Andrew’s behavior was part of the reason she avoided drinking entirely. As far as she could tell, no one’s life had ever been improved by the presence of alcohol. She made it a point not to look down on people who did drink, but she also never understood the appeal.
Celeste twisted the deadbolt on the front door and turned off the living room light on her way to the kitchen. After checking that the back door was locked as well, she went into the kitchen and flicked off the overhead light, leaving on a small lamp by the sink. Feeling strangely drowsy, Celeste poured herself a glass of water. As she was drinking it though, something in the air shifted.
It was a subtle change, but the air felt much heavier, almost oppressively so. The light of the lamp next to her flickered for a moment before going out entirely, plunging the room into darkness. The hairs on Celeste’s arms stood at attention as she suddenly got the distinct feeling of being watched.
A sharp rap on a window startled her, and she spun around to see someone outside on the porch, staring at her through the glass. She yelped in shock, dropping the glass she was holding. It hit the linoleum with a dull thud and bounced, a spiderweb crack blossoming across the curve where it landed. The figure in the window didn’t move.
Everything inside Celeste screamed at her to run, to get upstairs and rouse Andrew, but instead, she found herself slowly approaching the living room to get a better look. As she did, the figure came into focus.
It was the horned girl. She stood frozen outside the window, her wild eyes looking right through Celeste. Dried blood covered the sides of her head and her shoulders, as well as being matted up in her hair. The antlers weren’t growing out of her head, they had been drilled into it. Inflamed skin swelled around the base of the horns. The woman tilted her head to the side, sending a trickle of fresh blood from the right horn down the side of her face. If she still had control of her body, Celeste would have gagged.
With Celeste standing on the far side of the living room, the two women watched each other for a long, tense moment, until the girl’s head drooped forward suddenly, tapping the window with an antler. The sudden sound and movement shocked Celeste, making her step back a bit. There was something about the woman in the window that seemed familiar to her like she was looking in a mirror.
The girl knocked on the window again with her horns, more aggressively this time, before beginning to back away from the glass.
Recognition hit Celeste like a freight train and her stomach turned. She knew why the woman looked so familiar. It was Amelia Barnett.
Her blondish hair was a dark brown from all of the dirt and blood, and the muscles in her face were clenched in strange ways, but those brown eyes were the same. That was the girl from that month’s missing person’s poster in the pharmacy. Tears ran freely down Celeste’s cheeks, and she almost collapsed. The dizziness threatened to overtake her, but she caught the back of the armchair in front of her and steadied herself on it.
She wanted to call out, to say Amelia’s name, but her mouth wouldn’t move. The room started spinning as Amelia slowly turned and stepped out of sight. Her feet unglued from the floor and Celeste ran to the window, nearly falling over as the living room tumbled around her. She pressed her face against the window and strained her eyes in the darkness, looking for the missing girl.
Nothing moved outside.
Silence fell over the house; only Celeste’s ragged breaths and sniffling could be heard. She stared out the window, wondering where Amelia went. Her shoulders slumped in defeat and exhaustion, the static in her head growing louder. The girl was gone. Lost again.
A loud crash shattered the silence as the window exploded inward, peppering Celeste’s face with shards of glass.
A thick, strong hand wrapped around her throat and lifted her into the air. Celeste struggling to breathe and to free herself from the grasp as she looked down in horror. It was the thing from the paintings. Dark eyes locked with hers as the thing tightened its grip on her throat.
Celeste kicked limply at it until her vision faded to black.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Andrew woke up with a throbbing headache and a strange ache in his hips. His vision blurred slightly as he sat up and squinted at the blinding light that slipped between the curtains. The sound of his pulse in his head made him sick to his stomach. He smacked his lips together, feeling like he had spent the night sucking on cotton balls.
Grabbing the water off the bedside table, Andrew took a long, slow drink and tried to remember the night before. He remembered pouring that first glass of whiskey, intentionally not putting very much in. He had just wanted the flavor. Then Celeste came downstairs.
Did they have sex? No, they wouldn’t have. She couldn’t stand him when he was drunk.
Wait a minute, where was Celeste? For the first time, Andrew noticed that he was alone in the room. The blanket on her side of the bed looked untouched like she had never gotten in bed at all. Did she sleep on the couch?
Andrew climbed out of bed, his head and hips screaming in protest. What happened last night? Before he could find Celeste and ask, he desperately needed a double dose of pain meds. Half for his broken arm, and the other half for his splitting headache.
He got up and pulled the curtain completely shut. The light was far too bright for his sensitive eyes. Now that he could see, Andrew stumbled across the hall and into the bathroom.
The mirror on the medicine cabinet above the sink squeaked loudly as Andrew pulled it open, making him wince. He made a mental note for sober Andrew to oil the hinges later that day. The small pills rattled thunderously in the bottle as he struggled to open it, and even the faucet was far too loud. He popped a couple in his mouth and bent down to get a drink straight from the tap.
