Storberry

by Dan Padavona

  The night was thicker here, as though the streetlamps could not expel the gloom which pooled along their radii. The truck traveled slowly, and Greg recalled Rory Dickson's warning about vagrants and vandalism. The rundown structures to either side of the road stared back with lifeless indifference.

  The trailer park came into view beyond the road's end. Dell Lawrence's trailer was in the second row, and he worried anew about Katy. He felt a measure of responsibility, for he had been one of the last people to see her, leaving Branyan's apartment and sliding into The Red Lion. Dell hadn't officially reported her missing at the time, but he had known that the girl was on the run.

  While the police truck's searchlight swept across the yards, a shirtless man sat on his front porch, and watched the truck with undisguised animosity. A younger couple walked along the buckled sidewalk on the opposite side of the street, oblivious to the emergency vehicle. They shared a bottle obscured by a paper bag.

  The truck pulled into the trailer park. Tires bounced over the dirt lot hummocks. He swept the search light across the aluminum siding, and the reflection off the siding was blinding.

  Katy will return to the trailer. That is, if she had survived the wind storm.

  He didn't wish to consider the alternative.

  The front three trailer windows emanated dim white in cheap incandescent lighting. Shadows moved within, and he saw a woman peek at him through venetian blinds. The Lawrence trailer lay beyond, its interior black ink. It brooded silently in the moonlight, an empty shell.

  Then the searchlight found something.

  The bordering meadow waved in silver tones beyond the lot. A lone figure stumbled through the tall grass with an erratic gait.

  Hell of a night to get drunk, he thought. But as he watched the figure, gooseflesh rose along his arms. There was something disturbing about its gait, as though it conducted a frenzied search. The figure moved faster than he would have thought possible, darting left and right like a firefly. He put the truck in park and stepped out, his hand moving unconsciously to the gun on his hip.

  “You, there! Storberry Police Department.”

  The figure stopped in the field some fifty yards away, a dangerous silhouette against the silver field. It was staring right at him, and for a moment he felt the tinge of black terror slither across his skin.

  What the hell is he doing out there?

  “You need to get inside. It's not safe out here tonight.”

  The figure took one step forward.

  As he felt his heart thump, the sensation that he was facing a dangerous animal instead of a man overwhelmed him. The wind gusted at the man’s back, pulling his hair forward and setting the tall grass into frenzy.

  He blinked, and the shape disappeared.

  Greg raced to the truck and swung the searchlight across the field. Rye and bluestem swayed in the breeze. Beyond the tall grass, a cluster of trees cast an elongated pool of murk.

  The figure was gone.

  Twelve

  The truck lights cut through the night and painted Randolph Road in silvery glimmer. They passed the Giovanni farm, with its iconic cow and slogan painted across the giant barn front.

  It was well after midnight, and few lights shined within the residences. The silhouette of the hill forest loomed in the distance, resolute and monstrous. Flashes of red near the end of Randolph marked the onset of the damage swath two miles ahead, where emergency crews worked to clear the road. Somewhere in that mess was the Marks' home.

  Randy Marks felt sick to his stomach.

  They're going to find the bodies.

  He did his best to occupy Benny with small talk, but his eyes were fixed on the handle of the door. All he needed was a second while the others were occupied, and—

  “We're here.”

  Rory turned the truck into Mary's driveway and killed the engine. He grabbed the shotgun from under the seat and loaded it with shells from his shirt pocket.

  The six figures approached the two-story home via a short walkway lined with freshly-planted tulips, the air redolent of rich compost and dew-soaked grass.

  The front door was off its hinges and thrown aside, leaning precariously against tall shrubbery. The remnants of the hinges were twisted and bent in the door frame, splintered wood jutting out of the frame like an iron maiden.

  “I'll be damned,” Rory said.

  Astonishment covered his face. He touched the hinges and ran his hands along the warped door where the hinges were once connected, as though doing so could help him reason through the madness.

  “What on earth?”

  “It's just as I told you,” Mary said. “Shall we go inside?”

  Rory nodded. He readied the shotgun and led them forward, then Evan and Mary. Renee and Randy held Benny's hands in the back, but the boy pulled them free to show them that he wasn't frightened.

  “Stay close,” Randy warned his brother. “And don't wander off.”

  The keys jingled in Rory's pocket as they entered through the deformed jamb, and Randy wondered if there was a way to get hold of them without the big man knowing.

  One lamp was on in the living room. Mary flicked on two more, and the downstairs was awash in light.

  “This way,” she said, directing them toward the kitchen.

  They found the basement door smashed open against the wall, where impact cracks in the plaster ran to the ceiling in jagged spider webs.

  “It came up the stairs from the basement.”

  “He came up the stairs,” said Rory, but Mary detected the slightest waver in his certainty.

  Evan hefted the door off the wall and examined the hinges, the chrome warped and cracking.

  “I might argue that a man could break through this door. But how do you explain the front door? No man could do that,” Evan said.

  “Let's be reasonable. What are we saying? That a monster is running amok in Storberry?”

  “If you have a more logical explanation, I want to hear it.”

  Rory wiped the sweat from his brow on his shirt sleeve.

