The Fall of Never(119)

“What is this?” she said.

“Don’t you trust me?” His grin widened. There was suddenly something reptilian about him. “We used to be such good friends, you and I.”

“What?” More forceful this time. She thought of Gabriel, of how he’d looked the day she’d kissed him on the cheek, and of the picture he’d drawn of her in the pink princess gown.

Kellerella…

“Come,” Simon muttered and crept up and over the embankment.

Kelly had it in her mind to turn and run at that moment—but her feet suddenly refused to comply. Instead, she found herself scaling the embankment and dropping down to the other side, caught in surprise by a gust of freezing air.

At her foot lay a dead raccoon, its belly torn down the middle, its innards spread like butter across its fur and the pile of dead leaves on which it lay. Fat, yellow maggots squirmed in the gore; flies had taken up residence in its half-open mouth. A sharp, jagged piece of slate rested nearby in the leaves, slick and sticky with gore. Sticking out of the animal’s shredded belly were the remains of a several white plastic forks.

Groaning, she shuffled backward and nearly fell, unable to take her eyes off the carnage before her. A scuttle of large, black beetles dispersed from beneath the small corpse and scattered for the cover of the underbrush.

“God…”

“For you,” Simon said. There was a hint of joviality in his voice. He tiptoed around the carcass, his bare feet kicking up flecks of sod, and hopped behind a fence of berry bushes. “Like the story of the children lost in the woods,” he said. “To find your way back again.”

Again she wanted to turn and leave, but couldn’t. She wasn’t fully in control of her body, she knew; that somehow Simon had latched on to a hidden handle inside her brain, and was now dragging her through his insane funhouse. She followed him, managing to keep a distance at least, and only paused once upon seeing a second gutted raccoon strewn on the ground. This one’s arms and legs had been spread and speared to the earth with plastic forks, its face smashed and torn down the middle. She felt something lurch inside her, bent, and vomited a stringy paste onto the ground. Her whole world began spinning again. She heard Simon’s voice, but couldn’t tell if he was actually speaking or if she was hearing it solely inside her head: You’re not alone now, Kellerella. Now we’re both freaks on the hill. Ugly, ugly freaks on the hill.

“Keep moving,” Simon grunted and Kelly’s feet obliged.

He led her around a scattering of stones, laid out in a seemingly functional formation, and she nearly slid in the mess of a third carcass—this one larger than the first two. Though there were no visible wounds to it, she knew it was dead, could tell by its stillness, its rigidity, from the sightless bulge of its eyes. Its mouth was stuffed with something—some cloth, it looked like. And then she knew what it was: her father’s socks. The thing had been suffocated with socks.

She stopped walking, her head bent and hair streaming in her face, one hand out. “No,” she said, “stop. Stop this, Simon. What is this, what are you doing?”

“No stopping,” he said.

“Why are you doing this?” Scared, she found herself very close to tears.

“All this,” he said, extending his scarecrow arms, tendons knotted and bunched at the elbows, “I did for you. I can’t stop thinking about you, Kelly. I can’t stop it. Because I’m always inside your head. It’s not so easy for me to forget.”

“And you’re changing,” she half-whispered.

“Better,” he said. “I’m more real.”

“No. That’s wrong.”

“Doesn’t matter. Wrong doesn’t matter. It’s what’s here that matters, what’s real.” And he was right. “Come on,” he said, “there’s more.”

“I can’t—” But her legs jerked her forward and she pushed on toward the gingerbread house.

Like Simon, the house had changed. It had once been a beautiful thing, something from a child’s dream, coated in sugar and blooming with colored candies. Now it looked like an old shotgun shack in some remote part of the world. Its walls were stripped wood and bulging with knotholes, crawling with vein-like vines. Its roof was a canted slab of clapboard, hoarded from some dismal junkyard. It windows held no panes—only uneven hollow squares, seemingly cut jagged with a penknife. The door stood open: a black maw. Something hung by a trail of vines from the doorframe, dangling in midair, battered by the wind.

Simon crossed down the walkway and entered the front door, pushing the dangling object aside and setting it in motion. Kelly noticed droplets of moisture fall from it and splatter on the wooden floor of the shack: blood. The thing dangling in the doorway was a decapitated squirrel, gutted and mutilated like the rest, and suspend in the air by a tangle of vines. Again, she felt her gorge rise. Struggling to keep her balance, she planted one hand against the side of the house. It was fibrous and leathery and felt very much like flesh. Repulsed, she drew her hand away.

Simon’s pale form passed before the open doorway. “Do you want this to end?” he said. “Follow me if you do. Or it will just get worse.”

“I…can’t…” She was sobbing freely now.

“You built all this,” he said. “Now you’re afraid to face it, to look at it? Just as you’re afraid to face me? To look at me?” He snickered. There was nothing funny about it. “Just like your parents,” he finished.