by Andrew Pyper
After another mile and a half it stops. The bush grown across the gap, the birch and spruce branches tangled in a web. Lily grabs the Mossberg and a water bottle and starts hiking the rest of the way, which, by her guess, should be just over another mile or so.
When she makes it out the clearing is broader than she remembers. The absence of the high grasses of summer leaves it looking bald, so that the cabin sits in the center as an anomaly, its slanting roof and trapezoid window frames a small protest of the man-made against the chaos of forest.
She’s surprised to find the door still on its hinges. This, along with other indications of repair, shows that the cabin’s occasional visitors do enough to prevent it from collapsing.
Inside it’s dark. Once her eyes adjust she can see there’s still a kitchen and a table with plates holding nothing but mouse turds, a few wooden chairs randomly situated as if the last people here had left at the sound of an alarm.
The first thing she does is check the shotgun and utter an involuntary moan when she finds only one slug.
That’s all you’ll need.
She makes sure the safety’s off and takes a long drink of water.
Just hit it where it counts.
Now that she’s here, Lily expects her nerves to take over, to keep her alert. Instead, the weight of fatigue has her pacing around the cabin, fighting to string together the simplest thoughts. Where should she position herself? Stay by a window and keep watch, or wait for it to come in? In the end she doesn’t make a decision. She slumps to the floor next to what was once her childhood bedroom, her back to the wall.
The body has its limits. The mind too. You live through enough panic and horror to never sleep again but sleep comes nevertheless, unwanted and suffocating as a wool hood pulled over your head.
Lily’s eyes close without her noticing.
She dreams of blood.
Swimming in an ocean of it, thick and undulating in sluggish waves. So heavy it’s hard to keep her head up to breathe. But she has to. There’s an urgent need to keep slapping her arms forward that goes beyond preventing herself from drowning. There’s someone out here with her in the endless crimson sea.
Lily? What are you doing?
She hears her mother calling for her and swims toward the voice.
Stop it. Stop this now.
When she finds her mother she’s fighting to stay above the surface. Her hair glued to her skull, her teeth pale as Chiclets.
Lily! No!
Her mother’s eyes are filled not with relief at seeing Lily but with horror. It doesn’t prevent what Lily does next, doesn’t give her pause to ask herself why.
She reaches out to her mother, puts her hands on the crown of her head, and pushes her under. Holds her down. Lily feels the vibration of her mother’s body swallowing and choking and swallowing again until she sinks away and the ocean is still as a mirror.
She’s awakened by the monster knocking at the door.
48
* * *
Three thuds. Each followed by the hollow scratch of knuckles dragged over wood. Just as her mother had done after the third knock years ago, Lily rises and goes to the door.
“Michael?”
Deeper silence.
She presses her cheek against the door and can feel it on the other side: arms at its sides, shoulders hunched, head cocked.
For it to work, it will have to go fast: unlock the door, take two steps back, blow a hole through its chest. Three actions compressed into one.
She unlocks the door. Takes two steps back. Raises the shotgun level and fits the butt against her shoulder.
The door opens not by force but on its own, a slow widening. Its bottom stroked over the floor by licks of frigid air from outside.
She should fire now. Now. Now.
“Will?”
It steps forward and the floorboards utter a worried groan at the weight. The eyes roll in their sockets, holding on her a moment and then spinning away. The mouth opens and clamps shut, the lips smack together. The reflex of biting and chewing being tested before the real thing.
Like the women Michael had offered to Stoker in the rented room in Soho or the series of failed experiments, the brides he’d attempted to make before he’d found Lily’s mother, this is Will in resemblance only, alive only in the capacity to move and kill and eat. For the first time, his scarred and misshapen face matches the monstrosity of the rest of him.
“Please don’t,” she says at the same time she takes aim.
It answers by coming forward. One foot and then the other, every new step more sure than the one before.
“Four trees.”
A noise escapes its mouth. It tries again. They could be words, they could be nothing at all.
“More ease.”
It’s little more than a body length away when Lily hears it clearly.
“Forgive me.”
She pulls the trigger.
49
* * *
The thing that was once Will staggers back. Lily drops the shotgun from the shock of the noise only after watching the thing look down at its chest, the eyes momentarily focusing on the blood soaking through its parka.
It places a hand over the wound and presses, not to stanch the bleeding but to push its hand inside, feeling around its spine, searching for something dropped into a pool of brackish water.
It looks up at her again. Then it falls sideways onto the floor and goes still.
Lily bends to pick up the shotgun but realizes it’s useless now. There’s little chance there’s a weapon in the cabin. It doesn’t stop her from looking. Under the sink there’s a cast-iron pan. On a shelf an unopened can of baked beans. She considers taking each but ends up leaving both where they are.
What’s the plan, Doctor? You going to psychoanalyze him to death?
She peers out the open door to the clearing and the woods beyond it. She can’t see him but she knows Michael’s out there, watching her.
He’ll smell you if he doesn’t see you, track you if he doesn’t smell you. He’ll read your mind.
