Date: 2017-10-09 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror
Description: A collection of stories where you'll get a glimpse into a shadowy world of monsters and psychopaths, of demons and ghosts, of horrors and thrills, where nothing is what it seems. Inside you'll find: Two boys perform a ritual to invite a spirit into their home . . . but how do they get it back out? A man wakes up to find that he's the last person on Earth . . . or are there others out there waiting for him? When the zombie apocalypse happens, maybe the person you're shacked up with is more dangerous than the zombies. How far would a father go to bring his child back from death? A woman is stalk

RAZORBLADE DREAMS
horror stories
by

MARK LUKENS

Razorblade Dreams: Horror Stories—copyright © 2016 by Mark Lukens

All Rights Reserved

No part of this work may be reproduced without written permission by the author.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead (or any other form), is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Bettibup

Special thanks to April, Conny, Kelli, Mary Ann, Wren, Sharon, and Linda. Your help was invaluable.

OTHER BOOKS BY MARK LUKENS:

Ancient Enemy – www.amazon.com/dp/B00FD4SP8M

Darkwind: Ancient Enemy 2 – www.amazon.com/dp/B01K42JBGW

The Summoning – www.amazon.com/dp/B00HNEOHKU

Sightings – www.amazon.com/dp/B00VAI31KW

Devil’s Island – www.amazon.com/dp/B06WWJC6VD

The Exorcist’s Apprentice – www.amazon.com/dp/B00YYF1E5C

Night Terrors – www.amazon.com/dp/B00M66IU3U

What Lies Below – www.amazon.com/dp/B0143LADEY

Ghost Town – www.amazon.com/dp/B00LEZRF7G

The Darwin Effect – www.amazon.com/dp/B01G4A8ZYC

Descendants of Magic – www.amazon.com/dp/B00FWYYYYC

A Dark Collection: 12 Scary Stories – www.amazon.com/dp/B00JENAGLC

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
MR. BOONE
THE DISAPPEARED
DOWNLOADED TO HELL
SPRING CLEANING
ZOMBIE HOUSE
ON THE MOVE
THE LIGHTHOUSE
A RECIPIENT FOR A BURDEN
THE WRONG FEET
KILLING TAMMY
THE BEDROOM LIGHT
RAZORBLADE DREAMS
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

INTRODUCTION

You can skip this part if you want to. I know a lot of readers don’t read the introductions so I’ll try to keep it brief. But for those of you who do read introductions, here it is.

In the introduction to my first collection (A Dark Collection: 12 Scary Stories) I talked about my lifelong love of short stories. Of course I love novels, series (and movies and TV—preferably horror, suspense, and sci-fi, but I love any good story), but I also love a good short story. In that first introduction I just mentioned, I listed some of the great stories that I’ve read throughout my life, and now I’d like to list a few other great stories that I’ve discovered only in the last few years since my first collection was published.

I still love reading anthologies, discovering new writers and new stories, and I came across some incredible stories just reading anthologies and collections these last few years. But I also discovered some great stories because I’m preparing a blog post for this coming Halloween (2017) of the greatest horror short stories ever. I’m continuing my self-started tradition of posting a “best of” list for Halloween. Two Halloweens ago I posted a list of the best horror films, and last year I posted a list of the best 100 horror novels of all time. You can find those lists on my blog here: www.marklukensbooks.wordpress.com Now, as I explain in those posts on my blog, these aren’t my favorite movies and books, but a kind of consensus of the best, at least according to all of the lists I looked up on the internet. I included the top films and novels that appeared numerous times on all of these lists. And now I’m going to do the same thing with the greatest horror short stories. I’m not sure how long the list will be, maybe around 50-75, because finding lists of the best horror short stories online is a little tougher than finding lists of films and novels. My goal with these lists was to watch and read as many of these great films and books/stories as I could. I’d seen most of the films at the time I posted that best of list, but when I posted the best 100 horror novels, I was surprised to find that I’d only read twenty-five of them. Yes, that’s right, only twenty-five percent of the best horror ever written. So I set out to read as many of them as I could this year (and in the upcoming years). I felt that if I wanted to be a better horror/suspense writer (or just a better writer in general), then I should read more of the best of the best. And I felt that was also true of the great horror short stories.

All of that leads up to this: I discovered a lot of great horror stories that I’d never read before, and now I wanted to take the opportunity to share them with you. Some of these stories were from the list that I’m creating, but others were stories I’d read recently in anthologies and author collections. The newer stories won’t be on my list of the greatest horror stories (although they should be, and I’m sure some will be on lists of great horror stories in the near future).

So here are some of the great stories I’ve come across in the last few years:

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates

Guts by Chuck Palahniuk

Picking Splinters from a Sex Slave by Brian Kirk

The Gingerbread Girl by Stephen King

The Washingtonians by Bentley Little

Blood Music by Greg Bear

In the Bag by Tim Curran

White Chapel by Douglas Clegg

Psyche by D.F. Noble

One Possible Shape of Things to Come by Brian Hodge

I hope you’ll check out the stories above, if you haven’t already.

I don’t dare compare myself to these great storytellers, or to the storytellers on my “best of” list that I will be posting this Halloween, but I aspire to write good stories, stories that may scare you, but most importantly stories that make you think and stay with you. I feel the best way to hone that skill is to keep reading great stories, to keep being inspired. And even though I read stories from a writer’s point of view a lot of times, I have to admit that I also read them for pure enjoyment. I’m a writer, that’s my job now (thanks so much to you, dear reader), but I’m also a reader . . . I will always be a reader.

Okay, I only have two more quick points to make and then you can get to the stories. First, many people have asked me how I come up with my ideas for stories and novels. I’m sure it’s the question writers get asked most often. I wish I had a suitable answer for that question, but the best way I can explain it is that ideas just seem to form on their own sometimes. A question, a movie or TV show I’m watching, or even a conversation, can spark an idea that kind of just grows in the back of my mind until it takes on a life of its own, demanding to be written down. I go into much further depth about generating ideas in my upcoming books about writing, publishing, and marketing e-books, but I wanted to go into a little detail here after each story in this collection about the inspiration for each story, and maybe a little bit about the process of writing it. If you’re not into that kind of thing, if you don’t want to see how the machinery behind the curtain works, then please feel free to skip the ramblings of this author written in that fancy italicized font at the end of each story and go on to the next one. But for those of you who might be curious (I always am—I always read the author’s notes at the end or beginning of a story or a novel), I just wanted to do my best to explain how these particular stories came to life.

The second point I wanted to make is that in my last collection I tried to stay away from the typical monsters and horror tropes found in a lot of novels and stories, but in this collection I wanted to include them (zombies, demons, ghosts, vampires, aliens, and of course the worst monsters of all—the human monsters), or at least my twist on those monsters. The stories in this collection range over many years, a mixture of older ones and newer ones; some of the stories were previously published, others were stuffed away in a drawer for a while, and others I wrote specifically for this collection.

I hope you enjoy these tales. I hope a few of them scare you a little, but most of all I hope they stay with you for a while. So sit back, relax, and come take a walk with me . . .

And thank you, dear reader . . . thank you for everything.

Mark Lukens

Florida

2017

MR. BOONE

THE INVITATION

1.

Tonight was the night J.T. and Tyler were going to invite the spirit of Mr. Boone into their house.

“You scared?” J.T. asked his little brother as he sat at his desk, his laptop computer right behind him. The website J.T. had looked up was still on the screen.

“No.” Tyler practically barked the word out, but his eyes shifted to the laptop screen for a moment. The screen’s background was black with white, almost cartoonish, cobwebs in the corners. The spell to invoke the spirit of Mr. Boone was written in bright red letters. Both of them had read the spell many times now. J.T. had printed out the page and retyped the invocation so that it would be easier for them to read out loud later. They had memorized the ritual to call Mr. Boone, and they had agreed to try it tonight while their mom was out of town.

“You seem like you’re scared,” J.T. teased.

“I’m not,” Tyler assured him.

“Guys!” their mom called out from the living room. The sound of her high heels click-clacking along on the wood floor announced that she was coming their way. “I’m getting ready to leave!”

J.T. turned around and minimized the website on the laptop screen, then closed the laptop gently.

Their mom opened the door up to J.T.’s room a few seconds later. She never knocked, and sometimes J.T. had to lock his door to keep her from barging right in.

“You guys going to give me a hug goodbye?”

They got up and followed their mother back out to the living room.

“What are you guys doing in there, planning a party or something?” she asked over her shoulder with a smile (but J.T. knew she was fishing for information and trying to trip them up).

“No,” J.T. answered, but he gave his little brother a warning stare as they stepped out of the hallway into the living room.

Tyler couldn’t help smiling.

The little idiot was going to give it all away, J.T. thought. Tyler hadn’t learned how to keep a straight face in front of their mom yet.

Mom turned and stared right at J.T. once they were all gathered in the living room. “I’m serious, Jonathon,” she said. And she was serious when she used his full given name instead of the nickname that he preferred.

“No parties,” he grumbled. “We promise.”

“I’ve asked Mrs. Horton next door to keep an eye on the house. If she sees any cars in our driveway, or anything strange going on, she’s going to call me right away.”

“We know, Mom,” J.T. told her.

Tyler nodded in agreement, but he was still smiling.

Smiling.

Tyler’s face was getting red, and he looked like he was going to explode with the truth.

Of course Mom caught on right away. Her gaze lingered on Tyler for a moment, studying him like a cop getting ready to stare the confession out of a nervous suspect.

“No parties,” J.T. said again, trying to get his mother’s attention focused back on him.

It worked. “No one over at all,” she said when she looked at J.T. again.

“You can trust us, Mom.”

Mom’s face crumpled a little in concern. She could change facial expressions in a millisecond. “I feel so bad I have to leave you guys alone for two days. If your Uncle Bill could’ve watched you . . .”

“We don’t need anyone to watch us,” J.T. said. “I’m almost seventeen years old. Almost an adult.”

“I know,” Mom said and managed to sigh at the same time when she said the words. She stared at J.T. It seemed like she might break into tears at any moment. “If I didn’t have this stupid meeting to go to down in St. Louis . . .”

“I know, Mom. We’ll be fine. I promise.”

Mom still seemed like she was going to choke up with emotion. She’d left them on their own plenty of times before because of the crazy hours she worked as a district manager for a fast food chain, but she had never left them alone overnight.

“You have to trust us some time,” J.T. said.

“I know.”

“We’re not going to have any parties,” Tyler said and snickered. “It’s not like J.T. has any friends at school anyway.”

J.T. shoved his little brother, but then he nodded at his mom. Tyler was right; J.T. was an introvert who crept through the school halls, keeping to himself and his small group of nerdy friends. He buried himself in horror novels and scary movies. His dream was to become a creator of horror films one day, the next Wes Craven or John Carpenter. And tonight’s experiment—which he would film—would be just one more step closer towards that dream. He planned on putting his film online no matter what he captured tonight.

If Tyler had the guts to go through with the ritual tonight.

“Dinner’s on the stove,” Mom told them. “There’s also some leftover lasagna in the fridge. Snacks in the cabinets. I left you some money in case you want to order a pizza or something, but I don’t want you going out at night at all.”

“We know,” J.T. groaned. She didn’t have to worry about him driving even though he had his learner’s permit because they only had the one car, and she was taking it.

“I don’t want you going out anywhere at night,” she repeated. “And tomorrow, if you go anywhere, I want you to lock the doors to the house and make sure you take your cell phone with you. You have your Uncle Bill’s number on there, right?”

“Yessss,” J.T. said. They had been over this a thousand times already. “We’re not going anywhere tomorrow.” And it was the truth. J.T. didn’t have anything planned. His best friend—his only real friend—Garrett was at his dad’s house for the weekend.

That made J.T. think of his own father for a moment, and a stab of pain shot through him at the thought. Dad had died four years ago in a car accident, and J.T. felt like he’d curled up inside ever since, hiding away from the world. There were so many times he had wished his dad was still here to play ball with him, talk to him, take him fishing, teach him how to be a man and not the nerdy wuss he’d become.

He pushed the thought of his father away.

“You got your Uncle Bill’s number?” Mom asked again.

“I’ve got it in my phone. We’ll be fine. Don’t worry about us.” He thought he was going to have to push her towards the front door.

“Okay.” She looked around at the living room and then the kitchen like she might be forgetting something.

“You got everything?” J.T. asked her. He had helped her load her suitcase and bags in the car an hour earlier.

She nodded and then grabbed her purse off of the counter that separated the dining area from the kitchen. She had her keys and her phone in her hand. Her eyes were already getting big. The tears would be next.

Please don’t start crying, Mom, J.T. thought.

“Give me a hug,” she said. “Big group hug.”

They all gathered together. J.T. and Tyler gave her half-hearted hugs, but Mom squeezed them tight, closing her eyes.

“My guys,” she moaned as she let them go and wiped at her eyes.

J.T. and Tyler followed her out the front door onto the covered front porch and then down the curving walkway to the driveway. They watched her get in the car, start it, and back out of the driveway. She gave them an exaggerated wave goodbye from behind the windshield before she drove away.

J.T. looked at his little brother. “Time to get started.”

2.

J.T. and Tyler waited an hour before beginning the preparations just in case their mom needed to come back for something.

But after that hour had passed, they got to work.

Earlier they had gathered a lot of the stuff they would need for tonight’s ritual, hiding the items away in their bedrooms. They got them out, collecting the items in a pile on the floor in the living room. There were white candles in glass jars (thirteen of them—it had to be thirteen), a Bic lighter, a container of table salt, a homemade crucifix that they had constructed from two pieces of wood lashed together with twine, a few different colors of chalk (the kind kids used to write on sidewalks with, the kind that washed off easily), a printout of the invocation spell from the website, a length of rope (they used clothesline that J.T. had bought at a dollar store a week ago), a bowl filled halfway up with red wine, a bowl of fruit, another empty bowl, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and a razor knife.

Now that the items were laid out on the floor and the autumn afternoon had turned into full darkness, J.T. looked at Tyler. “You sure you’re going to be able to go through with this?”

Tyler cast his gaze down at the razor knife on the floor next to the bowl for a moment. “I’m sure if you’re sure,” he answered, but he didn’t look very sure.

“I’m sure,” J.T. promised.

The last thing J.T. got was his digital video camera. He’d practiced filming with it for two years, and he was an expert with it now. He had already filmed an intro earlier where he explained exactly what he and Tyler were doing, and he had taken some footage of them collecting the items they would need for the ritual. He planned on editing everything together later in the software Mom had bought him last year for Christmas.

They had to wait until close to midnight to perform the ritual, and the hours were going by slowly for J.T. But he still had plenty to do. He carefully drew the symbols on the front door and the floor in front of it with the different colored sticks of chalk. Tyler asked to help, but J.T. refused his offer—these symbols had to be copied perfectly from the internet pages. Everything had to be precise and perfect, or Mr. Boone wouldn’t come.

Next, J.T. laid out the circle of rope on the floor, making it large enough for both of them to stand inside of comfortably. Then he poured a line of table salt outside of the rope. This would be their circle of protection that they would stand inside of. At the front of the circle of protection, facing towards the front door, he laid their homemade crucifix down in front of it . . . just one more piece of protection for them.

Then he laid out the bowl of fruit, the bowl of wine, and the empty bowl in a group about ten feet in front of their circle of protection, which was the midway point between their circle and the aisle through the candles that led to the front door. The fruit, wine, and empty bowl were offerings to Mr. Boone, gifts to coax him into their house. But, of course, the empty bowl still needed to be filled with their blood.

“You ready to do this?” J.T. asked Tyler.

“You sure we have to do this part?” he asked.

“Yes,” J.T. said. “Blood is a critical part of the ritual. I already told you if you can’t do this—”

“Just do it,” Tyler said and offered out his hand to J.T.

J.T. used the Bic lighter to heat up the razor knife blade, and then he poured some rubbing alcohol over it. He’d read that either process could sterilize the knife blade, but he decided to use both just to make sure.

“Just close your eyes,” J.T. said as he positioned his little brother’s hand over the empty bowl on the floor. He had a towel on the floor in case he needed it, but his objective was to get as much of his brother’s blood into the bowl. He also had a supply of Band-Aids ready.

“Get it over with,” Tyler said and closed his eyes, turning his head away.

“Okay. Here it goes—”

“Ow!!!”

J.T. nicked the edge of Tyler’s palm, a slice about an inch long, but the blood flowed freely, dripping down into the bowl.

“You done yet?”

“Just a few more seconds,” J.T. said. “We have to get enough.” He gently squeezed Tyler’s hand, and his little brother howled. But J.T. held his hand tight.

A moment later J.T. had Tyler’s hand bandaged up, and now it was his turn. Tyler chose to watch as J.T. sliced the edge of his left palm and then held it over the bowl. They had coated the bottom of the bowl with their blood. J.T. hoped it was enough for the ritual.

After J.T. put a Band-Aid over his cut, he got his digital video camera ready and set it on the corner of the coffee table, tilting it up a little so it would catch the whole front door area in the shot.

J.T. lit the thirteen candles. He had set six candles up in a line on each side of the front door, and they looked to him like runway lights down an airstrip at night. The final candle, the thirteenth candle, was to be placed three feet beyond their circle of protection, behind them.

He shut off all of the lights in the house. Now all they had to do was wait until midnight.

“This probably isn’t even going to work,” Tyler said almost like he was trying to convince himself. He was slumped down on the couch and staring at the front door with the ancient symbols scribbled all over it. The flickering flames of the candles put out more light than J.T. thought they would have, but they also created eerie shadows that danced around the room. The corners were full of shadows that seemed to come alive with movement.

3.

It was eleven thirty—only thirty minutes to go until midnight. Actually the ritual was to begin a few minutes before midnight . . . it had to be timed perfectly, and J.T. set the stopwatch on his cell phone to get the timing down to the second. He had rock music playing on his MP3 player, some older heavy metal stuff from the eighties that was filled with satanic references. Not his favorite music in the world, but it seemed appropriate to set the mood.

And the mood seemed to be working on Tyler. J.T. suspected that his little brother might chicken out when the time came. If Tyler would’ve chickened out earlier, J.T. might not have minded—even he was beginning to get a little spooked by all of this—but he had gone to too much trouble and work to abandon this now. Their mom would be back tomorrow night, and this would be their only chance to try this and get it on film. It was a Friday night (which was important in the ritual), and now it was almost midnight, almost time to begin.

“If you can’t do this, then tell me right now,” J.T. told Tyler.

“I can do it.”

He didn’t sound convincing.

“If you can’t do it, then I don’t want you out here. I put a lot of work into this. I don’t want you ruining everything at the last minute.”

“I won’t,” Tyler groaned.

“You have to believe in this, too.”

Tyler nodded.

“No, I mean really believe in this. Mr. Boone won’t come unless we both believe, unless we both call out to him.”

Tyler sighed. “I believe,” he insisted.

J.T. stared at his little brother for a moment, and then he finally nodded. “Okay.”

They were quiet for a moment. The heavy metal song they were listening to had ended. They both heard the wind kicking up outside, tree branches in the front yard rattling like crazy. Something heavy hit the outside wall of the front of the house.

“What was that?” Tyler said as he jumped to his feet in front of the couch. He stared at the front door where their visitor would soon be entering.

“It’s just a storm,” J.T. said. He went over to his MP3 player and turned it off. He listened to the howling wind outside. This sudden storm seemed like a portent of bad things to come.

Tyler ran over to the front windows and peeked out through the drapes. He stared outside for a few moments.

J.T. joined him, staring out at the dark front yard. It was alive with movement, the tree branches waving around, the leaves rattling, debris flying down the street. The wind howled down through the eaves, whistling like a banshee.

“I’ve never heard the wind sound like that before,” Tyler whispered. “You think a tornado’s coming?”

“Come on,” J.T. said and glanced down at his cell phone. “We need to get ready.”

4.

At five minutes to midnight, J.T. and Tyler stood side-by-side in front of the front door to their house.

“I think we should lock it,” Tyler said.

“It has to be unlocked for him. We have to invite him in.”

Tyler didn’t reply, but he certainly didn’t look comfortable with the door unlocked. Tyler gripped his printed-out copy of the invocation that they needed to recite, the paper shaking a little in his trembling hands.

“Nothing’s probably going to happen anyway,” J.T. confided in Tyler. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

Tyler seemed to relax a little.

“You ready?” he asked Tyler.

Tyler nodded.

“Okay. Let’s start reciting.”

They read the words on their papers, their voices becoming one:

Oh Mr. Boone, come forth . . . hear our plea

Come to our home and enter, we invite thee.

We will knock thirteen times . . .

And then when the midnight toll chimes,

You are welcomed, and you are free . . .

And accept these gifts offered to thee.

Come forth, Mr. Boone . . .

Come forth, Mr. Boone . . .

Come forth, Mr. Boone . . .

The wind shrieked outside, and the house shuddered from the force of it.

J.T. extended his fist towards the front door, watching as Tyler copied his movements exactly. J.T. had his stopwatch ready, the seconds ticking down to midnight. They both knocked on the front door thirteen times in a row, their knocks echoing loudly throughout the house.

Once the thirteen knocks were completed and it was midnight on the dot, they both ran down through the aisle created by the candles and jumped inside the circle of protection. Mr. Boone couldn’t touch you once you were inside “the circle of protection.” That’s what the website had promised.

It was midnight.

The wind howled louder than ever. The front door flew open and slammed against the wall. The doorstop was the only thing saving a huge hole in the drywall from the door handle.

Tyler grabbed on to J.T., closing his eyes and whimpering.

But J.T. couldn’t help staring at the doorway . . . he had to see.

A man stood in the open doorway, silhouetted there by the flickering candlelight. He was completely black, like a living shadow. He was taller than the top of the doorway, and lamppost thin. His ragged clothing fluttered all around him in the fierce wind like a nest of writhing snakes. He wore a tall stovepipe hat on his head, the brim pulled down low. His arms seemed impossibly long, and his hands so large, his snake-like fingers longer than any human fingers should’ve been. And then a pair of eyes opened up in the shadowy face, and they glowed red.

J.T. closed his eyes and looked away from the horror in their doorway. He held on to his little brother.

There was another rush of wind—the loudest so far—and then all of the candles blew out.

Darkness.

Tyler screamed.

The front door slammed shut.

J.T. felt like screaming, too. But fear had dried up his throat.

Footsteps thudded towards them in the cloaking blackness.

Tyler sobbed.

“Sssh,” J.T. told his little brother. “Stop.”

Tyler stopped screaming, but he moaned. “I don’t like this, J.T.! Make it stop!”

J.T. opened his eyes and looked around at the dark living room. He still had his cell phone in his hand; he’d been gripping it so tight he was surprised he hadn’t cracked the screen.

Everything was quiet in the house. The wind outside was gone now. The sudden storm had vanished as quickly as it had come.

The light on his phone!

J.T. used the flashlight on his cell phone and shined it towards the front door. The weak beam of light from his phone stabbed through the darkness.

The front door was closed, and no one stood between it and their circle of protection. He shined the light on his phone slowly around the living room, from the front door to the drapes over the front windows, to the recliner, and then to the couch . . .

“Is he gone?” Tyler moaned.

“I don’t think he’s in here anymore,” J.T. whispered.

“I don’t want him in here,” Tyler sobbed. “I want you out!” he screamed at the darkness. “Go away! Leave our house! You’re not invited here anymore!”

J.T. made a full circle of the living room, dining room, and kitchen with the flashlight on his phone. The light wasn’t very strong—it only shined so far into the darkness, leaving the farthest reaches of the rooms in shadows. The entrance to the hallway was just a black mouth in the dark.

“I think everything’s okay,” J.T. whispered. “I’m going to turn on some lights.”

Tyler was still crying, and he grabbed J.T. in a panicked grip. “You can’t leave the circle of protection!”

“Light will protect us, too,” J.T. told him. He didn’t know if that was true, but he hoped it was.

Maybe Mr. Boone hadn’t entered their house. Maybe he had remained in the doorway when the door had slammed closed again. Maybe the ritual hadn’t been perfect enough for him to enter. Maybe there hadn’t been enough blood in the bowl. Maybe they’d done something else wrong. God, he hoped so.

Or maybe he hadn’t really seen that dark figure standing in the doorway. Maybe he had let his imagination run away with him in those few seconds.

Yeah, that had to be it. He just needed to get some lights on in the house, and they would both feel a lot better.

“I have to turn the lights on,” J.T. told Tyler. “You want some lights on, don’t you?”

Tyler nodded. His face was shiny with tears in the weak light of the cell phone.

J.T. wrenched his arm out of Tyler’s grip. The flashlight on his phone had gone out—it only stayed on so long—and he had to push the button again to turn it on. He shined it around their circle of rope and salt. He still didn’t see anyone around them.

“Just wait here,” J.T. told his little brother. He was off and running through the darkness towards the wall at the far end of the dining room. There was a big wall plate of light switches there. The light from his cell phone bobbed crazily in front of him in the darkness as he ran.

The dining room wall with the light switches seemed so far away now, and the darkness seemed to rush in all around him, suffocating him. He had that tingly feeling of fear dancing all over his skin; he was sure that he would feel something touch him in the darkness, a pair of huge hands with snake-like fingers that would wrap around his arms, his neck, his face . . .

He even thought he’d heard a whisper . . . his name spoken lightly through unholy lips.

“Jonathon . . .”

He ran as fast as he could, but time and space seemed to have stretched out around him, the laws of physics altered with this thing’s arrival.

Maybe Mr. Boone wasn’t in here. Maybe he hadn’t come inside after all.

A blur of movement raced past J.T.’s peripheral vision, a darker mass in the darkness that moved with lightning-quick speed.

“J.T.!” Tyler shouted.

Had Tyler seen the movement too?

J.T. felt his heart stop in his chest, but his legs kept on running like they were on autopilot, a portion of his brain operating on pure animal-like instinct now.

Finally he collided with the dining room wall. He slapped at all of the light switches, pushing them up. Blessed lights came on over the dining room table and in the kitchen. He turned around and looked at the house, trying to look everywhere, searching for Mr. Boone.

There was nobody in the house except him and Tyler who still stood inside the circle of rope and table salt that they had laid down on the floor.

J.T. felt like he could breathe again. Everything was okay now. They were safe.

Nobody had been there, his mind whispered. I just imagined it, that’s all.

“It’s okay now,” J.T. told Tyler.

Tyler didn’t look so sure.

“You can come out of the circle now.”

Tyler still didn’t move. “You sure?”

“Yeah. Just go sit on the couch.” J.T. looked back at his digital video camera perched on the corner of the coffee table. He wanted to check the footage on it.

“You need to lock the door,” Tyler said like it was his demand before he would consider leaving the circle of protection.

J.T. sighed, trying to put on a brave face for his little brother, but he still felt jittery, his muscles still rubbery with fear, an electric surge trembling through his body. He marched across the living room, past their circle of protection, and then down the aisle through the burnt-out candles. He checked the door handle. The door was unlocked. He twisted the lock on the door handle, and then he locked the deadbolt. He stood there at the door for a moment, staring at the ancient symbols he had drawn on the door. The world was quiet outside now that the sudden storm was gone.

Something struck the living room wall.

J.T. whirled around like a cat, frozen with fear but ready to run at a moment’s notice. He looked across the room at the larger couch and realized that the noise had come from Tyler jumping onto it like it was a life raft in the middle of a shark-infested ocean of water. Tyler stood up on the couch, his feet sinking down into the cushions, his eyes round dinner plates of fear.

Okay, at least Tyler was calmed down for the moment. Now it was time to check the footage on his camera and then get this mess cleaned up before—

J.T. stopped in his tracks as he stared down at the bowls of offerings they had laid out on the floor for Mr. Boone. He blinked his eyes, not sure if what he was seeing was real or not.

This couldn’t be right.

“What’s wrong?” Tyler practically screeched. But he wasn’t concerned or curious enough to leave the couch.

J.T. shook his head, at a loss for words for a moment. The fruit in the bowl was decayed, all of it sunken down, crushed under the weight of its own rot and covered with green and black mold. The wine and the blood were gone, both bowls dry as a bone.

He took a few more steps towards the circle of rope and salt and noticed that their homemade crucifix had been destroyed, crushed to bits of wood and pieces of twine.

Something had happened tonight . . . something had been inside their home. What he was seeing right now wasn’t an illusion, it wasn’t a trick of his imagination. This was real. Mr. Boone had been inside their home, and he’d been so close to them . . .

The camera.

J.T. rushed across the room and grabbed his camera off of the corner of the coffee table with trembling hands. He found the film file and started it again and watched.

“I wanna see,” Tyler whined.

“Come over here, then.”

“Why don’t you come over here?”

J.T. sighed and walked over to the couch. He sat down, but he was hunched forward and tense, sitting on the edge of it. Tyler moved over beside him, but he kept his feet up on the couch and off of the floor, huddling over J.T.’s shoulder.

They both watched the footage. The lighting was pretty decent for candlelight and everything was clear and in focus. He watched as he and his little brother stood in front of the door, the line of candles stretching out away from them. They both recited the invocation, the printouts gripped in their hands. Then he watched as he and Tyler knocked on the door thirteen times and then raced back to the circle of rope and salt.

He heard the storm outside on the film, the raging wind, the house shuddering. Then the front door flew open, and the candles blew out.

Darkness.

He backed the film up a second and froze it there.

Mr. Boone wasn’t in the doorway; at least he couldn’t see him there in the footage. There was only a split second of time between the door flying open and the candles blowing out. Tomorrow (when it was daylight) he would run the film through his editing software on his laptop and freeze it on that moment, enhance it somehow, filter the darkness, try to see if there was really someone there in the doorway.

He started the dark footage again. Tyler was screaming and crying on the film, and J.T. heard himself trying to console his little brother in the darkness. He saw the beam of light from his phone stabbing into the blackness, shining around like a crazy lightsaber on screen.

And then he watched the beam of light leave the circle of protection, disappearing out of the shot. A moment later the lights came on in the dining room and the kitchen. Tyler stood in the circle, crying. J.T. was pretty sure his little brother was going to beg him to edit his crying out of the film.

Then he watched himself walk to the front door and lock it. As he was locking the door, Tyler bolted out of the shot and onto the couch. Then he watched himself stare down at the bowl of rotten fruit, the empty wine bowl, and the empty bowl of blood.

The last thing he saw was himself walking towards the camera to retrieve it.

“That fruit is rotten,” J.T. whispered. “And the blood and wine are gone.”

Tyler seemed too shocked to say anything for a moment. He stared over at the bowl of rotten fruit and the other two empty bowls like he realized now what had happened, but then he looked back at J.T. “Rewind it.”

“You can’t really see it on the footage very well,” J.T. told him and stood up from the couch. He handed the camera to Tyler. “Here. Press this button when I tell you to and film me.” He knew Tyler was nearly as proficient with the camera as he was because he’d had Tyler film him so many times before in the short films that he had created.

“J.T., I don’t know . . .”

“Come on, Tyler,” J.T. snapped at him. “I need your help. I need you to do this for me.”

Tyler seemed to sense the importance of this to his brother. He swallowed hard and lifted the camera up to film him. He pressed the button and nodded. “Okay. Go.”

J.T. looked at the camera for a moment as he stood in the middle of the living room floor. “We’ve just finished the ritual and now we have evidence of what happened.”

He walked across the living room to the foyer and stood in front of the bowls, gesturing down at them. He knew he had taken plenty of footage of the preparations before they began the ritual. But would anyone who saw this believe this? They would think it was a hoax, a trick he’d played. He wished he wouldn’t have stopped the film; it would’ve been so much better if all of this was on a continuous loop.

“After we . . . performed the ritual, the fruit in this bowl rotted away in seconds. And the blood and the wine we offered are now gone. The ghost of Mr. Boone has taken the offerings.”

Tyler moaned from behind the camera, and J.T. scowled at him. He came for the camera and grabbed it from him. Tyler scurried back to the couch.

J.T. continued filming and continued narrating, getting as much of it on film as he could. He then toured their house with the camcorder, checking each room and turning on all the lights along the way. Tyler followed close behind him, bumping into him a few times.

“We’ve checked the house,” J.T. said into the camera after coaxing Tyler to shoot the film again for a moment. “No sign of Mr. Boone. He must’ve left.” J.T. shook his head like he was a little dismayed, overacting a little. “Maybe we did something wrong. Maybe the ritual wasn’t perfect. But there’s no disputing the fact that we have captured proof of the supernatural on film.”

J.T. walked towards the camera. “Cut,” he told Tyler. “We need to get this stuff cleaned up.”

5.

“I can’t sleep in my room by myself tonight,” Tyler told his older brother.

It was one thirty now. Everything was cleaned up. J.T. had cleaned everything up by himself because Tyler still refused to leave the safety of the couch. J.T. had even gone into their bedrooms to get their bedsheets and pillows so they could both sleep on the couches in front of the large flat-screen TV. J.T. had pretended to be upset at having to sleep out in the living room with his little brother, but secretly he didn’t want to sleep in his bedroom by himself either.

J.T. put a comedy movie on TV while Tyler curled up on the couch underneath his sheet, his head sunk down in two of his pillows.

It was almost dawn before they fell asleep.

THE HAUNTING

1.

A banging noise woke J.T. and Tyler up.

J.T. was on his feet in a second, looking around the brightly-lit living room.

“What was that?” Tyler asked.

“I don’t know,” J.T. answered, relaxing a little.

“It’s Mr. Boone,” Tyler whispered.

“He’s not here anymore,” J.T. said. He had tried to convince Tyler over and over again last night that Mr. Boone hadn’t remained in their house. He couldn’t deny that the ghost or demon or whatever it was had been inside long enough to take the wine and blood and to crush the crucifix, but then J.T. was sure that it had left. At least he was trying to convince himself as much as he was trying to convince his brother. They had done something wrong, he’d told Tyler. They had screwed up a critical part of the ritual, offended it somehow, and Mr. Boone had left.

But Tyler wasn’t sure of that.

And J.T. wasn’t, either.

J.T. checked the house again, inspecting each room, Tyler following closely behind him. No one in the house, nothing fallen over. No sign of where the loud noise had come from. After their search, Tyler made J.T. wait right outside the halfway open door to the hall bathroom while he peed.

“You all done, you little baby?” J.T. asked when Tyler hurried out of the bathroom.

Normally Tyler would’ve fought back against the insults, but not today.

“You want some peanut butter toast?” J.T. asked, deciding not to razz his brother any further.

“With jelly,” Tyler said and went back to the couch to watch cartoons on the TV.

J.T. didn’t fuss about making breakfast for them. He could’ve told Tyler to make it himself, but he knew Tyler would threaten to reveal to their mom what they had done, lording this secret over his head for a few days. J.T. would let him get away with it for a while, but after a few days Tyler would be in just as much trouble as he would be for not telling Mom right away.

The footage from last night ran through J.T.’s mind as he spread peanut butter and jelly on pieces of toast. He couldn’t wait to watch the footage on his laptop and really study the front doorway.

Had something been there last night before the lights went out? He definitely remembered seeing something there. He could see the dark figure in his mind’s eye perfectly: the tall, slender man with unnaturally long arms, long fingers, glowing red eyes . . . a dark demon at their doorstep, a demon they had summoned and invited into their home.

He felt a shudder run through him.

“Come eat this at the table,” J.T. said as he set the plates of toast and glasses of milk on the dining room table. Mom didn’t like them eating in the living room.

It seemed like Tyler was going to protest, perhaps threaten J.T. with the knowledge he could spill to their mother, but he didn’t. He knew when he was pushing things too far. J.T. could always fight back against Tyler’s threats by not escorting him to the bathroom anymore.

J.T. had already downloaded the footage onto his laptop this morning from his video camera, and he studied it with the sound turned down as he munched on his toast.

Tyler watched him, chewing with his mouth open and slurping down his glass of milk. “You don’t see him, do you?”

J.T. shook his head no, but he stared at the screen. He had it frozen on that moment in the film, and he had it blown up as much as he could without it becoming a distorted mess.

Was someone there?

He could just make out the outline of a man.

2.

Mom would be home in a few hours. She had already called and told them that she would pick up some dinner on the way . . . burgers and fries. She definitely didn’t want them cooking anything more complicated than toast or something in the microwave while she was gone.

Tyler was happy with fast food, and J.T. did one last check of the house to make sure there wasn’t any evidence of their little experiment left behind. He had taken out the garbage from the kitchen to the big plastic trashcan outside the garage, stuffing the garbage bag deep down inside. He’d thrown away the pieces of the crucifix and coiled up the rope and hid it away in the laundry room.

At least Tyler wasn’t as scared as he’d been last night—maybe because it was daylight now, or maybe it was because Mom was on her way home. Whatever it was, J.T. was glad.

3.

“Mom!” Tyler screamed and crashed into their mother, crunching into one of the fast food bags that she held in her hand.

“Oh my God,” Mom squealed. “I didn’t realize I was missed so badly.”

J.T. smiled at his mom. He was glad she was back, too. Things felt normal again now that she was home. Maybe the further they got away from their ritual last night the better. Maybe time would heal these frights.

“There’s another bag of fries out in the car,” Mom told J.T. over Tyler’s head. “And do you mind getting my bags out of the car? I’m so tired.”

“Yeah, sure,” J.T. said and hurried out the door.

It was already dusk outside, the sun disappearing down below the houses along the street, the eastern sky already dark and dotted with the first of the twinkling stars. No moon tonight. It would be so dark out here.

Dark.

Bad things came in the dark.

J.T. pushed those thoughts from his mind as he got the rest of his mom’s bags out of the back seat and then grabbed the other bag of food.

An hour later they were stuffed with junk food. J.T. had eaten two burgers and a large fries, and then washed it all down with a big glass of soda. Usually their mom didn’t approve of this kind of food, but it was a special occasion tonight . . . she didn’t feel like cooking after her long drive home. She told them all about her meeting; everything had gone well, and she was glad it was over.

“Anything exciting happen here?” she asked.

Tyler was silent, his eyes bulging a little like he was about to explode with their secret.

J.T. shot him a warning glance, and to his surprise Tyler just shook his head and smiled at their mom. “Just watched some TV,” he said. “And J.T. worked on his computer the whole time.”

“Oh yeah?” Mom asked, turning her attention to J.T. It was like she could tell they were keeping some kind of secret from her.

“Yeah,” he answered.

“Working on another film?”

“Yeah.” Something like that, he almost said, but didn’t. The less he said the better. He smiled, and he felt better. Everything felt better. Normal. He would forget about the footage he’d shot last night, maybe come back to it in a week or so, look at it with a fresh eye, then work on it some more. But right now he just needed some distance from it . . . he needed things to get back to normal again for a little while.

4.

Tyler lay in his bed wide awake. He had the lamp on next to his bed. His mom had told him to turn it out earlier, but he had waited until she went to sleep, and then he turned it on again. It was late, two o’clock in the morning, and he couldn’t sleep. He kept hearing noises coming from down the hall.

He stared at his bedroom door. It was closed. He thought about opening it a little. He even thought about grabbing his sheet and pillow and sneaking out to the living room to watch some TV. He needed something to take his mind off of Mr. Boone.

Was Mr. Boone outside their house? Was he walking around out there, trying to find his way back in? Or was J.T. wrong, and Mr. Boone had stayed inside their home the whole time, patiently waiting for darkness to come so he could materialize out of the blackness, form into a solid mass and . . .

Tyler squeezed his eyes shut. He tried to think about something else. Anything else.

A noise startled him. His eyes popped open. He stared up at the ceiling, at the air duct.

It was nothing—just the air conditioning coming on, that’s all.

But the noise sounded different, a squeaking noise, like metal turning inside of metal. He realized what the sound was after the first screw from the metal grate dropped down to the floor. He watched as the other screw twisted itself out of the grate. Then the grate was free and falling to the floor. Long, spider-like fingers stretched out of the rectangle hole in the ceiling now, pushing their way out of the small space.

Tyler jumped up in bed, ready to run.

And that’s when the lamp went out, plunging his room into darkness.

He screamed and lunged for his lamp, trying to turn it back on . . . but it wouldn’t work anymore. He heard the cracks and strains of the ceiling as Mr. Boone pushed himself out of the ceiling, pushing his way into their world.

5.

Tyler was screaming.

J.T. and Mom both rushed into Tyler’s room at the same time. J.T. flipped the light switch up for the overhead light. Tyler was curled up into a ball at the head of his bed, hugging his knees and crying.

“What’s wrong?” Mom asked as she darted over to him. She sat down on the edge of the bed right next to Tyler.

J.T. waited at the foot of the bed. His skin prickled with an icy dread as he watched his little brother.

Tyler didn’t answer for a moment, and his face was shiny with tears.

“Oh God, Tyler,” Mom said in shock. “You’re crying.”

Tyler sniffled and wiped at his eyes. He still couldn’t talk.

“What is it? A nightmare?”

He nodded, but then shook his head no.

This is it, J.T. thought. This is where Tyler spills the beans. Their little experiment last night had triggered a nightmare, and now he was going to be grounded from now until Armageddon.

“Someone was . . . was in here,” Tyler finally whispered.

Mom let him continue as she brushed his hair back from his forehead.

“I woke up and . . . and I heard . . . someone in here,” he said, his words coming out in a garbled rush. “And then I looked up at the ceiling, and the grate fell out. He was up there pushing his way out. I saw his fingers, and I heard the ceiling cracking . . .”

“It was just a bad dream, that’s all,” Mom cooed. She looked up at the ceiling. “See? The grate’s still over the duct.”

Tyler finally made himself look up at the ceiling. But he didn’t seem appeased at all.

“No. I saw it. It was real.” He started crying again.

“It was just a nightmare,” Mom said again.

Tyler shook his head again. “No. I was awake. I know I was.”

“You might have thought you were awake,” Mom assured him. “It might have seemed like you were awake, but I’m sure you were sleeping. I’ve had dreams before where I was half awake. Did you know you can be half awake, even have your eyes open, and still be dreaming?”

Tyler watched his mom like he was considering that possibility. “Can I sleep out in the living room with the TV on?”

Mom thought it over for a minute.

“Please. I want J.T. to sleep out there with me, too.”

Mom turned around and gave J.T. a hard stare and a scowl. “I guess that would be okay.”

“Yeah, fine with me,” J.T. said.

“Get your sheets and pillow,” Mom said.

Tyler jumped up and gathered his sheets and pillows and ran out of his room down the hall to the living room, turning on lights along the way.

Mom stared at J.T. “Do you know something about all of this?”

“He just had a nightmare.”

“Were you guys watching scary movies while I was gone?”

“No.”

“Reading him scary stories from the internet? Showing him things that he shouldn’t be seeing?”

“No, nothing like that,” he lied.

She stared at him for a long moment, studying him. Finally she nodded. “Okay. I’m going back to bed. I have to go into work for a few hours tomorrow.”

J.T. nodded, and then he went to his room to get his pillow and blanket.

6.

Tyler wasn’t much better the next day. He’d slept fitfully and kept J.T. awake much of the night. He looked exhausted, sporting dark circles under his eyes. His skin was pale, and somehow he looked a little thinner.

“Let’s eat some breakfast,” J.T. told Tyler who stared at the cartoons on the TV like a robot. He just nodded.

J.T. poured Tyler a bowl of cereal and set it on the dining room table. He whistled at Tyler like a dog. “Here, boy. Come and get it.”

This usually got a laugh out of Tyler. He usually came running, panting and barking like a dog. But not today.

He had to admit it to himself: his brother was traumatized . . . and it was his fault.

“It wasn’t a nightmare,” Tyler said in a low voice.

J.T. felt his skin crawl. It wasn’t just his brother’s words; it was his voice, the hopelessness in it, the dread. “You saw the air duct in your ceiling. The grate was still there, the screws still tight.”

“Then he put it back,” Tyler said, his voice even lower, his eyes still on the TV like he wasn’t really watching it, rather replaying the horror he’d seen last night. “He put it back, that’s what he did.”

J.T. started to protest, but what could he say? Then he thought of an idea. He went into the garage and found two flashlights. He made sure that they had batteries in them and that they worked. He brought them to Tyler and handed them to him. “Keep these with you tonight. The light will protect you. Mr. Boone can’t get you in the light.”

Tyler took the flashlights but didn’t say anything. He didn’t seem convinced that the light would protect him.

7.

Tyler wanted to sleep out in the living room again with the TV on, but Mom made him sleep in his bedroom.

“You’re eleven years old now,” she’d told him. “You’re too old to be scared to sleep in your own bedroom.”

He had cried . . . actually started crying, and that made Mom even angrier.

“You need to get to bed. You have school in the morning.”

But at least she had given in a little and allowed him to leave his light on. After he was alone in his room, he turned on a small radio that he had plugged in next to the lamp so he could have some noise to drown out any other sounds creaking in the house. He also had the two flashlights J.T. had given him earlier. He hid one of them under his pillow, and the other one was right next to his lamp in case it went out again in the middle of the night.

At first he had convinced himself that he was being a baby, and he had summoned the courage to march to his bedroom.

But now that it was late and everyone else was in bed, he was wide awake and he was scared.

He could hear creaking noises even over the music on the radio.

He tried to ignore the sounds, turning over onto his side, facing the lamp. His eyes were so tired they felt like they had sand in them. He rubbed them with his knuckles and then closed his eyes.

It seemed like he’d only been asleep for a few minutes when his eyes popped open. The alarm clock’s red digital numbers across his bedroom shined in the darkness: three thirty a.m. The lamp was out again. He heard a breathing sound in his bedroom.

Someone was close to him and breathing hard.

J.T.? He wanted to call out to his brother. Maybe J.T. had snuck into his room and was playing a prank on him. If that was true, then he would never talk to him again.

The breathing was heavier, closer. He felt hot breath on his face in the darkness. And that breath smelled. He couldn’t pinpoint what the odor was, but it was what he imagined death smelled like, a rotting corpse maybe with its mouth wide open.

And then something touched him, brushing his leg underneath the sheet.

He felt a weight sinking down at the end of the bed, like someone heavy sitting down by his feet.

Tyler screamed and grabbed the flashlight. His fingers were trembling so badly that he dropped the flashlight when he tried to turn it on.

Something touched his leg again. The breathing was heavier now, almost a grunting sound.

He pawed at his pillow, looking for the flashlight he had hidden under there. Finally his fingers curled around the tube of plastic, and his thumb found the switch. He flicked it on and shined it down at the end of the bed, the beam of light landing on the dark figure of Mr. Boone. His face was pure darkness, hidden under the shadow that the brim of his tall hat created. But his eyes were glowing red, and his mouth was a smile of sharp white teeth.

8.

It was a repeat of last night as J.T. and his mother stormed into Tyler’s room. He was screaming again, and this time he was practically inconsolable.

“He was in here again,” Tyler blubbered, tears streaming out of his eyes. “He was . . . was breathing on me . . . and he was at the end of my bed . . . he touched my leg . . .”

Tyler clung to Mom, still sobbing.

J.T. felt tears sting at his own eyes. His little brother could be a pain in the ass, but he hated seeing him terrorized like this.

After Mom got him calmed down, she let him sleep out in the living room again with the TV on.

J.T. slept out there with him. Of course he didn’t mind, he told their mother who needed to get back to bed because she had to be at work at five in the morning. J.T. set an alarm clock in the living room and promised that he would get them up and ready for school.

But as he lay there, he was pretty sure that they weren’t going to school tomorrow. Tyler wasn’t sleeping yet, and he didn’t look like he’d had much sleep in the last few days.

“I don’t know what to do,” J.T. said.

Tyler didn’t answer. He just stared at the TV in a fog.

“We should tell Mom what we did.”

Tyler still didn’t say anything. J.T. was proud that his brother hadn’t ratted on them, but now it was getting out of control. But what were they supposed to tell their mother? Tell her that they had performed a ritual, and now there was a demon inside the house? She wouldn’t believe them. She would just scold and ground J.T. for scaring his little brother.

9.

And that’s exactly what happened the next afternoon. J.T. tried to explain what had happened, he even offered to show her the film that he’d shot, but she wouldn’t hear any of it. Not only was she pissed that they hadn’t gone to school and that she was going to have to call the school and make up a lie because she hadn’t okayed their absence, but she was even angrier that he had performed some kind of satanic ritual in their own home and had scared the bejesus out of Tyler.

“You’re grounded from your computer, from the internet, from your phone!”

J.T. didn’t care so much that he was grounded. He just wanted a chance to explain his side of it, but Mom wasn’t listening.

“You’re both going to school tomorrow,” Mom told them as they sat on the couch. She paced in front of them. “And Tyler, you’re going to get over these nightmares. This isn’t real.”

“It is real,” Tyler whispered, his voice monotone, his face scarred with shock.

“See what you’ve done?” Mom said.

J.T. tried to plead his case, but it wasn’t working. He didn’t know what to do. He needed to find a way to solve this, to drive Mr. Boone out of their home.

10.

“Tyler,” a man’s voice whispered in his bedroom.

Tyler’s eyes popped open. He stared right at his lamp which was still on. The radio was on, the music playing softly. The flashlight stood on its end right next to the radio, and he had the other flashlight tucked underneath his pillow.

At least the lamp was still on. Thank God for that.

“Tyler, turn around.”

Tears leaked from his eyes as his body shivered uncontrollably underneath the sheet. His mouth was dry with fear, and he wanted so badly to cry out for J.T. and his mom, but he couldn’t make his throat work.

“Tyler . . . it’s me. Don’t you want to see me again?”

He recognized the voice . . . it was his dad. His dad was in the bedroom with him, on the other side of the bed closer to the closet.

“Let’s hang out together, buddy.”

Tyler stared at the light, his vision blurry with tears now. He shook his head no, and he couldn’t stop his body from shaking.

Footsteps approached the bed. A moment later, Tyler felt the weight of someone sitting down on the other side of the bed, the mattress sinking down from the person’s weight. Then he felt a heavy hand on his shoulder, felt the hot and filthy breath on the back of his neck. He could imagine what his father would look like now after his car accident, after being dead so long.

“Tyler . . . I want you to come back with me. I’m lonely. I need you there, buddy.”

Tyler screamed and screamed.

11.

“I’m listening,” Mom told J.T. as she stood in the dining room, her eyes bleary with exhaustion—she looked almost as tired as Tyler did now.

It took an hour to calm Tyler down and get him to stop crying. He was on the couch now, propped up into a sitting position with pillows, watching the cartoons on TV but not really watching it, zoning out again.

Tyler had told Mom that Dad had been in the bedroom with him. He said that he’d felt him behind him in the bed, heard his voice, felt him touch his shoulder. That was the last straw for Mom. She was still upset about Dad’s death, and it was something she didn’t talk about much. Just the mention of a memory could set her crying in a minute, and J.T. tried to avoid that as much as possible.

“I’ll tell you what happened,” J.T. told her. “But I want you to watch what I filmed after that.”

She looked skeptical.

“I’m willing to take full responsibility for this,” J.T. said.

“You bet your ass you are,” Mom said.

“This is all my fault, but you have to believe me. I think this might be real.”

Mom sighed and nodded.

J.T. hurried to his room and got his laptop. He turned it on, and selected his latest file, getting it ready to play. He brought it back and set it on the dining room table.

Mom had a cup of tea she’d nuked in the microwave, steam drifting up from the top of it.

J.T. told her everything they had done, and Mom listened in shocked silence. She didn’t interrupt him at all.

“Will you watch the video?” J.T. asked her. “Please.”

She watched the laptop screen. After she’d finished the video, she asked J.T. if he could rewind it so she could watch it again. She watched it one more time, and then finally looked at J.T. “This is real. You didn’t fake—”

“No, Mom. I swear to God, I didn’t.”

She looked at his face for a moment, and he could tell that she believed him.

“Mom, I’m scared,” J.T. whispered, and he glanced over at Tyler to see if he was watching them. He looked back at his mother. “I . . . I don’t know what to do.” He surprised himself by beginning to cry. He would never admit out loud how much he loved his little brother, but he was scared now that he was losing him. Tyler was wasting away, slowly going insane from this thing that was in their home haunting him now.

Mom sighed and shook her head.

“I . . . I could look up some more stuff on the internet,” J.T. mumbled. “I’ve tried for the last few days, some kind of . . . like antidote to whatever we did here . . . but I can’t find anything.”

“No,” Mom said in a gentle voice. “I think I know what to do.”

“What?”

“I’m going to call my Aunt Coats.”

Aunt Coats? “What … what can she do?” J.T. asked, struggling to even remember the last time he’d seen his mother’s aunt. She lived alone on a small farm in West Virginia that was nestled down in a valley. He and Tyler had visited her years ago, back when Tyler was only about four years old. Aunt Coats was a hick . . . plain and simple. She lived on some backwoods farm with some chickens, a few cows, and a large vegetable garden and greenhouse. She owned a 1970 GMC pickup truck that her husband had paid off when he was alive, and it was the only vehicle they owned. She didn’t have a computer or a TV or even a cellphone. The only thing her place was good for was to hide out if a zombie apocalypse came.

