The Summoning (9 page)

Ryan didn’t waste any time, he didn’t want Carol coming out of her bedroom or den to find out what had terrified her cat. He bounded up the stairs, but he tried to be as quiet as possible. He didn’t want to see Carol right now, he didn’t want to explain why he was home from work a few hours early, and he didn’t want her to see the fear on his face, hear it in his voice. And he definitely didn’t want to see Victor or Tom.

Ryan entered his room and locked the door behind him. He slipped the skeleton key back into his pocket and he stood there by the door as he scanned the room with his eyes. He looked at the bed, the door to the closet and the door to the bathroom, and then he looked at the bedroom window at the far side of the room. Nobody floating outside the window among the tree branches.

He stumbled over to the bed and plopped down. His legs felt weak, his mind was spinning. Why was he having these visions of this tortured man? And the man had called him Cutter, but that wasn’t his name – he was Ryan Freeman. He had a driver’s license with his picture on it. And why was he having these continuing nightmares? The red-haired man wanted to take him somewhere, show him something. Ryan felt like he knew what it might be, but it was something he didn’t want to make himself face.

Ryan jumped up from the bed and paced around the room. He didn’t want to be here in this house, he had only come back here because he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. Then he thought of Amber who he’d met at the pub. He grabbed his wallet out of his back pocket and plucked out the small piece of folded paper, the ticket that she’d written her phone number on. He unfolded it and traced the numbers with his finger.

After Ryan took a quick shower, he stood in the kitchen. Luckily no one was downstairs yet. A car was gone from the driveway, he had noticed that earlier when he’d pulled up. Maybe Carol was at the supermarket replenishing her supply of food – God knew that Ryan had eaten a lot of it since he’d been here. He hurried over to the phone on the wall and dialed Amber’s number.

He listened to the ringing on the other end. He really wanted to see her, he wanted to be with someone to take his mind off of the vision he’d seen today. But she could be busy. Maybe she had been just being polite when she’d written her number down, never really expecting him to call –

“Hello?” he heard Amber say.

“Hi, Amber,” Ryan said. “It’s Ryan,” he finished, but he would need to tell her more about himself, she wasn’t going to remember who he was. She probably got offers to go out on dates all the time. Who did he think he –

“I remember you,” she said.

Ryan couldn’t help smiling. “Okay. Yeah. I was thinking maybe we could get together and do something.”

“When?”

“Maybe tonight.”

A silence on the phone like she was thinking it over, but not for long. “Pick me up in a few hours,” she said and gave him her address. “Don’t come to the door,” she added. “Please. Just wait in your car until I come outside. I’ll see you pull up.”

To kill time, Ryan drove around town for two hours until it was time to pick up Amber. He had the layout of the town down pretty well by now from his few hours of driving up and down the streets (even though his travels around town weren’t jogging his memory in any way). The town of Edrington sprawled out from a center of the mom-and-pop businesses that lined the main county road that ran north and south. Another main county road ran east and west. Ryan didn’t have to drive too far out of town in any direction before he reached the woods.

Finally, it was time to pick up Amber.

He pulled up in front of her house which was located in a crummier section of Edrington. These were small houses squeezed in close together with cracked walkways splitting the unkempt yards, dirty siding and broken windows. There was an even worse neighborhood, a run-down trailer park, only a few blocks away.

Ryan parked on the street and waited. He didn’t shut off the engine. He stared at Amber’s house; it was small with a cozy yellow light spilling out of the front windows into the darkening world, but like all of the other houses up and down the street, it was in need of many repairs. He glanced at the driveway, but he didn’t see any vehicles parked there.

He wondered why Amber was so insistent that he not come to the front door. Was she ashamed of her house? Was she hiding something?

Minutes later, the front door opened and Amber hurried out of the house. She practically ran down the cracked walkway to his car. She jumped into his car and slammed the door shut. She gave him a weak smile as she stared at him with her big brown eyes that seemed so nervous. “I’m ready to go,” she said and seemed to be hurrying him along.

