One by One

by D. W. Gillespie

  Dean took a deep breath and glared down at her. He looked like a bull preparing to charge.

  “Before you fly off the handle, just think for a second. Think about what it means. If you didn’t paint it, and I didn’t paint it, then who did?”

  “I never said I believed you,” Dean snapped.

  “I never said I believed you,” she replied. “But let’s just pretend we both believe each other. Do you think Mom or Dad did it?”

  Dean shrugged, “I don’t carrrreee…”

  Alice rolled her eyes. “It wasn’t them. And it wasn’t us. So…”

  She paused, leaning forward, waiting for Dean to finish the thought for her. When it became clear that he wouldn’t, Alice did it for him.

  “Maybe I did see someone last night. Someone…in our house.”

  Dean’s mouth fell open in apparent horror. It was enough for Alice to drop her guard, and she pulled the phone from behind her back as she nodded.

  “Amazing,” Dean whispered before snatching his phone back, shaking his head derisively. “You’re too old for this shit. If you wanted to get me in trouble, there were easier ways to do it.”

  “But—”

  “Get out of my room.”

  “Dean—”

  “I said,” Dean spat as he pushed her forward, “get out of my room.”

  He didn’t quite slam the door, but he didn’t need to. He had made his point loud and clear. Alice stood there out in the hall for a moment, her eyes beginning to water, not out of sadness but frustration. There was something strange going on, but, for the moment, it seemed she was going to be left alone with it, without her big brother’s help. She turned and made her way back to her own room to hide her eyes and let the moment of pitiful anger pass.

  Chapter Five

  By the time Alice realized she hadn’t seen Baxter all day, the sun was beginning to dip in the sky. More than ever, the house seemed to be more glass than wood; the deepening dark seeped in from the outside, making her stomach churn. The realization that the cat was missing led to a quiet but frantic hunt through the house. Alice went room to room, conducting her search quietly at first, mainly because she didn’t want anyone to know how scared she was. There were too many coincidences in this house for her to ignore, and she hated the feeling that this place was somehow getting the better of her.

  “Baxter,” she whispered quietly into each room, fully aware that he ignored everyone in the family. So, she dropped down on hands and knees, checking under every bed, behind every curtain, inside every empty box. She had completely cleared the downstairs, making sure to close doors behind her, when her father bounded down the steps, coming to a halt in the hallway just outside her room. He had that exhausted, almost manic look in his eyes again, and she expected him to dart past her. At first, that looked like exactly what he planned to do, but something about the nervous glare in her eyes must have pulled him back.

  “Ah, shit,” he said suddenly.

  “What is it?”

  “Your blinds. They’re on my list.… I’ll do them right now!”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said.

  Frank eyed her for a moment, then asked, “What’s up?”

  “I…uh…”

  Alice didn’t want to speak, didn’t know if she even could speak. What if he was actually missing? Just behind her father, the creepy drawing peeked out over one shoulder, mocking her. Was the black X over the dog in the drawing bigger now?

  No, a calm voice whispered. Don’t start that. It’s all just a nasty trick. Don’t turn it into something bigger than it is.

  Her attempt to calm herself failed miserably, and she felt herself begin to tremble. If she didn’t do something, she would be crying again any second.

  “Alice?” Frank asked.

  “I can’t find Baxter,” she said in a syrupy voice.

  “Umm…hmmm…I thought I saw him upstairs earlier,” Frank said, putting two fingers to his chin as he always did whenever he was thinking. “Actually…maybe I just heard him pawing around. I figured it was him. If not, we’ve got some squirrels in the attic.”

  Alice stepped past him, still not wanting to talk, afraid that her fear would burst out of her.

  “Give me a second, and I’ll help you look,” Frank called after her.

