by A. P. Wayne
“Is there ... something I can help you with?”
“I was wondering if you’d like to get together sometime.” He figured if she was married with three kids, then he could probably at least fuck her or get a blowjob if she’d let herself go too much.
“Um, no.”
“That’s it, huh? Just no?”
He thought he heard her laughing before she ended the call.
Hunter had never felt as fucked as he had at that point. The waitress brought him a sarcastic amount of food and an entire pitcher of coffee, maybe as a hint. Hunter didn’t think he was hungry but he ate with gusto and ordered another beer. Maybe it was the soundtrack. His parents had never sent him a copy of the will. He assumed they had made a will. It would have just been irresponsible not to. He also assumed he was in the will, being the only child and all. He could call his aunt later and get some things worked out. In the meantime, he wondered if the plumbing in the house still worked. It was summer. The bottom part of the house seemed to be mostly there. He wouldn’t need things like heat and insulation for a few months at least.
When he finished eating, he vomited all over the table and walked out.
Eleven
Jordan awoke to sunlight filling her room and the sound of birds chirping. She had a pleasant feeling. Melanie had exhausted her last night. She hoped she had returned the favor. She wasn’t still in the bed with her. Jordan grabbed her phone. She had one unread text. It was Melanie saying, “woke up and went home. last nite was great.” Jordan smiled. She got out of bed, pulled on a thin robe and some clean clothes and headed to the bathroom to shower off the girl come and brush the taste of Melanie from her mouth, even though she would have rather let it linger.
In the shower, she thought about “The Walker Problem.” Melanie wasn’t the only reason this issue seemed pressing. There was only another week of school left. That meant she would soon have a copious amount of time to fill. Walker would expect her to spend that time with him. She didn’t know if she could take that. Her parents had made it clear he was no longer welcome in their house and she understood that. Which meant spending all of that free time at Walker’s. He’d already had the power cut off for the summer. He said the only reason he needed it was for the heat. She wasn’t even sure if he would need it for that by the time winter rolled around. So it wasn’t even like she could take a TV over there or anything. And talking to him was increasingly difficult.
But she felt bad about just leaving him abruptly. She wondered if he would just let himself starve. She needed to find a replacement for herself. She knew the thing with her and Melanie wasn’t permanent and she thought Melanie realized that too. But, for now, Jordan was happy. She wasn’t sure Walker could ever be happy. She certainly wasn’t the one to make him happy. But she thought he could be happier. His problem was that he was using her but felt bad for using her. He really just needed her for her blood but he’d convinced himself he enjoyed her company, that they were a couple, and needed to spend time together. What he really needed was either a mother or a slave.
That was why Jordan was determined to find out who was leaving the offerings. Whoever was doing that, and it might be more than one person, was enamored with what Walker had become. In exchange for Walker turning them, they would undoubtedly do whatever he asked them to do. Jordan had a fairly good idea who it was. She needed a little more proof before she acted on it.
This morning she was going to check the obituaries. Spend today asking some questions at school. Maybe do some following this weekend.
She dried herself off, smiling at the bruise-like hickies descending the insides of her thighs. Melanie had marked her. Despite what she had said, she was jealous as hell. She certainly couldn’t let Walker be with her until they faded. Or maybe she could. Maybe she would. See if he had the balls to ask her about it. Maybe they could have it out then.
Maybe.
Jordan pulled on her clothes and headed downstairs. Her dad had already left for work and her mom was probably still asleep. Her dad had left the Lawrence Chronicle on the kitchen table next to a half-empty coffee mug and plate with crumbs on it. He was kind of a slob but, between her mother and the housekeeper who came twice a week, his messes were well-tended.
She grabbed some coffee from the pot, figuring it hadn’t been brewed so long ago as to be gross, and sat at the table. She flipped to the obituary section. Lawrence was so small this wasn’t a huge task to scan. The paper only came out weekly. This week there had been five deaths. She looked for a certain profile. Two of them died of cancer. Both of them were in their seventies. They were out. One had died at birth. Out. One had died of a heart attack but reading the brief write-up revealed he wasn’t actually in Lawrence when he died. He was just from Lawrence and had died at his home in Denton, Texas. Out. The last one, however, fit her profile exactly. Chet Hendricks. Forty years old. Died in a one car accident on Route 4. The funeral would probably be closed casket because, if what she thought were true, he hadn’t died in a car accident at all. But she was sure whoever had killed him and drained his blood to leave in front of Walker’s house wanted to make the death look accidental. Smashed and beheaded probably. Something resulting in massive blood loss.
If the police deployed a crime scene investigation unit for every seemingly routine accident in Lawrence, and if those CSI units were as amazingly skilled as the ones on TV, Jordan guessed they would find a lot of things that didn’t quite add up. But they didn’t deploy those units for everything. She doubted a town as small as Lawrence even had one of those units. And if they did, she didn’t think they would send them out anyway. Or, if they did, they would make it a point not to find anything out of the ordinary. Admittedly, Jordan had seen the Fangs close-up so she had proof. She had reason to believe in the supernatural. But even before that event on Walker’s farm, she knew something was fucked up in Lawrence. There was a lot of death. A lot of craziness. And a lot of blasé attitudes toward this kind of thing.