Ryan nodded, but he didn’t smile.

Amber tilted her head with a look of concern on her face. “Something wrong?” she asked.

Ryan shook his head no and tried to smile. “I just had a bad day at work.”

Amber nodded and sighed. “If you’re not feeling up to this, I understand. We could -”

“No,” Ryan interrupted and really smiled at her this time. “I’m feeling a lot better now.”

Hours later Ryan and Amber strolled down a concrete path that meandered through a park. The path circled a large pond. They both licked at ice cream cones that were beginning to melt in the warm night air.

“That’s your plan?” Ryan asked Amber. “You’re going to get out of this town.”

Amber nodded. “Yep. That’s my dream. To get away from this depressing hell-hole.”

Ryan glanced around at the idyllic park they were in. “It doesn’t seem so bad here.”

“Yeah, the perfect little town.”

Ryan licked at his dripping ice cream cone – it was delicious. “So, what’s so bad about this town?”

Amber walked beside him in silence for a moment and then she looked at Ryan. “You don’t know about this place? No one’s told you about it?”

“No,” Ryan answered. “What is it?”

They came to a picnic table and sat down. They had eaten the last of the ice cream cones. They sat close to each other. Amber shivered even though it wasn’t cold. Maybe it was the ice cream she’d just eaten, Ryan thought. But he believed it was her feelings about this town that sent the shiver through her body.

“Ten years ago there was a serial killer in this town.”

Ryan just nodded and let her continue.

“He killed at least thirteen people that they knew about. Who knows how many other bodies were never found. A person would go missing and then they would find the body somewhere in town, badly mutilated. A lot of people in this town were related to the victims, or knew the victims, or knew people who knew the victims. It’s like an invisible thread that runs through everyone in this town. You can’t go anywhere or talk to anyone without the memories of the murders coming up.”

Ryan stared at her.

She smiled at him. “Sorry, I know it’s a gruesome subject.”

“No, I want to hear about it. Nobody has told me anything about this.”

“It’s not something that we talk about too much.” She paused. “I really don’t like talking about it, either. I wish I hadn’t even brought it up.”

Ryan sat there as a silence blanketed them for a moment. But he didn’t want the conversation to end; he didn’t want to leave Amber just yet. He didn’t want to go back to Carol’s house.

“So they caught the killer?” Ryan asked.

“Yeah, sort of. He killed himself. No one knows why he killed himself, but nobody really cared why, everyone was just glad it was all over.”

They were quiet for another moment and Amber looked up at the night sky, at the stars twinkling against the darkness.

“I just want to get out of here,” she said. “I want to go someplace where I don’t know anyone.”

“When are you going to leave?”

She shrugged, shook her head slightly and looked at him. “I don’t know. I’m trying to save up the money right now, but it’s tough.”

Ryan nodded. “What are you going to do when you get to this other town where no one knows you?”

“I want to go to school to be a nurse. A nurse that works with kids. Maybe even the physically disabled. I want to help people who can’t help themselves.”

Ryan smiled at her. “That’s a noble endeavor.”

Amber studied him and her eyes narrowed even though she was still smiling. “Are you making fun of me?”

“No!” Ryan nearly shouted out, but he couldn’t help smiling which he felt made him seem guiltier. “No, I mean it. Most people don’t have dreams like yours. They dream of becoming rich and famous. They don’t dream of helping other people.”

Amber studied Ryan for a moment, and then she seemed content that he was telling the truth. “What about you? What are your dreams? Your plans?”

Ryan shrugged. “I don’t know. Just drifting right now. Taking it one day at a time.”

Amber reached her hand towards Ryan’s face. He didn’t back away as she touched the corner of his mouth and wiped at it with her thumb.

“You had a little bit of ice cream on your mouth,” she whispered to him.

They stared into each other’s eyes. Her touch, like the handshake at Charlie’s Pub when they first met, sent shivers of electricity through his body.

They leaned closer to each other.

And they kissed.