  “You said he—”

  “It,” Mary said.

  “—it, entered the basement through the window. So let's take a gander.”

  She led them down the stairs, which groaned under their combined weight like old bones, past the laundry room, toward the carpeted room in the back. The malodorous stench had dissipated. When she saw the alcove door standing open, her legs turned to rubber. The thing had been in there all along. If she had remembered to check the alcove—

  She would have been killed.

  The rifle had only slowed the monster down. It would have killed her, right here in the basement. Only one weapon had worked against the beast. She touched the cross through the denim, and it emitted a peculiar warmth.

  She swallowed and closed the alcove door. Evan was watching her curiously, as if seeing her for the first time.

  In the final room, the wrenched window stood crooked on the far wall. The drapes waved ghost-like. Benny stood behind his brother and watched the drapes, the way a mouse watches a stalking cat.

  Rory pushed cardboard boxes out of the way to reach the window frame. The wood was cracked around the frame, and the brass locking mechanism had been bent until it split apart.

  “Might have used a jack of some sort,” he scratched his head and wondered. “You couldn't rip open a well-constructed window like this with just your hands.”

  “No man could, anyhow,” Evan said.

  “Right,” Rory said, eying him warily.

  “Need more proof? Let's look upstairs,” Mary said.

  As she led the group up the staircase, Rory didn't think any criminal in his right mind would still be inside the house. But he felt uncomfortable with Mary weaponless, leading the way into the unseen. He brandished the shotgun and followed close behind her.

  There was a hint of gunpowder in the air when they reached the top landing. The evidence of gunfire was everywhere. Rory found one partial shell wedged
in the bathroom wall, and the bedroom door lay wrecked on the floor with a gaping hole in the middle. Moonlight filtered through the deformed jamb in azure strands, as though searching.

  “I shot it—”

  “Him-”

  “—through the door.”

  Renee inspected the door with growing concern. The hole was so large that she didn't think anything could have survived.

  Mary turned on the ceiling light, and the darkness receded through the window into the night. The deranged scene looked less menacing in the light, but the memory of the horror gripped Mary like a cold hand on her spine.

  “You're sure you shot this bastard?” Rory said.

  “Several times,” Mary said.

  “She must have,” Renee said with a look of sudden understanding and terror in her eyes. “There's only one bullet hole in the bathroom, but this door took several shots.”

  “How could it take direct shots from a rifle and still have enough strength to blow through the front door?”

  Rory looked to Evan, who was bent down next to Renee inspecting the remnants of the door, for an explanation.

  Mary glimpsed the abandoned Remington next to her bedroom dresser, along with a handful of discarded ammunition.

  “Not that I'll be needing these,” Mary said as she gathered up the rifle and the remaining bullets.

  “What do you think now?” Evan asked Rory.

  He could see Rory's mind churn through the possibilities, and even the impossibilities. The older man gripped his head in his hands, as if by sheer force he could divine a sane explanation.

  “I think we should bring in Greg Madsen on this. But I sure as shit ain't going to be the one to tell him that some sort of monster is running amok in Storberry,” Rory said.

  “What do you believe, Rory?” Mary asked, watching him intently.

  Rory returned her gaze. He had seen what the horrors of combat could do to a man and knew what insanity looked like. It sure as hell didn't look like Mary Giovanni.

  It was going to take a lot more than the woman's word to convince him that something inhuman stalked the night, but she was as predictable as an eastern sunrise. This was the same determined Giovanni daughter that had helped her family build its business into a town fixture, before taking that same single-mindedness and parlaying it into the Sweet Nothings Café. He didn't completely believe what he had heard tonight, but he trusted that she believed it. Maybe that was enough.

  “I believe you are one of the bravest and most intelligent women I have ever known. If you say we are in danger, then we have work to do.”

  Chapter Five

  Jen curled next to Tom on the Barrows' living room floor. The grandfather clock ticked from the top of the staircase, keeping beat with the night, while shut windows walled away night sounds. Their reflections were cast in the darkened television screen, as though they were part of a movie. Watching their reflections gave her a focus point, while the sharp memories from the Kingsley home tried to rip through the paper-thin walls she had constructed to hold them at bay.

  As she pulled a blanket over them, he thrashed in his sleep. For a long time she held him, and he seemed mollified. At some point after 2:30 a.m. her body surrendered, and she drifted into slumber.

  Sleep was impossible for Tom. Whenever he came close to unconsciousness, the remembrance of his parents' deaths sent electrical shock waves through his body and jolted him awake. He tried to will himself to sleep, but his body did not obey. For short periods his body collapsed from fatigue, and he drifted into semi-sleep, caught in purgatory between the awareness of his surroundings and the machinations of his imagination in dream.

  His dreams were as fitful as his sleep. He was fishing in Becks Pond with Jen and looked down to find his body crawling with ticks. The parasites burrowed into his skin until they covered him from head-to-toe. Jen dove into the water to escape the ticks and surfaced in a cover of wet leaves, but then he saw the leaves move and knew they were leeches.

  His mother and father frequented his dreams, and when he dreamed of them, they were never truly dead. It had all been a mistake. A misunderstanding.

