The Rascal (24 page)

In a corner of the room, tinged with a cold blue from the darkened sky, Ethan found what he was looking for: a sled, a pretty handcrafted item with blades of pink poetry. There was a large crack shooting diagonally downward (the sled had not escaped whatever fury had happened here), but it would do fine. Ethan grabbed it.

He warily carried Lana down the stairs and placed her body on the sled, which he had put at the foot of the front steps to the big house. He took hold of the fine rope on the sled and gave Chloe one last look of disbelief. Chloe kept the candle they had carried through the house lit and led the way with the book as Ethan followed her with the sled. He was able to keep it under control despite its occasional hastening ahead on the snow and the slope. He could see Chloe had a plan, but he was not ready to ask her about it just yet. What she did say was that they were not going back inside the cottage to be with Jeff. Not at first.

Chloe led Ethan around to the back of the cottage. It was difficult for Ethan not to at least look in on his brother. Everything in his life had been about Jeff. To ignore him with a buffer of miles was a hard enough task as it was, but to ignore him when he was just yards away was torment. He could almost hear his parents chiding him.

Chloe stopped. “Bring her here. Beside the well.”

“You’re not dumping her in there, are you?”

“Help me move the stone away,” she said, putting the book down on Lana’s chest. Jeff had covered the well again when he had heard news of the snowstorm. “I know what I’m doing.”

They pushed the stone off and felt a draft of damp air escape. Chloe picked up the book once more and, facing the cottage, held it as if she were going to sing a psalm from it. The book was so large she resembled a little girl in church with an oversized song book.

“I’ve got a new home for you, Elling,” Ethan heard her whisper. And then she began to sing. To chant the words in the text.

Briars come to life, from ink to air.

Bring home the spirit that travels there.

A new home of flesh and bone contain

Here to find and here to remain.

Four lines, but said in repetition and written in thorn.

Ethan wasn’t sure now what he believed. The hours had exposed to him the lies about what was real and what was not. The things seen and unseen. He saw the wind kick up and the snow whip and rise into it. If that was coincidence or the power of words, he now could not say for certain. The trees swayed and creaked with more ferocity. The screen door at the back of the cottage slammed angrily. And all the while, Chloe chanted her sticky words, each one said as if being shot from her mouth rather than spoken.

A new home of flesh and bone contain

Here to find and here to remain.

Ethan watched the dead actress on the ground. There was no movement but what the candlelight sitting on the cover stone pretended. If the song Chloe chanted was meant to do something, it had yet to happen. Or maybe there would be no sign of change. Maybe it
had
happened. Ethan bent lower to take a closer look at the actress. He could discern no change of state in the corpse of Lana Pruitt. He touched Lana’s cheek. There was hollowness there. No life. He shuddered in awe at the natural course of things.

“I don’t think it’s working, Chloe,” he said.

She gave a gasp and a bitter and faint cry. Ethan knew she was annoyed at his having interrupted her chanting. He looked up at her, still in his knelt position beside Lana, prepared for an argument. But he was met with a hard leather smack that felt like a brick upside his head. He staggered back and to the side. He had barely regained his balance, barely had time to see the odd glint in Chloe’s eyes when she hit him again with the book.

His balance was lost now and he tumbled into the well, saving himself from the fall by grabbing at Lana’s corpse with one hand and the edge of the well mouth with the other. Above him stood Chloe. She grinned down at him. A drip of saliva fell from her mouth to his hand. Her eyes twitched and pulsed in a manner that resembled breathing.

“Chloe! Help me!”

“Oh, I’ll be back for you,” she said. It wasn’t her. That voice wasn’t hers. It was pitched and uncontrolled, going too high. “I got a man to see about a course. A main course.” This was followed by a cackle without meter or rhythm.

She dropped the book in the snow beside the well and lurched unsteadily toward the cottage.

“Chloe! Come back! Leave him alone. Fuck!”

