Rhiannon turned slowly in a circle, scanning the wall of darkness for any sign of her missing brother. The SUV was front-down in a shallow ditch, but Rhiannon could hear the engine still running and the lights were still on, which she guessed was a good thing.
“Ben!” she yelled, surprised at how weak and croaky her voice sounded against the weight of the cool night air. She listened, waiting for a reply. Instead, all she heard was the desperate whine of Thor, still perched on the center console behind the two front seats, pawing at Emily.
What was wrong with this dumb dog? Rhiannon wondered. Didn’t he know a dead person when he smelled her? She glanced around the outside of the car. Maybe the dog could be useful. She had seen how her little brother had taken to the big mound of fur.
“Thor!” she snapped. “Where’s Ben?” The dog glanced her way, then went back to sniffing Emily. “Thor,” she called again, this time a little less sharply. “We need to find Ben. Where’s Ben?”
Thor turned again at the sound of Ben’s name. He glanced back at Emily one last time, then jumped down from the backseat and started sniffing around the grass. “That’s it. Good boy. Find Ben.”
The malamute sniffed left and right a few more times, gave a single bark, and started up the embankment the car had fallen down.
“Wait up, you dumb dog,” Rhiannon shouted as Thor was swallowed up by the wall of blackness. Then she took off running as fast as she could after him.
Rhiannon scrambled up the embankment after Thor, her sneakers slipping on the loose earth. The dog stopped at the top for her, waiting patiently in the last of the light from the SUV’s headlights as she pulled herself up the twenty feet or so of incline, his tongue lolling from his mouth.
“Just slow down, dog,” Rhiannon panted as she finally pulled herself over the top of the embankment and onto the graveled curve of the road, but the dog was already off again. She could hear his paws scattering the gravel as he loped down the road, back in the direction of the Jeffersons’ place.
“Benjamin!” she yelled the next time she stopped. Sweat, sticky and salty, trickled down her forehead and into her mouth. “Yuck.”
The stupid dog had already taken off again, but Rhiannon wasn’t going to just blindly follow him. She waited patiently for a reply from her brother, then, when there was none, she called out into the darkness again, this time a little louder.
As she waited for her brother to reply, she thought about her dad. She had hoped that maybe she had imagined it all, but she knew that something was very wrong with him. She had seen the shape in the shadows that had those…hooked things stuck in him. Although she would not admit it, she knew her dad was badly hurt, maybe even worse. But her little brother wasn’t going to know that. He wasn’t going to sense the danger he might be in, that his daddy was no longer who he thought he was.
Although the fear was almost overwhelming for her, she was not going to let the thing that had taken her father take her little brother, too. If there was some way that she could rescue them both, she was going to figure it out. Dad always said she was much brighter than all her friends she hung out with.
The sweat from her climb had begun to cool as the chilly night air slowly claimed her body heat. Her breath formed a white cloud in front of her face. It was so incredibly quiet out here. Except for the occasional rustle of leaves from a light breeze blowing through the branches of the forest, there was no sound. Even the air felt absent, somehow—so still it might as well not be there.
The silence was broken by the sound of scattering gravel as Thor padded back to her location. He looked unhappy that she was not following him, but he could just stuff it. It was her brother that they were trying to find, and she was not going to put all her trust in some dumb dog. She was going to do things her way.
To prove the point, Rhiannon let out a long, loud “Beeeennnnnnnnnn!” into the night. Her voice echoed through the woods. She winced at how loud her call actually was. Who knew how many more of those things were out there in the darkness? And now they knew where she was for certain. God! She was so dumb sometimes.
In the distance, carried on the breeze, Rhiannon heard a faint but unmistakable answer to her call: “Rhiaaaa!” It was barely audible to her, but Thor’s ears pricked up and he was gone in a second, heading off down the path in the call’s direction. It was her brother. She knew the little dweeb’s voice as though it were her own.
He was alive.
