As she made her way to the parking garage, her initial excitement faded a bit. She realized she hadn’t asked the man how he’d gotten her number. It wasn’t that unusual for a stranger to call her out of the blue like this. Word got around; good babysitters were shared among friends like chocolate chip cookie recipes. But usually the caller would mention how they’d heard of her—“Mrs. So-and-So told me about you,” or “Little Nicholas Derry’s mom said you were good.”
But this man hadn’t said a word about it.
She had to assume it was one of the families she’d sat for before. Most of them would’ve recommended her very highly.
After all, she really loved kids.
† † †
She called her parents as she walked out to her car and explained where she was going and why and how long she’d be gone. They sounded alternately disappointed and worried, but they didn’t try to dissuade her. She could almost hear what they were thinking: a few more dollars coming in. Any little bit helped.
“Behave yourself,” her father warned. “Make sure you lock the doors after the parents leave. And, Cassie, no boys.”
“Don’t worry,” she told him. It was a ridiculous thing for him to suggest, since the only boy she’d ever kissed was way back in the tenth grade. Boys just weren’t interested in her (not that girls were, either, for that matter). But parents will be parents, she thought. “I’ll see you in the morning, Dad.”
“Love you, honey.”
“Love you and Mom, too. G’bye.”
The little white Volkswagen her parents had gotten her for her sixteenth birthday—before the lay-off and the other troubles had begun—struggled to start in the frigid cold. The motor ground out an asthmatic cough, stalled. Wintry air blasted out through the vents, but the controls were broken, stuck in the open position, so she couldn’t do anything about it. At least the heater still worked; it just took it a while to warm up.
She tried again. Nothing but a faint click this time. Then, all too quickly, the vent wheezed into silence and the dome light above her blinked out.
After shivering for another couple minutes, she tried again. The engine growled and her headlights sputtered. But it was pretty obvious by then: her battery was dead.
She couldn’t understand it. She hadn’t left any lights on. She flipped the switches, but everything remained dark. She tried the radio: nothing. Her heart sank.
There was a knock on her window. A man wearing a heavy parka and leaning over shouted through the glass: “Mall security, ma’am. Do you need a jump?” He showed her his badge.
Cassie rolled the window down and told him she wasn’t sure what was wrong, but after the man prompted her to open the hood, he brought his cart over and hooked some wires to her battery.
“Go ahead and give it a try now.”
She turned the key and prayed. This time the engine caught and held.
“Happens a lot this time of year,” the man told her, his breath coming out in thick puffs. He unhooked the wires and coiled them up. “Merry Christmas,” he said, and then he was off.
“Thanks!” Cassie shouted after him.
The whole episode had happened so fast that it was almost like a Christmas miracle. She found herself in high spirits once again. For the first time in a long time, she felt as if everything was actually going her way.
As the engine warmed, she typed the address of the job into her phone and waited for it to give her directions.
When the map showed up on the screen, she thought she’d made a mistake. It showed her a destination off of the eastern end of Gallo Highway, a long and lonely stretch of old secondary road that traversed the rural area south of the city. From the mall, Gallo roughly paralleled the new highway, at least until the two roads reached the river. There, the highway veered off and headed north into town. Gallo continued east, spanning the river and venturing on toward the old power plant, where it zigged and zagged through the low hills and forested marshland.
The house was right in the middle of Alden Wood.
The fact that there were residences out there surprised her. In fact, she’d always thought the dense woods were National Forestry land. No one else could possibly want it for anything. It was one of those places where a person could get lost and wander around forever and never be found.
Apparently she was wrong. People actually lived out there.
Even so, she didn’t favor the idea of going all the way out there.
“Everything’ll be fine,” she told herself. She was grateful for the sound of her own voice, grateful to hear the strength in it.
Her stomach gurgled, but there was no time to stop to pick up something to eat. As it was, she’d be lucky to make it out to the job by eight o’clock.
She pulled out of the crowded parking lot with its bright lights reflecting off the hood of her car. Shoppers stumbled around all over the place, oblivious to the moving vehicles. Their arms were heavily burdened with overstuffed shopping bags.
Cassie had to slow for a man standing in the middle of her lane. He wore a bewildered look on his face and was slowly turning around in circles. Cassie gave him a quick honk, which he returned with a glare before scuttling off to one side. Thankfully, the horn didn’t stick like it did sometimes. Despite the man’s impatience, she hoped he’d find his car soon. The temperature was dropping fast, and a frigid wind was starting to blow.
The line of cars waiting to leave the parking lot was long, and she waited as the drivers in front of her wouldn’t allow her to merge. Exhaust spewed from their tailpipes and blasted into her car. She couldn’t even turn it off.
By the time she made it onto the main road, the inside of the little car was finally starting to warm up.
The Southside Mall was a good eleven miles from the center of town and, according to her phone, eight-point-two miles from the address where she was going. Her phone indicated that the quickest way to get there would be the highway, then exiting on Second Street heading south, but she knew that, on this night of all nights, the main road would be stop-and-go traffic, hordes of people leaving town and hordes more coming in.