“Why don’t you shut up if you don’t have any ideas,” she hisses.
But I do have an idea.
Thirty years ago, her mother told her where to go. There couldn’t be anything at the trailer by the creek to help her now but she has to believe there was a reason she called it the secret place. If nothing else, trying to get there will prevent Lily from dying here, on the same spot, the same floorboards her mother died.
She retreats behind the doorframe and out of view. It won’t be full dark for another few hours, she guesses. Does she stay where she is and wait for the night? If she’s going to make a run to the trailer—a run anywhere—it will be impossible without at least some sunlight, but she judges that a few shades more of winter dusk might help act as cover.
It gives her time to find a screwdriver in one of the kitchen drawers and pry the plywood off the window in the bedroom. This is where her mother and Lily shared a bed a lifetime ago, cuddled close in the mornings when the warmth of the stove had died down over the night hours. Where she’d watched him stand over her mother’s body.
The thought of this and what he’s done to Will refreshes her hatred. It doesn’t matter if he was anticipating these feelings from her, if he was detecting her rage right now, brightly shining around her like a spotlight. She’s done with controlling herself. She hates him and she lets herself hate him. The heat of it tingles through her, anesthetizing her, so that when she crawls out the window frame and cuts her forearm on a shard of glass she barely recognizes it as pain.
There’s no obvious entry into the bush, but she thinks she can feel her way through to where the trailer ought to be. When she’s twenty yards in she stops to listen, looks back the way she’s come. Nothing. But she knows Michael is close. This is the prolonged end he promised her and it hasn’t even started yet.
She pulls aside a curtain of thorny devil’s club and comes out into a clearing sm
aller than the one in which the cabin sits.
The trailer is still there. More rust than when she last saw it when she came here some years ago, and its balance atop the four stacks of cinder blocks at its corners more precarious, but still a solid thing that might be entered without it collapsing under your feet.
She loops her fingers through the hole where the doorknob used to be. Up a couple of steps and she’s inside.
Lily scans the trailer’s interior and finds the derelict mess she expected. Empty plywood cupboards, corroded tins, a Formica table screwed into the paneled wall, a water-plumped paperback of Steppenwolf. The ammonia of animal urine strong as smelling salts under her nose.
Why would her mother send her to this place? There’s nothing here to defend herself with, nowhere to hide. Whatever she had in mind is gone now.
Unless it was never here to begin with, psycho.
Lily remembers the afternoon as a child she found her mother lying on the ground outside the trailer. She’d always assumed she discovered her mother in the middle of doing something she wished to keep private. But what if she’d wanted Lily to find her there? What if she was meant to wonder what her mother had left for her, to find it when she was old enough to see the secret was meant for her?
She goes outside, lies on her back, and slides under the trailer, pushing snow aside with her hands. Once her whole body is under it’s easier to move but she worries that even the slightest touch of its underbelly could knock out one of its supports and crush her.
The underside is a patchwork of plywood, squares of steel screwed in here and there to cover rotted holes, a pair of corroded rods running the length of the structure to hold it up. Lily arches her head, shifts to the side to see around her feet. Nothing.
But then: something odd nailed into the trailer’s floor.
A wooden box.
Lily recognizes it. A simple pine square with a locked lid that she recalls her mother once pulling out of a pillowcase she kept in her luggage.
“What’s in it?” she had asked.
“Your grandparents’ ashes,” her mother had answered. Lily didn’t want to ask more and risk making her mother upset.
She slithers over to it and finds the box. Without tools there’s no way she could free it. The screwdriver. The one she’d used to get out the cabin window. Still in her pocket.
She wedges the screwdriver between the lock and the box’s latch. Tugs down.
“Fuck!”
The pain comes with the jerking motion. Her finger feels broken. The good news is the latch seemed to move. A few more yanks on it might pull it out altogether.
She withdraws the index finger that’s already swelling and replaces it with her middle finger. This time she reaches her left arm over to grasp the wrist of the right to bring the screwdriver down with greater force.
Two broken fingers is better than waiting for him to pull you out of here.
She counts herself down from three then tugs as hard as she can.
With a metallic pop the latch tears free from the wood and the door swings open. A plastic bag clatters onto her chest.
Ashes don’t clatter.
She pulls the bag off her and looks inside. A pair of gloves with curved metal talons for fingers. A set of silver teeth. The points sharpened, the cuspids long as surgical needles.
She hunted with them.
The secret of the secret place.
She left them for you.
Lily shimmies back the way she came, pulling the bag with her. Her index finger strobing in pain. Glancing at it she sees the ninety-degree angle at its knuckle. The swelling has spread to her entire hand, now rounded and hard as a baseball.
Once she’s out from under the trailer she lies there, scanning the trail and surrounding bush. No movement, no fresh tracks. She gets to her feet, slides her back along the side of the trailer to the door, and opens it. It squeaks so loudly she almost closes it again but figures there’s no option but to go inside.
