The Narrows(81)
Brandy followed the trail of broken cornstalks for close to forty-five minutes before the trail grew cold. Something immense and mechanical loomed just ahead so she continued in that direction. It was a large combine harvester, yellow as a school bus, its reciprocating head filled with rows of metal teeth. She walked a complete circle around the machine, still not sure what she was looking for. Satisfied that she hadn’t found anything out of the ordinary, she pressed on through the maize, leaving the combine harvester to diminish in her wake.
By the time she emptied out onto Gracie Street, the sky had already been grumbling for some time. A light patter of rain fell but it only lasted a brief time. It felt good against her face. She had worked up quite a sweat hoofing it across town. On the shoulder of the road, she scraped the dirt out from between the cleats on the soles of her sneakers then picked aphids, spiders, and stalk borers from her clothes and hair. Across the road stood the first wave of abandoned farmhouses, their roofs sagging or completely sheared off, their windows like holes punched in drywall. Rising above the rooftops and farther in the distance, the crumbling grain silo rose up like a missile. NO TRESPASSING signs were posted everywhere, but Brandy also saw scads of empty beer cans, fast-food wrappers, and tire tracks in the mud. This was where many residents had lived and farmed until years of flooding had prompted their inevitable evacuation. Even now, the damage done to these structures was still clearly evident in the way they slouched and sloped and sank down into their foundations. The earth itself was still a muddy quagmire from the last flood.
Brandy crossed Gracie Street and trod across the muddy field, surveying the closest farmhouses with something akin to reverential silence. For the first time, she could understand why her father would have wanted to get out of a town as desolate and ruinous as Stillwater. These people had left, hadn’t they?
He could have taken us with him.
Again, she chased the thought away. This had nothing to do with her father.
As she crept closer to one of the farmhouses, she was overwhelmed by the smell of the Narrows coming off it in potent, suffocating waves. It was the smell that, following the flood, had permeated the whole town, including the Crawly household. It was stronger out here, however, and Brandy had to hold her breath when she peered into a doorway that no longer had a door hanging from the hinges.
Inside—crumbling darkness and warped, waterlogged floorboards. Animals had made nests and dens, and the vaguely sweet perfume of feces mingled with the reek of the flood. Great streamers of moss, as lush as carpeting, crept up and down the walls. Large rents in the roof showed the iron-colored sky and allowed rain to spill in. With one hand she reached out and touched the doorframe. It was spongy and forgiving. She thought she might be able to shove the entire structure over on its side with one sturdy shove.
She crossed between two dilapidated barns where weathered beams and struts poked out from the walls and through the roof like ribs through a rotting carcass. Between the two crumbling barns, a structure slightly larger than an outhouse gathered her attention. There was something rusted and metallic inside—some piece of farming machinery she didn’t recognize—and there was what looked like a bloody handprint on the outhouse’s open steel door. Brandy veered clear of it, cutting through the marshy ground to a small, square little house made of white brick. The roof was furry with moss that dripped over the front windows. There was a little porch off to the right where a door was set into the front of the house, off-center. The door itself looked like something scavenged from a junkyard. Determined weeds sprang up between the porch’s floorboards.
Something moved in one of the house’s windows. Brandy jerked her head and peered at the window, trying to see past the film of muck on the glass, but it was impossible. When the thing moved again, she was startled to find that the movement hadn’t been coming from inside the house, but from right above the window itself. Two bats, their wings intertwined about each other, dangled upside down from the drooping eaves of the house.
A second later, it seemed she was suddenly allowed to see the rest of them. They were clinging with clawed wings to the walls, scrabbling along the rooftop, hanging precariously from a slouching brick chimney, huddling together in damp, hairy pods beneath the porch…
Even as she moved toward the house, she couldn’t comprehend exactly what she was doing. Had she been watching herself on some instant reply, perhaps projected onto a movie screen, she would have denied that the figure moving slowly toward the house was her—surely she would have no intention of going up to that run-down, bat-infested shack. Yet here she was, and she moved with the silent and unwavering determination of a wildcat stalking prey through the underbrush.
The bats nearest the porch did not move as she mounted the waterlogged stairs and arrived before the closed front door of the abandoned house. She was suddenly alive, more alive than she had ever been, and she could feel the blood whooshing through her veins and the sweat bursting through the pores on her face and the agitation tickling the back of her throat. Her heart pumped like a piston.
She pushed against the door and it opened.
Chapter Fourteen
1
When Maggie Quedentock finally opened her eyes, she could see the soft glow of daylight behind the drawn shade of the bedroom window. Stiffly, she sat up. She was on the floor of the master bedroom, curled in a fetal position like a child who’d fallen asleep on their parent’s lap. What time was it? When was it?