The Waiting: A Supernatural Thriller(35)
The creaking of a door opening in the kitchen met his ears.
His head snapped in that direction. He waited, listening to the quiet of the house. With his pulse picking up speed, Evan stood and made his way through the living room to the kitchen, expecting the basement door to be standing ajar.
But it wasn’t. He checked all the other doors, and none were open even a crack. He stood in the middle of the kitchen, wondering why the hell they hadn’t left today.
Curiosity killed the cat.
The words seemed to come out of nowhere, and he shook his head, moving to the counter to make some tea. While the water heated, he watched the light fade from the day, the clouds on the horizon suspended, no closer or farther away than before.
He and Shaun were the clouds. Unmoving, unable to go forward or disperse, static in life. Soon they would both be old, himself in his eighties, Shaun nearing sixty. How would he take care of him then? How would he ensure that Shaun wouldn’t be scared if he couldn’t come to his calls right away, or if he couldn’t remember what he was supposed to do when he got there? What would they do when he couldn’t help them anymore?
The thought terrified him. This was the unsaid horror that stalked him each hour, submerged beneath the everyday trials and tribulations, the sadness and suffering. The image of Shaun alone and scared was too much to bear, so he banished it back to the depths of his mind from which it came, to hibernate with fangs of fear ready in its black mouth.
His hand felt cold, and when he looked down, he saw he was holding the basement-door handle. He yanked it back, surprised more by not remembering moving to touch it than by the chill it gave off.
“Basements are cold, that’s a fact,” he said to the kitchen.
His tea water wasn’t as hot as he liked it, but he poured it over the tea bag anyway, then sat at the table with his laptop. His email yielded no new messages, but he remembered he had no Wi-Fi service and couldn’t receive anything. He opened his article notes and scanned what he’d already written, and then typed for a moment.
Abel and Larissa Kluge—dead under mysterious circumstances. Allison Kaufman—died the same day as Larissa, look into death. Cecil Fenz—related to Kluges? Bob’s story—notes in basement.
Evan paused, his fingers hovering over the keys.
Clock at the center of everything?
He glanced at the basement door before snapping the laptop shut.
“Nope, I’m tired.”
Without bothering to put his untouched tea away, Evan shut the lights off and headed for bed.
But sleep wouldn’t come. It seemed drifting off was a magic trick he’d forgotten, a subtle secret of the mind that wouldn’t show itself. His thoughts played on a continuous loop, facts and words whirling like a tornado in his skull. After nearly two hours of tossing and turning, he rose and headed to the basement.
“I gotta get that light fixed,” he said, traipsing down the unlit stairs until his fingers found the switch at the bottom.
The basement looked the same, and he didn’t spare a glance at the doll lying on the floor. Knowing it was silly but doing it anyway, he took a chair and positioned it at the end of the table, not wanting his back to the clock. He sat and ran his weary eyes over the notes. Tonight, the scrawls looked different, Bob’s incoherent hand not seeming wild or unruly. In fact, the lines actually appeared to be words, although disjointed and hacked into the page. Evan sifted through them, seeing letters strung together one second, and the next they were gone, lost in a jumble of scribbles.
At the bottom of the pile, he found the words pressed into the paper. Closing his eyes, he ran his fingertips over the ridges, imagining he could read them like braille. I CAN SEE THEM.
He shuddered and opened his eyes. What the hell was he doing? Looking through the ramblings of a man who most likely wandered off into the winter night to freeze in some hidden place. Evan rubbed his forehead. God, he was tired. Without thinking about it, he whipped a hand across the sheets of paper in frustration, scattering several to the floor. They landed next to one another like birds alighting to feed.
“I need some sleep, then I can sort this out,” he said. “I also need to quit talking to myself.”
With that, he stood and reached down to pick up the papers, but his hand stopped inches from the floor. The air around him froze, and all sound stopped. The pages lay side-by-side, their edges almost touching, the scribbles and unintelligible drawings finally becoming clear.
“What the f*ck?” he said, stooping to the ground.
He slid two sheets together and saw that they formed the word BACK. “No way,” he muttered.
He grasped another paper and moved it close to the first two, flipping it different ways, but it didn’t fit. Grabbing all of the loose notes from the table, he pulled them to the floor, moving back to give himself room. He swung the papers different directions, matching their edges and then pulling them apart. Moving around the growing spread of pages, he looked at it from different angles like an artist studying a half-finished sculpture. His mind became focused on the task, the basement around him receding, the promise of something just out of reach coming together.
After pushing the last page into place, he stood and observed the four-foot by eight rectangle he’d formed, the mosaic finally complete.
HIS NAME WAS BILLY AND I KILLED HIM WITH MY TRUCK. HE WAS SIX. I CAN GO BACK I CAN GO BACKICANGOBACKICANGOBACKICANGOBACK.