Up the couple of stairs she pulls the door closed and looks around for something to lock it with. The best she can do is tie a fragment of rope left on the kitchen counter through the hole where the handle used to be and knot the other end to the pipe under the sink. It won’t be anywhere near enough to stop the thing if it tries to get in, but it may give her some time.
Lily creeps away from the door, bent low to avoid being seen through the small window frames long smashed clear of glass. Once she makes it to the back she opens the bag and pulls its contents out.
It’s all in surprisingly good shape: the leather of the gloves and the tightening straps at the wrist still supple and strong, the blades so sharp they leave a cut in her thumb when she touches one.
50
* * *
She starts with the teeth. It takes a couple of tries to figure out they don’t slide in but fit over the existing teeth until they click and grip around the rear molars. She puts one glove on her unswollen left hand. It fits perfectly, the leather snug and smooth.
There’s a fragment of mirror left on the wall of the bathroom stall and she gets up to inspect her face in the glass.
You look good. Like your mother.
Something bumps against the outside wall of the trailer. The structure whimpers, shifting on its moorings.
It’s here. Peter Farkas’s demon. Mr. Hyde. Yet Michael is here too. His voice finds its way to her, speaking in her head.
Do you see what you are yet, Lily? Do you see what you did?
She’s expecting another bump against the wall. Instead, the monster drags its claws along the length of the trailer all the way to the door.
Your mother tried to cure you. Remember? The teas and broths she made you eat? The strange songs she sang? Some of them lullabyes. But others chants, spells. She tried to banish the unnatural from your soul and keep you human.
Lily staggers out of the stall. All at once the screeching stops. She tastes the bitter spoonfuls her mother fed her, calling it soup though Lily knew it wasn’t. And the words her mother murmured as Lily choked and swallowed—that was magic. That was a light that wanted to chase the darkness out of her.
But you didn’t want the darkness out of you, did you? Not all of it. You wanted to be your father’s child. So how did you make her stop, Lily?
Outside the trailer the monster grunts. The satisfied sound of an animal that knows its prey is trapped.
Lily’s head is full of the dream of blood, the memory of her six-year-old self kneeling over the body. She did it. She fired a bullet through her mother’s chest with the Remington she’d been taught to use.
“No!”
It was meant to be a warning only, to get her mother to stop trying to change who she was. She was a child who was learning she wasn’t merely a child, not merely like everyone else in the world, and it frightened her. Excited her.
“No!”
She sees her mother’s eyes, wide in front of her.
“Please, baby! No!”
Lily pulled the trigger. And then, to be sure it was done, to make her mother stop staring into her, stop judging, she had taken the hunting knife in her tiny hand and brought it down.
When I came through the door, Alison’s body was on the floor. I knew what had happened, I could see it in your face. So I let the thing inside me show itself. Tore into Alison’s body even though she was already dead. To make it look like a bear did it. And you? Your head came around the corner. And you watched.
The claws tap against the metal skin of the trailer. A thousand scratches gouging through then pulling back until the wall is perforated and sharp as a cheese grater.
I protected you from the truth, Lily. I made it look like I was the one who did it—made you see a monster and flew you far, far away.
The blades anchor into the trailer’s side and cut screaming lines through the steel.
You were a child. My only child. But it’s time you see what you did. What you are.
“Stop,” Lily wh
ispers.
It’s time for me to give you the gift you’ve come for.
The monster hooks a claw through the open hole where the doorknob used to be and pulls. The door squeaks but the rope holds.
Lily fights the urge to be sick. Her side is pressed against the wall where the blades have cut through so that the thing will have to rip the door open and come up the first step before it sees her.
“My darling girl.”
The voice comes from the other side of the trailer’s thin metal door.
“Are you ready?”
Yes. You’re ready, Lily’s inner voice tells her. Show him just how ready you are.
A second claw slides through the hole, tightens its grip so that the points of the blades dig into the metal. Heaves it back.
The rope pulls on the pipe under the sink and holds for a quarter second before it comes free and the door flies off its hinges.
Lily blindly brings her left hand down. She’s only sure she made contact with her claws when she sees three of the five blades shining with blood.
The monster is there.
It looks down at its chest as Lily backs away. Past the sink, all the way to the rear bench that used to pull out into a bed.
The creature looks up at her. The lips pulled back in a snarling show of teeth.
“You cut me.”
It comes all the way into the trailer, filling the space of its narrow passageway. Starts toward her.
“That wasn’t very nice to do to dear old dad, was it?”
Lily can hear the swick-swick of its claws as they slice through the air.
She kneels. There is nowhere to run, no window large enough to squeeze through. It doesn’t matter. She doesn’t want to get away. A new power surges through her, the thrumming life of horror itself.
“Not nice at all . . .”
It kicks her. The toe of its foot hard to her chest. She’s thrown back against the bench, hitting her head on the edge. The blow almost knocks her out. She fights to remain conscious, feels herself swimming to the surface as though she’s been upended by a strong wave.