“She can help,” was all that Mom would say. She got up and walked right over to the cordless phone in the kitchen. She grabbed the phone and then took the address book out of the kitchen drawer. It was one o’clock in the morning, but Mom dialed the phone anyway.

“Aunt Coats?”

Mom waited a moment, listening. Aunt Coats must’ve been talking away on the other end like she’d known Mom was going to call her.

Finally Mom nodded as tears slipped out of her eyes. “That’s right,” she said. “We need your help.”

AUNT COATS

1.

Aunt Coats had taken the first flight available, and Mom had picked her up from the airport the next afternoon. J.T. and Tyler had skipped school again to go with their mom to the airport, and they waited in the car.

Mom walked towards the car with Aunt Coats walking right beside her. Mom was a small woman, but she looked gigantic next to Aunt Coats who couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds and probably only stood about five feet tall. But even though she was small, Aunt Coats exuded strength and a fierce confidence. Aunt Coats carried an ancient leather bag the size of a small suitcase in one hand, and Mom carried Aunt Coats’ other larger leather suitcase. They loaded the bags into the trunk, and J.T. got into the backseat with Tyler so Aunt Coats could take the passenger seat.

“Boys,” Aunt Coats said with a tight smile, nodding at them in greeting. Her face was a roadmap of wrinkles. She had piercing blue eyes that sparkled like rare gems, a greenish-blue color. Her hair was pure gray and pulled back in a tight ponytail, tied up with some kind of rawhide string. She wore plain clothes that looked like some kind of prairie clothing from the wagon trail days. Her shoes were work boots, and she had on saggy knee-high stockings. She smelled like a concoction of herbs and spices, and she sat up straight, as rigid as a stick of wood, yet she moved with a suppleness that spoke to a life of constant activity. Her mind seemed as sharp as her hawk-like eyes.

“Aunt Coats,” J.T. said. “It’s good to see you again.”

“Mmm,” she said like she knew better . . . like she knew that people didn’t call on her because of her pleasant company; people only called on her when they needed her particular set of skills. “You two have gotten big,” she finally said, and her words seemed as stilted and fake as J.T.’s hollow platitude had been. They were both awkward around each other, that gulf that comes with so much time passed between distant family members, neither knowing where to start.

“Let’s go,” Mom said with a smile. She was a natural people person . . . she dealt with customers all day long, and she was an expert in the small talk department and setting people at ease. “You hungry, Aunt Coats?”

“No, ma’am,” Aunt Coats said, her voice crackly and dripping with a southern twang. She seemed to have all of her own teeth; they were small and stronger than they looked.

“We’ll cook something up when we get back to the house,” Mom said.

J.T. had hoped they would stop and pick something up, but he didn’t argue about it.

On the drive back, J.T. thought about what Mom had said about Aunt Coats. She was her mother’s sister and the black sheep of the family, still living on the land that her mom’s side of the family had come from since nearly the time this country was founded. Mom’s distant relatives were backwoods people who believed in superstitions and ghosts, spells and conjuring. These were as real to these people as anything to us.

Aunt Coats had never gotten along with Grandma, Mom’s mom, and they had never reconciled their differences before Grandma suddenly passed away a few years ago. But Aunt Coats both held a grudge and didn’t at the same time. She accepted that she was an outcast, but she was also willing to jump on a plane to help at a moment’s notice.

“She said that she’s the only one who can help us,” Mom told J.T. after she’d gotten off the phone with her last night.

They had slept fitfully after that phone call, all of them together in the living room like Aunt Coats had instructed. She told them to light some candles on the dining room table and keep as many lights on as they could and still be able to sleep. She would handle the rest when she got there.

Maybe this would work, J.T. thought. He prayed to God that Aunt Coats, a woman whose whole family had shunned her, would help them.

2.

Aunt Coats entered their home right after Mom unlocked and opened the front door. J.T. and Tyler followed them in. J.T. carried Aunt Coats’ larger suitcase for her, and the old woman carried her smaller leather satchel.

Mom was rambling about something as J.T. closed and locked the front door, but her words died away when she saw the expression on her aunt’s face. Aunt Coats wasn’t listening to Mom anymore; she looked around the living room and then walked slowly towards the hallway.

J.T. and Mom exchanged glances. Mom’s eyes shifted to Tyler who still looked like a walking zombie.

“Oh he’s here alright,” Aunt Coats whispered as she entered the hallway.

J.T. wasn’t sure if he should follow her through the house or not.

“You’re going to leave this place!” Aunt Coats yelled from somewhere down the hall. “You’re going to leave this family alone!”

3.

Mom made some dinner, and Aunt Coats insisted on helping. Aunt Coats got a small wooden box out of her suitcase which was crammed with a collection of old clear bottles of herbs and spices that she sprinkled onto their meal. The bottles didn’t have labels or names on them, and she didn’t offer any information—but whatever she did to the food made it taste so much better.

“There’s power in herbs and plants,” Aunt Coats said as they ate dinner. “So much power and most people don’t even know about it. So much knowledge forgotten over the years.”

Tyler ate his meal in silence—he’d hardly spoken a word in the last twenty-four hours. J.T. wanted to console his little brother; he wanted to promise that their aunt would help them, promise him that Aunt Coats would make Mr. Boone leave. But most of all he wanted to apologize for doing this to him.

After dinner, Mom cleared the dishes away. Aunt Coats turned to J.T. “You said you recorded the ritual you performed on Friday night?”

J.T. wouldn’t even look at Tyler as he nodded. “Yes.”

“Let me see what you filmed.”

J.T. got his laptop for her and played the video.

Aunt Coats watched the laptop screen intently. She was hunched forward, her eyes narrowed, her mouth a thin line. She looked angry, ready to fight.

J.T. listened to the sounds coming from his laptop. He heard Tyler’s screams on there. He heard himself running to turn on the lights. He heard both of them shouting.

After Aunt Coats was finished with the video, she sat back in her chair and pursed her lips, nodding slightly. “We’re going to need to do that ritual again.”

Mom had just walked back to the table, but she stopped. They all stared at Aunt Coats in silence.

“But this time we’re going to have to do everything backwards . . . reverse the whole thing.”

“That’s it?” J.T. asked without thinking, suddenly realizing how rude it had sounded.

If Aunt Coats thought his question was rude, she didn’t show it. She just nodded. “There’s a little more to it than that. You’ll see. We need everything that you had in that ritual.”

“Make a list,” Mom told J.T.

J.T. ran to his bedroom and came back with a spiral notebook and a pen. He watched the footage on his laptop again and wrote the list.

“Where did you find those symbols?” Aunt Coats asked J.T.

“On the same website where we found the ritual. I still have the symbols drawn in this notebook.”

He showed her the pages where he’d copied the symbols from.

She studied the symbols for a moment and then nodded as if everything was satisfactory. She looked at J.T. and tapped the page in his notebook with a gnarled finger. “When we’re done with this, when we get this demon out of this house and away from all of you, then you need to destroy these symbols. And you need to destroy that film on your computer.”

J.T.’s heart skipped a beat. That footage he shot was his ticket to Hollywood, to fame. It was actual proof of the supernatural on film. But then he looked at Tyler who had gone into the living room and curled up on the couch with the TV on and the sound turned all the way down, and he knew he had to do it.

Aunt Coats seemed to pick up on J.T’s hesitancy about destroying his footage. “You can’t have any trace left behind. You can’t leave any doors open for it . . . not even a crack.”

“When are we doing this . . . this thing?” Mom asked. “Tonight?”

Aunt Coats shook her head. “We’ll do it tomorrow night, right at midnight. And we all need to sleep out here in the living room together.” She looked at Tyler in the living room. “That thing’s going to try even harder now to get him.”

4.

J.T. slept in his sleeping bag on the floor next to the couch. Mom slept on the larger couch. Tyler was curled up on the smaller couch in front of the TV. They were all asleep as Aunt Coats leaned back in the big recliner. She sat there with her eyes closed, but she wasn’t sleeping.

Footsteps sounded from down the hall . . . something coming this way.

Tyler moaned in his sleep, his face scrunching up a bit.

J.T. sat up like a piston, staring at the hallway where the footsteps were coming from. He looked at Tyler and Mom—both were still asleep. Then he looked at Aunt Coats. Her eyes were open in the murky room. The only light came from the lightbulb underneath the microwave over the stove.

The footsteps stopped, but a shadow raced around the room, flying around and blending in and out of all of the other shadows in the living room and kitchen. The shadows circled them like sharks.

Aunt Coats was on her feet in a second. She was still fully dressed; she even had her work boots on. She whispered something that J.T. couldn’t understand, words in some other kind of language. She also had a string of old animal bones in her hand, rattling them.

The shadows closed in around them. Aunt Coats hurried over to J.T. and Tyler. Mom was awake now and huddling closer to them.

J.T. felt the shadows breathing on them, and he could smell the rotting warm breath, a breeze from a slaughterhouse. He couldn’t see the shadow very clearly—it seemed to be shimmering in and out of existence, black shadows almost solidifying into tentacles and legs and gigantic spidery hands.

Aunt Coats chanted louder. She rattled the bones in her hand harder.

Tyler moaned as he sat up, his eyes wide open in the darkness. He hid behind Aunt Coats like she was a shield.

Just when J.T. thought the shadows were going to form into a solid thing and rush them, Aunt Coats’ chants became screeches, and she shook the bones at the shadowy things.

And then with a rush of wind, the shadows were gone.

Tyler was crying. Mom was crying, too. She hugged Tyler and then reached her hand out for J.T. “I’m so sorry I didn’t believe you.”

5.

The next day they all slept on and off in fitful naps. Mom had to go into work for a few hours. She took the list with her so she could pick up a few of the items. J.T. still had some of the items in the house: the bowls, the rope, the thirteen candles, and the different colored chalks. He got these out and started drawing the symbols on the front door like he’d done last Friday night.

“Keep the bowls empty,” Aunt Coats told him. “And don’t light any of the candles tonight.”

J.T. followed every one of Aunt Coats’ instructions—he didn’t want to screw this up.

Night came quickly, and they ate dinner together in silence. Aunt Coats cooked this time, making some kind of stew and adding more of her herbs and spices from her leather satchel.

After dinner, J.T. made another crucifix out of two pieces of wood, making it as similar to the one he’d used last time. He also laid out the circle of rope and salt in the living room. It was in the same spot as before, only this time it was much bigger so it could fit all of them inside.

J.T. printed out four copies of the spell he and Tyler had recited last Friday night, and he handed one to each of them. “At midnight tonight,” Aunt Coats said, “we’re going to read this spell backwards . . . everything in reverse. All of us together.” She looked right at Tyler. “You, too. You have to do and say everything at exactly the same time we do. You understand?”

Tyler nodded. He looked scared to death, but J.T. was glad to see that he was at least showing some kind of emotion and not walking around like he was in a trance. At least there was a faint look of hope in his eyes now.

6.

Right before midnight all four of them gathered at the front door, all of them ready to knock on it thirteen times in unison. They had left some of the lights in the kitchen and living room on, but Aunt Coats told them that the lights would go out as soon as this started so J.T. got flashlights for all of them.

Aunt Coats said a quick prayer with them, all of them holding hands. She asked for God’s forgiveness for all of them and their sins, and she asked for strength.

It was time.

J.T. watched his cell phone, and as soon as it was midnight he yelled, “Now!” They all knocked on the front door simultaneously, thirteen times, and then they opened the door up to the night outside. They walked backwards down the path through the candles to their circle of protection. They had their printed copies of the spell, and they began reciting the words backwards.

“Boone Mr. forth come.”

“Boone Mr. forth come.”

“Boone Mr. forth come.”

“Thee to offered gifts these accept and.”

“Free are you and welcomed are you.”

For a moment J.T. didn’t think this was working. He was afraid they weren’t going to get Mr. Boone out of their house and away from them.

The lights flickered. A sudden storm was picking up just like the last time they had performed this ritual. J.T. saw the front tree outside the open door, the leaves and branches shaking back and forth, the wind howling. But the rushing of the wind also seemed to be coming from inside the house, too. The lights went out. They turned their flashlights on and kept reciting the spell backwards.

“Chimes toll midnight the when then and.”

“Times thirteen knock will we.”

“Thee invite we enter and home our to come.”

“Plea our hear . . . forth come Boone Mr. oh.”

J.T. saw the shadows coming alive all around them. It looked like the racing shadows were solidifying, just like they’d done last night. But this time the forms were easier to see. Strands of shadows protruded out of the walls, floors, and ceilings. It looked like a root system from a gigantic plant was growing out of the walls. And maybe that’s what this thing had done . . . rooted itself in their home, their world, growing bigger and stronger, more complex until it would finally ensnare Tyler . . . and then the rest of them.

Aunt Coats began chanting in that strange language, just like she’d done last night, and her words seemed to be drawing those roots out of the walls, floors, and ceiling. There was a moaning and screeching sound as the strands were pulled free. The strands of roots changed into tentacles and feelers, many of them whipping around. Once all of the roots were free, the mass of shadows contracted in on itself and formed into a man.

For a split second J.T. thought the man standing there was his dad. He thought he’d heard his dad’s voice calling him.

No . . . it’s not him. It’s just a trick.

The man was Mr. Boone now, his features somehow defined even though his face remained in shadows underneath his tall hat. But J.T. could see the curve of a smile on the man’s face, the sharp teeth, and the glowing red eyes. Mr. Boone ran right towards them . . . right towards their circle of protection.

Oh God, he was going to enter their circle . . . he was going to get them!

Aunt Coats jumped out of the circle of protection, still chanting the entire time and rattling the bones in her hand. At the last instant Mr. Boone changed directions and crashed right into Aunt Coats, then through her, knocking her down to the floor.

The house was shaking. The storm outside was raging like a hurricane. Aunt Coats wasn’t moving anymore. Mr. Boone rushed past their empty bowls, and they were filled as he moved past them: wine in one, rotten fruit riddled with worms in another, and blood in the last one—all of their offerings returned. The candles lit one by one as the thing raced past them, and then it was out the door and into the storm.

The front door slammed shut.

The storm outside died down immediately.

The lights flickered and came back on.

They all rushed over to Aunt Coats who was still on the floor. And she wasn’t moving.

“Aunt Coats,” Mom said with tears in her eyes. “Are you okay?”

Aunt Coats didn’t look injured, but J.T. was afraid that she’d been mauled somehow by that demon. But there was no blood on her, nothing looked broken . . . she was just lying there. Dead? No, he could see her chest barely rising and falling.

“Aunt Coats?”

She opened her eyes and managed a smile. “It’s okay, dear. I’m going to see Howard now.”

“No,” Mom wailed and looked at J.T. “Call 911! Get an ambulance here!”

7.

J.T. cleaned up the circle of protection and cleared the bowls and candles away before the paramedics got there. Then there was a blur of movements as the paramedics rushed inside the house, the lights from their emergency vehicles splashing across the open door, the engines of their vehicles rumbling. They put Aunt Coats on a stretcher, but she wasn’t responding. She was already gone. She looked younger somehow, J.T. thought. She looked like she was at peace, and he swore he saw the ghost of a smile on her face.

Aunt Coats was pronounced dead on the way to the hospital. The official cause of death would be a heart attack, but J.T. knew what had really killed her.

8.

In the days that followed Mom took care of the funeral arrangements for Aunt Coats. They all flew to West Virginia where Aunt Coats wanted to be buried next to her husband Howard. A lot of Mom’s family was there, people J.T. hadn’t seen in a long time, and some he’d never seen. He couldn’t believe the number of people that had shown up.

They came back home and tried to piece their world back together. J.T. had followed Aunt Coats’ instructions and gotten rid of the footage on his laptop and anything else linked to the ghost of Mr. Boone.

He also threw his video camera away. He was done with it now.

9.

J.T. sat in his bedroom at his desk two days later. He’d finally gone back to school, and he was pretty far behind in his studies now. He felt exhausted and drained, depressed. He felt responsible for everything that had happened, for the horrors that Tyler had gone through, for his aunt’s death. It was all his fault, and that stupid video camera of his was what had started it all. He’d decided that he wasn’t going to be a filmmaker now. He wasn’t going to Hollywood. He wasn’t going to hurt anyone anymore. And now, with his dreams dead, he didn’t know where to go from here. He was adrift.

At least Tyler had gotten better. He was back to his old hyper self now. He still had nightmares at night, and they probably weren’t going to go away any time soon. Mom let him sleep with his light on, and he had three flashlights beside his bed that he checked every night before going to sleep.

There was a knock at his bedroom door.

“Yeah.”

No answer. For a split second J.T. thought Mr. Boone had come back. Mr. Boone was right outside the door, his roots embedded throughout their house again, all of those tentacles pooling together to form the shadowy man who would enter his bedroom.

The door opened and it was Mom and Tyler.

J.T. breathed a sigh of relief. Maybe his nightmares weren’t going to go away any time soon, either.

Mom had the video camera in her hand. “I found this in the garbage.” She laid it down gently on the bed.

“I don’t want it anymore.”

“I know you think this is your fault—”

“That’s because it is.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “But you need to learn from your mistakes.”

J.T. looked at Tyler—it was his little brother’s forgiveness he needed the most.

Mom pulled a folded piece of paper out of her back pocket and handed it to J.T.

“What’s this?”

“It’s a letter from Aunt Coats. It came a few days ago. She sent it from the airport in West Virginia right before she got on the plane to come here.”

J.T. read the letter. He was shocked. Aunt Coats had already made arrangements before leaving. She had left her home and farm to a relative in West Virginia, and she had left stocks and bonds to Mom that totaled nearly two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. But the most shocking thing was that Aunt Coats said she would be seeing her husband soon. She knew she was coming here to die, to be the sacrifice for that thing . . . and that’s what she said in the letter: The ghost of Mr. Boone needed a sacrifice—she’d written his name down in the letter. How could she have known?

Tears slipped out of J.T.’s eyes.

“Big group hug,” Mom said.

J.T. and Tyler hugged their mother.

“My guys,” she whispered.

J.T. could feel their forgiveness now, and he knew that they were all going to be okay.

This was a hard story for me to write at first. I remember I struggled with the first few pages for quite a while. I knew I wanted to write a story about a teenager who tries to find a spell on the internet to summon a demon so he can film it documentary style—isn’t that what all teenagers want to do? At first this story was going to be about a group of kids, but then I started re-thinking it, jotting down a few notes here and there over a period of months (while I worked on other stories and books of course), but I kept coming back to this one. I have a lot of story ideas that pop up in my mind, and after tinkering with them for a while I just know if they’re not going to work. I hate to abandon some of them, but if I’m not totally satisfied with it then I don’t want to write it. A few of the ideas have actually coalesced into stories over the years with some major effort, but a lot of others kind of fade away into that deep dark pit I call my subconscious. But those stories that do hang around and nag at me to be written, those are usually the ones that sometimes practically write themselves. And I was afraid that this story was going to be one of those tough ones that I had to grind through and perhaps never be totally happy with. But once I got working on the story again, changing it to a teenager and his younger brother, then I knew I had my story, and from then on it was a breeze to write. In fact, I just kept writing and writing. I never planned for this story to get this long, but sometimes the story kind of takes over in a way.

THE DISAPPEARED

DAY ONE:

Jeff noticed three things when he woke up that morning. The first one was that there was daylight shining through the vertical blinds that covered the sliding glass doors that led out to the pool deck. And since there was daylight streaming in, that meant he was late for work.

The second thing he noticed was that the electricity was out. He was lying on his right side when he opened his eyes and saw that the alarm clock on the table next to his bed was dark. No blinking red numbers—it was completely out. No power at all. He looked up at the ceiling and saw that the ceiling fan was off.

The third thing he noticed when he rolled over was that his wife wasn’t in bed with him.

“Shit,” he muttered. He was supposed to be in early today to help open the Dunkin’ Donuts store that he managed. He would need to call Larry, the district manager, and let him know that he had overslept. He grabbed his cell phone which was beside the dead alarm clock on top of the metal framed and glass-topped end table, the twin of the table on the other side of the bed—Cheryl’s side of the bed. The tables matched the bedframe and the black wrought-iron mirror on the wall. Cheryl was big into matching home décor.

Where was Cheryl? How come she wasn’t in bed with him? And how come she hadn’t woken him up when she’d realized the power was out? She knew he had to be at the store at seven. She knew the earful he’d get from Larry because he was late.

Jeff pressed the power button on his phone, already rehearsing his excuse in his mind: The power went out, but I’ll be there in thirty minutes. As he pressed down on the power button to bring his phone to life, he wondered why Larry hadn’t called him by now.

And then Jeff got his answer: his cell phone was dead. He held the button down for several seconds, but it wasn’t firing up. Maybe the battery had died in the middle of the night. He could plug it into the charger . . . if the electricity wasn’t out.

Maybe he should take the battery out and then put it back in.

Jeff got out of bed and headed towards the bedroom door which was a set of double doors just beyond the hallway where his small closet and Cheryl’s much larger walk-in closet separated their bedroom from their master bathroom.

But he stopped in his tracks when he glanced back at the bed.

Something was wrong.

He saw Cheryl’s pajama top on her side of the bed, the pajama top that she usually wore to bed, the pink and wooly one. The sleeves of the shirt were poking out from under the covers like someone was still sleeping there. But Cheryl wasn’t there.

He approached her side of the bed cautiously. He pulled the covers back away from her pajama shirt. Cheryl’s pajamas were laid out underneath the covers, the pants below the shirt, and socks at the ends of the pants legs; the socks were still tucked into the cuffs of the pants legs just a bit.

“What the hell is this?” Jeff whispered to himself. He turned and looked at the double doors that led out to the living room and the rest of the house.

“Cheryl?”

No answer from Cheryl.

He looked back down at the pajamas and socks. He had a queasy feeling in his stomach, and he felt a slight electrical tingling on his skin. The fine hairs on his arms felt like they were standing on end, prickling his flesh.

Something was really wrong here.

There had to be a reasonable explanation for this. Maybe Cheryl was playing some kind of joke on him. But Cheryl wasn’t the joking kind of person. He loved his wife to death, but she saw little humor in things. If they watched a comedy film together, Jeff would laugh like an idiot through the whole thing while Cheryl couldn’t wait for the film to end. Jeff couldn’t make Cheryl laugh with a joke; he told a friend once that the only way he could make Cheryl laugh was if he fell down and hurt himself.

And Cheryl definitely didn’t find that funny.

Jeff was about to leave the bedroom and search the house for Cheryl, but he hesitated for a moment beside the bed.

He needed to get going . . . he needed to jump in the shower (which probably wouldn’t have any hot water now) and get dressed for work.

But he was still hesitating. He needed to check something.

It’s just a power outage, he told himself. That’s all. Cheryl got up and threw her pajamas back on the bed.

Under the covers? Laid out like she was still sleeping in them?

And when had Cheryl, the neat-freak, ever just tossed her pajamas back on the bed after getting dressed?

Jeff reached down for the waist of the pajama pants and lifted the edge of it up slightly so he could peek inside. He saw a pair of light blue panties inside the pajama pants. He let the waistband of the pajama pants slip out of his fingers, and he took a step back away from the bed.

Why would she do that? Why would she lay her bed clothes out like this after getting up?

He grabbed the covers and pulled them back over the pajamas—he didn’t want to look at them anymore. And that’s when he saw something shiny on the bed near the end of one pajama sleeve. He leaned down to get a closer look. It was her wedding ring.

A terrible thought suddenly occurred to Jeff—Cheryl had left him. She’d gotten up, gotten dressed, laid her pajamas out like she was leaving him some kind of twisted message, took off her wedding ring and tossed it on the bed. Then she had turned the main breaker off and left.

But why? Did they have a fight last night? He couldn’t really remember. He remembered drinking a few beers, maybe a few more than normal even though he had to get up early. But the beer helped him fall asleep. He forced his sluggish mind back to last night, and the last thing he could remember was taking the garbage cans out to the curb.

“The garbage cans need to go out,” Cheryl had told him.

“I know,” he’d groaned at her as he walked towards the laundry room that led out to the garage. He already had the garbage bag in his hand from the kitchen waste basket when she had reminded him. Too late—he was already on top of it.

And then Jeff remembered going through the side door in the garage that led outside. He had walked a few steps to the wooden gate that opened up to their fenced-in backyard. He had taken the lid off the big green garbage can and stuffed the white bag of garbage down into it, pushing it down so he could close the lid. And then . . .

That was all he could remember.

Like he had blacked out the rest of the night.

He thought harder for a few seconds, concentrating. He could clearly see himself stuffing the garbage bag down into the big green garbage can. He needed to get the lid on or the crows would be pecking at the garbage by sunup; one of the joys of living in Florida—all of the critters. But he couldn’t remember anything after that no matter how hard he tried. He couldn’t remember going back inside, going to bed, nothing.

Maybe he and Cheryl had argued. Maybe he’d gotten a little too drunk and said something mean to her.

Or maybe Cheryl had been planning on leaving him for quite a while now.

No, she wouldn’t leave him. That was ridiculous. He just needed to find her. He hurried out of their bedroom and into the living room. The house they rented was pretty large—three bedrooms even though they didn’t have any kids yet (but they hadn’t exactly been trying like hell lately). The other two bedrooms were at the other end of the house. They used one of the bedrooms as a workout room and the other as a guest bedroom slash office slash storage.

“Cheryl!” he called out. His voice echoed through the empty house and bounced back down to him from the vaulted ceilings.

Jeff rushed through the house, checking the kitchen, the family room, even opening the sliding glass door that led out to the screened-in pool. Usually when he opened the sliding glass door their cat, Mickens, came running—she liked to go out there and catch lizards and frogs, and then try to sneak them back inside the house so she could torture them.

But Mickens didn’t come running.

Jeff went back into the kitchen. His mind was spinning. He looked down at his clothes and realized that he was fully dressed (except his shoes). He had on a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and socks. Had he slept in his clothes? Why would he do that? Had he gotten that drunk?

A sudden queasy feeling hit him like a punch in the gut, and his mouth went dry. He was suddenly very thirsty. He opened the refrigerator and grabbed a can of Dr. Pepper. It was warm to the touch.

How long had the electricity been out?

He popped the can open and drank half of the tepid soda down.

Jeff left the kitchen and entered the laundry room, and then went into the garage.

Just like last night.

The garage was pitch-black, and he had to feel his way along in the darkness to the side door. After a few steps into the darkness, he thought about retreating and finding a flashlight, but he was already this far now. He felt his way along the wall, past the air handler for the air-conditioner, and then he bumped into some boxes. For a moment he had a strange feeling that someone was in the darkness with him. He felt that tingling feeling of fear buzzing on his skin again.

Another strange thought entered his mind as he navigated his way through the darkness. Maybe Cheryl had been murdered, and the killer had laid her clothes out on the bed beside him while he slept. Maybe the killer was waiting in the darkness of the garage to attack him . . .

Jeff found the side door of the garage. He unlocked the deadbolt and then twisted the lock on the door handle. He pushed the door open. A dull sunlit morning invaded the garage, washing him in the light as he stood in the doorway. The breaker box was right near the side door, mounted on the block wall.

Cheryl wouldn’t have turned the electricity off when she left. Why would she do that?

Jeff checked the breakers anyway, just to be sure. They were all switched on but he flipped the main breaker back and forth; it made a loud clicking noise.

He looked back at the open side door. He was getting that queasy feeling in his gut again that something was very wrong here. He was in trouble. Something was wrong. No, everything was wrong. It was like his body instinctively knew this, but his mind was fighting it.

He needed to go outside, make sure Cheryl’s car was still out there in the driveway—then he would know for sure if she had left him.

Jeff thought about going back inside the house to put a pair of shoes on before going outside, but then he saw his sneakers that he used for mowing the lawn sitting near the door on the concrete floor. The sneakers used to be white, but they had turned a grayish color with green stains around the edges from weed-eating, edging, and mowing. He had to stay on top of the yard in this neighborhood; if the grass was an inch too high some busy-body neighbor would go and cry to the HOA.

He slipped his socked feet into the sneakers; the laces were already tied and seemed to be gummed into place with crud. After his sneakers were on, he walked to the open side door and went outside.

After he’d walked only a few steps along the side of the house, he could already see his SUV, a Chevy Equinox, in the driveway. And after only three more steps, he saw Cheryl’s Kia Optima parked right next to it.

Her car was here, but she wasn’t inside the house.

And don’t forget that her pajamas were laid out in the bed with her socks stuffed into the bottom of the legs and her underwear inside of them with her wedding ring on the bed covers. No, don’t forget those odd little details.

Jeff’s mind returned to the possibility that Cheryl was playing a joke on him. But this would be the first time ever in their relationship that she had played a joke, and if this was some kind of prank, then it was a doozy.

He was about to go back inside the house and look for her, but he hesitated beside the house. Their house was on a corner lot. He looked down the street, but he didn’t see anything moving. He didn’t hear any sounds except for the stale wind rustling through the trees. He couldn’t even hear the cars and trucks driving by out on State Road 54 which ran right outside their sub-division. He had learned to tune out the traffic noise over the last few months, but now that he concentrated on it he couldn’t hear it. It was so odd that the sound wasn’t there. He felt another cramp of fear in his stomach.

Why wasn’t there any traffic noise? There wasn’t the sound of a dump truck rumbling by, or the sound of a honking horn, or screeching tires.

Nothing.

He stood very still and felt the fear dancing on his skin like static electricity. He could feel a white-hot ball of panic trying to build up inside of him.

He closed his eyes for a moment.

“Fight it,” he whispered.

Why was he whispering? There was no one out here. When was he going to admit that to himself?

But there had to be a reasonable explanation. He wasn’t sure what time of day it was, but maybe a lot of people were already at work. And that’s where he should be right now.

The other thing that bothered him was six houses down the street. There was a car parked in the middle of the street. It was a small car, maybe a Toyota or a Honda. But the car wasn’t just parked there in the middle of the street, it was running. He could hear the car idling from where he stood—the running engine was the only other sound out here other than the death-rattle of the dry leaves in the trees from the breeze. It didn’t look like anyone was inside the car.

Jeff was torn for a moment. He wanted to go back inside and look for Cheryl again—really take his time—but he also wanted to walk down to that car. He thought about shouting down the street at the car, but the familiar tug of not wanting to embarrass himself in front of his neighbors held him back.

What neighbors?! his mind screamed at him.

He forced himself to move, ignoring the voice in his mind. As he walked down the street on his rather unsteady legs, Jeff glanced at each of the houses. The windows were dark, and he hadn’t seen any flashes of movement anywhere. He hadn’t heard any dogs barking. He didn’t hear any birds chirping or see any of the ubiquitous squirrels scurrying back and forth indecisively in the road.

When he reached the rear of the white car parked in the middle of the road, he could hear the motor a little better now—a soft purring noise. He looked at the back window, but even this close he couldn’t see anyone inside.

“Hello?”

No answer, just the steady hum of the car’s engine.

He crept down the side of the car and stood by the driver’s window which was rolled all the way down. He looked inside the car, and it felt like his heart stopped for a second.

This can’t be real. This has to be a dream. That’s it! I’m stuck in a nightmare and I’ll wake up soon next to Cheryl and tell her about this crazy dream I had. And then I’ll hug her. I won’t care if I’m late for work. Fuck work. I’ll just hold on to her for a while.

Inside the car was a set of clothes laid out on the driver’s seat; some kind of khaki pants, the legs draped down to the floorboard where there was a pair of dark socks tucked down inside a pair of brown shoes. One of the shoes was even resting lightly on the gas pedal. The shirt was slumped down on top of the lap of the pants.

There was another set of clothes on the passenger seat—a set of woman’s clothes: a black skirt draped down over the seat of the car with a pair of pantyhose hanging down to the floorboard still tucked down inside a pair of sensible heels. The shirt, made of some kind of shiny material that Jeff couldn’t name, was slumped down on the skirt just like the man’s clothes. And even from the driver’s side window Jeff could see an assortment of jewelry on the woman’s shirt: a necklace, two rings, a bracelet.

Okay! Time to wake up now!

The car was still in drive; it looked like it had coasted to a stop right here in the middle of the street.

Jeff looked back down the street towards his house.

“Hello?” he called out. “Is anyone here?”

No answer.

“Hello?! Answer me!”

Silence.

“Somebody answer me right now!” He no longer cared about embarrassing himself or seeming rude. He would welcome one of the fussy old people who lived in this neighborhood to open their front door and yell at him to keep it down.

He turned back around to the car, and something at the next house caught his attention. The front door was halfway open. Had it been open before? Had it just opened up? He couldn’t really remember.

He ran towards the house.

But before he made it halfway up the walkway that meandered through the manicured, tropical shrubbery, he slowed down to a disappointed walk because he saw the pile of clothes on the threshold of the doorway. In front of the pile of clothes was a plastic travel cup on the concrete walkway with a spray of caramel-colored liquid fanning out from the mouth of it. These clothes were piled up like the person wearing them had evaporated in an instant, and the clothes had fallen straight down in a heap because suddenly there wasn’t a body to hold them up anymore.

Jeff walked to the front door and stared down at the clothes which looked like some kind of gray business suit. Maybe this person had worked in a bank. Or maybe he had been a real estate agent. There was a slim black briefcase slumped in the doorway. He could look inside that briefcase and discover the man’s occupation, but he didn’t really care right now. The man was gone. He wouldn’t be doing any more banking or selling or meeting or managing or whatever the hell he used to do.

A wristwatch and a set of car keys were nestled among the clothing. Jeff crouched down in front of the heap of clothes and touched the spilled coffee. It was cold. He picked up the watch. It was still ticking away, and it showed the time as eleven fifteen a.m.

Jeff stood up and slipped the watch into his pants pocket. He stepped over the clothes and entered the home. It felt strange being in someone else’s house without their permission. The house was tastefully decorated (but Cheryl would have found it too cluttered—not her style at all). The house was somewhat similar to the one they rented, but laid out a little differently.

“Hello?” Jeff called out. He was getting used to not hearing a response, and his greetings were starting to sound stupid to his own ears. “Is someone here?”

The house was quiet . . . like a tomb.

Jeff found three more piles of clothes in the kitchen. There were two sets of children’s clothes at the table off of the kitchen. There was a box of cereal on the table next to a gallon of milk. There were two bowls of half-eaten cereal with the spoon in one bowl, and another milk-coated spoon on the floor. He touched the gallon of milk—it was warm.

By the sink in the kitchen, there was a robe and a T-shirt crumpled up on the floor over a pair of slippers. That pile of clothes used to be Mom.

He walked back to the formal living room and collapsed on the couch. He leaned forward and buried his face in his hands.

“This is just a dream,” he whispered. “Just some terrible nightmare that I’m going to wake up from any minute now.”

He started to cry. Then he sobbed. The piles of children’s clothes got to him. Two little kids erased while they were eating their Lucky Charms.

“Magically delicious,” he whispered through his tears.

He almost laughed out loud.

But he couldn’t let himself do that. If he started laughing, he was afraid he wouldn’t stop until his mind cracked right in half.

What am I going to do now? What am I supposed to do?

Jeff went back home. He checked a few more houses along the way and found piles of clothes with no bodies inside them anymore. He found clothing laid out over beds, piles of clothes in kitchens and bathrooms. He found one set of clothes on a toilet, part of the clothes inside the toilet bowl now, clogging it up. In another bathroom there was a set of clothes laid out on the counter, and the shower was wet. He turned on the faucet, but only a little bit of water dripped out. No water. No electricity. No nothing.

He found a battery-operated radio in the house next door to his. He turned it on, and it worked. He turned the dial slowly, but there was nothing but static. He cried again as he listened to the static, but he got himself under control a little more quickly this time. He turned the radio off and took it with him. He might listen to it later—the hiss of static might be better than the unending silence.

Back in his own house, he drank another can of warm Dr. Pepper. Then he laid down on the couch in the living room. He set the stolen radio and wristwatch on the coffee table next to his empty can of soda. Cheryl would’ve scolded him about leaving his empty can on the table, and right now he would’ve welcomed it. He would love to hear her voice right now even if she was yelling at him.

He closed his eyes and tried to make himself fall asleep. He wanted to go to sleep and wake up from this nightmare so he could be back in the real world.

DAY THREE:

By the third day there was no denying that everyone around him was gone. They had disappeared. All living things had disappeared. Pets. Animals. He hadn’t even seen so much as a bug.

The first night Jeff lit some candles and slept on the living room couch. It took most of the next morning to get over the shock that this was really happening, and then he spent the next few hours salvaging what he could from the refrigerator and the freezer before the food went bad. He cooked meats on his barbeque grill in the middle of his front yard. It was against HOA rules to use a grill in the front yard, but he would take a chance on a strongly-worded letter from them right now. He had cackled at the thought of the letter as he cooked up hamburger patties, sausages, two flounder fillets, and a small bag of shrimp. Mr. Jeff McConnell, the strongly-worded letter would say, it has come to our attention that you have been cooking out on your front lawn which is not only a safety hazard but unsightly blah, blah, blah . . .

That afternoon, before the sun set, he drove his Chevy Equinox around the whole neighborhood. He found more cars in the middle of the street. One of the cars had drifted off the road when the owners disappeared (or evaporated or vaporized or whatever the hell had happened to them) and bumped into a pickup truck with its tail end sticking out of the driveway like the driver had been in the process of backing up when “It” had happened. A mini-van had smacked gently into the trunk of an oak tree. None of the vehicles were running, but the ignitions in all of the vehicles were turned on. They had run out of gas.

After driving around the neighborhood, Jeff ventured out to the main road that ran in front of the subdivision—State Road 54. He drove a few miles in each direction, navigating his way around the stalled cars and trucks. He stopped a few times to check on several vehicles. They had all run out of gas. He imagined all of these cars and trucks just sitting here, running and running with no one inside of them. There were pileups in some places, and one of the crashes was so bad that he had to squeeze his Chevy through a space between a small ditch and the edge of the eight-car pileup that had involved a garbage truck that had pushed the collection of cars in front of it to a stop like a log jam.

He drove to a gas station and checked the pumps—but, of course, they didn’t work. He didn’t think gas would be a problem for his car because there were so many vehicles parked in front of houses and businesses with gas still in the tanks. He would just need to siphon it out. How long did gas stay good?

He entered the gas station store and found nine more piles of clothes in the aisles and two more piles behind the counter. He grabbed a few cases of sodas and beer from the warm coolers and hauled them back out to his vehicle.

After the stop at the gas station, he checked a few more businesses, but they were all the same—piles of clothing dotting the aisles, entryways, vehicles, parking lots. He found jewelry among the clothes: watches, rings, necklaces. He found other objects among the piles of clothes: fillings from teeth, a fake hip, and one contraption that Jeff guessed might be a pacemaker. He found pocket knives, keys, wallets, combs, and loose change and bills. He found a small handgun still stuffed snuggly down into what looked like an ankle holster. He even found an ankle bracelet for someone on house arrest. He found cell phones. The phones were turned on, but many of the batteries were already low or dead. And there was no signal on any of them, so he couldn’t have called anyone. He tried a landline in a few of the businesses, but there was no dial tone.

He drove back home.

DAY SEVEN:

The initial shock was over, and a sense of grim acceptance and survival had kicked in. He had taken out the food from the pantry and stacked the items on the counter. He kept everything he could salvage and rationed it out. Fruits, fresh veggies, and refrigerated foods like cold cuts and eggs would have to be eaten first. The bread and cheese would last a little longer. And he would save the canned and boxed foods for last. Anything he suspected that might have spoiled he dumped into a big black garbage bag—he couldn’t risk getting sick.

Running out of food and liquids to drink didn’t seem like it was going to be a problem in the near future. He probably had enough canned and boxed food and bottled drinks to last him a year just in his own neighborhood. He could take his time collecting the supplies; he didn’t have to worry about anyone coming to raid his stash because apparently he was the last person on Earth.

He spent a few days raiding houses around his neighborhood. He gathered a few handheld can openers, a small ax (to break into doors and windows), flashlights, and all the batteries, matches, and candles that he could find. It got pitch-black at night, and it was eerie sitting in his little sphere of flickering candlelight in the darkness. He used his wife’s gardening wagon to collect the supplies and bring them back to his house. He didn’t want to use his Chevy or his wife’s car—he wanted to conserve the gas for now.

For what? his mind whispered. You think you’re going somewhere anytime soon? You got traveling plans or something?

Jeff tried not to listen to the voice in his head, but it was becoming louder and more and more difficult to ignore.

He was thinking about traveling eventually. Maybe what had happened here to these people, whatever it was, hadn’t happened everywhere. It was a slim hope, but at least it was a hope.

Cheryl would’ve fainted if she could see the house now. The kitchen was stocked with canned and boxed foods. The pantry was packed full, and most of the counter space was taken up with the food. He had moved all of the furniture to the side in the guest bedroom/office for more boxes and cans of supplies. The workout room held all of the unopened and drinkable liquids he could find: bottled water, bottles and cans of beer and sodas, unopened juices, bottles of liquor.

He had a stock of dry goods in the other bedroom: stacks of sugar and flour (even though he didn’t know what the hell he would make with these), potato chips and snacks, unopened breads and rolls, unopened jars of peanut butter and jelly, boxes of crackers, jars of vitamin supplements, canned tuna and sardines, canned corned beef hash and Spam, soups, snack cakes, green beans, fruit cocktail, anything he could find.

He grabbed anything else he thought might be useful: medicines, bandages, scissors, first-aid kits, creams, extra toothpaste, soap, and dishwashing liquid.

He wasn’t much of a reader, but he had collected a pile of books over the last few days. He spent a lot of time reading now, even by candlelight at night. He started with books that might give him some kind of clue as to what had happened. The Bible and some other books about something called the Rapture were his first choices. He hadn’t known much about the Rapture and Judgment Day—he’d only had a vague idea about it, but he’d learned a lot so far from these books.

But this couldn’t be the Rapture, could it? Had God taken all of his flock up to Heaven and left only him on Earth? Was he the only sinner left? The only non-righteous sinner who hadn’t accepted Christ as his Savior? That couldn’t be right. He knew Cheryl had said many times that she didn’t believe in a god, that she needed more proof. So why would God take her up to Heaven and not him? And there were other people of different religions, even right here in his own neighborhood. There had to be some people who believed in Hinduism or Buddhism, and according to the books he’d read recently, they would not be swept up into the Rapture.

No, Jeff had to rule out the Rapture at this time of possible explanations to what had happened.

Dreams and hallucinations were ruled out next, but not the possibility that he had suffered some kind of stroke or accident, and that he was in a coma at this very moment with Cheryl at his bedside begging him to come back to her. If it was true that he was in a coma, then he wasn’t sure how he could get back to her and his former life. But he would try every night when he laid down to go to sleep. He prayed and did any kind of mental exercise he could think of, but every time he woke up he was still here and no one else was around.

The next item on his list was aliens. Maybe some kind of alien invasion had happened, and he had snoozed as they vaporized every living thing so they could walk along the Earth freely to ravage our resources. This theory could be possible, as frightening as it was. The idea of some strange alien creatures sneaking up behind him in the darkness while he huddled in front of his candles reading his books scared the shit out of him. And what could he do if he saw them? Run? He had to admit that so far he hadn’t seen any evidence of aliens, no spaceships in the sky. He had looked—he had a habit of watching the sky now when he was outside, paying attention, waiting for some kind of aircraft in the sky, some kind of sign that there were some other humans still left on this planet.

But he hadn’t seen any aircraft in the sky—human or alien.

If aliens had caused “this,” whatever this was, then the question that bothered him the most was why every living thing had been vaporized except him? How had he escaped the meltdown? Why had they overlooked him? It just didn’t make any sense, and it hurt his head to think about it too long. Thinking about being the last living thing on Earth caused a panic attack to build up inside of him. He wanted to run screaming from his house in blind terror when the panic attacks came, run screaming down the street. But he never did. He forced himself to calm down when the panic came. Where would he run to anyway? What could he do? So he would just wait for a little while until the anxiety attack left him with a hollow feeling of dread inside, and then he would drink some alcohol to calm down.

At least he had plenty of alcohol.

DAY NINE:

Jeff woke up in near-perfect darkness on the couch in his living room. Only one candle was struggling to stay lit.

A noise had woken him up.

He sat up quickly in the dark. A noise? Was someone outside? Or something? An animal? Some other living thing besides himself?

As he sat up, for the briefest of moments, he thought he’d been dreaming this whole thing, dreaming that everyone had disappeared on the planet and that he was the last living thing alive. He thought he’d fallen asleep on the couch after maybe he and Cheryl had had a fight, and then he’d had this crazy dream that seemed to last forever.

And now he thought he heard Cheryl whispering to him from the bedroom.

“Jeff, come to bed.”

It was something she said when he fell asleep on the couch with the TV on. She would stand over him in her woolen pajamas and colorful socks, and he would jump awake when he realized that she was standing over him.

“Come on,” she would say. “Come to bed.”

She always claimed she couldn’t sleep if he wasn’t in bed beside her.

Jeff looked around at the dark living room. Most of the flickering candles had blown out at some time during the night—there was only that one candle left, doing its best to push the darkness back. In the meager light he saw the cases of beverages and stacks of food and supplies piled up around the room, and then his heart sank. This hadn’t been some kind of nightmare. It was all real. He was really here in his own dark house, abandoned by everyone else in the world.

But Cheryl’s voice had been so real.

“Jeff . . .”

He jumped to his feet. He had definitely heard her voice this time. It was coming from their bedroom. His heart leapt into his throat and seemed to stop for a few seconds, and then it jackhammered in his chest like it was trying to find the right rhythm again. His legs went weak, and his mind teetered between hope that Cheryl’s voice was real and terror that it was real because he’d seen Cheryl’s wool pajamas laid out on the bed underneath the covers with her light blue panties still inside of them and the socks at the ends of the pants legs.

“Come back to bed, Jeff.”

The whisper was louder this time. It was real. Jeff glanced at the last flickering candle, and he thought about re-lighting the other ones. Instead, he grabbed the flashlight from the floor and turned it on. He hated to waste the batteries, but he considered this an emergency.

“Jeff . . . please . . . I can’t sleep in here without you . . .” Even though the double doors to their bedroom were closed, he could hear her whispered words clearly from beyond the doors.

Jeff got up from the couch and walked through the darkness to the double doors that led to their bedroom. The shaft of light from his flashlight knifed through the darkness along the way.

When he got to the doors, he put his hand on the doorknob, ready to fling the door open. But he hesitated. The whispering from the bedroom had stopped—almost like she was waiting for him to enter. He clenched the doorknob, turned it, and pushed the door open. He stood in the doorway, in front of the yawning mouth of darkness, the flashlight gripped in his trembling hand, the light beam wavering. But in the small circle of light in front of him he could only see part of Cheryl’s closet. The master bathroom was off to the right, and their bedroom was off to the left.

“Cheryl,” he said into the darkness. He felt stupid calling his wife’s name like all of this was real, like she could really be here in the bedroom just because he’d spoken her name aloud. He needed to get a grip on himself. She wasn’t here. He had just woken up from some kind of dream, and the whispers he’d heard were remnants of the fading dream as he struggled to wake up.

Jeff entered their bedroom, taking five steps, and then he immediately froze. He heard a rustling noise deep in the bedroom. The sound came from their bed. It sounded like clothing rustling against the sheets and covers. Something was moving around in the darkness . . . coming closer.

He took another step forward. He brought his flashlight up and aimed it at their bed across the room. He saw someone sitting on the edge of the bed, washed in the light from his flashlight beam . . . an emaciated person wearing Cheryl’s pajamas.

That thing couldn’t be Cheryl. That was some kind of dead thing on their bed, something that had crawled its way out of a grave, a skeletal form with strings of rotting flesh hanging down from its face and limbs. But the eyes—they were her eyes. The thing’s mouth opened wide, the lower jaw hanging down loosely. Things were moving around deep inside her mouth . . . some kind of tiny worms wriggling around in there.

“Jeff,” the thing whispered at him as it struggled to stand up beside the bed. And it was definitely Cheryl’s voice he heard now. As she got to her feet, he saw that her flesh was moving on her skeletal frame, growing and forming into something that wasn’t human anymore.

“Come back to bed with me,” the thing moaned and stumbled forward. “I can’t sleep without youuu . . .”

The thing tripped as it took another step forward and collapsed down onto the carpet with a mushy thump. It began to crawl towards him, leaving a dark trail of filth behind it.

Jeff snapped awake on the couch. He jumped to his feet and grabbed the flashlight from the floor. For a moment he had a terrible sense of déjà-vu. He looked around at the barely-lit room; the candlelight created a weird flickering light that made the shadows dance at the edges of the family room. He held the flashlight in his hand like a weapon, and he listened closely; he listened for anyone whispering from their bedroom, inviting him to come back to bed.

But he didn’t hear anything except his own heavy breathing.

He sat back down on the couch and realized that his entire body was trembling with fear and adrenaline. He tried to command his body to stop shaking, telling himself that it had just been a nightmare—the worst one he’d ever had—but a nightmare just the same. But he couldn’t get himself to stop shaking.

Jeff stayed awake until mid-morning, and then he caught another hour of dreamless sleep. He had planned on making another trip to the gas station in the afternoon to stock up on more supplies. He didn’t really need more supplies; it was just something to do.

But he never went. He ended up staying at home.

DAY FOURTEEN:

Jeff had made the decision to leave his home.

There were two reasons he had decided to leave, and the second one was a doozy. The first reason he wanted to leave was because he couldn’t stay in this house anymore. Day turned to night and night turned back to another day of rearranging his stash of food and supplies, reading, napping, drinking warm beers, and monitoring the radio. He would slowly spin the dial back and forth across the FM and AM bands, listening, his ear close to the speaker, hoping to hear a human voice somewhere in that crackling static.

But he never heard any voices.

He had started a journal. He’d never been much of a writer, but it felt good to jot things down, leaving behind some kind of record or log that he’d been here. For who to find? Who was going to be here after he was gone? Who was going to ever know he was here? But he didn’t let those thoughts dissuade him from writing. Those kinds of thoughts, if dwelled upon too long, led to panic, which led eventually to hopeless despair, which led to much more drinking, which led to passing out, which led to waking up in the darkness with the cold hand of fear squeezing his heart.

But now, as he sat in his living room among his sheets and pillows on the couch with the burnt-out candles all around him and the radio up on its Pedestal Of Hope in front of his stacks and stacks of food and drinks, he wanted to leave this nest he had built over the last few weeks. He wanted to search other places farther away from his neighborhood. He could always come back here if he didn’t find anyone else. His stash would still be here, untouched by humans or animals or bugs.

He had to search. He had to at least try. He couldn’t accept that he was the last living thing in the world. If it was aliens that had wiped life out overnight, then why weren’t they rummaging the Earth for resources? Why weren’t their scout ships cruising the gray skies above? And if this was the Rapture, then there would have to be others somewhere. At the very least there would have to be an Antichrist according to all of the books he’d read.

And if he was really in a coma, then what could he do about it anyway? If this was all some kind of vivid dream he was living through, then at least he still had free will enough to choose to leave his home.

There was always the possibility that he was dead, and this was Hell. But he didn’t like to think about that idea too much.

Besides, he was going crazy in this house. At least getting out and searching for other people would make him feel a little better. He needed to do something. He had already pillaged his whole neighborhood and the small gas station down the street as much as he could. He had siphoned gasoline out of the cars and trucks in the driveways and stored it in as many gas cans as he could find. He hated siphoning, and he hadn’t been very good at it at first. But as with other skills, he’d gotten better and better as time went by.

He couldn’t forget about the nightmares.

They hadn’t gone away. He was still dreaming of Cheryl in the bedroom, a wasted version of her, some dead thing that crawled towards him, begging him to come back to bed with her because she couldn’t sleep by herself. If anything, the dreams had gotten worse. Sometimes he dreamed that she’d crawled all the way out of the bedroom and was standing over him while he slept on the couch.

Sometimes he woke up screaming.

He started sleeping more in the daytime and staying awake at night so at least he wouldn’t wake up in the darkness, swatting at the rotting dead thing that used to be his wife standing next to his couch. At least in the daylight he could recover more quickly from the nightmare. Maybe he would still have the nightmares after he left his house, but at least he would know that Cheryl’s pajamas would still be here in their bedroom, laid out on the bed underneath the covers, and she wouldn’t be able to follow him.

The second reason he wanted to leave, the reason that gave him hope, was that he’d seen something. The last time he’d been at the gas station he’d seen a blur of movement in the brush at the other end of the parking area; it was a small dark shape running away. He hadn’t gotten a good look at the thing, but he still believed it was a cat, a frightened cat bolting back into the brush.