A second after Thor had been swallowed up by the darkness, Rhiannon began sprinting after him.
“What happened?”
Emily heard the voice ask the question again before she realized that it was she who was speaking. For a moment she was confused. Hadn’t she been in the SUV? Wasn’t she supposed to be going somewhere? There was something important she was supposed to be doing, she was sure of it.
Then, like a mistuned radio that finally found the right station, her mind cleared and the confusion was replaced by a heavy aching pain in her head and a nauseating dizziness that forced her to her knees. For a few moments, she thought she was going to throw up, but after a couple of deep steadying breaths, her vision cleared. A loud continuous whirring sound filled the inside of her skull where her brain had once been. The noise finally resolved into the dull drone of the Durango’s engine. Somehow she had managed to get out of the driving seat and walk a few feet away from the vehicle.
How the hell had that happened?
The children! She pushed herself to her feet, almost collapsing again as the world swam in front of her eyes. She staggered toward the lights of the SUV, her hand in front of her eyes to stop the screaming bolts of pain bouncing around her head.
The driver’s side door was wide open. She saw the congealed bloodstain on the glass of the window, and her hand moved involuntarily to her head. She felt a sting of pain as her hand found a raised egg-size lump on the left side of her head, a couple of inches back from her hairline. She pulled her fingers away and looked at the clean tips. Well at least she wasn’t bleeding anymore, but good grief, did it hurt like a mother.
The inside of the SUV was empty. Emily made her way around to the passenger side, leaning hard against the body of the Durango in case her vision betrayed her again.
There was no sign of the children outside the SUV, and she let out a small sigh of relief when she saw that there was no blood on the seats the kids had occupied. That could only mean that they had survived the crash and had left her for whatever reason. There was also no sign of Thor. She knew there was no way her dog would have abandoned her unless he had had to, so he must be with Ben and Rhiannon.
Standing in the dim glow of the SUV’s light, Emily realized with a growing unease that she knew exactly where the children were: they were on their way back to the last place they had seen Simon.
The pain in Emily’s head pulsed harder and lightning lanced through her brain as she tried to jog back to the driver’s seat of the big SUV, forcing her to stop and lean against its rear door while her swimming vision and whirling stomach returned to normal. Was she concussed? Maybe, but she had to get to the kids before they reached the Jefferson house. She had no idea how much of a head start the two children had, so she was going to have to get the Dodge out of the ditch and drive it if she was to have any chance of finding the children before they got to Simon…or he found them.
She edged around the SUV, leaning hard against its body for support. The front-left wheel of the Dodge was lodged in a ditch, canting the vehicle to the left, and the front-right wheel was halfway up the embankment; just a few more feet and the SUV would have rolled over, she realized.
Emily pulled herself through the open door into the driver’s seat, slamming it shut behind her, and instantly regretting it as the thud reverberated through her head. She gave a startled cry when the cabin lights went out, plunging her into darkness.
The engine was still rumbling, reverberating through the leather seats and steering wheel as she gripped it. She was going
to have to reverse this thing out of the ditch if she wanted to go anywhere.
The headlights illuminated the opposite side of the ditch the SUV had landed in. It was a couple of feet higher than the hood, and she had no doubt the SUV could make it over it if it wasn’t for the fact that it was lined with trees.
She slipped the gear stick to the reverse position and lifted her foot off the brake. The engine revs increased slightly, but the SUV barely moved an inch. She glanced in the rearview mirror; everything beyond the back of the Dodge was bathed in the red glow of the vehicle’s taillights. The white of the reverse lights stretched barely beyond that but were next to useless for seeing anything.
Sliding her foot onto the accelerator, Emily eased it toward the floor, slowly increasing the revs. The vehicle edged up the side of the embankment, then slid back down when it was almost halfway. Frustrated, Emily pushed harder on the accelerator pedal; the big SUV’s rear wheels spun as they fought for traction on the grass, finally found it, and catapulted backward out of the ditch and onto the field.
