The Rascal (18 page)

His disorientation was slowly passing. He was outside the cottage by the old barn, lying on a large, flat boulder that had apparently been used to cover the well. He couldn’t have been out there for too long. There were still patches of his underside that had not been dampened by the snow, and his skin was a blushing rose rather than a blistering red.

Ethan stood and looked around him, his mouth agape, his eyes adjusting. He noticed his were the only tracks in the snow, though he couldn’t remember stepping outside the kitchen door at all. He couldn’t remember anything past looking out the kitchen window. There had been a boy, hadn’t there? A boy who resembled…

Jeff!

The cottage door was wide open as Ethan stumbled back inside. There
had
been a boy. He had been as clear as day, though now his features were becoming blurred in Ethan’s memory. The boy began to resemble Jeff less and less. And where were the boy’s tracks? There were only Ethan’s.

A wheezing and coughing came from the couch. Jeff was turning colors, as if choking on something. Ethan leapt to his brother’s aid, ready to dislodge whatever was strangling him even as he himself was still shaking off what had happened to him. Jeff was turning a pale blue as Ethan lifted him for the Heimlich maneuver. Ethan was panicked and sweaty as Jeff’s chokes began to turn into dying gasps.

“Come on, Jeffy,” he said, a sob welling up in him. “Don’t do this.” A cold sticky sweat covered him like marsh humidity.

Suddenly, Jeff inhaled, his mouth wide, and he let loose a slight scream. He was breathing again, though his eyes were still shut to the world. Ethan watched as his brother’s color returned. Only then did he allow the sob that had been accumulating in his lungs escape. It nearly deflated him as he slumped onto the couch beside Jeff.

The coincidence of him waking up in the snow and his brother nearly choking to death was too much for him. What had he seen, and more importantly, why had he gone outside after it? He didn’t want to think about it. It was much easier to believe that Chloe was insane. He put the heels of his hands to his eyes and rubbed.

Jeff began mumbling in his sleep. They were incoherent strings of words for the most part, except once. Jeff, in a voice as clear and bright as sobriety, said, “No! You can’t come in.”

Ethan leaned in closer to hear. “What, Jeff? What are you saying?”

“No!” Jeff screamed.

The force of the scream and the surprise with which it took Ethan threw him off the couch to the floor. He gathered himself again, standing slowly while instinctively brushing his pant legs for creases. Then, once more, he saw the boy. The one from the kitchen window. The boy was fitted into a corner the room and he was staring daggers at Ethan. Ethan blinked and the boy was gone. His skin crawled with ice as he stared into the now-empty corner. The boy didn’t look a thing like Jeff. His eyes were much, much too wide, and that grin… There was nothing friendly about that grin. It was the grin of a starving man. Jeff had never hungered for anything. No one in the world could have ever hungered like
that
.

***

Chloe was startled and relieved when a signal finally made it through and Ethan answered his cell phone. She heard the covered panic in his own voice as well as if she had caught him in the middle of something or thrown him off a thought.

“Chloe?” he answered after swallowing back. He had never sounded pleased to hear Chloe’s voice. Not until that moment.

“Ethan! Oh thank God! I can’t get the car started. I’m sitting here and I can’t—Ethan? Are you still there?” She shouted as if Ethan were on the other side of a very crowded room. There was no point in whispering. The black mass knew she was in the car.

“I’m here! I’m here! Listen…” There was a long pause. Chloe waited and was about to say something when he spoke again. “I saw something,” he said. “Someone… in the room. I don’t know who it was…”

Chloe was still watching out her window at the form by the tree. It hadn’t moved and she was contemplating escape. The hairs on her arms and neck stood on end.

“We’ll talk about it when I get back. Your car is shot and I can’t walk to town. I’d freeze to death before I ever got there—Ethan?”

“Jeff was awake for a bit. He woke screaming.”