He had spent a few minutes exploring the brush and grass, calling for the cat. He even tore open a bag of cat food and poured the food onto a paper plate. Still no luck. Maybe it hadn’t been a cat. Maybe it had been a raccoon. Or a big rat. Or maybe it hadn’t been anything at all. Maybe it had just been his imagination (like Cheryl when she called to him from their bedroom).

It could’ve been his imagination, but he left the plate of cat food and the open bag beside it just in case the cat had been real. Or the raccoon or rat. Whatever it was, at least it would have some easy food for a little while.

Jeff wasn’t sure if what he’d seen had been real, but he chose to believe it was. Why not? It gave him some hope, and it gave him some sense of purpose. If there was a cat around here (or even a rat), then that meant there were other living things here besides himself; maybe very few living beings, but there had to be others somewhere. He decided right then and there to pack up his vehicle and drive farther away from his house and explore the city.

An hour later he was loading up his Chevy Equinox. He filled the back with camping supplies including a small grill he’d found and some charcoal and lighter fluid, along with bricks to build a fire pit and wood he’d found in someone’s fireplace for a campfire. He had four extra plastic cans of gasoline and two siphoning hoses. He threw a duffel bag of extra clothes and an extra pair of hiking boots in the back seat. He brought two pillows, two blankets, two bedsheets, and a sleeping bag and foam pad. He had a pile of paperback books and an assortment of CDs and cassette tapes. He crammed in two cardboard boxes of canned and boxed food in the back along with the gas and camping supplies. He included two folding lawn chairs. He brought along a toolbox filled with tools and a few extra parts for his truck: hoses, belts, and a tire plug kit. He also stacked up a few cases of water and sodas. And of course he couldn’t forget the alcohol—six cases of beer and four bottles of liquor—something to help chase those bad dreams away at night. The last thing he packed into his truck was a handgun and two boxes of ammo that he’d found four houses down from his. He tucked it underneath the driver’s seat. He wasn’t sure why he was bringing a gun, but he felt like it was better to be safe than sorry.

He was pretty sure he had everything he needed, but he could always stop at any store along the way to get anything else if supplies ran low. At the last moment he pillaged his closest neighbor’s house for dog food and cat food. They had a small dog and two cats. He wanted to have some food in case he came across another animal. He still couldn’t get the idea out of his head that there was something else alive here with him on this now barren planet, and the thought of it brought a smile to his face.

Jeff drove down State Road 54 towards Bruce B. Downs Boulevard, which led south into Tampa. But first he pulled into the car dealership near their subdivision and parked. He went inside the building and looked around until he found sets of keys. He grabbed a bunch of keys and went out to the parking lot, pressing the buttons on the fobs until the headlights of the vehicles lit up. And then he found the one he wanted . . . a brand new Jaguar.

It was a beauty. Something he couldn’t have ever afforded . . . a luxury he never could’ve had on his salary. And now he could just drive it right off the lot. Who was going to stop him?

“I’ll be back with it in a moment,” he told the imaginary salesperson.

The car roared to life when he turned the key, the motor rumbling with power. He gunned the motor a few times, and then he adjusted the seat, the rearview mirror, and slipped his seatbelt on. He turned on the radio, pressing a few of the preprogrammed buttons, but all he got was static. He had a stack of CDs in his SUV. He grabbed AC/DC and slid it in. The thrum of guitars and beat of the drums blasted out of the speakers.

Jeff stomped the gas pedal down, and the Jaguar’s rear end fishtailed, sliding, almost doing a complete donut. He straightened the wheel and sped towards the exit out onto State Road 54, hitting the brakes and sliding sideways, out of control for a moment. He raced down the three-lane street, swerving in and out of vehicles parked all over the road, their seats draped with clothing, jewelry, cell phones, belt buckles, a few pacemakers and hip implants here and there.

A few miles down the road, Jeff turned around. He drove back towards the car lot, darting in and out of the lines of vehicles, whooping with delight, driving faster and faster until he miscalculated.

“Oh Shit!”

Jeff slammed the front of the Jaguar into the side of a pickup truck, everything coming to an abrupt halt. The airbag exploded in front of him in a millisecond, knocking him back into the seat. It felt like his nose was broken and he felt a sharp pain right in the middle of his forehead.

Everything was still. The CD had skipped, starting over at the beginning of the song. He turned the music all the way down. He sat there for a moment, mentally checking himself. Nothing seemed to be broken. Even his nose was okay he guessed, just a little bloody. He lifted his hands up in front of him in the powder floating in the air from the exploded airbag and looked at his fingers, wiggling them.

And then he began to laugh.

He couldn’t stop laughing. He unbuckled his seatbelt and ejected the CD from the stereo. The Jaguar’s engine was still rumbling, but he let it run. Wisps of smoke were pouring up from the front of the car. He laughed harder at that.

You could’ve killed yourself.

He laughed even harder, so hard he could barely catch his breath.

“You could’ve paralyzed yourself, you stupid son of a bitch,” he said through his laughter. “You could’ve been stuck inside that fucking car until you died.”

Hilarious. Maimed. Death. A way out of this dead world . . . it was just too funny.

After he stopped laughing he began trembling. Just nerves, just the shock wearing off and the weight of what could’ve happened suddenly leaning down on him.

His car crash wasn’t too far away from the dealership, and he walked down the three lane road that was littered with vehicles.

“I’ve decided not to buy the Jaguar,” he told the invisible salesperson as he got back into his SUV and started it up. He could’ve taken another vehicle while he was at the car lot, but he didn’t feel like moving everything he had packed. It was late in the afternoon, and he wanted to find a place to camp for the night.

He ended up camping out at the edge of a department store parking lot. He found an area that was free of cars and trucks, and he started a campfire right there on the pavement. He laid out his sleeping bag and foam pad for later. He decided not to bring out his radio tonight. He sat in his lawn chair and ate a dinner of canned foods cooked over the open fire.

It was quiet after the fire died down. He had some wood he’d cut up with his hand ax, and he used most of it to keep the fire going through the night. He drank beer after beer, watching the fire until he drifted off to sleep near dawn.

Before going to sleep, he laid out two small piles of dog and cat food near the edge of his “camp.” He didn’t know if it would attract an animal, but he could hope.

DAY SIXTEEN:

Jeff nearly wrecked his Chevy Equinox as he veered close to a parked car to avoid the dog in the middle of the road. He stomped his foot down on the brake pedal, and the tires screeched in the silent, stale air as his truck slid down the road to a stop right next to a golden retriever that stared at him blankly, his tongue hanging out of his mouth. The dog looked like he was smiling.

Jeff jumped out of his SUV and stood there for a moment. He thought the dog might run off like the cat he’d seen a few days ago. He never thought about the dog attacking him, not this dog. No, he could tell that this dog was friendly. This dog was a family dog. He even had a collar with a little metal tag hanging from it.

“Come here, boy,” Jeff said.

The dog ducked his head and took a few steps forward. He was wagging his tail and whining a little.

“It’s okay,” Jeff whispered. “Come on, boy.” He patted his leg.

The dog took another tentative step forward.

“Hold on a second,” Jeff said. He reached inside his SUV and shut off the engine. The world was deathly silent once again. He hurried to the back of the Chevy and grabbed the bag of dog food. He had to hurry; he was afraid the dog would take off.

He turned around with the bag of food in his hand and the dog was already there, waiting.

Jeff smiled. “Good boy.”

The dog whined and sat down, his tail thumping on the asphalt. He licked his chops, his eyes on the bag of dog food in Jeff’s hand.

“You know what this is, don’t you?”

The dog whined again and cocked his head a little.

“Okay, hold on, boy. Let me find a bowl.” Jeff grabbed a plastic bowl and poured the hard dog food into it. Then he set the bowl down on the pavement and backed away.

The dog tore into the food, chomping it down. The food was gone in a few minutes.

“You were hungry,” Jeff said. Of course the dog was hungry. How much food had he found since . . . since whatever had happened? The dog might not be as resourceful as the cat he’d seen (and now he was certain that he’d seen that cat—he wasn’t going completely crazy just yet).

Jeff gave the dog some more food and then some water. Jeff petted the dog after he was finished with his meal. He had a friend now. He checked the metal tag on the collar and read the name: Winston. There was also an address and a phone number to contact in case the dog got lost.

“Winston?” Jeff said.

The dog’s ears perked up.

“What kind of name is that? Like Winston Churchill?”

The dog panted, wagging his tail.

“I guess you like it,” Jeff said. He patted his leg. “Come on, Winston. You want to come with me?”

Winston followed Jeff to the passenger door. He opened the door, and the dog jumped right inside.

“I guess you’re ready to go with me on my exploration. You’ll be my co-pilot.”

Winston panted and seemed to smile at the idea.

A few hours later, after navigating through the jammed-up cars on the road, Jeff drove along a sidewalk until he came to a side street that led to a massive collection of buildings—a hospital.

“Let’s see what we can find in there,” Jeff said.

Winston’s ears perked up.

Jeff found that he was talking out loud a lot now that Winston was with him. Before, he had felt kind of odd talking to himself even though no one else was around to hear him. But now, it was like he had a reason to talk. And Winston seemed to like it.

He pulled over on a small street between one of the main hospital buildings and a six story parking garage. The parking lots were half filled with cars, and a few cars were stalled in the roads. Jeff didn’t need to bother looking in those vehicles—he knew he would only find the clothes and any other inanimate objects left behind.

Jeff got out of his SUV, and Winston scampered out after him. “We should stock up on some medical supplies while we’re here,” Jeff told Winston. He looked at the parking garage. Maybe he would walk up there to the top and look around. But the hospital building was four stories, and that was high enough for him to have a good look around.

He grabbed a flashlight and a bottle of water and walked towards the entrance. He pushed the glass doors open, and they stayed open. He walked through the massive lobby, past the reception desk where piles of clothes lay on the chairs behind the counter. He passed the elevators and found a set of stairs beyond a metal door with a push bar. He pushed the door open and was met with pitch-black darkness. He turned his flashlight on, and the beam barely penetrated the darkness. He entered the large stairwell, holding the door open so Winston could follow him inside.

The door slammed shut behind him, completely shutting out the light from the lobby, leaving him and Winston in the darkness with only the beam of light.

What if the door automatically locked?

Jeff’s heart hammered in his chest. A cold sweat broke out, prickling his skin. How could he be so stupid? He pulled on the door, and it opened. He breathed out a sigh of relief. He could imagine himself trapped inside the stairwell. There was no reason to believe the doors would lock, but he couldn’t be sure. He had to be careful. Winston followed him back inside the lobby. Jeff found a bulky chair to wedge the door open. He knew the door wasn’t going to lock, but having the chair there made him feel better.

They entered the stairwell again, and the splash of sunlight from the lobby made walking up the first set of stairs much easier. The sunlight even managed to reach all the way up to the second level.

Jeff walked around the second level of the hospital, passing room after room of hospital gowns spread out underneath the sheets on the hospital beds. Equipment stood quiet. The rooms were murky even in the daylight. A set of nurse’s scrubs and a pair of Crocs were piled up on the floor in front of a cart with some kind of machine on it that Jeff couldn’t name. He hated hospitals, and being in this hospital was spookier than he thought it would be.

Winston sniffed at the clothes on the floor, taking his time and really smelling them. If a dog could look confused about a scent he was picking up, then this would be that look. Maybe Winston was picking up some kind of strange smells . . . maybe it was the scent of whatever force or occurrence had made all of the living things disappear; well, most of them anyway. Or maybe it was the smell of nothing, the complete nothingness that was bothering the dog.

“Come on, boy,” Jeff said as he walked back to the stairwell.

They ventured up to the top floor and then out onto the roof. Once again, Jeff found a big chair to keep the door to the roof propped open. He couldn’t tell if the roof door would automatically lock, and he didn’t want to take any chances. He could imagine him and Winston dying on the rooftop of dehydration, screaming for help out to a dead world all around them.

Moments later he stood at the edge of the roof, leaning against a waist-high block wall. He stared out at the world that was so quiet and still. The sky was hazy, almost like there was smoke in the air, but he didn’t smell any smoke. He didn’t smell anything, and he didn’t taste anything, just the stale air. Clouds drifted by lazily in the pale blue sky. Everything was muted, not as vibrant as he remembered. It was like looking at everything through a filter or a film. He looked all around them from this height, searching for signs of smoke or any other sign of life. But there was nothing.

He wondered if there could be another person out there. Or a few of them. He’d seen a cat so far, and now he had Winston. If they and he had somehow survived whatever had happened, then there had to be other living beings. They had to be around somewhere. But they could be a county away, or a state away, or even in another country. He hadn’t seen a single bird yet or a squirrel or even any insects, but the odds were that there were other living things around. Had to be.

Jeff went back down the dark stairwell, passing the fourth and then the third floors. He was now deep in the darkness of the stairwell with only his flashlight to guide his way. He had found some medical supplies on the upper floors for the first aid kit that he was building: bandages, antibiotics, medical tools, and ten bottles of various kinds of painkillers. He shoved everything into a duffel bag he’d found. A morbid thought occurred to him as he collected the painkillers. He could take a whole bottle of them if things got too bad; he could just take a whole bottle of them and slip away.

But what about Winston? He couldn’t leave Winston trapped here in this dead world by himself. Could he take Winston with him? Could he kill the dog if he had to?

Jeff didn’t want to think about that. It hadn’t gotten that bad yet.

As he moved carefully down the concrete steps, he couldn’t help thinking of his wife again. He could imagine Cheryl here in the darkness, shuffling down the steps to him.

“I can’t sleep without youuuu . . .”

She isn’t here! Nobody’s here!

Winston bolted down the steps, waiting on the landing below for Jeff, wagging his tail.

They got back down to the lobby and left the hospital building. He decided not to go up into the parking garage—he’d already been on top of the hospital and there was nothing to see. Besides, he was getting tired. He just wanted to move on away from this hospital ghost town and find a place to camp.

When they got to the truck, Jeff stopped in his tracks. The rear hatch was open.

Had he left the hatch open?

He didn’t think he had. He glanced around as he walked towards his SUV. Winston raced across the pavement to the back of the truck and jumped up onto it, his front paws on the floor of the back as he sniffed at the boxes inside, excited about something.

“What is it, boy?” Jeff called out as he approached the truck with the duffel bag in his hands.

Winston barked once as if calling Jeff forward, as if telling him to hurry. He was panting, and he actually looked happy.

“What is it?” Jeff asked again as he got to the back of the truck—and then he saw it. Someone had been here. Someone had gone through his stuff, maybe even taken some of it. He couldn’t be sure if some things had been taken; he hadn’t kept a strict inventory because he could always get more canned and boxed foods in any of the stores or the houses along the way. But it seemed like something might’ve been taken. His stuff had definitely been rummaged through.

By who? An animal? No, what kind of animal could’ve carried off cans and boxes of food and drinks? No, this was a person. Or maybe more than one person.

Were they friendly?

They could be. But then again, maybe they weren’t. If they were friendly, then why hadn’t they waited by his truck for him to return? Were they wondering if he was friendly, too? Were they waiting somewhere in the shadows that had grown long in the late afternoon? Were they watching him, waiting to see how he would react?

Then he thought about the gun underneath the driver’s seat.

“Shit!” Jeff said and ran for the driver’s door.

Winston was excited, barking and chasing him.

Jeff opened the door and reached underneath the seat. The gun was gone. The person had obviously searched his vehicle pretty thoroughly.

He turned around and looked at the tall buildings all around him.

“You can come out!” he called out. “I won’t hurt you!”

I can’t hurt you now that you have my gun. And please don’t hurt me, either.

“I’ve got plenty of food!” Jeff yelled. His voice echoed back to him in the valley between the hospital buildings and parking garage that was like a little city.

Shit, why had he left his gun in the truck? Why hadn’t he taken it with him? He needed to start being more careful.

Winston seemed ecstatic that he had smelled another living person. He jumped around in a little circle, barking.

“What should we do, Winston?”

Bark.

They could camp here near the hospital and wait for this person to come out of the darkness with his own gun aimed at him. The person was obviously waiting for the cover of night.

Or they could leave.

Jeff decided to stay.

Hours later, as the world grew dark, Jeff sat in front of the small campfire he’d built inside the ring of bricks he’d brought with him. He played one of the CDs on his boom box radio. He decided on Phil Collins, something upbeat, yet not threatening. The music drifted out into the night air. He hated to waste the batteries in the boom box, but he felt that this could be a special occasion.

He cooked dinner on his little grill. He couldn’t grill a steak—those days were long gone now—so he settled for a concocted meal of canned Vienna sausages and a mixture of canned corned beef hash, corn, and green beans. He had cracked open and drank a few warm beers. He had plenty more cans of beer for his visitor if that person ever decided to show up. He hoped the food, drinks, and music would be a peace offering to whoever had stolen his gun.

And that person could be watching him right now, planning to kill him, aiming the stolen gun right at him.

Would that be so bad? He had just been contemplating suicide with the pain pills only hours earlier, debating what he would do with Winston. Well, this person might make that decision for him now. He just hoped it would be a headshot and not a wound that he would suffer with for days before dying.

Then another even more chilling thought came to Jeff. What if this wasn’t a person at all? What if it was one of the alien things that had killed off almost every living thing on Earth?

No, that couldn’t be right, either. If it was one of those things, whatever they were, then they would’ve just zapped him out of his clothes right then and there like they’d done to everyone else. No, this was a person, another human being—it had to be.

It only took another hour for the person to walk out of the darkness.

Jeff selected another CD to play—The Rolling Stones this time—while he started on his seventh beer. He was feeling pretty light-headed. Why not go through the rest of his life drunk? Why bother caring now? He had eaten a few of the fried Vienna sausages and the mixture of corned beef hash, corn, and green beans. There was still plenty left for his visitor.

“Hello?” a female voice said from the darkness, startling him. She sounded closer than he would’ve expected.

Jeff froze. He hadn’t even been on guard.

“I’ve got your gun,” the woman said.

“I know,” Jeff answered.

“I’m going to come over to the fire.”

“Please,” Jeff said. “Please, I won’t hurt you.” He felt tears stinging his eyes just at the sound of her voice. The beer wasn’t helping him control his emotions very much. He didn’t want his first meeting with another human being to go like this. He didn’t want her first vision of him to be a gushing mess.

The woman walked towards him, materializing out of the black night all around them. She was maybe in her early thirties with a slim and athletic build. Her long dark hair was a contrast to her pale skin. She wore jeans, sneakers, and a thin hoodie-type sweatshirt. She had a small backpack on, and she held his gun in her hand, aimed down at the ground as she walked. She didn’t seem comfortable with the weapon, and he doubted that she had ever fired one before. Not that Jeff was any kind of an expert, either.

Winston barked, his tail thumping on the ground, and then he whined.

“He’s okay,” Jeff told the woman as he wiped away at his tears and sniffled. Then he laughed without even realizing he was going to do it. “He won’t bite. He’s . . . he’s real friendly. His name’s Winston.”

The woman stood a few feet away from the fire and stared at him and Winston.

“Do you want to meet him?” Jeff asked, crying harder. He nudged Winston. “Go on, boy. It’s okay.”

Winston bolted away and slinked up towards the woman, his head held low.

She crouched down and held out her empty hand to him. Winston licked her hand, and she petted him. He whined and wagged his tail, snuggling up to her.

“I’m sorry,” Jeff said, wiping at his eyes. “I don’t mean to cry . . . it’s just . . .”

The woman started crying too. She nodded and smiled like she understood exactly what he was feeling.

“Please,” Jeff said. “Do you want something to eat? I made some Vienna sausages, and corned beef hash and veggies. It’s an end-of-the-world recipe I created. I might write a cookbook, but all of the recipes will revolve around canned goods.”

The woman snorted out a laugh. “Sounds good.”

Jeff made the woman a plate of food and handed it to her, still being cautious, trying not to spook her.

The woman took the plate and sat down in the lawn chair at the other side of the campfire that Jeff had set up for her. She set the gun down next to her on the pavement.

“You can keep that gun if you want to,” he told her. “I don’t know why I brought it. I guess in case I came across whatever had done . . . whatever things did all of this.”

The woman nodded. She ate a bite of the hash and vegetable mixture. “I don’t blame you. I have a gun that I found. I guess it’s a good idea.”

“My name’s Jeff.” He paused for a second, taking a breath. “God, it’s so good to see someone else.”

“At least you’ve had some company,” the woman said and ruffled Winston’s fur. He had remained by her side the whole time, watching her eat.

“Quit begging, Winston,” Jeff said. “I just found him earlier today. I was alone before that. What’s your name?” He realized he was rambling again.

“Stephanie.”

“Hi, Stephanie.”

They talked well into the night, growing more and more comfortable with each other. She’d been married like Jeff had, but unlike Jeff, she had lost children to whatever had happened. She lived in Brandon, a suburb of Tampa, and she’d been working her way north as Jeff had been working his way south. She hadn’t seen any other signs of life.

“What do you think did this?” Stephanie asked Jeff.

“I don’t know,” Jeff answered. He went over the theories he’d come up with, and they pretty much matched her theories. They both thought some kind of aliens or some strange kind of a natural occurrence were the most likely scenarios.

“But we’ve been left alive,” Jeff said. “And Winston. And the cat I saw. That means there has to be more of us somewhere.”

“Why do you think we were . . .” Stephanie hesitated like she was searching for the right word. “Why do you think we were spared?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think there’s anything special about us.”

“Maybe the aliens had to wipe out all lifeforms before they came to this planet,” Stephanie said. “But maybe it doesn’t kill a hundred percent. Maybe there are always stragglers. Maybe they’re not even here yet. Maybe they’re still on their way, and they sent like some kind of gamma ray burst or something so this world could be ready for them, everything wiped out so they could have our planet for themselves.”

Yeah, that’s not a comforting thought.

DAY SEVENTEEN:

The next morning Jeff drove Stephanie to her car, and they found room for her stuff in his SUV.

They discussed what to do now as Jeff drove.

Jeff shrugged. “Just survive, I guess.”

“We should try to find some others,” she suggested.

It would be winter soon, Jeff told her. He suggested they find a place to stay through the winter and then start their search.

She seemed fine with that.

They would need to find a house with a fireplace, maybe several of them, for heat. Even though Florida could have some cold nights in the winter, at least they wouldn’t be in any real danger of freezing to death. And who knew? Maybe the weather wouldn’t even turn cold. From what Jeff had seen so far, it didn’t seem like the weather changed much. Now that he thought about it, he hadn’t remembered it raining since this thing had happened, whatever it was. And Stephanie hadn’t seen any rain, either. Maybe the aliens, or whatever they were, had done something to the Earth, something to the weather system. Maybe they were terraforming Earth before they got here as Stephanie had suggested last night.

They headed back up north the way Jeff had come from because the traffic wasn’t as jammed up as it was down in Tampa. They got back onto State Road 54 for a few miles, and then they drove farther north into Pasco County on another road.

They stopped and made camp near a plaza of shops in case they needed to look for anything else. Jeff started a campfire, and they made an early dinner as the sun dipped lower towards the horizon. The sky was still hazy and the wind was calm.

After they ate, Jeff stood up, stretching. “I’m going to go look around,” he told her. “See if I can find anything useful. You want to come?”

Stephanie shook her head no, and then she stretched out on the sleeping bag. “I haven’t slept much in the last few weeks.”

Jeff knew what that was like. “Come on, Winston,” he said.

Winston followed happily.

Twenty minutes later Jeff had walked down to the end of the plaza, checking out each shop. Some of the stores were kind of useless: an appliance store and a furniture shop. But he picked up a few things here and there. He didn’t really need much, but he knew Stephanie was tired, and he wanted to give her some time to rest. He didn’t want to hover over her or scare her in any way.

Winston seemed happy enough to sniff at everything, but it still looked like he was bothered by the lack of scents he was picking up.

“I know, Winston,” Jeff said. “It’s a brand new world. What can we do but try to survive?”

It was getting close to dusk now, and it was time to get back to camp.

He left the last store and stopped at the window, staring at a piece of paper taped to the glass. He stared at what was on the paper for a long time—it was the answer to what had happened to everything. Winston sat down beside him, panting happily, waiting patiently.

Jeff carefully peeled the tape back at the corners and took the paper off of the window. He folded it up neatly with his trembling hands and stuffed the square of paper down into his pocket.

Should he show it to Stephanie?

Not yet. He swore to himself that he would show it to her soon, but not yet.

DAY TWENTY-FIVE

Jeff and Stephanie found a mansion to stay in. It had seven bedrooms and eight bathrooms, much of that space useless now. They made their home in the living room, stacking up supplies in the family room.

Jeff made many supply runs, bringing back four gas-powered generators and fifteen electrical cords. He set one of the generators up on the back porch and covered the front of it with a piece of wood to block the noise. It was still noisy, but they got used to the sound. Jeff kind of liked the noise, a sound from the old world. He ran a thick, one hundred foot electric cord into the house and hooked it to a surge protector. From there he ran cords to lights in the living room and the appliances in the kitchen. They had a refrigerator again where they could keep their drinks cold. They had a toaster, but the bread was quickly going bad. They had a coffee maker and a stove to boil water.

He set up another generator outside the house and hooked the pool pump up to it. After shocking the pool with chlorine, it was swimmable again. It was getting a little chillier, but Jeff and Winston still got into the pool.

Jeff worked hard for a few days on the lawn, clearing away weeds and trimming back bushes from the house. Even though there didn’t seem to be much animal life left, the plant life was still growing.

In a large free-standing garage, Jeff backed out two of the vehicles and used that space to store as many cans of gasoline as he could find.

It wasn’t paradise, but Jeff and Stephanie had made a home there.

DAY THIRTY-NINE

Jeff and Stephanie grew closer, snuggling up together in bed. They had talked a lot in the last few weeks, learning so much about each other. Of course Stephanie missed her husband, her kids, and Jeff missed Cheryl, but all of that was over for them now.

That night, after making love, Jeff and Stephanie lay in bed, both of them staring up at the ceiling. They only had a few candles burning and the room felt warm and cozy.

“We should still look for others,” Stephanie said after Jeff was silent for a while. “We’ll wait until after winter is over, and then we’ll head north and look for more people.”

“Yeah,” Jeff said, turning towards her. “We’ll find some more people. I’m sure of it.”

DAY FORTY-TWO

Jeff began setting off fireworks at night. Just a few. Maybe someone would see them and come and find them. Winston was afraid of the fireworks at first, running around and barking, then hiding.

“It’s okay,” Stephanie told Winston, hugging him and comforting him.

“Someone will come,” Jeff told her. “It might take a few days, or even a few weeks, but someone will see these fireworks and come find us.”

She nodded. But maybe she was thinking the same thing he was. Would that person be friendly? They had also discussed the idea that whatever erased most living things might see these fireworks, too. But they had decided to take that chance.

DAY FIFTY-SEVEN

Jeff had gone out on a supply run. He’d taken Winston with him. Winston loved to go places. They hadn’t found much, but it didn’t hurt to stock up on more boxes and cans of food, a few more plastic cans of gasoline, and more wood for the fireplace.

When he got back, Stephanie stood in the middle of the living room. She stared at him, and she looked angry.

“What’s wrong?” Jeff asked, stopping in his tracks.

Stephanie had a folded-up piece of paper in her hand.

And Jeff knew what the paper was. She had found it. Maybe he should’ve thrown it away, but he couldn’t. He wanted to show it to her one day, but he kept putting it off, waiting until he was ready.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this?” she asked him.

Jeff didn’t know what to say. He knew this day would come. He thought he would be prepared for it. He thought he would know what to stay. But he stammered for a moment and then said nothing.

“You knew all this time?” she asked, beginning to cry. They were tears of anger and of hopelessness. “You knew and you never told me?”

“I . . . I wanted to . . .”

“What?” she snapped. “Protect me? Is that what you were about to say?”

He could only nod. It was true. Maybe he’d kept it from her because he wanted to protect her from the truth.

“You wanted to keep this from me because . . . what?” she spat out. “What? You wanted to play house? Is that it?”

“I was going to tell you,” he said, taking a step towards her.

She hadn’t stormed off yet, she hadn’t attacked him—maybe that was a good sign. But she was crying harder.

“I swear I was going to tell you,” he said in a softer voice. “You have to believe me. I could’ve thrown that paper away at any time in the last few weeks. I could’ve thrown it away, and you never would’ve known about it.”

She wiped at her eyes.

Maybe he was getting through to her.

He took a few more steps closer. He attempted a hug. She tried to pull away at first, but then she surrendered to him, crying harder.

He understood. He had wanted to cry when he’d seen the paper in the window at that plaza all those weeks ago, when he understood the truth. He gently took the paper from her hand and unfolded it, staring down at the words and the photo of Winston. Missing dog, the title declared. Reward for return.

“Everyone didn’t disappear,” Stephanie said as she cried into his shoulder. “It was only us. Everyone else is going along just fine in some kind of . . . alternate world or reality or whatever. And to them, we just disappeared.”

“I know,” Jeff whispered.

“Oh God, my kids and husband probably think I left them.”

Jeff was crying now.

“No one’s coming to find us,” she whispered. “We’re all alone here.”

“There might be others,” Jeff told her as he held her. “There’s us and Winston. And there’s that cat I saw. There might still be others.”

This was an idea that had fascinated me for some time. For a while it was just that, just an idea: a man wakes up and everybody, and every living thing, seems to have disappeared. I tried starting the story several times, but then I’d put it on the back burner over and over again. I had wrestled with the idea of turning this story into a book, but in the end I felt it was more suited as a story—a pretty long story. Much like the previous tale, this one kind of grew and grew on its own as I kept writing. But sometimes those are the most fun to write.

DOWNLOADED TO HELL

My name is Adam Romberg, and I’m going to send a man to Hell.

You may have heard of me—a tech geek who started a software company in his college dorm room. You probably don’t know much about my software or how it works. All you probably know about me is that I was a billionaire by the age of twenty-four. Most might say I have led a charmed life. I met the woman of my dreams not too long after my company IPO’d, and a year and a half later we had a baby girl together. Yes, it was a charmed life . . . a blessed life. And then four years after my daughter was born, six months ago now, it was all taken away from me.

I was gone from the house a lot by then, flying around the world and attending meetings. When my wife told me that she thought someone was stalking her, I didn’t pay much attention to it. We had the best security system in our house that money could buy. I even joked that I could hire an around-the-clock bodyguard for her if it would make her feel better. She told me not to be silly.

Two months after that conversation the man who had been stalking her, a man named Darren Lee Hodges, gunned my wife and daughter down while they were shopping. Darren Hodges was never caught, never even identified . . . a big mystery on the news. But I found him three months ago. It’s amazing what kind of information five million dollars will buy. I instructed my three-man team to catch Darren Hodges; I didn’t want him killed, or even hurt. I wanted him brought here to this warehouse that I had rented and then buried under a paper trail of shell corporations that could never be traced back to me.

Everything was set up in the warehouse for the procedure: the hospital bed, the restraints, the computer equipment, the surgical equipment. My men brought an unconscious Darren Lee Hodges in and transferred him to the hospital bed and strapped him down. It cost me over five hundred thousand dollars for these three men to abduct Darren and deliver him here unharmed, but I didn’t care what the cost was . . . I would’ve paid even more. The thought of revenge for what this man had done to my family consumed me: I couldn’t work, couldn’t eat, couldn’t think straight. I needed to do this; I needed to put this behind me so I could find some kind of way to move on.

An hour after Darren was delivered he woke up, and he was clearly agitated. He struggled against the leather cuffs and straps for a while but soon realized that there was no hope of escape for him. I let him struggle and scream for thirty minutes, and then I walked out of the shadows to stand beside his bed.

When he saw my face he understood why he was here. He stared at me with hatred, a defiant expression that showed me he was going to be able to handle anything I planned to do to him.

The surgical team assembled behind me. Darren’s eyes widened in surprise when he saw them. Maybe he had expected to be tortured, but seeing the surgeons was an obvious surprise to him. I gestured to the team to wait a moment—I had a question for Darren that I wanted answered. “I want to know why you killed my wife and daughter.”

Darren stared up at me as I stood next to his bed, and after a moment I knew he wasn’t going to answer my question. His final infliction of pain would be to deny me the reasons for his actions.

I sighed and turned to the surgical team. I nodded at them and they went to work, pushing a gigantic computer attached to a cart behind him, getting it into position.

“What are they doing?” Darren asked. He turned his head as far as he could to watch them, and then he looked at me.

I felt a sudden mean streak. I wanted to deny him information like he was denying it to me. He waited for my answer. Darren Hodges was a killer, but he wasn’t a stupid man. The police hadn’t caught him for his crimes because he hadn’t left any evidence behind (well, not much anyway, but just enough for my men to find him). No, he wasn’t a stupid man, and he knew he wasn’t going to get an answer to his question until I got an answer to mine.

“I hated you,” Darren finally said as the surgeons and technicians worked behind him. “I hated you and every other billionaire out there. You one percenters live in opulence while the rest of us struggle. You make more and more obscene amounts of money while more and more is taken from us.”

“I give away a lot of money.”

“Yeah, right. I know how the game works. Money is funneled through fake charities that are more like slush funds and money laundering schemes. You wash hands and scratch backs while the same is done to you, and the power and money stay at the top with the elites. But your days are numbered, I’ll tell you that. This is only the first warning to share your wealth or face the consequences.”

Darren stopped talking. He seemed smug, satisfied that his message had been delivered. I imagined that he would’ve eventually turned himself in for the murder of my wife and daughter just so he could bask in his newfound fame.

“I wanted to hurt you,” Darren said in a low voice. That look of satisfaction was still on his face. He looked like a man who could die in peace now.

“You did,” I told him.

“And now you’re going to hurt me, is that it?”

I shrugged. “Yes, in a way. But the operation these surgeons are about to perform will be painless. An anesthetic will be used.”

Darren didn’t say anything—he just watched me.

“No one knows you’re here,” I told him. “No one knows that I found you. No one will ever know what you did to my wife and daughter. You will never be remembered.”

He tried to hide his horror, but he couldn’t.

“At one of my companies we’ve been working on a new software,” I told him. “It’s cutting edge stuff; a brain/computer sync. There will be many uses for it in the future. One exciting development is that a person’s consciousness can be uploaded into a virtual world, a simulated universe. One day, when people are near death, they can have their consciousness, their essence, everything that makes them human, uploaded into a paradise of their choosing. They might even be there with loved ones. We’ve already worked on some prototypes. We’ve already had some success with animal testing, and we will begin human trials soon.”

I paused for a moment, building up to what I really wanted to tell him. “But I also had my team develop a special simulated universe just for you. It’s a version of Hell thought up by the best horror writers and game designers I could hire.”

Darren didn’t seem like he understood exactly what I was saying. Maybe that was my fault. Maybe I wasn’t being clear enough.

The head surgeon directed his team into place as two technicians attached the wires to the computer. These wires would be inserted into Darren’s brain soon.

“Your consciousness,” I told him, “your mind . . . you, essentially . . . will be downloaded into this software program where you will live on and on forever. Once you’re in the program, you will wake up in a world that is truly a hell. You will never have a moment’s peace as you run and run from horror after horror. You will be aware of everything at every moment with no possible hope of escape. And from now on, that world will be the only world you will ever know. Your memories will all still be intact. You will remember this . . . your former life, everything you’ve done. Maybe you will have regrets. Maybe you will be sorry for the things you’ve done, for killing my wife and daughter. Maybe you will beg for forgiveness. But no one will ever hear you.”

A nurse placed an oxygen mask over Darren’s mouth and nose before he could scream. He’d been given a sedative, but he was still trying to struggle. He was already hyperventilating, his eyes wide as he stared up at me. I was happy that I would be the last thing he ever saw before he woke up in that world.

*

Darren woke up in Hell.

He stood up in a dark hallway made of stone. The ceiling arched two stories above him in the darkness. Torches lined the walls, the flickering firelight creating shadows that danced at the edges of the light. The air was cold and damp . . . he could feel it on his skin.

Darren looked down at his body. He wore the same clothes that he’d had on in the hospital bed. He realized that everything Adam Romberg had told him was true. He was here . . . he was trapped in this software now, in this hell.

“No,” he whispered. “This can’t be real. This has to be some kind of . . . some kind of dream.”

Something growled from the darkness down the hall . . . some kind of large beast.

Darren turned and ran the other way down the hall until it led to another hallway, and then to two more halls. It seemed like he was in some kind of an old castle, but it was more like a maze. Screams drifted from down the hall to the right . . . so he went left.

He ran blindly. He passed by rooms with open doors. He stopped in one doorway and saw a crazed surgeon pulling a string of intestines out of a mutilated person strapped down to a chair. The tormentor was dressed in a blood-stained surgical gown, rubber gloves, and a cloth mask that was splattered with bright red blood. His eyes were wide and insane above the mask, and he was suddenly curious at Darren out in the hall. He held a large pair of pliers in one hand and a scalpel in the other.

The surgeon started coming Darren’s way.

Darren ran farther down the hall, looking back over his shoulder. The surgeon was impossibly fast, catching up so quickly. Darren turned back around and collided with a huge masked man who seemed like something right out of a slasher film. The monster of a man held an ax, swinging it up high. He brought the ax right down on Darren’s shoulder, knocking him down to the stone floor. Darren screamed. He could feel the pain of his bones separating. His arm was useless now. The pain was so intense . . . he could think of nothing else as he curled up into a ball. The last thing he saw was the man swinging the ax down right towards his face . . .

. . . and then Darren woke up strapped to a wood chair. He was alive again. Awake and in pain. The masked surgeon moved into his field of vision, holding the pliers and the scalpel. Darren screamed as the surgeon cut away his clothes . . .

*

Four hours later the brain surgery was a success. Darren’s consciousness had been downloaded to the software program, and he had already spent an hour in his new world now—a world of torture and horror that would go on forever.

Darren’s body was still alive for the moment—machines kept his lungs and heart working—but he was essentially braindead now as he lay on the hospital bed. I had a team of men coming to dispose of his body. Another two hundred thousand dollars would make sure his remains would never be found.

I walked over to a desktop computer and sat down in front of it. I logged on and sat there for a long moment just staring at the screen. I thought I heard a sound from my computer; the sound was so low I almost didn’t think it was real for a moment. But then I heard it again, and I smiled . . . it was a scream.

This idea came to me quickly, and I wrote this story maybe in a day or two. I had heard of scientists wanting to find a way to download a person’s consciousness into a computer program and it fascinated me; it would most likely seem to that person that they are still alive in their new “Matrix-like” world (and there’s always that theory that our whole universe is some kind of computer simulation and we don’t even realize it). But of course my mind turned to the darker possibilities: what if someone created a hell and sent someone’s consciousness there?

I watched the series “Black Mirror” on Netflix a few months after writing this story and I was intrigued by one of the episodes in Season 3 called “San Junipero.” I thought it was such a cool idea of creating a heaven-on-earth kind of place where someone’s consciousness could be downloaded at the time of death. But with a light side to an idea, there always seems to be a dark side . . . and this was my take on the dark side of that idea.

This story was first published in Halloweenpalooza which I’ve participated in during the last two years (and hopefully will again). You can find it on Facebook starting around October 1st of every year. I hope you’ll check it out, and hopefully I’ll be invited again to share another story and some giveaways there.

SPRING CLEANING

Paula Evans had no idea the misery and horror that would come just from hiring the old couple to do a few odd jobs around her house. Lou and Edna Kravitz had come highly recommended from her friends Diana and Ronnie Crager. “Yes, they’re pretty old,” Diana had told Paula on the phone. “But you won’t believe the amount of work they can get done. They can do just about anything. They’re honest and trustworthy . . . and they’re cheap.”

That had all sounded great to Paula. Now that she had begun working as a real estate agent full time, and with Scott’s software company really taking off, God knew they could use some help around the house.

Paula made a list of things she wanted done, and she called the number Diana had given her. Looking back now, Paula realized that she should’ve been able to hear the fear and nervousness in Diana’s voice—she should’ve been able to sense that something was wrong. But she didn’t, and Lou and Edna seemed very eager to stop by and talk to her.

Two hours after Paula called Lou and Edna, they pulled up to her gated driveway in a beat-up RV, waiting for her to open the gate. Paula’s yellow Labrador, Sadie, was going nuts, barking and running back and forth in front of the iron gates.

For just a moment as Paula walked down the driveway with the remote control in her hand, she felt a wave of fear wash over her. She didn’t usually meet strangers here while Scott was still at work, but this was just an elderly couple—an elderly couple that Diana had vouched for. Paula pushed away the momentary feeling of fear, but later she would wish to God that she had listened to her gut instincts at that moment and kept those gates closed.

After Paula opened the gates, the elderly man behind the wheel drove the RV down her long driveway and parked. The old couple got out of the rusted and stained vehicle. They both moved slowly like their bodies were already aching. Paula hoped that the condition of their RV wasn’t a sign of their cleaning skills (or lack thereof), because that beast of a vehicle could really use a good scrubbing and probably some repairs. She hoped it wasn’t leaking oil on her driveway.

Lou and Edna were opposites: Edna was short and round where Lou was tall and thin. Edna had a big head of bleached blond hair, and her husband had hardly any hair left—the top of his head shined in the Florida sun that leaned down hard on this part of the world with relentless heat. But they were both smiling as they approached, and neither one of them seemed to be bothered by Sadie’s constant barking and growling.

“Sadie!” Paula snapped at her dog. “Go over there!” She pointed back at the house.

Sadie seemed hurt; she lowered her head and slinked away. Paula felt bad, but she didn’t want Lou and Edna to be scared of her dog. “Sorry, she’s not usually like this.”

“What a beautiful home!” Edna squealed as she shuffled forward slowly, not at all afraid of Sadie, ignoring her altogether. Her husband walked right beside her, matching her snail’s pace.

These two are fast and dependable?

Paula smiled at them. “Thank you.”

“You must have at least five or six acres here,” Lou said, looking around appreciatively and taking the entire property in. “And no neighbors close by.”

“And right by the lake,” Edna cooed.

“Bet there’s some gators in that lake,” Lou said with a wicked smile.

Paula didn’t respond to Lou about the gators—it wasn’t something she liked to think about, and she felt that his remark was just small talk anyway. She knew there were gators in the lake. She’d seen them before—most ponds and lakes in Florida had them. “Diana told me you did a great job for her,” she said, changing the subject.

“Oh yes,” Edna beamed, her cheeks turning a little red. “Diana is a wonderful woman.”

Paula nodded and smiled. She felt at ease with this elderly couple right away. “Well, I made a list if you guys want to look at it.” She pulled out the piece of paper she had printed from her computer last night. “Just tell me what you can do and what you can’t do . . . or don’t want to do.”

“We can do anything you want us to,” Lou said as Edna took the list from Paula. She barely glanced at the list and then passed it to her husband who had produced a pair of reading glasses from somewhere in his clothes like a magician performing a slight of hand trick. He held the paper at arm’s length, studying it. “We can do all of this for you,” he said after barely studying the list.

“You sure? If there’s anything that—” She searched for the right word, not wanting to offend them. Was strenuous the word she was looking for? Difficult? Overwhelming?

“Yes, ma’am,” Lou said quickly before she could finish her sentence. He folded up the piece of paper neatly and stuffed it down into the pocket of his plaid shirt. “We can do it all, I promise you that.”

“Great,” Paula said. “If you need tools or a pressure washer—”

“We have a pressure washer,” Lou said. “And our own tools.”

Paula just nodded and smiled again. She tried to place their accents. For some reason she didn’t think they were from Florida. They didn’t have a southern or northern accent. Midwest maybe? Iowa or Nebraska? She could imagine them as a farming couple. “When can you start?”

“Today,” Lou roared. “Right now if you’d like.”

“How much do you charge?” Paula asked. “Do you charge hourly or by the day? By the job?”

Edna glanced around at the vast property and stately two-story home, then she looked back at Paula with a tight smile. “Whatever you think is fair.”

Lou nodded in agreement.

“Okay,” Paula said. “You can start with the fence if you want to. It needs to be pressure washed. There’s mildew growing on it.”

Lou and Edna nodded.

And that’s how it all started.

*

Lou and Edna scrubbed the metal fence and then rinsed it with their own ancient-looking pressure washer that sounded like it was going to blow up at any moment. The old couple moved slowly at first. It took them a while to get going, to set their buckets and scrub brushes up, to run the garden hoses out to their pressure washer. But they kept chugging along in the heat, never even stopping for a break.

By the end of the day they had gotten an impressive amount of work done. Scott was already home by then, and he was pleased to see some of the work around the house getting done. They both loved their big house and property, but it was a constant battle keeping the place up.

*

The next morning Lou and Edna were back. They had arrived right after Scott left for work. They unloaded their pressure washer from their RV and started working on the fence right where they had left off. Paula thought the old couple worked well together; they didn’t seem to argue or bicker at all.

Paula had to go out and show some houses, but she felt okay leaving the old couple there on the property. She left Sadie inside—that dog still went crazy every time she saw the couple.

When Paula got back that evening, Lou and Edna were packing it up for the day. She talked to them for a few moments. They didn’t even seem tired from the day’s work—they actually seemed more energized the more they worked, like they were getting slightly younger and healthier.

“Great job today,” Paula told them. “You’ll be back tomorrow?”

“Bright and early,” Lou told her, and his smile sent a shiver across her skin, yet she wasn’t sure why.

Paula watched from the living room window as they drove away in their RV. Sadie sat right beside Paula, growling lowly. She looked down at her dog. “You sure don’t like them, do you?”

*

“I’m really glad Diana and Ronnie told us about Lou and Edna,” Paula told Scott as they lay in bed that night.

“Me too,” Scott said. He sounded like he was on the verge of sleep. He told her earlier that it had been a grueling day at work. He’d downed two mixed drinks after dinner, and then he’d popped two of his Tylenol PM pills before bed.

“I called Diana to let her know how they’re doing,” Paula said. “But her phone was disconnected. I’ll have to drop by her house if I get a chance.”

Scott was already sleeping—he hadn’t heard a word she’d said.

She lay awake for the next two hours, unable to fall asleep for some reason. She lay in the darkness, listening to the soft purring of the air conditioning blowing out of the vents above her in the ceiling.

Sadie sat up on the floor, alerted by something outside. She bolted to the window with a growl in her throat.

Paula heard the sound from outside—a vehicle was out there driving down the dirt road just beyond their front fence. No big deal really, even this late, but Sadie’s reaction alarmed her. Paula got up and walked to the window, listening to the rumbling and rattling coming from outside. She knew that sound.

She pulled the curtain aside and looked out beyond the front lawn at the dirt road that ran in front of their home. A vehicle was driving away, the taillights disappearing in the darkness. The heavy vehicle rumbled along. It was an RV . . . it was Lou and Edna’s RV, she was sure of it.

*

“Can I ask a silly question?” Paula asked Lou and Edna the next morning before they got started working. “Were you guys here last night around one o’clock in the morning?”

Edna scrunched up her face and shook her head like it was the silliest question she’d ever heard. “No. We were fast asleep by then.”

Lou nodded in agreement, stooped forward. Even with his slight lean forward, he seemed taller than Paula remembered, and a little bigger. “Fast asleep,” he agreed.

“I told you it was a dumb question,” Paula told them and then laughed it off. She let them get to work.

*

That night Paula couldn’t sleep. Scott was out cold again, and Sadie was growling at the window. Paula got out of bed and walked over to the window. She hadn’t heard a vehicle driving around out there, but something had Sadie bothered.

Paula looked out the window and saw Lou and Edna’s RV parked in the weedy field next to their property beyond the fence. The vehicle was parked under the canopy of the trees, the shadows hiding the vehicle a little. There were no lights on inside the RV. It just sat there, a dark hulking behemoth in the hot and humid night.

Should she go out there? Should she wake Scott up?

Just then, as if Lou and Edna knew she was watching them, the RV started up and the headlights came on. The RV pulled out of the field, onto the dirt road, and drove away.

*

“Maybe they don’t have anywhere else to stay,” Paula told Scott as he got ready for work the next morning.

He shrugged and sighed as he adjusted his tie. “I don’t know. Just ask them.”

Paula felt a little pissed off that Scott was so dismissive about this. She wanted him to handle this for her, but he was passing it to her like this was entirely her deal. He was already upset with the old couple because there were areas of the fence that had turned a light gray after they scrubbed and pressure washed it. The lighter-colored splotches all over the metal made it look worse than it did before when the mildew was on it.

“Maybe the fence was always like that,” she’d told Scott, defending Lou and Edna. “Maybe we never noticed those lighter splotches until they washed all of the mold and mildew off.”

Scott didn’t think so.

Ten minutes after Scott left for work, Lou and Edna showed up. The couple looked refreshed and invigorated. The more they worked the more energetic they seemed.

How was she going to ask them about parking in the field last night? They stood there, smiling at her as if they were expecting an inquiry from her.

Paula decided to just spit it out and get it out in the open. “Were you guys parked over there in that field last night?”

The old couple’s smiles slipped away. They glanced at each other with looks of guilt.

“It’s okay,” Paula said quickly. “It’s okay if you stayed the night there.”

They looked nervous and pathetic.

“You guys don’t have anywhere to stay, do you?” Paula asked them.

“We can find somewhere else,” Edna said.

“No. Please. That’s not what I meant. Please stay. We could even run some electrical cords out to your RV. Maybe even hook up some kind of water line.”

“That would be wonderful,” Edna said and seemed to melt with relief.

*

Two days later Lou and Edna had their RV parked in the side field near the trees. They had an awning pulled out. Underneath that awning they had set up a table and two lawn chairs. They had built a fire pit surrounded by a circle of bricks. There was a dilapidated barbeque grill near the rear of the RV. They hadn’t wasted any time getting comfortable in that spot.

They had gotten some work done in the last two days, but Lou ripped out the wrong shrubs yesterday. Paula didn’t make too big of a deal about it. She lied and told him that she never really liked them anyway.

Scott wasn’t too happy about their new living arrangements.

“Why don’t you just pay them and tell them to pack that thing up and park it somewhere else?”

“I don’t think the little bit of money we’re going to give them is going to help their situation.”

“Then give them more.”

“It’s not that bad, Scott.”

“That thing’s an eyesore.”

“It’s not like we have any neighbors to complain about it.”

“That’s not the point, Paula,” Scott said and shook his head. He was arguing with her, but already giving in. He seemed distracted by something, which was so often the case these days. She knew he would eventually capitulate. This house was her domain, everything built and remodeled to her wishes. Sometimes she thought this house was only a place for Scott to sleep until he went back into his real world, the place where he really belonged, the world that mattered to him—his software company.

Scott walked away and mumbled, “Whatever.” And that was the end of that.

*

The next Monday Edna accidentally started a fire at the back corner of the house. Thank God Paula had seen it in time. The old couple helped her put it out. The damage wasn’t too bad. The day after that Lou busted a pipe and the garage flooded. He promised he could fix any of the water damage done to the drywall and baseboards.

“They’re causing more damage than they’re fixing,” Scott said that night after he got home from work.

Paula could tell that he’d had enough of this. He joked that the old couple was going to destroy their entire home soon.

“You need to get rid of them,” he told her, and then he gulped down the rest of his bourbon. He’d been drinking a lot more these last few months.

“Get rid of them? You mean fire them?”

“Yes. Fire them. They’re not working out. When one of my employees isn’t working out then I have to fire him.”

Paula was horrified at the idea of having to fire the elderly couple, but she was also strangely relieved. It would be so nice to have her house back to herself and to be able to let Sadie run around in the yard again. But still, it was going to suck to have to fire them.

“I’ll give them until the end of the week,” Paula said. “Just so they can make a little extra money.”

“You want me to tell them?” Scott asked. The alcohol had given a hard edge to his voice, and there was a dull and mean glare in his watery eyes.

“God, no. I said I’d do it.”

“Do what you want, Paula,” he said as he walked away. “You always do anyway.”

*

When Paula got home from work the next day, she realized that Sadie was missing. She asked Lou and Edna if they had seen her dog. They hadn’t.

The only thing Paula could figure was that Sadie must’ve gotten out of the house somehow, but she couldn’t figure out how.

Lou and Edna claimed that they hadn’t seen Sadie outside at all.

But how could that be? Paula wondered. If Sadie had gotten out, she would’ve run right up to the old couple and barked and growled at them. How could they not have seen her? She couldn’t help thinking that they were lying to her.

Lou looked past the house towards the lake in the distance. Paula could read the man’s thoughts as he stared at the water: If Sadie went down by the lake with all of those gators . . .

Paula felt like firing the old couple right then and there. She wanted to slap those stupid blank expressions of indifference off of their faces. What’s the big deal? their expressions said. It’s just a dumb dog.

Lou and Edna volunteered to help Paula look for Sadie. They walked around the property, calling the dog’s name. But Sadie never came running.