  “It’s fine,” Alice replied, without looking back. She didn’t care about the cat, not as much as she’d cared about Patty, the ancient, endlessly sweet cat they’d buried a few years back. That one had floored her, hit her harder with a dose of mortality than she was ready for, but Baxter…was just a cat. He was a pain in the ass, never very friendly, and prone to vanishing for hours at a time. No, it wasn’t concern for him that made her feel so suddenly frantic; it was what the cat represented. If he was gone, if she couldn’t find him, it meant something bigger was going on. Something that her darkest imagination had only begun to hint at.

  She made her way upstairs and continued checking every room, meticulously closing doors behind her. She walked slowly, back down the hall, and found her eyes turning to the half-sized crawl-space door. It was small, only about three feet tall, and even she would have to duck to squeeze into it. It had a small latch, which, she noticed for the first time, hung curiously open.

  “You almost ready for dinner?” Debra asked from behind her, close enough to make Alice yelp in surprise.

  “You scared me to death!”

  “Sorry,” Debra said. “What are you up to anyway?”

  “I was looking for Baxter. I can’t find him anywhere.”

  “Why are you so concerned with him all of a sudden?”

  Alice rolled her eyes, a skill that seemed to grow in her each day as she too approached her teens. “I don’t know. I just haven’t seen him.”

  “Well, unless he knows how to turn handles, I don’t think he’s in there.”

  “You didn’t go in there, did you?” Debra asked.

  “No,” Alice said. “Have you?”

  Debra reached for the handle and turned, and for a brief second, Alice winced. She didn’t know what to expect in there, but the possibility of what could be inside was enough to put her on edge. The door swung wide, and the meager, yellow hallway light poked a few feet in. There wasn’t much of anything beyond a plywood floor, some bits of loose insulation, and the occasional mouse dropping. Less than a foot in, a wall of junk rose up, creating a solid roadblock. Alice dipped down onto one knee, peering through the spaces between the boxes, deeper back into the dark. It seemed that the crawl space stretched the distance of the hallway, and on the far end was a tiny staircase leading up to the attic.

  “I don’t know who the hell designed this place,” Debra said. “Supposedly, there’s a ton of space up there for storage, but you have to fit it through this little damn tiny door. I bet it’ll take a day’s worth of digging this trash out of there before we can even get to the attic.”

  “Why would they do that?” Alice asked.

  “Like everything else in this Frankenstein of a house, it was added later. The old owners wanted to finish out the attic overhead. Apparently, most houses this old don’t have actual attics, just empty space. But this was the only way to get up there, besides the entrance in our closet.”

  “Wait, your closet has an entrance too?”

  “Yeah, the walk-in. Just a tiny hole, boarded up at the moment. No stairs or ladder or anything. They must have given up before it all got finished up.”

  Debra closed the door and latched the lock. “If I had to guess, the cat is probably running around in the woods, eating birds. He’s a city cat, so he’s probably going wild out there.”

  Alice looked out the hallway window, into the gray woods beyond. “But it’s so cold out there.”

  “He’ll come home soon. Come on, let’s get something to eat.”

  * * *

  Deb
ra had been baking a frozen brick of a lasagna, the kind that takes half a day to finish, and the smell of it was drifting so heavily through the house that even Dean had no choice but to heed the call. They sat around the couch once again, watching movies.

  “Satellite should be in tomorrow,” Frank said, answering a question no one asked. “It’ll be a pain in the butt to relearn all those channels again.”

  “They have cable in town,” Dean said as he finished off his food and left the room.

  “That’s your sole contribution to the conversation?” Frank asked bitterly. Dean was gone before anyone had a chance to follow up in any meaningful way.

  “Why?” Debra glared at her husband.

  “Don’t you start too.”

  Alice took that as her cue to leave the living room. She could hear everything as she walked back toward her room. They fell in on each other, whispering at first, before their voices bloomed into hushed semi-screams that might have been funny if they weren’t so sad. The two of them retreated into the kitchen as their voices grew louder and louder.

