One by One

by D. W. Gillespie

  She didn’t.

  But, even so, her nose was running from the cold, and when she sniffed, Dean shuffled his feet uncertainly.

  “He was…a good…cat?” he said.

  The sentence that escaped from his mouth was perched on the narrow divide between statement and question. Alice didn’t even know if he knew for sure which it was. Of course, Baxter was an asshole. He’d bitten every member of the house more than once. He was, in many ways, the most catlike cat any of them had ever seen. He’d liked being stroked behind the ears from time to time, but only when he wanted it, and only for as long as he wanted it. Anything outside of those parameters was asking to get nipped. The rest of the time, he spent his days in a perpetual panic, running from room to room, always careful to never get trapped between any human being and an exit. Alice’s friends had dogs, big, dumb, simple things that poured love out on anyone who happened to be in the vicinity. But Baxter. Baxter was as close as you could get to having a completely wild animal living in your house for years on end. If anything good came out of a situation like that, it was by pure chance alone, and it was hard to mourn something that felt so random.

  “I’m fine,” she said after a few moments.

  “It’s okay,” he replied. “I mean, if you’re not fine.”

  “I’m serious. He was a pain.”

  She’d been through worse a few years earlier. Patty, Baxter’s predecessor, was a loving, gray momma cat who gave birth to kittens every chance she got. That was fun, sweet, and the kind of thing kids thinks of when they think of pets. And, when she died, it had been rough. That was a true loss, the kind of thing that kept her in her room, thinking about life and death for a solid week. Baxter, in many ways, was just an attempt at replacing Patty. She’d never really seen it in those terms before now, but with his sudden death, she was almost thankful that things had gone that way. At least this didn’t hurt.

  “You sure?”

  Alice shrugged. “I think so. I just wanted to see it.”

  “It was a bitch to dig the hole,” he said. “Me and dad took turns. The ground is almost solid now from the cold.”

  Alice looked up away from the dark patch of earth and stared into the yellow field and the deeper woods beyond. She still didn’t have a plan, but she hoped she might be able to come up with something, to see some small detail that might drag them farther into the gray crag trees, to Daddy’s place.

  “It’s kind of spooky back here,” she said, fumbling for something else to say.

  Dean looked around as well. “I guess so. It was dark when we were back here before. Never really got a good look at it.” He took a few steps forward, closer to the looming branches that hung low overhead. Then, without warning, he began to walk toward them.

  “Where you going?” she asked, following at his heels.

  He tilted his head as he walked. “I thought I saw something.”

  About fifty feet away past the fence, they stepped into the line of trees. There was a neat little path, the sort of thing that would disappear in the middle of the summer when the grass was at its highest. Now, with most of the brush killed off from the cold, they could walk between the trees without even touching the branches. She followed along, excited and nervous that her plan was working so well without even being a plan at all.

  They walked in silence for a moment, and when they finally stopped, Alice glanced back. Even without a single leaf on the branches, the house was barely visible through the trees. Had they come so far? Surely it had only been a few steps, but the feeling that they had somehow stepped off the edge of the earth overwhelmed her.

  “Did you hear that?” Dean asked.

  She turned back around, ear cocked, eyes wide. The wind blew. A few close trees leaned against each other, that familiar sound returning, like an old rocking chair. Dead leaves stirred around her ankles. The woods were simultaneously alive and dead, and Alice wanted nothing more than to be back inside, back in the warmth and the quiet, back where the wind was just an abstract, something you heard but never felt.

  “Let’s go,” she whispered, but Dean shushed her with a wave of his hand. All thoughts of the diary, of undiscovered family secrets, fell away. She was only cold and afraid and ready to go home, to drink some cocoa, to forget that she ever wanted to come out here at all. The trees whined again, and it sounded like the woods were full of rocking chairs, each of them slowly rocked by invisible hands.

  “I swear to god, I saw something.”

  Alice was standing behind him then, almost hiding in his shadow, and she peered around his shoulder and looked deeper into the woods.

  “What?” she asked softly, afraid that someone or something other than her brother might hear. “What did you see?”

  For a long time, Dean said nothing. Then he spoke in a whisper. “It was…pink.”

  Alice furrowed her brow, and some of the dread of the place seemed to lighten. “Pink?” She tried not to laugh.

  “Shut up.”

  “What, like the Easter Bunny or something?”

  “I know what I saw,” he said. “It was like something blowing in the wind. Like…a dress or something.”

  Alice shook her head, but she didn’t move. The world held around them, quiet and still. Finally, Dean began to walk again, not back to the house like she hoped but onward, deeper.

  “Where are you going?”

  Dean waved a hand again, refusing to look at her. “Go back,” he said.

  “I’m not going alone. We need to stick together.” She stood, feet planted, eyes narrowed against the wind, watching him walk away. “You’re responsible for me!”

  It was a bit of a low blow, but she was desperate, and she knew where to hit him. It worked. Dean stopped, turned. “Come on then. I want to look around a little bit more.”

  Alice bit her lip. She was caught then, balanced between two worlds, between the fear of how the woods made her feel, and of the strange draw of the diary, of the secrets that had yet to be revealed.