*

Could Lou and Edna have let Sadie out? Paula wondered that night as she stared out the bedroom window at the old couple’s RV parked in the field outside the metal fence that was now bleached light gray in so many places from whatever caustic cleaner they had used. Could they have accidentally let Sadie out and then didn’t want to admit it? They’d surely had their share of accidents and mishaps so far. But then a more sinister thought came to her: Could they have let Sadie out on purpose? Could they have hurt Sadie?

Paula let the curtain fall back in place over the window and went back to bed. It was already three o’clock in the morning. Her real estate business had been suffering lately because she had to spend so much time here at home watching over Lou and Edna. Her broker was getting tired of asking other agents to cover for her. Once Lou and Edna were gone, things would get back to normal.

She closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep . . .

A creaking noise sounded from the hallway outside their bedroom door.

Her eyes popped open in the darkness.

Someone was out there in the hallway. Someone had just stepped on the squeaky floorboard.

Paula rolled over to see if Scott was out of bed—but he was still there, breathing deeply, heavily sedated. She thought about nudging him and waking him up. But it would be hard to wake him up. When he took those damn sleeping pills, he was out cold.

Creak.

She looked back at the open door and the darkness of the hall beyond it.

Lou emerged from the darkness and stood in the doorway. His pale bald head seemed nearly luminous in the dark, his eyes like empty black holes. He was bent forward a little. He seemed so much taller than before.

Paula jumped up and grabbed Scott. “Wake up!”

“What is it?” he mumbled, his voice thick with sleep. But at least he sat right up.

“Someone’s in the house. Someone was right there at the bedroom door.”

She didn’t know if it was her words or the panic in her voice, or both, but Scott was out of bed in a flash. She looked back at the bedroom door, but Lou was gone now.

Scott flipped on the lamp next to his side of the bed and then marched to their bedroom door. He turned on the overhead bedroom light, and he went out into the hall, disappearing into the darkness.

Paula held her breath for a moment.

The hall light came on.

A few minutes later Scott came back to bed, turning the lights off on his way. He looked annoyed and relieved at the same time. “No one in the house. All the doors and windows are locked. The alarm’s still on.”

Paula shook her head. “No, I saw someone standing in our doorway.”

“What did he look like?”

Paula didn’t answer. She felt like crying.

“It was probably just a nightmare,” Scott said as he rolled back over onto his side.

She wasn’t going to let Scott act like she was a child this time. “It was Lou,” she told him. Let’s see how he dealt with that.

Scott’s body seemed to stiffen as he laid there with his back to her, facing the windows that looked out onto the front yard and then the field beyond that where Lou and Edna’s RV was parked right now. She felt a strange feeling of satisfaction from his reaction, his shock.

Scott turned around and stared at her, deadly serious now. She would’ve guessed that he wouldn’t have believed such a preposterous idea, but he seemed to accept it immediately.

“I mean, that’s who I thought I just saw in the doorway,” Paula said.

“You think Lou was in our house?”

“It might have been a dream,” she said quickly, afraid of Scott’s sudden willingness to believe that the old man had been sneaking around inside their house. “You just said that all the doors and windows are locked and the alarm’s set.”

He shook his head like he was past the point of putting up with this.

“A couple more days,” Paula said. “By this Friday they’re out of here. I’m going to pay them what we owe them and then they’re gone.”

“Good,” Scott said as he rolled back over, facing away from her. He was asleep again in minutes.

*

The next day Paula spoke to Lou. She didn’t dare come out and ask if he’d been inside their home last night, watching her through the doorway. Instead, she talked to him about other things, and as she did, she tried to gauge his reaction. He didn’t seem uncomfortable around her. In fact, he seemed confident. He looked stronger now . . . somehow younger.

“I need to go into town for a few hours,” Paula told Lou. “I need to run a few errands,” she said as if she owed him an explanation.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. He had a pair of pruning clippers in his hands, and they looked like a dangerous weapon to her now.

Paula nodded at Lou and forced a smile on her face. But she didn’t think she was pulling off her act, and she could tell by the look on Lou’s face that he was amused by her nervousness. She hurried to her GMC Denali, got in, and left. She wasn’t running errands like she’d told Lou. No, she needed to go see Diana and Ronnie. She still couldn’t get through to Diana or Ronnie on their home or cell numbers—both had been disconnected. She needed to talk to Diana about Lou and Edna, and since she couldn’t get a hold of her on the phone, then she would go to her house.

*

Paula parked her GMC in front of Diana and Ronnie’s house. She stared in shock for a moment before she got out of her vehicle. She glanced at the large FOR SALE sign near the road, and then she looked back at the house beyond the iron gates and brick walls. She got out of her SUV and walked to the gates. The house looked abandoned. But not only that, the house was damaged. Part of the right side was stained black from what looked like a fire.

Had their house caught on fire? Why hadn’t Diana called her?

There were other signs of damage: torn-out shrubs, stains on the driveway, stones missing from the front columns, a few boarded-up windows. To the left, in the side yard, Paula saw a big dead spot in the St. Augustine grass where it looked like a large vehicle may have been parked—like an RV. She took a step back and studied the iron bars of the gate; they had the same pitted and bleached spots that their gates and fence did at home.

It was Lou and Edna . . . they had done all of this.

Diana and Ronnie were gone. They had moved from their damaged home and put it up for sale sometime in the last three weeks without telling her. Diana hadn’t even asked her if she wanted to be the real estate agent for the sale.

“You a friend of theirs?”

Paula jumped at the voice and turned around. An old lady walking a dog stood at the end of the driveway by the street. Both the woman and the dog looked tired in the muggy heat.

“Yes,” Paula answered and smiled. “I’m a friend of Diana and Ronnie Crager.”

The old lady just nodded.

“Did . . . did something happen here?” Paula asked.

The old lady stared at Paula strangely, like the woman was trying to decide how much to say. “They had some problems.”

“With the house?” Paula asked as she glanced back at it. “It looks like it was half destroyed.”

“There was a fire,” the old lady said. “The husband, he got burned real bad.”

Paula felt her heart skip a beat. “Ronnie . . . you mean Ronnie Crager got burned in the fire?”

She nodded. “Almost died, I guess.”

“But . . . but . . .” Paula’s mind was spinning, and all of this didn’t feel real. “Did they say how the fire started?”

The old woman shrugged. She looked ready to move on down the road. Even her dog seemed impatient to get going. “I don’t know.”

“I can’t believe this. They were friends of mine. I can’t believe they didn’t even call me.”

The old lady just nodded, the conversation apparently not interesting her anymore. She turned and left Paula standing there.

“Wait,” Paula said as the woman started walking down the sidewalk. “Do you know when the fire happened?”

The old woman stopped and turned around, frowning as she tried to remember. She shrugged. “About three weeks ago, I think.”

Three weeks ago?

“You’re sure about that?” Paula asked.

The old woman nodded and seemed a little perturbed at Paula questioning her memory.

“Thanks,” Paula said.

The old woman was already on her way again, and she gave a half-hearted wave without even turning back around.

Paula got back into her Denali, but she had to wait a moment before she could drive, until she got her trembling under control. If the fire had happened three weeks ago, then that meant that Diana had called her and recommended Lou and Edna after all of the damage they had caused, after Ronnie had gotten burned. Why would she do that?

*

Scott sipped his drink and paced the floor again. For once Paula had her husband’s full attention after telling him about her visit to Diana and Ronnie’s house.

Scott had called someone he knew at the fire department, and the man had told him that the fire had occurred three weeks ago. He’d also told Scott that the cause of the fire was faulty wiring and that no charges had been filed.

“They were there,” Paula said. “Diana was the one who recommended Lou and Edna to me. She recommended them even though they had damaged her house that badly. Even after Ronnie had gotten hurt. Why would she do that?”

Scott gave a slight shake of his head, dismissing it like it didn’t matter. “They need to go. Today. Right now. Write a check for them.”

It was almost dark. Lou and Edna were done for the day, tucked away in their battered and stained RV. They had worked on the pool area today, and now the pool was green. Lou promised that he would fix it tomorrow, but Paula knew she was going to have to call the pool company. She didn’t want those two touching anything else on their property. They were dangerous.

Paula wrote out a check for the amount they owed the old couple, plus another five hundred dollars. Hopefully it would be enough money to get them to leave.

Get them to leave? she asked herself. This was their property—they shouldn’t have to bribe someone to leave, especially not some seemingly harmless elderly couple.

Harmless. They were definitely not harmless. Paula thought of all of the “accidents.” But what if they weren’t accidents? What if that fire at Diana’s house had been set deliberately? What if Sadie hadn’t run away? What if they had done something to Sadie? A chill crawled across her skin, and she thought of Lou standing in the darkness just beyond their bedroom door last night.

Paula handed the check to Scott. He was a little liquored up and bolder now. His face was set, his eyes narrowed—his idea of a “tough guy” expression.

“Do you want me to go with you?” Paula asked him.

“No,” he said, practically spitting the word out at her. “I’ll handle this now.” She could pick up the real meaning underneath his words: She had screwed all of this up, and now it was up to him to fix it.

*

Paula heard her husband’s screams in the twilight. When he left to confront Lou and Edna, she waited on the front porch, tucked out of sight from the side yard and their view. She wanted to be out here, but she didn’t want to walk to their RV in the dark—she was willing to let Scott handle it even if she had to listen to him gloat for a few days.

But now he had cried out in the darkness.

Paula bolted off of their front porch and ran down their concrete driveway. Scott had left the gates open, and she raced past them. She sprinted down the dirt road that ran in front of their property. The lights from Lou and Edna’s RV bobbed in the darkness in front of her as she ran.

The woods were dark, the sky so dark blue . . . night was almost here. There were even a few stars twinkling in the night sky. The air was possibly only five degrees cooler than it had been in the day, and it was thick with humidity. Paula could already feel herself sweating as she ran. The mosquitoes were everywhere, buzzing around her face.

Scott cried out again, another long scream.

Oh God, Lou and Edna were doing something to him!

“Scott!” she called out.

She was close enough now to hear him moaning, cussing a string of words she couldn’t make out. She also heard Lou and Edna’s voices; they sounded like they were trying to soothe him with a sincerity that was surely false.

Scott was on the ground in the weedy grass near the side of the RV, curled up in a ball and holding his right ankle.

Paula dropped down beside him as he grimaced in pain and moaned, shaking his head back and forth, his face slick with tears and sweat.

“What is it?” she asked.

“My ankle. I think I broke my fucking ankle.”

“He stepped in a hole,” Lou explained.

“What hole?” Paula asked.

Edna pointed at a huge hole in the grass. It was nearly impossible to see in the darkness, but once it was pointed out to her she saw it. She saw more holes. There were a lot of holes in the ground that looked like they had been dug up with a shovel.

“You did this?” Paula asked before she even realized what she was going to say.

Lou and Edna looked shocked, like they had been insulted. It was overacting, Paula thought—something out of a bad movie. She wanted to scream at them to stop faking.

“Get out,” Paula told them. “I want you two off our property. Right now!”

“But . . .”

“Now!” Paula screamed.

Again, the old couple looked shocked and hurt, their faces drawn down into long frowns.

“Did you give them the check?” she asked Scott as she helped him up to his feet.

He shook his head no and handed her the crumpled up check in his hand as he gritted his teeth in pain. He looked close to passing out. She couldn’t leave him here with these people.

Paula practically slapped the check into Edna’s hand. “Here,” she told her. “This is what we owe you two, and more.” She hurried back to Scott and helped him walk. He stood on his good foot, hobbling.

“I can help you with him,” Lou offered, taking a few steps towards them.

“No!” Paula snapped. “Stay away from us.”

“This check is far too much,” Edna said.

“Keep it,” Paula said over her shoulder as she helped Scott hobble down the dirt road towards their gate. “Keep it and leave. We don’t need your services anymore.”

*

Paula had to take Scott to the hospital.

It was worse than she had suspected. The ankle bones had snapped, but there was also some nerve damage that was causing him a lot of pain. They set his ankle and then put a cast on it. They gave him some crutches and painkillers and sent him home.

When they got home six hours later, the RV was gone. Scott was already a little dopey from the pain meds, but they weren’t making his pain go away completely. Seeing that Lou and Edna were finally gone brightened his mood a little.

She got Scott up the steps to their second floor bedroom—a long, slow process. An hour later they fell asleep next to each other in their bed.

*

The next morning Paula woke up to the bleating sound of Lou’s ancient pressure washer. It was eight o’clock in the morning, and Scott had stayed home from work because of his ankle.

“What the hell?” Scott muttered as he rolled over, already wincing in pain.

Paula jumped out of bed and hurried to the window. “Oh my God.”

“What is it?” Scott asked as he struggled to sit up.

“It’s . . . it’s them. Lou and Edna are out there pressure washing the driveway.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Scott grabbed his crutches and hobbled over to the window. “The gates are open. Did you leave the gates open when we came home last night?”

“No.”

“You must’ve left them open.”

“No. I know I didn’t.”

“Then the only other explanation is—”

“—that they got the gate code somehow,” she finished for him.

*

After Paula helped Scott out of the house, they walked down the driveway together. Paula didn’t see Edna around, but Lou was hunched over the driveway, spraying it clean, focused on his work. His pressure washer was so loud—it sounded like an engine redlining and about to explode.

“Hey!” Scott yelled as they walked up to the old man.

Lou had a pair of safety glasses on, and he was wearing the same clothes he’d worn the last few days. His dark green workpants were tucked down into a tall pair of black rubber boots.

“Hey!” Scott yelled again.

Lou didn’t seem to hear them. But who could hear anything with that machine of his running full blast?

Scott tapped Lou on the shoulder.

Lou jumped and smiled at them. He took his hand off the trigger, and the water stopped blasting the concrete. “Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Evans. Good morning.”

“What the hell are you doing?!” Scott yelled.

“I know you told us to leave,” Lou yelled back, his hands out in a placating gesture. “And we will, but I promised to get this driveway done, and I don’t like to break my word.”

“I don’t care about that. I don’t want you here! You two are fired! Do you understand that?”

“Mr. Evans . . .”

“Turn that fucking machine off!” Scott yelled.

“But if I could just finish this section of the driveway. It’s going to look incomplete if I don’t.”

The motor on the pressure washer seemed to be getting louder, and now the machine was shaking back and forth like it was a bad boiler building up pressure.

“I’m going to call the police!” Scott told him. “I swear to God I am if—”

Something on the pressure washer blew. Paula didn’t know what it was . . . all she knew was that there was a loud pop, then the machine died. Scott screamed and collapsed down onto the driveway, writhing back and forth on the wet concrete, holding his hands over his eye. Blood was already oozing out between his fingers.

“Scott!! Oh my God, Scott!!”

“My eye! My fucking eye!”

*

Paula took Scott back to the hospital. He had to stay overnight this time, and she stayed with him. She didn’t want to go back home and see that Lou and Edna were still there. Somehow she knew that they would still be there, their rusty and battered RV parked in the same spot beyond the fence.

They couldn’t save Scott’s eye. The doctor said it was most likely a piece of a bolt that had broken off of the pressure washer. They had dug out some pieces of metal from his eye socket during surgery. At least the metal shrapnel hadn’t gone past his eye into his brain. Now Scott had a patch over his right eye, and he was doped up on even more painkillers.

“We’ll sue them,” Scott said as he lay in the hospital bed, slurring his words.

Sue them for what? Paula wondered. Their crappy RV? It didn’t look like they owned much else in the world. But she didn’t say anything to him.

*

When they got home the next day, the RV was still parked in the same spot in the field by the trees.

“That’s it,” Scott said without much force to his words. He was slumped down in the passenger seat, already dialing 911 on his cell phone.

Lou and Edna were weeding the shrub beds in the front yard when Paula pulled the GMC Denali up near them.

“We called the police,” Paula told the elderly couple when she got out of the Denali and walked around to help Scott get out of the passenger side.

Lou and Edna stood up and faced them, brushing off the dirt from their hands and wiping it on their clothes.

“We’re so sorry about what happened,” Edna said. “We just wanted to help out a little more, that’s all.”

“You’ve done enough,” Paula said.

Edna swatted at Lou. “I told you that stupid pressure washer was going to blow soon.”

Lou hung his head sheepishly, but Paula swore to God that it looked like he was trying not to crack a smile.

“The police are on their way,” Scott said as he got to his feet, balanced on one crutch. “You can stay if you want and deal with them. I don’t really care.”

“We just want to help is all,” Lou said again with his hands in front of him almost like he would be holding hat-in-hand. “Could you call the police back and tell them not to come?”

“Fuck you,” Scott said without much force.

“Okay,” Lou sighed. “If that’s the way you want it, then we’ll have to make a few phone calls ourselves.”

Paula and Scott had started half-bobbling/half-walking towards the open garage door, but then Scott stopped in his tracks, wincing in pain; he whirled around to look at Lou and Edna. Paula stared at the old couple. There was something menacing in the tone of Lou’s voice—he wasn’t so humble now. And his eyes, they looked dark, hidden in the shadow of his brows as he leaned forward . . . he looked just like he had when he’d stood in their bedroom doorway in the middle of the night.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Scott asked Lou. His words were slightly slurred from the pain meds and his body was tense.

“The IRS,” Lou answered.

Scott didn’t answer, but he was still tense, his body frozen.

Paula looked at her husband and watched his skin turn white under the blazing sun as the blood seemed to drain from him. “Scott?”

Scott didn’t answer.

Lou looked to his wife for help. “There might have been some problems with income that wasn’t . . .”

“That wasn’t reported,” Edna said, jumping in quickly to help her husband explain. “The Beckman job, I believe,” she said, nodding at her husband.

“How do you know about that?” Scott whispered. It sounded like all of the air had left his lungs.

“Isn’t that where he met Suzie?” Edna asked Lou.

Lou’s eyebrows shot up with mock surprise. “Yes, Suzie,” he said like he’d just remembered. But then he stared at Scott, and that dark malevolence was back in his smile again. “You remember Suzie, don’t you?”

Paula felt her stomach twist into a knot, her heart beating rapidly now. Just from the look on Scott’s face she knew he was having an affair with this woman named Suzie. Paula had suspected Scott of cheating on her for the last few months, but she’d never had any kind of proof.

“Who are you people?” Scott asked. His voice still sounded deflated, all traces of anger or aggression gone now, only defeat left.

“We’re just a couple of old farts who want to help you,” Lou said and laughed like all of those threats had just been a big joke. And Edna laughed right along with him. But the darkness was still in both of their expressions, just underneath their smiles.

They’re crazy, Paula thought. But it was more than that. They knew things about Scott, and he was scared now.

Paula turned towards the gates when she heard the cop car drive up. The gates were still open. Finally, the police were here.

The cop parked his car behind Paula’s Denali and got out slowly with a bored look, it was like he’d already made up his mind that this was a bullshit call that was wasting his time. “Evening,” the officer said. “We have a problem here?”

Paula was about to answer, but Scott practically pushed her out of the way and hobbled forward, leaning on his crutches. He spoke in a loud, fake voice. “I’m so sorry, officer. I . . . I made a mistake.”

The cop stood a few feet away from Paula and Scott, towering over them. He had his thumbs hitched on his belt in a casual redneck gesture. “A mistake?”

Scott smiled and looked at Paula, begging her with his one good eye to back him up.

“Yes, officer,” Paula said, clearing her throat. “It was just a mistake.”

The cop’s eyes shifted to Lou and Edna who managed to look like a pitiful old couple being bullied by two young wealthy socialites. Gone were their expressions of malice. God, they were so good at this, Paula thought.

“I was called out here because there’s a couple who won’t leave this property,” the cop said, staring right at Lou and Edna. “Is that you?”

“No,” Scott snapped before Lou or Edna could answer. “Like I said, these two are welcome here. They’re doing some work around the house for us.”

The cop seemed to doubt that.

“It was just a big misunderstanding,” Scott said. Usually he was a charmer (had he charmed Suzie into sleeping with him?), and he was trying his best to pour on that charm right now. But it wasn’t working. Paula didn’t know if it was because of the pain meds or because he was scared out of his mind, but this cop wasn’t buying any of Scott’s bullshit.

“You know it’s against the law to file a fake police report,” the cop finally said after staring Scott down for a full minute.

“I didn’t file . . .” Scott sighed, taking a deep breath and starting over. “I thought I needed the police here, and now I’ve changed my mind. That’s all.”

“Why do you want these two off your property?” the cop asked.

“I don’t want them off my property,” Scott yelled.

The cop stared at Scott again for a long time. Then he looked at Lou and Edna, then over at their RV parked outside the fence near the woods.

“That’s their vehicle,” Scott said. “It’s on our property, and we’re okay with that.”

The cop stared at the RV for a long, drawn-out moment. Paula was afraid he was going to demand to search it. Instead, he looked back at Lou and Edna. “You two mind if I talk to you alone?”

The old couple managed to look nervous, even scared. God, they made Paula sick. “Of course not, officer,” Edna answered with just the right amount of quivering in her voice.

The cop walked with the old couple over to his squad car and spoke with them for five minutes. They didn’t seem to be arguing, and the old couple smiled nervously the whole time and nodded a lot.

“What do you think they’re saying?” Scott whispered to Paula.

Paula glared at her husband and didn’t answer him. She had some questions of her own she wanted answers to.

All three of them walked back, and the cop finally looked satisfied, but still perturbed. He looked right at Scott. “If I have to come out here again for another . . . mistake, then I’m bringing you in on charges. Got that?”

Scott nodded numbly.

“Good day,” the cop said and then sauntered back to his car.

They all watched the cop’s car back down the driveway and then back out into the dirt road, kicking up a large cloud of dust as it sped away.

Scott stared at the old couple with a ferocious look in the one eye he had left. “What did you say to him?”

That strange expression was back on their faces . . . an expression of threat that actually frightened Paula a little. They didn’t answer Scott.

“What do you want?” Scott practically whined as he leaned on his crutches.

“We just want to be appreciated for our work,” Edna said.

*

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” Scott asked when they got back inside the house. He was agitated and fidgety. Paula knew he wanted to pace—he usually paced when he was angry—but he couldn’t pace because of his leg. “Appreciated,” he spat out. “Appreciated for what? For practically burning our house down? For destroying our fence? For destroying my leg? My eye?”

Our dog, Paula thought.

Scott struggled up to his feet and leaned on his crutches.

“Where are you going?” Paula asked him.

“To get the phone.”

“Sit down,” she told him. “I’ll get it.”

Paula got the cordless phone and brought it back to Scott. He grabbed it from her and punched in some numbers.

“Who are you calling?”

Scott held up a finger, signaling for her to wait a moment.

She watched him. She wanted to ask him some questions now. Questions about the IRS, and questions about this woman named Suzie.

“Hey, Carl,” Scott said into the phone, managing a smile. “It’s Scott Evans.”

Their lawyer—Scott was calling their lawyer. She should’ve figured that.

Scott explained what had happened on the phone for a few minutes. Then he was silent for a few more minutes as he listened to Carl. The blood was draining out of his face again, and he hung the phone up without a goodbye.

“What did he say?”

Scott cleared his throat. He stared across the room with his one eye. “He said . . . uh, he said he can’t represent us anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

Scott looked right at her with one wide eye. “He knows them somehow. He won’t say how, but he knows Lou and Edna. He’s afraid of them. He said there’s nothing we can do.”

Paula shook her head no. She didn’t want to believe this. “How can he know them?”

“He wouldn’t say,” Scott whispered.

Paula thought of the Cragers’ home and the fire damage. She thought of the old lady who had told her about Ronnie being burned half to death . . . mutilated. She had looked up the story on her computer when she’d gotten home and read the gruesome details of the fire. And Paula knew the fire hadn’t been an accident. She knew the fire hadn’t been caused by bad electrical wiring as it was officially listed; she knew the fire had been set purposely. She knew that Lou and Edna had done it; they had hurt Diana and Ronnie. And she knew that she and her husband were in danger now.

*

Paula couldn’t help it, she argued with Scott. She didn’t want to fight with him in his condition, but she needed to know what was going on with his IRS problems. And with Suzie.

After they yelled at each other, it turned out that they didn’t have IRS problems, at least not yet. But he had done some rather risky things, he told her, and if someone were to know about it and call the IRS, wellll . . .

“How can they know all of that?” Paula asked Scott.

Scott just shrugged and sipped a mixed drink, something he was not supposed to be doing with his pain meds. He even accused Paula of pushing him towards the drinking tonight.

Suzie was a different matter than the IRS problem. At first Scott tried to lie about it, but when he saw Paula staring at the front windows as if she could see through the walls to Lou and Edna’s RV, he knew all she had to do was go out there and they would tell her everything. He broke down crying and admitted that he had slept with this woman a few times. But it hadn’t meant anything to him, and he had already broken it off with her. He begged Paula not to leave him. He would never cheat on her again. Besides, what woman would want him now?

Paula wasn’t so sure she even wanted him anymore.

*

Paula couldn’t sleep that night. She lay awake in bed beside Scott who had begged her to sleep in the same bed with him. She gave in to him like she always did. Then he was out, knocked unconscious by his cocktail of alcohol, pain meds, and sleep aids. He was sleeping so deeply he almost sounded like he wasn’t breathing. His bandage and patch over his right eye practically glowed in the darkness.

A creak sounded from the hallway. Someone was out there.

Paula tensed. She knew who it was . . . Lou.

Moments later she saw Lou’s white face and bald head illuminated in the doorway much like Scott’s white bandage was. But Lou’s head was bent forward slightly, like he was looking down at her, and that kept his eyes hooded under his heavy brows hidden in shadows.

Lou stood there for the longest time, just breathing heavily, just watching. And then he left.

Paula felt like she could breathe again. She was scared, but she was also angry.

*

The next morning Paula marched right up to Lou and slapped his face. Both Lou and Edna looked shocked; this wasn’t the kind of appreciation they had been looking for.

“Stay the hell out of my house,” Paula told Lou. “Stay the hell out of my bedroom!” She turned and started to walk away, but Lou’s words stopped her in her tracks.

“You shouldn’t have done that.”

Paula thought about turning around and . . . and what? Slap him again? Scold him again? It wasn’t only his threat that had made her blood run cold, it was his voice—it sounded like the growl of a mean dog. She didn’t turn around; she kept on walking towards the house. She saw Ronnie Crager’s burned and mutilated body in her mind as she walked. She saw Diana quickly putting her house up for sale, throwing a few bags and boxes into their car, peeling out of the driveway, escaping Lou and Edna while they had the chance.

*

Five days later Scott got a letter from the IRS. He still hadn’t gone back to work. He didn’t want to go to work anymore; he didn’t seem to care about work anymore, or much else. Scott’s doctor told Paula on their last visit that there was major nerve damage in Scott’s leg from the break, and that’s what was causing him so much pain. The doctor didn’t know if it could be fixed; all they could do was wait to see if it would heal on its own.

And keep popping pain pills, Paula thought.

And popping pills Scott was. He was popping them every few hours when the fog of relief began to wear off a little.

Paula watched Scott open up the letter from the IRS with trembling hands. She watched him read it. She didn’t need to ask him what the letter was about. She could tell by the expression on his face that it was bad.

They did it, Paula thought. They said they weren’t going to, but they had called the IRS. They were probably going to call them anyway, but Paula couldn’t help thinking that they had called because she had slapped Lou.

You shouldn’t have done that, he’d told her.

And now they were being punished because of her.

*

Two weeks later Scott and Paula attended the IRS audit with a new lawyer Scott found. Scott had called around to friends and business associates for a recommended lawyer, but no one would return his call. It was like they were pariahs now. Paula found this lawyer on an internet listing.

The audit didn’t go well. Scott hadn’t been very careful about covering his tracks. He’d probably been too busy concentrating on Suzie.

The meeting with their new lawyer after the audit went worse. Scott and Paula really didn’t have much of a choice but to dissolve his company, sell their home, and then claim bankruptcy to pay off the IRS.

“You’re lucky you’re not facing jail time,” their new lawyer told Scott. He seemed proud of himself, like he was taking credit for this leniency afforded to them by the IRS.

Lucky, Paula thought. Yeah, we’re lucky all right. At least if they’d gone to jail they would be away from Lou and Edna Kravitz. Just in the last two weeks the couple had destroyed half of the front lawn, stained part of the driveway with something that resembled rusty water, gotten the front gates stuck open somehow, clogged up the pool, and broke the shed door and one of the downstairs windows. The air conditioner wasn’t working now which Paula was sure was their fault. The A/C tech came out and fixed the air conditioner, but it stopped working again yesterday. Now the house was like an oven. There were plagues of mosquitoes and flies all around their house that Paula had never noticed before. She blamed the plague of insects on Lou and Edna . . . that’s exactly what those two were like, a biblical plague.

Paula drove home as Scott leaned against the passenger door with the only eye he had left closed. He looked so pale, and it looked like he had lost at least twenty pounds in the last few weeks.

Their GMC Denali was making some kind of clicking noise, and she wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Lou and Edna had “tinkered” with their vehicle to “help” them out.

Paula looked at Scott again. He was slumped over even more now, and he hadn’t put his seatbelt on. She wanted to tell him to put it on and to stop leaning against the door. She had a bad feeling that something was about to happen. But before she could say anything, before she could even move, the door made a loud clicking sound, and the passenger door flew open.

“Scott!” Paula screamed as her husband tumbled out of the vehicle. He was a pale blur, and then he was gone.

Paula slammed on the brakes and prayed that she hadn’t run him over with the back tire somehow. She looked at the rearview mirror and saw a big pickup truck that had been tailgating them screeching to a halt right behind her.

Had the pickup truck run Scott over?

Paula slammed the shifter into park and got out of the Denali. She ran towards the back of the vehicle.

Please, God, let him be okay . . .

She found Scott crumpled up into a ball, moaning in pain, his leg—his good leg—was bent at a strange angle. She fell down beside him, sobbing.

“You okay, lady?” the big redneck driver of the pickup truck asked.

“No, I’m not fucking okay!” Paula screamed at the man. He backed up a step with wide eyes. “Call a fucking ambulance!” she told him.

*

Scott had twisted his knee and broken his collar bone in the fall out of the Denali. He spent the night in the hospital and then was dismissed the next day. Paula had to find a wheelchair for Scott—he was going to be spending the next few weeks in one.

As she drove Scott home, a depression blanketed her, a gloom like she’d never known before. Morbid thoughts of killing the old couple entered her mind. She needed to get a gun and then put a bullet in each of their foreheads . . . she needed to end all of this suffering and misery. But then she would go to prison. Probably get the death penalty. Or maybe they would find her insane. Yeah, insane. That’s kind of what she felt like right now.

So, okay, killing them wasn’t the answer. At least not killing them outright. Maybe an accident. God knew Lou and Edna were the masters of accidents—they would probably see an accident coming a mile away.

They needed to escape those two. They needed to run. Hadn’t that been what Diana and Ronnie had done? Hadn’t Diana gotten her burnt and mutilated husband into their car and escaped before that old couple could hurt them anymore?

Paula drove through their gates that were stuck open and pulled up to the garage door. It was halfway up and bent at a strange angle like it had somehow come off the track. She was sure Lou and Edna would have a reasonable explanation for how they had broken the garage door, and then she would get to hear their promises to fix it.

But it wasn’t the garage door that had shocked her into stillness for a moment. No, it was Lou and Edna that had shocked her. They stood there beside each other in front of the broken garage door holding hands, both of them smiling like they were proud of something they had done. Then they moved out of the way to reveal what they had built inside the garage.

Paula couldn’t believe what she was seeing. She had wondered how she was going to get Scott up the few steps of the garage door and into the house. But Lou and Edna had taken care of that problem—they had built a wooden ramp to the door so she could wheel him up there. The wood looked warped, the job looked amateurish, but she figured it would be easier than trying to wheel him up the steps.

It was like they knew he would need this ramp. Like they knew he was going to fall out of the Denali and hurt himself worse. Like they had planned it.

The old couple came over to assist Paula with Scott as she struggled to get him into the wheelchair. Scott could stand and hobble just a little, just enough to help her, but he was still in pain even though he was trapped in a fog of pain meds. The painkillers didn’t seem to be helping much anymore for whatever reason, but he was still getting addicted to them already. He looked miserable. He had lost one of his front teeth in the tumble out of their truck, and the skin on one side of his face and down one arm was rubbed raw from the pavement. His left arm was immobilized in a cast and sling, a useless appendage now.

“How can we help?” Edna asked with that stupid, sickly-sweet voice.

“Stay away from me,” Paula growled through clenched teeth. “I’ve got it.”

“We’re just trying to help,” Lou said, managing to sound hurt.

“I think you’ve helped enough,” she said as she wheeled her husband underneath the crooked and stuck garage door to the ramp they had built.

I have to get away from them, she thought.

And then the answer hit her.

*

Paula got Scott settled on the couch downstairs. She was hurrying because she wanted to get to the phone. The answer seemed so simple now; it had been staring her in the face for so long now. Why hadn’t she seen it before?

She made sure Scott took his pills. She got him a cold drink, turned the TV on for him, and flipped the switch for the ceiling fan since the air conditioner still wasn’t working. He turned his head to the side, his skin shiny with sweat. He moaned. He always seemed to be moaning now.

Paula left Scott alone, letting him twitch in a fitful sleep. She went into the kitchen and grabbed the cordless phone. Of course Diana and Ronnie had escaped Lou and Edna—they had packed up their things and put their house up for sale. They had jumped into their car and escaped. But not before passing Lou and Edna off to her.

Paula felt a sudden stabbing hatred for Diana—she’d known the misery that Lou and Edna were going to cause, yet she had recommended them anyway.

But Diana hadn’t had a choice, had she? How much longer could Diana and Roger have put up with Lou and Edna before they killed her and her husband in some kind of accident or drove them insane?

And Paula didn’t have much of a choice right now, either.

Who to call? Which friends of hers needed the most help around their house? And then she thought of Patty.

*

Patty met the old couple at her front gate. They drove a beat-up RV, and for a moment she was a little skeptical of their cleaning and renovation skills based on the condition of their vehicle. But then she pushed that thought away. Lou and Edna Kravitz had come highly recommended by Scott and Paula Evans—and she could trust them.

Patty opened the gates for the old couple who waved and smiled at her as they parked their RV. They seemed so friendly . . .

This was one of those rare stories that came to me fully formed and I wrote it down very quickly. And pretty much what you read here is very close to the first draft I wrote (which, for me, is a rare occurrence).

My wife and I were doing some work around the house, cleaning a metal fence. As I was working, I had a lot of time to let my mind wander. I love doing work like that (like mowing the lawn, for instance) where I don’t have to think too much about what I’m doing and I can let my mind wander—that’s when a lot of these ideas form or I work through some sticking points in a story. As I do that kind of cruise-control type of work, I don’t really try to think of a story—I just let my mind wander from one thought to the next. And a lot of times a question, or a few questions, pop up in my mind. Then the ideas begin to flow. In this case, as I was scrubbing this metal fence, I wondered what would happen if we ruined the fence (which is pretty expensive) with the cleaning agents or something. And then I pictured a sweet elderly couple who are hired to help out around the house, coming highly recommended from their friend . . . and then the whole story kind of unfolded right there in my mind while I worked on that fence underneath that hot Florida sun. I remember writing down the first twenty pages or so (handwritten—I usually handwrite most of my first drafts), and then finishing it up over the next day or so.

It’s strange how ideas pop up sometimes. I knew this wasn’t technically a horror story, but the idea of this elderly couple you can’t get rid of, where accidents keep piling up, chilled me after a while. But the most chilling thing to me was that the main character was more than willing to pass this curse that is Lou and Edna Kravitz on to a friend.

ZOMBIE HOUSE

The beginning of the zombie apocalypse had been a rush of confusion and chaos on that first day for Rhonda.

She’d woken up in bed, sometime around mid-morning, and heard a scratching sound at her bedroom window across the room. Her curtains were open, and she saw her younger brother Jay pawing at the window with one hand. Half of his face was covered with dried blood. His eyes were bulging, but glazed over with death. His mouth was open far too wide, his loose jaw swinging back and forth slightly as he moved.

For a second Rhonda thought this was some kind of prank Jay was pulling because he knew how much she loved horror books and movies, especially anything about the zombie apocalypse.

But it only took a few more seconds to realize that this was no prank—her brother was a mutilated, gory mess . . . dead, yet still scraping at her window and trying to get inside.

She screamed and ran for her parent’s bedroom in a fog of panic. Her parents were gone. The electricity was out. The phones weren’t working.

Rhonda ran out to the living room and stopped when she saw her friend Eric standing there. He had blood splattered all over him, and she thought he was another one of the walking dead. But no, he was alive. He had a claw hammer gripped in one hand.

“My parents . . .” she said, unable to get the rest of the words out.

Eric just nodded solemnly.

“Jay,” Rhonda whispered, her breath leaving her lungs, making them feel empty. She fought for breath as she hyperventilated.

After guiding her to the couch and helping her to get her breathing under control, Eric told her everything he knew so far. He guessed it was some kind of airborne virus, and then the infection had spread quickly from bites and scratches. He told her his parents had been infected—they were zombies now—and then he’d come here to check on her. It had been too late for her family, but at least he’d gotten to her in time. He told her that he’d read articles on the internet about the government playing around with bioweapons and super viruses, and he knew that sooner or later some terrible disease was going to break out.

“But how come we’re not infected?” she asked him.

“I don’t know,” he told her. “Usually with any virus, there’s always a small percentage that aren’t affected by it.” He looked lost and hopeless. “I wish I knew more,” he said.

Eric was eighteen years old, one year older than she was. He lived next door (which way out here in the country meant a quarter of a mile away). He was in many of Rhonda’s classes at school, and neither one of them were that popular with the other kids. But at least she wasn’t the victim of torment and teasing like Eric was. He was tall but gangly, with a severe case of acne—the target of a lot of the jocks in the locker room

The common bond she and Eric shared was their love of all things horror. Eric would come over and they would watch zombie TV shows and movies together. They even fantasized about what they would do if a zombie apocalypse ever happened.

Well, it was here now and she wasn’t ready.

Be careful what you wish for.

She and Eric had been friends for years, and even though she could tell that Eric wanted more from their relationship, she made sure not to send him any kind of mixed signals. But here he was now, her friend. The only one left.

He had saved her.

Rhonda curled up on the couch as the day grew into afternoon, still in shock. She didn’t know what to do.

“We need to leave,” Eric told her.

“And go where?”

“We need to get some help, but I think we need to hole up somewhere safe for a while first.” He hesitated for a moment. “My family has a cabin up in the mountains. It’s stocked with food and water. We’ll be safe there.”

Rhonda wasn’t ready to leave; she wasn’t ready to go out there with all of the zombies.

“I need to go back outside,” Eric told her. “I need to see how bad it is, make a plan to get out of here.”

He got up to go.

She grabbed him. “No. Wait. Don’t go.”

“I need to do this.”

She let him go.

An hour after he had left, Rhonda heard a noise coming from the kitchen. She got up and crept towards the archway that separated the living room from the kitchen. The noise was louder; it sounded like crashing wood.

She entered the kitchen and saw where the noise was coming from—the door that led out to the garage. Eric had nailed a piece of wood over the door to barricade it, and he’d stacked a few kitchen chairs in front of it, but Rhonda’s father was trying to get inside (not her father anymore; he was a zombie now). The flimsy board over the door had broken free, but at least the pile of chairs was keeping the door from opening all the way. Her father could only get one arm and his head through the open door.

Rhonda didn’t stick around. She ran to her bedroom and locked the door. It was what Eric had told her to do if any of them tried to break in. She knew she should’ve grabbed the biggest kitchen knife she could find and stab the zombie in the head. You had to get them in the brains; everyone knew that. But she couldn’t make herself do it. It was a lot different in real life than it was on the TV shows or in the movies. If she had been a character in one of those shows, she would’ve had a pair of guns holstered around her waist like an Old West gunslinger. Or she would have used a claw hammer like Eric used. But she wasn’t a character in a movie, and she just couldn’t do it.

Maybe in the future she would be able to fight zombies, but not right now.

Eric found Rhonda in her bedroom some time later. He told her that he’d been able to coax her dead father back outside again, and then he’d barred the kitchen door shut. He still smelled of blood and rot, some of it smeared all over his clothes. Maybe the blood on his clothes allowed him to walk among them.

“We can’t stay here much longer,” he told her.

She nodded in agreement.

He told her it was bad out there—real bad. He suggested the cabin again that he’d told her about before. “We’ll be safe up there. Nobody around for miles.”

She nodded again—it was their only chance.

“We’ll take your mom’s car from the garage,” he told her as he gave her an opened can of soda to drink. “I’ll get it ready, and we’ll leave tonight.”

She took a sip of the soda and nodded. The soda was warm, but it felt good on her throat.

Eric surprised her by hugging her. At first she was going to pull away, but then she gave in and let him hold her.

God, she never would’ve imagined Eric holding her like this, comforting her. She saw him in a new light now. He talked differently. He even looked different to her, more attractive somehow.

Hours later Eric woke Rhonda up in the darkness. He only had a flashlight to light their way as he guided her to the garage. She was so tired, so groggy, still in shock. She lay down in the backseat of her mom’s Dodge Durango with a blanket, and then she was out again.

The next thing she knew she woke up inside the cabin.

The cabin was small with only a bedroom, a bathroom, a living room, and a kitchen—just the basics of furniture and décor. Eric had already boarded up the windows the best he could while she’d been asleep, and daylight invaded the cabin in between the slats of wood. But at least they were safe for now.

There was food stocked up in the cabin as Eric had promised, but it wasn’t going to last more than a week or two. He needed to go on a scavenger run. He asked if she wanted to go with him.

“I’m sorry,” she told him. “I’m not ready to go out there yet.”

Eric understood. He told her to take her time and then he touched her face, the gentlest of touches.

After he was gone, she locked the cabin door and stared at it. She felt bad letting him go by himself. She felt useless, like a dead weight Eric was forced to drag around. She promised herself that she would change in the next few days—she promised herself that she would force herself to go out there into that zombie-infested world.

An hour later, any thoughts of going out into that world evaporated when she heard a zombie at the living room window. There was a hard thump against the glass, and then that pawing sound—the same sound her brother had made.

She went towards the window, and she could see an old man out there, clawing at the glass. He looked even more decayed than her father and brother had been.

Even though the zombie only clawed at the window for a few minutes, it seemed like forever. And then he was at the front door, thumping against it, rattling the door handle, trying to get inside.

Rhonda sank down to her knees, and then she crawled over by the kitchen cabinets with the claw hammer Eric had left behind clutched in her hands. She cried silently and stayed as still as she could.

The zombies found us already. We were supposed to be safe up here, but they found us!

Eric woke Rhonda up hours later. She was angry with him, taking out her fear on him. He took it well, but he told her things were worse out there than he had imagined. The dead were everywhere. She calmed down, and he gave her a bottle of water. It was warm, but it was from the solar-powered well on the property. The water tasted a little funny, but it quenched her thirst.

“I’m sorry,” he told her as he held her. “We’re going to find some help soon. I promise. I’ll find a military patrol or something. Someone who can help us.”

That night they kissed. And their kissing led to the bedroom. They made love for the first time. It felt so good to be in Eric’s arms. Afterwards, they lay together in silence, their naked bodies still touching under the thin sheet that covered them.

Two days later Eric went on another supply run. He said he would try to find a battery-powered radio, even though none of the stations were coming in on her mom’s Durango—everything was static. He’d promised to try to find something sweet for her, maybe some chocolate. But everything was already becoming scarce out there, and he wanted to be careful; he didn’t want to be noticed by the other survivors. A lot of those survivors were even more dangerous than the zombies, and he didn’t want them following him back to the cabin.

After Eric left, Rhonda had visions of those survivors finding the cabin and kicking the door in. She could be raped or killed. Or the survivors could take over the cabin and kick her and Eric out and into the land of the living dead.

But those nightmarish visions of survivors vanished when she heard the zombie back at the living room window, pawing at it. Only this zombie was a woman. Rhonda slinked back to her spot on the floor near the kitchen cabinets, cowering there with the claw hammer gripped in her hands.

A few days later Eric tried to get Rhonda to come outside with him. “Just for a few minutes,” he told her.

But she couldn’t do it.

“Take your time,” he told her as he held her. “I don’t want you to go out there until you’re ready. We have all the time in the world.”

Rhonda had lost so much . . . her entire family. But she was so lucky to have Eric with her.

Four days later everything changed.

Eric was on another supply run. He had brought chocolates back for her, and she had eaten all of them along with a few more cans of warm soda and that funny-tasting water from the well. He promised to find more goodies for her on this trip, maybe even another bottle of vodka. She had finished the last bottle they had, drinking a cup or two every night so she could sleep. But sometimes just being in Eric’s arms made her feel better than the alcohol did.

She’d been writing in her journal when she heard a noise outside—but it wasn’t the sound of the zombies clawing at the wood and glass. This was a different noise. This noise was coming from above the cabin.

The noise got louder and Rhonda froze. She recognized that sound.

A helicopter.

A helicopter was flying right over the cabin.

And now it was flying away.

Oh God, what was she doing? It could be a military or a police helicopter. Maybe they were searching for survivors of the plague.

She grabbed her claw hammer and ran to the front door. She hesitated there for a moment at the front door as the sound of the helicopter grew fainter. She imagined opening the door and seeing zombies right on the other side. She imagined the zombies were somehow smart, waiting hour upon hour for her to open the door.

But she pushed that image from her mind—this was her only chance. Eric would be so proud of her for flagging down a helicopter. They could be saved. Maybe they would be taken to a military compound where people were beginning to rebuild America. Maybe this plague had only affected this part of Georgia, or even just the Southeast. Maybe there were other parts in America, or the world, that were safe.

Rhonda unlocked the front door and swung it open.

No zombies that she could see.

She raced out into the front field of tall grass. She looked around for zombies in the field, or in the woods all around the cabin, but she didn’t see any. She looked up at the blue sky and spotted the helicopter. It was flying away from the cabin.

Nooo . . .

She raised her hammer up and waved her arms frantically. She screamed even though she knew her yells could attract zombies.

But now the helicopter was gone.

The world was silent again, and she stopped yelling and waving her arms.

She was sad to see the helicopter go, but she was also elated as hope built up inside of her. The helicopter meant that humanity wasn’t dead. There was a place they could go. She couldn’t wait to tell Eric about it.

But then something in the sky caught her attention—a vapor trail from an airplane, which looked like a white dot up in the sky.

There was an airplane in the sky?

She noticed two other vapor trails in different directions. There were other planes in the sky. It looked like a normal blue sky on a normal day.

Rhonda felt a sense of dread worming its way through her body. Her skin tingled, and her stomach flip-flopped inside of her. Her muscles suddenly felt weak.

Something was wrong here.

She walked back towards the cabin, but instead of going inside, she went around to the side of it where the living room window was. She clutched her hammer even tighter as she saw the dried bloodstains on the wood siding beneath the window. She crept down the side of the cabin, and the smell of the dead was already hitting her.

She hesitated for a moment. Was there a zombie close by?

But she forced herself to walk to the back corner of the cabin where the smell was worse. She peeked around the corner and froze. Crumpled against the back wall of the cabin was the body of the zombie woman she had seen a few days earlier at the living room window. But the woman wasn’t moving. Most of her legs were gone.

Rhonda forced herself to move closer to the dead woman. She walked on numb legs and raised her hammer a little, ready to use it if the woman lunged at her.

But this woman wasn’t going to lunge at her; she wasn’t going to move ever again. She was dead. Maggots nested in the stumps of her legs, and ants crawled all over her body.

Now that Rhonda was closer to the woman, she saw the steel rods stuck into the woman’s wrists. The rods were two and a half feet long. They looked like they controlled her arms like one might control a Muppet.

The horrifying realization hit her now—the zombies only came to the windows and door whenever Eric was gone. He’d been outside every time a zombie came. He had been controlling them. Eric had killed these people and he had made them act like zombies. He had set the whole thing up to get her here to this cabin, to be with her, to live out this sick fantasy of his.

Oh God, he had killed her family.

She heard a vehicle driving up through the trail in the woods that led to the cabin.

Eric! He was coming back.

She had to run. Once he realized that she knew the truth, he would kill her. Maybe she would become another zombie puppet for him to play with.

Rhonda spotted a small woodshed near the trees where the seemingly endless woods began. She bolted through the tall grass to the front door of the shed and ducked inside. The smell of rot inside the shed almost took her breath away, her head swimming for a moment. She looked back out through the cracks in the wood door as her mom’s Dodge Durango pulled up in front of the cabin. Eric got out with a burlap sack in which he had collected his “scavenged supplies.”

It didn’t seem like he had seen her dart inside the shed, but she couldn’t be sure. But as soon as he went inside the cabin and realized that she wasn’t there, he would be back out in a flash and looking for her.

The smell inside the shed was still nauseating her. She turned and looked around now that her eyes had adjusted to the darkness. An old man’s body was draped over a table in the middle of the woodshed. His legs were gone, sawed off near the groin like the woman’s were. Maybe Eric took the legs off so it was easier for him to carry the bodies to the windows.

There was a pile of legs in the corner. The blood all over them was dark and coagulated, the fabric of the clothing stuck to the deteriorating flesh. A cloud of flies buzzed around the dead flesh, and they sounded like a swarm of bees to her.

Was her brother in this shed? Her mother and father?

No, Eric must’ve left them at her house. Surely the police had discovered the bodies by now and a manhunt was underway for her and Eric. It would only be a matter of time before the police found them, and then she would be rescued . . . if she could live that long.

She remembered that Eric had told her this was his family’s cabin. Surely the police would search this place soon.

But that glimmer of hope only lasted a few seconds.

She realized now that Eric had been lying about that. This was probably some random cabin he’d found, and the old man and woman lying in pieces were the owners. Eric had scouted this place out, killed the old couple, and then stocked the cabin with food so they could hide out here during the “zombie apocalypse.”

Rhonda looked back out through the cracks in the door. Eric was still inside the cabin. She needed to get out of this shed—she was trapped in here.

“Rhonda!” Eric sang her name out into the clear mountain air.

It was too late. Eric was already outside again.

“Rhonda, I know you’re out here somewhere!” His voice was pleasant and controlled, maybe even a little amused. But she could hear the malevolence just underneath. He was angry, but trying not to show it.

Eric turned the corner at the front of the cabin. He had a gun in his hand.

“Rhonda, come on out. I didn’t want you to see this yet.”

She huddled against the shed door, holding her breath as she watched Eric walk down the side of the cabin towards the back where the top half of the woman’s body lay slumped against the wall.

“I knew you would find out eventually,” Eric yelled. “I just wanted more time with you. Maybe a few more days. We had something in that cabin, and I know you felt it, too!”

He was getting closer.

Could she outrun him? She had been in that cabin for almost a week and a half now. Her muscles felt weak and her mind was foggy. She began to suspect that Eric had been slipping something into her drinks and the “gifts” that he brought back with him.

“We can still do this a while longer,” Eric said as he took another step away from the back of the cabin.

Another step closer to the woodshed.

“We can still pretend. Just like the movies we watched and the books we read. Remember how we used to talk about what we’d do if the zombie apocalypse happened? This has always been our fantasy. Ours, together.”

Another step closer.

“I don’t want to kill you, Rhonda. I . . . I love you.”

Eric smiled. He clenched the gun tighter in his hand.

He took another step closer.

Rhonda still had the claw hammer in her hand, but what good was it against a gun? A few more seconds passed by, and she didn’t even think about it . . . she bolted out of the woodshed and ran for the woods. Her muscles were rubbery and her mind was fuzzy; she was running on pure adrenaline now.

She ran through the brush in the woods, dodging trees. Her sneakers crunched on the dead leaves and pine needles. So loud. Too loud.

“Rhonda, stop!”

He sounded so close, but she didn’t dare turn around to see how close. She just kept on running.

She spotted something up ahead. A fence in the woods, maybe it was marking off someone else’s property. If she could just get inside that property . . .

A shot rang out. Rhonda swore she felt the bullet whiz right past her shoulder.

Had she been shot?

A split second later she heard a bullet smack into the tree trunk in front of her, the brittle bark exploding off of it.

Rhonda made it to the fence which was strung with barbed wire. She didn’t even hesitate, she just pulled the strung wires apart so she could squeeze through, holding the bottom wires down with her claw hammer. She couldn’t believe she had held on to the hammer the whole time she’d been running.

She was almost through the fence, but then her pants snagged on the barbed burs, holding her there. She was stuck.

Another shot rang out. She felt the impact of a bullet strike her calf. It hit her so hard she was pushed through the fence to the other side where she landed with a thud.

Oh God! I’m shot! He shot me!

“Rhonda, stop! Stop right there! Wait for me!”

His voice sounded so close. She felt like she was going to pass out; everything at the edges of her vision was going dark.

Get up! she told herself. You have to run!

