Cruel World(20)

The flames climbed for a long time, burning high into the dark heavens before relenting and falling into a somber radiance that would’ve seemed peaceful had he not known its source.

Quinn shut the door and paused at the juncture in the hallway, staring down its darkened length to the office before continuing on into the conservatory. He laid on the daybed, tucking one arm beneath his head and knew that sleep would not come, there would be no way it could. Not after today.

But after he gave the brightening stars a last look through the room’s curved glass, he closed his eyes and drifted off within seconds.

~

A keening scream woke him hours later in the dead of night. He bolted upward at the sound, almost sprawling to the floor as vertigo swept over him, the embrace of sleep still strong in his limbs. The cries were high and short, screeching across the grounds in blasts that curled his guts in on themselves like coiling snakes. It was a rabbit in distress, there was no mistaking it. He’d heard it once before when a female had given birth to a litter beneath Mallory’s back porch. Foster had live trapped them but one of the young had gotten pinned beneath the trap’s spring-loaded door. Its cries had echoed all the way to the main house. Foster had tried to save it but it had died a day later, its spine crushed, its hind legs limp and useless.

The screams cut off as abruptly as they began and Quinn moved to the west end of the conservatory in the general direction the sounds had come from. He leaned into the glass, its surface cold beneath his palms.

The grass shone silver outside beneath the light of a half-moon. The woods were drapes of solid shadow. He watched the tree line for movement but none came. He stood there for a while, hands pressed to the glass like a patient observer at the zoo. His breath began to fog a section below his face and he reached to wipe it away as a strange sensation sprouted like a seed within him. It made gooseflesh erupt across the nape of his neck and down the backs of his arms in sickening waves. He stepped away from the glass quickly, retreating until he stood at the entrance to the conservatory. The urge to flee expanded until it was all he could feel, the same instincts that he was sure the now silent rabbit possessed in life, calling out to run, run, run.

Quinn swallowed and made his way through the dark house until he was in the living room. He wrapped himself in a thick quilt hanging over a chair and laid down on the large sofa, his eyes glancing around the room. The house ticked as it settled on its foundations. The small sounds that he knew so well were alien to him now. Each creak was a footstep, each click a doorknob turning.

He fell asleep without knowing it, sliding seamlessly into a dream of running through an endless forest, dark and twisted branches tugging at his clothes like beggars seeking change. There was something behind him but he couldn’t gather the courage to look back. In the late morning, he woke covered in sweat and breathing hard, as if he had actually been sprinting only moments before. He rose and refolded the blanket before making his way to the kitchen.

When he looked out the window, he saw that the graves had been dug up during the night.





Chapter 7



Visitors



He stood beside the disturbed earth, looking down.

Both sheets he’d wrapped the bodies in were visible, the shrouds torn and tugged upward revealing a jelly-like substance caked with dirt. The soil itself had been turned and scattered into the surrounding grass, some sticking to the trunk of the towering pine. Quinn moved around the holes, trying to ignore the stench that rose from them. The smell was overlaid with an oily odor that came and went with the wind. He looked to the west to where the jet crashed the night before. A slice of gray smoke rose, cutting the blue sky into halves.

He knelt and touched the dirt. There were marks from the animal that had done this in the overturned earth. It had dug down and pulled the sheets up and after finding nothing to eat, moved on. Quinn stood and picked up the shovel that had fallen over in the night, recovering the sheets as best he could. When he was finished, he looked into the woods, his eyes growing unfocused. A bear—it had to be—or maybe a coyote. There was nothing else large enough in the state of Maine to exhume the graves overnight. The problem with the theory was the fence surrounding the property. Smaller animals could move freely between its bars but anything larger would be unable to gain access, unless it had been inside the hundred acres when the fence had been erected eighteen years ago.

“We would’ve seen it,” Quinn said to the woods. But maybe not. Animals were reclusive, especially bears. There were deer on the property; he’d seen them many times over the years, but never anything else besides squirrels and rabbits, along with the occasional porcupine.