Brighter, a supernatural thriller (2 page)

Carrie didn't like the other person. Was frightened of him. Said many times, "I just think one of these times you're going to hit me."

But he'd never even raised a hand to her. He wouldn't. He didn't think he would.

Didn't matter. She'd ended it anyway. She went back to her parents' house. He went back to his. Like they were kids playing at love and relationships.

He didn't want to go back, but he was flat broke. He and Carrie had bought themselves out of their lease. Carrie could have covered it. Offered to, actually, but Garrett's pride couldn't let her. No, he'd paid his half, but his half had been all he had. He was left with just about enough money for gas to get back to West Virginia. So here he was, crawling back to his parents' house and crawling back to Elston. A town that held so many bad memories for Garrett. A town he'd tried only to forget.

He wondered if Elston had forgotten him.

As the phone stopped ringing, and his mother picked up, he thought, "Not damned likely."

Chapter Two

When Ramona Brinks moved into the apartment above The Holy Grind in Elston, her new neighbor Angelica Murdock was less than polite about it.

"God! I can't believe you're the one moving in here," said Angelica, standing on the back porch that wrapped out around the apartment building, spitting cigarette smoke from her mouth along with her words.

Ramona looked around, trying to make sure Angelica wasn't talking to someone behind her. No one was there. Angelica was definitely directing her venom at Ramona. Ramona made an attempt at a smile and lit a cigarette of her own. "Hi, Angelica," she said. "How are you doing?"

Ramona wasn't sure when Angelica had started being such a bitch. She pinpointed it right around the time that Angelica started hanging out with the river hippies.

Angelica rolled her eyes.

Ramona considered asking Angelica why she was such a bitch. She decided that probably wasn't a great idea. Besides, Angelica was probably only being rude to Ramona, because Angelica was a friend of Cecelia. And Cecelia was still pissed that Ramona had slept with Tucker two years ago.

Ramona turned away from Angelica and smoked her cigarette, brushing strands of hair off her sticky, sweaty forehead. It was hard work moving, and it was a particularly warm fall day.

"Listen," Angelica said to Ramona's back, "just keep your shit off of my side of the porch, okay?"

Ramona turned around. "Sure," she said. "Fine."

Angelica hadn't always been this much of a bitch, had she? At one point, Angelica had been friendly to Ramona. Ramona was sure of it. Then again, maybe Ramona was making too big of a deal out of Angelica's rudeness. Maybe Angelica wasn't even being that rude. Maybe Ramona was just in a bad mood because her apartment was crappier than she expected it to be.

Ramona had been inside the apartment she was renting more times than she could count. It was a prime piece of real estate among the younger set of Elston, and both Zane Richards and Sheila Noonan had lived in it at one point. Zane, in particular, was well known for throwing parties two or three times a week. In her glory days, Ramona had been in attendance at each and every one of those parties. Now...Ramona had a job. She couldn't party like she had when she was in college. She'd graduated a month ago, and since then, things had stayed remarkably the same. Ramona didn't know what she'd been expecting. She hadn't thought there would be fanfare or seventy-six freaking trombones or anything like that. Still, she thought that things would be different after she graduated from college. She'd been working her ass off for this moment for four years of her life. She expected it to be satisfying. She expected it to be rewarding. Instead it was...nothing.

Life after college was a lot like life in college. Except now, she wasn't working towards anything. She didn't have any goals or classes to take. And now, she had a job. Well, she had the same job as she'd had when she was in college. She worked for the admissions office at Elston College. But now, instead of being work-study, she worked there full time. Which meant she had to get up at seven in the fucking morning, five days a week. This really cut into her partying time. Which kind of pissed Ramona off, because partying was one of the few things she actually enjoyed anymore.

Ramona was depressed. She suddenly felt washed-up and useless. She'd never realized how much of her self-worth was tied up in her performance. Graduating from college in four years and getting good grades in her classes had been one of the ways she'd let herself know that she was doing well at life—that she was ahead of the curve. Now, Ramona was working for little more than minimum wage and not using her degree for anything. She felt like a failure.

