Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner (26 page)

Yeah, the trips going
fine. I just stopped because I’m tired. There wasn’t a tornado that
lifted me into the sky. I didn’t come to with my car idling on the
interstate.

Sully took a few extra minutes to calm
himself a little more. Then he made the call. Luckily, Anna didn’t
pick up the phone. He left a short message.

#

Alone in the mist. But this time he
can breathe. And he can move around. He wants to meet them, to know
who they are, to know what they want and why they keep coming to
him. But where have they gone? Where are the coma men?

#

Sully drove through Little Axe around
noon on Saturday. He was relieved to be on the homestretch. All
morning, he had been anxious that the events of the previous night
would repeat themselves. But the rest of the trip had been madness
free. It hadn’t even rained again.

It was only a mile to Perry Acres, the
housing addition outside of town. His house was not actually part
of the addition, but since it was only a small wheat field away,
people often assumed that it was. He saw Anna’s Neon parked in the
driveway. He wondered if she was still in her writing world, since
he still hadn’t been able to contact her.

Sully’s house had been built by the
farmer who lived in it years ago. The construction was sturdy but
the layout strange. It was hard to know where the main entrance was
intended to be. The front of the house had a porch and a door. But
the side of the house, which ran along the driveway, had a sidewalk
leading up to a smaller porch and then a foyer. This was where
Sully liked to enter, and most guests seemed to naturally go
there.

From the foyer, Sully entered the
kitchen. From there, he looked into the dining room and saw Anna’s
laptop on the table. He smiled, remembering how he had pictured it
there the night before. He knew she must have just finished typing,
because she had not shut it off.

Or maybe she wasn’t done. Maybe she
had left the room briefly, and when she came back, he would be a
distraction to her.

Off the dining room, at the front of
the house, was what Sully thought was intended to be the living
room, this being where the front entrance led to. Sully used it as
a study. He would often go there to grade papers. Anna often went
there to write in solitude if Sully and Monica were
home.

Anna probably knew that he was home by
now. He figured he could go into the study and wait while she
finished up. Then she would come to him when she was ready. He had
his hand on the doorknob, when he heard Anna’s alluring
voice.

“Sully.”

Next to the study, separated from it
by glass doors, was Monica’s room. Next to that, separated by a
wall, was his and Anna’s room. That was where he thought Anna’s
voice had come from.

En route to their bedroom was the
strangest thing about his home. It was just this room in the middle
of the house. Sully had made it into the living room when he made
the other room into a study. The middle room might as well not have
been there as Sully crossed it on his way to his waiting
girlfriend.

He found her sitting in a chair
against the wall. With one hand, she held a paperback a few inches
above her face. A finger from her other hand was inside her open
mouth, gently caressing her tongue. Sully looked at her from top to
bottom as she pretended that she didn’t see him there.

She was wearing a gray T-shirt but
nothing else. The way she was sitting, slightly propped, with her
legs spread, he could see everything between her legs.
Simultaneously, his mouth watered and his penis swelled. Then Anna
dropped the hand from her mouth down. Without looking up from the
book, she ran her fingers through the small patch of curly hairs
and into the pink below.

“What ya reading there, baby?” Sully
asked.

“Some book on cannibalism,” Anna
responded lackadaisically. Then, in the same low-key tone, she
said, “And now I’m going to eat you, my sweet, sweet
Sully.”

There were a few seconds of pause,
something Sully thought a part of this cool horror writer’s way of
building tension, and then abruptly, Anna tossed the paperback
aside. She jumped up and then jumped into him. She took him down to
the floor. As she so often did, she ravished him.

#

Afterward, they lay naked on the
floor, Sully flat on his back, Anna curled into him. Relaxed and
satisfied, Sully laughed.

“What’s so funny?” Anna asked, making
little circles on his chest with her fingers.

“You’ve got to be the most aggressive
woman in the world.”

Anna sat up. “Does that bother you?”
she asked, the look on her face confident.

Again, Sully laughed. Before he had
met Anna, he didn’t know women were capable of having sex like her.
He doubted most men could match her intensity. And it didn’t seem
to be leveling off as they spent more time together.

“No. I can’t say that it
does.”

Anna smiled and lay back down beside
him, obviously not oblivious to the complement she had just
received.

“Did you get my messages?” he
asked.

Anna hesitated and then answered, “You
know, it’s the funniest thing. I was at the table writing last
night, and it was going pretty well. I heard your message and
figured I’d call you later. Then, the next thing I knew, I was
sleepy. And not just get-ready-for-bed sleepy. More like,
I-wonder-if-I-can-even-make-it-to-the-bed, dog tired. I barely
remember walking back to the bedroom and getting undressed. I
didn’t even hear the phone ring the second time. I must have slept
right through it.”

Almost on cue, the phone beside the
bed rang out. It was an older model that Sully kept around simply
because he figured nobody could ever sleep through its blaring
ring. A little astonished by Anna’s story, he got off the floor. He
answered the phone on the third ring.

“Hello.”

“Sully,” his mother’s voice said
abruptly. “Did you just get home?”

“Yeah, a little while ago.
Why?”

He heard his mother moan. Then her
voice croaked as she said, “Something bad has happened.”

“What Mom? What is it?”

“Ohhhhh!” his mom cried.

Anna came up to him. “What Sully?
What’s wrong? Is Monica okay?”

Monica? Yes, she had to be okay. He
would have been notified before his mother if something had
happened to Monica. Faith would have called him first. Faith would
never call his mother, scared to death to speak to a woman who
hated her.

“It’s one of your students,” his
mother finally said.

#

The last time anyone saw Caitlin Barr
alive was Friday night around 10:55PM. She had attended a party for
the Little Axe football team, which had just won its first game of
the season. She had left alone, rushing home to make her eleven
o’clock curfew. She never made it.