Chloe closed her eyes to hold back tears. When she opened them, the figure behind the trees had vanished. Her heart quickened and she gasped.

“Ethan,” she whispered. But even as she did so, she heard from his end a ruckus of sudden things: The door bursting open. A wind sweeping past. Ethan dropping the phone and yelling in fright.

“
Jesus
—!” he screamed, and then the signal was lost.

Chloe sat motionless with the phone to her ear. Her eyes were fixed on the pine tree where the figure had stood, her heart felt ready to leap from her chest, and her voice failed her as it petrified and lodged in her throat. She was going to die. They were all going to die.

***

Lana could tell by the way he was looking at her that the man recognized her from her films. She could always sift out the film fans. There was an obsessive quality about their stares. Almost hungry. Reminiscent of the eyes of Wicker. Whoever this kneeling young man was next to Jeff, he was a fan.

She quickly closed the door behind her as a tourniquet to the wind. She had been standing outside in the scathing cold for a while, watching the cottage, working up the courage or guile to enter. If Chloe and Jeff were in trouble, which she was certain of, there was nothing else she could do but come face to face with her own dread. Something good needed to come from this place and its ferocious history. So even as she felt a fever rising in her from the indifferent care of her own body, she stormed into the cottage so that Jeff might recover.

Ethan stood, looking unsure as to how to respond. “He’s sick” was all he could manage. His face was a confused mess of emotions: grief, angst, guilt, and finally, awe.

Lana studied the dimly lit cottage, a place her daughter had loved and Michael had labored on but was foreign to her. A place from the outside that she saw as nothing more than a babysitter, then a nightmare. Every wall and piece of furniture stared at her, judged her and sneered. She felt the nightmare. She knew it was observing her. In her dreams, the nightmare took the image of a googly-eyed boy sometimes. Only eyes as big as his could see all that she had done and all that she hadn’t. She almost apologized to the cottage, but stiffened up. This was not the place to fall into distraction. There was a fan present.

“Who are you?” she asked Ethan as she knelt beside Jeff and felt his forehead. She realized she looked a mess. Her bird’s nest of hair hadn’t been brushed but was pulled back by a limp barrette. Her eyes sat atop swollen bags of flesh.

“Ethan. I’m his brother. You’re the actress?” His hands clenched and unclenched in nervous excitement.

She gave him an oblique glance of bother. “I was.”

Jeff was burning up. She inspected the scratches on his face and arms.

“We don’t know why he’s doing it. I’ve put salve on it, but…”

“Little good it will do him. His problem is deeper.”

“You know what’s wrong with him?”

“I’ve seen it before.” She stood, her eyes still on Jeff. “There’s nothing you can do for him. Not if you can’t get him away from here.”

“From the cottage? What’s the place have to do with it?”

“Don’t be stupid.”

Ethan was struck by the words as if Lana had physically assaulted him.

“He’s fighting on the inside,” she said.

“But we can’t get off the hill. There’s nothing we can do? Nothing at all?”

Lana finally gave him her full attention. “There may be one thing. But I’ll have to go back up to the big house. There’s a book there that may offer a solution.”

“A book?” Ethan was incredulous. Lana saw his admiration for her disappear as clearly as if he had spat it out on her.

She couldn’t believe she was going to do it herself. She had sworn off the book after the incident with Chloe, but she had to reach beyond that fear. Reach beyond and into another world. A world she herself had not believed in until recent years.

“Keep doing what you’ve been doing,” she said. “Keep him comfortable. I’ll do what I can. And let’s hope that he keeps fighting.”

“Wait!” Ethan pleaded.

But she was already outside again, and with the shutting of the door, she knew something else had come with her. She stood still on the porch momentarily, steadying herself by the post. “You’re coming too, then?” she said aloud.

Only the wind answered.

She swallowed. “So be it.”