The icy coolness of the toilet seat woke him up slightly as Andrew used the bathroom, his elbows resting on his knees and his head buried firmly in his hands. There was no possible way he had drunk enough the night before to feel that hungover. He knew that medicine and alcohol didn’t mix well, but he had thought for sure that a small glass of whiskey would be fine. Celeste was far more knowledgeable about drugs than he was, so he would have to ask her about it.
Celeste!
Andrew cursed himself for forgetting about her so quickly as he unrolled more toilet paper than necessary and wiped. The sound of the flush nearly made him blackout, but he found his way through the hall and down the stairs. There hadn’t been a single time in their marriage that she had been upset enough to sleep anywhere other than their bed, which meant that he had either royally screwed up, or something was very wrong.
Stuck between a rock and a hard place, Andrew prayed for the former.
He waddled down the stairs as quickly as he could, his hips roaring at the apparent abuse of walking. The creaking of each step might as well have been an icepick to the brain, as far as Andrew was concerned. Every sound and movement made him sick to his stomach. Even back in college, Andrew had never been as hungover as he was at that moment.
But none of it mattered once he saw Celeste.
She was lying unconscious on the living room floor, bathed in the light of the window above her. Andrew skipped the last few steps and ran to her side, wincing as he did. He grabbed her shoulder with his left hand and shook her gently, but firmly.
“Celeste,” he said through the mounting panic. “Please wake up. Come on baby, please wake up.”
She didn’t react.
Andrew shook her harder, praying for the first time in years as he did. He needed her to wake up. He couldn’t go through this world without her.
She wouldn’t move.
He tried shouting, to no avail. Desperate and out of options, Andrew said a quick apology before slapping her limp body across the face.
Celeste’s eyes shot open and she threw herself into a sitting position, gasping wildly as she did. Andrew threw his arm around her and did his best to calm her down.
“Babe, thank God you’re okay,” he said, tears streami
ng down his face. “I thought I lost you.”
“It was so horrible,” she told him through tears of her own. “It attacked me.”
“What attacked you?” He held her face in his hands and looked her in the eye. She was so frightened.
“The thing from the paintings,” she choked out. “It broke through the window and grabbed me by the throat.”
Confused, Andrew looked up and to find the glass completely intact. As far as he could tell, it looked untouched.
“Babe, the window’s not broken.”
Celeste’s eyebrows furrowed as she stared in disbelief behind him.
“But… but it was,” she stuttered. “He attacked me. And the girl from the missing person poster was there too. She had horns and was covered in blood.”
Andrew’s concern faded slightly when he realized what was going on.
“Darling,” he said, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear, “I think you were having a nightmare.”
“Then how did I end up down here?” She protested, pulling back from his hand.
“Maybe you were sleepwalking.”
“No, no, I wasn’t sleepwalking,” she stood up and stormed off toward the kitchen, looking for something on the ground as she went. She got to the sink before ducking down and disappearing behind the half-wall, reappearing a second later with a glass cup in hand. “Come look at this.”
Andrew winced at the volume of her voice and did as he was told. When he got to her, she thrust the cup into his hand. He took it gingerly, seeing the series of cracks that were cascading around its circumference.
“What am I looking at here?” He asked, unsure of where Celeste was going with this.
“I dropped this last night when I saw Amelia Barnett in the window.”
“Who’s Amelia Barnett?”
She grew more agitated at his question, explaining, “She’s the girl from a missing person poster at the pharmacy, except she’s got horns now. I saw her standing in the backyard two nights ago and I just saw her again last night. She was outside that window, just staring at me. Then she left right before that thing attacked.”
Her words slowed and her shoulders slumped as she reached the end of her explanation, as if saying it all out loud made her hear how it sounded. She looked up at him, upset and confused, searching for an explanation. A wave of pity and guilt washed over Andrew. He had so focused on himself the whole time that he failed to see how much Celeste was struggling. Looking down at her now, Andrew could see that she drowning.
Trying and failing to think of the right thing to say, Andrew simply pulled her in for a hug. She awkwardly embraced him, trying to wrap her arms around him in a way that avoided his sling entirely. After she found the optimal position though, her muscles relaxed as she took a deep breath and buried her face in his chest. They stood like that for a long time.
“I’m sorry you’re having these nightmares,” he said. “But I’m more sorry that I haven’t been paying attention to you since we got here. I’ve just been focused on myself, and somehow I completely missed the fact that you’re struggling with this too.”
She nodded against his chest and he heard a small sniffle.
“This house sucks,” she said, and he could feel her crack a small smile.
He let out a small, sharp laugh and sniffled too. “Yeah, it is the worst.”
They both laughed together for a moment as the intensity of their emotions melted away. After such an eventful start, Andrew had a hard time believing it was just a normal Wednesday morning.
They broke their embrace and started making breakfast, doing their best to move on with the day. Celeste told Andrew all about his antics the night before, showing him her newest piece of blackmail evidence. The pain meds may have kicked in by that point, but they did nothing to quell the emotional pain of seeing himself passed out, lying spread eagle on his back. Celeste grinned smugly as she pocketed her phone before returning to her pancakes.