Rhonda jumped up to her feet and grabbed the hammer that she’d dropped on the leafy ground. She hobbled away, but she was surprised that there wasn’t much pain in her leg.

Maybe she was in shock.

Maybe the pain would come later.

If there was a later.

She tried not to pay attention to Eric’s voice calling out to her, threatening her, then begging her to stop, then threatening her again.

There was something ahead in the trees, some kind of wood structure. Maybe it was a house, but as she got closer she realized it was some kind of woodshed. But this shed was at least twice the size of the one she’d just been in, the one with the old man’s body draped over the table and the pile of legs in the corner.

She prayed that Eric was having as tough of a time as she’d had with the barbed wire fence.

But she was also sure she would feel another bullet rock her forward and slam her to the ground. Or worse—she would feel his hands grabbing at her, tackling her.

She reached the shed. She hobbled to the doors and pulled them open. She went inside, frantically looking around. Wood counters ran down both long sides of the shed with old tools and junk piled up on them. There were stacks of lumber in the shed, big metal jugs, pieces of what looked like scrap metal and air-conditioning parts. Large pieces of antique furniture were stacked up against the far wall, some of them covered with plastic blue tarps. Some of the exposed wood was coated with green mildew.

She needed to hide in here somewhere, but then she looked down at her blood-soaked leg. Eric would be able to follow her blood trail anywhere she went. He would know where she would be hiding.

Maybe that was it.

She grabbed a warped roll of duct tape from the counter and wrapped some of it around her calf, stopping the flow of blood. She threw the roll of tape back on the counter with the other junk.

“Rhonda! You can’t hide from me!”

He was close, but not all the way to the shed yet. Maybe he was even slowing down now that he knew where she was. She might still have at least thirty seconds.

There were spots of blood on the ground outside the shed doors, and she’d tracked more blood when she’d stepped inside. She took off her sneakers and left one just inside the shed doors in the splash of light, and then she slid her other sneaker under the corner of the plastic tarp with the toe of the shoe sticking out.

She hurried out through the shed doors, making sure she wasn’t leaving any blood behind now. The tape had worked. Outside, she prayed she wouldn’t run into Eric, but he wasn’t there yet. She darted around the corner, waiting at the side of the shed with her claw hammer clenched in her hands.

Leaves crunched as he approached, and twigs snapped.

Was he coming up behind her?

She turned around and looked at the rear corner of the shed. She couldn’t tell where the sound was coming from, but he wasn’t sneaking up behind her.

And then she heard him at the shed doors; she heard the door creaking as he opened it all the way.

“Rhonda, come on out. I know you’re in there.”

The next few seconds of silence seemed to stretch out forever. Was he still waiting in front of the doors?

“Don’t make this hard on yourself,” he finally said. He sounded like he was still in front of the shed doors, still waiting. And why not? He had all the time in the world. As far as he was concerned, he had her trapped inside the shed.

But he was still waiting.

Why?

Had he figured out her plan? Maybe he was too smart for that. Maybe he’d seen too many movies like she had.

“Come on out,” he said, and she breathed a sigh of relief. “If you come out, I’ll make it quick. I promise. Otherwise, well, I think you’ve seen what I can do.”

Rhonda heard him take a step inside the shed.

Then another step.

This was her only chance.

She peeked around the corner. Eric wasn’t there—he was already inside.

She hurried towards the shed doors, her bare feet making no noise on the marshy ground.

For a split second Rhonda was sure that Eric had figured out her plan. She was sure he would be waiting just inside the doorway with his gun aimed at her. She would see a blast of light from his gun and then everything would be over.

Would it be so bad? At least she would be with her family again.

But when Eric spoke from inside the shed, she knew he hadn’t figured it out yet. “You had your chance, Rhonda.” And then, lower, almost under his breath: “Oh, the things I’m going to do to your body.”

She rushed inside and struck him in the back of his head as hard as she could with the claw part of the hammer, the claw sinking into his skull. He collapsed like invisible strings holding him up had been cut. She let go of the hammer’s handle as he fell, the claw still stuck in the back of his head. He fell on his face. His gun slipped from his hand and slid away into the darkness.

Was he dead?

No, he was moaning and writhing on the dirty and stained concrete floor. There was blood coming out of the wound in his head, but not as much as she thought there would be.

Without thinking about it, she put her foot on his upper back and grabbed the hammer’s handle and pulled. It was really stuck in the bone, but she wriggled it free as he moaned louder and tried to flip over.

She raised the bloodstained hammer up as he turned over. His eyes were wide, his mouth open like he was struggling for air. He tried to grab at her legs, and he was up on his knees so quickly, ready to lunge at her.

But he was a second too slow.

She sung the hammer and struck him in the side of his head. It made a wet thumping sound, and he went down.

“That’s for my family,” she told him.

He was down flat on his stomach again, but not out yet. His face was stained with blood, and he writhed on the floor. He looked a little like a zombie himself now.

She grabbed the roll of duct tape that she’d used to wrap around the bullet wound in her leg. She pulled his hands behind his back and taped his wrists together. He tried to struggle as she bound him, but he was too weak. After his hands were secured behind his back, she taped his ankles together, wrapping the tape around at least ten times.

Then she stood up and pushed her hair out of her face. She spotted the bloodstained hammer on the floor near him. She thought about picking it up and hitting him with it again.

And again and again.

Maybe if she was a character in one of those zombie movies she could have done it. But maybe she was never going to be like one of those characters.

She left Eric there on the floor, moaning and struggling. She walked through the woods and came across an old lady who stood there, aiming a shotgun at her.

“What’s all that commotion?” the old lady asked. “I heard gunshots.”

Rhonda dropped down to her knees and raised her hands in surrender. She started crying. “Help me. I’ve been shot. He . . . he tried to kill me.”

“Who?” the old woman asked as she lowered her shotgun a little.

“He’s in your shed. I hit him with a hammer. Please . . . call the police.”

The old woman yelled over her shoulder without completely taking her eyes off of Rhonda. “Jerry, get the phone! Call the police!”

The old lady turned back to Rhonda and smiled. “You’re safe now, child.”

Rhonda lowered her hands and bent forward. She began sobbing.

The idea for this story came to me while I was watching some kind of zombie movie (I can’t even remember it at all anymore). I didn’t think the movie was very good, but there was a young couple holed up in a cabin or a house or something (as they so often are in zombie movies), and I began to wonder . . . what if a guy somehow convinced a woman that the zombie apocalypse had begun just so he could keep her captive for weeks? And then the idea was born. Of course, I had to work out how the guy could fake an entire zombie apocalypse, and I hope I pulled that off here.

ON THE MOVE

Jack crept through the dark house with his duffel bag gripped in one hand, heading towards the back door. The place was quiet. The digital clock on the stove showed nearly four o’clock in the morning in bright green numbers. Cindi (that’s how she spelled it—Cindi with an “i”) was asleep . . . more like passed out from all the wine they drank earlier, but he still wanted to be quiet—he didn’t want her to wake up and catch him running out on her. He’d told her in the beginning that he couldn’t stick around; he wasn’t the kind of man who was ever going to stay long. She’d told him that she was fine with that. But the women he met never really were; they all thought they could change him, that if the sex was good enough, and if they loved and cared about him enough, then he would change . . . and he would stay.

But he never stayed.

He couldn’t.

He didn’t leave and move on just because he wanted to be free to travel and meet some new woman—he left to protect them. He was never able to stay in one place very long. As soon as he saw the boy show up, he knew it was time to move on. The boy had shown up last night, the boy who always followed him.

The boy was relentless . . . the boy never gave up.

The boy was dead.

Jack crept to the back door. Millie, Cindi’s overfed cat, rubbed up against his legs, purring. It almost seemed like Millie didn’t want him to go, like she was acting as a surrogate for Cindi, trying to entice him to stay, a silent plea for him not to leave this time.

But Millie really just wanted him to let her outside.

And he did. He and Millie walked out through Cindi’s back door together.

It took an hour for Jack to walk into town, and then another two hours to walk through it. He finally caught a ride with a trucker heading west into Oregon.

“I’m heading to Portland,” the trucker told him.

“Fine with me,” Jack said as he climbed into the cab.

The trucker introduced himself as Ralph. They shook hands. Jack offered to pay Ralph some money for the ride. But Ralph turned it down, perhaps feeling that Jack needed the little bit of money he’d earned laboring for a construction company more than he did.

Jack settled back into the seat. Ralph made small talk for a little while, and Jack obliged, realizing that the true fare for this ride was conversation.

“You got kids?” Ralph asked as he drove.

“No,” Jack answered. “You?”

Ralph nodded. “A boy.”

“How old is he?”

“He’s eleven,” Ralph said and then he was quiet for a moment. “I need to get back to my boy. He needs me.”

Jack felt a chill run through him—maybe it was the worried expression on the trucker’s face, or the tone of his voice. But the chill had really come because the conversation reminded Jack of the dead boy who was following him, the dead boy who wouldn’t leave him alone.

Ralph grew silent for a while, lost in his thoughts as he drove. Jack tried to think of something else to say after their conversation had died, but then he eventually dozed off.

They were heading west towards the ocean. The land would end at that ocean, and Jack would have to decide whether to head north or south. At least he was putting some distance between the boy and himself. But the boy would find him again eventually—he always did.

The boy’s name was Adam. Jack had found that out after reading a newspaper article about the auto accident that had killed him—a hit and run accident. Police were still looking for the driver.

Jack had been that driver.

He couldn’t help dreaming about the accident; the scene replayed itself nearly every time he closed his eyes, drawing him back to that lonely road on that late fall afternoon. It had been a Sunday, and dusk had come quickly. Jack had been at a friend’s birthday party, and the drinking had started. Jack had left early, but not before chugging down six bottles of beer.

Six beers—that was all he’d had. Not enough to make him drunk, but maybe just enough to throw his concentration off a little. What threw his concentration off even more was his cell phone. When he struck Adam with his truck, he’d been trying to answer a text from his girlfriend, trying to let her know that he was on his way home and that he would be there soon. She was already mad that he’d gone to the party in the first place—she didn’t like his friends.

Between glancing down at his phone and driving, he’d never seen the boy on the bicycle.

Adam . . . his name had been Adam.

Jack struck Adam so hard that he’d knocked both the boy and his bicycle into the woods. Jack had screeched to a stop on the lonely Virginia road. Nobody was coming in either direction; he hadn’t seen another car for the last ten minutes.

On shaky legs, Jack got out of his truck and approached the trees, rushing into the thick brush.

Oh God, no . . . please . . . God, no . . .

The boy was dead, Jack could see that immediately. His body was crumpled up at the base of a tree. There was a dark splash on the trunk of that tree, and bark had been chipped away. The boy’s arms and legs looked bent at odd and painful angles. His face was a red smear of gore from where he had collided with the tree trunk. A glint of white skull peeked out from where the top of his head was coming apart. The bicycle was only ten feet away and it was obscenely undamaged, just a bent back rim from where Jack’s pickup truck had struck it.

Jack stood there on trembling, weak legs. He wanted to puke, but somehow he held the vomit down. He was paralyzed with indecision for a moment . . . part of him wanted to crash forward through the forest brush and help the boy, try to revive him somehow. But the rational part took over. The boy was dead. Nothing could be done now.

It was time to call the police.

Jack walked out of the woods, down the grassy shoulder towards his waiting truck, the motor still rumbling.

Thoughts bolted through his mind like lightning strikes, fragments of thoughts really: I’ll be ruined . . . prison for the rest of my life . . . I’m not ready for this . . .

He still hadn’t seen another vehicle drive by, and it was nearly dark.

Lonely road . . . no witnesses . . .

He could just leave. No one would ever know.

Jack looked back at the woods, then at the road. There was no sign that he’d hit the kid. There were black marks on the road from where he’d skidded to a stop, but there were a lot of black marks on this road. He walked to his truck, the taillights glowing bright red in the growing darkness. He walked around to the front of his truck. The grill and bumper weren’t even damaged that badly. It was such an insignificant injury to his truck compared to the damage the boy had suffered, such a contrast between metal and the frail flesh and bone of the human body.

A moment later, not even realizing he’d gotten into his truck and put it in drive, he was speeding down the country road. The cell phone was still in the center console, the text message to his girlfriend unfinished.

He would call the police . . . yeah, that’s what he’d do. He just needed some time first, some time to think, to prepare what to say, to pull himself together.

Jack didn’t drive home. He drove to a gas station that had a carwash and parked his truck in a far corner of the parking lot. He bought some beef jerky, a bag of potato chips, and a twelve pack of sodas. He was so thirsty . . . so hungry even though he was still nauseous. He paid for the carwash with cash along with his groceries, and the bored cashier gave him the code for the carwash tunnel.

He went through the carwash, putting his truck in neutral and letting the big machines and spray jets wash the little flecks of blood and dirt away from the front of his vehicle. It looked like most of the damage to the boy had come from when he’d struck the tree trunk in the woods. If the boy would’ve just missed that tree, maybe he would’ve lived. Maybe he would’ve had some broken bones or something, but he probably would’ve lived.

Jack went to the ATM machine after the carwash and drew out as much money as he could. Tomorrow was Monday, he would come back to the bank when it first opened and withdraw exactly half of the money he and his girlfriend had in their account. He would stay somewhere tonight, a motel room, and then after he left the bank tomorrow morning he would run. There was no sense in lying to himself anymore; he knew now that he wasn’t going to call the police—he was going to run.

It wasn’t fair. This wasn’t his fault. He’d only looked away from the road for a second. This was that boy’s fault. Why had he been riding his bicycle on that lonely road that late in the afternoon? He looked, what . . . eleven or twelve years old (Adam had been eleven years old—Jack would find that out later in the newspaper article). What kind of parents let their kid ride a bicycle by himself down a dangerous road like that, and practically at night? It was as much the parents’ fault as anyone else’s.

Jack woke up early the next morning after sleeping fitfully through a string of nightmares about the boy sitting up in the woods and trying to speak to him through a jaw that was pushed way too far to one side, his shattered teeth gleaming among the red gory maw. One eye was staring out through that red mask; the other one was gone or popped like a grape. The boy was reaching for him in the dream, reaching with a twisted arm that was already turning black with rot, busted fingers stretching out towards him.

He went to the bank right at nine o’clock and drew out one thousand eight hundred and forty-nine dollars. He could tell he was making the teller nervous as he leaned towards her at the counter. He knew he was on camera, and his dirty baseball cap wasn’t much of a disguise. He’d shaved his mustache and beard off last night in the motel room. He also shaved off all of his hair with a pair of electric clippers he’d bought at Wal-Mart. It wasn’t enough though. He was going to get caught. Eventually the police were going to come out of the shadows somewhere, guns drawn, and then they were going to arrest him. Of course they were going to beat the shit out of him somewhere between the cop car and the jail. He would eventually go to prison; maybe he would even get the death penalty.

But the police never came. Adam’s body wasn’t found until late the next afternoon after extensive searching. The parents had no idea why Adam had been riding on that road so late at night—or so they said.

By the time Adam’s body had been found, Jack had already stocked up some supplies in a duffel bag he’d bought, and he was already heading west.

Jack didn’t know where he was going . . . he was just running. He couldn’t contact anyone that he knew. He destroyed his cell phone and threw the pieces off a bridge into a river. He knew he would have to ditch his pickup truck at some point and then proceed on foot.

It was only two weeks later when he’d first seen Adam. The boy was just standing on a street corner, staring at him with that one good eye he had left that was set in that mask of caked gore. But Jack could see the expression in the boy’s eye . . . anger, rage, a burning need for vindication.

Jack ran when he saw the boy. He headed farther west. He hitchhiked and then stayed in a small town for a while. He worked an odd job, but the boy found him again.

And again in the next town.

Every time Jack saw the boy, he was a little closer. Jack knew that he couldn’t let the boy get too close to him—he couldn’t let the boy touch him.

“Leave me alone!” Jack had screamed at the boy one time.

“I’m sorry,” Jack had wailed at the boy another time. “I’m so sorry.”

No one else could see the boy—Jack realized that after the first few times—but the boy was real even though nobody else could see him.

Now Jack was on the move again, already into Oregon, heading towards the Pacific Ocean. He’d gone from one coast to another in the last few months.

After Jack got out of Ralph’s semi-truck, he stayed in Portland for a few days. But then he moved south, moving on down the coastline. He found some work in a small town. He met another woman in a bar, a lonely woman who was okay with Jack moving on eventually . . . but inside, she knew that she could change him, love him enough to make him want to stay.

Jack stayed at the woman’s house. Her name wasn’t important. They drank together. Jack drank a lot now. She made love, but to Jack it was just sex, just a duty to perform, just a release for him. What used to be pleasures in life were just dull and gray things now. And there was always that dread in the back of his mind that the boy would show up again soon.

After a few more drinks, Jack lay on the woman’s bed, nearly drifting off to sleep. The boy haunted Jack’s dreams as relentlessly as he haunted his waking moments.

Jack woke up in the dark and saw the boy—he was so close now, standing right beside the bed, hovering over him. Jack backed away from the boy, scooting back towards the headboard, rousing the woman next to him.

“Mmmm,” she murmured. “You okay?”

Jack glanced at the woman, and then back at the boy. His breath was caught in his throat as he stared at the boy, the gore on his face a dark and shiny mask in the moonlight. Jack’s heart hammered in his chest, the blood a drumbeat in his ears. His mouth was dry with fear. He was unable to say anything to the boy, unable to form words.

Then the boy was across the room, standing in the doorway. He curled a finger. Come here, that gesture said: Follow me.

What do you want? Jack almost whispered, but he still couldn’t get the words out.

“I want to show you something,” the boy whispered, his askew jaw moving strangely.

It would never end, Jack thought. The boy would just keep coming back and coming back. Eventually that boy was going to touch him, and then Jack might die of fright . . . or guilt. His heart would stop in his chest.

He didn’t have a choice. He couldn’t run anymore. He got up and walked towards the boy. He needed to see what the boy wanted to show him.

His name was Adam, Jack told himself. He was only eleven years old. He shouldn’t have been riding his bicycle on that lonely road at dusk . . . his parents should’ve been watching him more closely.

You should’ve been watching the road instead of playing with your phone. You shouldn’t have downed all those beers at that birthday party. You shouldn’t have been speeding on that narrow road through the woods.

“You okay?” the woman asked again, her words still slurred from the vodka. She was already going back to sleep.

Jack didn’t bother answering her. He slipped his jeans on, keeping his eyes on the boy in the doorway the whole time. After he had his pants on, Jack shoved his socked feet into his sneakers. He put on a blue flannel shirt over his T-shirt. He was ready to follow the boy now. The boy slipped from the doorway deeper into the darkness of the house.

Jack followed the boy through the house, to the front door, then outside to the street. They walked down the street towards the town, Jack keeping at least ten paces behind the boy. It was late, but there were still a few cars and trucks driving around—maybe even some cops on patrol. He might look like some kind of drunk walking around out here, and maybe he was still a little drunk. What would he tell a cop if one pulled up beside him, leaning out his window? Tell him that he was following this dead boy that only he could see?

“I’m sorry,” Jack told the boy as they walked through the darkness. The air was cold, and the stars were bright in the night sky.

The boy didn’t answer. He didn’t turn around.

But Jack kept following. All this time he’d been running from the boy, and now he was following him.

“What do you want?” Jack asked, crying now, his vision blurry with tears. “What do you want me to do? Turn myself in? Tell them where my truck is?”

Still no answer from the boy.

“I’ll do whatever you want,” Jack cried, and he was telling the truth. He couldn’t take this anymore. He couldn’t take the running, the weight of the guilt. He would go to prison. He just wanted to tell the truth now.

The boy stopped.

Jack stopped.

It was like the boy had heard Jack’s words. The boy turned around slowly and stared at Jack with the one good eye he had left. He lifted his arm up and curled his finger at him again: Come here.

Jack hesitated.

The boy curled his finger again. “Come closer,” the boy whispered even though his ruined mouth hadn’t even moved.

Jack began walking forward. The boy was going to touch him now . . .

“I’m ready,” Jack cried through sobs as he walked across the street towards the boy.

There was a blinding flash of light and the blaring horn of a semi-truck. Jack stood there in the road, and in those last few seconds he saw the driver of the truck behind the windshield. It was Ralph, and he had a smile of satisfaction on his face now, a smile of revenge.

I need to get back to my boy, Ralph had said in the semi-truck when he’d given Jack a ride. He needs me.

Jack looked one last time at the boy standing at the side of the road before the truck slammed into him, and now he knew what Adam had wanted all along.

This is another one of the newer stories in this collection. I had an idea of a man who wandered from town to town, never settling down, always running from a secret . . . he had killed someone . . . a kid.

And from there the story kind of unfolded for me. Although the plot of this story is not exactly original (but what stories are truly original anymore—it seems anything can be compared to something else), it was still something I wanted to write, my take on this somewhat common ghostly idea in horror and suspense. Was the ghost of the boy ever really there, or was the man only seeing his guilt personified? Had Ralph been tracking Jack at the same time the boy was? Was the ghost of Adam helping his father find Jack? I like to believe the ghost of Adam was real, but that’s up to you.

THE LIGHTHOUSE

It takes . . . it takes and it doesn’t want to give back. You have to take it back.

Richie remembered the old man’s words whispered from cracked lips, through rotting teeth.

Just a whisper.

“I’m only trying to help.” That’s what the old man had told Richie that night.

Richie opened his eyes as he lay in bed. Marla wasn’t next to him. He wasn’t really sure where his wife was—somewhere else in the house, he guessed. He wasn’t really sure if he cared where she was right now.

His only thoughts were of Lizzy, his dead daughter. Only nine years old and washed out to sea.

The sea had taken her. She was out there deep down in that cold black darkness somewhere. And sometimes the sea doesn’t like to give back.

“I can help you get her back,” the old man had whispered to Richie after he had pushed him away three nights ago. Richie had continued on with his drunken stagger after wallowing in pity at the Crook’s Den Bar up on the “Hill” in town.

He only took a few more shuffling steps forward before the old man’s words hit him, before they’d really sunk into his alcohol-soaked brain.

“Whaddidyousay?” Richie slurred as he turned back around towards the old man, nearly tipping over in the process.

And now Richie remembered seeing the old man in a new light just then. The old man didn’t seem like a harmless and feeble old man anymore. Suddenly, he looked a little taller, a little stronger. There was a look of confidence in his eyes and a look of slight amusement.

Even though Richie’s mind was numbed with the alcohol, he still felt a chill running through his body, and he felt the buzzing of electricity on his skin in the salty night air. Everything around him seemed to stop for a moment. The sound of the surf only a few blocks away was replaced with the blood rushing in his ears.

He had wanted to rush at the old man that night and shake him for saying such a thing to him, for mocking his sweet little girl’s death, and worst of all, for giving him a split-second flicker of hope.

But Richie hadn’t rushed at the man. He wouldn’t admit it to himself that night, but tonight, as he lay in bed in the darkness, he realized that he was somewhat afraid of the old man who was half his size and twice his age. A quiet power seemed to hum from the old man at such a low frequency that Richie couldn’t hear it—but he could feel it.

In the next few moments the old man claimed to know long-forgotten ways of the dark arts. Whether used for good or evil, it didn’t matter; these skills were only tools, and tools themselves were neither good nor bad. Richie couldn’t remember everything the man had said that night . . . only bits and pieces.

Richie walked along with the old man; they walked up to his shack tucked away in the woods up in the hills that overlooked the small coastal Maine town. The lighthouse dominated the rocky shore in the distance behind them, its light shining a beam out at the endless black ocean—the same ocean that had swallowed his daughter only a few days before.

The rest of that night in the old man’s shack was now a blur in Richie’s memory, and he could only recall fragments of it. He remembered that the old man had asked for blood, and Richie had surrendered his arm and let the old man pierce something into his vein to drain some blood out. The old man had asked Richie to repeat phrases. He had repeated those phrases that he didn’t understand. The old man had asked for a photo of Lizzy, and Richie had given the old man the photo he carried in his wallet. The old man had killed some kind of bird, maybe a chicken, for a sacrifice of sorts. He made Richie drink something, but he was still reeling from all the bourbon he drank earlier in the evening. Richie remembered the old man staring at him with his coal-black eyes, smiling at him with a wide grin of rotted teeth.

“What now?” Richie had asked the old man, feeling suddenly even drowsier. Had it been the liquor finally overwhelming him, or had it been the concoction that the old man had asked him to drink?

“Now you wait,” the old man had whispered. “She will come back to you in three nights.”

Two nights had passed. Tonight was the third night. He waited in his bedroom on the bed as the surf pounded against the rocks two hundred yards away from the house. The lighthouse’s beam of light washed over the bedroom window with a reliable rhythm every sixty-six seconds.

He hated the lighthouse. He’d been looking for work and found an ad for a lighthouse keeper in his local newspaper. He had applied and sat through several interviews. He didn’t know anything about lighthouses or the duties a keeper performed. The interviewer assured him that his lack of knowledge really didn’t matter, they were just looking for a family that didn’t mind staying in the home next to the lighthouse in this small coastal town with nothing to do and eight months of harsh winter. All he had to do was live there, keep the place clean, and report anything that needed repaired.

Richie was desperate—he took the job.

He moved his family up here to this small Maine town at the top of the world. Their two girls, Alyssa and Lizzy, were excited about the beach. When they’d first arrived here, it was still warm enough to go to the beach and to go swimming in the ocean, but it wouldn’t last long. Soon, it would be so bitterly cold, just stepping outside would be a chore.

He remembered Marla’s face when they first got here. She seemed so happy for the first time in such a long time. She seemed secure. They finally had a decent place to live, money coming in, and Richie had been sober for three months by then.

They had only been here a month and then Lizzy was swept out to sea. Alyssa, two years older than Lizzy, was supposed to have been watching Lizzy while they played on the beach. But Richie knew the fault really lay with him and Marla. They had snuck up into the rocks while the girls played on the sand. They’d found a private place to make love.

When their daughter’s scream pierced the afternoon air, everything changed.

The next few minutes were like some kind of nightmare that Richie wanted to erase from his mind, but the hyper-real details wouldn’t go away. He had tugged his pants back up right there behind the rocks. He hadn’t bothered with his shirt.

Something bad was happening, and his senses were on fire.

He ran down to the beach and saw Alyssa standing near the surf, staring out at the roiling ocean.

“Where’s Lizzy?” Richie screamed as he ran across the wide beach towards his daughter. He ran over rocks embedded in the sand, but he didn’t even feel their jagged edges biting into the soft flesh of his feet. He didn’t feel anything except fear, because he really didn’t need his daughter to explain what had happened. He could see in those few seconds that his younger daughter was lost out there in the ocean somewhere.

“Daddy . . .” Alyssa cried, the tears streaming down her face underneath the bright sun. “She was just here . . . just a few seconds ago.”

Richie jumped into the roaring surf, swimming out into the cold, unending waves. He screamed Lizzy’s name. He dunked his head under the surface like he might catch a glimpse of her pale body flailing around in the murky water. Please God, he prayed. Please don’t let me lose her.

Hours later the police were there on the beach, all three of the town cops. Many of the townspeople had volunteered to search the beach and the rocks up on the shore, hoping that Lizzy had been swept down the shoreline in a rip current and managed to escape half a mile up the beach. Maybe she was somewhere among the rocks, in shock and exhausted from her fight for survival, but alive.

But Richie knew that Lizzy wasn’t going to be found sitting on a rock waiting for them. Alyssa had told him that she’d seen Lizzy swept out to sea. She cried and told Richie that she’d tried to swim after her, but she couldn’t save her.

Richie could’ve scolded his daughter for even letting Lizzy in the water. Neither one of them was supposed to be in the water when he and their mother weren’t around. But he didn’t yell at her. He didn’t even look at her. And that seemed to make his daughter sob even harder as Marla hugged Alyssa’s shoulders.

Now, three nights later, Richie lay in bed in the darkness—darkness except for that rhythmic splash of light from the lighthouse that washed over the bedroom window with dependable timing. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do, how he was supposed to feel. He wanted both the old man’s spell to work and not to work.

He froze for a second as his wife’s scream pierced the night.

“Richie!” his wife shrieked from deeper inside the house. “Richie, come here now!”

Richie jumped out of bed and ran from their bedroom to the kitchen where his wife stood at the sink. She stared out the kitchen window that looked down at the beach below.

“What is it?” Richie asked, fighting both hope and dread at the same time.

For a moment Marla didn’t look away from the window, like she was afraid that looking away would make what she’d seen disappear. But then she slowly turned to look at Richie with shock in her eyes, her mouth quivering as she tried to form words. “Lizzy. I saw . . . I saw Lizzy just now . . . down on the beach . . . she’s alive . . .”

Richie shook his head. The reality of the situation was hitting him. That old man couldn’t be right. His daughter was dead. The old man couldn’t have brought her back. Could he?

He stood in front of the sink and stared out the window which was now just a black square of night. “Turn off the kitchen light,” he snapped at Marla. After the light was out, he stared out the window, mentally counting down the sixty-six seconds until the next swath of light from the lighthouse splashed across the beach, the beam stretching out across the ocean, lighting the beach enough to see the small footprints in the sand that led from the surf up towards their house.

She had come out of the water. But how was that possible?

The light was gone, the beach and ocean cloaked in darkness again.

Alyssa had come into the kitchen. She stood at the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, her eyes dinner plates of curiosity and hope. Had she overheard Marla? “What’s going on?” she whispered.

Before Richie could answer, there was a knocking at the front door. Three loud knocks.

“It’s her!” Marla cried and ran for the front door.

Richie was about to grab his wife. And what? Stop her? Tell her that this wasn’t possible?

But he didn’t. He let her run towards the living room.

Marla unlocked the front door and swung it open. Richie and Alyssa stood next to each other at the edge of the living room, watching.

Lizzy stood in the doorway. She was still wearing her pink, one-piece bathing suit and it was soaking wet. The pink suit was stained with dirt, and there were a few tears here and there. Her long dark hair clung to her shoulders. Her skin was so pale it almost seemed to glow in the darkness of the front porch. Her eyes were so dark, just soulless circles in her face. No feeling there now . . . no life.

Marla shrieked and grabbed her daughter, hugging her, holding her. “Oh God, you’re alive! Thank God you’re alive!”

Lizzy seemed like a rag doll, limp and lifeless in Marla’s arms as she squeezed her and rocked her gently back and forth.

Richie looked at Alyssa. His daughter’s eyes were filled with fear. It was like she instinctually knew that the little girl in their doorway wasn’t her sister anymore.

As Marla walked Lizzy to the kitchen, Richie hurried to the front door and closed it. Then he locked it.

*

An hour later, Marla had given Lizzy a bath and dressed her in a white flannel nightgown. After the bath, Marla had turned the heat on for Lizzy, but to Richie it felt uncomfortably hot already. His wife now flew around the kitchen like a bird trapped in a cage, gathering dishes, ladling out stew for everyone, floating high on a cloud of bliss as they all sat at the table.

“What happened?” Richie asked his younger daughter as he watched her.

Lizzy gazed down at the bowl of stew her mother had placed in front of her, but it seemed like she wasn’t really seeing the bowl of food, like she wasn’t seeing anything.

“Lizzy,” Richie whispered. He touched her wrist to get her attention and then drew his hand back like he’d touched a live wire. Her skin was so cold.

Lizzy looked at him and shook her head ever so slightly with a vacant, confused look in her eyes.

“Where were you?” Richie asked. “These last three days . . . where were you?”

“Oh, don’t badger her, Richie,” Marla said with a gigantic grin on her face. “She’s back, and that’s all that matters.” Marla looked at Lizzy. “Eat your stew, honey. You must be starving.”

Lizzy obediently picked up her spoon and dunked it into the brown stew. She brought a spoonful up to her white lips with a slightly trembling hand. She opened her mouth just a bit and shoved the spoonful of stew into her mouth.

Alyssa watched her sister in shock as the stew slid right back out of her mouth, dribbling down her chin onto the tablecloth.

“Something’s wrong with her,” Alyssa said as she looked at her father in horror. “Can’t you see that something’s wrong with her?”

“She’s just been through a traumatic experience, that’s all,” Marla said. She already had a cloth in her hand, cleaning Lizzy’s face. “You don’t have to eat right now if you don’t want to, baby,” she whispered to her daughter.

*

When it was time for bed, Alyssa pleaded with Richie and Marla to sleep with them. She didn’t want to sleep in the same room with her sister.

Lizzy stood in the doorway to their bedroom, waiting and watching with emotionless eyes as her sister begged to sleep with her parents.

“You’re too old to sleep with us,” Marla said. “You need to keep your sister company. Look out for her.” And her expression seemed to add: Like you didn’t do before on the beach.

“Can I sleep on the couch?” Alyssa asked with tears in her eyes. “Just for tonight?”

Marla was adamant. She wanted Alyssa in the bedroom with Lizzy. She wanted her to protect Lizzy, be there for her if she woke up in the middle of the night.

Marla stomped off to the girls’ room to tuck Lizzy into bed. Alyssa stood in the living room and turned to Richie in one last-ditch effort. “Daddy, something’s wrong with her,” she whispered.

Richie just nodded. He understood his daughter’s fears. He knew what was wrong with Lizzy. She wasn’t natural. She had been dead underneath that ocean for three days and now she was back. That old man hadn’t brought his daughter back to them alive; he’d brought a dead girl back to them.

“Maybe Lizzy will tell you what happened to her,” Richie whispered to Alyssa.

“No,” Alyssa answered with her chin quivering, her eyes welling up with more tears. “She’s mad at me for letting her die. She wants to hurt me.” Her voice was getting louder, more hysterical. “She wants to make me pay. I know it.”

“I’ll talk to your mother about it,” Richie told her. “But I think she’s going to want you to sleep in the room with your sister.”

*

Hours later Richie lay in bed. His wife was sound asleep. It was the first time she’d slept deeply since Lizzy had died.

Yes, she had died. That was it. She had died. She had been dead for six days and now she was back. He had wanted his daughter back more than anything in the world, but he wanted his Lizzy back, not this thing that had come from a watery grave.

“Dad! Mom!”

Alyssa’s screams shattered the silence of the night.

Richie was out of bed in a flash like he’d been subconsciously ready for this all night. He ran through the dark house, his bare feet thundering on the wood floorboards.

Alyssa stood outside of her bedroom door, hugging herself, shaking and crying, looking so thin and frail in her white nightgown.

Richie grabbed his daughter’s shoulders a little too tightly, his hands sinking into the flesh of her tiny shoulders, bunching them together more. “What happened?”

“I woke up and . . . and she was on top of me in the bed. Her mouth . . . it was open wide. Like she was going to . . . to bite me or something.”

Richie let Alyssa go, and he even moved in front of her, shielding her as he turned and stared at the dark doorway to the bedroom. He couldn’t see anything past the doorway, and the light from the lighthouse hadn’t splashed across the bedroom windows yet. He waited for the light, mentally counting down the seconds. He strained his ears, listening—but there was no sound from inside their bedroom . . . not even the sound of Lizzy breathing.

Then the light came.

For those few seconds of light Richie saw Lizzy asleep in her own bed, the covers pulled up to her chin, her eyes closed, her dark hair splayed out around her on the pillow, and then the bedroom was swallowed up in darkness again.

“She’s not asleep,” Alyssa whispered from behind Richie. “She’s never going to sleep or eat.”

Marla came running up to them, groggy, pulling her housecoat closed around her body. “What’s happening?’

Alyssa was about to explain, but Richie jumped in quickly. “Alyssa had a nightmare. That’s all.”

“Where’s Lizzy?” Marla cried as she dashed to the bedroom. She disappeared into the darkness of the room, lost for a moment in that darkness until the splash of light from the lighthouse lit up the room again and revealed Marla beside Lizzy’s bed, hovering next to her, watching her little girl sleep.

Richie turned to Alyssa who stared up at him. “You can sleep out here in the living room,” he told her. “I’ll start a fire in the fireplace.”

Alyssa nodded, her face shiny with tears, but she didn’t look like she was going to sleep tonight.

*

Richie stayed up most of the night, sitting out in the living room with Alyssa so she could go to sleep. She didn’t have to go to school because the school had given her a few weeks off so she could grieve for her sister.

What about Lizzy going to school? Richie wondered. Surely Marla would want to notify the school that her little girl had come back. She would want to tell everyone in town that her daughter wasn’t dead, that she had come back to her, that she had somehow battled the waves and the elements, the cold and darkness, and fought her way back.

But Richie knew none of that was true. That old man, that witch or warlock or whatever the hell he was, he had summoned this dead girl somehow. Richie knew that he needed to go and see that old man again. He crept into their bedroom and watched Marla for a moment, making sure she was asleep. She was out, breathing deeply, able to sleep now that her daughter had come back. He moved silently through the darkness to their dresser, and then stood still as the light from the lighthouse invaded their bedroom for a moment. When it was dark again, he opened the top drawer and dug out his pistol from underneath his underwear and socks.

*

As the sun rose over the ocean, Richie woke his wife up. He told her to stay inside for the day and get some rest. She told him that she needed to take care of Lizzy. Richie promised her that he and Alyssa would look after Lizzy for the day. Marla smiled—that seemed okay with her—and then she closed her eyes. Soon she was sleeping soundly.

Lizzy was awake and sitting at the kitchen table; she stared straight ahead at the wall, lost in a daze, her eyes focusing on nothing. Alyssa watched Lizzy from the living room, curled up in the corner of the couch.

“Why can’t I go with you?” Alyssa asked her father as he put a jacket on.

“Because this is something I have to do alone,” he told her.

“I don’t want to be here with her,” she whispered, her eyes darting to Lizzy at the kitchen table.

“Your mom’s here.”

Alyssa just stared at Richie.

“I’ll be back as quickly as I can,” Richie told Alyssa, and he kissed her on her forehead.

He was out the door before his daughter could argue with him more, and he walked towards town. He marched up the hill through town and then up into the woods. He found the old man’s shack. He pounded on the front door.

No answer.

“Open up!” Richie yelled. He felt the heavy and reassuring weight of his pistol pressing against his lower back, the weapon shoved down into the waistband of his pants, hidden by his jacket. He would get the answers he needed from this old man one way or another.

He pounded on the door again even harder . . . and then the door opened up on its own, the hinges creaking in the morning air.

Richie took a step back. He was about to reach for his gun, but he made himself wait a moment.

“Old man!” Richie called at the dark doorway. He didn’t even know the old man’s name.

No answer.

Richie took a step towards the doorway, his eyes adjusting quickly to the gloom beyond. There was nothing inside. No furniture, no possessions . . . the place had been cleaned out.

He took a step inside, then a few more steps. He walked gingerly across the floorboards, looking around. The place was dark and quiet. It smelled musty.

“Hello?” Richie called out hesitantly.

No answer. And there wasn’t going to be an answer—nobody was here.

But the old man had been here, Richie told himself. Hadn’t he?

Richie bolted out of the shack and raced down the hill towards town, towards the Crook’s Den Bar. He rushed inside and asked the bartender about the old man who lived up in the shack at the edge of the woods.

“Nobody’s lived up there for years,” the bartender said coldly.

Other patrons were looking Richie’s way, suddenly interested in his lunatic ravings. He looked at the men, not remembering any of their faces from his drunken binge the other night, but they seemed to remember him. A few of the men sat together in a tight group, just watching. What had he said while he was in here the other night? What had he done? Had he stumbled up the road to that old shack in the woods and imagined the whole thing?

Had he imagined Lizzy coming back from the ocean?

Maybe the pressure of his daughter’s death had snapped his mind. Maybe he couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t.

Richie suddenly felt sick. He felt like the whole world was spinning out of control.

“You okay?” the bartender asked, but his words sounded like they were coming out in slow motion, and there was no real concern in his voice.

“Maybe he needs a drink,” one of the old men in that tight little group said.

A few of them laughed.

The bar’s patrons grew bolder with their comments. “Can’t handle his liquor,” another said.

“Leave him alone,” an old woman said with a pity that hurt Richie more than their mean remarks or their suspicious eyes.

Richie just shook his head and tried to smile. “I . . . I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I need to get back home.”

He ran down the street through town towards the sea, towards his house and the lighthouse next to it. Back to his wife, his Alyssa . . . and his Lizzy.

*

When he burst inside the house, he almost expected to see Marla still grieving over their lost daughter. Or maybe he expected to see all of them again . . . maybe Lizzy had never died. But what he found was exactly what he’d left. Alyssa was still curled up on the couch, and Lizzy was still sitting at the kitchen table staring blankly at the wall.

Marla came out of the bedroom, her eyes puffy with sleep. Richie had woken her up when he’d burst inside the house. She looked at him and Alyssa for a moment, then she looked into the kitchen at Lizzy, her expression turning to horror.

Oh God, she knows, Richie thought. She knows that Lizzy’s really dead. She finally sees it now.

“Why didn’t you get her anything to eat?” Marla scolded Alyssa.

Alyssa looked too tired and apathetic to defend herself. And Marla didn’t wait for an answer from Alyssa; she was off to the kitchen to take care of her little girl.

Richie looked at Alyssa and her haunted eyes. What could he say to her? How could he explain any of this?

*

That night, when it was bedtime, Alyssa pleaded with Richie and Marla—she didn’t want to sleep in the bedroom with her sister.

“I’ve had just about enough of this,” Marla snapped at her daughter. “You weren’t there for her down at the beach, but you’re going to be there for her now. You hear me?”

Alyssa’s face crumpled in pain and shock. “Mom . . .”

Richie turned to Marla. “You can’t say that to her,” he said.

“She’s going to sleep in the same bedroom with her sister,” Marla said through clenched teeth. “Lizzy is back, and we’re going to have a normal family again.”

Richie didn’t argue.

Alyssa gave up, resigned to her fate. She marched into her bedroom and crawled into bed. Lizzy was already tucked into her own bed, the covers pulled up to her pale face. She stared up at the ceiling with dark glassy eyes that had no moisture in them.

Marla smiled at them in the doorway. “My girls,” she whispered.

*

Hours later Richie lay in bed, staring up at the darkness. Marla was sleeping deeply now on her side, facing away from him. He watched the dark ceiling, counting down the seconds until the light from the lighthouse washed over their room. Even with the curtains closed, the light managed to wash inside their room, lighting up the whole house.

He lay there waiting to hear Alyssa’s screams in the night again. Was this how every night would be? Would he lie awake waiting to hear his daughter’s screams?

Earlier he had tried to talk to Marla about Lizzy, about how strange she was now that she’d come back from the . . . ocean. But Marla wasn’t listening, tuning him out, having none of it.

“Dad,” Alyssa moaned in the night.

Richie was out of bed in a flash. He glanced back at Marla, but she hadn’t even moved. He ran out into the living room, and then to Alyssa who stood there in the darkness. He grabbed her shoulders and felt her shivering underneath his hands. Her eyes were wide in the darkness, her skin so pale (but not as pale as Lizzy’s).

“She tried to bite me,” Alyssa whispered, her words almost incoherent as she trembled. “She was on top of me again, Daddy. She had her mouth open—it was open so wide, and she was trying to bite me.”

The lighthouse’s light washed over the living room. Richie’s heart jumped when he saw the blood on Alyssa’s neck. He saw what looked like scratch marks on her arms.

“Oh God,” Richie said.

“She’s dead,” Alyssa said. “She’s dead but somehow she came back to punish me, to kill me for letting her die. She never sleeps. She closes her eyes . . . but she never sleeps.” Alyssa started crying, a silent sob, her mouth hanging open, her eyes squeezed shut.

Richie hugged his daughter, trying to calm her down. He looked at the girls’ doorway beyond them, then he glanced back at his bedroom doorway. Marla hadn’t woken up yet. He guided Alyssa to the couch and sat her down. She was beginning to calm down a little.

“I know,” he finally told her in a low voice.

She looked at him in shock, not expecting an adult to believe her wild story.

“I know she’s dead,” Richie said again. “I don’t know how she came back, or why, but I know that she has come back from the dead.”

“But . . . but she’s not herself anymore,” Alyssa said.

Richie nodded. He felt sick with responsibility. This was his fault. He had either dreamed up the visit with that old man in the shack, or the old man had really been there that night. Either way, Richie had asked for this. He had brought Lizzy back and now he had to make things right.

“Look,” Richie said. He took his daughter’s hands. “I have to send her back.”

Alyssa brightened, her eyes wide with hope. “I’ll help you.”

“No,” Richie said immediately, his voice a little too loud. “No, I need to do this myself.”

“I’m going to help you,” Alyssa insisted.

“Alyssa,” Richie snapped. He almost told Alyssa that this was her sister they were talking about. But it wasn’t her sister anymore, was it? And that thing wasn’t his daughter either.

“If we don’t do this,” Alyssa said, “then she’s going to get me. And then she’ll get you, and then she’ll get Mom.”

Richie was silent for a moment, his mind spinning. His eyes shifted from his daughter back to his bedroom doorway, and then he looked at the other end of the house, at the girls’ doorway off of the living room. Neither Marla nor Lizzy had gotten up yet.

“Please . . .” Alyssa whispered, on the verge of tears again.

Richie sighed. “We have to be very quiet.”

Alyssa nodded.

Richie didn’t know how he was going to do this. He wasn’t sure if Lizzy was going to put up a fight or not. “We need to get some rope. Do you think you can coax Lizzy outside?”

Alyssa looked frightened at the prospect, but she nodded her head, her eyes large and shiny in the darkness. She seemed willing to try anything.

*

Forty-five minutes later Alyssa had taken Lizzy by the hand and led her outside. Alyssa held on to Lizzy’s wrist tightly, but she was ready to bolt away from the younger girl at any second if attacked.

Richie waited near some shrubs with the pieces of rope he had found. He had also grabbed some large sinker weights that he’d found in the shed, tucked away in a corner among other ancient fishing gear.

“Dad,” Alyssa whispered.

He stepped out from behind the bushes and stared at his two daughters. Alyssa looked frightened and nervous, full of pent-up energy, her body trembling. Lizzy just stood there as still as a statue, her limp hair blowing around in the night breeze that was already turning chilly, already signaling the end of summer. Her eyes were sunken into her face, and they looked like dark holes in her pale flesh.

If Lizzy knew what was going on, if she had any idea of why she was out here, she didn’t show it.

“Lizzy,” Richie said. “I want you to come with us down to the beach.”

Lizzy didn’t nod or say anything. She just stared at Richie with the lifeless dark blobs that were her eyes out here in the night.

Richie had a length of rope coiled up in his hand. He walked around Lizzy and stood behind her. He grabbed her arms gently and pulled them behind her back. Her flesh was so cold when he touched it . . . freezing. She didn’t resist, she just stood there and let him tie her wrists together.

Alyssa was crying as she watched, but Richie didn’t know if she was crying from sorrow or relief . . . or both.

“Come on,” Richie said more to Alyssa than to Lizzy. He guided his younger daughter by the shoulders down through the sand towards the beach where the night surf roared in the darkness, lit up every sixty-six seconds by the passing of the lighthouse beam.

When they got to the water’s edge Lizzy stopped, like she realized what was going on. When she saw the water up close, she was suddenly afraid. And for that moment Richie saw his daughter again. She shook her head and started backing up in the sand, struggling with her bound wrists, twisting her body back and forth, grunting.

“Lizzy,” Richie said, trying to hold on to her.

“No,” Lizzy whispered. “No, Daddy. Please.”

Richie froze. He stared at his daughter’s face. She was looking at him . . . really looking at him.

“Dad,” Alyssa screamed. “Dad, you have to do this!”

But Richie wasn’t listening to Alyssa. He saw his daughter again, his Lizzy, his baby girl. Oh God, what was he doing? Was he crazy? What the hell was he trying to do to his daughter?

Before Richie even realized what he was doing, he was untying the ropes from Lizzy’s wrists. He barely felt Alyssa beating on him with her fists, screaming at him not to fall for this.

Richie was crying as he clutched Lizzy’s shoulders, staring at her, his vision blurry with tears in the darkness.

Alyssa broke in between them, pushing Richie out of the way. Richie hadn’t expected the push, and he was knocked off-balance. He was back up to his feet in a second, one side of his body coated in wet sand now.

“What the hell are you doing?” he growled at Alyssa.

Alyssa didn’t answer. She stood facing Lizzy.

Lizzy’s helpless expression turned sinister in an instant when she saw Alyssa, the smile of an evil creature, her eyes dark blobs again, her flesh even more pale in the moonlight.

“I’m right here,” Alyssa told Lizzy. “Come and get me.”

Lizzy rushed at Alyssa, her mouth wide open, a growl in her throat. Richie swore to God that it looked like his younger daughter had more teeth than she should’ve had, and those teeth looked longer and sharper. She was quick and strong, like an animal, and she pounced on top of her older sister, knocking her down to the sand, snapping at her neck like a rabid dog.

Richie acted without thinking. He tore his younger daughter off of his older one and tackled her to the ground. She was face-down in the sand, and he already had her arms twisted behind her back, holding her wrists together. Lizzy struggled underneath him. She was so strong she nearly bucked him off of her. She was a whirling demon now, a tornado of strength and rage.

“Here,” Alyssa breathed out, handing Richie the length of rope. Between the two of them they wound the rope back around Lizzy’s wrists, tying them together tightly. A few moments later Richie had Lizzy’s ankles tied together. He attached a rope to her ankles that he had already tied the ancient metal weights to.

It was time.

With tears in his eyes, a sob choking his throat, Richie carried this thing that used to be his little baby girl out into the roaring surf.

A scream split the night.

Richie turned around in the waist-deep water as a wave crashed against him, bathing him and the struggling thing that used to be his daughter in the freezing saltwater.

“What are you doing?!” Marla screamed as she ran down the beach. The shaft of light from the lighthouse washed over her, revealing her horrified face for a moment as she ran towards them, and then she was shrouded in darkness again as the band of light moved on down the beach.

“Hurry, Dad,” Alyssa said. “Please hurry.”

Richie turned back around and plowed into the next oncoming wave. He pushed forward with his legs, trying his best to run underwater against the waves. When the water was up to his chest, he let Lizzy go. He watched her float away on the black water, her white nightgown billowing around her, her dark hair pasted across her pale face, her mouth open, water pouring in. She was sinking fast, the weights pulling her down.

Marla bolted past Richie, diving down into the water.

“Marla, no!” Richie yelled as he tried to grab her.

His wife bobbed back up a second later, blowing water out of her mouth and nose, trying to spot Lizzy in the ocean.

“She’s dead!” Richie yelled at his wife. “Can’t you see that? Can’t you see that she’s dead?”

Marla didn’t answer. She dove down into the water, already ten feet away from Richie now, out in the deeper water.

Richie started to go after Marla, but he felt a hand on his arm. He turned and looked at Alyssa who stood in the water next to him, the water almost up to her chin. Even though her face was wet, Richie could tell she was crying.

“Let her go,” Alyssa said through a choked sob.

Richie was about to snap at Alyssa—how could she say a thing like that? Of course Lizzy was dead, but Marla was still alive . . . they could still save her.

“She’s never going to be okay,” Alyssa said as if reading Richie’s thoughts.

Richie looked back out at the endless dark ocean in front of them as another wave crashed into them, knocking them back towards the shore. He stood back up and stared out at the water as the beam of light passed over it, illuminating the scene as Marla thrashed in the water, still screaming Lizzy’s name, still looking for her little girl. She would never stop looking for her . . . Richie would never be able to bring her back; he realized that now.

“She’ll never be the same,” Alyssa said through chattering teeth, and then she started sobbing.

Richie took his daughter into his arms and carried her back up to the shore. He knew she was right. He’d lost his Lizzy, and now he’d lost Marla. But at least he could still save Alyssa.

This story started out as a screenplay idea. A producer called me up a few years ago and asked me to come up with several ideas for horror films for a studio. He asked me to come up with at least ten ideas pretty quickly, and he wanted a short treatment for each one. I think I came up with eight ideas, and then eight more, and finally four more after that. Well, the sad ending is that none of them got picked up, but the good news is that several of those treatments turned into stories and novels for me . . . and one of them was this one.

A RECIPIENT FOR A BURDEN

“There’s something strange about the new guy we hired,” Wyatt told Lee. “There’s something . . . something not right about him.”

Lee glanced at his phone, already antsy, his mind already moving on to other matters, and he wasn’t hiding his annoyance about being called all the way out here to this jobsite for what was probably a petty argument.

But this wasn’t petty. Wyatt needed Lee to understand that. Wyatt wasn’t the most eloquent person in the world at expressing his thoughts into words—that’s why he was a drywall hanger and not a friggin’ poet—but damn it, he needed to make Lee understand that there was really something wrong with this new guy.

“What’s he done?” Lee asked with a sigh, still glancing at his phone. “Start a fight with one of the other guys?”

“No.”

“Drinking?”

“No.”

“Drugs?”

“No,” Wyatt said, getting exasperated.