Before her encounter with the Fangs, she knew something was off but she didn’t necessarily believe it was supernatural. She thought the police were probably just concepts and that everyone in Lawrence had some stake in the corruption so no one said anything. But now she knew it was all the doing of the Fangs. They had a way of making people do things. And not do things. They were mostly unseen and that was the way they preferred it. And not all of them stayed in Lawrence but it was a place they preferred. It contained the opening to that other world, Neverly, the town behind Lawrence.
Jordan had had a brief glimpse of that other town. The reality of that other town. It had chilled her.
She knew many other people had glimpsed it. A Fang could show this place to a potential victim, seducing them with it. Getting the victim to come to them.
And then, before the victim knew it, the door had closed, they were meat for the Fangs, and would never be seen again.
There were very few people who could open this door to others. Provided a place had the right energy, it could be a doorway. Some people were keys to that door. She occasionally fucked one of those people.
If everything were to bubble to the surface like she thought it would, she would have to tell him this. Let him know he could get to that place. A place he could hide.
She sipped the coffee to try and give her mind focus. She was getting ahead of herself. Maybe this Neverly had a tendency to seduce her as well. She had sworn to never tell Walker about his power to go there. As much as she didn’t want to be with him, she also didn’t want to think about what would happen if he crossed over. The bloodsucking, earthbound Fangs were monsters, of course, but they were also still vaguely human. The ones in that other place ... She took another sip of coffee.
She really needed to think about something else.
Something more pleasant.
Like these poseur Fangs who were sacrificing people around town and how she could bring them and Walker together so Jordan could remember what it felt like to be fr
ee.
Twelve
Hunter tried sleeping on one of the charred couches he remembered from childhood but woke up because he thought he was suffocating and went out to sleep in his car with the windows rolled down. It was still suffocating but a different kind of suffocating. This was probably how people became homeless. He got online to check and see if there were any colleges in the area with positions available. He didn’t find anything. Probably something he should have checked before coming out here. The year was practically over. Maybe listings for the next school year would start popping up soon.
If he didn’t have enough money to rent a shower then he could probably find one of those interstate truck stops with the pay showers. Use a laundromat to wash his clothes.
There was a part of him that wanted to mourn his parents. He wasn’t completely heartless, but it felt like there were too many things he had to do. Also, his life was so sad already that he didn’t see the sense in grieving for something he didn’t have any control over. Less than a year ago, he’d had a beautiful wife, a loving and smart son, a house in a decent suburb his in-laws had bought with cash for their precious only daughter. What he didn’t have was a grasp on how tenuous all those things were. In the end, he’d come out of it with nothing except his borderline personality disorder. Of course people told him he would always have Major, but that was only true to an extent. It’s a lot different to go from living with someone to seeing them every other weekend. If he ended up staying in Lawrence, it would be even less than that. Maybe a few days around Christmas. A few weeks in the summer. Anything else would be impractical. He wouldn’t have the money to drive back and forth to Illinois and he couldn’t see Alison willing to spend money to make it easier for her only son to spend time with a man she hated.
Hunter let out a long, shaky sigh, the kind that could turn into a sob if he let it.
He should probably call around and see if there were any job openings anywhere, even if it meant bagging groceries.
He felt like he needed to clear his head first. He contemplated going for a drive, but that would eventually mean spending money he didn’t have on gas.
Maybe he would go for a walk. Given Chief Bowsman’s warning and the way he’d brought the party at Chef Uncle’s this morning, downtown was probably out. He had never been much of a nature person but here he was surrounded by acres and acres of growing corn and woods. He wasn’t that far from the reserve. They had trails and things there.
Fuck trails, he thought.
It shouldn’t really be considered nature if there were civil little trails cut through the whole thing.
No. He would plow through those woods as though they were virgin territory. He would explore until he was raped by thorns and eaten by ticks or wolves. Or maybe just until he got tired.
He walked to the edge of the yard and stepped into the woods. It felt like an absurd thing to do. Shouldn’t it be a primal urge or something? Were the evolutionists as fucked in the head as the creationists?
Once in the darker confines of the woods, under the leafy canopy, he started to feel more relaxed. Maybe relaxed wasn’t the right word. He thought maybe “at peace” was what he was looking for but dismissed that because it made him sound like a damn hippie.
But there was something about the smells and the sounds of the birds and the insects and the ... screaming?
Hunter was really really far away from being a Good Samaritan so he waited until he heard it a few more times before he began moving in that direction. He didn’t have anything to defend himself or anybody else with. He wasn’t sure how susceptible someone capable of evincing that kind of scream would be to a well-placed cutting remark or a firm grasp of vocabulary. He wasn’t even wearing his blazer.
He felt like running would probably do more harm than good but he did walk considerably faster than he had been.
The scream was the kind often described as “blood curdling.”
He broke into something close to a lope but didn’t think a heart attack would benefit anyone so he went back to his previous pace, now with a painful stitch in his side.
“Hello!” He thought maybe announcing himself could lessen an impending crisis.
The screams continued.
