Chapter 17 #2
The upper floor felt nearly as narrow as the staircase, as a sudden wave of newfound claustrophobia—which was frankly long overdue for Nora—crept its way up her spine.
She opened the first closed door she could reach and stepped inside.
The walls were bare, but powder-blue wallpaper still winked out from under years of discoloration.
Against one formerly blue wall at the back of the room sat an old-fashioned metal crib and a small bed, a large dusty birdcage between them.
Nora took a step inside, her utter bafflement clouding her logical inclination to avoid creepy old nurseries.
Was this where Phil grew up? The origin of whatever evil he currently harbored?
Or did he have children? But why would he need to keep that a secret?
Well, Nora considered, there weren’t any women of childbearing age in town, at least not that he wasn’t directly related to.
Could he have kidnapped someone? That wasn’t much of a leap from murder.
Maybe it was someone Charlie knew somehow.
Nora’s head was spinning. Even with her renowned worst-case-scenario-concocting habits, she was starting to sound crazy to herself. She was in over her head here.
She turned to leave the room, when the floor creaked from somewhere down the hall.
Nora froze. It was the house settling. That’s what Bubbie would always say when Nora would go diving into her bed in the middle of the night, crying about monsters or intruders or really big raccoons.
Houses settled, especially old ones. Though why their settling had to be so unsettling never quite made sense to Nora, even when she eventually grew up and learned how house foundations worked.
Another creak. Either this house was really making itself comfortable or there was someone else in it with her.
Nora had seen Phil pass her outside. He was heading back the way she’d come, out of the forest and into town.
No, this was someone else. Someone walking straight towards her.
Beads of sweat burst onto Nora’s brow, her cheeks flushing red as blood surged into her head, presumably to pick up the slack from her brain, which had just hung a little “out of order” sign outside her prefrontal cortex.
Her eyes darted around the room. Next to the crib was a small closet, as narrow and foreboding as everything else in this house.
Without time for a second thought, she dove for the closet door and slipped inside.
The footsteps grew louder, closer. Nora begged her lungs to inhale more quietly, but they were too busy panting in fear to notice.
The door to the nursery groaned as it opened even wider than Nora had originally pried it.
The creaking approached her, slowly, rhythmically.
The footsteps sounded heavy, and as they neared, Nora heard a small dragging sound accompanying them.
She clapped a hand over her mouth and nose.
Asphyxiation statistics buzzed around her, but she swatted them away with the assurance that whatever was on the other side of that closet door would be worse.
With a squeak of protest, the closet door inched back, slowly, achingly slowly, until the room reappeared in front of Nora, only this time she wasn’t alone.
The person attached to the footsteps, the one who’d opened the closet door, stood there towering beside the crib, spine twisting into a hunch, a shock of stiff white hair above sunken eyes so dark they were nearly black, reflecting no light.
Nora screamed. No, Nora tried to scream, but she quickly realized the sound wouldn’t come, so she did the next most reasonable thing.
Nora ran. Back down the stairs, back through the kitchen, back out the door that was still mercifully open, and back into the woods, which were now being pelted by heavy drops that hit hard with the force of a howling wind.
Nora didn’t care. She didn’t care about the rain or the wind or how badly her lungs stung from running and from the scream that never came.
All she cared about was getting as far away from the white phantom in that secret stone house in the woods as her slippery feet would take her.
* * *
Nora tumbled through the front door of the little red house with as much force and as little intention as a candy wrapper on the wind, the gust behind her made of sheer panic.
She ran her wild eyes over the living room, half expecting to find Phil there again, another deadly trick up his sleeve.
Instead she saw only Ruby and Richard sipping coffee on the couch, their serene little vignette promptly shattered by Nora’s impressively dramatic entrance.
Mud caked the hem of her pants; her brown hair sprang from the hair elastic at her nape; her eyes were wide and feral.
“There’s someone in the woods,” she said, her voice foreign to her own ears, the strain making it high and tight.
Ruby placed her mug on the coffee table and looked to Richard, but Nora was having none of it.
“No. No. No more lies. There’s someone in that house in the woods.
Who is it? Is it someone evil? Someone violent?
Someone who eats faces as a hobby? What the hell is going on? ”
Ruby somehow shrank despite her already-tiny stature, her proud shoulders rounding. “I suppose we’d best tell her,” she said to Richard.
“About time,” he responded. “Why don’t you have a seat, Nora?”
