But therein lay the problem, of course. They were gone. I was still alive. And without Robin and Lexi, that seemed like an impotent state, a redundancy that needed fixing, all those memories nothing more than piles of ash, or dirt, useless to me now.
Up ahead, the old man’s turn signal flashed, and I eased my foot down on the brake, watched as he angled his rusted ruin onto an unpaved road that ran a quarter mile before turning again and vanishing into the woods.
I waited, certain now I knew where he, and by extension I, was going.
I had seen it in my dreams.
What I didn’t yet know was whether he would be alone, or if the woman would be there too.
Only when the trees quenched his headlights did I follow.
EVENTUALLY THE ROAD became a trail which, though it had clearly been traversed by vehicles, didn’t seem intended for them. Thick twisted roots rose from the dirt to scrape at the underside of the car even as low hanging branches rapped their knuckles against the roof. Brambles and shrubs crowded me on both sides until it felt like I was driving not through nature but an angry crowd that might at any moment tear me free of it. The uneven terrain jostled me in my seat, making my teeth crack together. It was hard to keep my hands on the wheel and the car on the road. Animals fled so quickly through my headlights, I couldn’t tell what kind they were.
I lost track of how much time passed, felt disorientated by the sudden dark and the inefficacy of my highbeams to keep it at bay. The car was now cocooned in branches that made tortured shrieking sounds against the metal until my fillings ached. I thought I saw phosphorescent lights in the distance, but it was only lightning bugs rising before the windshield. Other lights glowed in pairs as nocturnal animals watched my progress from the safety of the woods. A sudden splat as a wet leaf hit my windshield and I had to swallow the urge to scream.
The longer it went on, the more I began to think that it might never end, that maybe this was the trap in which the woman wished to keep me. Her endgame, infinitely cruel in its banality. I’d expected a showdown which would ultimately end in my death, a death I would not resist once I’d uncovered the reason for it all. The notion that I might be trapped for eternity with my ghosts seemed like the worst kind of hell.
I rolled down the windows. I don’t know why. Perhaps it was because I was baking alive in the heat of my own panic. Perhaps I felt like I was about to pass out. Or maybe I just wanted to let loose the scream that seemed to perpetually be surging up my throat. But I opened it and the branches, now not branches at all but impossibly long and wet clambering fingers, exploded into the car to find me. And find me they did, probing their sticky fingers into my eyes and mouth. I let go of the wheel and clutched at them, but they were too slick, too fast, and whipped away only to lash back at me and score the flesh of my face.
I screamed.
I screamed.
I flailed at them.
When the car veered off the road, I didn’t care, didn’t know.
As the world tumbled and turned, I could only struggle and yank and tear and bat at the branches, the tendrils, the boneless arms with their verdant baby fingers as they tried to infiltrate my throat and prod the soft flesh of my eyelids, pulling them away so they could slip inside.
Then the car met sudden resistance, the world slammed to a halt, and the mass of branches withdrew like a hand burned by a flame, content to let the darkness take its place.
SHE TURNS HER HEAD at the sound from the woods. It may as well be the horn signaling the imminent arrival of the invaders. Soon the night will be lit by the glow of their lamps and their torches, and yet again, they will come to fall at her feet. She raises a hand and bends a forefinger. The dolls follow her instruction, gathering in a perfect circle amid the symbols on the floor.
They look up at her, their faces falling to pieces like shattered porcelain, revealing the depthless hollows within. Stars swirl and universes ignite within that cavernous cosmic dark. There is a low hum in the room, a mumbling that comes from nowhere and everywhere at once.
The woman leans forward, her spine making the sound of shells breaking in a gloved hand as it reshapes to accommodate the motion. She brushes aside the thatched mass of her writhing hair and brings her face close to the dolls. She can feel the cold from them. Lightless, amorphous tendrils spindle outward from the hollows, umbilically uniting the children to one another and then to her like spokes from a burned wheel. Only once they are connected does she feed them what they need.
It is, as always, a story, but not one they have heard before.
This one is about a man who didn’t know how to love his wife and child enough so the gods made him pay for his apathy by taking them away.
The children listen intently until the sound of dead leaves being crushed underfoot brings their attention to the warped cabin door.
9
THERE WAS A RED FLICKER in my right eye as I stumbled toward the cabin. My vision jolted with every labored step, and my breathing sounded like someone raking leaves. There was so much pain in so many places, I couldn’t identify any of them. Distantly, I wondered if something was broken. I couldn’t quite tell if I was even awake, or if any of what I was seeing was real. I vaguely recalled waking up upside down, still strapped into the driver seat of my car. A tree branch had punched a hole in the windshield, the sheared off end of it like the tip of a spear before my right eye. That I still had my life was a miracle. That I hadn’t been blinded was even more of one.
After crawling free of the wreck, I’d walked aimlessly, hoping I’d eventually find myself back on the trail, back on the road. I wanted to go home, wanted to wake up in my own bed to find Lexi lying next to me, and Robin safe in her crib. I wanted all the horror undone, and in my confusion, head throbbing mercilessly, I demanded to know why it couldn’t be so. Because it wasn’t fair, any of it. I had done nothing to deserve such a callous intervention of fate and was no longer content to accept it as reality.
