by Abe Moss
Joanna looked doubtful.
“It’ll be fine. Just move fast. The doctor’s head will spin.”
“If he doesn’t somehow already know.”
“They don’t.”
“We hope.”
“They don’t.”
They stood in front of the kitchen window a while longer. Addie’s blood pumped hot through her chest, cold through her hands and feet, numb with excitement and worry. Thoughts raced like wooden planks through a storm and she felt equally capable of both following through with their plan and calling it quits at that moment.
“We’d better do it now, before I think too much.”
Joanna nodded. She went to the door, hand on the knob. She paused.
“Just do it like we said. It’s not complicated. Even if you mess up a little it won’t matter. We just need Nuala to go after me, and the doctor to be here. That’s it.”
Joanna raised her shoulders, took a deep breath, rolled her neck from side to side. She looked at Addie one last time.
“See you when I see you.”
“Go.”
She opened the door and ran. Addie returned to the kitchen window and watched discreetly as she jogged to the doctor’s, up the porch steps, and disappeared into the shade of the awning. It was hard to see a whole lot after that. The door opened. Joanna spoke to someone, likely Nuala. Then Joanna stood on the porch doing nothing at all for a few moments. She even looked over her shoulder once, possibly to let Addie know she was waiting on Nuala or the doctor or something else. Eventually someone returned to the door and walked past Joanna and down the steps. It was Nuala. Joanna followed her down. The doctor followed both of them, pausing halfway down the porch behind them. Joanna pointed off in the distance.
She’s telling her she heard the breaking glass. She’s telling her she came to check on me and saw me running for the woods. She’s telling her she noticed the knife was gone from the kitchen when she came to get them.
Nuala started toward the guesthouse. She gestured for Joanna to follow. Fear-stricken, Addie crouched down, eyes just barely peeping. She watched as they drew nearer and nearer, until finally they were close enough that she could hear Nuala’s words.
“Show me exactly where she ran to…”
They disappeared out of sight around the side of the house. Meanwhile, the doctor followed them halfway across the yard and stopped. Addie watched him for a while. The longer she did, the greater her desire to drop out of sight. Was he looking at her? she wondered. Could he see her?
He started moving again, in the direction of the open front door. Quickly, Addie dove away from the window and behind the kitchen counter. She stayed there on all fours, panting silently. His footsteps entered.
This isn’t how we planned…
The doctor’s footsteps progressed halfway through the room, somewhere on the other side of the counter where she couldn’t see. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. The doctor paced around the room a little. His footsteps faded, and then they grew, and then faded again. When they came nearer a second time she held her breath. She felt the floor scrape under her fingernails and realized she was resting on the tips of her fingers like claws. She relaxed them, palms flat.
“Doctor?”
It was Joanna. Her footsteps came through the door. Addie swiveled quietly in place and poked her head out. Joanna scanned the room from left to right. Addie waved frantically, mouthed her name for no apparent reason. She didn’t notice. Then the heavy boots returned. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
“Nuala’s gone to look for Addie.”
Silence. The doctor wasn’t capable of anything else.
“I know this probably isn’t the best time, with Addie missing and that, but since you’re here…” There was genuine-sounding heartbreak in her voice, a quaver, a hesitation. “I think Meatball might be dead. I can’t tell. He might just be sleeping, but… he’s been sleeping since earlier this evening and… and… I don’t know for sure. I wanted your help…”
The sound of movement—the rustling of a heavy coat, perhaps—and Joanna disappeared with the doctor deeper into the house, down the hallway toward her bedroom.
Now. Go now.
Addie crawled out from behind the kitchen counter. She walked on tiptoe toward the front door, checked over her shoulder four, five, six times on the way, eyes glued to the hallway. Her chest thudded terribly. She felt it deep in her belly, limbs shaking like cold putty. When she stood in the open, moonlit doorway, the deserted yard before her like an open warzone, she looked one last time to make sure there weren’t any eyes watching her go. There weren’t. And so she went.