After Ryan dropped Amber off at her house (but she would not let him walk her to her door – she was adamant about that and Ryan wasn’t going to argue with her about it on their first date), he went back to Carol’s house. His car tires crunched on the gravel as he pulled up into the driveway and parked behind the other two cars.

He got out of his car and walked across the front lawn to the porch. He tried his best to sneak across the floorboards to the front door. He unlocked the front door and entered the house. It was dark inside the living room, but there was a light coming from down the hall where Carol’s bedroom and study were; it was a flickering light, like light from a candle. He closed the door and locked the deadbolt, trying to be quiet.

He snuck across the living room floor and peeked to his left at the dark dining room and archway to the kitchen beyond that. He glanced to his right to the hall and he could see where the light was coming from, a door was cracked open on the right hand side of the hall, and the soft, yellowish light flickered around the door’s edges. He paused for a moment, expecting the door to fly open and Carol to rush out into the hall.

But she didn’t. And he didn’t know why he’d had such a thought.

He shrugged it off and hurried up the stairs, being as quiet as he could.

In his bedroom he lay down on his bed after locking the door and checking on the stacks of cash underneath his bed – his nightly ritual. And checking the bedroom window, he couldn’t forget about that, it was another one of his nightly rituals. He had inspected it closely, making sure it was locked. He looked out the window, even though he didn’t like being that close to it, and watched the smaller tree branches and leaves rustling in the night breeze. There wasn’t much of a breeze outside, but still the leaves rustled and the sharp points of tiny branches scratched at the glass.

He lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, watching the flickering shadows dance across the plaster from the TV’s light. He thought of Amber, of her dreams of running away, of starting over.

He was tired, he knew that, but he couldn’t seem to sleep very long without slipping into the nightmares. He wondered how long a person could go without sleep. How long before their health suffered, before their mind snapped?

His eyes began to close.

Pitch black.

Ryan stood alone in the darkness and he saw that now-familiar reddish glow in the darkness and he saw the red-haired man emerge from the foggy light. And even though the thick gashes on each side of his face always made it seem like the man was smiling, Ryan knew that he wasn’t smiling, his mouth was as closed as it could be with the missing flesh around his mouth. His light eyes were cold and leveled right at Ryan.

“You need to see something,” the red-haired man said.

Ryan was about to resist, about to run, but he found himself …

… standing in front of a small wood house in the middle of the darkness, the house was very small – really just a shack. That same reddish glow that surrounded the red-haired man surrounded the small house. The wood siding was covered with green mildew and the roof sagged. The woods were crowded all around the house; heavy branches hung over the roof, some of the smaller branches hung down onto the roof and they scraped at the loose shingles every time a breeze blew. They made a scraping sound – much like the bedroom window, Ryan thought.

Ryan could feel the red-haired man right behind him in the darkness, slightly to his left but close enough that the man could’ve touched him if he wanted to. His body shivered at the thought of a touch from this man’s fingertips.

An instant later, Ryan was even closer to the house, right in front of one of the windows. He was close enough to see the cracked glass panes of the window, close enough to see the peeling paint on the siding, the wood rotting in many places. Some kind of insects burrowed through the wood. Spiders constructed webs in the corners of the window panes.

“Look inside,” the red-haired man whispered from right behind him.

“I don’t want to,” Ryan answered and he could hear a hitch in his voice, he could feel tears stinging his eyes. He could feel the weight of despair crushing him, of all hope gone. “I can’t go in there.”

“You don’t have a choice. You have to see it.”

Ryan turned to run, but the red-haired man grabbed Ryan’s arm, his slimy ruined fingers sunk into Ryan’s flesh. Ryan swore he could feel things slithering out of the man’s fingers, spreading out on his skin, they felt like tiny insects skittering across his flesh, some of them trying to burrow inside of him.

For a moment, Ryan couldn’t move as the tears fell from his eyes. He stared at the red-haired man. They were so close to each other, just like they had been in the dark utility room at the construction site. He could feel the freezing breath from the man’s ruined mouth on his face. He could smell the musty odor.