Emily’s head flew forward then back again as her seat belt lock engaged. Blackness began to creep into the edge of her vision, but she willed herself to stay conscious, pushing it back until she realized her foot was still on the accelerator. She slipped it off the pedal and slammed on the brake. This time her head flew backward into the head support of the seat, and she saw motes of blackness float across her eyes, blocking the console gauges.
“Jesus,” she hissed when her vision finally cleared again. “I’ve about had enough of this shit.”
Taking a deep breath, she slipped the gear stick back into drive and slowly pushed on the accelerator, pointing the grill of the Dodge in the direction she thought the road should be. If she could find the embankment she had crashed over, she would follow it and hope she could find a way onto the gravel road that led back to the Jeffersons’ place.
The SUV’s headlights cut through the darkness in front of her, illuminating the ground ahead. Everything else beyond that was pitch-black. Wasn’t there something brighter? Emily glanced down at the stick with the light controls; the twisty-knob thing had one more selection to it. She turned it, and instantly the field of light in front of her widened and heightened.
“That’s more like it.”
With the high beams on, she quickly spotted the curve of the embankment rising up in front of her. There were no tire tracks coming down the slope, but she could see a chunk of earth and clots of muddy grass near the base of the embankment, a weaving track of crushed grass and broken earth leading away from where she had landed. What she also saw, as she slowed to a stop at the base of the embankment, was a line of divots, presumably leading up to the road above. She could be wrong, but to her it looked almost like the kind of marks she thought Rhiannon’s sneakers would make if the little girl was trying to climb it.
It was hardly conclusive proof, but it would have to do because it was the only clue she had right now to what direction the children had taken.
Emily accelerated slowly until the Dodge was parallel with the base of the embankment and began slowly following the base around as it curved to match the road above. About two hundred yards farther on, she saw the dusty-gray reflection of the gravel road as it dipped down and leveled out.
Turning hard right, she directed the SUV up onto the road. She heard the ping of gravel bouncing off the frame of the SUV as the front tires scrambled for grip. Then, with a final stab of the accelerator, she felt the rear tires dig deep into the soft earth and push her up and back onto the road.
Stealing herself against the coming confrontation, Emily carefully accelerated the SUV and headed back along the road toward the Jeffersons’ house.
“Rhi-annnnn-on!”
Her brother’s frightened voice drifted through the trees like a ghost toward her and Thor. The dog’s ears pricked up at the boy’s voice; then he dropped his nose to the ground again and bounded forward between two sprawling sycamore trees.
“I’m coming, Ben,” Rhiannon yelled back. She tumbled after Thor. The laces of her left sneaker had come undone and would occasionally catch under her opposite foot, almost tripping her. She knew she should stop and tie them again, but her brother’s voice had grown more scared sounding with each passing minute. So, she chose to keep on instead, unwilling to stop until she was with her little pain of a brother again.
Not long after she had scrambled up over the edge of the culvert, Thor had suddenly cut diagonally into the forest, leaving the safety of the road for a more direct route to Ben. That might be great for a dog with his superior sense of smell, but for Rhiannon, it was a painful and frustrating diversion. She bumped into trees, almost lost an eye to a low-hanging branch, and tripped over roots seemingly with almost every other step she took. She could feel rivulets of blood trickling down her arm, and her cheek stung from a collision with a branch.
The black shadow of the Jeffersons’ house suddenly loomed large in front of her. She had emerged from the woods on the west side of the house, adjacent to the garage they had escaped from earlier.
Thor suddenly stopped, growling menacingly. The dog backed up until he was parallel with Rhiannon, his eyes fixed squarely on two shapes that slowly resolved from the shadow of the house.
Ben was at his dad’s side, one of Simon’s hands resting heavily across his back, cupping the little boy’s left shoulder. Behind them, that same indistinct shadow she had seen earlier loomed, blocking out the shape of the house and moving with the boy and the man.