She zipped across the yard from the shadow of one home to the next. When she reached the doctor’s she bounded up the porch three steps at a time—one jump, two jumps—and, unable to slow herself in time, fell against the front door with a grunt. The door opened with ease. She stepped inside. She shut the door behind her.
She was inside. All alone. She had the house to herself, aside from Bud somewhere upstairs. For a short while, she had time to search. Nuala would be in the woods for a good while longer, at least, she thought. Maybe twenty minutes or so…
Not wasting any time, she headed straight for the stairs. They creaked underneath her, no matter how lightly she stepped. They were pitch black, too, until she reached the top, where the faintest moonlight streaked the upstairs hallway from the open door at its end. She passed the closed guest bedroom where she hoped Bud waited and continued into the doctor’s room, knife in her right hand, keys in her left. The wardrobe stood against the far wall, shut like it always had been. The desk was against the adjacent wall under the window, the curtains wide open above it. She went to the desk first. She set the knife on top and fumbled through the keys. Skipping the truck key, she tried two others in the filing cabinet before the third finally turned. It unlocked with a click. Her heart beat faster. She pulled the drawer open…
…and found nothing inside. The drawer was empty. A black box of nothing. No folders or files or binders or journals. Just empty.
There was something here and now it’s gone.
It was the truth. She didn’t need to know it to know it. They knew the keys were missing. Lyle had them and now he was dead—keys still missing. They’d protected themselves from exactly what Addie intended to do.
Then she remembered the wardrobe. She chose a key at random, possibly the one she’d just used on the drawer, and then realized as she tried to unlock the wardrobe that it didn’t have a lock. She pulled the doors wide apart. It took her a moment to make sense of what she saw. Not clothes, as she’d halfway expected. Not even a rod to hang them from. Inside were a series of shelves. On the shelves were a couple dozen ceramic vases. She touched her fingers to one of them, felt the smooth surface under a coating of dust. Some were larger than others, but mostly all about the same size. Each had a decorative design painted or etched or molded on it, with curly little handles on some. She grabbed one, pulled the lid off with a dusty, hollow shuck. She shook it gently back and forth and something shifted inside—light and soft. She tipped the vase with her hand at the opening, tipped it farther and farther until its contents slid down. She gave it a gentle shake, just a nudge to spill something out, and a fluffy gray powder fell into her open hand.
“Oh…”
She stared blankly for a second, thinking nothing. She tipped the vase higher and even more pooled into her palm. The powder was so fine that a plume of it surrounded her as she poured, though there were harder, larger flakes and pieces that came out and fell through her fingers. She set the open, emptied vase back on the shelf, set the lid next to it. She grabbed another. Shuck. She dropped that lid on the floor. She tipped the second vase and more gray powder poured out. She dumped it all. And then a third vase. All the same. She put a hand to her mouth and coughed, surrounded in the chalky cloud of ash. She dropped the third vase on the floor and buried her nose and mouth into the crook of her elbow as she retreated away to the other side of the ro
om.
They could be from anything.
(Anyone)
It doesn’t have to be that.
(What it obviously is)
Will there be room inside for four more?
Just then someone screamed, a faraway shriek. She went to the window to see.
“Oh fuck…”
The doctor. He swept slowly across the yard like a dark wraith, hulking and rigid. Joanna chased behind him, past him, hands cupped to her mouth hollering something up at the window Addie couldn’t hear. They were found out, it seemed.
With no time to spare she ran into the hall to the guest bedroom. She cycled through the keys, the knife clutched in her sweaty hand. The second key she tried did the trick. She threw the door open, threw herself inside after it into the dark.
“Bud!” she shouted, and her voice cracked with frightened urgency. She could hardly see a thing, the curtain let in almost no moonlight at all. She hurried to his bedside. “Bud, please, get up. We have to leave.”
