by Lucy Lambert
His abs and chest, just like his face, were soaked and glistening with sweat.
“Close the door!” he said.
His eyes had changed. They were yellow, now. My brain reacted, taking over. I slammed the door shut, turned around, and leaned against it. From within the room there was a ripping noise, followed by an inhuman cry of pain.
I buried my face in his jacket, blotting out the world as I covered my ears. That only succeeded in muffling the noise a little.
I’d never felt so terrified in my whole life. I’d heard phrases like “scared stupid” and “petrified” before to describe the feeling, but never before did I feel so scared that I was actually incapable of moving, of helping myself.
It was like the human body just shut down in that scenario, somehow realizing there was no way out of the situation and choosing instead to let nature take its course.
At first, I thought the silence was just my brain somehow turning off.
No, I thought, you’re not dead. He’s just not making any noise anymore.
That almost scared me more than when he had been. At least then I had some idea of what was going on.
The air was stuffy and stale in his jacket, too, pressed right up against my nose and mouth like that. The urge to breathe came back and I lifted my face away from it.
That pounding noise was my heart. That rasp the breath rushing in and out between teeth clenched in fear. Despite my earlier coldness, a chilly bead of sweat ran down the curve of my spine.
But aside from that, there was nothing. I heard nothing from behind that door.
Swallowing, trying to push that lump back down my throat, I leaned forward onto all fours and then climbed to my feet. Not knowing what else to do with it, I threw Adam’s jacket around my shoulders. It was several sizes too large for me. I fingered the tears in the leather and thought about the claws I’d watched sprout from where Adam’s fingernails used to be.
I became aware of something breathing heavily and deeply behind me. My back tensed. This was the part in horror movies when the dumb blonde turned to find the beast staring right at her, its eyes hungry and saliva dripping from its fangs.
I understood that urge now, too. That desire to turn and put a face to your fear.
A thought flashed through my mind: is this how Jenn felt?
Slowly, I turned.
Those yellow eyes stared back at me through the little barred window in the door. Below them was a long, black-furred snout. I got the impression of a muscular, wolfish body standing behind the door.
Those clawed hands, swollen now to monstrous proportion, reached up and wrapped around the bars as he draw his lips back from fangs that were far too white.
“Adam?” I said.
When he growled, I could feel the reverberations in my chest. This wasn’t Adam. It shared the same body, but one look into those feral eyes and I knew there was nothing of that man left in there.
The monster tried reaching through the bars, but his forearm was too thick. When it got stuck, he roared.
I screamed and fell back on my ass, turning over right away and scrabbling away on all fours, too terrified to make that leap onto my feet to sprint.
That huge door slammed against its frame as I ran up the stairs and slammed the basement entrance shut behind me.
“I see…” I said, “I see…”
I rushed into the kitchen, the only room in that big, empty house I was familiar with at all, and hid under the marble overhang of the island.
Even with the door closed and little distance between us, I could hear his howls of frustration down there. When he slammed into the door, I could feel the house tremble.
Not knowing what else to do, I struggled for a moment to pull my cell out of my pocket. Now that I was away from the sight of that thing, I could gather myself a little better.
I unlocked it, checking for any messages. Nothing. I was here with Adam (or what used to be Adam, anyway) and there was, as I was growing accustomed to, nothing from Jenn.
I nearly dropped the phone, then. This is what Adam wanted to tell me. And he did it by showing me the truth. I looked at the jacket again, at the little shreds of leather around the scratches, and the way it was torn.
This is what had happened to him the night of the date. He thought he could control it, but he’d lost control (because of me, I knew then).
I’d hurried home as he became that monster. Jenn went for her walk, then. She’d been out there, all alone with him.
Quickly as I could, I stripped the jacket off and threw it on the tile floor. How many of those scratches and tears were from her?
But I also knew why Adam had brought me here tonight to show me this. I looked over at the fridge and touched my lips, remembering that frantic, impassioned kiss. I could still taste him, if I thought about it.
He cared about me, and he wanted me to care enough about him to realize the truth.
That monster had killed Jenn. That was why I couldn’t find her. Her body was out there, somewhere.
He also wanted me to see that it wasn’t him that killed her. It was the monster. And he and the monster were separate, like different personalities sharing one body.
The truth of it all made me bury my face in my hands, pushing back against my eyes to keep the tears locked behind those lids.
As though he could know what I was thinking and feeling from down there, the werewolf let out a howl that cut through all the walls and doors between us.
“Shut up!” I said.
Was this what Vick warned me about in the cafeteria? But how could he know? I wiped at my cheeks, trying to keep from going crazy right then and there.
If werewolves and witches were real, what else was? I thought I’d learned long ago that monsters and demons and all that crap were all stories, meant to be understood as parables, or ways to keep unruly children in line, or for cheap late night entertainment.
