Enthralled: Paranormal Diversions (4 page)

Every muscle in her body tight and trembling, she slips into the cabin and wraps her hands around the shotgun, its weight a comfort. She carries the lantern from room to room, listening for a sound out of place under the beating of the storm. Everywhere’s empty just the way it should be, but she leaves the lantern burning on the table because she can’t bear the dark.

Tucking the gun under her arm, she climbs up to the loft and pulls the rope ladder after her. Sally’s gone to bed long enough before that she already sleeps deep and even, her breathing a syncopated hiss mixing with the storm. Margie spends the night pressed against the wall, staring out the windows to the clearing around the cabin. Tiny squares of light spill from downstairs, flickering like fire against the darkness.

The storm clears before dawn and, exhausted, Margie sneaks back onto the porch. She’s almost convinced herself she dreamed the puddles—of course no one had been there, of course it was just the rain collecting under the eaves. The cabin’s old, the gutters unrepaired.

There are a million explanations for what she saw the night before. Margie’s just about convinced herself of all of them as birds wake up around her and start calling to the day.

But then she sees the book. It lies on its spine, flipped open to the middle, pages fluttering in the remnant wind. When she picks it up, the cover curls a bit and wet fingerprints smudge some of the corners.

It’s the
Visitor’s Guide to West Virginia
.

“Found your book.” Margie tosses it onto the table, causing one of the chipped plates to rattle. “You should be more careful with it—if it hadn’t been tucked behind one of the planters on the porch, it would have gotten soaked,” Margie adds.

Sally looks up at her, lips stained dark with juice. “I didn’t take it outside, duh.”

Margie stands at the sink and looks out the window. She loves her sister, knows she’s probably right. But she has to believe Sally’s lying because otherwise someone came into the cabin and took the book. Someone stood leaning against the wall, flipping through pages while Sally and Margie sat inside, oblivious.

Her fingernails scratch against the old dingy grout of the tiled kitchen counter. This cabin’s the safest they’ve found since the change time. They’ve built a quasi-life here perched on the tip of a steep mountain. Margie’s garden is coming in, she has supplies enough to can and pickle, and the well has a hand pump so they don’t have to worry about water.

Though she lets Sally plan road trips in the evenings, Margie’s indulged herself with the idea of staying for a while. Settling in further. Spending the winter beside the fire quilting. Simple things you don’t dare dream about while the dead rumble around you.

Margie’s shoulders sag. Whoever’s out there hasn’t hurt them. Not yet. But if there’s anything Margie’s learned about the world since it changed, it’s that it’s only a matter of time.

She’s learned that lesson well.

“I’m going to check on the laurel walls.” Margie shoves a water bottle into a ragged backpack with extra shells and a plastic yellow flashlight. “It might take me a while. You going to be okay without me here?”

Sally lies on her back on the leather couch, an old paperback romance held above her head.

“I’m not a baby anymore, you know.” She says it slow and even. “I can tell there’s something going on. You’re not as good at hiding it from me as you think.”

Margie looks at the baby fat still visible under the smooth planes of her sister’s face. “It’s nothing,” she says.

Sally rolls her eyes. “Whatever.”

Margie isn’t lying about checking the perimeter, but that only takes an hour and then she finds a thick copse of weeds where she has a clear view of the cabin. Bugs swirl around her, creeping along her neck and tangling in her lashes, but she sits calm and still through dusk and into the late evening.

Through the window she watches her sister fix something to eat and flip through the atlas listlessly before selecting another novel and carrying it up to the loft. The lantern burns inside, beckoning to Margie, but she keeps to the weeds, waiting while stars begin to catch fire overhead.

He comes a few hours after nightfall, just as the moon burns a bright halo on the horizon. He creeps up the steps and eases into the swing, gripping the rusted chain to keep it from creaking. The ax he’d been carrying lies forgotten against the railing as if he’s not afraid of anyone or anything out here.

None of her traps signaled his approach, and Margie wonders just how many times he’s circumvented their defenses. She watches him a moment; it’s been so long since she’s seen a living human being other than her sister that she’s fascinated, even if this guy’s some sort of creeper who’s been in their cabin and touched their things. He hunches over himself so that most of him’s hidden in shadows, and she can’t get a good look at him except to tell that his hair’s tattered and his clothes ragged along the edges.

