting Daniel too. But as something different. Something just for him.

  Sam pushed closer, up the front steps. “What did the girl look like?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Daniel? What did she look like?”

  He paused.

  Across the street, a middle-aged couple exited their house and paused on their way to the SUV parked in their driveway. They stared over at Daniel’s house in confusion.

  “Mind your own fucking business!” Moore yelled.

  They could clearly see the couple flinch. And then the couple hurried to their car, backed out of their driveway, and drove away at top speed.

  Sam put a hand on Daniel’s shoulder.

  “What did the girl look like, Daniel?”

  He exhaled a trembling breath. “She was a teenager. She . . . she looked just like our Claire except . . .”

  “Except what?”

  Daniel swallowed hard. “Except she didn’t have eyes. She didn’t have . . .”

  Daniel crumpled to the thick green grass, tears running hot streaks down his face.

  “What is this?” he asked them. “What’s happening?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s happening to us too,” Moore said. There was no malice in her voice. In fact, there was something very close to compassion.

  Daniel stared up at them. He looked tired, beaten down, cut off from the Zen-like peace he had once projected. The detachment in his eyes was profoundly unsettling.

  He must have read the concern on Sam’s face, for he turned to him and struggled to muster a trace of conviction.

  “What are you two doing here, Sam?”

  “We need to talk,” Sam told him.

  “And then?”

  “And then we figure out how to stop this.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  SATURDAY, APRIL 22

  THE WAITRESS, LONG and crooked like a bent cigarette, refilled their cups one by one with coffee as black as river mud. They offered polite smiles, waiting until she had moved down the line of booths before anyone broke the silence.

  “What’s the situation, then?” Daniel asked them. He had ordered a mound of burned bacon, scrambled eggs, and hash browns smothered in ketchup—just to show them that he was fine, that he was eating, that there was nothing to worry about. But he took one bite of the bacon and set it back down.

  Look at us, Sam thought. We’re not sleeping. We’re not eating. I weigh less than I did in high school. And Moore, she’s lost her definition. She looks exhausted. But Daniel . . . he’s wasting away. He’s being devoured from the inside.

  Sam watched him push the hash browns around on the plate with a fork.

  People must think he’s sick, that he has a terrible disease.

  In a way, he did. They all did.

  “Well?” Daniel was growing impatient.

  Moore turned to Sam, one eyebrow raised. “Do you want to tell him or should I?”

  “I’ll do it,” Sam volunteered. He took a breath.

  Begin at the beginning.

  And so Sam told Daniel about the events that had transpired since their trip to Kill Creek. He told of the insatiable need to write that had pushed him to the breaking point of sanity; of the inspiration that had become oppression; of the sense that
he was back at the Finch House every time he stepped away from the computer; of the visit from Eli, from which he learned the details of Moore’s latest opus; and finally of visiting Moore in Los Angeles and discovering that their books were impossibly similar.

  As Sam recounted his tale, Daniel sank deeper and deeper into his seat. It was the first time he hated—truly hated—being captivated by a story.

  Daniel looked to Moore, a thought occurring to him. “You haven’t insulted me once since you guys got here.”

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “That worries me,” Daniel explained. “Anything that can take the piss out of you worries me.” He shoved away the plate of food.

  “I take it you’ve been working on a new book too,” Sam said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Is it similar to your other books?”

  “Not even close.”

  “Describe it to us.”

  Daniel did. The plot was no surprise to Sam. The specifics were different—character names, location, motives—but the basic structure was exactly the same as his and Moore’s, right down to the moment when the first brick fell from the wall.

  “How many pages have you written?” Sam asked.

  Touching his thumb to his fingers, Daniel did a quick mental count. “At least two thousand. Maybe more.”

  “Double- or single-spaced?”

  “Single.”

  “Jesus fist-fucking Christ,” Moore exhaled from low in her throat. “That’s not a novel. That’s a monster.”

  Snatching up a thin paper napkin, Daniel wiped away the dots of sweat that had sprouted on his brow. “This has to be a coincidence, right? I mean, it’s impossible, the three of us writing similar books.”

  “Except they’re not similar,” Moore said. “They’re the same. Exactly the same. Beat for beat.”

  They all fell silent. Around them were the sounds of the diner: silverware clinking on plates, coffee cups being refilled, the murmur of voices. It was late, the day already a distant memory. For everyone else in the diner, it was just another Chicago night.

  But for us . . .

  “There was something with me in my house,” Sam told them.

  “What was it?” Daniel asked.

  They don’t need to know. Not yet.

  Sam shrugged. “I don’t know. A presence.”

  “I saw it too, in my place,” Moore admitted. Her voice was low, as if she were afraid someone outside of their table might hear. “When I would stop writing, it would call to me. It would say my name.”

  Sam offered her a sad smile. “Still think it’s just a mass delusion?”

  Moore thought for a moment, then shook her head.

  Daniel rubbed his forehead so hard, he left red streaks across his skin. “We never should have gone to that house. None of this would be happening if we hadn’t gone there.” Then something occurred to him, his eyes wide. “What about Sebastian?”

  “We haven’t spoken to him,” said Sam.

  Daniel’s face brightened. “Well, we should. Maybe he’s not experiencing it. Maybe he’s all right.”

  “So? What if he is? What does it prove?” Moore asked.

  “Nothing,” Daniel admitted, “but it would at least mean that whatever’s happening to us, stops with us. It would mean it’s contained.”

  Contained.

  The word did not sit well with Sam. It conjured up images of a virus run amuck, of men in hazmat suits working feverishly over doomed patients as dark rivers of blood poured from every orifice. The word made him feel as though they were infected with something unknown and therefore incurable. Three more bodies to throw on the fire.

  “We have to go to Sebastian,” Daniel insisted. “We have to check on him. See if he’s okay.”

