Ashes (23 page)

Dexter went down the trail. He wasn't sure
why. Maybe he wanted to relive the day before, the struggle, the
tears, the drops of blood. Maybe he wanted to get the shoe.

Water fell off the green leaves overhead as
he wound his way into the woods. His shirt was soaked by the time
he reached the clearing. The forest was alive with dripping,
flexing limbs, trees drinking and growing, the creek fat and muddy.
A fungal, earthy stench hung in the air. He stepped into the
clearing.

The ground was scarred with gashes of
upturned soil. Brown holes. Empty. Where Dexter had buried the
pets.

Blood sacrifice. Works like magic. Especially
on Halloween.

Dexter tried to breathe. The shivering in his
belly turned into a wooden knot.

Twigs snapped damply behind the stand of
laurels where he had hid the day before.

No. Dead things didn't come back to life.
That only happened in stupid movies.

Tammy Lynn’s shoe was gone. No way would she
come back here. It had to be Riley, playing a trick. But how did
Riley know where he had buried the animals?

He heard a whimpering gargle that sounded
like a cross between a cluck and a growl, maybe a broken meow. The
laurels shimmered. Something was moving in there.

"Riley?" he whispered hoarsely.

The gargle.

"Come on out, dickwit," he said, louder.

He saw a flash of fur, streaked and caked
with dirt. He fled down the trail. His boots hardly touched the
ground, were afraid to touch the ground, the ground that had been
poisoned with blood magic. He thought he heard something following
as he crossed into the yard, soft padding footfalls or slitherings
in the brush, but his heart was hammering so hard in his ears that
he couldn't be sure. He burst into the house and locked the door,
then leaned with his back against it until he caught his
breath.

Something thudded onto the porch, clattering
along the wooden boards. Behind that sharp sound, a rattling like
claws or thick toenails, came a dragging wet noise.

Clickety-click, sloosh. Clickety-click,
sloosh.

It stopped just outside the door.

Dexter couldn't move.

"What the hell's wrong with you?" Mom stood
under the archway leading into the kitchen. Her face was pinched,
eyes distended, skin splotched. Greasy blades of hair clung to her
forehead.

Dexter gasped, swallowed. "The—"

She scowled at him, her fists clenched. He
knew this had better be good. "I was just out running."

"You're going to be the death of me, worrying
me like that. Nothing but trouble." She rubbed her temples. Her
smell filled the small room, sweetly pungent like a bushel of
decaying fruit. Dexter put his ear to the door. The sounds were
gone.

"What are you so pale for? You said you
wasn't sick."

Dexter shrank away from her.

"Now get up off that floor. Lord knows, I got
enough work around here already without putting you in three
changes of clothes ever goddamned day."

Dexter slunk past her into the living
room.

"Guess I'd better get that laundry in," Mom
said to no one in particular. Her hand gripped the doorknob, and
Dexter wanted to shout, scream, slap her away. But of course he
couldn't. He could only watch with churning bowels as she opened
the door and went outside. Dexter followed her as far as the screen
door.

The porch was empty.

Of course it was. Monsters were for movies,
or dumb stories. He was acting like a fourth grader. Stuff coming
back from the dead? Horseshit, as Dad would say.

Still, he didn't go outside the rest of the
evening, even though the sky cleared. Mom was in a better mood
after the first six-pack. Dexter watched cartoons, then played
video games for a while. He tried not to listen for
clickety-sloosh.

One of Mom's boyfriends came over. It was the
one with the raggedy mustache, the one who called Dexter "Little
Man." Mom and the man disappeared into her bedroom, then Dexter
heard arguing and glass breaking. The boyfriend left after an hour
or so. Mom didn't come back out. Dexter went to bed without
supper.

He lay there thinking about magic, about
blood sacrifice. About the open graves in the pet cemetery that
should have been filled with bones and decaying flesh and mossy fur
and shaved whiskers and scales. He tried to erase his memory of the
creature in the bushes, the thing that had followed him home. He
couldn't sleep, even though he was worn from tension.