He jumps up as she steps from the weeds, but he doesn’t move for his ax. His body’s pole-bean thin, but even so she notices coiled muscles twined around his bare arms and knows he’s strong. She figures he’s her age or a little older.

“Just in case you can’t see out here,” she says, even and strong, “I’ve got a shotgun aimed at your gut. I wouldn’t reach for that ax.” Margie walks into the clearing, toes hitting the ground before she rocks onto her heels. She listens for movement just in case the boy isn’t alone, but she hears nothing but the night bugs screaming.

The boy raises his hands. “I’m not planning on doing anything stupid,” he says.

Margie swallows. She feels off balance inside, not really knowing what to do next. “Who are you and what do you want?”

“My name’s Calvin. I’m here because . . .” He looks down at his feet. He wears old yellow boots with knots in the laces holding them together. He shrugs. “I saw the light and I just . . .” He twists his face like it hurts him to say it. Then he looks up like he can see her in the darkness.

“I was lonely, okay?” He sounds defensive, his shoulders hitched forward.

The words cut into Margie—she doesn’t know what to do with them. “Where’d you come from?” she finally asks.

He shrugs. “Around. Here and there.”

Margie watches him, the slow rise and fall of his chest. He doesn’t seem as scared as he should with a gun pointed at him. “You know I don’t trust you, right? And I’m not going to trust you?”

He nods.

“Kick your ax off the porch,” she tells him. “And if you’ve got any other weapons, toss them too.”

Calvin reaches out with his toe and nudges the ax until it slips under the railing into the overgrown bushes. From his pockets he pulls two knives and a bag of bullets but no gun— they’ve become too scarce in the past years.

Margie keeps the shotgun on him as she climbs the steps. For a while they stare at each other, her trying to put the piece of his existence into the puzzle of her life up here.

“What’s it like back down the mountain?” Margie finally asks.

Calvin doesn’t hesitate. “Horrible.” He slumps into the swing. “There aren’t a lot of safe places left, and finding food’s impossible.” He stares at his hands, his elbows propped on his knees. There’s dirt under his nails and filling the cracks of his skin.

They sit like that for a bit, nothing of the world between them that’s the same except for the monsters. Margie thinks about what it was like before the big change, when you could talk about things like movies or television or some funny joke from the internet. She grapples for some sort of bridge she could pull between them so that the gap across the porch wouldn’t seem so big and wide.

“I can’t let you leave,” she finally says. “You know that, right? I don’t want you sneaking around out here and, even if you left, I can’t have you mention to someone out there that we’ve found a safe place.”

He nods his head. “I was hoping maybe if I promised not to tell anyone . . .” He looks at her and sees that she’s not the kind to offer false hopes to strangers. His face falls. “I understand.”

“I can tie you up on the porch or inside—I’ll give you that option.”

He looks through the window at the lantern spilling over the atlas and guidebooks. “Why West Virginia?” he finally asks.

Margie rubs her fingers along the stock of the shotgun, tracing the edge of the trigger. She still has the safety on, but he doesn’t know that. “My sister gets to choose where we go and she remembered some show about West Virginia.”

“It’s a nice place,” he says. “Prettier than you’d think.”

“You’ve been?”

“Yeah. Before. My family used to go camping up on the Cacapon in the spring.” He no longer looks at his hands but at her. She’s tucked into the darkness, but still there’s something about the way he sees her that makes her feel a sort of intimacy.

“I’ll get the rope,” she says, because she doesn’t want to talk about families or vacations or the time before.

“There’s a guy tied to the porch swing,” Sally says when Margie comes down from the loft in the morning. Margie watches as Calvin slowly rocks outside, his wrists still lashed to the chains.

“You know you’re terrible at knots, right?” Sally says, flipping through one of the guidebooks spread around her. “He could have gotten out easy if he’d wanted.”

She traces an interstate across the mountains on the map, cross-referencing a set of directions in her notebook. “Don’t know why he wouldn’t just escape if he had the chance,” she mumbles without looking up at her older sister.