  Moore ran chipped fingernails over her face and let out a slow, irritated groan. “This is just fantastic. We spend one night in that house, and now we’re on a goddamn supernatural scavenger hunt.”

  Daniel shook his head. “But it’s obviously not just going to go away. We have to do something about it.”

  “I know we have to do something! Just give me a goddamn moment to express my fucking feelings!”

  Moore shoved her coffee cup away with a clank, a bit of java spilling over the lip and onto the saucer beneath.

  Daniel smiled a small, pleased smile. “That’s the T.C. Moore I remember.” And then, as quickly as it had appeared, the smile faded, his face regaining its previous slackness. It was a transformation that happened much too easily, as if this were the first smile Daniel had allowed himself in a long time.

  The three sat quietly, Moore tapping a fingernail on the rim of her coffee cup, Daniel poking at his breakfast with disgust.

  “I’m sorry about your daughter,” Sam said suddenly. “I don’t think I ever told you that.”

  Daniel paused, not looking up from the red traces of ketchup that cut through the sea of grease on his plate. “Yeah . . . well . . . shit happens.”

  Sam had expected, “The Lord works in mysterious ways” or “Everything happens for a reason,” but not “Shit happens.” This was the death of Daniel’s only child, after all, his flesh and blood, not a blown tire, not a stain on a freshly laundered shirt. “Shit happens” just didn’t cut it.

  The waitress came around, warming their cups with piping hot coffee.

  Sam peered out the window that bordered one side of their booth. The parking lot was out there somewhere, cars in a neat row, snug between white lines. A sign featuring the name of the diner, Bailey’s, surely spun at the side of the road, a neon arrow directing hungry travelers to the cozy comfort of the greasy spoon. Traffic must be rolling quietly down the street, anonymous drivers fighting sleep as they made their way to destinations unknown. It was all there. It had to be.

  But Sam could not make it out. He stared through that window, and all he saw was darkness.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  SUNDAY, APRIL 23

  THEY PLANNED TO fly to Ithaca, where they would check on Sebastian. There was still the chance that whatever was happening to them had, for some reason, left him alone. But they all doubted this was the case. They expected to find the old man in a similar state.

  Unfortunately, Sebastian Cole was somewhat of a recluse. There was no listing of a home address online. There was no official Sebastian Cole website; all sites dedicated to the literary legend were managed by fans, who kindly supplied the information on their “Contact Us” pages that all correspondence was to go through Cole’s agent.

  The agent turned out to be a crusty bastard in New York who was equally tight-lipped about Sebastian’s home address. “All correspondence must go through me,” he told them. Hail-Mary calls to local bookstores in Ithaca also turned out to be dead ends. “Mr. Cole keeps to himself,” one shop owner said. “See him at Pat’s Diner now and again, but can’t tell you much about where he lives except that I’ve heard it’s off Ridge Road. Or is it Taughannock? I know it’s near the lake. . . .”

  They were trying to plan their next move when Sam got a call on his cell phone.

  “She’s dead.”

  The voice was familiar. Sam tried to place it.

  “Who’s dead?” he asked, confused. “Who is this?”

  “It’s Justin.”

  The name meant nothing to him.

  The caller must have sensed this, for he immediately followed it with, “Wainwright. It’s Wainwright.”

  Justin Wainwright.

  It was strange to think of this odd young man as having a first name.

  It was almost eight in the morning when he called. The three of them had stayed at the twenty-four-hour diner until dawn, talking and drinking coffee. After the early-morning call to Sebastian’s agent, Sam and Moore had accompanied Daniel back to his home so that he could pack a bag. Thankfully, his wife was at church, allowing Daniel to go about his business without a messy confrontation.

  When Sam’s cell phone rang, he stepped out the back door and onto a semicir
cular slab of concrete that served as the Slaughter family’s patio. A five-burner, stainless-steel grill was positioned on one side, a wicker couch and two outdoor chairs on the other.

  “Who’s dead?” Sam asked again.

  Careful. This is Wainwright. You don’t know what he’s up to.

  Wainwright cleared his throat. “Kate. You know, my . . . my . . .”

  I know who you’re talking about, asshole. But . . . dead? Kate’s dead?

  Sam could no longer feel his legs. He let his body slip down into one of the chairs, his eyes darting back and forth but focusing on nothing. “How?” he finally managed to choke out.

  “Killed herself.” Wainwright practically screamed it. He cleared his throat again, attempting to keep his emotions under control. “She slit her wrist, Sam. No, slit isn’t right. She savaged herself. Cut her bloody arm to shreds. Last Thursday. Her landlord found her on the floor of her apartment, lying there. Oh my God. Why would she do that?”

  Why the hell’s everyone asking me like I know what the hell’s going on? Sam wondered.

  Eventually Wainwright admitted to Sam that Kate had changed over the past few months. She had grown increasingly paranoid, claiming at first that someone was tampering with her footage. She began arriving late to shoots, then not showing up at all.

  At the same time, their personal relationship was suffering. She wouldn’t return his calls. She stopped coming over to spend the night. At first, he thought she was blowing him off, that she had tired of him. But Kate had always been so kind and understanding. She had seen past his money and his pathetic quest to prove his worth to the world. She had truly liked him for who he was.

  “There aren’t a lot of people who like me, Sam,” he admitted.

  No kidding, Sam thought.

  Ultimately Wainwright had no choice but to let Kate be, both personally and professionally.

  Then, one night in late March, he spotted her crossing the street in SoHo. Her appearance was shocking, her face slack, thick shadows under her eyes, clothes and hair unwashed. He called out to her, but she quickened her pace and disappeared down the crowded sidewalk. A week later, he stopped by her apartment and knocked. He was sure she was home, he had heard shuffling from inside, but she never answered the door.