Chapter 5
MONSTERS IN THE NIGHT
Frozen in place, with my stomach squeezing in on itself in fear, I watch as a huge stranger assaults a man at my rear door, takes a knife off him, then hauls him into the night.
The moon lends enough light to paint them, but not enough to identify either.
They disappear over the fence, one dragged by the other, leaving me shaking.
I have no idea who the stranger is but thank fuck he intervened.
It takes me five, ten minutes, to recover, to weigh up my options with my back to the wall.
I slink back inside the house, lantern in hand.
I’m afraid to switch it on in case it attracts someone.
After cursing at myself, I rustle up the courage and turn it on.
It’s an old style one, its inadequate lighting reminding me of horror movies.
The upstairs hall and stairway are bathed in precisely the sort of light that attracts things that go bump and claw you into closets so they can devour you, piece by piece.
Am I scaring myself? Yup. “Grow a backbone.”
I almost, but don’t, call the cops. The stranger might? Should I track him down? How, though? I don’t know his motives.
That visit is a heavy nail of hammered-in certainty telling me that I am on a kill list. Same as Dad.
Someone wants me dead.
Because I dared to come home? Just that? There must be more.
Calling the sheriff might endanger me. Revenant is miles from another town. Revenant seems tainted, reeking of villainy. Is it due to where Dad worked or something else? Cryonics and medical research always seemed nerdy without truly being dangerous.
I will leave you the house. It was an aberrant statement considering the rest of his alarming message. We used to play silly games here, games with clues.
Clues. I patter downstairs, lantern held high so I can see the steps and not slide down on my ass.
My father has been murdered. I need proof of that, and I need it tonight, then I can drive away and show it to someone who is not implicated. If the house doesn’t hold a clue, I should leave in the morning.
“I just need to survive the night,” I whisper, frowning at the hallway full of paper. “And get a gun?”
The piles are numerous, though mostly in his study and here. “The Fire Department would love this place.” I eye the stacks, toeing the nearest. “Have to start somewhere.”
Kraken cat has followed me and hangs around for a while, purring and head-butting my leg, then he wanders off and curls up on a blanket. Molly should have cat food. I’ll ask in the morning, before I leave, or whatever I choose to do.
Funny how I’m worried about the cat in the middle of this. I glance over at the furry critter and can’t help smiling.
As I kneel, the house seems to twist, vibrate, and distort, as if someone is playing with my balance mechanisms or the physics of the world.
For ten, twenty seconds I am on all fours with my hands planted on the floor.
The disconcerting sensation pulses, leaving a scintillating halo at the edges of my vision that fades away to nothing.
Gone? I check the ceiling, the walls, and even the cat looks unhappy. His big round eyes are dilated and dark. The house has stopped throbbing.
“We good? Was that…” I recheck my surrounds, recalling Molly’s crazy theory. “The Large Hadron Collider?”
Its construction happened after I left town. If that was it, no wonder she thinks aliens and zombies are coming for us.
“I take back everything bad I thought about you, Molly.” I dust off my hands, square my shoulders. Back to what is truly important.
Kneeling on the floor, I leaf through everything, pulling apart the piles and laying things aside as methodically as I can. Until I find…something.
This old photo album has sprigs of lavender pressed under the cover’s rotting plastic. Though dried and flattened, they’ve kept their purple color. I’m unsure of the significance but he used to grow it in the garden because I loved the pretty flowers. Did he want to draw my attention to this album?
A photo of Dad and Mom, with her cradling my baby brother, makes me stop turning the pages. There are notes beneath some of the photos. This writing seems different.
The photo was taken thirty years ago, four years before I was born. Though it appears someone has sifted through the piles of Dad’s papers looking for something because I can see gaps, disturbed dust, and missing stuff, this album has been left alone. Or perhaps it was opened and dismissed.
My suspicions are already high.
Hailey and us. How sweet to recall her like this before she grew up and we played secret messages.
The ink is darker than the other writing.
More significant: the baby isn’t me and Dad would never write that unless… Unless this is a message to me—to the current me.
When I was little, we would mess about with the letterbox on my two-story doll’s house.