  Do it now, or you’ll never do it.

  Without another word, she ran to her brother’s side, and they carried on in silence, each footfall echoing around them in the empty woods. Alice kept scanning the horizon, looking for…what exactly? A pink dress? The idea of it was so silly that she wanted to laugh out loud.

  Mary.

  Her inner voice whispered the name, soft as the wind on her cheek.

  Girls love pink.

  She owned one herself, a cute little springtime dress that made her feel grown up even if she did only wear it to church. Her mom made her take it off the moment she walked in the house, but Alice always managed to make a detour to the bathroom to stare at herself in the mirror, to pose and make duck faces like some kind of pop star.

  And as absurd as it was, an idea had planted itself, was already sprouting deep roots. The face pressed to her window, the outline of a person peering in, looked to be a figure with long, wild hair.

  Mary.

  Alice let the name echo in her mind, curl in her brain like the wind that curled around her legs. What if, in some distant way, Mary was all around her, in the house, at her window, in the woods itself?

  “I didn’t see anything,” she answered, pushing away the frightening images swirling in her brain. Mary was gone, just a memory at this point, but Alice could feel something lingering, like eyes watching her sleep.

  Dead eyes, a voice whispered. Her eyes.

  “Come on,” Dean said as he kept plowing in. There was a trail, a faint one that became clear once they passed into the veil of trees. She kept expecting to see a deer or a raccoon pop up and sprint away from them, but beyond the wind, the woods were silent.

  “How much longer?” she asked, feeling the cold in her toes for the first time. She had dressed warmly enough for a short stroll, but the farther they trekked, the deeper the cold
bit into her, so deep that she was ready to abandon Daddy’s place.

  “A little farther, I think,” he said. “You can do it.”

  He seemed to realize how sweet he was being, and he immediately backtracked. “Don’t blame me if you’re cold. I told you to go back.”

  Being alone in the house at this point was like flipping a coin. It was warm and relatively safe to be sure, but the otherworldly strangeness of the place had only grown in her mind. The last thing she wanted to do was walk back alone, regardless of what horrors might be waiting ahead of her. She trudged on, head down, so focused on putting one foot in front of the other that she didn’t notice the shed until they were nearly upon it.

  “What’s that?” Dean asked, stopping them both on the trail. Alice looked up and gasped at the sight of it, a dingy gray skull of a building hidden among the trees.

  Daddy’s place.

  “What the hell?” Dean said as they walked into the small clearing that held the shack. It was tiny, maybe twenty feet wide and half that deep. It was constructed of old, unfinished wood planks that had gone gray from the weather. The roof was a mismatched array of shingles that looked like they had been scavenged from various jobsites over the years. Her original impression of the building as a half-buried skull wasn’t far off base. A pair of small windows marked the eyes, and the dark wooden door could have been a mouth.

  “What is this place?” Dean asked, but Alice didn’t have an answer. She barely heard the question at all as she kept staring at the wooden door. The paint might have been dark green at one point, but it had turned a sickly gray. In the center, right at eye level for a young girl, was a patch of white. It was just enough to cover up the words that Mary had painted there years before.

  She looked back up the path. The house was out of sight, but she didn’t think it was as far as it seemed. During the summer, when the woods were warm, the walk down here wouldn’t be so bad at all. Mary’s father could come and go as he pleased. Dean walked up to the doorway and tried the handle. A metal clasp held it in place, and hanging from it was a chain with a sturdy steel lock.

  “That’s a heavy-duty lock,” he said, jangling the door.

  “Yeah,” Alice said, finally finding her voice. “I wonder what’s in there.”

  The windows were blacked out from the inside.

  “It’s newspaper,” Alice said, leaning close. “Look…you can see the print.”

  “That’s some weird shit,” Dean said, leaning close.

  They walked the perimeter of the shed, checking it for other ways in and out. There was a tree growing close on its back end, and a tree stand for deer hunting leaned against it. It still looked sturdy enough to use.

  “I bet this was like a little hunting shack or something,” Dean said.

  “Why?” Alice asked. “I mean, the house is just up there.”

  “Maybe they just liked the quiet. A chance to get away. I mean, I get that.”

  Alice considered whether or not the statement was directed at her, but she didn’t linger on it. There were piles of sheet metal stacked against the back of the shed; Dean tilted his head and stared.

  “What a junk pile.” He gave the stack of metal a solid kick. As he did, a rabbit shot out from underneath; Alice screamed.

  “Jesus,” Dean said. “You’re so jumpy.”

  “Let’s go back,” Alice said. “I’m freezing to death.”

  They walked back around, and Dean reached for the lock once more. “This is still in good shape,” he said. “I bet we can break it open. I think I saw a sledgehammer in the shed by the house.”

  “Later,” Alice said. “Let’s go back, please.”

  Dean seemed to be ignoring her. He was scanning the tree line around them, listening for something. There was a stirring in the distance, closer to the house. For a long moment, neither of them moved.

  “Rabbits,” he said to himself. “Feel sorry for them in this weather.”

  “They can d-d-dig…we can’t. Let’s get b-b-back.”