  “It’s because you didn’t even hear him. He’s old enough to have an opinion.…”

  “Oh, his attitude is my fault now? The last I checked, a fifteen-year-old isn’t paying the fucking mortgage.…”

  The general dance wasn’t new to Alice, but the tone was. She still couldn’t quite wrap her head around how sharp and casually cruel her usually bubbly father had become in the past few days. She tried her best to remember what her mother had said, about how hard he was being on himself with the new house, but it wasn’t enough for her to excuse him. From the sound of it, her mother was done looking the other way herself. Alice had seen them go a few rounds countless times in the past, and it didn’t really matter who was right. Her mother had a resolve in arguing that her father simply didn’t possess. Eventually, he would burn out and end up apologizing long before she would.

  Alice had heard enough; she slipped into a pair of fuzzy slippers and grabbed her coat from the wall hooks just inside of the kitchen. She never made eye contact with her parents, but the argument died just long enough for her to enter and exit.

  “Where you going?” Frank asked, clearly beginning to tire and looking for an out.

  “Just some fresh air out back. Maybe listen to the frogs.”

  “Honey, there are no frogs this time of year,” Debra said.

  Alice didn’t stop to listen, and the arguing started back up as soon as she was out of their sight. It was too cold to be out there in pajama pants, but the bracing wind was a nice change from the surprisingly sturdy central heating unit that blasted out of the old wall and floor grates. Before her, the concrete deck shined under a single, blue light that hovered from a pole a dozen feet away from the dark, gaping hole of the pool. The wind whipped through her hair, and Alice pulled her hood up, sinking further down into the jacket. It was, as she expected, a bit creepy out there. The blue light shined down, reflecting off the ripped sides of the pool liner, blending with the gray concrete, and casting the entire area in an otherworldly glow. It reminded her of a sci-fi movie, the way everything looks just before a flying saucer lands and the aliens start killing everyone.

  Alice whistled as she walked, trying to match her tone to the wind. Together, she and the frozen breeze made a strange music that mixed with the endless moan of the woods. Once, the wind grew to a howl, and she stopped, listening. Never more had she been convinced that the woods themselves were alive, that this house, this pathetic stamp of humanity, was just a boil, a tumor, a cancer on something larger, older, wilder. They were trespassers here, fleas on the back of something they could barely even comprehend. The only question was, would they be strong enough to dig in and stake their claim, or be driven back, beaten, and maybe even broken in the process?

  Alice made a round toward the back of the long, rectangular pool, checking out the deep end. How cold had the night grown when she wasn’t looking, wasn’t expecting it? There were a few days in the previous week when spring teased them, promising to come early, to bypass the coldest months of January and February altogether. But the night had gone from simply cold to bitter, and in a few moments, she was shivering. She passed by the diving board, taking a second to peer into the darkest depths of the black water. A gust of wind raced through the pool beneath her, whipping up a sudden, unexpectedly foul smell that nearly made her gag. Just like before, it reminded her of sewage, but there was something else. Something deeper.

  Something dead.

  The wind died, and she looked closer, leaning forward to catch a glimpse of something glimmering at the bottom of the pool. Something too bright to be part of that grimy water. A plastic bag caught in the wind maybe? Some random bit of trash that ended up in the pool?

  No.

  Something glistened in the darkness, a pair of dim beads that still managed to shine in the moonlight.

  No.

  * * *

  Alice didn’t politely wait for her parents to stop arguing as she normally would.

  “Where’s the flashlight?”

  Frank and Debra both stared at her; the panic in her face must have been clear, unmistakable.

  “Honey, what’s wrong?” Debra asked.

  “Jesus, you’re shivering,” Frank added.

  “The flashlight,” Alice demanded, her voice breaking a bit.

  “I…I don’t know,” Frank answered. “Probably in a box somewhere.”

  “Mom, let me have your phone.”

  “Alice, what’s going on?”

  “Just let me have it,” she said, nearly yelling now. “Please, come with me.”