  In one dream his father died in the hospital. Funeral arrangements were made, but before his father was delivered to the morgue, he awoke, to the doctors’ surprise. They had misdiagnosed his condition, and Chuck Kingsley was going to recover.

  Tom’s father returned home, but he seemed lost, the dying embers of sunlight touching his face as he lay placid in his easy chair. He sometimes asked if the Red Lion Tavern was still open, and Tom told him that he needed to unlock the doors to the bar so that the customers could return. His father said the keys were lost and drifted into sleep.

  In another dream, his mother drove him to college. They stood together amid a maze of sidewalk which converged beneath their feet. Brick-faced buildings rose out of a sea of ivy, like sunken ships covered in kelp.

  He saw it all from a third-person point of view. The boy holding Donna Kingsley's hand could not have been more than eight years old.

  His belongings and memories were stuffed into suitcases, laid out at his feet on the sidewalk. He watched the boy say goodbye to her. There were streaks of tears on his cheeks.

  “I don't think I want to go to college yet.”

  “This is your time, Tommy. Make me proud.”

  “I'm not ready for you to leave, Mommy.”

  “I don't have a choice. I'm sorry, but I have to go now.”

  He heard himself say, “I love you,” as his eyes opened for good at 4 a.m.

  As is the case with semi-sleep, he felt as though he had been in and out of slumber for several hours, when in truth only 90 minutes had passed. Jen's arm was around him when loss overcame him. He cried for several minutes, burying his face into his arms to avoid waking her. His shoulders shook under the blanket, and she awoke and stroked the hair from his eyes.

  “You're all right,” she said.

  “They're gone.”

  “I know they are. I'm here, though, and I'm not going anywhere.”

  She held him.

  As a solitary lamp cast in flaxen tones from the far corner of the room, the night sky perched itself against the windows. It was two hours until sunrise.

  “We need to find your parents,” he said, eyes groggy from exhaustion.

  There was a dread certainty in her eyes.

  “Tom, I don't think they're coming back either.”

  Two

  At 4 a.m. Armstrong General Hospital was sound asleep. The young nurse on the second floor had collapsed at her desk with her face buried in an open paperback, blonde ponytail splayed across the pages.

  The rotund orderly sweeping the hall with mechanical indifference gave up the facade of working hard and pulled out two rolling chairs. He sat his ample backside in one and put his feet on the other. Then he pulled the hood of his sweatshirt over his eyes to block out the irritant fluorescent lighting. The soft hum from the fixtures made for the perfect white noise lullaby.

  The orderly was dreaming of cruise vacations and mai tai cocktails when Dell Lawrence crept into the hall. Lawrence had stood in the shadows at the end of the wing, the steady beep of heart monitors counting time, watching for the nurse and orderly to depart their posts. He only needed a few seconds to find the boy. Now that they were asleep, Dell could take his sweet time.

  He passed so close to the orderly that his shirt brushed the chair that the man’s feet were propped on. Cold sweat broke across his brow, and he froze in place waiting for the fat man to open his eyes. The orderly snorted and relaxed again.

  He breathed deeply. As he slipped past open patient rooms, he centered his eyes on the security cameras, careful to avoid their gaze. At points where he could not place a wall between himself and the lens, he pulled his shirt over his face and stayed low to the wall. Video evidence would be damning, after all. That is, if the Branyan boy hadn't already fingered him. By sunrise, the boy's mouth would be shut permanently. Dead men tell n
o tales.

  Room 208.

  Finding him had been easy. He had called the hospital under the guise of the boy's uncle, and the idiot at the front desk had all but drawn him a map. But visiting hours weren't until blah blah blah.

  Dell had fucked up. Pretty severely at that. He had only meant to scare the boy. Knock him around a little. Make sure he never touched Katy again. That had changed when he saw the smug piece of trash, running the store like he was Mr. Bigshot King of the Beef Jerky. So he had lost control. Plain and simple. Not much of a defense in court, he supposed.

  Yeah I guess I kinda lost it, yer honor. Fucked things up royally. Never meant any harm. It's our kids, ya know? Gotta protect'em. I'm sure glad you see my point of view.

  He stole glances into the patient rooms on his left.

  212. An old man sleeping.

  210. A young boy in a leg cast probably dreaming of riding his bike again by summer.

  Nobody awake to see him.

  Then 208.

  His temples pounded. Did he really intend to murder the boy? There was still time to reconsider.

  It's him or me.

  Dead men tell no tales.

  The room was dark and tomb-like. Parking lot lighting streamed through venetian blinds and rendered alternating slashes of glare across the walls. An empty cot was at the front of the room.

  No roommate.

  Good.

  No witnesses.

  As the light pattern spread across the boy's cot like railroad tracks, Dell saw that his eyes were closed, head tilted toward the window. One of his eyes was blackened and parts of his face were swollen into purple mounds. The turned down blanket revealed a taped ribcage.

  Otherwise, the boy didn't look half-bad. A damn tough kid. Dell had to give him that.

  Too fucking bad you're going to die now.

  Dell snatched the pillow off the empty cot and approached the boy. He licked his lips and then looked behind him. Nobody to see.