Having had the previous night’s events laid out for him, Andrew was left with no good explanation for his hangover. He even checked the bottle of whiskey himself and saw that there was barely more than two shots’ worth of the golden liquid missing from the bottle. Something felt wrong about the whole situation, but with nothing else to go off of, Andrew decided that it must have been a weird interaction with the medication. He decided that he would avoid taking his medicine that evening so he could have a drink and remember it too.
As they were eating, Celeste also told him about the truck she had seen at the funeral, and how it was the neighbor from down the road.
“I know he’s probably just some old dude,” she said. “But I got a really weird vibe from him. Do you think you could go over today and check him out?”
“You want me to spy on our elderly neighbor?” Andrew asked.
“Not spy, just check out. Like, go over there and introduce yourself.”
“Why would I do that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he knows something about Corvus that we don’t?” She certainly knew how to pique his interest. “If he does, then it’s a win-win. You learn more about your grandfather, and I get the comfort of knowing that the man down the road isn’t a complete weirdo.”
Andrew mulled it over for a moment. Normally, he’d be able to resist the offer, but the guilt he felt over Celeste’s night terrors tipped the scales in her favor. It wouldn’t make up for him being so oblivious to her struggles, but it was a start.
“Fine,” he said. “But only because of your superior negotiating tactics.”
She walked around the table and kissed him on the cheek. “You’re the best.”
“I know, I know.”
Celeste had left and was walking up the stairs when Andrew called back to her.
“Hey wait,” he said.
“What is it?” She asked.
“That thing you saw, the thing in the paintings. Corvus gave it a name. He called it the Ragged.”
***
Celeste gave Andrew a quick kiss goodbye and listened as the sound of wheels on gravel disappeared down the driveway. Then, she turned her attention to the squat, unimpressive, and overflowing bookshelf under the window. She sat on the floor next to it and took a deep breath in. Nothing beats the smell of old books.
Corvus’s selection wasn’t too exciting, being composed mainly of almanacs and manuals, but the content of the book didn’t change the scent. She pulled her hair back in a ponytail, trying to decide how she would go about organizing it all, but found herself instead staring at the window above the shelf.
There wasn’t a scratch on it. It had all felt so real, yet the only piece of evidence she had was a broken cup.
The Ragged.
The name hung over her mind like a dark cloud. Images flashed through her head again. A massive hand punching through the glass and wrapping around her throat. The feeling of suffocating as her feet left the floor. The look of malice in those eyes.
She shook her head, clearing the thoughts away. It was all a dream. She had sleepwalked and knocked the glass off the counter before falling over in front of the window. The rest was a figment of her overactive imagination.
A few deep breaths and reassurances later, and Celeste was finally ready to tackle the task at hand. She had found a couple of cardboard boxes in Andrew’s old closet and set them aside. One was for books that may be worth keeping or selling, and the other was for books that could be thrown away.
She knew that it would be simpler to just put the useless ones in a trash bag, but Celeste couldn’t bring herself to treat books with such disrespect. She would throw them away in a box, and maybe even give them a Viking funeral if Andrew would allow it. And if she could find a lake.
So on she went, picking up books one at a time, leafing through them, and deciding their fate. The series of almanacs was simple enough to figure out. She decided that, while she didn’t want them, she understood the value of records like them. Keep.
Next came
the various handbooks and manuals that explained the processes and mechanics of machinery and tools that Corvus had presumably used around the farm. She flipped through the pages absentmindedly, neither interested nor seeing the value in keeping the manuals to pieces of equipment that were likely just going to end up in a landfill somewhere. Trash.
After the top shelf was cleared of the more didactic material, Celeste started finding more interesting reads. The second shelf from the top was comprised largely of unreturned library books, of which there were a half dozen books on folklore. They were mostly focused on the legends of the British Isles, but there were a couple dedicated to mainland Europe and even a single book about Icelandic beliefs.
That group took a great deal longer to parse through, mainly because Celeste kept getting sucked into the stories. They were fascinating and peculiar, chock full of colorful characters and outlandish events; she just couldn’t stop reading once one had caught her eye. Of particular interest to Celeste, though, were the dog-eared chapters of the books.
It seemed that Andrew’s ghoulish habit of folding the corner of perfectly good pages ran in the family. As much as the habit upset her, Celeste found herself quietly thankful for the insight it had given her over the years. She could always pick up one of Andrew’s books and, using the pages he had dog-eared, figure out what he was fixating on at the time. Andrew wasn’t the most open man, so Celeste often had to get a little bit creative to figure out what was going on in his head.
Hoping to obtain a similar insight into her enigmatic grandfather-in-law, and to stop herself from outright reading each folklore book cover to cover, Celeste began focusing solely on the bookmarked sections. Strangely, all of the pages were about faerie folklore.
She quickly learned during her reading that the faeries from children’s movies were nothing like the fairies from folklore and legend. The images that she had carried her whole life of sweet little people with wings and the occasional temper were quickly supplanted with vindictive alien beings of immense power. The fae was not to be trifled with.
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