Margie stares at Calvin. “Me neither.”

Margie pats him down to make sure there aren’t any more weapons tucked in his clothes, and then all three of them go to pick berries. Sally pesters Calvin about where he’s been and what the mountains out West are like compared to those in the East. Calvin’s patient and kind and always aware of the fact that Margie has a gun and is willing to blow some part of his body off at the slightest provocation.

Days pass one after the other: gardening and taking care of the cabin in the day, Calvin tied up at night, time rolling after time as the great clock unwinds.

“She knows the trip is a lie,” Calvin finally says one night as Margie wraps rope around his arm and the swing.

She hesitates.

“She knows more than you think. About the world. About what your chances of survival are.” He pauses. Her face isn’t far from his, and she smells the berry sweetness of his breath.

“Our chances of survival,” he says softly.

Margie lets the rope trail from her fingers and stumbles to the other end of the porch until the railing bites her hips.

“What do I have to do to prove my loyalty to you, Marg?” Calvin asks. “How many nights do I have to sit out here tied up when we both know your knots are crap and I could escape anytime? What will it take for you to trust me?”

Margie slumps, sliding down until she sits on the edge of the porch. Fireflies flash in the gardens, bright reminders that for some creatures the world hasn’t changed.

“I’m the one who had to kill my mother,” Margie confesses. Her chin trembles, her whole body shaking. A breeze trips up the mountain, cool and crisp like fall. “After the change we got out of the city and we found a place and for a while it was safe, but then we were ambushed. My father yelled but no one could hear. They took my mother, and my father resisted, and I didn’t know what to do but grab Sally and run into the woods. I watched what they did to my mother, and when my father tried to fight, they killed him and tossed his body aside. I could smell the death and hear the moans and then they just left my mother on the ground while they ransacked inside. I told Sally to stay and I found my mother and there were bite marks all over her and she said nothing when I held the gun against her.”

She inhales as if she’s never known air before. “We had somewhere safe, and they took it.”

Calvin strips the ropes from his arms and pulls her against him. More than anything else in the world Margie wants to sob and grab hold. Just to know that there’s someone out there to help her survive so that she doesn’t have to carry it all.

He holds her so tight she feels like she might snap, and she pushes against him because she needs to hear his heart and feel every inhalation. “Sally doesn’t know,” she says against his shoulder. “She doesn’t know what it takes to survive.”

He presses his lips against the crown of her head and whispers, “Hush,” into her ear with his hot breath. Around them night peepers scream to each other, tree frogs wailing for the darkness.

Margie doesn’t tie Calvin up but instead lets him help her inside, where they lie on the couch and she thinks that maybe there is such a thing as survival in this world.

When the two men charge into the cabin, Calvin’s the first to reach for the gun. Margie falls from the couch to her knees and wants to scream for Sally but presses her lips tight, hoping that maybe the strangers won’t know there’s someone else inside.

Calvin flips off the safety and raises the gun to his shoulder. The strangers are tall and broad, one of them with a tangled beard and the other with black hair slicked back behind his ears. It’s almost too easy to see the family resemblance to Calvin, and Margie goes numb as she notices.

“How quaint,” the bearded man says. He strolls inside as if there isn’t a shotgun pointed to his chest. He glances around— at the map on the table, at Margie’s face that’s still rubbed a little raw from Calvin’s unshaven cheeks.

He turns to face Calvin while the slick-headed man leans against the door frame. “Nicely done, little brother,” he says. “You checked there’s food enough for winter and the other guns are secured?”

Calvin nods, eyes downcast.

Margie chokes. Her body flames a deep burning red as shame churns inside. It feels like the moment her family was ambushed on the road, when time seemed to slow down and she noticed the most pointless details. Now she feels the grit of the hardwood floor biting into her knees and realizes how badly she needs to pee.

Slick Hair moves toward the loft. “Where’s the other one?”

Margie tries to block his way and she’s shoved to the ground, her head hitting the corner of a chair as she falls. She paws at the man, hooking her fingers in his clothes, but he bats her away, crushing her hand until she feels something pop and give.