Over the years, Lana had pieced together an interpretation of the events that had happened in her absence from Bad Luck Hill that mirrored what had actually occurred almost perfectly. Clues had come to her in dreams and memories. She had studied the past, those last few weeks before she left to make movies, and had seen, in her studies and memories, things she had not noticed at the time they were actually happening. The scratches on Michael’s arms. The way he stared into the well, ignoring Rebecca as she played. The way Rebecca carried on conversations with the air. The way she referred to an imaginary friend as “the rascal” and said he wanted her to do mean things. And then there was the feeling in Lana’s own gut that told her to stay away from the cottage. At all cost, stay away. To go in would be tantamount to an invitation. Why hadn’t she relayed this feeling to Michael or Rebecca? The guilt was enormous.

So, as she walked back to the big house, an invisible companion near her breathed malevolence into the wind and her interpretation of events played like a film in her mind:

Michael must have been staring down the well again, scratching at his arm. That’s the only way Rebecca could have wandered back to the big house without him knowing. She would have asked, of course, but he wouldn’t have heard her. His mind was falling into the dark. If he had heard her, he would have certainly gone with her. He adored the girl.

Lana saw her daughter skipping up the hill, singing as little girls in horror films do right before tragedy befalls them. Before they’re drowned by monsters. Lana saw Rebecca waving from atop the widow’s walk at Michael, trying to get his attention. Yelling for him in play. His back was still to her, shoulders hunched as he continued staring down, down, down.

It was her scream that must have woken him from the dark. He could have done nothing to save her from the fall. Her body lay limp and broken on the lawn. If he ran fast enough, maybe he could save something of her. Keep her last breath from escaping. But the reality of the moment took hold of him as he cradled her in his arms.

And yet there was movement in her body. It jerked and her eyes sprang open. This Lana had seen in a nightmare. Rebecca’s eyes were rolled back in her head, yet she turned to look at Michael. He was horrified by what he saw. She smiled, but it was unlike any smile she had given before. It was too wide of a smile. It distorted her delicate features to that of a growling bobcat.

At once, Michael dropped her body and stood, backing away. “Don’t do this!” he shouted. “Leave her!”

But the small broken and twisted body of the girl stood as well, the grin intact and the mouth spilling bile and blood. Slowly, she began to lurch toward her father. Each step was a struggle. Her ankles rolled and the dying nerves in her arms caused them to twitch and spasm. Her head pitched back and forth, side to side, on her broken neck and a giggle came from her throat of such drunken greed that it was predatory. Michael could not move.

She threw her body at him as if pitched from the earth, her bobcat mouth wide. He pulled back and then struck out, leveling her. She struggled to stand again and began to sob. He knew it was not his little girl who now cried before him, but the sobs still broke his heart.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

Beyond his better judgment, he reached out for her. She napped like a vicious canine, nearly taking a finger. She moved on him faster now, until she had him cornered on the cliff. There was nothing for him to do but play the game out. This thing didn’t want the body of a dead little girl. It wanted
his
body. With Rebecca’s corpse, it only wanted to play.

Rebecca jumped at him, and he grabbed her little, broken arms, swinging her around until he lost his balance. Stumbling back from a near fall to the rocks below, he let go of Rebecca’s arms and saw her body once again go limp as she fell. It lay broken for a second time on the shore. Broken, as was his mind as he cried out for her.

It was almost immediately that the itching began again. The burrowing.

“She fell,” Michael had told Lana over the phone.

That’s how Lana had found out her little girl had died. She did not break down weeping, as the scene required, but matter-of-factly gathered what information she could from the broken man on the other end of the line. It was like taking directions to some place new. She then booked a flight home and traveled there in near silence.

She half expected Michael to be standing there beneath the big house, beside the small casket that held Rebecca. Strangely, she was hoping for it. But the girl had been buried in the garden out back. Their service was small. Lana never responded to inquiries from Hollywood friends about her daughter’s death. It took no time at all for her to completely cut from her life every acquaintance she had ever made.