He saw a house through the woods. He’d almost forgotten about that house. In all his years growing up here, he’d never mustered up the courage to go inside it. There were many such houses in Lawrence. Old farm houses that had just been abandoned. Many times people didn’t even know the reasons. The residents were just never heard from again. Hunter often suspected that if someone were to ask the friendly neighborhood bank, they would probably get a much better idea. He’d even written about a house like this and maybe, somewhere in his subconscious, this was the house he’d written about.
In short, it looked exactly like the type of place screams like that would be coming from.
Stopping about twenty feet behind the house, he strained over the blood pounding in his ears to see if the screams continued.
“Hello?” he said again.
Panic must have rendered him dumb. He didn’t know why he didn’t think of it before but he pulled his phone from his pocket. Luckily, there was a bit of battery left. Within seconds he could call the police or, if he came face to face with the perpetrator, he could take his picture and instantly upload it to his twenty-four followers on Twitter.
He continued walking toward the house, resolving to call the police if he heard the scream again. He would walk around and look in all the windows. Even though he was older and wiser, he still had no intention of entering that house. In fact, maybe it was that wisdom that gave him more reasons not to enter.
He heard another sound but this time it sounded like laughter. Not mean, sadistic laughter. Light, happy laughter. He felt good about leaving on that note. After all, he hadn’t seen anyone doing anything. Now if someone were to catch him looking in their windows, he’d just feel like a creep.
He turned to walk away from the house and back toward the woods. He had a sudden feeling of anxiety and took off running faster than he had run here. It was a feeling he hadn’t had since he was a kid. His dad would send him out to the woodshed with a wheelbarrow to fetch wood. He was always fine until he turned to go back to the house. That was when the panic seized him. Sometimes he would take off running and leave the wheelbarrow behind. His dad usually told him if he didn’t go back to get it, he was going to make him sleep outside in his underwear.
Reaching the woods intact, panicked and breathing heavily, he’d forgotten what that feeling was. Cautiously, he drew to a stop and looked over his shoulder at the house. He still didn’t see any murder victims or comedians. No clowns, either.
Jesus, he didn’t even know why he’d entertained the thought of staying in Lawrence without his parents to mooch off of.
He’d been here less than twenty-four hours and he’d already discovered his parents were dead, been threatened by the police, spent a night in jail, and been scared out of his skull.
The reality of how completely and totally he was fucked came back to him. There were probably a number of people who thought anger was just a manifestation of some deeper fear. Hunter wouldn’t disagree with them. Especially now as the anger swallowed the fear in a red tidal wave and he stormed around the woods, ripping up saplings, kicking dirt clods, karate chopping trees, and shouting, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” all the while.
It was probably, like, his favorite word.
Thirteen
Walker woke up earlier than normal. Starving, as usual. He didn’t feel like reading so he opened the door to go outside and paused to look down and make sure he hadn’t been left another offering. Two days in a row would have been an even greater cause for alarm. Not that he was exactly sure why he should worry about it since it didn’t seem like anyone else was.
Today he thought maybe he would try to make it to the Jenkins place. Since he and Jordan were once confined to this farm it seemed ironic that he now chose n
ot to leave. He should escape as much as possible, if not permanently, just to celebrate that right. But it wasn’t really that he chose not to leave. There just wasn’t any place to go. There had been Jordan’s and, once that was out, that was it. He knew Jordan had friends but she’d been careful to never have them around Walker for very long. He didn’t really know her reasoning. She didn’t seem jealous but, he guessed if he wanted to be kind to himself, that could have been a reason. More likely she was embarrassed of him. A twenty-year-old jobless loser. A sad sack. Quite possibly a Fang and a murderer. And with the social skills of ... what? A paper cup, maybe?
To even get to the woods, Walker had to walk through a large cornfield. This year, the local farming outfit hadn’t planted anything in it. Come harvest, they’d have to pay royalties. Maybe they didn’t know who to pay or maybe they’d rather just take the cut in profit in order not to pay him. Last summer about this time, all the crops on Walker’s parents’ property died but they had come back even more beautiful than before.
Walker could have really used the money. For the moment, anyway, it made his walk easier. During high school, he’d come back to these woods a lot and had never made it so quickly. The pond had been one of his other favorite spots but that had evaporated when he and Jordan closed the door on the Fangs.
Or one of the doors.
Walker definitely wasn’t comfortable thinking they’d never be back. He knew he was partially one of them but honestly thought if he just ignored it, it would go away. Maybe Jordan was right. Maybe he did need to try and act normal—get a job, eat people food—instead of being this creepy recluse.
On his walks, Walker always liked the quiet. And it wasn’t really like it was quiet at all with the bird and insect and animal sounds. The breeze through the trees. It was quieter in the house but, in the house, his thoughts seemed too loud. Sometimes he would stop thinking for a few seconds and realize his jaws were clenched so tightly his ears were ringing. And Jordan lived in a “quiet” neighborhood but between the traffic, constant hum of the appliances, neighbors, and the occasional siren, it seemed like it was never quiet. Out here the only thing like that was the occasional airplane flying overhead. And he thought the natural sounds were good at creating just enough diversion to draw him out of his head.