Chapter 9 #2
Inside the safe, I find the deeds to the house and to Uncle Bill’s truck, a couple of expired driver’s licenses, a yellowed snippet of a Review-Journal article about a woman who died in a hiking accident, and a receipt for a handgun.
That’s just like Uncle Bill, to keep the receipt locked up but the gun itself lying around somewhere.
Maybe he took it with him, wherever he’s gone.
I scrape the contents of the safe out onto the carpet, and a battered Nokia phone I hadn’t seen tumbles out after them.
Prepaid, probably ten years old and built like a brick, with a strip of masking tape over the back.
Scrawled in black Sharpie over it, in Uncle Bill’s juvenile handwriting, is a note: Emergencies only!
!! I jam my thumb into the little on button, but the battery’s dead.
I plug Uncle Bill’s iPhone into the charger next to his bed and shove the Nokia into my pocket as something surprisingly close to a sob rises in my throat. I don’t know where Uncle Bill’s gone, I don’t know why, I don’t know when—if—he’s coming back. And I don’t know what to do.
It’s just the hangover, I promise myself, and the eeriness of the empty house. It’s just because we rely on him, and he keeps letting me down.
Outside, a dog yips and whines. Right. There’s a world outside, sun and road and patients waiting. I’d better get to work.
The dog barks, louder this time. Louder than is reasonable, given I’m inside the house. I breathe in, and the smell of carrion grips me by the throat. Then comes the wind.
Desert winds always sweep through Las Vegas with the changing of the seasons, whipping sand into your eyes and swaying long-haul trucks on Highway 95. But this wind smells wrong, like sun-bleached skulls and withered limbs, like biting into rotting fruit.
I don’t want to find out, but I have to.
Someone’s smashed the window of Uncle Bill’s office.
Glass like grains of rice scatters the desk.
Beneath it, half-soaked into the tufted carpet, is a spreading pool of liquid about the size of a pair of footprints.
From the smell, I know it’s blood, but there’s something wrong with it.
Not red and drying, but viscous and oil colored and stinking of decay.
It doesn’t smell like Uncle Bill. I don’t know whether or not to be relieved by that.
A noise like static in my ears. At first I think it’s the computer—who breaks into a house only to leave the computer and the safe?—but then I realize it’s my fear, transmuted into a buzzing plea to be anywhere but here.
When I try to back out of the room, my sneaker meets the computer tower nestled under the desk. The monitor screams to life in a blaze of white light. He doesn’t have a password, so when the screen fades into a perceptible image, it’s his inbox.
The wind spits through the broken window, whipping my hair into my eyes.
There’s nothing from the past week in his inbox.
The older stuff is all automated bill pay reminders, a few months-old personal emails, and something from an email group called map-western-us that is either blank or won’t load.
There’s nothing recent in his sent mail either.
I find something in his drafts.
Hey man, it reads. There’s no subject line, and no address in the “To” field. I couldn’t get you on the phone. I know this sounds crazy, but
That’s as far as he got. But there are notes underneath, things he wanted to say but hadn’t decided on the right words for. The first one reads, Flayed man… what do they call them here?
Has my mom been tormenting Uncle Bill with this flayed man stuff too?
The other notes don’t give me any answers:
Telepathic?? Waking dreams?
MR and RV both 2017, Mt Charleston disappearances (unconfirmed)
The wind picks up even more, scraping cold fingers over my neck as I copy what he’s written into my phone. I’ll search it later, see if it means anything.
“Flayed men are just a story, right?” I asked Uncle Bill once, trying to make it sound like I didn’t care, like I already knew the answer. Like my mom’s threats of calling him didn’t work on me anymore.
He swirled the coffee around in his mug, staring at it like it was the most exciting thing in the world. “Sure, Ellie. They’re just a story. Same way that when politicians make promises, it’s just a story. Or in court, when they’re trying to convince the jury.”
“Okay,” I pressed, “but he’s not really hunting us, is he? He’s not actually real?”
“What I was trying to say was,” he continued, not really answering my question, “the whole world is propped up by stories, and some of them are exaggerations or just plain lies, but some . . .” He paused for a long time, swilling coffee around his mouth. “I mean, look at us.”
I shut down the computer and take out the trash, and when I’m standing on the curb, I can almost convince myself not to be afraid.
I drive too fast all the way to work, with the GPS on at top volume even though I don’t need it, the Nokia plugged into my car charger and the windows down to keep my senses full of the smell of air and sand. To keep my mind off Uncle Bill and what I’m going to do next.
I know what I want to do next. I want to shut my eyes and wake up in my bed, with Uncle Bill calling me.
I want to box up the terror that started to press in on me back at the house and put it away and never have to look at it again.
I want none of this to be real. Maybe the next best thing is pretending that it isn’t.
Except I can’t do that, because we need blood.
That doesn’t mean I know what to do. The loneliness is the worst part. I can’t ask my mom, and no one else will understand.
Maybe the knife-sharp creature inside me will have an answer.
It’s the worst of me, but it’s also the only part of me that doesn’t know how to lie.
I wait until I hit an arterial, where I can keep driving without paying too much attention, and part my lungs and reach my awareness toward the iron bars.
“What would you do?” I ask it.
The answer comes not as a word but as an impulse—a lunge forward, legs outstretched, ears pinned back.
Run.
The windshield blurs into a screen of pure red, like I’ve run through a car wash, only it’s not water, it’s blood. The rancid smell of carrion gags me. I hit the brakes and someone honks, very far away, as a message worms its way into my mind again, just like it did at the party.
Not long now.
“Turn left,” the GPS burbles in her clipped, inhuman voice. I snap back to myself just in time to catch a middle finger from the driver passing me. My windshield is clear.
I dig my nails into the steering wheel and turn. What else can I do? But that single syllable, run, echoes in my ears like a drumbeat until I pull into the hospital parking lot.