Admittedly, Ramona's degree was in English, so it wasn't as if there were a plethora of jobs she was actually qualified for. But Ramona had intended to go to grad school after college. She'd just put off taking her GREs or applying anywhere for so long that she'd missed all the deadlines. Now she was stuck in Elston for another year. Signing this lease on the apartment above the Grind was like signing herself into prison. Ramona wanted to get on with her life. She wanted to get out of Elston. But she was stuck here. For another whole year.

It didn't help that her apartment was different than the way she remembered it, either. Sure, she'd spent umpteen gazillion parties here when Zane had lived in it, but somehow, she'd managed to remember the whole thing way bigger than it was. The apartment was a studio. It had a breakfast nook with a bar and a separate bathroom, but other than that it was just one room. Ramona had imagined it as a much larger room. As it was, her furniture and bed barely fit in the place. Her bed was currently protruding above the edge of the large picture window in the middle of the apartment. Ramona hated the way it looked. To top things off, her apartment didn't have a closet, for Christ's sake. She'd just discovered this fact, along with the fact that the door to her back porch (a wraparound kind that she shared with her neighbors, including Angelica the rude) was located in her bathroom. Who put a door to the porch in a bathroom? It was weird.

Ramona sucked hard on her cigarette. Smoke invaded her lungs. Her heart beat fast, but she felt calmer. God. She just wanted something to feel okay in her life right now. She just wanted to feel like she was doing something right. She shook her head and stared off the porch into the alley below. Downstairs, there was a courtyard. She could see the back of The Grind and the parking lot where she parked her car. She lifted her cigarette to her lips—

And dropped it, uttering a cry of pain. The damned thing had burned down to her fingers and burned her. She ground it out with her heel and went back inside her apartment.

Inside, everything was still in boxes. It was hot. She needed an air conditioner or something, because the apartment was sweltering. Ramona shoved her hair off her forehead again, suddenly fed up with everything. The heat, the size of her apartment, the fact Angelica was fucking rude. She sat down hard on the wooden floor, and glared around at the four walls, glared at the piles of boxes (several overflowing because Ramona hadn't done the neatest packing job), glared at her furniture, which looked oversized in her new, tiny apartment. Tiny. Small. Cramped.

That was how Ramona felt. Cramped. Stuck. Boxed-in. Her apartment was a box. A sweltering, teeny box. Ramona felt her breath start to stick in her throat. She took a shallow breath. Tried to breathe deeper. Panicking, she jumped to her feet and ran to the large picture window, which was open to the outside world. Ramona stuck her head outside, relieved to get draughts of clearer, less stuffy air. The air was still hot, though. And outside, the main street of Elston stood stock-still. There was no breeze ruffling the trees. There were no clouds moving across the sky. Instead, Elston looked like a postcard picture. Unmoving. Stagnant. And the town was so tiny. Ramona could turn her head and see from one end of town to the other. Cramped apartment in a cramped town. And everything was the same! Ramona struggled to catch her breath again.

Angelica's voice floated into the apartment. "I'm closing your back door, okay? You shouldn't leave it open like that."

"It's hot!" Ramona shot back. She flipped off Angelica's voice.

Angelica didn't hear or didn't care, because Ramona heard her porch door slam. God. Ramona wished that bitch would just die.

* * *

It wasn't that Garrett had forgotten why he'd left Elston. Not exactly. No, he had memories of the evening. Foggy, fuzzy ones, but memories. He remembered getting beaten up. He remembered bleeding on the pavement outside The Brass Frog, not being able to see anything, just hearing the sounds of feet hitting the pavement as his attackers scattered. And he knew that someone had told him to get out of town and never come back. He remembered that part. Actually, that part was pretty crystal clear. It was just before that. Before that, it got fuzzy. But he remembered earlier in the night clearly. In between, it was all a mess. Confusing. He remembered, earlier that night, being angry and deciding to get trashed. God. He'd been so angry.

It hadn't been over anything monumental. He'd lost a job. He'd never expected the job to last forever. He hadn't even wanted that. But he'd wanted to leave on his own. Put in his two weeks, because he was headed for something bigger and better. Instead, he'd been fired. The boss had claimed that Garrett wasn't doing his share of the work. That he was slacking off. It was a lie. Starkey, that asshole, must have said that. Starkey always had it in for Garrett. It was Starkey who wasn't pulling his fair share anyway. He was a kiss-ass. He got what he wanted by saying what the higher-ups wanted to hear.