She took a right at a promising intersection and waited for her phone to recalculate the route.
Turn left in…point six…miles.
She was bummed to find that the new road seemed to be just as crowded as the highway. She inched along, her eyes glancing between the cars in front of her and the clock on her dash.
It took her nearly ten minutes to get to the light at Gallo, and when she did she was relieved to see that the left turn lane was completely empty and that there was a dedicated turn signal. The arrow was currently red, but at least she’d be able to cut across the on-coming traffic when it came time.
As she sat idling at the stop light, she thought about the coincidence of the call. Inevitably, she began to ponder questions she’d been avoiding asking herself. She wondered what kind of people would live so far out of town, especially in the thick patch of forest of Alden Wood, where the trees were old and the ground swampy. Rumors about the place passed among the town’s residents. They ranged from the outrageous to the utterly macabre. Some people believed the woods were enchanted, others haunted. The folks around these parts certainly did enjoy their storytelling.
In the past, Cassie had always shrugged them off as so much hooey. In the past, she’d never had a good reason to venture out there, much less after dark.
But of all the stories, she’d never heard of anyone actually living out there—well, except for that one ridiculous story about the wolf man, but everyone knew that one was pure fantasy. More than likely what she’d find was some squatter family living out of a trailer. Or a shack.
Or a drug-runner’s hut.
Or maybe a murderer’s hideout.
“Stop it!” she scolded herself. “None of those people would need a babysitter, would they?”
At the other extreme, she supposed it was possible that where she was going might be an old mansion,
left over from the days when the area was first settled back in the early eighteen hundreds. Like the old Dunbury place, for example. The first Dunburys had built their house in the middle of what used to be woodland—all part of the same forest that once covered this part of the country. Alden Wood and a few other places were all that was left of it. The old Dunbury house now stood in the center of a town that had grown up around the hill bearing the same name.
Alden Wood was the largest and thickest patch of trees to remain, and it had remained uncleared simply because the lowland was unsuitable for development. The trees, both ancient and twisted by the winds that perpetually blew there, had remained standing. They were moss-covered and completely unfit for lumber.
So why would someone want to build a house out there?
Solitude, she thought. Some people valued their privacy. Maybe it was some big, fancy manor, all stone walls and tall multi-paned windows and tapestries and portraits of long-dead ancestors glaring down from massive frames hung over stone mantle pieces, souls which plied the wide hallways and uttered agonized moans decades after their bodies had passed on.
Cassie giggled to herself, despite the involuntary chill that passed through her. She was doing it again, letting her imagination run wild on her. She simply didn’t believe in ghosts, being too pragmatic for such flights of fancy. They simply didn’t exist.
Besides, the world was filled with too many real horrors to worry about spirits. Eighteen percent unemployment, for one thing. And Christmas dinners without prime rib. And those poor kittens and puppies spending Christmas all alone in their cages.
“You can only do so much,” she mumbled as the arrow turned green. She turned, leaving all such thoughts of ghosts and other horrors behind.
Hers was the only car to make the turn.
The road soon grew dark—not pitch black, since the sky above her was clear and there was a full moon and it reflected brightly off of the plowed snow on the ground and what was still on the branches of the trees. She flipped on her high beams. The piles of snow turned into odd-shaped lumps, monstrous figures of all shapes and sizes.
She imagined furniture hunkering down beneath dust covers, and this brought to her thoughts of the house that might be hidden in Alden Woods.
“There’s no mansion.”
Would a single father and a young child be living in such a place? Would the owner of a mansion have the misfortune of having to work the night shift on Christmas Eve? Would such a father, presumably well-to-do, leave his child in the hands of a complete stranger?
This time, her shiver lingered a bit longer, and the first seed of self-doubt took root in her mind. She hoped she wasn’t going to be sorry for agreeing to take the job.
The road quickly narrowed and darkened even further. The distance between trees narrowed, the shadows crowding ever closer, seemingly drawn in by the lights of her car. More and more the trees leaned inward, arching their crooked crowns over the road, shredding the moonlight with their naked branches. No other headlights or taillights broke the darkness.
She knew the road was rarely used anymore, not since the eight-lane highway had gone in a few years past. Still, it was remarkably well-maintained. She couldn’t tell how recently it had been snowplowed, however, since the last storm hadn’t dropped snow in over a week. It was possible the road might be impassable for twelve hours or more while it waited for plows to clear the main arteries into and out of the city. She doubted this road was very high on their list.
Luckily, there wasn’t another storm expected in until late tomorrow afternoon. By then she’d be home, all of her shopping done, and one very special present under the tree. Maybe even more than one. Maybe even a nice roast on the table.
Her mouth began to water.
She actually didn’t mind the emptiness of the road so much. There were advantages to being the only car on it. At least she wasn’t stuck in traffic like all those other people out there. But she did feel a bit lonely, like she could be the last person on earth and not realize it.
She urged the car to go a little faster.