I stumbled along for what felt like hours before I realized I was holding Blanky in my right hand. It was caked in mud and leaves, and perhaps it was only the breeze or my own crippled vision, but it appeared to be moving. I could feel the material brushing against my bloody fingers as if it was not a blanket at all but a pillowcase filled with eels. When I raised my head and saw the soft amber glow of lights ahead of us, I figured I’d imagined nothing and maybe the thing was just excited to be home.
The old man. I’d been following the old man.
I had to keep reminding myself why I was here, what had happened to me to leave me broken and bleeding on this path in the middle of nowhere. It was difficult. What little reason I had left demanded I turn around and try to find the highway, to flag down a passing car and go straight to the hospital, or at the very least, home where I belonged. This was madness, it said, and I would not find whatever it was I had come here to seek. It would only end in misery.
Blanky coiled itself around my wrist like a snake, the baby teeth in the hem digging into the flesh of my wrist.
It seemed my destination was not up for debate, so I moved on toward the cabin lights, every step sending a bolt of agony through me.
I DON’T KNOW WHAT I expected to see once that door opened. Hell itself? The tall woman bent almost double, gnarled hands pulling me inside while the swirling vortex in her face rid me of the last of my sanity? Would there be children pretending to be dolls seated on the floor, baby fingers poking from their eyes to wave perversely at me in the moments before my life was extinguished? Would Robin be among them? Would I see someone nailed to the floorboards, eyes wide with the panic only those of us in the final moments of our existences truly know? I felt the fear and the grim acceptance of such things warring within me, but was no longer in any condition to retreat, should it even have presented itself as an option. Instead, after knocking a single time, I simply stood a few feet from the door, weaving on my feet, all but blind in one eye, my chest feeling like broken glass, and waited.
The door opened and a face hove into view.
“Yes?”
He was still wearing the threadbare suit pants, but had discarded the rest in favor of a raggedy white T-shirt with old sweat stains beneath the armpits. The hat was gone too, revealing a pate threaded with scars. His arms were rail-thin and speckled with freckles and liver spots. The old man peered warily at me through his spectacles, glass eye lost in darkness.
“I’m here,” I said.
He frowned as he inspected me, wariness turning to alarmed recognition. “You. I saw you today. Why...what happened to you? Do you need the police? You’re hurt.”
“Accident,” I mumbled. “But you know why I’m here.”
With great effort, I summoned enough focus to take in the room behind him. I can admit now to a certain disappointment at the sight of it, because it was just a room. There was no witch, no dolls, no man staked to the floor, no symbols carved into the wood. Instead, there was a tattered floral-pattered sofa, a sheepskin rug, and an old portable TV on a stand. The smell of popcorn and butter told me all I needed to know about the insidious activities I’d intruded upon. The old man had been preparing to watch a movie.
This was not The Other Place. It was just a house.
“Do you have a phone?” he asked, shaking me gently by the shoulder, indicating it wasn’t the first time he’d posed the question. I looked squarely at him, saw the slight trace of unease in his good eye. He should have been afraid. I had no business being here, and I was not myself. It’s not usual these days to find someone who would open the door to a stranger covered in blood. Most people would call the cops first. Of course, he didn’t have a phone or maybe that’s exactly what he’d have done.
“Mister? Sir?” He shook me harder. “Do you have a phone with you?”
“Back in the car,” I told him, “Or, it was. I don’t know.”
“You should come in and sit down.”
He moved away from me, one hand extended, inviting me into his sanctuary.
I didn’t move. “Is this your home?”
He squinted at me. “This? Oh no. I just use it sometimes when I work in Columbus. Saves me a long trip home. It belongs to my brother, or it used to. He’s passed now.”
The accent, faint but there. He came from somewhere in Europe.
“You don’t share it with anyone?”
He lowered his arm, clearly content to answer but worried that the questions were coming to him courtesy of a concussion. “I used to share it with my wife. She’s no longer with us either.”
No longer with us.
I smiled at that. Lexi. Robin. No longer with us, as if they’d simply left the room.
Frowning, the old man looked down at my hand and saw the blanket. Saw Blanky. I saw him see it and watched him as carefully as my juddering vision would allow. The blanket tightened under his scrutiny. Recognition?
“You should use that to stop the bleeding,” he said, but he looked confused. “Did I...?”
“Did you sell that to my wife? Yes, you did.”
Concern became suspicion now and he took a single step backward, one hand reaching for the door. I stepped inside, over the threshold. To shut me out, he’d have to hit me with the door and he didn’t look inclined to do that to an injured man.
“Why is it here?” he asked me, a note of fear in his voice. “I mean, why do you have it with you?”
“Do you know what it is? Do you know what it does? You do, don’t you?”
He moved back another step. I took a corresponding step forward and elbowed the door shut behind me.