The whole time, it was the children who were right. The adults, the people who were supposed to know it all, were just fooling themselves the entire time. Fooling themselves while they slept in their beds with the closet open, or the space under the bed unchecked. Fooling themselves while out camping.
I squeezed my eyes shut and tried not to think about it. My sanity was slipping away, and I grasped at it with the very tip of my fingernails.
“Okay, calm down. It’s all okay, he’s locked up…”
Clearly, he’d transformed down there before. All those gouges and scrapes in the wall proved that. Why else would he have a reinforced door like that?
Then I realized there was another piece of the puzzle. I could see what it was, just not where it fit.
Vick knew about all this. But how?
I felt overloaded, and completely exhausted. As my muscles unclenched, the adrenaline drained out of me. Balling myself up as best I could, my eyes slid shut.
I thought I dozed for only a moment. The clock on my phone said it was about quarter after one in the morning.
Down in the basement, that thing still raged. I stood at the entrance, my forehead leaned against the cool door. Despite my apparent nap, I didn’t feel any less tired. If anything, my body felt even less energized.
I walked around the first floor like a zombie, pausing to glance out at the useless BMW parked in the driveway. Wherever I went, I always found myself back in the kitchen.
I sat in the seat Adam used when we first came in. The loaf of bread was still there, along with the peanut butter and knife. I made myself a peanut butter sandwich, not bothering to cut the crusts off.
My eating was mechanical, without any flavor. It was just nourishment, sugar to give me a little boost so that I could try and make it through this.
I had this stone-cold, heavy certainty in the pit of my stomach that Jenn was dead.
What made it even heavier was that it felt like it was at least partially my fault.
Could I go back in time to the day of the midterm? If I could, I’d go find
Jenn straight away after class. I’d make us stay in her room or mine all night, neither of us allowed out.
Maybe then, Adam would have been able to control himself without me around. Even if he hadn’t, we’d be behind the security of several locked doors.
As far as I knew, time travel was still impossible. That left me in the present, with only a few facts to rest on.
They read like this: Adam was a werewolf. Adam had also basically admitted to killing Jenn, even though he blamed this on his monstrous alter ego.
The peanut butter did keep me going for a few hours. It was surprising how long it took for time to drag by, early in the morning when the entire world was still asleep.
I wondered when he’d turn back to his human form. Would it be when the sun broke in through that skylight? Did that mean he remained a werewolf longer in the winter than in the summer?
There was a digital clock, its numbers green, on the door of the fridge right over the ice dispenser. I watched the time change, advancing forward no matter hard I concentrated on forcing it to stop and reverse.
Those numbers read, “5:17” when I keyed “911” into my phone.
I didn’t have Jenn’s body, but I had her admitted killer locked in a room downstairs. The cops wouldn’t believe me about the werewolf stuff, but one look in there and they’d have to open an investigation.
My thumb hovered over the little green receiver-shaped “Call” button. One push, a few words, and there’d be a cruiser here shortly.
My thumb shook. I bit down on my bottom lip, trying to will myself into pushing the button and alerting the authorities.
“It’s the right thing to do,” I said, “Come on, you know she’d want you to.”
This was all so awful. Jenn was the type of person who’d be absolutely thrilled to find out that monsters were real. Hell, for all I knew, death by monster was her preferred way to go.
Besides, Adam wasn’t really the monster. I’d come to that conclusion myself already, hadn’t I?
The clock on the fridge read “6:09” when I finally locked my phone and put it back into my pocket.
Chapter 25
I woke up to see daylight coming in through the windows along the far kitchen wall. I’d slept with my back hunched over, my head resting on my folded arms on top of the marble island.
Everything was stiff.
“Ouch…” I said as I straightened up.
I had a purpose, though. Straight down into the basement I went, down that hall towards that iron-banded door. I could see the light in there as well, coming in through the skylight.
Going onto my tiptoes, I looked in through the window. Adam was curled up into a fetal ball, naked, right under that spot of daylight.
“Adam,” I said, “Adam!”
He stirred, looking over his shoulder at me.
“Steph…? You’re still here.”
“Of course I am. The keys to the car are in your pocket. Unless you ate them last night.”
“Last night…?” he said. He sounded dazed.
What was it like, coming down from that? Was it like being on the biggest high imaginable, then crashing? Or was it just like one of those hangovers you got after getting blackout drunk, your head pounding and every last fiber of you praying for more sleep?
“Come on, get out here. How do you unlock this?” I asked tugging at the bars in the window. He needed to do something. We needed to do something.
When he stood, I’d forgotten that he was totally naked. Some heat rose in my cheeks as I looked away.
The door opened.
“It only works from the inside. The monster is all instinct; he doesn’t really know how to open a door, and this one’s too strong from him to break down.
I shoved his jacket into his arms. He went back into the room to retrieve what was left of his clothes. His shirt, of course, was torn to shreds. But his jeans and boxers were in surprisingly good shape as he pulled them on.
