Chapter Fourteen #2
Sarah imagines herself finally answering the call of the woods. Stumbling between the trees with nothing but the yearning to disappear.
The wind circles the canopy, making the branches sing. “The phone,” she says. “Because fuck the outside world and everyone in it.”
Yes. Rage first. Always rage first. That initial flame, kindled in your body before it snuffs out into misery. Sarah thinks of her own dead phone, tucked in her backpack. She hasn’t missed it at all. Because fuck everyone outside her little bubble. She called Graham, and look what happened.
Elijah takes out the phone. The battery’s at five percent.
Ben was always forgetting to charge it, or so he claimed whenever Sarah couldn’t reach him.
The screen displays a notification for a missed call from Graham.
She could try to call him back, but what would she say?
That she’s calling from a dead man’s phone?
Anyway, Graham had sent Ben to claim her, as if she were a shopping bag forgotten in a coat check. It’s really his fault Ben died.
Rage first. Sarah lifts her chin. “Throw it. Throw it as far as you can.”
Elijah hurls it with surprising veracity. It whistles through the air until it strikes a tree trunk and plummets into a nest of snow and fallen branches. Just a thing, in the end, like the Ben-shaped body stiffening in the garage.
“What next?” Elijah asks.
“The scarf.” Because you’re boiling with fury and disbelief at how your life has gone. The scarf itches, burns, strangles. You plow deeper into the woods and you’re too hot and you tear it off and toss it aside. You’ll show them. They’ll be sorry.
Sarah fiddles with the neck of her borrowed parka, unzipping the suddenly too-tight collar. “Just drop it,” she says.
Elijah pulls out the scarf and lets it slip to the ground. She’d bought Ben that scarf last Christmas, because he’d lost his. It’s a nice scarf, from the same expensive store where he got his coat, and she bets he told people he’d bought it himself.
“The coat,” she says, unzipping her parka all the way.
It’s still too hot, even without the scarf. You’re burning up. You want to make it stop. You want to make all this feeling stop. You want to burrow deeper into the woods until it devours you.
You want to disappear.
Elijah takes out the coat. Dark grey wool, carefully lint brushed before every outing, the lapels sharp and crisp. Appearances had always been important to Ben. No one could know he was a failure, that he hadn’t been able to pay off his credit card bill for months after he’d bought that coat.
“Hang it over a branch. Neatly,” Sarah says. Even in Ben’s state of mind, he wouldn’t leave that coat crumpled in the snow. He’d treated it with more care than he’d treated her.
Elijah smooths it over the closest branch. Sarah nods in approval.
The garbage bag wilts in Elijah’s hand, shiny and black against the dull paleness of the forest floor. “What’s left?” she asks, praying that things go her way for once.
Elijah takes out a single key attached to a fob.
Her heart stops.
“Should I toss this as well?” he asks, crumpling the garbage bag into his coat pocket.
“No!”
She reaches for the key, but Elijah pulls it back. “You’re not wearing gloves.”
“Ben’s car. I don’t have to take Caleb’s truck. I could take the car to get out of here.”
Elijah shakes his head. “Caleb won’t like that.”
“Fuck what Caleb likes.” Rage first.
Elijah says nothing, only stubbornly presses his lips together.
She takes a deep breath. What would Ben do?
Make them feel sorry for you. “Elijah. Help me get out of here. Please. I know I’m supposed to be in quarantine at least another week, but we don’t have the time.
Caleb says they’re turning on him in town.
It’s because I’m here. It’ll be safer for all of us if I go.
” She doesn’t have to fake the tears welling in her eyes.
Elijah closes his fingers over the key. “I can’t disobey Caleb. He’s family. He’s all I have.”
Sarah takes a step toward him. What next? Give the love and acceptance they hunger for. Give it and take it away when they don’t do what you want.
Now you get it, Ben whispers. Now you understand.
“Elijah,” She closes a hand over his arm, the arm that holds the key to her freedom. Literally. “I could be your family, too.”
Elijah raises his hand like he’s about to drop the key into her palm, but then withdraws it.
“Take me with you,” he says, his Adam’s apple bobbing.
He’s so heartbreakingly young. In Jacob Vass’s shearling coat, he looks like a little boy playing dress-up in his father’s clothes.
“I don’t want to be left alone with Caleb.
You know how he is. The storm inside him—it’s gotten worse lately. ”
Do you ever feel like you’re becoming someone you hate? Jacob Vass hangs over the house like a stench. Elijah was worried one day his father would come back, but Jacob already haunts Sweetside Manor.
