by Mira Gibson
The question flew out of her head when she saw her front door.
It was open.
When she eased inside, she saw candlelight flickering across the floor and lapping up the living room wall. Shapes and shadows played off the bookshelves, the column of framed photos beside it, and a wooden rocking chair in the corner. Cautiously, she crept deeper into the room, as she scanned the bookshelf, seeing but not understanding. The sight too complicated to process.
Spray paint?
A giant red circle had been drawn over the books, the wooden shelves, and the wall. Within the red circle was a five-pointed star, also red, at its center a pair of eyes.
When she glanced at the row of candles on the floor, she startled. There was a dark mound before it, mangy fur catching the light. Then a putrid smell hit her—carcass rot.
Gasping and sputtering as she realized what it was, her heart leapt up her throat. Her stomach clenched hard, nausea sweeping through her.
Someone had dug up her old dog. His bones were exposed, ribs spiking through decomposed flesh, snout so eroded it was merely fangs protruding a jaw, his tail an arch of spiny ridges.
It looked satanic, and when she neared the red symbol, she realized it was drawn in blood.
Chapter Eleven
He could hear them through the woods, seeping through the cracks between the shed's wooden slats—chanting. He might have thought it was the wind, their rising and falling tones that resonated beneath the natural hum of the forest, but Quinton knew better and a cold sweat broke out across his chest because of it.
Seated on a cracked milk crate, his heel pounding like a metronome on high tempo, he watched the shed door, studying its shadows as though it would calm him.
He debated turning on the light. Its naked bulb, bright and stark, had made him queasy when he'd first stepped inside, yanking its string. Somehow it felt better with the light off. Or at least it had—hiding out unseen, covered in darkness, denying the role he was about to play. But his fears had found him in the shadows, and now he was itching for a new way to expel them.
Alert, ears pricking up at the sudden silence in the distance, he nearly eased realizing the chanting had stopped. But the lapse was fleeting, and when they began booming out another sustained tone, beating their rawhide drum at intervals and prolonging the ugly ritual, Quinton’s anxiety swelled into full-blown panic.
Roberta should have been here by now.
He pushed off from the crate and the plastic cracked in terrible timing with the faint pattering of bare feet over twigs outside the shed.
Her soft whisper came urgently through the closed door. “Quinton?”
Guts burning in relief they hadn’t reneged and snatched her, he rushed to let her in. “Keep the light off,” he ordered when she reached for the string. “I don’t want my parents to know I’m not in my room.”
“Okay,” she said quietly, as she eased the creaking door shut.
She looked ghostly, shadows forming in the hollows of her cheeks, across her eyes, her mouth a dark line. The only evidence she was of this world was the rank dress she refused to take off.
Roberta investigated the camera in her hands then padded over to the dusty window where a patch of moonlight shined through. With the camera pressed to her face, she pinched one eye shut, twisting the lens, adjusting the aperture, and getting the settings just right then passed it to him, helping the strap over his head.
It felt like a noose.
Last time, Roberta hadn’t been able to steal her mom’s camera and in a scramble of desperate measures they’d bought a disposable one. Only when they’d returned to CVS to pick up the prints and seen the sheer horror on the clerk’s face, did they grasp the critical error they’d made. An oversight they wouldn’t repeat. Charlie’s reach had been far and wide, and the manager had intervened, dismissing the clerk and handing them the prints. The clerk never reported what he’d seen in those images as they scanned out of the printer. And Quinton never saw him again either.
“Come on,” she whispered, leading him outside. “I know he’s home.”
Every cell in his body was screaming. He didn’t want to do this again, but he put one foot in front of the other, pinecones crunching under his sneakers, twigs snapping, the misty night dampening his hair, his sweat-slick face, as they wove through the sparse trees that would eventually connect to Jake Livingston’s backyard.
Roberta seemed tense. Her gait was stiff not swaying like she usually moved.
Stealing peaks when he wasn’t squinting through the darkness straight ahead, he glimpsed her downward gaze, her somber eyes, eyelids slack. She seemed dreadful.
Here and there a sapling branch whipped his face, surprising him, and he flinched from the sting, as they trekked deeper. Like Quinton’s family and the King’s, Jake’s house was on Lake Winnipesaukee, but the faster route, which would’ve been along the shore, could risk exposure if anyone was night fishing on the lake. All told, he would’ve preferred running that risk, as opposed to veering through the woods and walking along a thin strip of wilderness the clan could easily spy. It felt like tempting fate. He was terrified they'd go back on their word and harm her if their paths crossed.
Roberta winced when a fallen tree branch snapped under her foot but not because it cut her. The crack had been loud and they were nearing the gathering where the chanting had risen to wails. Crossing undetected behind scattered trees and in patchy shadows would require the stealth of a cat burglar, a quality neither of them possessed.
As they worked their way through at a glacial pace, taking painstaking care where they stepped—avoiding twigs, muscling over loose rocks, shifting their weight with the utmost precision—Quinton caught sight of torches blazing in the brushy field beyond the trees. The cloaks and hoods, the dark circle of joined hands, flames licking silhouettes, sent his heart punching up his throat.
