22
Rayne
In the Trees
“C ome to the church, Rayne. We found bodies.”
James’s voice crackled over the walkie on my bedside table, the first words I heard as I dragged myself out of a troubled sleep. Wind and rain had howled all night, thunder rattling the house’s old bones. Rest didn’t come easy, but I still felt some relief: Salem was gone.
She was safely off the island, back on the mainland, and far away from me. It ached; fuck, it hurt every time I thought about her, every time I breathed too deep. But the pain of loss was one I was accustomed to, one I knew how to deal with.
I hadn’t even been able to face Salem to say good-bye, yet I headed out alone into the early morning, armed with my rifle and my knife. I’d hidden from her, I’d watched her leave the manor from the window in the attic and hated myself the entire time.
She frightened me most; the possibility of her was more terrifying than anything lurking in the darkness.
But she was gone.
My time with her was done.
I was a fool for letting myself fantasize, even a little bit, about what could have been. I knew better. There was a massive roadblock between me and the rest of my life, and that block was alive and deadly.
All spring and summer, I got to pretend Blackridge was a normal place. I ran my business, fucked around, made the most of the warm season while it lasted. But like a child’s game of make-believe, that came to an end. I didn’t live during the long, warm days of summer.
I waited.
My life was lived in the cold dark of winter. It wasn’t tending guest rooms or scraping fireplaces, it was endless nights in torrential downpours, stalking the forest with my gun. It was hunting and tracking in silence, just me and my dog against the long night.
If I didn’t find a way to kill that thing, these corpses would be the first of many in a long, brutal winter.
Despite the early hour, the church was alight and the bell tolled the time as I crossed the town square. The flags from the Halloween festivities flapped weakly in the breeze. Smashed pumpkins littered the ground. Windows were shuttered; some had been boarded up.
The church doors were open. Several people sat scattered among the pews, their desperate prayers falling upon the unhearing ears of the golden Christ hanging over the pulpit.
A crowd had gathered in the yard outside the cemetery gate. Someone was wailing, the gut-wrenching sound echoing in my ears as I pushed through the crowd.
Hanging in the gnarled boughs of the pine trees were bodies. One half hanging here, another hanging there. Pieces and parts dangled from the creaking limbs, intestines strewn out like party streamers.
Their heads hung there, eyes glassy and vacant, skin gray and decaying. Two familiar men, and one young woman.
Martin, George, and Andrea. The missing had been found.
Turning away, I gagged as quietly as I could, pulling up my jacket to hide my dry heaving. It never got easier to see, it never became less horrifying. My stomach roiled and I was thankful I’d chosen not to eat this morning.
The wailing, I was certain, came from Andrea’s mother.
I glanced back to see the poor woman standing beneath the destroyed remnants of her daughter, pulling her own hair so hard it was coming out in clumps.
A man, perhaps her husband, tried to hold her, to comfort her, but her grief was too much to be contained.
Hurriedly, I turned away and vomited into the grass.
“We need to pray!” Although I couldn’t see her, Ruth’s voice carried over the crowd. “In these times of righteous judgment, we must turn to our God and lean upon his mercy. We cannot doubt—”
Someone shouted, “Fuck your prayers!”
The crowd dissolved into shouting. Distress, uncertainty, and anger rippled through them, growing like a storm.
“How do we get them down?”
“The children! Don’t let the children see!”
As the people erupted into chaos and arguments, I spotted James smoking a cigarette at the back of the church. He was staring at the ground as I came up beside him, his hair and clothing disheveled.
“You okay?” he said, offering his cigarette. “Those men were your guests, weren’t they?”
“Yeah. George Trager and Martin Keen. Martin had two adult daughters.” I didn’t often smoke tobacco, but I needed something to distract me, so I took the cancer stick and inhaled. “And George had a grandkid on the way.”
My hunters came equipped for bears, sometimes deer or wild turkeys.
No hunter alive knew how to face a creature that could mimic their own voices and travel in near-total silence.
A beast that could take bullet after bullet, heal itself.
A monster that learned more about us year after year, becoming harder to predict as it grew more violent.
“Where’s your dad?” I said, and James nodded his head to indicate his location.
As much as I hated to look, I glanced over to the trees again.
My Uncle Gerard was there, his wife, Veronica, beside him, comforting Andrea’s distraught parents.
The dead girl’s mother had fallen to the ground, and my aunt rubbed her back, singing a soft hymn.
My uncle’s head was bowed in prayer, one hand on the shoulder of Andrea’s father.
But the man didn’t pray. He just stared at the ground with empty, listless eyes.
“This is new,” James said, motioning at the trees. He sounded clinical, and I knew he’d put on his imaginary lab coat as a defense against the horror. “This display behavior, it’s... odd. It hasn’t done this before.”
“It’s learning how to scare us,” I said. “How to make us panic. Make us weak.” My hand shook as I lifted the cigarette again, and I glared at it until I could make it stop.
“Do you think it’s getting stronger?” James’s clinical tone broke.
I shook my head, flicking my ash to the ground. “I think it’s getting smarter.”
The crowd moved and parted as the sheriff arrived, followed by a middle-aged Black woman, Dr. Tasha Hale.
She was the only doctor on the island and, as such, our only medical examiner.
She’d obviously gotten straight out of bed, with a trench coat over her pajamas, but her voice was calm and collected as she offered words of consolation to the panicked and terrified people around her.
As I watched the crowd, full of exhausted faces, I spotted something that made my heart stop.
Salem.