After being fired, anyone would have been reasonably upset, but there was nothing reasonable about that night. Nothing reasonable about the way he'd behaved. Nothing reasonable about what he'd seen... Whatever, it was he'd seen... He couldn't quite remember it. Sometimes he dreamed about it. He'd wake up in a cold sweat, bed sheets tangled around his limbs. He'd thrash, trying to free himself from the sheets. From the images.

God, what
had
happened?

For the first time since pulling onto I-35 North in Austin, he began to think that coming back to Elston had been a very, very bad idea. But again, he'd had no real choice in the matter. He knew he was always welcome at his parents' house, and he had no money. After he arrived, he lay low for a while, not leaving his parents' house for any reason. But eventually, they began to question him. What were his plans? He certainly didn't plan on lying around their house for the rest of his life, did he? He was considering getting a job, wasn't he? And even if he weren't, the least he could do was help out around the house a little.

So Garrett began to run errands, do laundry, and wash dishes. He had precisely wanted to avoid leaving the house, because his mother was a huge gossip, and he was sure that news of his return was all over town. But he couldn't come up with any reasonable excuses why he couldn't go to the grocery store for his mother. He didn't think she'd understand if he told her that there were a bunch of people out to get him. So he went, but he was certain that someone would see him and recognize him. The first few times he went on errands, he didn't see anyone he knew. He began to think, to hope, that all of them had left. This
was
a college town, after all, and it
had
been five years. It was long enough for all of them to have graduated and moved away.

He became so hopeful that he dared to venture into town, to Elston's bar: The Brass Frog. Elston was a very small town, so it only had one proper bar. There were other establishments that served alcohol, but they all also served food and rarely stayed open past midnight. The Brass Frog had stained glass windows and old church pews set up around its tables. It opened into an outdoor garden, where there were more tables set up. In the winter, the garden was closed up, but it wasn't quite winter yet. The last breaths of warmth still lingered in the October air, so the garden's doors were open.

It was Friday night, so The Frog was crowded. Being the only bar in town, it did a lot of business on the weekends. At one point, there had been two other bars in Elston, but they'd both gone out of business. In each case, the owners had shoved the profits up their noses. Garrett didn't even know where anyone got cocaine in this town, but it was apparently a big thing. He wasn't into it. He thought the drug was stupid.

Garrett nudged his way towards the bar so that he could order a drink. He had to shout over the conversation and canned music, but the bartender got the message and brought him a cold Budweiser. He was about to go back into the garden. Inside the bar it was hot and the air smelled faintly of sweat. He thought the cool air would feel nice. But a girl approached him—long blonde hair, blue eyes. She was dressed in a peasant blouse and bellbottoms. A hippie chick. Elston was crawling with them. He wondered if she shaved her armpits. She was awfully pretty. Maybe he didn't care.

"Hi," she said. "I don't know you. How is that possible? It's such a small town. I know everyone. But I don't know you. Are you visiting?"

Garrett laughed. "Not sure, actually. I, uh, used to live here."

"Really? Moving back?"

"Maybe," he said.

"It's the vortex," she said. "Am I right?"

The vortex.

–swirling bodies screaming mouths wide blood spattered white sharp teeth like pine needles gaping jaws snake fangs
—

"You okay?" said the girl.

Garrett shook himself. "Fine," he said. He shouldn't have come to The Brass Frog. That was where he had been that night. And now he was having the nightmares again, but he wasn't asleep.

"You don't look okay," said the girl. "Listen, I live just above The Holy Grind, next door. We could go up to my place if you want."

Garrett shook his head. "Sounds nice, but I can't. I'm sorry."

"Is it because you don't know me?" asked the girl. "My name's Angelica. I'm a Sagittarius. My favorite movie is
Raiders of the Lost Ark
. My favorite band is Rusted Root. I enjoy long walks on the beach and eating veggie burgers. There, now you know more about me than my own mother. You wanna come now?"