He lay on his back, naked, head turned. Even the dark couldn’t hide the sickly pallor in his cheeks, or the pain twisting his mouth. She bent over him, took him gently by the shoulders.
“We’re leaving. You have to come with—”
“Help me…” he croaked.
He turned his head toward her very slowly, the muscles in his neck strained with bulging veins. Panicking, she looked him over head to toe, trying to decide how best to carry him out on her own, and her eyes fixed on something which stopped her in her tracks. There was a dark stain halfway down the sheets, spread large and thick. Her own muscles clenched at the sight of it.
“Bud…” she took him all in, his condition truly dawning on her. “Tell me what to do.”
He opened his mouth but couldn’t speak.
“Okay. I’m going to move you…”
She leaned across him and tried to throw his arm over her neck, assuming she’d haul him over her shoulder like a firefighter. Never mind that she lacked the strength. When she put her head across his body to try, there came a sound from the other side of the bed.
“Huh?”
Something was hunched on the floor. She screamed. She stumbled back, away from Bud. A wiry figure climbed onto the bed, crouched over his body, hissed. Addie stuck the knife toward it, mind scattered in terror, praying it didn’t come closer. It hissed again, orange eyes raised toward the ceiling. Rows of bright, glittery teeth grinned from a black, reptilian skull. Addie couldn’t move.
It leaped from the bed and she recoiled into the wall behind her, arms wide, and it fell into them like a writhing cannibal child, biting teeth and all. She swung herself around in a circle, backpedaled toward the bed. It panted as it climbed over her, grabbed at her, tugged at her clothes for a place to bite. She stuck it once with the knife. It groaned. Needle-like pain radiated through her shoulder, warm and aching, and she could hear the breathy mashing of its teeth as it gnawed into her. She stabbed it again. It whirled, slithered around her body. She hunched as it hung to her back. It seized her knife-wielding arm and those needling teeth started on her hand. She gasped. The knife fell to the floor.
“Fuck off!”
She tripped over her own feet and fell to the ground. Avoiding being crushed under her, the creature rolled away. She picked herself up, fell over again, inched herself toward the bedroom door. The creature sat between her and the bed, pawing its clawed fingers at the ground like an angered bull ready to charge. Addie pushed herself through the doorway, sat up, grabbed the doorknob. The creature came at her, squealing, and she shut the door in its spitting face. Its claws rapped and scratched at the other side.
What the fuck was that?
She absentmindedly touched her gouged shoulder, looked at the glove of blood left on her hand. Feeling woozy, she got to her feet.
She still clasped the keys safely in her hand.
Heavy footsteps approached from the stairs. Not looking back, she rushed into the doctor’s room and shut the door just as his giant body revealed itself from the top of the staircase. She went to the window. Searching top to bottom she saw no way to open it. Thinking quickly, she hoisted the doctor’s typewriter up off the desk and hurled it through the glass with an exhausted bark. The door opened behind her. She stood on the desk, crunched glass under her callused feet. The doctor reached for her and she jumped. She fell to her knees on the roof and rolled through the shards of glass, paying no mind to any that may have lodged inside her on the way. She crawled to her feet.
“Joanna!” she screamed. “Joanna!”
“I’m down here!”
She traced the edge of the roof until she came to the truck down below. Joanna peered up at her.
“Start the truck!”
Addie tossed the keys down to her. They fell to the dirt through her hands and she snatched them up. While Joanna climbed inside, Addie mustered the courage to jump. She bent at the knee, gave a little practice lunge, swinging her arms. The truck roared to life. Addie jumped. She landed in the truck bed with a metallic bang. Her legs gave out beneath her and she collapsed onto her shoulder. Breathless, she pulled herself up on the side.
“I’m in! Go! Go!”
