Chapter Two
The plan came to her slowly. So slowly, in fact, that she tried to shake it off.
She focused on dusting her tiny apartment over the store—much to Popcorn’s disgust. He grabbed her by her fluffy socks every time she tried to go over the blinds with a damp cloth, and wouldn’t settle until he had dragged her away from the window entirely.
Then he demanded chicken, by plunking himself down in front of the refrigerator and glaring at her with his silly half-pug, half-chihuahua, half-god-only-knows-what face.
All of which was a great distraction. But eventually, the plan clawed its way back into her head. It just built and built despite her best efforts, until finally she had to face it. She was going to do it.
She was going to take the book he’d been reading to him.
Just to maybe show him that having this book was totally okay.
Though, good lord, was it ever hard. Popcorn did not want her to go.
He barked when she started tidying her curly red hair and securing it back with a couple of flowery barrettes.
Then he barked even harder as she chose her good glasses, with the purple frames, and a nice cardigan that matched her green skirt.
Like he knew exactly what all of that meant, somehow.
He even tried to bar the door when she grabbed her car keys.
All of which only made her more nervous about everything she was doing.
It took her about a thousand years to drive up to the cabin everybody knew he owned, in the woods.
Then about a thousand more to get out of her car.
For the longest time she just sat there, staring through the windshield at his ramshackle home.
And honestly, who could have blamed her?
It looked like something the Evil Dead regularly spent time inside.
The windows were narrowed eyes; the porch seemed on the verge of collapse.
Plus everything was a sort of dingy dark brown, in a way that weirdly reminded her of dried blood.
As if a lot of people had been massacred here over the years, and their insides had accumulated to eventually make this:
The place where the angriest man alive lived.
I ’ m going to be stuffed into a wood chipper if I do this, she thought, blankly.
Yet somehow, she still found herself grabbing the book.
And getting out of the car. And walking up to the house.
As if just going ahead made the idea of being chopped into bits ridiculous.
It made her silly, for turning his probably normal house and much more normal than she had imagined manner into something angry and murderous.
He was just a dude. That was all. Just a really big, hairy, crotchety dude. And this was just a house. A really ramshackle, weird old house. She could deal with that. She was sure she could.
Until she stepped up onto that front porch.
The wood just creaked way too much beneath her sensible shoes.
Like it was going to collapse at any moment and send her into whatever horrors lived below it.
A million spiders the size of her fist, she imagined, as she crept forward.
One foot pressing and testing out as she went.
Then the other sliding next to it. Over and over, until finally she was halfway across.
But no better for it.
Now she could see the rocking chair that stood in one corner, moving ever so slightly, despite the lack of breeze.
And the coil of disturbingly heavy chain, just beneath one of the windows.
As if there was something massive inside that needed to be regularly restrained.
A beast, she thought, and almost turned around there and then.
Doubly so, when she saw the front door.
It stood like a broken tooth in a rotten mouth, crookedly attached at the hinges.
Grim enough under any circumstances, she suspected.
But even grimmer once she realized it wasn’t closed.
It stood ajar—as if someone had forgotten about it on the way in.
Or hadn’t been able to shut it, because of whatever they had been carrying at the time.
A dead body , her mind helpfully filled in.
Though somehow it wasn’t him carrying one that came to her immediately.
It was him being the thing carried. Or him having to drag himself.
The Hollow Brook Gazette had been running a lot of rogue beast stories lately.
Last week, there’d been one about a cow from Flannery’s farm with a big bite out of its side.
As if some great white shark had grown legs, then wandered here from the nearest ocean.
Now it was roaming around between the trees, taking chunks out of things, apparently.
And as much as she wanted to scoff, it was not inconceivable that one of those things was Jack Jackson.
That Jack Jackson was in there, bleeding out of a big hole in his side.
And even if he wasn’t, there was a strong possibility that some far more reasonable calamity had befallen him.