Ethan’s grip was weakening. His hand slipped from Lana and he desperately grabbed at the book in a plea that somehow the weight of the tome would offer him some leverage. But the book immediately began to slide toward him on the snow. His other hand was reaching its threshold of icy pain. Everything was daggers tearing into tender flesh. As the book swept past him down the well, Ethan gave all his strength to digging into the ground with the freed hand and pulling himself up. He yelled and swore for that strength. He kept Kelton and Bug in his mind. Once his shoulders were above the well mouth, he pushed up with his elbows and then was able to at last use Lana’s body as a means to pull himself out of the pit completely. Finally, he lay beside the dead actress, every breath a step closer to a cleared head.

Jeff’s cries of torment brought Ethan back to the situation at hand. His lungs were still in excruciating pain from his self-excavation from the well as he raced to the cottage through the impeding snow. He barreled through the coal-black kitchen. The cottage was screaming. Ethan was sure of it.
The place was actually screaming
.

Jeff was on the floor, writhing and crying out, as Chloe knelt over him.

As his eyes adjusted, Ethan saw the dark liquid that shocked the floor beside Jeff before he realized what Chloe was doing. He retched and cursed at the sight. Then he remembered the baseball bat, which still lay on the floor. Chloe turned to look at him even as he swung.

She howled as her already bloodied mouth cracked and was dislocated, gushing blood of her own. He heard it splatter the cottage. She landed across the room on her stomach.

Jeff was crying for Ethan. His words were obstructed by the pain as he cradled his bloodied hand, now severed of two fingers. His screams were incoherent babblings. Ethan’s natural urge was to see to him, but Chloe was still alert on the floor. He could see her form moving. Ethan grabbed her by the ankles and dragged her through the kitchen to the back door against her flailing arms and wretched screams of anger. She reached for furniture, trying to get an upper hand, but Ethan’s anger was racing and boiling hot. Chloe left a thick stream of dark blood in her wake.

Ethan gave Chloe a final pull out the kitchen door and went to grab her by the collar. She kicked him fiercely and he landed a few feet away. His fear was that Chloe would make for Jeff again, but instead, she was on top of him, raging and eyes ablaze with someone else’s soul. Her dislocated jaw quivered and dripped specks of blood on him even as she tried to bite him. He defended himself from her blows, but the blood—both hers and Jeff’s—dotted his face and the surrounding nighttime snowscape.

In the scuffle, something fell from her mouth and hit Ethan in the face. Something blood-soaked and wet. A ring finger.

Ethan retched and threw Chloe off of him. He hardly recognized the woman he saw now. In such a short span of minutes, she had become something else altogether. Something he would never have agreed to believe in.

Ethan wasted no time. He rose and ran at Chloe, who held her jaw as she rose to meet him. For an instant, for just a moment, Ethan saw the woman she truly was peering at him from behind possessed eyes. She was horrified. She was pleading and trapped. The expression made him pause just long enough to come to a realization. In that moment of connection, he and Chloe came to an understanding about what needed to be done. The spirit must remain in its new home.

He grabbed her by the collar, and Chloe was once again replaced by the presence of another more dominant soul in her body. The rage emerged like a geyser. Chloe began choking Ethan as he pushed her near the well. Every step he grew weaker from the lack of oxygen, but no less determined. She spun him around so that it was he whose back was to the well. Her grin was supreme and caked with blood and flesh. He was losing and she knew it.

In his spin, Ethan saw figures around them in the woods. People he had never seen before were watching. He knew who they were without explanation. This was Wicker. The townsfolk. They had no intention of helping him. They had climbed the hill, black masses struggling against the white snow, with the intention of seeing a tragedy.

With a final fit of self-preservation, Ethan hit Chloe in the jaw. The monster in her screamed and loosened her grip. At last Ethan was able to right himself, but as he did so, his heels backed up into the body of the dead actress.

