Chapter Twenty-Nine Ashley
TWENTY-NINE ASHLEY
The horse was coming. She could hear its footsteps, slow at first, clipping and clopping down the tiled floor of her apartment building, increasing to a trot, then an all-out run, hooves pounding, shattering the tile beneath them.
She opened the door, and there it was waiting for her, a white horse with yellow eyes, frothy blood-specked foam around its mouth.
And on its back sat her mother in her good camel-hair coat, her face a bloody mess, part of her skull exposed, broken, brain matter seeping out.
Her mother opened her mouth to speak and the left half of her jaw came unhinged, hanging with bits of tissue from her cheek.
Ash, you need to listen.
He’s coming for you.
Ashley awoke in full panic mode, a scream stuck in her throat. It took several seconds to orient herself: she was not in her old med school apartment or even at home. She was in Room 1 of the Deer Run Motel in Boone’s Ferry.
Take a breath, she told herself. You’re okay.
Someone was knocking on her door, loud and persistent. A deep, hollow banging. She thought of the children’s story about the Big Bad Wolf: Little pig, little pig, let me in.
What time was it? She’d unplugged the bedside clock because of the sickly green light it gave off. She reached for her phone. Where was it?
Malcolm was right next door. She’d said good night to him around ten, promising that they’d open the trunk together in the morning before he left for Josephine’s.
She’d heard his TV on as she was falling asleep: something loud with a lot of gunshots and car chases with revving engines and squealing tires.
Maybe it was Malcolm at the door? Coming by to say he couldn’t sleep and invite her out to smoke a joint?
Or maybe it was the woman from the office, meet-as-strangers-leave-as-friends Liz, to tell her that the water was out, or there was a fire, or their truck headlights were on. Or her husband, Jack, to warn them again: Might not be safe.
Or maybe, just maybe—it was the thing that lived in the woods.
Where the hell was her phone? She had no cell service or Wi-Fi, but at least she could check the time, use it as a flashlight. She groped hopelessly around the nightstand in the darkness, knocking the lamp over onto the floor with a crash.
Another three knocks in rapid succession; more like the pounding of a fist—or clomping of a hoof—on the outside of her door.
“Coming!” she managed, making her way to the door through the pitch-black motel room, smashing her knee on the edge of the desk.
“Shit!” she yelped as she hobbled right up to the door, put her hand on the cold metal knob.
There was no peephole, no window. Only the thin panel door that any old wolf worth his salt could blow in with one puff.
“Who is it?” she called, with a remarkably steady voice.
Nothing.
She put her ear against the door, but all she felt was her own heartbeat pounding.
Maybe she was too late. Maybe whoever it was had given up.
Or maybe she’d imagined it. Don’t go there, she told herself.
“This is real,” she whispered aloud, the sound of her own voice grounding her, comforting her in some way. “I’m not imagining this.”
But hadn’t she told herself the same thing back then? Back when she actually believed that her mother had come back; come back to warn her?
She held her breath, counted to three, and yanked open the door.
She staggered back a step. She blinked in disbelief at the figure standing outside her door—shoulders impossibly broad, the hooded coat he wore, long and patched together with uneven squares of mismatched leather.
The creature before her had a skull for a head; not a human skull but an animal’s. A deer maybe…
No, she knew, looking at the length of the nose and the teeth: the huge white teeth. This was the yellow-white skull of a horse, black sockets for eyes, teeth gleaming. The loosely hinged jaw moved, opening slightly.
She tried to scream, but no sound came out, only the useless hiss of her own sour breath.
She slammed the door and threw her body against it, shoved the dead bolt into place.
A hallucination. A figure that had followed her from a dream. A terrible nightmare brought on by old Josephine and her stories and the creepy little knackerman doll, by seeing that blank gravestone with all the gifts.
But she was done with all of that. With seeing things that weren’t there. Right?
She thought of Gram, of the pain in her face when she’d said to Ashley in the hospital, “You need to concentrate on getting well. Take some time for yourself. You can finish med school later. Nothing matters more than you getting better.”
But hadn’t it been there, in Gram’s look, even then? The grim certainty that Ash would never recover completely, would never go back to med school, would never become the success story they’d all believed she was destined to be.
That she’d move back home, take whatever job she could find, pretend not to notice the headshakes and the whispers: “Such a shame.”
Ashley, who’d had such promise.
Ashley, who’d always been at the top of her class.
Ashley, who’d gone round the bend and seen her dead mother not just in the halls of her apartment, but in the cafeteria at UVM, near the nurses’ station on her med-surg rotation, once at the all-night convenience store where Ashley had stopped for energy drinks in the weeks after her mother’s death.
She was terrified to fall asleep: she lived on coffee, energy drinks, caffeine pills.
Because when she closed her eyes and slept, her mother was always there.
But then the nightmares bled into the daytime and Ashley couldn’t tell what was real and what was dream.
That was when she went to her grandmother and, over coffee and tears, told her she’d decided to check herself into the hospital, that she’d been seeing things. Terrible things.
There was another knock at her motel room door. The knob rattled, turning.
Ash leapt back, suddenly convinced it was her mother on the other side of the door now. Her mother with her face swollen, purple, parts of it looking like raw meat, her jaw dangling, unhinged.
I tried to warn you, she would scream.
I tried to explain but you wouldn’t listen!
“Ash?” Malcolm called from behind the latched door. “Hey, Ashley, are you okay?”
She unlatched the dead bolt and opened the door, threw herself into her brother’s arms. He held tight to her. He seemed to be trembling nearly as much as she was.
“I heard banging,” he said. “What the hell is going on?”
“I—I don’t know. I think I had a bad dream.”
“Ashley, someone was here.”
“Someone?”
Don’t you mean something?
She was sure she could still smell it: a dank, forgotten smell—old cloth, dirt, things long buried.
She thought she should tell her brother the truth. He deserved to know.
It’s happening again. I stopped my meds because I thought I was all better, and now I’m seeing things that aren’t there. Things that can’t be there.
But instead, she said, “I thought I heard knocking, but I was sound asleep and I couldn’t find the light and when I opened the door…”
He looked at her, eyes wide, waiting.
“I thought I saw…” she started, tears spilling from her eyes now. “But I must have been dreaming.”
“Dreaming? Then explain how this got here.”
Malcolm pointed at the front of the door.
There, in dripping dark-red paint, was the mark—the same mark she’d seen on the little girl’s house earlier today. The crude figure of a horse’s head, like a prehistoric cave painting.
Ash reached out, put a finger on the wet paint of the creature’s mane, took it away and put her thumb to it, rubbing the oily red around like a kindergartener with finger paints.
Relief washed through her. Hallucinations didn’t leave paint behind, at least not paint that your sane brother could see. Whatever horror they were facing, it was real, and they could face it together.
“What the hell is this?” Malcolm asked, turning, looking around the parking lot where his old Chevy pickup sat alone, out across the deserted street, into the woods beyond.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I think we know someone who does.”