He didn’t know, not fully, not really, the things they’d done to her. He’d only seen the disastrous effects—her rage, refusal to eat, the hot clips of whimpering, teeth bared like a wild animal when her mind couldn’t reject the truth of what her body had been through. Each time was worse than the last; it took Roberta longer and longer to recover, and when she did an eerie calm would come over her. Vacant eyes. Slack jawed gulps of booze, a slow restoration until she’d blossomed with characteristics he recognized.
But it didn't matter that she could recover. It was chipping away at her, eroding her spirit with each passing year. She was crumbling from the inside out.
Quinton had agreed to help her take the photos, jeopardizing his life for no other reason than to save her from them, from the weeks of grueling recovery, from the probability that if she went through it again, endured another soul-murdering night, she’d come back nothing more than a shell.
Following behind Roberta as they hooked left, cutting straight through the woods, no longer within the clan’s sightlines, Quinton picked his pace up to a jog. The camera rattled even though he held it tightly in both hands. He prayed it was working, that they wouldn’t discover some kind of mechanical malfunction and have to do this all over again.
Through the trees, the windows on Jake’s house glowed softly, lights shimmering across the lake’s rippling surface. Roberta keeled over and planted her hands on her knees, catching her breath when they reached the edge of his yard.
“That’s the living room window,” she explained, softly padding across his yard towards the shore to stay in the shadows. “The couch is right there so I’ll get him in that area. Make sure the flash is off.”
Quinton eyed the camera, but had no idea what all the gadgets represented. Handling it, she pushed the flash down into the camera body for him.
“You’re going to have to sneak up close to the window, but you have time,” she went on. “And Quinton, be sparing. There aren’t that many frames.”
The camera was rattling in his grasp and he realized he was trembling. Jake wasn’t a simpleton. He wasn’t a dr
unkard or impulsive or nearsighted like the others. He was clever and calculating. He played life like a game of chess, every move planned with exquisite precision, his sights set on the endgame like a heat seeking missile—as dangerous as Roberta, if not more so.
Years ago, Jake had become involved with a woman who had a mental disorder and was rumored to have killed a homeless man living out in Opechee Park. An urban legend had formed quickly amongst the neighborhood kids, Quinton included, that if you were at the park after midnight, Weird Wanda would crawl out of the lake and eat your face off, as the homeless man was rumored to have been found—drenched and faceless. Despite the keen interest they’d taken in Weird Wanda, spying on her and throwing rocks at her shopping cart full of trash and blankets, it hadn’t been the kids who'd ruined her life. It had been Jake. Posing as her protector and confidant, he’d aimed to substantiate rumors since the police had done nothing to investigate. He'd ended up falling just shy of his goal and almost earned some fancy journalism award Quinton had never heard of. More men had been found dead at Opechee before they locked up Weird Wanda, and new rumors formed surrounding Jake, but the kids didn’t joke around about him anymore. They’d been truly terrified.
“It’ll be fine,” she said, shifting her gaze from his hands and touching eyes with him.
His stomach bottomed out like a mallet to an anvil, but he steadied his grip, nodding to prove he was ready. And in return, she gave him a brittle smile. Fine was not what this would be.
When he’d learned of Gertrude, of her title and reason for checking in on Roberta, he’d found it impossible to manage his expectations—high hopes at a high cost. He’d ached for her to expose Charlie’s degradation, Zhana’s ignorance, and the logic behind Roberta’s abnormal behavior. But here they were again, scared shitless in the dark, scrambling to buy time, and knowing it would only be borrowed and expire far too quickly.
Quinton wanted to tell her he was sorry, that he loved her, that he wished he could shoulder her burden—the fits of dread that cloyed up her throat, strangling her—but as he studied the lines and angles of her skeletal face, the desperation in her sinking eyes, he knew it would be too little. Words and wishes were too damn small.
“If anything goes wrong,” she said. “We meet back at the shed.”
“Right.”
He thought she might hug him, but she only smirked a smile that didn’t reach her eyes, and asked, “I look okay?”
“Mm-hm,” was all he could muster, any vowels and he would’ve screamed and thrown himself into the lake.
Though she looked sprightly, bounding into the wash of light across the yard, she still exuded the same raw urgency that had him crippled. And perhaps because of it, because she both dreaded this and needed it to be over already, Roberta paused when she reached the planters, hanging back near the bushes and allowing them to distract her.
She started sniffing around, feeling the leaves and investigating each branch, and then as if forgetting herself, she began digging.
For the life of him, he couldn’t understand why.
Chapter Twelve
Gertrude was perched at the forefront of Jake’s mind and nothing he’d done had sent her flying out of his head, not chipping away at his next article, not tidying up the living room—which he’d never have considered except he hoped she might return—and not standing in a scalding-hot shower, lathering and scrubbing and feeling the burn.
As he adjusted the faucet to turn up the heat, he cringed recalling his misplaced invitation of welcoming her upstairs. Juxtaposed with having offered her a beer, the impression he must have given her—hungry, angling, ruled by the wrong head—was mortifying and yet entirely accurate.