  Debra handed it over, and Alice flipped on the flashlight app. Then, she dashed back toward the back door, her parents following closely at her heels. Her mother kept firing off questions from behind her, but Alice didn’t even glance back. She needed to see what that oddly light shape was in the pool, even if, deep in her heart, she already knew the answer. Without a word, she walked to the diving board, leaned over, and held the light over the lip of the pool. There, at the bottom, was Baxter’s glassy-eyed corpse.

  Chapter Six

  Alice nearly hyperventilated when she saw it clear in the light. There was a moment, a short one, when she tried to talk herself out of it, when one of her inner voices, a soft motherly one, tried to convince her it was all okay.

  It’s not Baxter. No, not him at all.

  Alice couldn’t hear the voice clearly, not when her heart was pounding so dangerously loud. As awful as the moment was, Debra didn’t waste any time. She grabbed the phone, slapped a hand onto her daughter’s shoulder, and marched her back inside, back where it was warm, back where dead cats didn’t stare up at you with green, dead eyes. Whatever awful work was left to be done, it would be up to Frank to handle it.

  “Calm down,” Debra said, pulling a chair out from the kitchen table. “Just breathe, just breathe.”

  Debra stood in front of Alice for a moment, rubbing her shoulders, letting her calm down bit by bit. She touched Alice’s face once and winced.

  “You’re freezing,” she said. “You want some tea? Something to warm you up?”

  Alice hated tea, but not knowing what else to do, she nodded. Debra turned to the sink and began to fill up a coffee mug to heat in the microwave. Alice, still dazed by it all, glanced back toward the living room and the pool beyond. There was a clear line of sight from the kitchen, through the living room, and past the sliding glass doors that led out to the pool. Even from the kitchen, she could see her father balancing the net on the end of a rusty pole some twelve feet long. He was leaning back, struggling with the weight of it, moving slowly and steadily to keep the load on the end from falling. And there it was, rising out of the darkness, a mass of slick fur.

  “Oh god…”

  Debra hurried back to Alice’s side.

  “Jesu
s Christ,” she replied. “Come on. You don’t need to see this.”

  Dean, who had been roused by all the commotion, walked into the kitchen.

  “What’s her problem?”

  “Go out by the pool,” Debra said. “See if your father needs help.”

  Dean did as he was told, but he moved as slowly as humanly possible. Alice saw the pair of them huddled over the lump that had once been the cat.

  Why did it smell so bad? He couldn’t have been dead for long.

  “Come on, honey,” Debra said as she led Alice away from the kitchen. “You don’t want to have nightmares.”

  Debra made a quick stop by the bathroom, just long enough to wet a washcloth in the sink. When the pair finally made it to Alice’s room, she dabbed her daughter’s forehead as they sat on the bed. Alice stared down at her comforter for a moment, and when she glanced back up, she saw something strange in her mother’s eyes. What was it? Grief? Fear?

  No. It was expectation. Debra was clearly bracing herself for something, some flood of emotion to pour out of Alice, and when it never came, the expectation had changed to confusion.

  “You…okay, honey?” Debra asked.

  Alice was still struggling a bit to breathe, but she was able to recall her old asthma days, the slow, steady in and out. It was muscle memory at that point, the kind of thing that would never leave her regardless of whether or not she carried around an inhaler. Alice took a deep breath, readied her response, then faltered.

  “I know that Baxter meant a lot to you.…”

  Did he? a cynical voice whispered.

  Alice didn’t have an answer for that. Something deep in her chest seemed to hurt, but Alice wasn’t the stoic type. Just like her father, she had been known to tear up over made-for-TV movies, pop ballads, even commercials from time to time. She would never admit it, but she was a crier. So why wasn’t she crying now?

  “I imagine he just slipped off the edge…probably trying to get at a bird or something,” Debra said. “It’s so cold out, and it’s icy out there around the concrete…I bet he slipped in and just couldn’t…”