He walked with me up the stairs, still gripping the rail tightly. He seemed exhausted, too.
“So you understand?” he said when we got to the top.
“I think so.”
“We should grab some food. It always leaves me starving.”
He started for the kitchen, but I grabbed his arm. His flesh was cold and trembling, and I could tell he could barely stay on his feet. But this couldn’t wait.
“Later. We need to do something first,” I said.
“What?”
It was hard for me to say. The words just didn’t want to come out. Saying them felt like admitting defeat. But they had to be said, if I wanted to bring closure to everything.
“We need to find her,” I said.
Adam brushed some of that lank hair out of his eyes. “What do you mean?”
He really was out of it. And that meant I had to say it all.
My voice started to break, and I had to keep rubbing at my eyes.
“We have to find Jenn’s body. You have to take me to where you left her.”
Adam slumped against the wall, his eyes wide with shock and fear. After a while, he nodded and began rooting around in his pocket for the keys to the car.
Chapter 26
I watched the little car icon on the BMW’s GPS move slowly down the road. Hazelglen was sectioned off into a very rough grid, which the map showed. However, if I looked out at the town, all I could see were the rows of old houses.
With it being afternoon now, most people were still at work. The houses were dark and empty. Most of them had their curtains drawn. This was strange. It was the middle of the day, the sun was shining. Were the people here allergic to light or something?
An awful frustration boiled in my stomach. My shirt stuck to the small of my back with the sweat I’d worked up, wandering first around the campus, then around a few acres of woods just outside the town.
They were the spots Adam said his… alter ego was most likely to take the body. How did he know? Well, apparently he’d woken up completely naked in those areas a few times, a dead animal somewhere nearby.
That was early on in his werewolf career, according to him. The lycanthropy curse set in at the onset of puberty, and those were his memories from around then before his parents began locking him in that room.
“Maybe she’s still alive…” Adam said.
It was hard to be angry with him then, but I managed. He’d searched even harder than I had. He’d never killed anyone before, apparently.
I didn’t look at him. I knew if I did, I would find him a touch green in the face. Just the thought of what he did made him nauseous, and he wanted to find her so badly.
“Or maybe you put her body in some random ditch we haven’t checked!” I said.
“Maybe she ran? Goths are rebellious, aren’t they? Maybe she wanted to run away…” Adam said.
When we got back into the car after finally calling our search off, large black bags formed under his eyes. He stared out at the road in front of the car without blinking, as though this was all just some awful dream he’d wake up from soon enough.
I could feel the tension in him from the passenger seat. He kept adjusting his grip on the steering wheel, shifting his butt around, trying to find some comfortable position.
He couldn’t, though. Not because of the BMW. No, it was a lovely car. It was all him. Adam Arnold was uncomfortable in his own skin and bones, like he despised the very fibers of his body for doing what they’d done.
“She was at school, not home. This is where she wanted to be. Why would she run away from where she wanted to be, Adam? Even if she did, don’t you think she would have let people know?”
I was wound up tightly, too. That fruitless search was just as frustrating as it had been exhausting.
It wasn’t just that, though.
Adam slapped his hands down on the steering wheel as we pulled up to a red light.
Part of me knew that he’d done it. That thing inside him had come out and killed my friend. The o
ther part agreed, somewhat, it just didn’t think he deserved all that blame. Different personalities in the same body couldn’t be blamed for the actions of the other, could they?
It all hurt my head. I wasn’t a god damn philosophy major.
“Just get me back to the campus,” I said.
I knew that the search should keep going, but it felt like we were both about to fall over. Not to mention both of us badly needing showers. Besides, I had class in about two hours.
I’d come here wanting to get educated, to finally get on with my future. All this stuff was in my way. How come obstacles always popped up at the least opportune moments? Not the just the normal stuff either, like boys and parties. But murder and monsters of all things!
The light turned green and Adam spun the BMW’s tires, peeling away from the intersection. The windows dulled the sharp noise, but it still grated at the back of my mind.
I opened my mouth, about to tell him to calm the hell down, that there might be a cop waiting in some speed trap along the road. But I stopped.
The denim of my jeans stretched across the rectangular box of the phone in my right pocket. I had been this close to calling the cops on him myself.
Maybe it would be better if he got pulled over. The cop would lean in, ask for his license and registration, and i could just start screaming about how he’d kidnapped me, how he’d already killed my friend…
But then we drove along the little stretch with that single line of trees guarding the perimeter of the campus on one side, and the nice old houses on the other.
The signal clicked softly as he flicked it and turned into the campus. He went as far as he could in the car before pulling up along the curb. He threw the shifter into park.
“We’ll find her…” he said.
His fingers flexed on the gear shift, and I could feel him looking at my hands in my lap, considering whether he should grab one and give it a reassuring squeeze.
Hot anger flared up in me again. Not just at him, but at myself. Despite all this, I still liked him! I actually wanted that little assuring squeeze, and those kind, empty words.