She shook her head. Her nerves were so shot she already half felt like she was sitting, and her feet were too rooted to the floor for her to attempt the real thing.
“Very well,” Richard said. “There is someone out in the woods, yes. The same someone who’s always been there.”
Nora squeezed her temples. “I don’t get it. You said your dad built that place, right? But he must be, like…” She squinted at her grandfather and placed his age somewhere towards the second half of his eighties. “Over a century old.”
Richard nodded. “One hundred and twenty-seven.”
“I don’t…”
Richard smiled at her, though whether in pity or apology she couldn’t tell.
“Papa will know you’re here by now, no doubt. I’m sure he was thrilled to see you, though I’m sorry he gave you a fright.”
“You’re trying to tell me that your dad is over a hundred and twenty and lives in the woods alone?”
“Things work differently here in Virgo Bay, dear,” Ruby said. “I told you this is a special town.”
Nora crossed her arms over her chest, as much in impatience as it was a means to steady herself. Her grandfather took a heavy inhale.
“We lost my mother when I was very young,” said Richard.
“Too young. You, of course, understand that pain. My papa, he never really healed from that loss. He was all alone in the world with three broken children to raise in a heartless city. But there are dangers in the city, and Papa couldn’t bear the thought of losing us too, so he decided to move us somewhere safe.
Though when he went out in search of some land to settle on, he didn’t expect to find this place. ”
“You know a thing or two about Death given your line of work,” said Ruby. “Which means you know how little any of us really knows about it.”
“Your grandma tells me you followed in her footsteps,” Richard added.
“What Oliver, Richard’s father, found when he came here,” Ruby continued, “was one of Death’s Blind Spots.”
At this Nora finally sat down, her legs unable to hold her up with the added weight of all she was hearing.
She’d heard of Blind Spots before, as rumors and conspiracy theories passed around the office, but neither she nor anyone else really gave them any credence.
The idea that there were places on earth that Death couldn’t reach seemed like wishful nonsense.
But if that man in the woods really was the father of an octogenarian, it definitely forced Nora to reconsider everything she thought she knew about life, and death, and anything in between.
“You mean,” she tried, then choked on a wave of emotion, then tried again. “You mean no one can die here?”
For someone who had spent all her life running, fearing, learning about, and running farther from Death, the very premise flooded her with more emotion than she knew what to do with. She felt like she needed a whole second body just to process the influx of tears and tension and relief and anger.
“It’s not quite that simple,” said Ruby.
“Death can’t see us to claim us, so we’ll never get sick or die of old age as long as we remain within the borders of Virgo Bay.
Only our own doing, or the actions of another human, can take a life here.
But once we leave town, we’re on the same clock as anyone else.
It may even be accelerated due to our time on the outskirts of the normal life cycle, though there’s no real way to be sure.
Your father was the only person to leave this place for an extended period of time. ”
Nora sat in the silence that followed her grandparents’ words, trying to absorb it all.
As long as she was here, she wouldn’t die.
All the ailments and illnesses she’d spent her whole life fearing suddenly couldn’t touch her.
The sensation that washed over her as that reality sank in was unlike anything she had ever felt.
She felt light. All the weight of the anxiety she had carried for so many years lifted.
Her head and limbs filled with helium. She felt like she could float up and up and up forever and would never fear the fall. She was free.
But Charlie wasn’t. Charlie was still in as much danger as ever. If murder took a life in Virgo Bay the way it would anywhere else, nothing had changed for him, and that thought brought Nora back to earth.
Charlie. Wait. Where the hell was Charlie?
“Where the hell is Charlie?” Nora said as she thought it.
Ruby cocked a brow. “I assumed you’d have more questions.”
“I do,” said Nora. “Lots. But my main one right now is, Where is Charlie?”
“Phil and a few of the boys stopped by on their way to work on your car and asked Charlie along,” said Richard.
“Charlie’s out there with Phil?” Nora leapt up from her seat. “I need to borrow your car.”
“We don’t have one,” said Richard. “But I’m sure Charles wouldn’t mind if you borrowed his. He’s out there with the boys, but his keys should be on the table by his front door if you want to grab them.”
Normally, breaking into somebody’s house and stealing their car wouldn’t be Nora’s ideal rainy-day activity, but Charlie was off in the middle of nowhere with someone who might be trying to kill him, so there wasn’t much time for good manners.
“Which house is his?”