Joanna floored the gas and the tires spit a stream of dirt and rocks behind them. The truck lurched forward. Addie fell on her ass. They swung in a wide arc through the yard, throwing her from one side of the bed to the other. The rear dragged sideways as Joanna spun them wildly toward the road. Then they straightened out. Addie sat up. She watched behind them through a mess of wind-blown hair as the doctor came down the porch steps. Still he didn’t run. Only walked. By the time he set foot on the dirt they were already leaving the property. The road sloped toward the woods, and soon the doctor disappeared behind it. Addie sank down, rested her head against her chest, the air rushing over her.
They’d done it, she thought. They were out, just as they wanted to be, just as they planned. Well… not entirely…
The sky narrowed between the trees overhead as they entered the woods. Addie lifted her head to see it. She licked her dry lips with an even drier tongue.
There’s nothing out here for us.
Chapter Thirty-One
Addie rested in the back of the truck, catching both her breath and her wits, only for as long as Joanna would drive. It wasn’t long. It may have been ten minutes into the woods that they slowed. The overhanging branches, just a blur, passed over them slower and slower until the brakes squealed and they were stopped. The driver door opened and Joanna came to meet her outside the bed.
“I can’t drive anymore, Addie. I’m sorry, I just can’t. I’m shaking. I just can’t.”
“It’s okay. I’ll drive.”
She climbed out of the back and stood with Joanna on the dirt road. She let Joanna breathe for a minute. The woods on either side of them were quiet and vacant, dark and pressing. Looking in the direction from where they’d come, the road bent out of sight. Ahead of them it continued in a straight line, narrowing until the darkness fogged it. Addie didn’t think she’d ever felt more uncertain. Any doubt she’d felt about the doctor was gone. Her feelings on that were clear. But the road ahead… she hadn’t the slightest idea what may be in store for them.
Imagine if the road goes on forever and ever. Imagine Nuala’s warning was true in the most literal sense.
“What happened back there?” Joanna asked. “What did you find out? Where’s Bud?”
“Lyle was right. At least I think it’s safe to assume so. The desk was empty, but I think they emptied it when the keys went missing. They didn’t want us finding them. But even so, I found something maybe even worse.”
“What?”
“That wardrobe in the doctor’s room, I looked inside. There are vases in there, dozens of them, and they’re all filled with the same thing. Ashes.”
“What do you think that means?”
“I think it means Lyle was right. I think—”
A branch snapped a little ways off in the
trees. They both jumped at the sound. They searched with their eyes and saw nothing. All was quiet again, just the single interruption and then nothing. Joanna rubbed her arms as though she was cold.
“Let’s get moving again. We can talk in the truck.”
Addie got in the driver’s seat and Joanna climbed into the passenger’s. She shut the door and then reached down for something on the floor. What she brought up with her was a bundled-up blanket.
“Is that Meatball?”
She nodded. “I figure once we’re safe someplace I’ll bury him or something. I didn’t bring a shovel, but… we’ll see…”
Addie started the truck again and they drove. She glanced at the gas gauge and saw they had a half tank. According to the trip odometer, assuming it was cleared routinely, the truck had already gone 100 miles on its current tank. Not the best gas mileage, but…
“So what happened with Bud?”
Addie squinted as she drove, watched the trees on both sides with paranoid diligence. The headlights were soft and dirty and barely seemed to reach ten feet ahead. If anything decided to jump in front of them they’d surely hit it, she thought. That was, unless she drove like an overly-cautious grandmother, which she couldn’t bring herself to do.
She hardly heard Joanna when she spoke the first time. That, or she willed herself not to. Maybe she did hear her. It was difficult to think about.
“Addie?”
“Huh?”
“What happened with Bud? Was he…”
She cleared her throat. “I couldn’t bring him. I tried. He was hurt pretty bad still. I…” She remembered the bloodstained sheets, how hard it was for him to even look at her. “Lyle was right about him too. Whatever happened in that room, it wasn’t helping him.”
“What did you see?”
The image of the creature on his bed burned like a camera flash. She saw it clearly on the road ahead, in the canopy of the trees that passed by, on the backs of her eyelids when she blinked. Those tiny razor teeth. Those glowing pumpkin eyes.