  Alice was seriously considering leaving him if he didn’t agree, but to her relief, he turned and began to lead them back the way they’d come. They walked in silence, or at least as much silence as the woods would allow. There was a feeling now that Alice couldn’t shake, that the woods had tried to hide that shed and that by finding it, she and Dean had done something they weren’t supposed to. Now, the woods were watching them, following them, trying to spit them out like gristle stuck between two teeth. Dean kept scanning, kept looking left to right like a bird, or a groundhog on its haunches.

  Like prey.

  Alice thought of the rabbit, alone out here in all this cold, surrounded by things that wanted to kill it, chief among them, the woods itself. Something rose up in her mind, a memory of a book she once read, a book about talking rabbits running away from all the things in the world that wanted them dead. The memory filled her with a sick feeling, a tension that felt like a rubber band inside her that was being stretched tighter and tighter. Alice kept waiting for something to happen, for all that tension to suddenly break. But it never did. Dean never stopped her again, never pointed into the woods, never claimed to see any little girls in pink dresses.

  Little girls.

  He had said that, hadn’t he? Or did Alice just think that?

  The house came into view, huge and fading, like a sad little sunset, and the sight of it calmed the tight, crouching feeling in her stomach. They were almost totally past the fence when Dean noticed the hole.

  “Aw, shit.” He stopped in his tracks, and Alice nearly bumped into him. His voice wasn’t filled with fear or dread. Rather, it was the voice of an exhausted homeowner who comes home to find that raccoons have torn through his trash.

  “What is it?”

  Dean sighed, a heavy, tired sound, as he stepped aside and pointed.

  “That.”

  The spot where they buried Baxter had been, a few minutes earlier, a smooth circle of dirt. You could even still see the boot prints on it where Frank and Dean had patted it down. But now, it was an open hole. Dirt had been tossed aside, and as far as she could tell, the grave was completely empty.

  “What in the world?”

  Dean shook his head. “Coyotes. Or maybe dogs. Jesus Christ, I can’t believe they’d do this in broad daylight. Dad said we should have looked for some rocks to put on top of it. I thought we got it deep enough though.”

  For the first time since finding the cat, Alice began to tear up, not from sadness but from the simple grotesqueness of it all.

  “Come on,” Dean said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “There’s nothing left to see out here. Let’s get inside before whatever did this comes back.”

  * * *

  Frank was the first to arrive home. Alice had just begun to get all the feeling back in her toes when she heard him coming in, the thump of his heavy footsteps distinct from her mom’s. She considered getting up from the couch to see him, to tell him everything that had happened that day, but she wasn’t ready to just yet.

  From the living room, she could see he was carrying half a dozen plastic bags looped across his arm. It was a mishmash of supplies picked up from the hardware store. Paintbrushes, painter’s tape, drop cloths. Dean and Alice were sitting in the living room together, a Harry Potter movie playing in the background. Dean was on his phone, not really watching the film, but both of them in the same room was no doubt a strange sight.

  “What are you two up to?” Frank asked awkwardly as he set down the painting supplies. The cans of primer landed on the hardwood with a thud, and Alice looked up from her daze. She watched him with a wary eye, still a bit on edge from the blowup earlier.

  “You painting?” she asked.

  Frank half shrugged, half nodded. “Well, it wasn’t part of the plan…at least not at first. But, if we’re going to be snowed in, I f
igured I’d make the most of it.”

  Dean looked up from his phone. “Starting on the hallway?” he asked without blinking.

  Alice was stunned by how much gall her brother showed to their father. Frank looked from one to the other, measuring the moment. He somehow managed a smile.

  “Good a place as any,” he said.

  “I suppose so.” Dean looked back at his phone.

  Frank stood for a moment, half in and half out of the living room. Then he seemed to find his voice.

  “Look, I’ve been pretty uptight about this place. No sense in acting like that’s not true. Things got heated last night, and I just want to say that I’m sorry.”

  Dean didn’t look up. Alice glanced between the two of them, waiting to see who would be the first to say something, anything.

  “Sorry about what?” Dean asked finally.

  Frank actually laughed at that, a genuine, sweet laugh that made Alice feel better than she would have thought possible in that moment.

  “How about, I’m sorry for being a dick? Will that work?”

  Dean never looked up, but he did grin. “It’s a start.”

  Frank had that way about him. Even at his angriest, he’d go out of his way to prevent a war in the family. In some ways, Alice didn’t understand that at all. It made him look weak and afraid to deal with things. But on the other hand, the older she got, the more she appreciated her dad’s easy way. They were, whether any of them liked it or not, all in this together. So, why not be cordial?

  “The snow looks like it’s picking up,” he said as he began to organize his supplies. “Weatherman says we might even get half a foot. Pretty exciting, huh?”

  Despite herself, Alice felt her heart flutter. “Really?”

  “I guess we’ll have to see,” Frank replied. “So…what have you been up to today?”

  Dean and Alice looked at each other, both of them seeming to dare the other to tell their father what happened.

  “What?” he asked when no one spoke.

  “We went down to the woods,” Dean said finally.