“It’s a blanket. I don’t understand what you—”
“You killed my wife and my baby girl.” It sounded like I might be crying, but I couldn’t be sure. “You sold this to my wife and it killed them both. I need you to tell me how you could do that to them. To me.”
There was nothing but naked fear on the old man’s face now. He looked around the room as if trying to register an escape route or the whereabouts of the nearest weapon. He held his arms out to his sides as if considering actual flight. “Sir...I am not sure what you’re talking about, but I think you should sit down. I think you, maybe, hurt your head. I can go to the cabin up the road and see if they can call for help, or maybe we can look for your phone.”
I closed in on him, Blanky so tight around my hand it was cutting off the circulation. “Did she threaten you, the witch? Did she make you do it? Did she kill your wife to show she was serious? Did you wake up one morning to find this blanket stuffed into her throat? Please tell me you had no other choice or I don’t know what I’ll do.”
He backed further away into the room but did not take his eyes off me. There was a small kitchenette at the back of the cabin. If he made it there, he’d probably find a knife and end me. I had to make him answer.
“Just tell me, please. I’m begging you. Tell me why you sold this blanket to Lexi.”
His brow was sheened with sweat. He licked his lips, good eye flicking from the walls to the floor to my face, and when at last he spoke, it was with a nervous tremor in his voice. “I gave that blanket to your wife because she...she asked me to. She wanted it. I didn’t even take her money. I told her she could have it as a gift. A gift to...to celebrate her first child.”
I stared at him, searching his face for the lie, for the cleverly concealed truth behind his claim. I stared for a very long time, until the doubt returned and the strength of my convictions began to leave me.
“I...I don’t know why I’m here. Please...help me.”
But then, just for a moment, I saw his face start to swim, saw the edges becomes less clear, less defined, saw the flare of blazing stars beneath his skin like red suns seen through a veil.
Still wearing the mask of fake sincerity, he said, “I’m very sorry for your loss,” and I was jerked forward by the blanket in my hand hard enough to crack my neck.
We were on the floor then, me straddling him as he struggled against me, looking down as Blanky shattered the old man’s dentures on its way into his mouth, forcing him to swallow them. The blanket took my fist down with it and thus I felt the warmth of his throat as it tried to resist the obstruction while still struggling to draw air. Air hissed in through his flaring nostrils, tears streamed from his eye. He looked up at me in absolute horror, hands clenched on my arm, trying to force me away. Part of me was glad that he now knew what horror was, the same horror in which he had been complicit for decades, perhaps longer. Blanky surged forward and I found myself assisting, putting all my weight behind it until the life left the old man’s eyes and his body stopped bucking. I smelled shit and piss as his body let go and I rolled away from him, my head spinning. The stars continued to dance before my eyes as I rose to my feet, exhausted now. I stood looking at the body for the longest time, not convinced that an agent of supernatural forces might not just cough the blanket out and come back to life, perhaps with vengeance in mind.
But he didn’t. He lay there, dead amid the foulness of his own excreta, mouth open, throat swollen with the child’s blanket. He hadn’t given me the answers I’d come here to get. He’d lied, content to remain a coward rather than give me the peace I needed. But that was fine. He was dead, punished for his part in the horror show, unable to visit his evil upon anybody else, and that would have to suffice, at least until the woman finally decided to show herself.
Before I left, I caught a glimpse of myself in the darkened window above the kitchen sink. My face was gone, in its place, a hole through which I could see the night beyond.
I DON’T KNOW HOW I got home or how many times I collapsed before I got there, but the sun had risen in a sky that looked suddenly alien to me when I finally turned the corner into my development.
The police were there, two cruisers parked outside my door, four of
ficers milling around talking. Harriet and Tony Dean were there too. Of course they were, always so eager to be involved in other people’s lives. They gasped in horror when they saw me. The policemen’s hands strayed to their holsters as if I’d inadvertently wandered onto a Western movie set at high noon.
“What’s going on?” I asked, offering a smile to calm their nerves, because they looked as if they’d seen a ghost. I must assume I looked like one.
Two of the officers approached me, grim determination on their faces. “Mr. Brannigan?”
I tried to say something to them, to raise my bloody hands to show them I meant no harm, but then the world tilted and spun away from me and I was gone, their voices trailing me down into the dark.
10
I AWOKE IN A HOSPITAL bed, my right foot and right arm in a cast, my skull swaddled in bandages. Harsh daylight burned through the pristine white blinds. A pulse monitor had been cinched like a futuristic clothes peg over my finger. A female police officer sat next to the bed. I recognized her from the night Lexi died. The woman I’d offended in my grief. At the foot of the bed stood a large black man in a suit. His gaze was not kind. He introduced himself as Detective Marshall Murray from the Columbus Police Department. He asked me if I felt up to answering some questions. I told him I was, which was a lie, and at some point, I faded out. When I woke up it was night time and I was alone but for the solemn beeping of machines, and I had been handcuffed to the bed rail.
I slept, and did not dream. It was a small mercy.
Eventually, the detective returned and he had even less patience than before.
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