Lee checked for messages on his phone, and for a moment Wyatt felt like slapping that phone out of his boss’s hand.

But he didn’t do that.

“So, what’s wrong with him?” Lee asked, finally looking at him. “What’s this thing that’s so strange about him?”

“It’s not one particular thing I can really say . . .”

Lee sighed again, and he looked like he was ready to jump back into his pickup truck. “Look, Wyatt, you can’t—”

“I think he’s staying the night in the houses we’re working on,” Wyatt blurted out.

Lee looked over at the one-story, ranch-style house in the clearing carved out of the woods. The yard around it was mostly dirt, the driveway not even poured yet. The sounds of screw guns zapping screws into the drywall and hammers pounding nails drifted out of the open windows. And then he looked back at Wyatt.

Maybe that would get Lee’s attention. Wyatt wasn’t a businessman like Lee was, but he was pretty sure that it was against some kind of law or something for one of the crew to be spending the night in these houses. Or maybe it had something to do with insurance or something.

“You ask him if he’s sleeping here?” Lee asked.

“Well . . . yeah,” Wyatt answered.

“And?”

“And he said he’s not.”

Lee gave a slight shake of his head like he didn’t understand.

“But I saw empty soda cans down in the basement,” Wyatt went on quickly before Lee could say anything. “And an empty beef stew can. And there’s this . . .” Wyatt paused, trying to think of the right word. “Nest” came to mind, but he didn’t want to use that word. “There’s like this bundle of blankets and clothes in the corner of the basement, underneath the stairs. That’s where all the cans were, too.”

“And you think those things are the new guy’s?”

Wyatt knew how this was sounding; this conversation wasn’t going the way he had expected.

“Did someone see him sleeping here?” Lee asked.

“No. But he’s the first one here in the morning.”

“Is he the last one to leave?”

“Well . . . no. But I think he comes back at night after everyone’s gone.”

“What makes you say that?”

Wyatt just shrugged. “He has these . . . I don’t know, these kinds of sores on his neck and wrists. I think he has more of them on his arms, but he’s always wearing long-sleeved shirts and long pants no matter how hot it gets.”

“Sores? Like a disease or something?”

“No. Not sores, really. That’s not what I mean.”

“Then what do you mean?” Lee asked. “Like track marks or something?”

“I don’t think so. I asked him what they were, and he said that he’d cut himself. That’s kind of what they look like . . . like they’re cuts.”

“So this guy’s got a few cuts?” Lee asked.

Wyatt didn’t know what to say.

“And that’s it? Some guy is battling through tough times, maybe catching a few winks in a basement until he gets his first check?”

It was worse than that, Wyatt wanted to explain, but didn’t know how. There was more to it than just the cuts and his sleeping in the basement. The new guy (Daniel was his name—not Dan or Danny, but Daniel) was always staring at him in a strange way. And sometimes Daniel smiled when no one else was looking, a small and strange smile, just the ghost of a smile. Wyatt would catch Daniel staring at him throughout the day—just staring at him. Normally Wyatt would’ve told the guy to stop looking at him like that, but there was something about Daniel that really freaked him out for some reason. It was just his gut feeling that Daniel was bad news, and Wyatt always trusted his gut feelings. It seemed like Daniel was always watching him and waiting for something. Like he was hoping to see Wyatt hurt himself, cut himself with a razor knife or fall off the scaffolding or something. And even if Wyatt didn’t see Daniel staring at him, he could feel the man looking at him . . . always watching, always waiting. He wanted to tell Lee all of this, but he didn’t even know where to start.

“Maybe I should see if the guy needs some cash,” Lee muttered.

Wyatt almost expected Lee to reach for his wallet, but he knew Lee was too cheap for that. And this wasn’t what Wyatt wanted; he didn’t want Lee to help Daniel out or feel sorry for him, he wanted Lee to get rid of this guy.

As if Lee had read Wyatt’s mind, he spoke: “Look, this new guy . . .” He paused, trying to remember the guy’s name.

“Daniel.”

“Yeah. Daniel. He’s a good worker, right?”

“Yeah.” Wyatt had to admit that. Even though Daniel looked like he didn’t get enough sleep—his red-rimmed eyes and ever-present vacant stare were evidence of that—he always hustled when it came to work.

“He gets along with the crew?” Lee asked. “Hector likes him?”

Wyatt nodded. Again, he couldn’t argue with that, and he knew Lee would ask Hector about it later. But it was true, Daniel got along with all the guys. He was quiet, but everyone else seemed to like him.

“So what’s your problem with him? Because he might be sleeping in the basement? I’m sure as soon as he gets some money he’ll get a place.”

Wyatt only nodded. Why argue? Lee seemed to have his mind made up.

“Look,” Lee said. “Just give this guy a few weeks. See how he does. What’s he been here? Four days? Five? Once he gets some money, then check the basement in the next house and see if there’s a . . .”

Nest, Wyatt thought.

“. . . a bundle of clothes and blankets and cans down there,” Lee finished. “But let’s give the guy a chance. You know how hard it is to find good workers.”

Wyatt knew.

“Okay. I gotta run. How much longer on this house?”

“Should be done by tomorrow,” Wyatt told him.

“Good. I’ve got another two houses lined up and waiting on you guys.”

And there it was—Lee’s mind had already moved on to other things. Problem solved.

But to Wyatt the problem wasn’t solved. He knew that Daniel had been sleeping in the last house that they’d hung the drywall in, and he knew he was sleeping in this house at night. He was going to prove it. He only had tonight, but he’d already planned on coming back later, sometime after midnight, and catch Daniel in the act. Take photos with his phone. Somehow he had to get this creepy guy fired.

Wyatt told himself that he wasn’t scared of Daniel. Wyatt was six foot two and two hundred and thirty pounds of muscle . . . well, mostly muscle. He wasn’t scared of anybody. But he was bothered by Daniel. And he was wary of him for some reason, plagued by an eerie feeling that he couldn’t articulate. There was just something wrong with Daniel—that was the only way he could describe it.

*

Daniel knew Wyatt was on to him.

But he didn’t really care. He knew this was coming, and he wanted it to happen. He had prayed it would happen. He was sure tonight would be the night. Oh God, he prayed it would happen tonight.

At the end of the day, after rolling up the tools and packing them into Wyatt’s work truck, Daniel asked Hector for a ride into town.

But Hector was going in the other direction.

“I can give you a lift,” Wyatt said, eyeballing him, daring him to turn down the offer.

“Okay,” Daniel told him. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

Daniel knew where this was going.

Twenty minutes later they were driving down the road, a blanket of tension smothering them.

“Where you headed to?” Wyatt asked, gripping the steering wheel hard as he drove, his forearm muscles bunching up.

“Just into town. You can drop me off at Robinson and Third Street.”

“That’s where you live?”

Daniel had to think quickly; it was something he had learned to do over the last few years of carrying this burden, this thing that had cost him everything, turning him into a drifter, into a vagabond, into a pariah. And now he had a chance . . . Wyatt had no idea what he was fucking with.

“I’m meeting a friend,” Daniel finally said.

“Going to a bar?” Wyatt asked, accusation in his tone.

“I don’t drink.”

They pulled up to the intersection, and Wyatt pulled over into a parking lot to let Daniel out.

Daniel knew Wyatt wanted to fire him. But he also knew that Wyatt didn’t have the authority to do that, or he would’ve already done it. None of that really mattered now. Daniel just needed to hang around long enough to get Wyatt to come to the house at night. He’d chosen Wyatt, making sure Wyatt didn’t have any kids—that was the one condition that he’d given himself when looking for the next person, the next recipient of this burden that he carried.

Of course there was always the danger that Wyatt wouldn’t show up tonight, that these plans would fall through, that things wouldn’t line up like they were supposed to—he’d been through that so many times before. It wasn’t easy ridding himself of this burden. He couldn’t just run up to someone and thrust it upon them. No, that person, that future recipient, had to come looking for it, just like Daniel had done so long ago. It was hard to find a good recipient, but Daniel believed that he’d found one in Wyatt. But if not, if Wyatt finally talked Lee into firing him, then Daniel would just move on until he found another possible recipient, someone else like Wyatt.

Daniel was almost too nervous as he got out of Wyatt’s truck, too nervous that he might say the wrong thing and tip his hand. “Thanks for the ride,” he said.

“You gonna be at work tomorrow?” Wyatt asked.

“Yes,” Daniel said as he stood outside the truck with the door still open. “I’ll be there.”

“I don’t want you there. You know that, don’t you?”

Daniel just stared at Wyatt in that way that he knew Wyatt hated. He knew he might be pushing his luck right now, provoking a fight with this bigger man. In that case, he knew he couldn’t fight back if Wyatt attacked him—he didn’t have the energy for that. The beating from Wyatt might be painful, but it would be nothing compared to what he went through all the time now.

“I know you don’t like me,” Daniel told Wyatt. He almost added that he didn’t really care, but he bit his tongue and kept up his deadpan stare.

Wyatt smiled, a lopsided and mean smear of a smile. He nodded slightly as he spoke. “You’re right about that. Why don’t you just quit?”

“I need the money,” Daniel answered softly. But he really needed something else even more. He didn’t want to carry on this conversation any further. He was pretty sure he had antagonized Wyatt enough to get him to the house tonight. He shut the door and walked away. He heard the truck pulling away behind him, the back tires barking on the pavement as Wyatt gunned the gas.

Daniel didn’t look back.

*

Two hours later, after a meal that Daniel knew would be sucked out of him soon, he hitched a ride as far as he could get, and then walked the rest of the way back to the house.

He approached the house carefully, looking for Wyatt’s truck. But he didn’t see it anywhere. That didn’t mean that Wyatt wasn’t already inside that dark house waiting for him. It had happened one time before. Daniel had succeeded in getting a possible recipient to a location, but the recipient had showed up earlier than expected. He’d been waiting for Daniel with three of his friends. The four men had beaten Daniel up pretty badly—he probably should’ve gone to a hospital, but he couldn’t let the doctors and nurses see the wounds all over his body that his clothing hid.

Daniel went around to the back of the house, to a window he’d left open just a crack. Even if someone would’ve double-checked the windows and locked them, Daniel had become an expert at picking locks these last two and a half years. The window was still unlocked and opened just a crack. He slid the window all the way open and crawled through it into the house. Inside, he walked from room to room. All of the ceilings were hung with drywall, and about half of the walls were finished. There was no place for a person to hide in here, and after a quick search Daniel knew the house was empty.

He went down to the basement. He didn’t have a flashlight, but he didn’t need one; he knew the basement well enough after only two nights down there. He went to the corner underneath the stairs where his wadding of extra clothes and an old blanket were. He took off all of his clothes and folded them up neatly; he stacked them up in a pile away from his nest. He sat down on the blanket and his other clothing, waiting for the thing to come from the darkness.

He might have dozed off for an hour, but the thing never let him sleep too long. He heard it in the darkness, moving around, its sharp claws clicking along the concrete as it hurried towards him. It latched on to him. It sucked at his blood, Daniel was sure of that. Was it a vampire? Daniel couldn’t say. It looked like some kind of spidery creature, like what an octopus might look like if it could skitter across the land. But it sucked out more than just blood when it fed on him—it sucked at his energy, his will, his soul.

Daniel thought back to that night two and a half years ago, when he’d come across that old man in the alleyway. He’d come back that night to find the old man, bringing him some takeout food and the little extra cash that he could afford to part with. But when he saw the old man lying on the filthy asphalt amid a nest of trash and boxes, he froze. The old man’s naked body was so pale in the lights from the far-off streetlamps. There were strange wounds all over the man’s flesh.

He should’ve run right at that moment. He should’ve known then that there was something wrong with this old man. He wasn’t a kindly old man suffering through a bout of bad luck; he was something . . . something different.

But instead of running, Daniel had walked closer to the naked man that night, concerned about his wounds. “Are you okay?” he’d asked the man.

The old man had laughed at him. “Finally,” he’d said with tears in his eyes. But even though he’d begun crying, he was still cackling like a madman.

And that’s when Daniel saw the creature on the man’s back, a tentacle stretching around his body, the creature dislodging itself from the old man’s flesh.

Daniel ran then. He dropped the takeout box and bolted blindly down the alley as fast as he could towards the street.

“You can run, but it will find you!” the old man shouted. “It’s seen you now and it will always find you!”

Daniel made it out to the street, and he ran two more blocks before chancing a look behind him. He didn’t see some creature chasing him; he saw nothing but the empty sidewalk.

A few blocks later, when he was closer to home, Daniel began to convince himself that he hadn’t seen some kind of spidery creature on that old man. It hadn’t been real. He got home to his girlfriend and gave her a kiss after locking the door to their apartment.

She could tell something was wrong with him, but he told her everything was fine. He just needed a drink, then a shower, and then some sleep. He was just exhausted, he told her, that’s all.

That night he woke from a nightmare. The sound of the barbs at the ends of the creature’s tentacles clicking along the asphalt as the thing chased him down the alley echoed in his mind. He jumped awake, and he swore he could hear those same sounds coming from somewhere inside the apartment.

The creature had found him.

They needed to run. He turned to wake up his girlfriend, but he found a shredded mess of gore where her abdomen used to be. Her eyes were wide open in the darkness, staring blindly up at the ceiling.

Daniel had run then. He had no choice. The cops would never believe that he hadn’t killed his girlfriend. He would have to keep running.

The next day Daniel went back to the alley to find the old man, but he was gone. Maybe the old man was dead. Maybe that thing had gone back and killed him after Daniel had run last night. He didn’t see any blood anywhere among the cardboard boxes and trash.

Daniel left town that day, on the run from that moment, moving from place to place. But no matter where he ran to, no matter where he hid, that thing always found him. It found him every night, and every night it came to feed.

Night after night it fed. Daniel wanted to die, but he was too cowardly to kill himself. He just wished the thing would leave him alone. He realized that he needed to find someone to pass this thing off on like the old man had done to him. He needed to find a recipient for his burden. And maybe tonight that recipient would come.

*

Wyatt told his wife that he needed to go back to the house they were working on, afraid that he’d left some tools behind. Audrey wasn’t buying it, probably thinking that he was going out to hook up with some girl. He’d cheated on her in the past, but tonight was different—he wished he could tell her that, tell her the truth.

He left before the argument started. It was almost midnight, and he was going to be tired tomorrow morning. But it was going to be worth it to get rid of Daniel. He probably would’ve stayed awake all night anyway, just tossing and turning in bed.

As he drove, he wondered why the hell he was doing this, why this was so important to him. He could just dog Daniel day after day on the jobsite, pick at him until he got fed up enough to quit. It might take a while, but he was sure Daniel would eventually quit. But then again, maybe he wouldn’t. Daniel wasn’t a normal person. Wyatt didn’t know how he knew that, but he did.

He had his cell phone with him, and if he caught Daniel there tonight (and he knew Daniel was going to be there tonight as much as he’d ever known anything in his life) then he would snap a photo. Then what? Show Lee? Why? So Lee could feel even sorrier for this guy?

Then what?

Some darker thoughts came to mind, floating up from his subconscious. It almost felt like something was controlling him, like deep down he knew what he really wanted to do when he got to the house but couldn’t admit it to himself.

Wyatt stopped the truck half a mile down the road from the house, around the bend in the narrow road that cut through these woods. He got out and grabbed his drywall hammer from his tool belt on the passenger floorboard; it had a hatchet on the other end like all drywall hammers did. He stuffed his cell phone down into the pocket of his jeans, and then he grabbed a heavy Maglite flashlight.

He was ready.

He was just going to see if Daniel was there. That’s all.

So why are you bringing your hammer?

Because Daniel might be dangerous.

But that was silly. Wyatt was a lot bigger and stronger than Daniel was.

What if Daniel had people with him? Some of his homeless friends.

No, there was another reason Wyatt was bringing his hammer with him, a reason he didn’t want to look square in the eye.

“. . . gonna make sure this shit ends tonight,” he heard himself whispering in the darkness as he walked towards the house at the end of the road; the house was just a dark bulky shape in the clearing.

The half-moon and the stars of the cloudless night sky provided enough light for him to see his way to the house, and his eyes had adjusted well to the darkness. He didn’t want to use the flashlight until he absolutely needed to.

He had the key to the house with him, and he slipped it into the front door. He worked slowly, being as quiet as he could. He entered the home and carefully shut the door and locked it.

His footsteps sounded loud, and they echoed off the completed walls and ceilings even though he tried to be quiet. The plywood subfloor creaked a little as he walked.

Daniel would hear him coming.

Who cares?

Daniel didn’t have anywhere to run—he was trapped down in the basement now.

Wyatt shuffled down the basement steps, not bothering to be so quiet now that he knew Daniel was trapped down here. Halfway down the steps he heard the noises from the basement, some kind of slurping noises. And then a moan. A moan of pleasure? Of pain?

What was that freak doing down here? Did he have a girl down here with him? A guy? Wyatt pictured an orgy of homeless men.

At the bottom of the steps Wyatt turned his flashlight on. The slurping sounds were louder now, and the moaning had changed to laughter—an eerie laughter floating out of the darkness towards him.

“Daniel!” Wyatt yelled. “What are you doing down here? You need to leave this property.”

More laughter.

Wyatt was starting to get a little freaked out; he could admit that to himself. But he was also becoming angry; those dark thoughts he’d had earlier began taking over his mind. He gripped the hammer and his heavy flashlight even harder, like they were weapons.

And they were weapons, weren’t they?

“Daniel.”

No answer, just that deep and throaty cackling.

“You hear me, Daniel? You need to leave. I’ll call the cops.”

“No you won’t,” Daniel finally answered through his laughter.

The anger in Wyatt took over. He marched around the steps towards the area underneath it where he’d seen the

(nest)

bundle of clothes and blankets earlier today.

Daniel’s voice was suddenly deep and menacing. “You’re here for a different reason, aren’t you?”

That strange slurping noise had continued the whole time.

Wyatt aimed his flashlight beam at the corner beyond the space underneath the basement stairs and saw Daniel on his bedding of blankets and old clothes. Daniel was completely naked, his pale body covered with wounds . . . old wounds and fresh wounds, blood smeared across his skin. His hair was messy, his eyes wild and bulging.

“You can see it, can’t you?” Daniel asked as he stared at him . . . that vacant stare that chilled Wyatt to his bones and angered him at the same time. That stare made Wyatt want to bash this guy’s fucking head in.

“You can see it,” Daniel said, and this time it wasn’t a question. There were tears in the man’s eyes now and a wide, insane smile on his face.

And then Wyatt saw something behind Daniel, some kind of tentacle rising up behind him like a cobra, the end of the tentacle splaying out like petals opening up on a flower. There was a giant hooked claw in the middle of what looked like some kind of puckered mouth with little jagged suckers and knobby teeth radiating out from it.

No . . . this can’t be real . . .

“Same thing I thought,” Daniel said as if he could hear Wyatt’s thoughts, and he began to laugh again. “It’s yours now. It’s all yours now.”

Wyatt turned and ran.

“You can run and run,” Daniel screamed, laughing even harder now. “But it will always find you!”

*

Wyatt raced home and parked his pickup in the driveway. He hurried inside his house and locked the door. It was two o’clock in the morning, but he poured himself a shot of whiskey. And then another.

Audrey came out of the bedroom, broiling in anger, itching for a fight, demanding to know where he’d been for the last two hours. But then she stopped, her expression softening, suddenly concerned.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

So he told her. He blended his lie about forgetting his tools with the truth of finding Daniel in the basement. He told her that Daniel had been naked, and that he’d had all of these cuts and wounds all over his body. He left out the part about the tentacle. That wasn’t real; that was just something he had imagined.

Audrey tried to console him. She told him that he should call the police.

He told her that he didn’t want to call the police.

“Why not?” she asked, and then a sudden fear turned her face pale. “You didn’t do something to him, did you?”

“No,” he snapped at her, and then his voice softened. “No, of course not. Why would you think something like that?”

“I don’t know. I know how much you hated that new guy.”

Wyatt was about to argue with her, but he really couldn’t say anything. She’d heard nothing but his rants about Daniel for the last four days.

He thought about that thing he’d seen behind Daniel. He’d only seen part of a larger creature, he was sure. What had that thing been doing to him? Sucking his blood? Eating him?

No. That hadn’t been real. He’d just freaked himself out, that was all. It had just been a trick of the shadows or something.

“I just need to get some sleep,” Wyatt told Audrey. “I’m gonna call Lee in the morning. Tell him . . . tell him what I saw.”

Audrey just nodded.

Wyatt lay down in bed next to Audrey, feeling suddenly uncomfortable in the darkness, his thoughts turning to Daniel. He thought about seeing him in the morning . . . in a few hours. He thought of that stare of Daniel’s, and that small smile. No, he wasn’t going to work with that guy anymore. He’d tell Lee that he would quit before he had to work another hour with that freak. Yeah, that was it. He’d put his foot down, it was going to be Daniel or him—the choice was up to Lee.

That made him feel a little better, enough to drift off to sleep . . . but only for a little while. He woke up to the sound of clicking noises, like a dog’s claws ticking across a tiled floor as it ran.

You can run and run, Daniel had said. But it will always find you.

It had found him—that thing that had been feeding on Daniel had found him.

Wyatt reached a hand out to Audrey to wake her up. They needed to run. But his hand settled into a warm wetness. He realized now that he hadn’t heard Audrey breathing. The thing had gotten her earlier, and now it was coming for him, bolting into the bedroom. He could see the whole creature now . . . and he screamed.

*

Lee drove to the jobsite as quickly as he could. Hector had called him, letting him know that neither Wyatt nor Daniel had shown up for work. Hector said that he couldn’t get in touch with Wyatt on his cell phone or his home phone. Then Hector called back ten minutes later and told Lee that they’d found Daniel down in the basement; dead, bloody—it looked like he’d been tortured.

“Call the police,” Wyatt told Hector. “And nobody leaves. I want you guys there to tell the police what you found. I’m on my way.”

Dear God, Lee thought as he hung up his phone and drove even faster. What did you do to him, Wyatt?

This is one of my older stories—I probably wrote this one in my late teens or early twenties—but I did a major rewrite on it before adding it to this collection. The idea came to me as a kind of vampire story, but not the typical vampires we usually see in movies and books, but more of a creature from hell that sucks not only blood but the actual life-force out of someone.

THE WRONG FEET

AUDIO LOG: 001

I’m alive.

I think I’m alive . . . which is strange because I died a long time ago.

Well, died in a way.

I woke up in the pilot’s seat, a little disoriented after an unknown amount of time in suspended animation, frozen in a cryo-tube. I have my exploration suit on. It’s a bit rumpled. My left sleeve is rolled up a little, the glove on but not attached all the way to the suit. The right glove is completely off. My helmet, tanks, and filters are still stored away somewhere in their cases.

I don’t remember coming out of the cryochamber. I don’t remember landing on this planet. I don’t remember anything before waking up here in the pilot’s chair in front of the windshield that looks out onto this place.

I’ve completed a full systems check, and all of the readings seem to be okay. It’s amazing that these computers still work, that there’s still some kind of power and battery life left. I’m recording all of this on audio, and I plan on sending the audio files out into space. Maybe the data will get back to Earth somehow. I don’t know.

I’m looking out through windshield of this space pod right now, and I can see a beach of orange-colored sand that my space pod is resting on. There’s a forest of waist-high vegetation to the left that stretches off for a few miles to a line of mist in the distance. To the right is an ocean of dark churning waters. A brown cloudy sky hangs above everything, and it feels so low, pressing down on this world. There’s a light source from somewhere. A sun? I can’t see one. And all of the light seems to be a yellowish-orange color, like a constant sunset on a cloudy day. The fog or mist or haze, whatever it is, clouds the horizon in every direction, even out over the dark ocean. Actually, in a way, it’s kind of beautiful here.

According to the computer systems and sensors, the air outside is breathable with an Earth-like mixture of nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and carbon dioxide, along with other trace gasses. The temperature is fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit. Winds are minimal. The gravity seems to be roughly the same as Earth. There isn’t a noticeable difference. No seismic activity detected so far. Toxin readings are coming back negative at the moment.

I need to put the rest of my exploration suit on and go out there to do some field tests for microbes, pollution, pollens, molds, etc. I’ll need to take samples of the soil, air, water, and vegetation.

AUDIO LOG: 002

I have my helmet on, and I’m speaking into a microphone inside of it, still recording everything. The tanks on my back are pumping air through my suit so I can breathe. I’ve attached my gloves. I’m ready to go out there.

I’ve just opened the pressurized door on the side of my space pod. As I open the door, a metal ladder unfolds to the ground.

I’m on the sand now. I’m about to take my first step onto this alien world. But wait—

My boots seem like . . . they seem like they’re on the wrong feet.

AUDIO LOG: 003

I’ve come back into my pod and switched my boots around. They’re oversized rubber boots and I’m not sure why they were on the wrong feet. Of course, I can’t remember ever putting them on in the first place.

So many mysteries to figure out. I can’t wait to get started. I’m going back out there again.

AUDIO LOG: 004

I’m back in the pod now. It feels good to have the helmet off. I was suddenly hungry as soon as I got back inside, and I squeezed some liquid-type stuff out of one of the food pouches. I’ve got the samples I collected from outside inserted into the diagnostic equipment, and I’m waiting for the readings to come back. So far there isn’t any sign of life here at all except for the vegetation. But nothing else. I didn’t see any sign of marine life in the ocean. I didn’t see any shore life like crabs or mollusks. No insects. So far, there isn’t any sign of microbial life coming back from the tests yet.

I sit back, staring out at that dark ocean, imagining all of that lifeless water. The yellowish light and clouds haven’t changed at all over the last few hours. The clouds move constantly, but they just seem to churn in a circle, never really moving anywhere. Long days here, I suppose. Probably a totally different rotational and orbital cycle than Earth.

AUDIO LOG: 005

I guess I should introduce myself. My name is Andrew. I was born in 1993. I became a very rich man, a self-made man. I built an empire. I gave back to charities when I had more money than I could spend. In my seventies I got sick with cancer. I was dying. There was nothing the doctors could do. In the last few months I had left, I opted to have this space pod built with a cryochamber inside. It was also built to shield the radiation from space. It had a solar sail that would open up once it was launched into space. The sun would push it away from our solar system, pushing it deep into our galaxy. A beacon on the pod would send a signal back to Earth for as long as the solar-powered batteries lasted.

Technically I was still alive when I was frozen into my cryochamber. As a lark, I had them add all the instruments and the exploration suit, enough food pouches and a recyclable water system to survive. None of us ever thought it would really be used. The reality was that I would probably float through space for thousands of years until I collided with some asteroid or moon, or was pulled into a distant sun by the gravitational pull and then incinerated—the most expensive cremation in human history.

Of course, there were other remote possibilities like being found by an intelligent alien species or landing on a planet like this one.

I had led a very fulfilling and adventurous life back on Earth. I’d traveled the world, done everything I’d wanted to do. I had no regrets. One thing I could never stand was boredom. So I figured, even in death, why not go out with one last big adventure . . . the greatest adventure of humanity? I wanted to be the first human to travel beyond our solar system.

And now I have.

So how did I end up here? Was it an accident? Pure luck? I can’t believe that. Even if I would’ve entered the gravitational pull of this planet I’m on, I would’ve crashed into the ground and broke apart, been pulverized. And somebody, or something, pulled me out of my cryochamber. Something powered up all of this equipment. Something dressed me. Something put my boots on the wrong feet.

Something brought me here.

AUDIO LOG: 006

Days have gone by now even though nothing ever seems to change here. The clouds above churn slowly, but still never seem to move anywhere. The ocean laps endlessly at the shore, but there don’t seem to be any tides. The wind is nearly non-existent. Even the plants don’t seem to grow. It’s always light here, no darkness, just that constant yellowish-orange sunset light filtering down from those clouds above. And that mist in the distance—it’s always there in every direction.

I’ve eaten more food from the liquid pouches, but I’m beginning to conserve the food as much as I can. Eventually, maybe in three or four months, I’ll run out of food.

Whatever brought me here hasn’t tried to contact me yet. I’ve yelled up at the sky. I’ve entered that sea of vegetation. I’ve even drawn messages in the sand: words, crude pictures, math equations.

Nothing.

All the diagnostic tests have come back negative. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of life here at all.

Just me.

I’ve entered the ocean looking for some kind of fish or sea life. Nothing. The water is salty, the same chemical make-up as the oceans on Earth . . . just no life in it.

It’s lonely here. I’ve been spending more time in my pod, listening to books or music stored on the computer. I’m homesick. I don’t even know how far away I am from home. I don’t even know how long it’s been, how long I was out in space.

Tomorrow I’m going to bring a few food pouches and a plastic jug of water, and I’m going to walk down the beach to that mist—see what’s beyond it. Maybe “they” are beyond that mist; maybe they are waiting for me to come to them.

AUDIO LOG: 007

Today I walked down the beach and into the mist. It took maybe an hour and a half.

As soon as I was into the mist, I began to get a little disoriented. But I could hear the ocean off to my right, and I just kept walking forward. I only walked another five minutes before I nearly walked into a wall.

A wall. Some kind of smooth glass or clear plastic wall with more mist behind it. I couldn’t even see the wall at first; it just looked like more mist. I ran my hands along the smooth surface. I knocked on it. Pounded on it. But it seems impenetrable. I dug down into the sand a few feet, but this wall or border or whatever it is, seemed to go far down into the ground. I followed the wall into the vegetation, wading through the waist-high bushes, but the wall seems to go on forever. I went back to the beach and followed the wall into the ocean, up to my chest, but the wall continues on into the ocean.

And then I came back here. Back to my ship. My pod.

AUDIO LOG: 008

It’s been a few days . . . or weeks . . . hell, I don’t know. I’ve followed that wall all the way around through the vegetation and then back to the beach. I looked for a door of some kind in the plastic wall, but there isn’t one. That wall or border, it’s all the way around me. It’s like I’m in some gigantic glass or plastic bubble, like some gigantic terrarium.

I keep going out there on the beach. Sometimes I yell up at the sky. I yell at them. But they won’t answer me.

Why are they keeping me in here if they won’t answer me?

AUDIO LOG: 0010

Today I dug down into the sand as far as I could. I made a big hole, and then it almost caved in on me. I felt like I was digging my own grave, so I stopped.

I cried.

I yelled at the sky again.

I came back in here to my pod and listened to some more music. I tried listening to a book. But then I got mad and pounded on the computer panels, and now my music and books won’t play anymore. I can’t fix it.

I cried again.

AUDIO LOG: 0011

I don’t know how long it’s been now—at least four months if the beard that I’ve grown is any indication. I’m starving. My food is gone now, and I’m existing only on water. I feel sick and weak.

I’m going to go into that vegetation and eat some of the leaves or roots or something. No way to cook any of it . . . I’ll just have to eat it raw.

AUDIO LOG: 0012

I tried some of the plant life, or whatever it is. It tasted bitter and left my lips and tongue a little numb. That feeling went away after a few minutes, but then severe cramps in my stomach started. I vomited the chewed-up plants, but I’m pretty sure I poisoned myself. I came back into my pod and drank some water, and then I threw up again.

I’m going to go outside now and lay on the beach.

I think I’m dying.

Finally.

AUDIO LOG: 0013

I’m alive.

I think.

I woke up in the pilot’s seat. My beard is gone. My exploration suit is on but the helmet and tanks are still stored away. My left glove isn’t attached all the way. My right glove is completely off. My boots are on the wrong feet.

I’m staring out through the windshield right now. The beach is still there, the ocean to the right and the vegetation to the left, the clouds, that yellowish light . . . all the same. Always the same.

I should be dead. The cancer that I’d been dying from should have killed me by now. But they brought me back. Dressed me again. But something doesn’t feel quite right. I don’t know how to explain it, but it feels like a few minor details of my body weren’t reconstructed quite correctly . . . like my boots being on the wrong feet. I can’t help but feel that there were small errors made in my reanimation. Some of my memories feel mixed up . . . some of my thoughts seem strange.

AUDIO LOG: 0014

More time has gone by and I haven’t felt like recording anything for a while. My beard has grown long again. I’m starving again. Dying again. I keep eating the vegetation and throwing it right back up, but some of it must be keeping me alive.

Barely.

My music and books still won’t work even though the battery life is still charged on many of the computers and instruments.

I go outside a lot and yell at the sky, at these gods who are watching me. I know they’re watching me. Studying me. For what? Why? What do they want?

AUDIO LOG: 0015

I can’t take it anymore. I’m going to walk out as far as I can into the ocean and drown myself. I don’t want to come back this time.

Please . . . don’t bring me back.

AUDIO LOG: 0016

I’m alive.

I’m awake and in the pilot’s chair again. My exploration suit is on. My left glove is gone . . . I can’t find it. My boots are on the wrong feet. A piece of my thumb is missing now; it’s like it was never there. I don’t feel right. I don’t feel like myself. Am I some kind of clone? Has my consciousness been downloaded into this new body? With some errors, of course. For all their powers, whoever they are, they keep making small mistakes.

Why won’t they just let me go? Why won’t they just let me die?

Don’t they even know what dying is?

This is another one of my older stories, and it was originally published in Black Petals Magazine. But I’ve done some major rewriting from the original story that appeared in that magazine. The basic plot of the story is still the same, but I think this version is a little darker now.

I recall years ago hearing something about a billionaire who wanted to launch himself out into space when he died, and then I thought: What if he came across alien life out there? Lifeforms that are much more advanced than we are. What would they do to him? Would they bring him back from death? And then the story began to form in my mind. I’ve always wondered how we would ever communicate with a far superior lifeform. It would be like us trying to communicate with a group of insects scurrying around on the ground. Would these aliens be so much more advanced than us that there’d be no hope of us ever understanding them and their motives?

KILLING TAMMY

Jordan Lee Harvin was a serial killer, and he was going to kill Tammy tonight. He had killed thirteen people in the last four years. For the last three weeks he’d been stalking Tammy, soon to be his fourteenth victim. Of those thirteen murders, twelve had been women. The lone male was unexpected. Jordan usually did a very thorough job of watching his victims before he killed them; he cased their homes, studied their habits, collected details about their lives. But one night, almost three years ago, he’d been surprised by a man in the house, a sleepover guest of his victim’s. He had shot the man immediately, killing him instantly, then he’d been forced to hurry through with the killing of the woman. It had been rushed and not as satisfying to him as it could have been, but he had learned a painful lesson that night: he needed to be more careful.

And with experience came skill. He had been careful as he watched his latest victim. Tammy was twenty-four years old, a waitress at some kind of buffalo wing house/bar and just rebounding from a breakup with her boyfriend. She’d had some of her friends over a few times, but a lot of nights she was home alone.

Like tonight.

Tonight was the night.

Jordan had waited outside Tammy’s house for two hours. He had parked his pickup truck in an empty lot next to a 7-Eleven and walked the five blocks to Tammy’s house. He was dressed in a dark hoodie and knit cap with a backpack slung over his shoulders. At a distance he looked like a scrawny teenager who fit into the neighborhood. In his backpack he carried an extra change of clothes, several lengths of strong but thin rope, a pair of handcuffs, a roll of duct tape, extra gloves, and a few construction trash bags. He had a .45 handgun stuck into the waistband of his pants. The gun was only for emergencies and for intimidation—he didn’t like to use it unless it was an emergency. He liked to strangle his victims with the rope, watching the expression on their faces as their life slipped away from them.

He waited in the shrubs behind Tammy’s house. From this vantage point he had both a view of the back and side of her home, and he could still see a small part of the street. He’d already made a copy of the key to her back door by sticking a gum-like material into the lock a few days ago, using that as a mold to fashion a metal lock pick to turn the tumblers. If the pick didn’t work (but it would—it always had before), he had his eye on one of the back windows. Among his other supplies in his backpack, he carried what he called his burglary kit: a glass cutter, small hammer, a pry bar, an alarm code jammer, a cell phone jammer, and a small flashlight with a powerful strobe that could disorient a person. If a cop ever stopped him and wanted to search his backpack, then it was going to have to be that cop’s last day on Earth. He didn’t want to kill a cop, or anyone else—it wasn’t as satisfying as killing the targets that he stalked—but he would if he had to.

Stalking was half the fun. Sometimes he would spend weeks, even months stalking a person. He would find out everything he could about that person. He would watch them at home, at their work, haunt their social media pages. It was amazing how much personal information a person would willingly provide online.

Jordan was an expert with computers as well as alarm systems. He was a black belt in karate. His whole life had been training for this passion of his. He’d known at a young age what he wanted to do, what his urges were, and he’d plotted his course in life, training his body, mind, and spirit in every skill he would need.

Tonight it was finally going to pay off. He loved the feeling right before he entered the home of his victim, that thrill and even the nervousness he still felt after all of these years. But once he was inside, a calmness washed over him, and he became like a machine, doing his job—something like the Terminator, unstoppable on his mission. Yet even though he was machine-like in the execution of his tasks, he still allowed himself to feel everything, lock it all away for future rumination.

He didn’t wear a mask; he wanted his victims to see his face before they died. He had an attractive face, he knew that. Some women even said he had a trusting face and kind eyes . . . if they only knew. He loved how the victims watched his face as he strangled them, staring up at his romance-cover-good looks, wondering how someone who looked like him could do what he did.

These urges had nothing to do with sex. He liked sex with women, loved it actually. It was easy for him to find partners—he had no problem with that. He didn’t rape his victims before or after their demise. He didn’t steal their panties or a lock of their hair or take any other kind of souvenir. He just liked to watch their faces as their lives slipped away. He loved the power of someone’s life in his hands, the intimacy of being the last person that his victim spent this most important moment of their lives with. He wanted to share that important moment with them, to be a witness to their passing from this world into the next. Sometimes he tied their hands behind their backs, promising them that he wasn’t going to hurt them, that all he wanted to do was to take some stuff from their houses. He used the rope to tie their hands—the handcuffs were only for emergencies. The one time he’d used handcuffs on a woman, she had freaked out. What kind of burglar walked around with a pair of handcuffs? Rope seemed more spontaneous. Rope seemed more along the lines of what a typical burglar would have on him.

But he hadn’t even tied the last two victims up; he’d been on top of them before they’d even become fully awake. They had struggled; but he’d actually liked the struggle, the challenge.

It had been long enough now. All the lights had been shut off inside Tammy’s house for over an hour. Jordan crept from the bushes to the back door and picked the lock, getting inside within three minutes. He’d found an old listing of the home on Zillow to get a layout of the home, and he’d peeked in the windows a few days ago, so he had the interior of the home mapped out in his mind.

He moved slowly through the darkness, setting his backpack down on the kitchen table. He had two lengths of rope in one gloved hand and his gun was a reassuring weight against the small of his back. His black sneakers didn’t make a sound as he walked. The air conditioner was on, and it was cool inside the house. Tammy didn’t have any pets so he didn’t have to worry about that.

Jordan moved down the hall towards Tammy’s bedroom. Moments later he pushed the door open, hoping that it wouldn’t creak. It didn’t. Tammy was covered up with a sheet, the blanket bunched up at the end of the bed. Her dark hair was splayed out on the pillow. She was sleeping soundly—he couldn’t even hear her breathing.

For a moment he watched her, listening for any sounds. And then he was on her in a flash, tearing the sheet away from her body.

He froze.

It wasn’t Tammy—it was some kind of mannequin or lifelike doll.

He’d been set up.

The bedroom exploded with beams of lights and people yelling at him. “Down on your knees! Hands up!”

Jordan complied. There was nothing he could do. There were three of them, two men and a woman, all dressed in some kind of dark tactical gear with helmets and face shields. They all had weapons and flashlight beams pointed at him.

He’d known this day was coming, the day he got caught. Some serial killers might never be caught, but a lot of them were eventually caught. Jordan believed those who were caught wanted to be caught. They wanted to go down in history, to be remembered forever as a monster, an immortal bogeyman to be studied.

He felt handcuffs snapped on one wrist, and then his other arm was wrenched behind his back, his wrists shackled together. He was forced to his feet. He finally got a better look at the two men and the one woman who had captured him. He thought they would’ve been wearing city police uniforms or sheriff’s uniforms, or even possibly the FBI, but he didn’t see any kind of identification at all on any of them.

His stomach sank, his heart stopping for a moment. Even through her clear facemask, Jordan could see that the woman was Tammy.

He was pushed forward by one of the men, flashlight beams lighting their way—none of the house’s lights had been turned on yet. None of the three were talking to each other, or to Jordan, or calling this arrest in to some dispatcher. Everything was silent. Jordan was beginning to get a bad feeling that something was wrong here.

“You guys aren’t cops, are you?” Jordan asked as he was pushed forward through the house. The hand on the back of his neck felt like an iron clamp.

“Shut up,” the man behind him said without much force.

Jordan saw that he was being pushed towards a door in the kitchen that led out to the garage. If these three weren’t cops, then who were they? Were they family members of one of his victims? Were they some kind of vigilante group that had caught on to his crimes? Had he been stalked the entire time he thought he was stalking Tammy?

“Who are you?” Jordan demanded. “Where are you taking me?”

“I said shut up,” the man behind Jordan said as he forced him forward through the large garage towards the rear end of a black SUV, its rear hatch already open.

Jordan felt the pinch of something sharp on the side of his neck, then a slight burning underneath his skin as a liquid entered his veins.

“Get in,” the man behind him said, and already his voice sounded so far away.

Jordan wanted to resist, but his legs were beginning to feel a little rubbery, his mind drifting to strange and random thoughts like he was on the edge of sleep.

That was the last thing he remembered.

Jordan woke up sitting in a wooden chair in a fifteen by twenty foot room. The walls were constructed from block, painted a dull gray. There was nothing on the walls except a flat screen TV at the far end and a large mirror to Jordan’s left that was obviously a two-way mirror. There was only one metal door in or out of this room. In front of Jordan was a sturdy table with a thick metal ring on it that the chain connected to his handcuffs was attached to. At the other end of the table was an empty chair.

He felt groggy, but he was waking up quickly. He tested his bonds, but everything looked new and everything was strong. The table and chair seemed to be bolted to the concrete floor. At least the chain threaded through the metal ring had enough slack to let him wipe at his eyes and the dried drool at the corners of his mouth. He was so thirsty.

Where was he? This place looked like an interrogation room to him. Maybe those three were cops. He felt somewhat relieved to finally be caught. He’d always wondered what this day would be like. He would begin his journey into notoriety. He would give interview after interview to the police, only feeding them bits and pieces, enough to keep them strung along. He would write a book and get an agent. A film agent, too.

But then he wondered what kind of cops drugged their detainee. He couldn’t remember having had his rights read to him. The thought of vigilantes came back to him now.

The door opened, and a man in a dark suit and tie entered. Someone outside closed the metal door and Jordan heard the sound of heavy locks clicking into place. The man in the dark suit was tall and lean. He walked with a purpose, a man of action, a man who commanded respect and attention, a man of extreme focus. He carried a folder and what looked like some kind of remote control (for the flat screen TV, Jordan assumed). He sat down in the chair at the other end of the table. His hair was short, but not military short. He wasn’t extremely handsome but definitely not ugly. His light blue eyes were focused right on Jordan, and he stared at him for a full sixty seconds without saying anything.

“Can I get something to drink?” Jordan finally asked.

The man didn’t answer; he just glanced at the two-way mirror.

A moment later another man dressed in a dark suit and tie entered the room with a bottle of water. He left the water on the table within reach of Jordan and left without a word.

Jordan grabbed the bottle of water and made sure the cap was sealed before he opened it—he didn’t want to take another blackout trip. The cap was sealed, but he thought he was going to drink it whether the cap was sealed or not because he was so thirsty. After drinking down half the bottle of water, Jordan set it down carefully and then looked at the man seated across the table from him. “I’m not saying anything without a lawyer.”

The man nodded slightly and opened the folder on the table, glancing down at the papers inside. “You’re not under arrest,” he said.

Jordan lifted up his shackled wrists. “Coulda fooled me.”

“We have you,” the man said. “We took you, but we’re not cops.”

Jordan had that sinking feeling back in his stomach again. “What the hell are you talking about?” The thought of some victim’s family abducting him for revenge came back to him.

The man looked back down at the open folder in front of him, ignoring Jordan. “Jordan Lee Harvin,” he said, reading a paper inside the folder. “Thirty-two years old. Male. Caucasian. Above average I.Q. but no college education. Heterosexual.” Then he finally looked at Jordan. “Serial killer.”

Jordan didn’t reply.

“You’ve killed thirteen people,” the man said. “Twelve women and one man.”

That sinking feeling in his stomach was worse than ever now, and his balls were crawling. “How do you know that?” he whispered.

The man closed the folder. “We know a lot about you, Jordan.”

“Who are you?”

“You can call me Mr. Vance. I work with the government, and I’m here to make you an offer.”

“An offer?”

“Yes.”

“Government?” Jordan wondered if he was still knocked out and trapped inside some kind of dream.

“We need people like you,” Mr. Vance said, ignoring Jordan’s shock. “We need someone with your particular set of skills.”

“My skills? You need me to . . . what? Kill people?”

“Exactly. We’ll give you a new identity, put you up in a new place . . . relocate you. Think of it kind of like the witness relocation program.”

“And?”

“And when we need you to . . . to dispose of someone for us, then we’ll notify you.”

Jordan was still having trouble believing this was happening.

“It’s a good deal,” Mr. Vance said as he stood up. “It’s your only deal.”

“Because if I don’t take the deal then I’ll be going to jail?”

Mr. Vance chuckled. “No, not jail.” He aimed his remote control at the TV, turning it on.

Jordan stared at the TV. There was a still photo of a long wooden box on the screen.

“That’s a coffin,” Mr. Vance said. “It’s ready to go into the incinerator.” He turned back towards Jordan, staring at him. “If you decline our offer, then you’ll get another injection in your neck. A few hours from now you’ll wake up inside a box like that. You’ll probably be in that box for a few hours before the conveyer belt takes you into the incinerator.”

“You . . . you can’t do this. You have to give me a lawyer. I’ve got . . . got . . .”

“Rights?” Mr. Vance asked. “You’ve killed thirteen people. And now you want your rights? What about their rights?”

Jordan didn’t say anything. He grabbed his water bottle with trembling hands and drank down the rest of the cool water.

“I’m not going to give you a lot of time to think this offer over. We would love to have someone with your talents, but if you refuse, we understand. There are others we can contact.”

“You have other people doing this?”

Mr. Vance didn’t answer.

Jordan felt time slipping by quickly, and he wanted to slow things down. “Who would I be killing?”

“Whoever we tell you to. And no one else,” he added firmly. He sat back down, relaxing, suddenly charming. “Look, I know you’ve got these . . . these urges. I understand that. This is a job where you can satisfy those urges. But you can only kill the people we tell you to and only in the way we tell you to.”

“But why me?”

“Because you’re pretty good at what you do.”

“Not good enough, apparently.”

“Don’t beat yourself up about that. We’ve been watching you for a while. Hell, we watch everybody. We noticed that you’re efficient at what you do. You’re not a pervert, you just like to kill. And that’s exactly what we’re looking for.”

Mr. Vance stood back up. He looked like he was ready to walk to the door now, the conversation over. “Your choice, Jordan. You can take the offer or you can be reduced to ash. No one knows you’re here. You’ll just disappear—one of so many who disappear every day. You’ll never be remembered. You can choose that, or you can go on living and doing what you do best. What you were born to do.”

Jordan didn’t answer.

Mr. Vance started walking towards the door. “You’ve got ten minutes to decide.”

“Ten minutes?”

Mr. Vance didn’t respond.

Jordan looked back at the TV that Mr. Vance had left on. The pine box was now moving down a conveyer belt towards the incinerator, the metal door opening, the fires of hell burning inside.

The ten minutes flew by. Mr. Vance was back. He didn’t even bother sitting back down. He stood at the other end of the table, waiting for Jordan’s decision.

“If I take your offer,” Jordan said, “then I’m going to disappear anyway, right?”

“I’m afraid that’s how relocation works.”

“Aren’t you worried that I’ll run?”

“You’ll have a chip implanted inside of you. Several of them and you won’t know where they are in your body.”

“So I just . . . just live somewhere and what? Just wait?”

“We’ll create a background story for you. You’ll have a schedule to keep. Someone to check in with often. We’ll always know where you are.”

Jordan didn’t say anything for a long moment, and he could feel Mr. Vance’s impatience. “Okay,” he finally said. “I’ll do it.”

On the TV, the pine box was already inside the incinerator, the metal door closing.

“Good decision,” Mr. Vance said, clapping Jordan on the shoulder as he walked towards the metal door. “It’s not really so bad. Remember, you’ll be doing this for your country.”

This is one of the newer stories that I wrote for this collection. I don’t really know where this idea came from, it just kind of popped into my mind as a question: What if the government hired serial killers as assassins? And then that question led to other questions like: How would they get the serial killers? How would they make the serial killers cooperate? And those questions led to this story.

THE BEDROOM LIGHT

This can’t be happening. I’m just imagining this. Or no, maybe my mind has finally snapped. Or

(Oh God No)

maybe I’m already dead—already dead and in Hell.

I sit here saying these things over and over again in my mind as I type this down on my laptop computer in front of me. The electricity has gone out (I think some of those things chewed through the wires somehow), and the only light now comes from the screen in front of me. I am curled up at the end of the couch, as far into the corner of the living room as I can get. But even the walls aren’t safe . . . because they’re in the walls too.

Nowhere is safe now.

I have a battery-operated radio next to the now-useless telephone, and I’m listening to the weather reports as a storm-of-the-century rages over this house. My cell phone is useless way out here in the country, and the engine in my car has been destroyed.

I feel like I only have moments to live. I need to get all of this down as fast as I can; I want someone to know what really happened here.

I can hear them upstairs now. I can hear them outside. I can hear whisperings. Plotting. I’ve got to hurry.

My name is Evan Sommers, and if you’re a fan of horror and supernatural books and movies, then most likely you’ve heard of me. I was on a ten year success streak with my books and screenplays. Everything I wrote seemed to turn to gold.

And then the muse decided to give me the silent treatment, and writer’s block landed on me with a thud. I tried taking some time off from writing. I got divorced. I almost got married again. I tried a few different hobbies. Nothing was working. I just stared at the blank page day after day after day. I tried to write; I would hammer out sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, but it was all garbage. And I couldn’t do that to my fans. I couldn’t do that to myself.

I came up here to Vermont to visit my sister. The area really appealed to me—the mountains, the never-ending forests, the small and cozy towns, the isolation. While staying with my sister for a few weeks, I heard a rumor about a haunted house in the next county, in a small town called Carston. So I went to check it out. I drove into the small hamlet nestled in the woods and asked around. Everyone there had heard of the haunted house, and a few pointed me in its direction. Of course they warned me to stay away, but they knew a reckless city slicker when they saw one. They knew I wasn’t going to heed their warnings, so they only shrugged their shoulders and resigned me to my fate.

It took forty-five minutes of driving outside of town, and another twenty minutes of back-tracking, before I found the dirt path snaking through the woods that led to the house. For a few moments I believed that the townspeople had purposely given me wrong directions, either to send the out-of-towner on a wild snipe hunt or because they didn’t want me to find it.

But I found it. I drove my Jeep Cherokee over the rutted road and emerged from the suffocating woods to see the dilapidated, two-story structure looming up on a hill with no vegetation around it, like nature itself had pulled back away from the house in fear and disgust a long time ago.

I drove up the hill as far as I could. I put the Jeep in park and turned it off. I got out. The world around me was silent. Not even the sound of birds filled the air. Maybe the wildlife had abandoned this area, or perhaps they were holding their collective breath, waiting for an explosion of violence to occur.

As I stood there in the knee-high grasses, I could feel stories coming alive in my mind. Worlds were opening up to me—dark worlds, terrible worlds. I saw characters coming into existence, tales unfolding. My fingers were actually twitching, like I was an addict suffering through writing withdrawals. Suddenly, I needed to get back to a keyboard.

I needed to be inside that house, I needed to live in it, breathe in its musty air—I needed to write in it.

I spotted a sign discarded in the overgrown brush thirty yards away. It was a rental sign and it looked pretty old. I jotted down the phone number in my cell phone and raced back to my Jeep. I didn’t care if I had to rent the house or buy it outright. It didn’t matter. I had to be here. My muse had left me a while back, and now I had found her again; she was holed up in this haunted house, and I had to be with her again. She was waiting for me somewhere inside those gloomy walls, waiting to embrace me again, waiting to whisper dark secrets in my ears.

I sped back to town and found the real estate company. The agent seemed shocked that I wanted to rent the house. She asked if I wanted a tour even though I could sense a plea from her for me to decline her offer. She let out a held breath when I told her I didn’t need a tour. I paid for a six month lease right there in her office. I would’ve paid more. This house was going to let me write again. This house was going to be my salvation.

Or so I thought.

How wrong I was. I wish I could go back and tell myself that.

