The Fall of Never(79)

She thought, Little Baby Roundabout, someone let the Baby out…

Catching her breath, she stepped a foot into Becky’s room. The breathing she’d thought she’d heard—it was coming from in here, from Becky.

“Becky?” Her voice shook the silence. “Sweetheart?”

Across the room, Becky’s window was wide open; the sheer curtain flagging in the cold wind.

“Goddamn,” she moaned and ran for the window—slicing her bare feet on bits of sharp somethings—her lungs aflame—the entire room seeming to spin before her eyes—dizzy. The flailing arms of the curtain wrapped around her body. The wind hit her, frozen and angry, and she brought an arm up to prevent her eyes from watering. Blind and with her free hand, she reached out impulsively, her fingers probing for the raised window. Her hand thumped glass and she leapt forward and slammed the window closed on its sill. The frame rattled and the curtains withered around her.

Catching her breath, she moved backward several paces from the window. The moon was full and pale yellow.

Man in the moon! her mind screamed. It’s a face, just like a face!

And her mind made no sense.

Broken bits of plastic lined the carpet. The shards had cut her feet. And they almost reminded her of something—there and there and almost there—but she couldn’t grasp it.

This is all coming together, all coming down, all starting to reek like two hidden dead girls in the third floor broom closet.

“Kelly…”

And it was a perfect sound, those words—as if all space and time had briefly given way to absolute silence in order for that word—that sound—to justly impress and frighten her…like words spoken in a room filled with no one but the dead…

“Becky,” she managed and sprang forward toward her sister’s bed. In the darkness she groped for her sister’s hand, found it, squeezed it—and recoiled. It was cold and stiff: the hand of a corpse.

A scream threatened her throat. She felt the room tilt to one side, desperate to shake her off balance.

And again that voice: “Kelly…”

She spun around and peered through the darkness. For the briefest of moments, Kelly stood in the darkened bedroom staring at the half-open closet across the room. And the shape inside, pale and moving, nearly squirming…

“They did it in the closet where no one could see,” whispered a voice from the closet. It was undeniably a female voice, yet gritty and baritone.

Kelly couldn’t move.

They did it in the closet…

“Mouse.” The name did not simply issue from her mouth; rather, it was coughed up through her throat and forced through her lips like verbal constipation.

Snapping, she scrambled toward the closet door, grabbed the knob, and—

—ohGodohGodohGodohGodoh—

—flung it open, prepared for the worst.

The closet was empty.

Kelly stood there in the darkness, her chest heaving, sweat sliding in large rolls down her ribs, her eyes wide and staring.

I heard you. My God, I really heard you…

I’m losing my mind here…

Yet now, all she could hear was the sound of her sister’s labored breathing from halfway across the room.

And, of course, her own.





Chapter Eighteen


“Time’s catching up to me,” the hermit Graham Rand said, sizzling sausage links over a flame on his range. He dropped several pats of butter into the pan. From over Graham Rand’s shoulder, Sheriff Alan Bannercon watched as grease from the pan spat and exploded like miniature fireworks. “No spring chicken, that’s for sure. You can tell everywhere you look at me—I see my hands shakin’ and I know. Like some sort of warning, some way of God’s, tryin’ to tell you your time’s almost up. Better make the goddamn beds and milk the cows, because it’s about to fall to dark.” The old man turned and faced the sheriff. “There’s chairs around th’ table for sitting, you know.”

Five minutes ago, Alan had been standing outside Graham’s secluded cabin, staring at the peeling siding and splintered roof with passive deliberation. In short, Alan had no patience for the old hermit—considered him more a nuisance than anything else, really—and regretted having to speak with him. That Graham Rand was the last person to see Felix Raintree was unfortunate. If he could coax even the slightest suggestion of helpful information from the old recluse, Alan Bannercon could go home a happy man. But he hadn’t counted on it; there’d simply been too many phone calls in the middle of the night, too many occasions where the old fool had seen—allegedly—the apparition of his dead wife floating among the trees of the surrounding forest. He was a lonely old man that, over time, had managed to trick himself into believing in the purely absurd.

“Mr. Rand, I need to ask you about Detective Raintree.”

Graham swiveled the pan on the burner, skirted to his left to retrieve one final pat of butter, and dropped it into the sizzling grease. He turned around and faced the sheriff, his face looking hollow and malnourished.

“That man is a good man,” Graham said, wagging a tree-branch finger at Alan. “He knows about these woods, I think.”

“You spoke with him two nights ago at the station? He gave you a ride home?”

“It’s considerate.” He said this with an unflinching air of stateliness. “And don’t think I don’t know about some of you boys.”