I scurry upstairs and find the house on a shelf in my old room where I’ve already dumped a bedroll and hauled some bedding from a cupboard.
The dollhouse is dusty and derelict, with plastic pieces missing, and the letter box has fallen over due to the little plastic strut having snapped.
The dust is thinner here, scraped away by large fingers. Tucked inside the letter box is a tiny note on a thin strip of rolled paper. Getting it out of there takes some doing due to my fingers being too big and I have to break the plastic and swear at it.
I sit on the bed to read the note with the lantern perched on the mattress. The springs squeak under me. The scrap of paper is so tiny and tightly rolled. My fingers are clumsy, and I have to close my eyes and draw two deep breaths before looking. My father was the last person to hold this.
Dad’s tiny writing. From six months ago, or more, really. Of all the things to make me tear up. I swipe at my eyes. At the top I read:
Check the cache. I may add more there.
The cache? On that I am puzzled.
Carefully, I unroll the rest of the note, squinting to read some of the jammed-together script.
A tear spills as I read his words. The writing evokes a memory of his warm hand stroking my hair while he reads me a story. That was years ago, and I can still remember the sweet scent of the plants flowering outside my bedroom window.
“If anything happens to me, it was murder. There is a secret in this town. They’re trying to make special soldiers called frankenstructs, and no law is keeping them from doing terrible”
Terrible what? What are frankenstructs? Who is them? This sounds insane but he was murdered, and I have to believe there is a kernel of truth in there, somewhere.
Why did he go fishing if he suspected someone wished to kill him? Would they kill him to stop him spilling information?
Someone did. I feel that truth in my bones, my flesh, my blood.
Now, what do I do about it?
This is the big question I have no good answer to.
Which is why I return to the balcony with what’s left of a bottle of Dad’s ancient whisky to try to drink some sense, or is it nonsense, into myself.
I’m somewhat drunk, angry, sad, and stupidly fatalistic.
Come and get me, assholes. I switch off the lantern despite the ominous storm-clouds rolling in.
After an hour or so, it begins to rain. Cold, freezing rain and some spatters in under the roof.
The weather with its occasional crack of blinding lightning is appropriate for my mood, to the last dot of the T in lightning. And the little noose in the G?
What am I drinking again? Is it Laphroag? It’s lap something I decide, peering at the label getting spotted by rain.
“Lap dancing,” I declare, gulping another few swallows and raising the half-full, half-empty bottle to the grumbling, light-blasted sky.
This is why I am sitting with my ass on the floor in soaked leggings.
I’m drunk as an alcoholic skunk, wet and shivering, and the rain is mixing with my tears and making it difficult to see, when a man climbs over the railing and drops with a soft thud.
The timber vibrates from the force of his landing.
Startled, I squint up at him, until my thoughts and fears catch up to each other.
I shove myself backward and stand, leaving the bottle spinning as I retreat, slowly, and wobbil-lily?
I cannot even think the word in this state.
My feet turn inside out, and I stumble. He frowns at my feet, slowly shaking his head.
Am I to die here, tonight?
I’m only wearing my now-sodden wolf socks and of course that is stupid, but I never expected this, this…
whoever this man is…to visit me. Feet are the last of my worries because this is the man from the door.
I’m almost sure of this since he’s bald and huge, and the visual of him easily pulling the other man over my fence is pinned to my memory board.
He’s also the man who kept the other dude from, I guess, gutting me like a fish. The man who dragged a killer away and vanished them.
He’s back and maybe he wants to kill me, too?
He climbed up my house like it has a beanstalk on the outside.
My heart is beating so fiercely, I’m waiting for it to explode from my chest, then a world-swaying nausea arrives to add to my woes.
I hold my stomach, wondering if I should try to pull off my socks before I run.
A bolt of lightning skewers the sky behind my visitor, reflecting off the house walls behind me, painting him in a stark palette of light and dark.
For a second, he’s this beautiful combo of Freddy Kreuger and Hannibal Lector lit up like a Christmas tree.
He’s wet. His shirt and pants cling to him. This is unsurprising, considering the weather.