“I feel bad leaving him, though. I’m the only one who really understands him,” Elijah says. “And I can’t help thinking he’s right I’m better off at home.”
Sarah stares despondently at the paint-stained fist in which the key has disappeared. “That’s what he wants you to think. You’re smart, Elijah. You’ll figure out how to survive outside Sweetside. And I’ll look after you,” she adds, and she means it. She’s already Wendy to his Lost Boy.
“Will you?” He turns his dark, soulful eyes on her. “I’ve been alone for so long.”
Sarah tucks a curl behind his ear. “So have I,” she whispers.
She brushes the spot below his black eye gently with her knuckles. His breath trembles. Closing her eyes, she presses her forehead to his. She cups the back of his neck, and he does the same to her, his latex gloves cool and soothing on her skin.
It feels right, to be twinned like this. They’re two peas in a pod, her and Elijah. Both damaged. But both survivors.
Sarah’s eyes fly open as a metallic jingle interrupts the quiet moment. “Oh, I dropped the key,” Elijah says.
Sarah pulls away from him and starts scrabbling in the snow. She has to find the key first. She’s happy to take Elijah with her, but she’s worried he might withdraw his help if he’s afraid of Caleb.
“Got it,” Elijah says.
Sarah hides her disappointment with a smile, and then a silver glint beyond his shoulder catches her eye. Another key? Another relic of a disappeared man?
“What is that?” She rambles off the path toward the base of a tree. The roots are exposed like veins, the snow mixed with dirt and dead weeds, as if a wild animal—or Elijah—has been digging.
“It’s okay, Sarah. I got it,” Elijah says.
Sarah ignores him, crouching over the little metallic knot shining from the overturned dirt.
She brushes away the snow—and rocks back on her heels.
It’s a tooth, capped with a crown.
She wipes more of the snow and dirt away and her bare fingers trace a curved row of teeth in a bone the color of the grey sky.
A human jawbone, wide and raw. Like Caleb’s.
“It’s interesting what you find in the woods,” Elijah says.
Sarah straightens, slowly, too numb and bewildered by this discovery to say anything but his name. “Elijah?”
Elijah looks wistfully at the jawbone. “I think a lot about how it must’ve felt to stab Dad over and over again. To watch him bleed out. To stand over him and let him know who’s more powerful. To stand there and know you’re alive and he’s not.”
Sarah’s legs lock into place. “Elijah, what are you saying?”
Ben laughs in her head. You know what he’s saying, you stupid girl. You really can pick ’em.
Elijah’s smile is sad and apologetic. “This is why we don’t have knives.”
Sarah stares down at the bone. Jacob Vass’s jawbone, gaping like the photo in the dining room, broken open so he’ll always be screaming.
The ease with which Caleb took care of the mess after Ben died makes sense now. And afterward she’d lain in the arms of a killer—
He lay in your arms, killer, whispers Ben.
The revelation hits like a wave of nausea. Sarah’s legs give way and grabs a tree to steady herself. The bark nips at her palms, but she barely feels it. “I can’t believe—”
“You’ve spent a lot of time with him now. You don’t think he’s a little—off?”
Elijah’s words echo inside her head, and she gets the nagging feeling she’s heard them before. She can’t remember who said them. It might have even been her. But it doesn’t matter. She just has to get into Ben’s car and drive away. She’ll sort it out later.
“That night, when you and Caleb—” Elijah blushes. “I came into your room because I was afraid for you. I think you woke up and saw me.”
“What about the others? Stuart McGee and Joseph Singh?” Sarah asks, although she knows the answer.
“They’re buried here too. You understand. That feeling, to stand over someone and feel alive—it’s addicting.”
Sarah nods, or shudders. Fight or flight, her body screams. It’s definitely time for flight.
Running away and leaving your mess behind again? Ben whispers.
Sarah staggers in the direction from which they came, breath rattling in her lungs. Elijah follows. “Did you like the story about the screaming in the woods? I thought of it. Some of our guests really have complained about the sound of the wind,” he says.
Sarah stumbles again. Bare branches like Elijah’s pale fingers snag on her coat, her hair.
Pulling her in, demanding that she stay.
There were never ghosts screaming from the woods.
It was all in her head. Or maybe they were screaming for different reasons.
They were crying a warning, not an invitation.
She doesn’t know what’s true anymore. Black is white, up is down. She might as well still be living with Ben. Her pulse booms, the only constant in her life, the only thing she can be sure of. Her internal compass spins and spins until it points to the only exit.
“Elijah,” Sarah rasps. “Let’s get out of here.”