The official report from the Sheriff’s
Department was that something inside the cabin of her car must have
ignited. Then, trying to escape, Caitlin opened her front door,
allowing in a rush of oxygen that fed the flame, causing it to
engulf her. They found her remains about a half-mile from her
parents’ farm.

The next two days of school were
cancelled. Services were held on Tuesday.

Sully had been raised in Little Axe.
The road to the cemetery ran by the high school to the outskirts of
town. Many times he had seen the processions drive by. The Little
Axe cemetery, in his mind, had always been a place for two types of
people, the really old, and the occasional baby that didn’t make
it. Those in between simply were not allowed. But now, the rule had
been broken.

And what a perfect fucking day for a
funeral Tuesday was. The sky was clear and the wind nonexistent.
Sounds rang out with clarity. Images were clean and crisp. A town
stood in shock as a coffin containing the charred remains of a
seventeen-year-old senior at Little Axe High was lifted onto a
platform. There were sounds of people crying, but they were drowned
out when Caitlin’s mother, who had been silent in her catatonic
state, erupted.

The fifty-year-old housewife, and once
proud mother of one child, rushed up to the platform, screaming,
“No! No!”

Pallbearers, Mark Walker and Craig
Norris, two of Caitlin’s former classmates, caught Mrs. Barr’s
leaning body before she could slip into the open grave. They held
her body at an angle over the large hole in the ground, as the
woman clad in a black dress flailed her arms about the large sky
blue coffin that contained her favorite person in the
world.

The two pallbearers looked around in
fear and confusion, until Caitlin’s father came to their
assistance. As Mr. Barr dragged his resisting wife away, she
screamed, “Don’t put her down there! She’s just a baby! Don’t take
her away from me, please!”

Up to then, Sully’s mind had been on
the lost girl and her classmates, whom he would have to face the
next day. At that point, seeing the child’s mother become the most
desperate, pathetic creature he had ever seen, seeing her father’s
hollow expression, he began thinking of his own daughter, who was
now so many miles away.

Anna was on one side of him and his
mother on the other, both clinging to him. He pulled them both
closer and pushed the thoughts away.

#

Sully wanted to go home after the
funeral. But there was a sense of urgency in her voice when his
mother asked if they would ride to Elk City with them for dinner.
He felt pangs of guilt, realizing that he had not considered what
the day must have been like for her. He doubted there was anyone in
town whom could identify with the feelings of Mrs. Barr more than
his mother, having once almost lost her only child.

Wind for him, though. Wind instead of
fire.

He rode in the backseat of his
parent’s Grand Marquis, one hand in Anna’s beside him, the other
stretched over the front seat to his mother. As his father drove
silently, his mother alternated between spells of quiet tears and
outright bawling, as Anna sat there with a blank expression on her
face, possibly with her novel in her head, Sully thought. He
wondered how much this would disrupt her. She told him before that
the initial stages of writing a novel were always the most
difficult. She had gotten no work done since he had come home from
dropping off Monica, constantly with him, consoling him, helping
him console others. He thought she would recover fast, as soon as
she picked up the pen again. But he worried that he thought her too
strong. He worried about taking that strength for granted. In his
mind, he resolved that he would insist she work tomorrow. But part
of him, the part that clung to the belief that Anna was infinitely
strong, knew that his assertions would be in vain. Anna would make
up her own mind.

A while later, they sat inside the
steakhouse. Across from him, Sully’s dad was reading a newspaper,
as he ate his steak and baked potato. In the next seat was Sully’s
mother, who was ignoring the sandwich she had ordered, staring off
at the wall, the look on her face now anger, a red pout with
bloodshot eyes. Beside Sully, Anna picked through a soup and salad.
A vegetarian, she did this habitually, always checking for little
pieces of meat that might have accidentally made it into her food,
like one piece of flesh would cause her a deadly allergic reaction.
He knew she hated being in the steakhouse at all, the scent of meat
cooking so prominent, but for the sake of Sully and his parents,
she tolerated it.

Tonight, Sully was a vegetarian too.
The imagined image of Caitlin’s burnt corpse made the thought of
cooked meat repulsive to him.

His mother’s mood seemed to dictate
the atmosphere. They ate in silence. It wasn’t until they were in
the car, on the way back to Little Axe, that his mother spoke
up.

“I think Monica should be here,” she
said in a coarse tone.

In the backseat, Sully and Anna looked
at each other. There were three people in the car who were not shy
about telling Gladys Jacobson that she needed to mind her own
business. Sully wouldn’t do it tonight. By the sympathetic look on
Anna’s face, she wouldn’t do it either. Horace Jacobson, Good Old
Dad, a usually quiet man by nature, but not a man to take shit from
anybody, had no problem sticking it to his forlorn wife.

“Don’t start, Gladys. Sully’s got
plenty on his mind without you turning your mouth on
him.”

Sully looked from Anna to his mother.
Her face was beet red, and her eyes were bulging. It looked as if
her scowl could set the man on fire. She spoke in a hissing
whisper. “I just don’t understand why that woman should ever be
allowed to see my granddaughter again.”

His father started to speak but was
cut off.

“She abandoned her daughter,” his
mother said in a loud, self-righteous voice. “And as parents, the
worst of all sins, even worse than murder, is to abandon one of our
children. Never, ever, should we give up on them.”

Sully felt Anna’s claws sink into his
forearm. He looked and saw that her mouth had fallen agape and
realized that she knew what he knew. They had both heard his
parents fight before. It was usually not that big a deal, as
neither one was really that hurtful to the other. But tonight, in
the last thing that she had said, Gladys Jacobson was not just
talking to her husband. She was talking about him.