Fixing her car, reviewing the shredded police report while sitting so near her he could smell her shampoo, and listening to her voice—a soft, melodic timbre, her carefully chosen words, severity grounding her tone—he’d felt strangely alive like she’d woken the animal in him and he couldn’t tame it, didn’t want to.
The hot water turned suddenly cold and he shut it off then grabbed a towel from the rack without stepping out. As he’d done all night since she’d left, he challenged himself not to relive their time together by playing over in his head all that had transpired.
By the time he reached the refrigerator he’d failed and decided on the next best tactic—another beer. He’d drank three already and wasn’t sure if they were helping or making things worse; probably worse, but at least they blurred his fixation for a little while until his body metabolized the alcohol and he had to start all over again. That’s what this was, right? An obsession?
He stared at the devil’s face on his Stone IPA then cracked the bottle open and drank as he walked into the living room that looked like an eerie clone of itself now that he’d cleaned. It was making him vaguely uncomfortable.
All that remained on the coffee table were the police report he’d done a shoddy job of piecing back together and a notepad plagued with handwritten scrawling, his ideas for his next article. But when he sat, stealing his notepad into his lap and leaning his beer against his towel-wrapped waist, he couldn’t focus on either.
He kept seeing her face, conjuring it as though she might follow, show up in the flesh, replacing his vision of her with the reality. Fawn-brown hair, one side—pin straight—falling to her shoulder, the other short as a buzz and soft as goose-down or so it’d looked beneath her cockeyed hat. Her face was shaped like a heart, pronounced apples of her cheeks and a narrow, crisp jaw, broad forehead and piercing eyes—almond in both shape and color. A mysterious version of the girl next door, he’d seen a world of regret in her eyes and a wealth of determination in her expression, competing characteristics, their impacts clashing, like she hadn’t quite been in the room with him, the ambiguity perhaps a buffer so no one would get too close. Her pale lips had looked so smooth...
This wasn’t even remotely productive.
If he couldn’t focus, he might as well put some clothes on. The shower dew on his chest had dried, he noted. Clutching his beer and holding his towel so he wouldn’t lose it, he padded around the coffee table, but when he heard faint chinking—nails against glass—at the window, and turned he saw Roberta lurking on the other side.
She tapped her nails again then spread her fingers, palm pressing like an orphan begging for a home.
Jake pointed to his backdoor then met her there after depositing his beer on the table.
As soon as he met her gaze he realized his error. Her eyes traveled the length of his bare chest, lingering on his towel, the particular placement of where his hand held it closed, and when she glanced up at him again, a kittenish smirk spread across her face.
“What are you doing here?”
She presented a branch, which he vaguely recognized from the bushes behind his house except that it was withered yellow and dry. Holding it up for him to take or look at—he was thrown and couldn’t read her—she said, “It’s dead.”
“Roberta,” he groaned. “It’s late. You need to go home.”
A flirtatious glint sparked out of her eyes and his impulse was to lie, but knowing Roberta she’d probably twist it to serve her purpose. Gertrude’s warning came to mind.
“Are you expecting someone?”
“I’m expecting to go to bed,” he said dryly.
“In your towel?”
His attempt to stare her down was backfiring terribly, but when he thought he caught movement near the lake, he scanned the dark shore. He must have been seeing things; too many beers. There was nothing out there but the wind rattling cattails near the bend.
“What do you want?”
“Can I come in?” Again, she indicated the branch. “I want to ask you something.”
“As you can see, I’m not dressed-”
“I don’t mind.”
“Ask me now,” he ordered.
“Well I’m hungry.”
“This isn’t a diner.”
“Ah,” she droned, nodd
ing as though she’d just figured out why he was being short with her. “Stood up.”
“Really?” he said, unimpressed. “That’s what you’re going with?”
Like water rolling off her back, she let his stubbornness slide, asking, “Why would it die?” She took a moment to consider the branch’s leaves. “Just like at my house, whatever I bury kills the plants.”
Suddenly, his nudity was all too apparent, only a towel separating them. It turned his stomach. He needed to put something on.
“So stop burying things. Problem solved. Goodnight.”
When he tried to close the door, her palm smacked against it.
“I have information you want.”
“What?”
In a snap her entire demeanor had changed.
“Let me in.” She was pushing and though alarm bells were going off in his head, he couldn’t resist.
“Tell me what you know,” he demanded, knowing full well that’s not how this game would go.
Bartering, she repeated, “Let me in.”
He stepped aside and did what he could not to let her graze the length of him as she passed.
Instead of welcoming herself to the kitchen, as she would have if she’d been truly hungry, she rounded into the living room.
“Loosening up, are we?” She was eyeing his beer.
“I need to put something on,” he said, excusing himself for the stairs.
“How about music?” she called after him, but he was already padding up, unnerved.
In his bedroom, he threw on a pair of jeans and an old Nirvana tee shirt that had shrunk in the wash, but not enough to look clownish, and when he returned, Roberta was draped on the couch, drinking his beer and reading the police report like she owned the place.
“You’re not old enough to drink. Put it down.”
Like a brat, she chugged in response, draining the bottle, then placed it delicately on the coffee table as he’d asked.