Now he understood. Now he was truly unbalanced. As he fell backward, he reached out for Chloe. The look of surprise on her hijacked face was countered by the one of sadness in her eyes. Ethan and Chloe fell down, heads cracking against stone until they lay with their necks broken at the bottom of the well.

Two lifeless bodies. One trapped soul. The rest was quiet.

***

The cottage was in pieces and hemorrhaging. The blood was in a drying puddle on the living room floor and in a great long swath through the kitchen. A distinct sign, easily discernible without mumbled interpretation. Jeff followed it once he had gotten his bearings, holding his ruined hand beneath his other arm and close to his rib cage. He had passed out and slept undisturbed where Ethan had left him on the floor, and now it was morning again. The sun had risen, tricking the world into thinking all was good. All was just fine.

Jeff walked slowly, unassured. He was severely weakened by illness and the fight. He hacked and coughed, he stumbled and groaned. If he had caught sight of himself in a mirror, he wouldn’t have known who it was. He had been scarred by the scratches and his color was that of sea foam. The itching had ceased completely, though, and that was how he knew to come out of the cottage.

The snow was splattered more pink than red now. Evidence of frenzied steps and sliding falls offered a clearing for him to walk. Jeff’s socked feet were numb to the cold that was biting them. In fact, the world was numb and could not but be heard as whispers even if it was blaring. The truth of things was seeping in.

At the well lay the body of the actress. She was as white as porcelain. Even in death, her face now content, Jeff had no feeling for her one way or the other. He looked past her, into the well mouth, but that sense of curiosity he had first experienced when he and Chloe had moved to Bad Luck Hill was no more. There was nothing.

With strained effort, he sat on the edge of the well, his legs hanging over into the earth and stone hole. He was alone, and “alone” felt like numbness. Jeff had never been alone in his life. There had always been someone there. His parents. Ethan. Chloe. Someone to count the days with. Someone to take care of him. To tell him he was the Golden Boy.

Alone. The word echoed in silent loops in his mind and then once aloud as he called it down the well mouth. As his voice vanished into the stone, Jeff thought he heard a bumping, a knocking about, echoing back up from down below. Like something was trapped there and feverishly trying to escape. Jeff stared into the lonely darkness and it returned the gaze. And he began to cry.

Family Plot

Wicker loved to talk. Bad Luck Hill was the town’s primary source of gossip and shock. Anything that was of any worth in conversation had always centered around Bad Luck Hill. It brought infamy to the town, which brought gawkers, which fed the economy. Rumors came down from the hill like a mudslide and Wicker was ready for them. The townsfolk had been waiting for the first whisper of fresh rumors since the new cottage owners had arrived in the fall. Wicker licked its chops all the way through the storm, and the meal they were greeted with would last them for years.

The actress was gone, apparently having moved on. Most assumed she had finally grown tired of everything and left. Only a few whispered otherwise.

She had had an affair with the young man and was forced to leave.

No. She had killed the young woman and buried her in the garden. That would explain why Chloe hadn’t been seen in town after the storm had passed.

No. She had thrown herself off the cliff. After all, a body was never found.

Whatever happened, it was for the best. Wicker had grown tired of the actress. New blood was needed.

The police finally made it up Bad Luck Hill once the ice and snow began to melt. They found only Jeff at the cottage. He was sitting on the porch, his hand wrapped in thick layers of gauze and tape. His face, neck, and arms were gouged and scabbing. Yet he was more rested now than he had been in some time.

“Everything’s fine,” he told them after a round of pleasantries where the deputy never met his eyes. “The power is finally back on. I did hurt my hand, though, chopping up some firewood.”

“Looks like you did more than hurt it, Mr. Cane. Maybe you should come into town and see the doc.” A suggestion or an order?

“Maybe I will sometime.”

“How’s your wife? Is she doing okay?”

“I don’t know. She left me. Left me high and dry.” The words were emotionless, almost as if a waste of breath.