After securing the lease for the house, I went back to New York and packed up everything in my apartment in one day. I put anything I wasn’t taking with me (which was most of the furniture) into storage units. I had just broken up with my umpteenth girlfriend after another disappointing and hopeless relationship (my fault, not hers), and there was nothing holding me back. I loaded up my Jeep with only the bare essentials, and I was on my way back to Vermont.

Once I got the keys from the real estate agent, I walked into the house for the first time . . . my house now. As soon as I stepped inside, it felt like I had been away from home, my real home, and I was finally back. The house was old, built in the mid-eighteen hundreds. It was a three-story Victorian with an attic occupying the entire third floor. It was dilapidated. Shutters were missing next to some of the cracked windows. Paint was peeling away from wood siding. The front porch looked like a safety hazard. The whole structure seemed to have a slight lean to it. The floorboards moaned and creaked when I walked across them, and there was a constant chilly draft throughout the house even though it was the middle of summer. The house was furnished with dumpy furniture, but I didn’t care. To be able to write again I would’ve sat on milk crates and cinder blocks. The rooms in the house were spacious. They had ten foot high ceilings, and on the far side of the living room was the wooden staircase hugging the wall that led upstairs.

I am looking at that staircase right now as I write this—I keep glancing back at the steps that lead up into the darkness. Those things are moving around up there . . . I can hear them. It’s only a matter of time before all of them come for me. I need to hurry . . . I have things to tell before they get to me.

On the day I moved in I made the twenty mile trip to the supermarket to buy two weeks’ worth of groceries and liquor. I came back, put the groceries away, and got my laptop out, setting it up at the rickety kitchen table where I sat down to write. The ideas were pouring out of me, almost like the stories were writing themselves, like they were channeling through me. I watched my fingers dance across the keys of the laptop like they weren’t even my own. I had always written outlines before, copious amounts of notes, constantly re-writing and editing—but these stories seemed to come out fully formed. I couldn’t write fast enough.

Now I know that they were telling their stories through me; they wanted their stories told—they were freeing themselves through me.

The noises started happening about three weeks ago: noises inside the walls, creaking in the floorboards, crackling in the ceilings. There were scratching noises. There were sneaky, scurrying sounds. I looked and looked for the source of the noises, but I never found any evidence of rats.

I was starting to lose sleep; those noises were driving me crazy. But I wouldn’t let them stop me from writing. If anything, I was writing even more. I was beginning novels, racing through them towards the shocking endings, stockpiling manuscripts. I was writing nonstop fifteen to twenty hours a day, fueled on whiskey and snacks.

But still, the noises—they were always in the background. I played music, blared the TV on some twenty-four hour news channel, but I could always hear them, like they were whispering to me, coaxing me to write their stories. I could’ve called the owner of the property about these pests, or I could’ve even called a pest control company. Looking back now, I wish I would’ve called an exterminator. But I know now that the exterminator wouldn’t have seen them or heard them or spotted any evidence of them. No, they would’ve hidden, and hidden well. But if truth is to be told here, and everything I write now is the truth, the real reason I didn’t call anyone for help was because I was afraid that if I exposed them then the stories would stop, that this obscene partnership we had created would be over.

So I kept on writing . . . and the noises continued.

Three nights ago I finally tore myself away from the house and went to a bar in town. I had to get away from here for a little while, try to clear my head. I was afraid I would pass out soon from exhaustion. I had been cooped up in this old house for nearly a month, and I needed some time away. I came back to the house drunk, not even remembering my drive back. I staggered inside and clomped up the steps to the upstairs hallway. I needed to take an urgent piss. As I got to the top of the steps, I stopped and stared down the long hallway. At the end of the hall was my bedroom door. The light was on in my bedroom—I could see the strip of light underneath the closed door.

I was certain that I had turned off the light before I left. In fact, I don’t know why I would’ve turned it on because it had been daylight when I’d left.

I moved down the hall slowly, flipping lights on in the bedrooms off of the hallway as I went, leaving illumination behind me like a trail of breadcrumbs. I got to my bedroom door and listened for a moment. I didn’t hear anything, no scratching or creaking noises, everything strangely silent like someone was waiting to pounce.

And then I heard it beyond the door—a man whispering. I thought I could make out the words, but not quite. I couldn’t help thinking that those words and that voice were familiar. I know I should’ve ran downstairs and called the police, but I didn’t. The alcohol in my veins produced a false courage. Instead of running, I opened the door and rushed inside. I might have even yelled, but I can’t remember. Everything in the bedroom seemed fine; nothing looked like it had been disturbed.

I went back out to the hall, to the bathroom and relieved myself. I was shaky, trembling with fear and adrenaline. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t alone in this house, that someone else was here with me. I entered my bedroom again and grabbed my pillow and sheet, taking them downstairs to sleep on the couch in front of the comforting glow of the flickering light from the television. I was forcing myself to take a night off from writing, afraid of burning myself out.

But, of course, I couldn’t sleep. And soon I was at my laptop again, finishing the book I was working on, finishing a few more stories, adding to my stack of finished drafts.

This afternoon I went to the grocery store to stock back up on food. I double checked before I left to make sure I had shut off all of the lights—especially my bedroom light.

As I drove back, a monster thunderstorm formed in the sky above me from out of nowhere. I made it back to the house just before the downpour. I set the grocery bags down on the dining room table and then put them away.

I climbed the stairs to the second floor and froze at the top of the steps.

The bedroom light was on, the strip of light shining brightly in the murky shadows of the hall. I walked slowly down the hallway again, listening to my footfalls echo around me, bouncing around me. I glanced in at the dark bedrooms as I passed them.

Moments later I stood in front of the door to my bedroom and stared down at the strip of light underneath the door. My mouth went dry with fear, and my heart hammered against my breastbone. I glanced behind me back down the hall.

I reached down for the door handle, about to grasp it, about to turn it and enter the bedroom.

I heard a voice; someone was whispering to me from inside my bedroom . . . right on the other side of the door.

“Chop, chop,” a man’s voice said from behind the door.

And I knew those words. I knew where I had heard them before; I had written those words in my book The Boneyard Murders which was about a serial killer who waited in the darkness, whispering to his victims before attacking them with an ax.

Chop. Chop.

Someone was inside my bedroom pretending to be the deranged character from The Boneyard Murders. Some insane fan or some fundamentalist Puritan was waiting to punish me for the horrors and filth I had written and unleashed on the world.

I backed up a step, trying not to make any noise. But he already knew I was outside the bedroom door. He had been waiting for me.

He struck that ax against the door and just the tip of the blade punctured through the bedroom door, splitting the wood down to the bottom of the door.

I ran back down the hallway towards the stairs. But I could already hear something moving around in one of the bedrooms to my right. I raced past the open doorway and saw a creature filling the opening, trying to squeeze through. The being’s flour-white skin hung in loose folds on its massive body, rolls of flesh bunching up around its neck and sides. On its large head, the skin was stretched taut, and there was a network of bluish-green veins just underneath the papery skin. Its mouth hung open impossibly wide, like an anaconda unhinging its jaw to devour its prey. Inside the creature’s mouth were rows upon rows of yellowed, needle-like teeth. Its eyes were bulging and red, and they seemed like they were about to burst out of the thing’s face.

The thing growled at me and lifted up its head, crushing the top of the doorway. Wood cracked and plaster exploded, raining down on me as I fell backwards. I slid down the hallway wall towards the stairs as the creature began to push its massive bulk out through the doorway. The plaster walls popped, the cracks radiated from the doorway.

In the distance, behind me at my bedroom door, I heard another whack of the ax blade against the door. I swear I could still hear the killer whispering to me from behind the door.

Chop, chop.

I got to my feet and rushed down the stairs so quickly that I tripped over the last few steps and crashed down to the first floor. It felt like something had snapped inside my knee and there was a starburst of pain that blanked everything out for a few seconds. I collapsed down onto the floor, holding my knee, writhing in pain and groaning with tears of agony rolling down my face.

But then I heard the crashes from upstairs. That creature was free—it had burst through the doorway—and that was enough to get me back up onto my feet. But I could barely walk, and I definitely couldn’t run. I hobbled to the kitchen table, dragging my nearly useless leg behind me as I grabbed my car keys.

What was happening? Upstairs, there were two characters from my books that had somehow come to life.

I didn’t understand it; I just wanted to get out of the house. Maybe the house was haunted. Maybe it was making me see things that weren’t there, making me see the horrors I had created through the years, the horrors I had infected the world with.

I yanked the front door open, ready to get to my Jeep as fast as I could through the torrential downpour. But I stopped in my tracks. The hood of my Jeep was open, and there were giant slug-like creatures devouring the engine and the metal of the Jeep. The clear slime the creatures left behind was burning through the metal like acid.

I had seen these creatures before—I created them in a short story called Slugs.

A noise off to my left whirled me around on my unsteady legs. There were people out there shambling about in the darkness and the rain—a lot of them. I watched as the mass of people stumbled towards me.

Zombies, just like I’d written about in my post-apocalyptic novel When Hell Rises.

I hurried back across the creaky porch to the front door as the undead stumbled towards the porch steps and railing. Their arms were extended like they were already reaching for me, their mouths wide open, ready to bite down on my flesh and tear it away piece by piece.

I got back inside the house just as the horde of zombies fell against the door. I backed away, afraid the door was going to explode inward from their weight. But it held. At least for the moment.

I hobbled over to the couch just as the electricity went out, plunging the house into darkness. In the darkness I could hear the sound of the storm more clearly; I could hear the zombies outside clawing at the doors and windows, their fingernails snapping off as they tried to pry the windows open. I heard the sound of heavy work boots from upstairs strolling down the hallway, the ax being dragged along the wood floor. I heard the sound of the madman whispering and singing to himself; I heard him whispering: “Chop, chop.” I heard the creaking and groaning sounds inside the walls, the wood lath and studs snapping as the giant white creature forced its way from the world I had created into this world.

I had nowhere to run to. I checked the windows, and there were zombies as far as I could see. There were thousands of them. I tried the phone, but it didn’t work. My cell phone had never worked way out here. I stumbled over to the couch and opened up my laptop just to have a source of light.

And then I started typing. Because that’s what this house wanted all along, it wanted me to write and write, and bring more of them to life.

My fingers race across the keys now as I type this. The front door has finally given way, crashing to the floor under the weight of the zombies. They’ve fallen into the house in a heap of writhing dead flesh, biting and tearing at each other to free themselves from their tangled mass. Some are getting back to their feet, and they’ve spotted me here in the corner.

The killer has already come downstairs, dragging his ax behind him. The ax blade plopped down each step on the way down.

The white creature finally crashed through the doorway upstairs and is now hurtling itself down the steps, crushing them on the way down. All of my creations are about to collide with each other on their way to me. But it doesn’t matter which of them gets to me first.

I don’t want to look at them. I don’t want to.

There are sounds in the walls right behind me. I hear rats. They are the rats I dreamed up in my story House Infection. They are chewing through the walls right now, and I can hear their squeaks and squeals as they squeeze their wet and hairy bodies through the small holes they’ve chewed through the walls.

The monsters are coming towards me from all sides now. A few seconds ago a large ripple undulated through the floor underneath me. There’s something big in the basement, pushing up against the floorboards, and I have an idea of what it might be. But I don’t want to think about it.

This is the end. I can hear the madman whispering right beside me as he raises his ax up. I hear the rats, and I can feel them clawing and biting at my feet and legs. The undead moan and gurgle as they fall down on top of me.

Tell my sister I love her.

Oh God forgive me for what I’ve brought into the world. Forgive me for ev

From a New York Times article:

Well-known author Evan Sommers was found dead in his rental home near Carston, Vermont. After not hearing from him for a month, his sister, Lynn, called the authorities. Sources are saying the author died of an apparent heart attack, but they’re not ruling anything out until an autopsy is performed.

“He died while writing,” Evan’s sister commented. “He died doing what he loved.”

Evan Sommers was best known for works such as HOUSE INFECTION, THE BONEYARD MURDERS, and WHEN HELL RISES.

He was forty-one years old.

The Bedroom Light was a story I wrote in my late teens, back when I was heavily influenced by Stephen King and Dean Koontz (not that I’m not still heavily influenced by those great authors). I wanted to write a monster story where the craziest monsters came at this guy all at once. But in the rewrite I made it more of creations from his stories coming to life, and I like this version much better.

RAZORBLADE DREAMS

Cassie sat up in the darkness of her bedroom. She’d had the nightmare again. Her heart was hammering in her chest. Her skin felt clammy and tingly at the same time. She felt shaky, panicky, like she needed to run, like some devastation was imminent.

She looked at her alarm clock, the red digital numbers seeming to float in the darkness. She still had an hour and a half before she had to get up for work. Instead of rolling over and trying to go back to sleep, she turned on the lamp next to her bed. She took a sip of water from the bottle next to the lamp, but it barely seemed to quench her thirst.

Gotta get up, she told herself. Gotta get up and move around for a minute.

Getting out of bed disturbed her cat—she jumped off the foot of the bed, the soft thud of her paws hitting the laminate flooring. The nearly all-black cat darted out of the bedroom and seemed to dissolve into the darkness beyond her open bedroom door.

Cassie stared at her half-open door. She’d never been afraid of the dark before, but something felt wrong right now.

“It’s just a dream,” she whispered to herself. But she really didn’t like the trembling sound of her voice right now.

It felt like there was something in another part of her home . . . someone waiting for her in that darkness.

“Stop it,” she hissed at herself. Both of her cats were in the house somewhere. If there was someone in the house then those cats would’ve darted right back in here and hid. There was no one lurking in her house—she needed to be rational about this. It was just a nightmare, just a dream that had freaked her out.

After another swig of water, Cassie went into the bathroom off of her bedroom. She turned on the light and splashed her face with water. She stared at her reflection in the mirror. She couldn’t get rid of the creepy-crawly sensation on her skin. She tried to remember the nightmare, but only bits and pieces were coming back to her. She thought she’d been in a car with someone in the dream . . . she thought there might have been a child in the back seat. They’d been driving somewhere . . . but they were lost. The little girl in the back seat was getting agitated . . . maybe she was scared.

Cassie couldn’t remember who was in the passenger seat—that person was just a blank right now.

She left the bathroom and went out to the kitchen, turning lights on along the way. She still felt a little shaky from the dream. Maybe something else besides water would help, maybe some tea. It did have caffeine, which was probably counterproductive to going back to sleep, but a cup of tea sounded good right now; it sounded relaxing. She figured she was probably going to be awake until morning anyhow.

As she filled a pot with water, a memory of the dream hit her with such a sudden force it felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. There’d been a man in the dream, and he’d been dressed in black from head to toe. He’d even had a mask on, some kind of hood over his head. He’d been standing in a crowd of people because . . . because they had stopped their car . . . but why had they stopped? Maybe they had stopped to ask for directions. But they’d gotten out of the car at some point and were in that crowd, and that man dressed all in black was in that crowd, staring right at her.

God, it gave her chills just thinking about it.

Cassie jumped as something bumped her bare calf, and she almost let out a scream.

Her cat bolted out of the kitchen . . . it had been her cat rubbing up against her leg, wanting her to open the sliding back door so she could go out onto the screened-in back porch.

“Sorry, Slinky,” Cassie said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Slinky waited by the sliding glass door hidden behind a curtain of vertical blinds, but Cassie wasn’t going to open that door right now. No way. She was still too freaked out about the dream even though she still wasn’t sure what had scared her so badly. The guy dressed in black with the mask? Maybe, but she couldn’t remember the man doing anything other than staring at her through the crowd. Maybe there were other parts of the dream that she wasn’t remembering.

After turning the stove on for the pot of water, Cassie went into the living room and turned the TV on. She needed some more light and background noise right now. She flipped to a twenty-four hour business news channel and let it drone on in the background. Futures and Asian markets were streaming along the bottom of the screen. She glanced at some of the share prices, and then went back to the kitchen. The news was getting her mind off of her dreams, the nightmare finally beginning to fade away completely. Her thoughts turned to the day ahead of her. She’d worked in finance for years. Maybe it was boring to most people, but she found numbers, economics, and stocks fascinating. Numbers were reliable, they were dependable. Two plus two was always going to equal four—from here to the other side of the galaxy. Yes, numbers could be counted on (excuse the pun, she told herself), not like people who always let you down. Her ex-husband was one of those people who would let you down. Many in her family were those kinds of people. So were a lot of her co-workers. She couldn’t really call her coworkers friends because she didn’t have anyone she could call a true friend; she had some girls she spent time with on holidays or took an occasional shopping trip with, or had a drink or two with (Cassie was not much of a drinker), but not a best friend, not someone she could whole-heartedly trust. The closest person she could call a close friend would be Zoe at work.

“I’m not opening the door for you until the sun comes up,” Cassie told Slinky who still waited patiently by the vertical blinds. Well, patiently for now. Soon she would start pacing and meowing, and then start spazzing, racing back and forth and crashing into the blinds, throwing a feline temper tantrum.

Cassie walked into the living room again and checked the sliding glass door to make sure it was locked, moving the blinds and perhaps teasing Slinky. She went to the formal living room, and then the foyer to check the front door.

This was ridiculous. Of course the doors were all locked; she never forgot to lock her doors at night.

What was wrong with her? She didn’t usually react to nightmares like this. Actually, up until a few weeks ago, she couldn’t remember having had any bad dreams since she was a kid. She hadn’t even remembered many of her dreams over the last few years. She wondered if she even dreamt at all, or maybe she just dreamed about work: numbers, stock prices, PE ratios, financial reports.

The water on the stove was boiling. She added three tea bags and let it boil for a minute longer. She checked her cell phone and found the usual high number of email alerts . . . and a missed call.

A missed call? Sometime during the night?

She checked the phone number, but there was no number, just the word: RESTRICTED. She checked to see when the call had come. Around four thirty this morning—only an hour ago. That was strange; she hadn’t heard the phone ring. Even though her phone was out here in the kitchen, she was sure she would’ve heard it ring. But the call must’ve come while she’d been having the nightmare. Maybe the ringing of the phone had actually awakened her.

She checked to see if the caller had left a message.

There was a message.

She jabbed the messenger bar with a swipe of her finger, and the message began playing. She touched the microphone button so she could hear it without holding it up to her ear. There was silence, then a slight static as the little bar at the bottom of the screen moved along slowly. For a second she thought the person who’d left the message wasn’t going to say anything, perhaps realizing they’d called the wrong number at four thirty in the morning. But then a man’s raspy voice spoke, and he only said three words. But those three words chilled her to the bone. “Sweet dreams tonight?”

Cassie turned around and looked behind her, suddenly afraid that someone was in her house.

No one there, but that tingly sensation was back again, dancing along her skin. And that panicky/shaky feeling was back, that feeling that made her want to run.

Cassie turned on more lights. She turned the TV up a little louder. She went back to her phone and played the message again. And then again and again.

“Just a prank,” she told herself after listening to the message five times.

The tea in the pot had been boiling for several minutes now. She turned the burner off and poured the tea into the pitcher with a cup of sugar.

It was just a coincidence, she told herself. But as a number cruncher, she didn’t believe in coincidences. She’d had a nightmare about some strange man dressed all in black and wearing a mask, and then someone had called her while she’d been dreaming and left a message asking if she’d had sweet dreams tonight.

A sudden anger rose inside of her. Prank call or not, she wasn’t going to let this go. She would call this man back, that’s what she’d do. But then she remembered that the man had called her from a restricted number—her phone wasn’t going to let her dial him back.

*

Work dragged by for Cassie. She was tired, but once she got to her desk and started meeting with clients, she delved into her world of finance, helping people with more money than she would ever earn make even more money.

“You wanna do lunch today?” Zoe asked.

Cassie looked up at Zoe as she stood next to her desk. “I brought my lunch today,” Cassie told her, and then frowned. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Zoe said, smiling. Zoe was always smiling, always cheerful. She wore bright colors, a contrast to most of the others in the office who wore drab grays, browns, blacks . . . Cassie included. Zoe also wore a lot of jewelry that was always clinking and jingling. Tattoos peeked out of the open collar of her shirt and out of the cuffs of her sleeves. Even though Zoe didn’t seem like the prototypical financial advisor, she was great at her job, and she had an almost supernatural ability to predict the markets. Speaking of supernatural, Zoe believed in all things supernatural, and she wasn’t afraid to tell anyone. She claimed she had gotten her abilities from her grandmother who’d been a psychic and taught Zoe the mystical side of things.

“You okay?” Zoe asked.

“Yeah,” Cassie answered immediately, lighting up with her customer-friendly smile. “Why?”

“I don’t know.”

That wasn’t true, Cassie thought. Zoe knew something—she could tell something was wrong.

“I just didn’t get enough sleep last night,” Cassie finally admitted.

Zoe stared at Cassie for a moment longer, like she knew there was more to the story than that. But when Cassie didn’t volunteer any more information, Zoe smiled and left.

*

Cassie came home and started some dinner. She felt a little better now after working all day, but she also felt more tired than usual.

After dinner she called her mother and talked to her for twenty minutes, listening to her mother’s complaints and criticisms, and the always thinly-veiled suggestions that Cassie go out and try to meet some guy. Cassie’s mother wanted grandchildren before she keeled over, you know.

Cassie reminded her mother that she already had grandchildren—Cassie’s sister Christine had three children.

“I want some grandchildren from you,” her mother said.

After cleaning the kitchen and putting the dishes away, Cassie went to her bedroom and turned the TV on. She didn’t usually watch TV in her bedroom, but she thought she would do so tonight. She also ran a hot bath. After relaxing in the bath for thirty minutes, Cassie dressed in some comfortable pajamas and stretched out under the bedsheets, watching some old movie on Turner Classics. Both of her cats were curled up at the end of her bed.

She had almost drifted off to sleep when she heard a noise from the kitchen. She sat up, staring at her half-open bedroom door. She looked at the foot of her bed and noticed that both of her cats were gone. When had they left the bed? Maybe she had drifted off for a moment. The noise in the kitchen was probably the cats playing around with each other.

She heard the noise from the kitchen again . . . it sounded like someone was walking around out there, and that someone was not trying to be quiet about it. She sat there for a moment, listening. Her heart began pounding, and that buzzing/tingling feeling was back on her skin. She went to grab her cell phone on the end table next to her bed, but it wasn’t there. Where was her cell phone? She thought she’d brought it into the bedroom with her, but maybe she’d left it in the kitchen like she usually did. At least the cordless phone was on the table, and she grabbed it, ready to dial 911 if she needed to.

Quietly, she got out of bed and crept to her bedroom door, still listening the entire time. The noises were still coming from the kitchen. It almost sounded like someone was moving pots and pans around, and utensils . . . like someone was cooking.

She stepped out into the living room and saw a light on in the kitchen, and she knew she hadn’t left the lights on in there. A wall at the other side of the living room blocked a lot of the view of the kitchen from where she stood—she didn’t see anyone there, but she could still hear the noises.

For some strange reason she wondered if her mother was in the kitchen. Her mother had a key to the house; maybe she had come over to fix something. But no, that didn’t seem right.

Cassie heard a voice from the kitchen . . . a male voice humming some kind of song. The large flat screen TV in the family room beyond the kitchen was on. She could see the glow from it, hear the babbling voices coming from it, the words incoherent.

A man was in her home. Maybe it was the same man who’d called her cell phone last night and left that strange message. She was going to call the police right now. She was about to dial 911 when the cordless phone rang in her hand.

She stifled a scream, nearly dropping the phone. The little screen on the cordless phone lit up in an eerie green light as it rang—she saw the number on the screen: it was her own cell phone number. She raised the phone up to her ear and pressed the TALK button. She didn’t say anything, just listened.

There was heavy breathing on the phone, and then he spoke, his voice purring in her ear. “Come into the kitchen, Cassie. I’ve got something for you. Something I’m making. A big surprise.”

Cassie felt herself walking forward like her legs were moving on their own. The noises were louder in the kitchen as she got closer. She was ready to turn the corner and walk into the kitchen.

She saw the man in black at the counter, his back to her as he worked on his surprise. He had a cutting board out, knives, bowls . . . and the two dead bodies of her cats lying next to the wooden cutting board, their dark bodies matted with blood, stretched out like dead rabbits ready to be skinned and prepped for dinner.

The man had on black pants, a long-sleeved black shirt, and black boots. A leather hood was over his head, tied up in back, a crisscrossing of leather strings.

He was turning around with the bloodstained knife in his gloved hand . . .

Cassie jolted awake, sitting bolt-upright in bed. Her cats were as startled as she was. The TV was still on, the sound turned down low, the rest of the lights in the bedroom off.

It was just a dream. Just a dream, that’s all.

For a moment Cassie wasn’t sure if she was still in the dream or not. Was this reality? For a sickening moment, she wasn’t sure. She was afraid she might hear that man in black humming a tune in her kitchen, getting his knives and dishes ready for his surprise.

“It was just a dream,” she told herself, her voice sounding loud to her own ears. But she needed to speak, she needed to do something to show that she was in control of her own body, something to prove to herself that this was real and not a dream.

“It was just a dream,” she told herself again in her shaky voice. Her cats were okay—they were staring at her from the foot of the bed, they weren’t slaughtered on her countertop in the kitchen. Everything was okay.

Cassie jumped when her cell phone beside her bed rang. She stared at the phone, watching it light up as it rang again. She didn’t need to get closer to the screen of the phone to see that there wasn’t a phone number there, only a word in capital letters: RESTRICTED.

The phone rang again.

It was him. The man from her nightmares was calling, the man who wore the mask.

She wasn’t going to answer it. No way was she going to answer it.

The phone finally stopped ringing, and she knew it was going to voicemail now. He was probably listening to her cheerful request to leave a message.

After a few minutes the phone emitted a soft beep, letting her know that she had a new voicemail.

She didn’t want to touch the phone. She didn’t even want to look at it.

The person calling her and leaving these messages wasn’t the man from her dream. She had to be rational about this. This man had begun harassing her, and she’d just applied him to her nightmares, masking him and dressing him in black—making him even scarier in her dreams. Yeah, that made sense . . .

. . . except that she’d begun dreaming about the man in black before this guy started calling her and leaving these messages.

But maybe not. Maybe her memory—which was usually very trustworthy—was a little screwed up, and she was falsely remembering him being in the dreams before he called. It could be possible.

She picked up the phone and checked the message, listening. But there was no message, just the hint of someone breathing on the phone. Then the message ended.

Cassie was relieved that the man hadn’t left a message. But she also felt unnerved, like she could feel his patient anger through his heavy breaths on the phone, an anger that was slowly building.

She nearly dropped the phone as she was setting it back down on the table because it began ringing in her hand. She set it down and stared at the screen. RESTRICTED. He was calling again. She sat on the side of her bed, staring at the phone as it rang again and again. She was almost tempted to answer it, tempted to scream into the phone, scream at him to leave her alone.

Turn the phone off—that’s what she would do. It wouldn’t stop him from leaving voice messages, but at least she wouldn’t have to listen to it ring all night. And she would unplug her home phone, too. She didn’t think he had her home phone number, but right now if anyone called she was afraid she might scream.

Her cats were still curled up at the foot of her bed, staring at her through half-closed eyes like they were waiting for her drama to end so they could go back to sleep.

Cassie thought about getting up and checking the rest of the house, checking the doors again even though she knew damn well that they were locked. Maybe she would check the windows again, too.

A ding from her phone got her attention—it wasn’t the voicemail sound; this was the sound of a text message.

She felt almost like another person, like she was watching someone else’s arm reach for her cell phone. She picked it up and opened the text message. There was no text, only a photo of the front of her house taken in the early afternoon light.

*

Cassie didn’t sleep the rest of the night. She got up and checked the doors and windows. Minky and Slinky followed her, both of them thinking she might be opening the sliding glass door that led out to the screened-in porch, but no way was she opening that door right now; she didn’t care how many tantrums the cats pulled, she didn’t care if they shredded up her sofa right now.

She made coffee, drank half a pot of it. And at exactly seven o’clock a.m. she called her boss and told him that she would be running a little late. He didn’t ask why, or show any concern, just annoyance, and then there was a click as he hung up.

The next call she made was to the police.

The officer took his time getting to her house, probably because she hadn’t dialed 911, but the police station itself. The cop was middle-aged, a little heavyset, and he moved with a cocky slowness. But his eyes were sharp. He seemed friendly, but that friendliness also seemed false, and she could sense a suspiciousness coming from him that a lot of cops seemed to develop after years on the job.

After Cassie explained the harassing phone calls, she let him listen to the two voicemails (one was only the heavy breathing). She showed him the photo of her house in the text. She sat back and waited for the cop to jump on the horn and call for backup, put out an APB on this stalker.

But he didn’t do that. Instead, he told her that there wasn’t really much he could do.

“What do you mean?” she asked him.

He told her he couldn’t trace a restricted number, and he couldn’t tap into cell phone records without a warrant. Odds were, he told her, that this guy was using a pay-by-the-month phone, sometimes called a throwaway phone or a burner phone. He might even be some kind of hacker who was bouncing the phone number all around the world.

“But he took a photo of my house and sent it to me.”

Nothing really illegal about that, he informed her. Until this man actually threatened her, or she could ID him, there wasn’t much to be done about it.

So, she would have to wait until this maniac broke into her home and tried to kill her?

The officer was apologetic and seemed antsy to get on to some “real” police work. At the front door, he said two things: he reiterated that there wasn’t anything he could do, and he told her to call 911 if anything else happened.

*

Cassie’s day got worse. Her boss was still pissed off that she was even later than she had planned. She’d made an error with a client’s numbers yesterday, and he chewed her out about that. She was groggy and preoccupied, making mistakes.

She bought two bottles of wine on the way home along with a few other groceries, walking the aisles on autopilot, avoiding going back home for as long as she could. She didn’t make any dinner when she got home . . . she opened one of the bottles of wine and began drinking. She was going to sleep tonight, damn it.

Hours later Cassie was buzzed. She had finished one bottle of wine and started on the other one. She had picked at some snacks for dinner and turned on the TV in her bedroom. And before she knew it she was asleep, and then she was . . .

. . . dreaming.

In her dream, she was trapped inside a dark building, like some kind of abandoned factory . . . something from a horror movie. There were strange multi-colored lights everywhere and steam hissing from gigantic pipes that were attached to the walls, those massive metal pipes disappearing deeper into the darkness.

The man was following her—he was dressed all in black, like a living shadow. He’d been right behind her, chasing her, shouting at her: “Cassie, I’ve been trying to call you . . .”

Cassie turned a corner, but this nightmare maze seemed to go on forever. She chanced a look behind her, but he wasn’t there. She turned back around and slid to a stop.

He was right in front of her with a large opened straight razor in his gloved hand. “I’ve been trying to call you, but you won’t answer.”

Cassie snapped awake, sitting up like a piston in the darkness . . . but not complete darkness because she’d left the bathroom light on. The bathroom door was almost closed but still allowing enough light for her to see the bedroom all around her.

Her heart was beating fast again, like she’d been running (just like she had been in her dream). Her skin had that clammy, tingly feeling of fear that she’d come to know so well these last few days.

“It’s okay,” she whispered to herself.

Her cats were at the foot of her king-sized bed, but they were both up, their ears perked. But they weren’t staring at her—they were both staring at the bathroom door. There were noises coming from her bathroom; it was like someone was moving around in there.

Now that she thought about it, she couldn’t remember leaving the bathroom light on before she went to bed. Had she left it on?

More noises came from the bathroom.

Cassie was about to reach for her cell phone on the table next to her bed, but then her cats jumped. Slinky hissed at the foot of the bed, her fur standing up, her tail puffed up like a bottlebrush. There was something below the bed on the floor that was scaring both of her cats.

And then her stalker rose up from beyond the foot of the bed . . . dressed all in black just like he’d been in the dream, that leather mask tied tightly around his head, holes for his mouth, nostrils, and eyes . . . eyes that were shining brightly and insanely in the meager light coming from the bathroom. A smile of sadistic glee formed as he seemed not to stand up but to levitate from the darkness below the bed, like the shadows had been swirling below her bed and forming into a solid thing . . . into him.

He had a straight razor opened up in his hand, the blade sharp and shining in the light from the bathroom.

“Cassieeee,” he whispered, dragging out the end her name.

And then he was flying through the air at her, that lunatic smile still spread across his face even though the corners of his wide mouth were hidden by the edges of the mouth hole of his mask.

He swiped at her with the straight razor.

Cassie was too petrified to move. She just watched the razorblade coming, everything seeming to move in slow-motion.

“Goodbye,” the man told her as he swung the blade at her throat.

Cassie jumped awake with the sound of the man’s word echoing in her ears, thrumming in her bones. With quick, panicky movements she clawed at the lamp next to the bed. The bathroom light wasn’t on like it had been in the dream (but oh God, she was going to leave that light on from now on—she couldn’t wake up in the darkness like this again).

Now that the blessed light illuminated her bedroom, she saw that no one was in the bedroom with her. The cats were at the foot of the bed just like they’d been in the dream, only now they were looking at her with wide eyes of surprise, jolted awake just now when she’d sat bolt-upright in bed.

Cassie finally got her breathing under control and looked at the alarm clock. It was only two o’clock in the morning. She wasn’t sure if she would be able to go back to sleep now, but she needed sleep so badly. She was exhausted, her muscles felt weak and she was getting some small tremors in her calf and forearm muscles. Her eyes felt like someone had rubbed sand in them; she massaged them with her knuckles.

And then she burst out crying.

Her sobs were unexpected. She hadn’t even known she was about to cry. But she was so tired, and worse, she didn’t even feel like herself anymore. It was both an odd and terribly frightening feeling. She didn’t usually cry much, and she wasn’t usually scared by much. But this person stalking her was really getting to her, nagging at her subconscious.

*

The next two nights Cassie barely got any sleep. Every time she fell asleep the man in black would be there waiting for her, waiting to terrorize her until she snapped awake again. On the third night she took a sleep aid, but the pills only knocked her out for a few hours, and during that time she was trapped inside the nightmare before she could finally jolt herself awake.

She was so tired. She felt like a zombie, like she was just drifting along through her day. Her feet felt like they were floating a few inches above the floor, her head as light as a balloon. It was difficult to concentrate, and she was beginning to see quick flashes of movement out of the corners of her eyes (Him! it’s him! He found me at work!). But when she turned to look, there was no one there.

The man called again, and this time she picked up the phone and screamed into it. “What do you want with me?”

“Sweet dreams?” the man asked in his raspy voice.

“Why won’t you leave me alone?”

“How are your kitties doing?” the man asked.

“I’ve called the police,” Cassie told the man as she paced from her bedroom to the kitchen, then to the family room, watching all of the windows as she walked, her eyes darting constantly. “I told them all about you.”

The threat didn’t seem to bother the man. “Your cats—what are their names? Slinky and Minky, I think? Right?”

She stopped walking, her heart freezing for a moment in her chest. “How do you know that?”

“Remember when you saw me in the kitchen with your cats?” the man asked, his voice just a raspy whisper now.

“What . . . how do you know . . .?”

“I know what you dream because I’m there in your dreams.”

“No . . .” she whispered. “That’s not true.” Her voice sounded so far away to her own ears . . . weak, defeated.

“You know it’s true,” the man said in a conversational tone. “You saw me in your kitchen with your dead cats on the countertop. I was making something for you. A surprise. You never gave me a chance to finish it and show it to you.”

Cassie hurried over to the sliding glass door and pushed the vertical blinds aside a little, staring out at her backyard.

“You saw me in your bedroom a few nights ago,” he said, his voice even lower. “At the foot of your bed. I had a straight razor in my hand.”

Cassie didn’t say anything; her voice was lost for a moment. She remembered the dream, the masked man at the foot of her bed, rising up from the darkness in the glow of light from her bathroom, the straight razor clutched in one gloved hand. Those eyes . . . that cruel smile . . .

“I’ve been in your dreams, and I’ll keep coming back. I’ll keep bringing sharp things with me.”

“Why?” Cassie asked, the word cracking in her throat. She almost broke into a sob. “Why are you doing this?”

He hung up.

She looked at the phone like she couldn’t believe he’d hung up on her. She was about to redial, her thumb moving to the buttons, but then she remembered that his number was restricted. She couldn’t dial him back.

What did he want?

*

Cassie drifted through Monday at work. Her workload was a lot lighter now because her boss had rescheduled many of her clients after she refused to take some time off even though he had practically begged her to do so. What was she going to do? Go home and sleep? At least here at work she could keep her mind off of the man terrorizing her dreams for a little while.

At lunch Cassie took the elevator down to the ground floor. She’d brought her own lunch, and she wanted to eat outside, sit in the sunshine at the side of the building. She chose a spot on the wide, knee-high curb of a gigantic planter of trees and shrubs, her drink and sandwich next to her. But she didn’t feel like eating. She didn’t feel like doing anything except sitting here in the sun for a while.

She wondered if her stalker might be out here. Was he watching her right now? Would he try to approach her? Not here. Too many people around. And if he really wanted to get to her, he knew where she lived. He knew the inside of her home. He knew the names of her cats. He knew her dreams.

Changing her thoughts, she wondered how long her boss was going to put up with this. How long before she was forced to take some time off? How long before she was finally let go? This was a competitive business, and every year there was a group of brand new college graduate hotshots vying for a job in this crowded market.

“What’s wrong?”

Cassie nearly jumped out of her skin. She hadn’t even heard Zoe walk up to her on her aqua-colored spiked heels that she was wearing today. She sat down on the plant ledge next to her with a jangling of jewelry and strings of brightly-colored beads. But her heavily made up eyes were full of concern.

“I . . . I just wanted to eat out here,” Cassie answered. She tried to force a smile. “It’s such a nice day . . .”

“What’s wrong?” Zoe asked again, her face set, but that compassion was still in her dark eyes.

Cassie felt like crying, and she looked away from Zoe, not able to hold her stare any longer. She tried to hold the tears back, but she couldn’t. She pressed the edge of her fingers under her nose like that might stop the tears, but then she started crying.

Zoe hugged her, pulling her closer to her. She didn’t coo or offer words of sympathy, she just held her until she was done crying.

“I’m sorry,” Cassie said, taking a tissue out of her purse and carefully drying her eyes.

Zoe pulled away and stared at her. “Tell me.”

So Cassie did. By God, she told Zoe everything even as crazy as it all sounded: the dreams, the phone calls, the text with the photo of her house, the sleepless nights, the paranoia, the thought that she was losing her mind. It took nearly fifteen minutes of spilling her guts . . . and now it was all out in the open.

“You’re being psychically attacked,” Zoe told her matter-of-factly.

Maybe a week ago, definitely a month ago, Cassie would’ve laughed at her friend, or perhaps even been offended that Zoe expected her to believe some of her voodoo/hoodoo crap. Bur right now, at this moment, she was open to any insights Zoe might have.

Zoe continued her thoughts with no prompting from Cassie. “This man, he’s locked on to you somehow, and he’s been able to invade your dreams, and to some degree control your dreams.”

Yes, as crazy as it sounded, that seemed to be right. “But . . . what am I supposed to do? I don’t know who this guy is . . . I can’t even see his face in the dreams. He uses a restricted number, which is most likely on a throwaway phone or a number that’s been bounced around the world several times. My neighborhood policeman pointed all of that out to me.” She stopped talking, inhaled, and let out a long breath. “I just don’t know what to do,” she repeated in a softer voice.

“Have you ever heard of lucid dreaming?”

“Yeah,” Cassie answered automatically, but then she wasn’t quite sure if she really knew what it was or not.

Zoe waited for her explanation.

“Yeah, I’ve heard of it,” Cassie said. “But I can’t really explain it.”

Zoe helped out. “Lucid dreaming is when you’re able to control your dreams.”

Cassie nodded. That would sure be useful to her right now.

“I can lucid dream,” Zoe said. “I’ve been able to do it for years. I can fly in my dreams if I want to. Go where I want, see what I want, do what I want.”

Cassie was instantly jealous. In her dreams, like most people’s dreams she guessed, she was a helpless hostage carried along by her subconscious whims and a stew of images it served up.

“My dreams are like watching a movie every night,” Zoe continued quickly, getting excited now. “A movie I get to choose and control. It could be an action movie one night, or a suspense movie the next night. A romance . . . even erotic dreams.” Zoe smiled, and the faintest blush reddened her cheeks. But then she was all business again. “I learned how to do it from this guy named Saul. He’s the best.”

“But could I . . .?

“Anyone can learn,” Zoe said, grabbing Cassie’s wrist with both of her hands for the briefest moment in a fit of excitement. She was like a child recounting her vacation at Disney World. “It takes some time and effort and practice, but anyone can do it.”

And then Zoe froze for a moment as a monumental idea astounded her. Her eyes widened in shock, her jaw literally dropping, the wad of gum she’d been chewing nestled against her molars. “Oh my God . . . let me hook you up with Saul. He could totally help you.”

Cassie started to automatically decline, but then she stopped herself, willing to listen to Zoe’s proposition.

“He’s a little expensive,” Zoe warned.

Any amount of money right now seemed reasonable to Cassie for one night of peaceful sleep.

“He’s so nice,” Zoe continued.

“Let me think about it,” Cassie finally answered.

Zoe seemed a little disappointed, almost like it was a personal rejection, but it wasn’t enough to make her give up. “Let me talk to him, get you an appointment. It might take a few days to get you in, but I’ll let him know that you’re having an emergency.”

“He’s that busy?” Cassie asked, trying to imagine the line of people waiting to learn how to fly in their dreams . . . and do other things.

“He does more than just deal with dreams.”

“Is this guy a psychiatrist?” Cassie asked, not even trying to hide the suspicion in her voice.

Zoe sighed. “He has a medical degree, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I’m asking if he’s a shrink.”

Zoe still seemed to be dodging the question. “He specializes in natural cures, a holistic path. He’s a spiritual guide.”

“A spiritual guide?”

“Just meet him for one session,” Zoe begged. “Just a meet-and-greet. No obligation.”

Cassie nodded, and Zoe exploded with glee, hugging her.

*

When Cassie got home, she made a strong pot of coffee. Then she looked up as much as she could find on the internet about lucid dreaming. She sipped the coffee—she had abandoned the strategy of forcing herself to sleep with alcohol and sleep aids (not together of course) and decided on forcing herself to stay awake as long as possible until she hopefully collapsed into unconsciousness from pure exhaustion. She unplugged the landline to her house phone and turned her cell phone off, and then she went back to work on her computer. She felt a little better, like she was actually doing something now about this man who claimed to visit her dreams.

There were many different variations on what Zoe had called lucid dreaming, but it all came down to the ability of being aware of one’s own dreams and to eventually control them. She also looked up any information about psychic attacks, and what she’d found was pretty scary stuff. She went back to the lucid dreaming websites and jotted down some notes. A few of the websites recommended grounding herself in reality throughout the day to remind herself that she wasn’t dreaming (and the thought of not being able to tell whether she was dreaming or awake throughout the day sounded terrifying). There were many variations of grounding oneself, usually using objects, but the simplest way was to use one’s own hands. One simple grounding test was to touch the fingers of her right hand to her left palm. If her fingers couldn’t go through the flesh of her left palm, then she was awake. But if they could travel through her flesh, then she was asleep, but also aware that she was asleep.

Cassie sat in her office chair in front of her desktop and looked down at her hands. She touched the fingers of her right hand to her palm, irrationally afraid for a moment that her fingers were going to easily slip through her flesh . . . but her fingertips touched solid flesh.

A sip of coffee.

She also had her bedtime strategy, which made up a consensus of what many of the websites recommended. She needed to make her bedroom and her bed into some kind of sanctuary of sleep—no TV, radio, computer, cell phone, excess light, no stimuli of any kind for an hour before going to sleep; and better yet, meditation before going to sleep.

Yeah, she was going to meditate after six cups of coffee.

Besides turning her bedroom into a sleep sanctuary, she was to reinforce the grounding exercise many times throughout the day, and she’d touched her fingers to her palm quite a few times as she looked up more information tonight. The idea of the exercise was not only to reinforce the idea that she was awake while doing the exercise, but also to plant the action in her subconscious so that it would show up in her dreams. She was so sleep-deprived right now that she was willing to try anything.

Two hours later, after a hot bath and a light dinner, she meditated for half an hour before lying down in bed. No TV, no phone, no computer, no music, no distractions, just like the websites had instructed. Nothing but relaxation as she lay there, and two more rounds of touching her fingers to her palm.

She left the bathroom light on (acting on the promise that she had made to herself), but kept the door nearly closed to keep the bedroom somewhat dark. The cats were curled up in their usual spots at the foot of the bed.

It didn’t take Cassie long to drift off to sleep, feeling more relaxed and somewhat more positive than she had in the last week.

And then the dreams began . . .

In the dream, she was back in that endless ironworks factory—something Freddy Kruger might’ve called home—and this environment wasn’t something that felt wholly created from her own mind, but more like something implanted there by someone else. But at the same time the factory felt different, like there might be something different about this dream.

She heard the footsteps echoing from the darkness.

He was coming—the man in black, the tormentor of her mind, the stalker in the leather mask.

Cassie looked down at her hands, amazed that she was able to do so in her dream, amazed that she had this kind of control already. Maybe she too would be able to fly in her dreams soon like Zoe did, or maybe even have an erotic dream that she controlled. She poked the fingers of her right hand into the palm of her left hand and . . .

. . . her fingers went through the flesh of her hand easily.

It worked. She was in the middle of her dream, and she’d been able to control what she was doing.

But when she tried to pull her fingers out of her left hand, they were stuck. Somehow the flesh of her left hand had closed around her fingers, trapping them in her hand. She pulled and pulled, but she was stuck. Her flesh was fused together.

And he was coming. He was running towards her now from the darkness, his heavy boots thudding on the floor and echoing off the halls of abandoned machinery and rusty pipes that dripped some kind of dark poisonous liquid.

Cassie ran away from the sound of the footsteps, her linked hands swinging uselessly back and forth in front of her like she was running with handcuffs on. She turned a corner in this crazy maze of pipes and wires, and she saw the man. He stood twenty feet away in a haze of fog, dressed from head to toe in black.

Cassie turned around and ran back the other way.

But he was in her path again. He didn’t have the straight razor in his hand this time . . . no, this time he had a chainsaw, the motor running, puffs of smoke pouring out of it, the chain whirling. “You need some help getting your hands apart?” he asked, laughing.

And then he rushed forward, swinging the saw down on her right wrist, cutting it apart, blood spurting, bones snapping.

Cassie bolted awake, her breath caught in her throat, her heart slamming in her chest, eyes wide. She’d never had a panic attack before, but she imagined that this is what one felt like.

She started crying again. She cried so much now. A helpless feeling blanketed her, threatening to crush her soul. Everything seemed so hopeless. If she didn’t get some rest she was sure she would die soon, or go crazy. Her health was declining. She had dark circles under her eyes. She wasn’t eating. She felt tired, but jumpy. Things skittered at the edges of her vision. And these suffocating waves of anxiety and depression washed over her again and again. She was ready to give up now, ready to let this man kill her in her dreams. She’d read before that if you died in your dreams, then you died in real life.

Well, she was ready.

“What am I saying?” she cried into her hands. She pushed her fingers into her palm to make sure she was awake, hoping to God that her fingers wouldn’t sink through her flesh easily.

“Oh God, I’m going crazy. I’m losing it.”

She had to get up. She needed to walk around for a minute even though her legs felt weak and shaky.

A few hours later, after the sun had come up, Cassie called Zoe. She knew she had woken her friend up early on a Saturday morning, but Zoe was instantly awake, instantly concerned.

“What’s wrong?” Zoe asked. “Another nightmare?”

“The worst one so far,” Cassie answered, trying her best not to cry. “I’m ready to see that friend of yours.”

*

Zoe managed to get Cassie an appointment with Saul on Monday afternoon.

Cassie took off from work a little early (which her boss was all in favor of after she told him that she had a doctor’s appointment—she saw a hope in his eyes that the doctor she was seeing would get rid of whatever affliction was ailing her and bring back his old employee).

She drove out of town, barely remembering most of the drive. She knew it was dangerous to drive in her sleep-deprived condition, but she felt a little better today, somewhat optimistic that this friend of Zoe’s—Saul—could possibly help her; he seemed like her last hope. She’d managed to get some sleep on Sunday. The nightmare man didn’t visit her in every dream. She figured that if the nightmare man really was a person psychically invading her dreams as Zoe believed and not a figment of her own imagination, then this man couldn’t be sleeping all the time and waiting for the chance to invade her dreams; there had to be times when their sleep schedules didn’t link up, and that’s why Cassie had been trying to sleep at different times throughout the day, catching catnaps when she could.

Twenty minutes later Cassie was far outside the city, suburbs giving way to larger homesteads, some with cattle grazing in the fields. And then she came to a mailbox (a sturdy wooden one that looked like a homemade craft project) with the numbers of the address on it that Zoe had given her. Beyond the mailbox was a dirt drive that led into a patch of woods.

This was someone’s house? Zoe hadn’t told her she was going to someone’s house. She thought she was going to see a doctor in an office, a professional. Now she began to wonder if this Saul guy was really a doctor. Knowing Zoe, this guy was more likely some New Age hippie.

Maybe she had the wrong address—she couldn’t completely rely on her foggy brain these days. She checked the address in the text message that Zoe had sent her as a reminder. Same number, same road.

Maybe Zoe had written the address down wrong.

Maybe she should call Zoe.

It was almost two o’clock. Almost time for her appointment.

Cassie set the phone down, deciding to drive down the dirt trail and at least see the place. Her phone was right beside her on the passenger seat in case she needed to call Zoe.

After rounding a bend, the dirt trail opened up to a parking area in front of a one-story home that looked like it had been some kind of cottage at one time, but the cottage had expanded over the years with addition after addition, yet everything seemed to flow somehow, almost like the home was an extension of the nature all around it. The home was built of wood planking. Slate tiles were layered on the roof. Everything was painted and finished in earthy tones and textures.

Cassie parked with the front of her car pointing towards the porch that ran most of the length of the front of the home, then wrapped around to the L-shape part of the house that jutted out on the left. No dogs barked or ran up to her car . . . that was a good thing. She watched the simple wooden door underneath the porch roof. She expected to maybe see some kind of sign advertising Saul’s services. Instead she saw potted plants everywhere and wooden outdoor furniture. Wind chimes and bird feeders hung from the edge of the front porch and from tree branches in the yard. In the corner of the L-shaped porch was what looked like some kind of rock structure, probably a water fountain of some kind.

She was about to call Zoe when the front door opened, and an older man dressed in faded blue jeans and an untucked white button-down shirt stepped outside. He had holes in the knees of his jeans and long gray hair tied back into a ponytail. His skin was bronzed from the sun, and he had no shoes on his feet. At least six or seven necklaces hung around his neck, and he had even more thin bracelets and bands on his wrists.

An ex-hippie, just like Cassie had suspected. And knowing Zoe, she realized that she must be at the right place.

The man smiled at her, walking to the edge of the porch by the steps, giving her a friendly wave.

Cassie turned her car off and opened the door. She got out, but remained by her open car door for a moment. She smiled at the man. “Are you Saul?”

“I am. And you must be Cassie.”

Cassie nodded. She grabbed her purse and shut her car door. She walked up to the porch and extended a hand in greeting to the older man. She was shocked when he grabbed her, hugging her. It wasn’t an offensive hug, but a genuine and caring gesture, one Cassie hadn’t felt in such a long time.

The hug was brief, and then Saul pulled away. He looked older up close, but his age seemed deceiving. He could’ve been anywhere from his early fifties to his late sixties. He was thin, but healthy-looking with lean, ropy muscles underneath his tanned skin.

“Come on inside,” he said with a warm smile.

Cassie followed Saul inside his house where there were more plants, more water fountains, more hanging things: dreamcatchers, chimes, other artwork. A Buddha statue dominated one corner. Christian crosses decorated the walls along with a primitive wooden carving that looked like it might be from South America. One far wall was a massive network of bookcases crammed with books, but not scholarly, show-off books—these shelves held a mishmash of multi-colored spines, hardbacks mixed with paperbacks, some of the books lying on the tops of the stacked ones; these were books that someone actually read, studied, and enjoyed. Pieces of low, comfortable, and overstuffed furniture were situated around the large room. Brightly-colored area rugs covered parts of the bamboo flooring. The place was a mixture of contradictions, both cluttered and comfortable, somehow spacious but cozy at the same time.

They walked past the kitchen on the way to an archway off of a dining room that led to another room in the back. The kitchen’s surfaces were mostly wood, stone, and stainless steel. The counters were cluttered with jars of what looked like herbs. Copper and metal pots and pans hung from hooks near a behemoth of a stove and brick oven.

“We’ll talk back here,” Saul said, leading her to the archway.