His eyes kept traveling to
the cold glass between his curtains. The streetlight threw shadows
that striped the bed, swaying like live things. He tried to tell
himself that it was only the trees getting blown by the wind.
Nothing was going to get him, especially not all those animals he'd
dismembered. No, those animals had loved him. They would
never
hurt
him.

He'd almost calmed himself when he heard the
soft click of paws on the windowsill. It was the sound the cats had
made when they wanted to be let in. Dexter's Mom wanted them out of
the house, because of the hairballs and the stains they left in the
corners. But Dexter always let them in at night to curl on top of
the blankets at his feet. At least for a week or so, until he got
tired of them.

But he didn't have any cats at the moment. So
it couldn't be a cat at the window. Dexter pulled the blankets up
to his eyes. Something bumped against the glass, moist and dull,
like a nose.

No no no not a nose.

He wrapped the pillow around his ears. The
noise was replaced by a rapid thumping against the outside wall.
Dexter hunched under the blankets and counted down from a hundred,
the way he did when he was six and Dad had first told him about the
monsters that lived in the closet.

One hundred (no monsters), ninety-nine (no
monsters), ninety-eight (no monsters)...

After three times through, he no longer heard
the clickings or thumpings. He fell asleep with the blankets
twisted around him.

Dexter awoke not knowing where he was. He sat
up quickly and looked out the window. Nothing but sky and Sunday
sunshine.

Dad picked him up that afternoon. Dexter had
to walk down to the corner to meet him. He kept a close eye on the
woods, in case anything stirred in the leaves. He thought he heard
a scratching sound, but by then he was close enough to get inside
the truck.

Dad looked past Dexter to the house. "My own
goddamned roof," he muttered under his breath.

"Hi, Dad."

"I suppose she filled you up
with all kinds of horseshit about me." His hands were clenched into
fists around the steering wheel. Dexter knew what those fists could
do. There had to be a way out, a way to calm him. Riley's words
came to Dexter out of the blue:
Gotta tell
'em that you love 'em.

Yeah. Works like magic. He'd seen how that
turned out. Got you what you wanted, but somebody had to pay.

"She didn't say nothing."

"Any men been around?"

"Nobody. Just us. We . . . I miss you."

Dad's fists relaxed and he mussed Dexter's
hair. "I miss you, too, boy."

Dexter wanted to ask when Dad was moving back
in, but didn't want him to get angry again. Better not to mention
Mom, or home, or anything else.

"What say we go down to the dump? Got me a
new Ruger to break in." Dexter managed a weak smile as Dad pulled
the truck away from the curb.

They spent the day at the landfill, Dexter
breaking glass bottles and Dad prowling in the trash for salvage,
shooting rats when they showed their pointy faces. Dexter felt no
joy when the rodents exploded into red rags. Dad was a good
shot.

They ate fastfood hamburgers on the way back
in. It was almost dark when Dad dropped him off at the end of the
street. Dexter hoped none of Mom's boyfriends were around. He
opened the door to hop out, then hesitated, remembering the
clickety-sloosh. He had managed to forget, to fool himself out
under the clear sky, surrounded by filth and rusty metal and busted
furniture. In the daytime, all the nightmares had dissolved into
vapor.

Dexter looked toward the house with one hand
still on the truck door. Dad must have figured he was reluctant to
leave, that a son missed his father, and that no goddamned
snotty-eyed bitch had a right to keep a father from his own
flesh-and-blood. "It's okay. I'll see you again in a week or so,"
Dad said.

Dexter searched desperately for something to
say, anything to put off that hundred-foot walk across the dark
yard. "Dad?"

"What?"

"Do you love Mom?"

Dexter could see only Dad's silhouette
against the background of distant streetlights. Crickets chirped in
the woods. After a long moment, Dad relaxed and sighed. "Yeah.
'Course I do."

Dexter looked along the street, at the forest
that seemed to creep up to the house's foundation. "You ever been
scared?"

"We're all scared of something or other. Is
something bothering you?"

Dexter shook his head, then realized Dad
probably couldn't see him in the dark. "No," he said, then, "Do you
believe in magic?"