“Hello, sweetie,” said her father. Rhiannon felt a shudder of fear run down her spine at the sound of Simon’s voice. Thor gave another growl and backed up even farther until Rhiannon was between him and Simon.
She could see Ben’s face, pale against the black night, splotches of dirt on his cheeks bisected by the tracks of tears that still ran from her brother’s rheumy eyes.
“Rhia,” he sniveled, and he flinched as Simon’s grip tightened against his shoulder.
“Come here, Rhiannon. There’s a good girl.” The voice sounded like her father’s, but it wasn’t. There was none of the warmth usually present when he spoke to her. And no way would he ever have let Ben cry like that. Besides, the only time Dad ever called her by her full name was when he was pissed at her. And if he was angry, then why was there a permanent smile fixed to his face? No, whoever this was that had her little brother, it was no longer her dad.
Her father was gone. The pain of the realization was like a dagger thrust into her heart, and she felt her own tears begin to soak her cheeks again.
“Rhiannon,” Simon called again, this time a little sharper, utterly oblivious to her pain. “I said…come…here.” As he spoke, Rhiannon could see her father’s hand slip from Ben’s shoulder and move around the back of the boy’s neck. “I won’t ask again.” The threat to her brother was obvious.
Simon’s head suddenly dipped sideways until his ear was almost touching his right shoulder. It was as if he expected this position to give him some new perspective on this strange little creature before him. The smile grew wider, and Rhiannon saw his hand tighten around Ben’s neck. His fingers enclosed her little brother’s throat completely as simultaneously he lifted the boy up until his feet were just inches off the ground.
“Noooo!” Rhia pleaded as her brother began to choke. His feet jittered and kicked, and his eyes, still fixed on hers, bulged as his mouth opened and closed like a fish stranded on the bank of a river. Though she wanted to move, she was glued to the spot by fear. Her feet might just as well have been roots for all the good they did her. She wanted to run, to head back into the darkness of the woods and never look back. “Let…Let Ben go,” was all the resistance she could muster.
“Come here, Rhiannon,” repeated Simon, still holding the boy. Rhiannon could see Ben’s face slowly turning redder and redder as his convulsive kicking began to grow slower and slower.
“Not fair,” whimpered Rhiannon as she took another r
eticent step toward her father and brother. “Please,” she sniffled, “let him go.”
Her father’s head moved from horizontal back to its normal, upright position. As his head moved, he lowered the little boy back to the ground until the kid could at least rest the tips of his toes on the grass. It was low enough that the pressure was removed from Ben’s throat, but easy enough for her dad to quickly lift him off the ground again if he wanted to.
Her brother let out a gasp as he sucked in air, and Rhiannon felt a surge of relief as she saw his eyes, which had been tightly shut, flicker open and meet her own gaze. She had no doubt that if he wanted to, he could easily tear her brother in half. The only reason it needed Ben was that whatever was concealed in the shadows was just too slow to catch her. It had to lure her to it. It wanted them both.
This close to what had once been her father, she could make out webs of fine black veins that spread out maplike across his face and his arms. In fact, every exposed piece of skin seemed to have those lines just below the surface. And, although shrouded in shadow, she could see his eyes were no longer the comforting pale blue she remembered; now they swirled with shades of darkness that foretold violence as surely as a thunderstorm promised lightning.
She was almost within arm’s reach when she froze and stared past both her father and brother into the deeper darkness that lay just behind them. A smell, powerful enough to make her want to throw up, permeated the air and wafted to her on the cool evening breeze. Transfixed, Rhia saw the shadow shift, saw the three thick tubes running from her father back up into the darkness pulse and flex in synchronicity. Instantly, the arm holding Ben relaxed, dropping her brother the final inch or so to the ground and sending the boy coughing and spluttering to his knees. The other hand shot out toward her, grasping her upper arm in an iron grip that was far stronger than her father would ever have contemplated using.
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