Cassie figured this back room was Saul’s office, but it was more than that. The first thing she noticed as she entered the vast room were the large panels of plate-glass windows that looked out onto the pool and deck area with tropical vegetation and shrubs surrounding it. There was a Japanese garden feel to the area without it actually being one. Inside the office were more Far East influences: bonsai plants, another stacked stone fountain (this one turned on, the water gently splashing down the flat stones), Hindu tapestries, a shoji screen in one corner. It was so peaceful here, and Cassie couldn’t help feeling a lot more at ease after only a few minutes.

“Please sit.” Saul gestured at two recliners that were positioned catty-corner from each other with a large wooden table between them that had intricate scrollwork around the edges. Atop the table was a Japanese paper lamp that towered at least two feet up from the table, a set of heavy wooden coasters, and a box of tissues.

Saul waited for her to select a chair, neither of the pieces of furniture seeming to be his “doctor’s” chair. Everything so far seemed so informal, like she was meeting with a new friend.

Cassie sat down and looked at her shoes. “Oh. Do you want me to take my shoes off? I didn’t even think about it . . .”

Saul smiled, his face crinkling up with laugh lines. “Only if you want to.”

A beautiful young woman came in carrying a tray with a small teapot and two cups balanced on it. His daughter? No, his wife or girlfriend. She set the teapot and cups down on the table between their chairs, pouring tea into the two cups. She smiled at Cassie. “I thought you might like some tea.”

“Thank you.”

The woman had a pleasing, clean scent—like fresh laundry hung out on a sunny afternoon. Both the woman and Saul looked so healthy, so radiant, practically glowing with vitality. They seemed . . . happy. Of course they probably both got more than two or three hours of sleep a night.

After the woman left the room, Cassie sipped the tea. It didn’t seem to have sugar in it, but she tasted a vague sweetness. It was soothing, and it felt good on her throat.

“I guess Zoe told you why I needed to see you,” Cassie said as she set her tea cup down.

“She told me it was an emergency. I cleared the rest of my schedule for the day so I don’t want you to feel rushed in any way.”

Cassie felt flattered.

“Please,” Saul said, his smile disappearing, only concern in his eyes now. “Tell me everything.”

So Cassie did. Much like with Zoe a few days ago, Cassie poured her guts out. And she cried, thankful that the tissues were handy.

Saul listened patiently, hardly interrupting, only a quick question here and there. His eyes were light blue, and they seemed so bright in his dark face; they were expressive eyes, compassionate eyes.

“Zoe thinks this man, the one in my dreams, is psychically attacking me.”

“She’s correct,” Saul said without hesitation.

“But isn’t it possible that this guy started harassing me, calling me, and then my nightmares started? Isn’t it possible that I’ve been implanting this stalker into my own dreams?”

Saul stared at her for a moment, reptile-still, his hands together in front of him, his forefingers together in a “psychiatrist’s steeple.” And then he spoke: “Do you feel that’s true?”

The question seemed simple enough, but it hit her like an ice-block. She’d never really asked herself what she felt was true; she just tried to rationalize things, trying to come up with answers that she wanted to be true. Somehow the idea of being mentally disturbed in some way seemed preferable to her than the idea that this man was actually able to enter her dreams and control them.

Saul didn’t wait for Cassie to answer his question, like he didn’t need to hear her rationalizations. “This man has some . . . abilities that you may not understand, that you may not even believe in, that you may not want to accept. But he has locked on to you somehow, and now he is harassing you in your dreams . . . as well as in your waking life, with the phone calls and the photos of your house.” He paused for a moment, his eyes still intense. “It’s only going to get worse.”

Cassie nodded. She felt like crying again. She always felt like crying these days. “So what do I do?”

He sat up straighter, hunched forward, his elbows on his knees, his eyes fierce with intensity—he almost looked angry. “You fight back.”

“How?”

He leaned back in his chair, that warm smile back on his face. “I’m going to show you how.”

“Okay.” Cassie wiped her eyes, sniffled. She took another sip of the tea.

“You’ve heard of lucid dreaming,” Saul said like he already knew the answer.

“Yes. I told you about my experiences with that.”

“At least you’ve taken the first steps. We’re going to take it a lot further than that. I’m going to teach you to control your dreams more than this man does. You will be the master of your own universe and of your own dreams.”

“Okay.”

“Say it,” he snapped.

She was a little shocked by his outburst, but she repeated the phrase: “I will be the master of my dreams.”

“No. You are the master of your dreams. Say it.”

“I am the master of my dreams.”

“And you are the master of your own universe. Say it.”

“I am the master of my universe.”

“You will conquer your fears. Say it.”

“I will conquer my fears.”

He sat back, relaxing and smiling. “Good. I want you to say those things to yourself over and over throughout the day. Those phrases will be your grounding. I want you to meditate several times a day. Do you know how to meditate?”

“I . . . uh . . .”

“I’ll show you. I also want you to take a week off of work. I can write a doctor’s note if you need me to. Can you afford to take a week off?”

“Yes,” Cassie answered, suddenly looking forward to week off of work. She had plenty of money saved, more than enough. And her boss probably wanted her out of the office until she could focus on her work again.

“Good. I want to see you every day this week, around this time of day. I need to see you for at least two hours a day. Can you commit to that?”

“Okay.”

“Good. We’ll work on meditating today. As I take you through the meditation, you’ll be in a half-awake and half-asleep state. You’ll have one foot in the waking world and one foot in the dream world.”

“What? Like hypnosis?”

“Sort of. But don’t think of it as hypnosis. Think of it as a state of being.”

“Okay,” Cassie answered. She didn’t know why, but the idea of hypnosis had always frightened her a little.

“As we meditate, you are going to enter your dream world while still being grounded in the waking world. You will learn to do this over and over until you can remain conscious in your dreams. But first you’ll need an object to ground you in your dreams.”

Saul got up and walked over to a large, old-fashioned desk with a roll top. He searched through the drawers. “I want you to wear something while you sleep,” he said over his shoulder.

He found what he’d been looking for and came back.

Cassie had been expecting him to bring back a necklace with some kind of charm on it, or something along those lines—she hadn’t been expecting what he held in his hand.

“This goes around your wrist,” he said, holding out a black leather contraption with buckles and a steel ball with sharp studs on it. There was also a little brass padlock dangling from the larger buckle. It looked like some kind of S&M gear.

But Cassie took it from him and held it.

“Buckle that strap around your left wrist,” he instructed as he sat back down. “You are right-handed?” he asked, but again it seemed more like an affirmation.

“Uh . . . yeah,” she answered, feeling a little strange suddenly.

He smiled, sensing her confusion. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “It’s fake leather.”

She nodded and buckled the strap around her wrist. The smaller strap went around her hand and it had the metal ball covered with sharp points attached to it.

“You will wear this when you sleep,” he explained. “You’ll have the metal ball in the palm of your hand, and you’ll squeeze the ball when you want to come awake and out of your dream. You will have the ball with you in the dream and with you in the waking world. When you squeeze the ball in the dream, you’ll squeeze it in the waking world.”

Cassie gave the metal ball a squeeze. The little spikes hurt, but not enough to break her skin.

“I’ve got something else for you,” Saul said, jumping up and hurrying back to the desk again.

Oh God, what now?

He came back with a sturdy notebook and a fancy ink pen clipped to it. “Use this to write down what you see in your dreams. Everything you can remember.”

“But you said I would be controlling my dreams.”

“To a point. And not entirely at first. You will have to learn to control your dreams. It’s going to take a little time. And this man will still have control of your dreams at first. At least until you become more powerful.”

Cassie must’ve given him a doubtful look because he continued on quickly. “You can do this. You do have some abilities just like the man in your dreams does. If you didn’t have those abilities, then he wouldn’t have been able to seek you out in the first place. Many people have these abilities and never even know it. But you know it now, and I can teach you to be stronger.” He handed her the notebook and pen. “And don’t forget to write everything down. You never know what could be a clue.”

*

Cassie stayed at Saul’s for another two hours. They meditated most of that time, and he showed her how to put one foot in the dream world while keeping one foot in the waking world.

She left with the notebook and the leather (fake leather) cuff and metal ball that looked like some kind of medieval torture device. She felt a little glimmer of hope for the first time in ten days. Saul’s enthusiasm was infectious. She began to believe that this could possibly work.

Of course those were daytime hopes and thoughts.

As night came, her thoughts turned darker, and the fear came back. She ate dinner, picked at it really. She tried to watch TV, but she couldn’t concentrate. She repeated her mantra throughout the night. Before bed, she tried to meditate again, but it wasn’t working out so well without Saul beside her, guiding her. She could already feel the little bit of confidence that she’d built up earlier slipping away. And she could feel both of her cats watching her as she sat cross-legged on the floor, trying to meditate.

At least she hadn’t gotten any calls from her masked nightmare man. But she kept her cell phone off most of the time now and her home phone unplugged all the time.

Much like some of the websites she’d read, Saul recommended that she turn her bedroom into a “sanctuary of sleep.” She lit a few candles and played some relaxing music. She read a little from a paperback book (no TV or computer before going to bed). She set her alarm to get up early even though she didn’t really need to get up. She’d already called her boss on the way home and let him know that she needed the rest of this week off—and he seemed more than eager to oblige. Zoe had volunteered to take some of her workload—she was truly a great friend.

Cassie lay down in her bed after fluffing her pillows. She’d blown out the candles and turned the music off. She left the bathroom light on, the door ajar. One cat, Slinky, was curled up at the foot of the bed, and Minky was wandering around the house somewhere, but she would be in soon.

She laid the notebook and pen down beside the lamp on the table next to her bed. She also had her cell phone close by even though it was turned off; she still wanted the phone near in case this stalker grew bold enough to actually break in. She had her leather cuff buckled to her wrist and the padlock locked. Saul had told her that the lock was important, and the lock would also be there in the dream. Even though the stalker could control many aspects of her dream, he wouldn’t be able to remove the leather band from her wrist because it was locked here in the waking world. She didn’t need to understand exactly how it worked, he’d told her. She only needed to believe.

She got comfortable under the bedsheets, the metal ball resting in her palm. She squeezed it gently just for reassurance. She lay on her back, closing her eyes, concentrating on her breathing as Saul had instructed her . . .

. . . and she was in a dream. She was in that abandoned factory that she’d found herself in so many times recently. Rusty pipes lined the walls, running off into the darkness. Steam drifted by. Multi-colored lights shined from some unseen source. Something dripped in the shadows.

“You’ve been trying to ignore me,” the man’s voice boomed.

She couldn’t see him anywhere, but she knew he was coming.

Her heart skipped a beat and she started to panic. She needed to run before she saw him, before he came after her, before he caught her.

But then she stopped herself. She looked down at her left hand. She was wearing the leather cuffs on her wrist and hand, the metal ball dangling from her palm. She squeezed the metal ball hard and . . .

. . . she woke up.

She sat up and looked down at the spiked metal ball in her hand. Her palm hurt just a little from squeezing so hard, and she relaxed her fingers, the pain subsiding.

It worked. It actually worked.

Both of her cats were watching her, their eyes already closing again to slits as they drifted off to sleep again—both of them apparently used to her sudden and explosive awakenings by now.

What time was it?

She looked at her alarm clock on the crowded table next to her bed. Three o’clock in the morning. God, she must’ve slept for a few hours before she slipped into that nightmare.

The man’s voice still seemed to linger in her mind. He’d been angry in the dream, his voice booming. He would come after her again . . . he would find her in the next dream. But at least now she had a chance.

Cassie lay back down, concentrating on where she wanted to go in her dream. Not his world, not his creation. She wanted to go to her own creation.

“I am the master of my life,” she whispered as she closed her eyes.

“I am the master of my dreams.”

“I will conquer my fear.”

In her dream, Cassie stood on a crowded city street that she didn’t recognize from her “waking life,” but it was a place she’d seen in her dreams before. People were walking around, moving past her. Some seemed purposeful in their walk, a destination to be reached. But others seemed to be wandering around aimlessly. A lot of the people talked to each other; some of them huddled together in small groups; nothing conspiratorial, just normal conversations.

Cassie looked around at the people as she moved past them, but she didn’t see the masked man anywhere. He couldn’t be far, though.

She started walking faster through the crowd of people, brushing by the ones who didn’t seem to want to move out of her way. She was going somewhere in the dream, yet not really sure where she was heading to. But her dream knew where she was going, her subconscious propelling her forward.

Was she running from her masked stalker?

Maybe, but she wasn’t sure.

The crowd began to thin out, almost like the people were parting for her, backing away from something. And then she saw what it was. A little girl stood on the sidewalk—the same girl she’d seen in a dream before, the one when she’d been driving in the car and they’d gotten lost. The girl had been in the back seat. She wore the same white dress, and she had the same long blond hair. Only now she was holding a pink piggy bank, the big ceramic kind of a cartoonish pig. There was blood dripping out of the bottom of the piggy bank where the rubber stopper to empty the coins was. And the slot on the piggy’s back was smeared with blood, like a piece of flesh had been somehow squeezed down into that narrow slot.

The girl held out the piggy bank, her expression blank. “He wants to show you something. He wants to show you what’s inside.”

“Inside the piggy bank?” Cassie asked.

“Inside everything. He wants to see what’s inside of you.”

Cassie tore her eyes away from the girl and looked at the crowd that surrounded her. She hadn’t noticed before, but all of them had stopped walking and talking, they just stared at her, all of them sharing the same blank expression that the girl had, their mouths hanging open like a zombie’s slack jaw.

The crowd began to move towards her as one, closing in slowly. Cassie had nowhere to run.

“I can control them!” the nightmare man’s voice boomed from somewhere beyond the crowd. “I can control everything here!”

She couldn’t see the masked man anywhere, but she knew he was working his way through the crowd of people like he was moving through a cornfield, getting closer and closer to her.

The little girl dropped the piggybank down onto the concrete. Cassie forced herself not to turn around and look; she didn’t want to see what had been stuffed inside of it, the bloody pieces of flesh amid the shards of shattered pink ceramic.

She looked down at her left wrist; the leather cuff and metal ball were still there. She squeezed the spiked metal ball as hard as she could . . .

. . . and she was awake.

She didn’t sit bolt-upright this time. She just laid there for a moment with her eyes open, relaxing her grip on the metal ball, her heart jackhammering in her chest, and that strange creepy-crawly feeling dancing along her skin.

Then she smiled. She had escaped from the dream again. The masked man had controlled the dream, but she’d been able to get away before he could get to her. And now Cassie began to believe that these lucid dreaming techniques that Saul was teaching her might really work.

*

Cassie met with Saul for the rest of the week. Because she had taken the week off of work, she’d gotten a lot of chores done around the house. She went to the gym every morning and worked out, nothing too strenuous. She also tried to take a walk in the park in the afternoon. But most of all she relaxed. She meditated, getting better at it. As she meditated, she repeated her mantras. “I am the master of my own dreams.”

During her sessions with Saul, she showed him the things she’d written down in her notebook after waking up from her dreams.

“Does any of this mean anything to you?” Saul asked about the writings in her notebook at the end of their Friday session.

“No. Not really.”

“Well, keep writing. There will be clues in your dreams, clues to help you fight this stalker.”

Cassie knew she had to be patient, but she was frustrated that the masked man was still haunting her dreams. He was still sending threatening text messages to her cell phone, and he’d sent two more photos of the front of her house. There wasn’t much she could do besides keep her doors and windows locked. Calling the cops would be useless. Until her stalker actually did something, there wasn’t much they could do. The only other thing she could do was learn how to control her dreams.

“It takes time,” Saul told her.

She nodded. “I know.”

He smiled at her. “What if I told you that you can already control your dreams?”

“I’d say that you’re mistaken.”

“You just don’t realize how much control you have yet. You still need to keep meditating. You need to get to that plane between the waking world and the dream world, with one foot here and one foot there. The more you do that, the more you will train your subconscious to control your dreams.”

“I know,” she said, and she really did believe him—she’d already seen it beginning to work.

“Try to straddle both worlds as you meditate this weekend. Try it several times a day. And as you meditate, I want you to think of a place you want to go to in your dreams, a place you know well, a place where you feel safe and comfortable. It can be a made-up place or a real place, but it must be your place, a place you can control. Try to go to this place over and over as you meditate. Get your subconscious used to going there.”

Cassie did as Saul instructed, practicing the exercise as she meditated. She chose a beach she’d gone to on vacation years ago. She didn’t remember the beach perfectly, but she just kind of invented a lot of the details as she pictured it.

And that night she dreamed of that beach, and she dreamed of it again on Sunday night.

On Saturday night there had been dead things washing up onto the beach. She turned around in her lawn chair and saw the masked man up on the sand dunes, floating just above them, watching her. She had squeezed the metal ball to wake herself up.

On Sunday night he wasn’t at the beach, and it felt like she spent hours on that beach alone, under the warm sun with the smell of salt in the air. The waves crashed to shore in a rhythmic beat. This time she had constructed a tall brick wall around her in every direction, the back of the wall running along the dunes, the sides of her enclosure running down to the ocean and disappearing under the water.

“He can’t get inside of this wall,” she told herself in the dream. “I’m safe now.”

She woke up on Monday morning feeling refreshed for the first time in weeks. She couldn’t believe how happy she was, and she couldn’t believe how much a good night’s sleep could restore her mind, body, and spirit. She was ravenous, and she cooked eggs and potatoes. It was still early, and she got ready for work, excited to be going back. She felt hopeful for the first time in a long time.

*

Everyone at work noticed that Cassie was back and feeling better, even her boss.

“So Saul’s helping?” Zoe asked when Cassie had a break.

She couldn’t help smiling. “I never thought it would work. I mean, I can’t fly yet. At least I don’t think so. I haven’t even tried.”

“I’m so happy for you.”

“Thank you so much, Zoe. If you hadn’t helped me, if you hadn’t introduced me to Saul . . .” Cassie let her words trail off. She was going to say that she would’ve gone crazy. But she had promised herself no more negative thoughts—Saul had made her promise that. And she was never to make negative thoughts verbal, never to speak them into existence and make them powerful.

“No,” Zoe said. “You helped yourself. Saul just showed you the way.”

*

Over the next few days the masked man still visited her dreams, popping up less often, but still showing up unexpectedly and bringing his horrors with him. She’d had to squeeze her “wakeup ball” several times to escape those dreams.

She’d invented more places to go in her dreams. Sometimes she could get away by herself, but sometimes he would find her.

On Friday afternoon, she went to see Saul for their session. They began with meditation for twenty minutes, and then they drank some tea and talked.

“I think you’re ready now,” he told her.

“Ready for what?”

“Ready to go after this stalker.”

Cassie’s heart felt like it was frozen for a moment, her whole body motionless. “I . . . I don’t think . . .”

“He hasn’t come after you in your waking life,” Saul said.

“The photos of my house on my phone,” she protested.

“Just empty threats. That’s all.”

“You don’t know that.” Her words didn’t have much conviction behind them.

“He’s just a bully. Psychic stalkers usually are. He just wants to torment your mind, but he doesn’t have the guts to do it in real life. I bet if you go after him, if you stalk him, he’ll run.”

Cassie didn’t think so.

“May I see your notebook?” Saul asked, his hand already out like he knew she wouldn’t refuse his request.

She handed the notebook to him.

He flipped through some pages, his reading glasses slipped down low on his nose. He stopped after a few moments of skimming her words and looked at her. “There’s a place in a lot of your earlier dreams—some kind of abandoned factory or something. Metal pipes on the walls, electrical wires, something dripping.”

“I don’t want to go back there.”

“It’s obviously a place where he feels comfortable, a place where he feels powerful. You have to go there and find him, chase him.”

Cassie didn’t say anything.

“I know you’re scared of this man. That’s what he wants. But he’s just a bully. I promise you that. You show him that you’re not afraid, and he’ll run.” Saul paused, staring at her for a moment. “You want him to stop, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

He nodded, a smile spreading on his lips. “Then stop him.”

*

It took two more nights of meditating, of practicing to keep one foot in the waking world and one foot in the dream world, before she decided to try to go after him. She told herself that she needed more practice meditating, but what she really needed to do was to work up her nerve. It was scary talking about her masked stalker in Saul’s home, but it was absolutely terrifying when she was by herself, getting ready for bed in her “sleep sanctuary,” knowing that soon she wouldn’t have one foot in the waking world anymore, soon she would be fully immersed in the dream world . . . in his world.

It took these last two days to not only work up the courage to go after this man, but also to become angry. She knew now that she needed to get to the point that she was angry and tired of him terrorizing her.

“I am the master of my world,” she told herself, trying to relax as she meditated. “I am the master of my body. I am the master of my dreams. I will conquer my fear.”

She let that wave of anger wash over her. She was mad that this man had invaded her dreams, her thoughts, her privacy. He had roamed around in her dreams, finding her phone number, learning the layout of her house, learning so much about her life, using it against her. She was so angry now that she felt like throwing stuff around, punching the walls, screaming. But she didn’t do any of those things because she was even angrier at herself for being afraid.

“I’m so tired of being afraid,” she whispered to herself. And then she answered herself: “Then do something about it.”

This man, this stalker, this bully—he had watched her, prowled the shadows of her dreams. Well, she would do the same thing to him. She would stalk him now.

An hour later Cassie lay in bed, the cats curled up in their usual spots, bathroom door ajar, light on, air conditioner turned down low. She had her bottle of water and notebook beside her alarm clock on the table next to her bed. She had her “wakeup ball” in the palm of her hand, her fingers relaxed.

She was ready.

She closed her eyes and . . .

. . . she was in the abandoned factory that the masked man liked to frequent. The massive, corroded pipes ran down both sides of the wide hall, disappearing into the darkness that seemed to go on into infinity. She heard that dripping sound, like something poisonous was seeping out of those long-forgotten conduits of metal in which God-knew-what used to flow. Tangles of bare electrical wires ran alongside the pipes. She stood on a cracked and rough concrete floor. Those reddish-orange and green lights came from somewhere. That mist or steam or fog swirled around like a London street at night.

Cassie took in all the details. There were clues here; she just needed to see them.

Her stalker hadn’t revealed himself yet—maybe he wasn’t here yet. Not asleep at this moment or not in this part of his dream world yet. As much as the masked man seemed to love chasing her, maybe even he needed breaks now and then so he could . . . what? Pursue others? Were there others that he tormented? Maybe he needed a break to dream of other things. Maybe he flew in his dreams like Zoe did. Or maybe he had erotic dreams. Judging from what she’d seen so far, she didn’t want to imagine what dark things turned her stalker on.

She looked down at her leather cuff, the studded metal ball dangling from the smaller leather strap buckled around her hand. She stared at it for a moment. This was so strange, almost like she was thinking in her dream, almost like she was awake.

For a panicked moment she thought she really might be awake.

Was she awake?

Her fingers automatically closed around her wakeup ball, squeezing harder until she felt the dull spikes dig into her flesh.

But then she backed off. No, not yet.

She began walking. She would see where this place went to. But then she stopped. Why should she keep walking down this tunnel of pipes, conforming to this world that he had created?

She turned to her left, facing the lines of old rusty pipes and wires. She lifted her hands up and pushed them apart like she was pushing back invisible drapes . . . and the world of pipes and wires and darkness faded away, revealing a brighter world beyond it. She could see the city street out there, people walking past. She went out onto that street, but this time she didn’t brush by them politely, this time she pushed them out of the way with slight gestures of her hands, watching their shocked expressions as they were pushed back by a powerful, invisible force. Each person’s face had the same expression, an exact replica of the one before it.

Were those expressions the stalker’s expression? Were they a collection of his subconscious feelings?

She saw the little girl standing off to the side of the street, no piggy bank this time. Her white dress and light hair stood out among the dark and gray mass of people that seemed to be melting together into a mist of shadows at the periphery of her vision.

“You’re making him mad,” the little girl warned.

“Good,” Cassie said. “Where can I find him?”

For a moment the little girl didn’t answer, and now Cassie saw the fear on her face.

“Does he haunt you, too?” Cassie asked.

The little girl still didn’t answer.

But Cassie didn’t need her to answer the question, she already knew. “Where does he go?”

The girl looked out at the street.

The crowd of people backed out of the way, revealing the empty street. Buildings lined both sides of the street, like some kind of downtown area of a city that she’d never been to before.

Cassie looked back at the little girl. “What’s your name?”

The girl seemed on the verge of tears. “You’re going to make him mad.”

“I don’t care. What’s your name?”

“Jenna.”

“Everything’s going to be all right, Jenna.” Cassie turned back to the street. The buildings seemed to have moved slightly, parting a little like the crowd of people had done. Everything in this world seemed to be in a constant state of flux.

Someone was running down that street, running past the buildings, running away from them.

It was him.

She chased the man, trying to catch up to him.

The buildings all around her shook, cracks winding through the concrete and stucco, windows shattering, glass, dust, and tiny scraps of paper raining down on her.

But she was getting closer, catching up to the man in black.

A building toppled over in front of her, about to crash down onto her and crush her. She almost gave in and squeezed the wakeup ball, but she threw her hands up like she was going to catch the falling building.

“Stop!” she yelled at the building.

And it stopped, hanging there over top of her. Even the dust and shards of glass froze in the gray light.

Cassie continued running underneath the frozen disaster, and she was suddenly in the middle of a neighborhood street.

The man stood at the end of the street. He was still dressed all in black. He still had on black gloves and black boots. He still had his black mask on. But he seemed different now . . . smaller . . . scared. He turned and ran towards a house at the end of the street, a three-story Victorian home. He bounded up the porch steps and disappeared through the front door, slamming it shut behind him.

Cassie walked down the street to the house. She stopped at the end of the street, reading the street signs of both streets: Bryant Street and Eighth Avenue. Then she looked at the front porch of the house across the street, the numbers of the house in big black digits, the last number cocked at an angle like it was loose against the siding and about to fall.

She wanted to remember the address. Her pen was suddenly in her hand and she scrawled the address on her forearm.

The house looked rundown, in need of repairs. The steps creaked as she walked up them onto the front porch. To her right, in the gravel driveway, were two vehicles. The one in front looked like an older car, maybe even from the eighties. The car behind it, closer to the street, was a compact car, maybe a Toyota or Nissan.

Cassie walked up to the front door of the house and tried the door handle.

Locked.

She willed the lock to disengage and tried it again. But the door handle still wouldn’t budge.

*

Cassie woke up and saw the address scribbled on her forearm and a pen beside her on the bed. She must’ve written it on her arm in her sleep. She got up and turned on her computer, pacing as she waited for it to boot up.

“Come on,” she whispered. A moment later she sat down in the office chair and searched for the address. She figured her stalker must be in a nearby town because he’d driven by her home several times to take photos of it. After she entered the address into the search bar, a few suggestions popped up—but only one of them was in the next town. She punched in the address on Google maps, used satellite view and zoomed in until she was on the ground, facing the house from the street that T-boned into it—the same house she’d seen in her dream.

Next, she searched through public records to see who owned the house. It was a woman named Nora Bennett. Cassie jotted the information down, searching Google for Nora Bennett, trying to find any information that she could. But Nora Bennett was a common name, and her search was getting her nowhere.

She got up and looked at the alarm clock next to the bed. It was almost five a.m., but she was wide awake. Just the small amount of sleep she’d managed to get in the last week was such a welcome pleasure, such an energy boost. She needed to do something. She took a shower, then got dressed for work. She drank a cup of coffee while she fed her cats and packed a quick lunch to take to work with her. She filled a thermos she’d gotten for Christmas with the rest of the coffee and then hurried out to her car.

But instead of going to work, she went to the next town. And forty minutes later, after following the directions on her phone, she found the street she’d seen in her dream. She parked her car halfway down the street that ran into Bryant Street, the old Victorian right at the end of the street.

She sipped her coffee as she waited. The neighborhood was waking up around her, people walking to their cars and trucks, ready for another day of work.

But Nora Bennett’s house was still dark. The front door was still closed. There were two vehicles parked in the narrow driveway between her house and the one next to it.

What now? Should I knock on the door?

She knew the woman’s name, but if the woman answered the door then how was she supposed to ask for the stalker? She didn’t know his name, or even what he looked like. She could ask if Mr. Bennett was home, but they might not even share the same last name.

And what if her stalker answered? How would she even know it was him since she hadn’t seen his face?

No, she needed a better plan.

It was getting late. She needed to head to work.

She started her car and smiled. At least she was starting to get somewhere. She swore she could feel eyes watching her, perhaps from one of those second story windows.

“That’s right,” she whispered as she turned her car around. “I’m watching you. I’ll see you in your dreams.”

*

Cassie met with Saul after work. She was excited to tell him about the progress she’d made. She felt like some amateur sleuth in a mystery novel.

“That’s great news,” he said.

“But I don’t know how to confront him.”

“Confront him in your dreams.”

“Yeah, but if he runs back to his house, I can’t get in.”

Saul nodded, but he had a strange look in his eye, like he wanted to tell her something but he was waiting.

“The front door of his house, it’s like the metal ball you gave me,” she said as the realization hit her. “Right? I mean you said he couldn’t take the cuff off of my wrist in my dream because I had it locked in real life.”

“Yes,” he said slowly like he was choosing his answer carefully. “I said that.”

And then Cassie felt a chill running through her. She knew then that Saul had lied to her. He’d told her that if she locked that strap around her wrist that her stalker wouldn’t be able to unlock it in the dream. But it wasn’t true. Saul had tricked her subconscious into entering her dreams with a talisman that really didn’t have the power that she thought it had.

As if Saul could read her thoughts, he spoke. “You gave it the power it needed. You gave yourself the power you needed.”

And now she didn’t need the strap, the little padlock, or the wakeup ball anymore. She had learned how to control her dreams. “Does that mean I can unlock that front door if I want to?”

“You can try,” he answered. “Only you know what you can do in your dreams.”

*

Cassie got ready before sleep, meditating and relaxing. She’d been thinking for the last few hours about what Saul had said.

Only you know what you can do in your dreams.

Why did Saul’s words sound so ominous to her? Was there something, even after all of this time, that he was keeping from her? Obviously, even though he hadn’t come out and admitted it, he’d been deceptive about the wakeup ball. But she thought of that like a child learning to ride a bicycle and the parent claiming that they still had their hand underneath the seat of the bicycle so the child could build up the confidence to pedal without training wheels. Yeah, that’s what her wakeup ball had been—training wheels.

Saul had told her that she had a strong mind. He said everybody did, but he felt that hers was stronger than most. She agreed with him in a way; she’d always been strong-willed and disciplined, focused when it came to tasks. She remembered how focused she’d been through college, how determined she’d been to work for a Fortune 500 company. It seemed like she used to be able to will her wishes into existence. Where had that drive gone? Where had that confident, strong woman gone? Had this stalker broken her spirit that easily? No, the truth was that the stalker had been the last straw to break the back of her will and determination. The truth was that she’d been slowly deteriorating over the years, letting her confidence and her drive waste away, letting happiness slip away.

But not anymore. She was going to change. She was going to fight this. She was going to become the master of her own dreams, of her own ambition, her own life, her own reality. She wanted her old self back, that strong and brave person she used to be. She decided right then and there that she wasn’t going to let this psychic bully, or anyone else, intimidate her anymore. She was going to fight back . . . just like she used to.

Cassie lay down in bed, the room nearly dark. She didn’t strap the wakeup ball to her wrist—she didn’t need it anymore. She closed her eyes and began to dream . . .

*

In the dream, Cassie started out in the same abandoned factory that she’d been in so many times before. But she could tell right away that her stalker had abandoned this creation of his.

But she was sure that he had created other dark playgrounds by now, probably an infinite number of them.

She would find him.

The factory dissolved around her as she concentrated on him now. But it was hard to focus on him. She didn’t know what he looked like except for the mask and black suit that he wore. She didn’t even know his name. She didn’t know much about him except where he lived and the woman he lived with, Nora Bennett. Maybe Nora was his mother, his sister, his grandmother, his girlfriend, his wife.

“Bennett!” she screamed into the darkness swirling around her, taking a chance that Bennett was his last name. Lights faded in and out of existence, like suns, star systems, entire galaxies forming and then dying, swirling around her like she was God. “Bennett, I’m calling you!”

No answer for a moment and then: “Over here.” Just a whisper.

The world around her went completely dark; the only light a bluish-white illumination in the distance. The light seemed to shimmer, almost like it was under water or in a shifting fog.

Cassie willed herself closer and a moment later she was close to the light which was beyond a wall with a massive iron gate in the middle of it, spikes on top of it. She could see the outlines of ancient oaks around her with knotty, gnarled branches. And there were things among those trees.

But the true horrors were waiting beyond that gate, beyond that wall, in that cemetery.

The gates swung open with a screech.

Her stalker had prepared something for her inside this cemetery . . . something just for her. She could feel her heartbeat quickening, fear wanting to creep up and take over. She glanced down at her left wrist, but the wakeup ball wasn’t there. For a panicked second she thought she might be trapped here, that she was this madman’s prisoner now.

“No,” she whispered. “I’m stronger than that. I am the master of my body and mind, the master of my dreams, of my universe.”

Cassie stepped through the opened iron gates and into the hilly and overgrown cemetery with old marble and stone tombstones and monuments. There were more of the ancient, gnarled trees inside the cemetery, looming in the darkness. That bluish-white light lit up the graveyard enough to see, but most everything was still in shadows.

“Come on out, Bennett,” she yelled. “I know who you are now. I know where you live.”

Tentacles sprouted up from the graves, pushing their way up through the dirt and weeds, rising up into the air like gigantic cobras ready to strike. Some of the tentacles had suckers, others had thorny looking things, some had reptilian mouths full of teeth at the ends of them, others opened up like a flower. They looked like something from a Lovecraftian nightmare.

Cassie stood her ground as the tentacles rose to their full height, hovering there. She raised her hands like a wizard casting a spell. She had to think of something fast. She looked at the stone tombstones and thought about the tentacles turning to stone, and then the tentacles froze, turning gray and cracking, then crumbling to the ground in pieces.

A rustle in the grass off to her right.

It was him—he was running.

She chased him, and the cemetery morphed into his neighborhood street now. He was already at his house, already up the porch steps to the front door, and then inside. He slammed the door shut.

Cassie ran up onto the front porch and was at the door. She twisted the door handle.

Locked.

She concentrated, trying to turn the handle, willing it to turn—but it wouldn’t budge.

“Damn,” she said. She needed to find a way inside, but his home was a fortress to her right now. “I’ll be back,” she promised him and walked away.

*

Cassie woke up from the dream. She still had another hour before she needed to get ready for work, but she got up and took a quick shower. She fed her cats, packed a lunch, wolfed down a quick breakfast, and then she was out the door.

She called in sick to work on the way, using another one of the personal days that she had accumulated throughout the year. Then she called Zoe and let her know that she had something to do today; Zoe offered to cover for her without hesitation. “You go take care of things,” Zoe said almost like she knew exactly what Cassie was going to do. Who knew? Maybe she did.

Cassie drove to the next town and parked down the street from her stalker’s home. She waited for fifteen minutes, watching the house. She saw her stalker for the first time as he left the home and hurried out to his car. It was difficult to make out details from this distance, but she could see that he was average height and a little overweight, but it was hard to tell because his clothes looked baggy. He wore a black shirt and dark pants. He had shoulder-length hair that looked messy. He got into his car, and a moment later he drove away.

This was her chance.

She put her car into drive and drove down the street, parking in front of Nora Bennett’s home. She got out and walked up the steps of the front porch. It felt so strange being there on the front porch in real life—it felt just like it had in her dreams, everything exactly the same, the feel of the sagging porch boards under her shoes, the chipped paint on the front door, the hanging address number on the faded vinyl siding.

Cassie knocked on the door, waiting a moment, counting down forty seconds, then she rang the doorbell and knocked again. She saw the slight movement of the curtains in the window to the left of the door.

For a moment Cassie didn’t think the woman was going to answer the door, but then she heard the clinking of a security chain, the fumbling of locks and deadbolts. Then the door opened.

Nora was older than Cassie had expected. She assumed that the woman who owned this house was her stalker’s mother . . . and maybe she was, but now she thought maybe the woman was his grandmother. She looked to be in her late sixties or early seventies. She was tiny, at least four or five inches shorter than Cassie, and very thin. But she had kind eyes and a radiant smile, even though she seemed a little cautious about opening up her door to a stranger.

“Hi, Miss Bennett,” Cassie said, beaming.

The woman seemed to melt a little with relief now that Cassie had mentioned her name.

But Cassie needed to think of something quickly. She remembered seeing the community college sticker on the rear window of her stalker’s car. “I go to school with . . .” she hesitated like she was trying to recall his name.

“Henry,” the old woman helped.

“Yes, Henry. We just started a class together. I’m his study partner. But I left some work for another class with him. I just called him, and he told me that he left it at home. He said he couldn’t come back because he needed to get to his early class, and he told me I could come by and get it.”

God, this was sounding lame. No way was Ms. Bennett going to buy this story.

The woman’s brows scrunched a little in suspicion. “He asked you to pick it up for him?”

“Yes. He said it’s in his bedroom. Somewhere on his desk, he said.”

“He doesn’t like anyone going in his bedroom,” Nora said, suddenly a little nervous. “He doesn’t even let me go in there.”

“I know,” she said, giggling a little like the idea of it was silly. “But this is kind of an emergency. I need that assignment for a different class. In fact, I’m kind of late right now.”

“I guess I could call Henry,” Nora said.

Cassie nodded immediately. “Yeah. Sure. You can use my phone if you want to. I’ve got Henry’s number right here.” She was lying, and she wasn’t sure how she was going to handle this if the woman called her on the bluff. But she tried to sound convincing.

“I better not bother him,” Nora said as if on second thought. “I guess it would be okay if you came in for a few minutes. As long as he said it was okay.”

Cassie could see the fear in the old woman’s eyes, and she suddenly realized that this woman was scared of Henry. He must’ve bullied her, too. Maybe he terrorized her—only the terror wasn’t in her dreams but in real life. She felt a surge of anger, but she controlled it, keeping up her act.

“Thank you soooo much,” Cassie told Nora. “You’re a lifesaver. I’ll probably fail this class if I don’t turn this assignment in.”

“Oh dear,” Nora said, opening the door even wider. “Come on in. You’d better hurry.”

“Thank you. I’m so sorry to be disturbing you like this. I don’t usually leave things behind, but I’ve just been so stressed out lately.”

“College can be stressful,” Nora said. “Do you want something to drink? I just made some tea.”

“Oh no, but thank you,” Cassie said. “You’re so sweet. I’ll just be a minute.” She hesitated, waiting for directions.

Nora suddenly realized why she was waiting. “Oh dear, I’m sorry. Just up the stairs there. Henry’s room is the first one on the right.”

“Thank you,” Cassie said and dashed up the steps.

The upstairs was dingy and gloomy—the whole house was. It needed cleaning, and it needed some sunlight. She found the first door on the right, and it was closed. She wondered if Henry kept his door locked, and she didn’t know what she was going to do if it was locked. But the door had a regular doorknob, and she didn’t see a place to insert a key. Besides, she was sure that Henry had Nora scared enough not to go into his room, and he didn’t need to lock it.

Cassie opened the door and stepped inside, her heart pounding; she felt both thrilled and scared at the same time.

The smell of Henry’s room hit her immediately; it smelled like dirty clothes, old food, and . . . other smells she’d rather not ponder. She wanted to open a window, but she didn’t think she would be here that long. She was just going to have to tough it out for a few minutes. The place was a mess: bed unmade, clothes all over the floor and heaped up on a threadbare recliner in the corner, the closet door open, and the interior stuffed with boxes and other junk. The bed was against the far wall, and right beside the bed, opposite the closet, was a student’s desk and an office chair. On the desk was a newer desktop computer. The walls were covered with posters and magazine cutouts of heavy metal bands and horror movies. A bookcase was crammed with horror novels and an assortment of bobble head dolls and monster movie figures.

Henry loved horror, Cassie realized; he loved to re-create these scenes in the dreams he entered. She saw some of the influences she’d seen in her own dreams on these walls: A Nightmare on Elm Street, Hellraiser, Alien. She also saw a movie poster with a shadowy killer on it who wore a leather hood—obviously an inspiration for the persona he portrayed in his dreams. Now she knew what she was working with, what she might be up against in the next dream. She knew Henry’s name now, she knew what fascinated him, and now she knew how to fight back.

She’d been inside Henry’s home now, inside his private space, invading it like he had invaded her dreams. And she wanted him to be aware that she had violated his privacy like he had violated hers—she wanted to leave him a message.

She looked through his desk and found a stack of photos, just some photos of Henry and other family members. There were photos of a wedding, a cookout, a concert. She selected the best photo of Henry, a clear photo of his face. He had boyish features even though he was a man. His hair was red, and he had a splattering of freckles across his nose and cheeks. She pocketed the photo. She also took an item of his, a plastic monster figure, shoving that down in her pocket too.

After finding a piece of paper and a marker, she scribbled out a quick note, leaving it right on the desk among Styrofoam plates with dried food stuck to them. The smell of sour milk was coming from a line of plastic cups on the top shelf of the desk above the computer monitor.

She looked at her note, reading the words silently: See you in your dreams.

As she turned to leave, Nora was standing in the doorway.

“Wow,” Cassie breathed out. “You scared me.”

“Did you find your assignments?” she asked.

“Yes,” Cassie said automatically, but then realized that she didn’t have anything in her hand.

Nora looked wary, and a little afraid, like she’d been duped, and now she was going to pay for it when Henry got home. Cassie felt sorry for the old woman.

“I’m sorry Henry’s room is such a mess,” Nora said. “I’ve tried to get him to clean it but . . . he just refuses.”

“It’s okay. I really should get going.”

Nora looked around at the room again, staring at the posters on the walls. “I don’t know why he’s so fascinated with all of that . . . that stuff.” It was like she couldn’t find the right words to express the horror on the walls.

“I know,” Cassie said. “I’m more of a romantic comedy fan myself.”

Nora seemed scared to enter the room, and she backed away as Cassie came towards the door. They stepped out into the hall together, and Cassie shut the door. “Thank you again for letting me get my assignment.”

The old woman didn’t say anything, but Cassie could see in her eyes that she knew that there was another reason she’d come up to this room.

“Is Henry your grandson?” she asked Nora.

The old woman shook her head slightly. “He’s my nephew. I let him live here because he doesn’t have anywhere else to stay.”

Cassie nodded, wondering if Henry had no family left, or no family who would let him live with them.

They walked down the stairs towards the front door.

“Are you going to be okay?” Cassie asked Nora as she stepped out the front door and onto the porch.

Nora smiled, nodded. “I’ll be fine.”

“Do you ever have bad dreams?” Cassie asked on impulse.

The question seemed to catch Nora off-guard, and she answered immediately. “Sometimes.” Then she thought about it for another few seconds, her face dropping more. “Quite often, actually.” She seemed so tired, on the verge of helpless tears.

Cassie took Nora’s hand in hers and held it for a moment. The old woman seemed a little surprised by the gesture, but then she brightened, smiling again.

“I have a feeling those nightmares are going to be ending soon,” Cassie said.

Nora smiled sweetly like she wished she could believe that.

*

Cassie drove to the library and rented a handful of horror movies: Hellraiser, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and a few slasher films. She didn’t like horror movies, but she wanted to immerse herself in Henry’s world, to be able to fight back with whatever he might throw at her. She watched the movies, fast-forwarding through some of them as she waited for night to fall, waiting to go to sleep. After the sun had set, she took a hot bath, and then she meditated for an hour with candles burning and soft music playing. She was getting ready for battle tonight. When she went to sleep, she was going to find Henry and end this.

An hour later she was lying in bed, her eyes closed, the bathroom light on and the door open just a bit. She had the photo of Henry and his monster movie figure in each of her hands. Her cats hadn’t come to bed tonight; it was like they knew tonight might be a night of restless sleep for them and her.

Cassie concentrated on slipping into her dreams . . . into that abandoned factory where she usually started.

*

Cassie stood in the abandoned factory with its rusty, leaky pipes and the strange lights that illuminated the darkness. But Henry wasn’t here; and she kind of knew he wouldn’t be. She parted the walls of the factory and stepped out into the next world of swirling shadows, a landscape morphing into existence as she entered it.

She concentrated on Henry. She had the photo of him in her hand, and she glanced down at it. She also had the monster figure she’d taken from his bedroom—these were links to him from the waking world to the dream world.

“Henry Bennett!” she called out. “Where are you?”

She closed her eyes in the dream, holding the photo and the monster figure, concentrating on Henry . . . “seeing” him in her mind.

And there he was, in some other monstrous landscape, something from a haunted spaceship drifting through space. A safe space, he thought. But she could find him anywhere now.

He ran down the dark metal halls of the spaceship, trying to outrun her. But he couldn’t lose her.

And like the other times, when there were no other options, he was suddenly on his own street, running for home, running to his true safe space.

“Not this time, Henry!” she yelled, catching up to him.

He stood in the doorway of his home for just a moment, staring back at her with true fear in his eyes behind his mask. And then he bolted inside and slammed the door shut.

Cassie heard a series of locks turning and bolting shut—more locks than there should’ve been on the door.

“I’ve already been inside your home,” Cassie said through the door. “You know that. I’ve already been invited inside.”

“Go away!” Henry shouted from behind the door. “Leave me alone. I’m not bothering you anymore!”

“I’m like a vampire,” she yelled at Henry through the door, using a reference he would understand. “Once I’ve been invited inside, I can come and go as much as I want.” She concentrated on that thought as she turned the door handle.

And the door opened easily.

Henry stared in disbelief as he stood in the hallway near the stairs. “You . . . you’re not supposed to be able to do that.”

“The rules have changed,” she told him.

His eyes bulged behind his leather mask, his gloved hands clenched into fists.

“You can take off that mask,” she told him. “I already know what you look like. You’re not a monster, not a killer, just a sad little man.” She threw the photo she had of Henry up into the air, and suddenly the walls were covered in photos of Henry.

He whimpered and ran into a room off of the hall.

She knew it was the dining room.

Cassie needed to hurry before he woke himself up. A moment later she was in the dining room, and she forced a chair to slide out and slam into him. He sat down hard, and chains came from the ceiling, floor, and the corners of the room—thick chains with hooks and barbs on the ends of them, something from the Hellraiser movies. They wrapped around his body, pinning his arms and legs to the chair, the hooks piercing his flesh.

Cassie walked up to Henry as he struggled. His eyes bulged behind his mask, his mouth open wide as he panted.

“No more,” she told him as she pulled his mask off, revealing his boyish face. “No more, Henry.”

He struggled, but the chains pulled tighter and tighter, tugging at his skin and clothing. He moaned in pain.

“You leave me alone,” she told him. “You leave Jenna alone. You leave your Aunt Nora alone. You understand me? You can make up whatever perverted fantasies you want to with make-believe people in make-believe worlds, but you leave the real ones alone. Got it?”

He didn’t answer.

“I’ve been in your house. I’m going to become real good friends with your Aunt Nora, and she’ll let me know if you’ve been bullying her. I’m going to be watching you.”

Henry suddenly dissolved into nothing, disappearing, and the chains that had been holding him dropped down onto the chair with a clatter. He had woken himself up. Cassie dropped the leather mask she held in her hand like it was a filthy thing.

*

Cassie made several more trips to visit her new friend Nora. She made sure that Henry knew that she’d been there. She often left messages on his desk for him. And over those few weeks, she’d watched Nora grow stronger and more confident. Henry couldn’t get kicked out of his aunt’s house—he had nowhere else to go. She convinced Nora to use the power she had over her nephew.

“He won’t terrorize you anymore,” Cassie promised.

“Thank you,” Nora said, holding on to Cassie’s hand with tears of joy in her eyes. “Thank you for everything.”

For the next few weeks Cassie prowled Henry’s dreams, following him and watching him, controlling those dreams when she felt the need to. It was exhausting sometimes, and distasteful, but necessary. She was always watching, always ready in case he tried to torment someone else.

Cassie visited Jenna’s dreams a few times, but she didn’t interfere in any way. Hopefully as Jenna grew older, these nightmares would fade into her memories until they were gone for good.

*

Cassie continued seeing Saul for a session every week, getting stronger and stronger every time, but also delving deeper into her meditation. She had changed in a fundamental way over these last few months, and she told him that she had him to thank for that. Of course he said she only had herself to thank, that he’d only been her guide. She knew he was going to say that.

She’d also grown closer to Zoe, and she now could count a few people in this world as true friends.

At work she got promoted. She slept like a baby at night now. She ate better, exercised more, stressed out less. She’d even gone out on a few dates, but nothing serious. She wasn’t going to rush anything. She felt like she would know when the right person came along.

She was truly the master of her own life now. And she was the master of her dreams . . . and sometimes she flew in her dreams.

This is one of the newest stories in this collection. The idea came from a conversation with my son. I don’t want to name names, but he told me about a friend of his who swore he could lucid dream. And this friend told my son that he’d seen him in his dreams, that he’d followed him and watched as some creature followed my son, and another creature followed my son’s girlfriend.

The idea gave me the chills. Of course I immediately thought my son’s friend was bullshitting him, but the writer wheels inside my mind began turning right away. “There’s a story in there somewhere,” I told myself. I thought I was going to write something more along the lines of my son’s friend’s claim that he saw dark entities following my son and his girlfriend, and I’d only jotted down a few notes so I wouldn’t forget the essence of what I wanted to write.

But then I was listening to a radio program, something about paranormal stuff, and a lady was talking about people psychically attacking others. And these two ideas kind of melted together. I wondered right away what would happen if a man who could lucid dream began tormenting another person in their dreams, and this story was born. It’s so exciting when a story comes together, or the roadblocks in a story idea break away and I can see the path the story wants to take.

This was a fun one to write, and like a few of the previous stories, it kind of got away from me. I almost turned it into a novella, but I felt that the story needed to be told at this length. I’m pretty happy with it. I hope you were, too.

AUTHOR’S NOTE:

Thank you so much for reading my book! I hope you enjoyed it.

A favor to ask:

I have a favor to ask of you. If you could take the time to leave a quick review on Amazon, it would mean so much to me, and it could help other readers.

Being an author is a dream come true for me, and it only happens because of readers like you. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Please feel free to follow my blog for updates, sales, articles, and more. Just click on the follow button in the link below.

www.marklukensbooks.wordpress.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Mark Lukens has been writing since the second grade when his teacher called his parents in for a conference because the ghost story he’d written had her a little concerned.

Since then he’s had several stories published and four screenplays optioned by producers in Hollywood. One script is in development to become a film. He’s the author of many bestselling books including: Ancient Enemy, Darkwind: Ancient Enemy 2, Descendants of Magic, The Summoning, Night Terrors, Sightings, The Exorcist’s Apprentice, What Lies Below, Devil’s Island, The Darwin Effect, Followed, Ghost Town: a novella, and A Dark Collection: 12 Scary Stories. He’s a proud member of the Horror Writers Association.

He grew up in Daytona Beach, Florida. But after many travels and adventures, he settled down near Tampa, Florida with his wonderful wife and son … and a stray cat they adopted.

He loves to hear from readers! You can find him on Facebook at Mark Lukens Books, and on Twitter @marklukensbooks. You can also follow his blog at www.marklukensbooks.wordpress.com and he can be reached via email at marklukensbooks@yahoo.com and mark@marklukensbooks.com

If you liked the stories in this collection, be sure to check out my other collection of short stories.

www.amazon.com/dp/B00JENAGLC

Ancient Enemy . . . it wants things and you have to give it what it wants.

www.amazon.com/dp/B00FD4SP8M

And don’t forget about the sequel to Ancient Enemy.

www.amazon.com/dp/B01K42JBGW

Ghost hunters investigate an abandoned Caribbean island with a bloody past and a terrifying secret . . .

www.amazon.com/dp/B06WWJC6VD

Four film school students investigate a remote cabin where an alien abduction reportedly took place many years ago . . . but they encounter much more than they ever could’ve imagined.

www.amazon.com/dp/B00VAI31KW

After a tragic accident, seventeen-year-old Danny goes to live with his father who is an exorcist . . . but their first case together will reveal mind-blowing secrets that will change Danny’s life forever.

www.amazon.com/dp/B00YYF1E5C

How do you hide from a psychic serial killer? That’s just what Tara must do when the monster who slaughtered her family finds her again.

www.amazon.com/dp/B00M66IU3U

Ryan wakes up in a motel room with a bag of stolen money, bullet hole scars on his chest, and no memory of his past. His only clue is an address in a small Oregon town where all of the horrifying answers are waiting for him.

www.amazon.com/dp/B00HNEOHKU

Six strangers wake up in a ghost town where they must figure out the rules in a twisted game before it’s too late.

www.amazon.com/dp/B00LEZRF7G

After suffering from debilitating nightmares, Pam goes back to her father’s estate to uncover the horrifying source of those dreams.

www.amazon.com/dp/B0143LADEY