Dad laughed, his throat thick with spittle.
"What kind of horseshit has she been filling you up with?"

"Nothing. Never mind."

"The bitch."

"Guess I better go, Dad."

"Uh-huh."

"See you." He wanted to tell Dad that he
loved him, but he was too scared.

"Say, whatever happened to that little puppy
of yours?"

"Got runned over."

"Damn. I'll see Clem about getting you
another."

"No, that's okay."

"You sure?"

"Yeah."

"Bye now."

"Yeah."

Dexter stepped away from the truck and
watched the tail-lights shrink as Dad roared away. The people in
the few neighboring houses were plastered to the television. Blue
light flickered from their living room windows. The trees were like
tall skeletons with too many bones.

Leaves skittered across the road, scratching
at the asphalt. A dog barked a few streets over. At least, it
sounded like a dog. A good old red-blooded, living and breathing
turd factory. Never hurt nobody, most likely.

He walked into the scraggly yard, reluctant
to leave the cone of the last streetlight. He thought about going
up the street and cutting across the other end of the yard, but
that way was scary, too. The autumn forest hovered on every side.
The forest with its clickety-sloosh things.

He tried to whistle as he walked, but his
throat was dry, as if he had swallowed a spiderweb. He thought
about running, but that was no good. In every stupid movie where
dead things come back, they always get you if you run.

So he took long, slow steps. His head bent
forward because he thought he could hear better that way. Halfway
home. The lights were on in the kitchen, and he headed for the
rectangle of light that stretched from the back door across the
lawn.

He was twenty feet away from the safety of
light when he heard it. Clickety-sloosh. But that wasn't all. The
gargle was also mixed in, along with the tortured meow and the
rustle of leaves. The noise was coming from behind a forsythia bush
near the back steps. The thing was under the porch. In the place
where Turd Factory had napped during sunny afternoons.

Dexter stopped.

Run for it?
They always get you if you run. But, now that he
thought about it, they always get you anyway. Especially if you
were the bad guy. And Dexter was the bad guy. Maybe not as bad as
Riley. But at least Riley knew about love, which probably protected
him from bad things.

Yell for Mom? She was probably dead drunk on
the couch. If she did step out on the porch, the thing would
disappear. He was sure of that, because the thing was his and only
his.

And if he yelled, he knew what would happen.
Mom would turn on the porch light and see nothing, not even a stray
hair, just a scooped-out dirt place behind the forsythia. And she'd
say, "What the hell do you mean, waking up half the neighborhood
because you heard something under the porch? They ain't nothing
there."

And she'd probably slap him across the face.
She'd wait until they were inside, so the neighbors wouldn't call
Social Services. Maybe she'd use the buckle-end of the belt, if she
was drinking liquor tonight instead of beer.

He took an uncertain step backward. Back to
the curb, to the streetlights? Then what? You had to go home
sometime. The thing gargled, a raspy mewling. It was waiting.

A monster that could disappear could do
anything. Even if he ran to the road, the thing could
clickety-sloosh out of the sewer grate, or pop out from behind one
of the junk cars that skulked in the roadside weeds. The thing
could drop from the limbs of that big red maple at the edge of the
lawn. You can't fight blood magic when it builds a monster on
Halloween.

He had a third choice. Walk right on up. Keep
trying to whistle. Not scared at all. No-sirree.
Zip-a-dee-doo-dah.

And that was really the only choice. The
thing wasn't going away. Dexter stepped into the rectangle of light
and pursed his lips. He was still trying to whistle as he put his
foot on the bottom step. Monsters weren’t real, were they?

The bush shook, shedding a few of its late
yellow flowers. The gargle lengthened into a soughing purr. Dexter
tried to keep his eyes on the door, the door that was splintered at
the bottom where the puppy and cats had scratched to get inside.
The door with its dented brass handle, the door with its duct-taped
pane of glass, the door that opened onto the love and safety
promised by the white light of home. The door became a blur, a
shimmering wedge lost in his tears as the thing moved out from the
shadows.