The road weaved into and out of the moonlight, sometimes curving gently, sometimes altering its direction with unannounced suddenness. Cassie pushed her speed as much as she dared, but even then it didn’t feel like she was going very fast.
It wasn’t just the curves that kept her from pressing harder on the gas. With the temperature dropping, she’d have to be especially watchful. “You’ll never see black ice until it’s too late,” her father always warned her.
But even the ice wasn’t the last of her worries. The woods in these parts were full of deer and other creatures. Wolfmen, she thought, cracking a smile. But the thought of hitting something, even a rabbit, terrified her. She’d rather run herself off the road and into the trees than hurt a poor wild creature like that.
Of course, that wouldn’t do, either.
So she slowed down again. The trees continued to pass by her in a blur of shadows. The road grew narrower.
The radio station she’d been listening to started to pop and fizz. She reached over and shut it off. When she looked up, a shadow flashed past just on the side of the road. She thought it might’ve been a person, but who’d be out walking here at this time of night?
She decided it had to have been a tree.
The mechanical female voice on her phone, which had been silent for several minutes, startled her: Turn right in…two…miles.
Her eyes flicked to the rearview mirror. There was nothing there, just trees.
Turn right in…one point five…miles.
She looked for signs, but there were none. The short, white mileage markers had been buried beneath the mounds of plowed snow. Even the taller signs one expected, those announcing the route numbers or warning of sudden hazards, were lacking.
Her tires were beginning to make a crunching noise. When she’d left the mall, they’d sounded sticky and whispery on the road, which had been wet with runoff from the day’s melt-off. But now the slush and water were turning to ice. More than once, she felt her tires slipping. She slowed down even more. The needle on her speedometer barely nudged thirty. The forest on either side of her crowded ever closer. The shadows took on a more sinister cast.
Turn right in…one…mile.
She slowed even more, straining her eyes so she wouldn’t miss the side road.
Anxiously, she turned the radio back on, pushed SCAN. The radio stayed silent as it searched for a signal.
Turn right in…point five…miles.
The radio finished cycling through the bands without finding anything. She turned it off again.
Approaching right turn in…five hundred…feet.
Overhead, the darkness was now complete. She was in the heart of Alden Wood. There was no light passing between the trees, neither from approaching cars or buildings.
Turn right.
She stomped on the brakes and felt the car begin to fishtail in a slow, lazy arc. She felt them grip. She spun the wheel, guiding the car into the opening in the berm, barely making it. The tires bumped down onto an uneven surface. She’d been afraid of finding the road unclear, but it wasn’t. Her tires were on solid ground and she didn’t have to plow through more than an inch or two of crush. The mounds of snow beside her rose five or six feet high, blocking her view into the wood.
It was like driving down a tunnel.
The track was wide enough to allow only her car. If anybody happened to be coming the other way, one of them would have to back up.
Continue straight for the next…two…miles.
The car’s frame rattled and squeaked around her.
Never before had two miles seemed so long. Never had the night seemed so empty and dark. Never had she felt so alone.
“Let’s be honest, here, Cass,” she said, bouncing over a particularly deep pothole that jarred her neck, “there’s no hidden mansion out here. Hell, you’ll be lucky if the place has got four standing walls and internal plumbing.�
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She laughed, but it was a nervous laugh, filled with worry and doubt.
“As long as it’s heated,” she added. “And it’s dry. And there’s something to eat.”
Her stomach growled agreement at the thought.
“It’s not too late to turn around.”
Except there was no turning around.
The clock on her dash read 7:50.
The car jounced over another pothole, this time making her bite her tongue. She swore, tasted blood. Already the two hundred and forty dollars was looking like not enough.
Finally, at a minute before eight o’clock, she reached the end of the road.
And there, nestled in a clearing, was a tiny, brightly lit house.
† † †
“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this,” the man told her, holding the door open and inviting her in.
Cassie hesitated a moment, then stepped into the modest home. She was surprised to find it clean and warm.
“Where’s your…?”
She realized she didn’t even know if he had a son or a daughter.
The man quickly shut the door and latched it before turning and grinning at her.
“Jeremy’s…brushing his teeth. He’ll be right down. Here,” he said, ushering her over to the couch, “come in and sit down. I’m sorry for this being so last minute, but my usual sitter couldn’t…come out tonight.” He sighed. “To be honest, she didn’t work out. I’m looking for someone more…permanent.”
Cassie didn’t sit. She didn’t want to admit to herself that this didn’t feel right, though that’s how the whole situation made her feel: more than just uneasy. She looked around, but there was no sign of a boy anywhere: no toys lying around, no children’s books. There were no pictures.
“I think—” she began to say, but the man cut her off.
“Have you had dinner?”
She shook her head. “But I’m not hungry.”
He nodded, still grinning.
“Because if you were, there’s stuff in the freezer. I could warm something up before I go.”
“I thought you were in a hurry.”
Insomnia: Paranormal Tales, Science Fiction, & Horror Page 2