Maybe he’d had too much to drink, and stumbled in, and then face-planted somewhere.
Or eaten something bad, before passing out just beyond the door he’d tried to go through.
He could have even had an accident, and gone back and forth on whether he needed the hospital.
Because he was definitely that kind of guy. The kind that would lose a finger, then fix it with a Band-Aid. And it was all these thoughts that pushed her to at least call his name. “Mr. Jackson?” she asked, in a more wavery way than she would have liked. She had to clear her throat and try again.
But he either didn’t hear her, or couldn’t respond.
All she could make out was the hum of what sounded like a refrigerator. The ticking of a clock. The plink of water dripping into a sink, almost ominously. And there was nothing to be seen through that small crack. Just darkness, deep and dense, fringed with the dimmest of lights.
It was like looking into an abyss.
She definitely didn’t want to plunge into that.
But she took a calming breath, and gave the door a little push anyway. Just a little one, and with her hand half over her eyes as she did, in case horrors were on the other side. Blood all over the walls , she thought, as she gingerly parted her fingers.
And saw instead a string of fairy lights, glowing and winking at her through that little gap.
Like the kind of thing she had in her store, and he had definitely seemed to hate.
Yet there they were, pretty enough that she dropped her hand.
She stepped closer to them, as if they might disappear if she did.
But they didn’t.
Instead, she saw other, similar stuff.
There was a picture on the wall of a kitten in a flower pot.
Then, farther down, another one—a painting of a homely cottage surrounded by honeysuckles, of the sort she had always wanted to live in.
It looked the way she wanted her store to be.
Like something from a long-forgotten and very romantic fairy tale.
And true, it was hung pretty crookedly.
Plus it seemed to be covering what looked to be a big hole in the wall.
But even so, it threw her a little. As did everything else. Like the knitted throw over the collapsing couch that looked as familiar to her as the painting had. Or the tiny cushion he had placed in one corner of it. Or the stacks of what looked inexplicably like VHS tapes all over the place.
Though it wasn’t the fact that they were VHS tapes that really boggled her mind.
It was the titles on the covers.
They were all soft and nostalgia-dipped family movies, and gentle romances set in small towns.
She saw copies of things like Splash and Willow , in amongst what looked like the collected works of John Hughes.
He seemed to have a thing for John Candy, which she supposed made some kind of sense in one way.
The man often played misunderstood losers, as far as she recalled.
But in another way it just seemed incredible.
If she’d been forced to guess what kind of movies he liked before now, she’d have said anything with Jason Statham in it. Or maybe John Cena. Or even just something with the words bone cruncher in the title.
Yet somehow there was no bone crunching here.
He didn’t even appear to have a blood-curdling type of hobby, like juggling chain saws or stuffing roadkill and mounting it on his walls.
Instead, he seemed to have a thing about fixing music boxes and doing crossword puzzles and oh holy moly, was that some kind of knitting project?
It was, it actually was. It looked like he was making a goddamn tea cozy, for the love of heck—and not even in any kind of grumpy colors. No, these were practically pastels.
He almost had a rainbow going on there.
And what kind of person did that make him?
She had no idea. But definitely not the one everybody in town thought they knew. Bare minimum, he was a lot softer and more wholesome than he looked. And in ways she wasn’t quite sure how to process, or even fully believe in. She had to touch the cozy, just to make sure it was real.
Then absolutely regretted it, for two very big reasons.
First: because all it did was prove this was exactly what it looked like.
And second: because she proved it at the exact moment that Jack Jackson decided to stride into the room, and completely caught her in the act.
In fact, she actually had his tea cozy in her hands when he found her there.
Even though she couldn’t remember picking it up.
She’d only meant to lightly touch it, and yet here she was.
Fully fondling his secret things with her massively intrusive fingers.
Like a thief of his feelings, she found herself thinking, and hated how accurate that seemed.
Hell, it was practically written all over his face.
He looked deeply disturbed by what she was doing.