Chapter Seventeen Ashley
SEVENTEEN ASHLEY
The road was barely wide enough for two-way traffic. But they didn’t have to worry about traffic. They didn’t pass a single car as they drove into town.
The thick forest came to an abrupt end as the road leveled out.
There were open fields on both sides, full of brown grass, dried cornstalks, late-season crops of pumpkins and winter squash adding splashes of vivid orange to the dreary brown landscape.
Beyond the fields, the maples and aspens had lost their leaves, the trees naked and skeletal against the gunmetal-gray sky.
The foliage back home was still blazing—the elevation made the difference; they were up higher now, though the village itself was in a deep valley.
A heavy gray sheet of mist covered the entire landscape, seemed to be held in place by the surrounding hills and mountains, like soup at the bottom of a bowl.
They passed a turnoff on the right called St. James Road, and the only house on it was a dilapidated white farmhouse.
Beside it, a red barn listed to the left.
Half a dozen Holsteins grazed in a pasture that was more mud and manure than grass and came up to the edge of the road they were driving down.
A rusted tractor with flat tires stood in the middle of the field.
The cows looked thin and rheumy-eyed. A large white horse stood in front of the cows, peering over the split-rail fence topped with rusted barbed wire, watching their truck go by warily.
Its eyes were large and nearly black, even from this distance, and reminded Ashley of dome-style security cameras in a department store.
Something to keep you on guard and make sure you didn’t steal any lipstick.
Horses made Ashley nervous. It wasn’t that Ash didn’t see the beauty, she did—but she also saw their vast size, the rippling of muscles under the sleek coat, their enormous teeth. In Ashley’s version of fairy tales, the Big Bad Wolf would be far worse as a horse.
My, what big teeth you have.
All the better for ripping you to shreds, my dear.
As if reading her mind, sensing her fear, the horse pulled back its lips and whinnied, showing a frothy mouth full of square yellow-white teeth.
Ashley shuddered.
She remembered, for a split second, the hallucinations she’d had before she checked herself into the hospital a few weeks after her mother’s supposed suicide.
She’d never accepted that her mother had jumped off that bridge, and was horrified at how easily Gram and Malcolm did. “If she’s dead, where’s the body?” she’d demand, and they’d respond with nothing but platitudes and worried glances at each other.
Ashley had tried to keep herself from falling apart.
She’d tried to keep up with school, with classes and clinicals and exams; to put on a brave face and keep going, because that was what doctors did, wasn’t it?
And if she was going to be the amazing doctor everyone always told her she would be, she needed to learn to put her emotions in a box, to do the work that needed to be done and move on.
But then her mother started visiting her.
Over and over, Ashley saw her mother in her room, back from the dead, her face swollen, head cracked and bleeding.
Ashley’s unconscious mind playing a cruel joke, pulling every horror lever in her brain—sometimes her mother showed up riding a white horse with yellow eyes.
Ashley would hear the clip-clop of hooves in the hall at school or in her apartment building, and play the game of not looking, of telling herself she knew it wasn’t real, but always, she’d turn.
She’d turn and see the white horse, her dead mother sitting bareback on it, wearing her good camel-hair coat.
Her face a gory mess like an overripe plum that had burst its skin and was now fetid and rotting.
I’ve come to tell you something, Ash. Something important.
You need to listen. You need to remember.
Ashley shook the memory away.
Grief-induced psychosis. That was how her psychiatrist in the hospital had explained it. Sometimes grief, especially when the loss was sudden, traumatic, or unresolved, was simply too much to bear and the human mind snapped.
That was what had happened in the lawyer’s office on Friday. Gram’s death, the shock of the inheritance, it was all too much.
She closed her eyes. Heard her mother’s voice, firm and loud in her head: Listen.
“You okay, Sis?” Malcolm’s voice snapped her back. He’d given up on trying to play his self-help books and had the radio tuned to a far-off classic rock station, “Smoke on the Water” crackling through the speakers.
“Yeah,” she said, rolling down the window, catching the scent of moldering leaves, woodsmoke.
Houses were starting to dot the road ahead now.
They passed a woman who watched them from a rocking chair on a porch decorated with cornstalks and pumpkins.
Ashley waved, but the woman didn’t wave back.
A man in overalls leaning into the engine of an ancient Ford pickup lifted his head and watched as they drove by.
Two kids kicking around a soccer ball on a brown grassy slope turned their way.
Ashley felt the eyes of the whole town on them—humans, cows, and horses alike—and it made her shudder.
“I thought we’d go find the motel, check in, then maybe take a walk and explore on foot,” Ashley suggested.
“Good plan,” Malcolm said. He glanced up at the navigation display, which still showed them driving in a blank sea of green. No town here. No streets. No cell phone towers.
A place that didn’t exist.
Here there be monsters territory.
Ashley held tight to the printout of the map, traced the way the forest road became Main Street, following their route with her finger. “Keep going on this road,” she told her brother.
“Aye, aye, Captain!” he said, turning the music up.
The houses got nicer-looking as they moved closer to the center of town.
The paint jobs were fresh, the landscaping well-kept.
Ashley felt slightly less tense as she looked at the trimmed hedges, front steps decorated with potted chrysanthemums in festive autumn colors, cornstalks, grinning jack-o’-lanterns.
She smiled at the thought that Malcolm’s old Chevy Silverado fit right in, in this landscape of pickup trucks and tractors.
They passed a beautiful two-story colonial brick house with a plaque by the door that said: STODDARD HOUSE, CIRCA 1858. There was a scarecrow on the porch, watching them as they passed.
The road was in bad shape—the pavement cracked and full of potholes—contrasting with the picture-perfect, autumnally decorated homes. If there ever had been two yellow lines separating travel lanes, they were long gone.
Mal slowed down as they passed a dark-haired boy in a red jacket who was heading the opposite direction on a bicycle. When the kid’s eyes met Ash’s, he quickly made a U-turn and began to follow them, ringing the bell on his bike.
“Looks like we’ve got ourselves an escort,” Malcolm said with a laugh, eyeing the kid in the rearview mirror.
Another boy on a bike pulled out of a side street and joined him; then a third joined the little parade—a girl with pigtails in a white coat.
Ashley turned back to look at them. They were all pedaling hard to keep up with the truck.
Ashley raised her hand to wave at them. The pigtailed girl, who was clearly the youngest, threw something at the truck.
“Little juvenile delinquents!” Mal shook his head, eyes on the rearview mirror. “That was a damn glass soda bottle!” He hit the brakes and the kids scattered, turning off down side streets.
Mal and Ash continued slowly down Main Street and passed the low brick Boone’s Ferry Post Office.
Beside that was Pops’ General Store, which was fronted with a large porch with benches and an old carved wooden cigar-store Indian standing guard by the front door.
Across the street was Loon’s Call Pub, with a neon Pabst Blue Ribbon sign glowing in the window and a sign above the door that declared: GOOD DRINKS AND COMPANY SINCE 1899.
A woman was standing in front of the pub, her back to them.
Her dark, curly hair fell on her shoulders.
Her slim frame and the way she held her body, with her hands buried deep in the pockets of her camel-colored coat…
it was all too familiar. Ashley’s heart thudded as she waited for the apparition to turn around, show its dripping bloody face, the exposed skull, the ruined jaw.
But instead, she walked right into the pub.
“Did you—” Ash started to say, but Mal hadn’t heard her, his focus on something up ahead.
“Look at that.” Malcolm slowed down and pointed at the sprawling wooden building just past the pub. An old factory, complete with a waterwheel being turned by the river. STODDARD FACTORY, the gold-lettered sign stated.
They crossed a short bridge, and just beyond it there were a few more neatly kept houses. A woman in a long-sleeved white dress was hanging clothes out on a line. A little boy in a plaid coat out walking his dog turned to look as they passed.
Main Street came to an end, leaving them with the choice of going either right or left on Pickering Road.
“Take a right here,” Ashley directed Malcolm, looking down at her map. “The motel should be on this road.”
They passed a big red barn that said it was a tack-and-feed shop, then turned into the parking lot of the Deer Run Motel.
The driveway was gravel and there were two buildings: a low single-story block of motel rooms with red doors labeled one through eight, and to its left a small office with a peaked roof. There were no cars in the parking lot.
“Here we are,” she said. “The only lodgings in town.”