Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner (36 page)

Sully had known they couldn’t have a
baby. He had never known why.

“Well, we decided that we wanted a
child, no matter what. So we went to an adoption agency. We had
high hopes. But as it turned out, adoption wasn’t a simple thing,
especially if you wanted a newborn, and your mother and I weren’t
going to settle for anything else. So we put our names on a list,
and we waited, but a couple of years passed and we hadn’t heard a
thing. Your mom was becoming more and more inconsolable. I was
growing impatient myself. All the people we knew our age had kids,
most of them in their teens. We couldn’t wait to have one of our
own. So I made a trip to the city. I met with an attorney there who
specialized in adoption. It cost me a pretty penny, but he
guaranteed he could find me a newborn within two months. And he
delivered. It wasn’t three weeks later that he set me up an
appointment with a social worker.”

His dad suddenly stopped and looked
about the room.

“What Dad?” Sully asked. He thought he
felt it too. It was as if something had come into the room with
them, just a vague sense. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” his dad finally replied.
Then he went back to his story.

“I drove back to the city. And I met
with this social worker. She told me that she had a pregnant girl
who was unfit to be a mother. Said they didn’t know much about her.
They didn’t even know her name, but everyone called her Tela.
Couldn’t say how old she was but said she looked fifteen or
sixteen. The police had brought her in a few months before. They
found her at this whore house.”

His dad paused and looked at Sully as
if for reaction. But Sully didn’t know how to react to this
information. He just wanted to know more. “Go on,” he
said.

His dad frowned and sighed, then said,
“They kept your mother in the back of that place. I guess young
girls brought more money than their older counterparts. That social
worker told me such a thing wasn’t so uncommon.”

His dad sat there with a look on his
face that was half sadness, half disgust. Then he seemed to shake
it off.

“She wanted to give me some time to
think it over, but I told her I didn’t need it. We just wanted a
baby and it didn’t matter where it came from. She was okay with
that, but she wanted me to meet the girl first. I
agreed.”

The presence in the room was stronger,
and Sully felt a strange drowsiness falling over him.

“They brought that girl in. And it
made me feel just terrible, sick to my stomach. She was a pretty
girl. But there were no two ways about it. She was crazy as can be.
She talked in gibberish, like there was someone else in the room
who understood what she was saying. And she didn’t look at me at
all. Her eyes kind of floated around as she spoke.”

Sully felt pulled two ways. He wanted
the end of this story, but he was growing more tired, as if he had
been drugged. His dad seemed to be looking around more and more as
he spoke, but Sully wasn’t sure if it were real or just his tired
head playing tricks on him.

“I couldn’t get out of my head how
awful this poor girl had been treated. She barely even knew where
she was, and men would pay money to go back into a room and have
their way with her. Then I had this sick thought. I wondered to
myself who the father was.”

His dad stopped talking. Now, Sully
didn’t think it could be in his head. The old man’s head was
darting around frantically. He was trying to find what had come
into the room.

When his dad was finally able to stop
looking around, he said, “And that’s when she said the one thing
that made any sense at all. And she looked right at me. She said it
like she had read the question right out of my head. She said, ‘All
of them.’”

And with that, the tiredness
completely overwhelmed Sully. He felt himself slipping off into
oblivion. Then he felt the hand hit his face. He opened his eyes to
see his dad standing in front of him.

“You’re fading fast, Son, and
something I don’t understand is spooking the hell out of me. I have
to go, but I want you to hear this first. You have many lives in
you. You can live over and over again. You’ve got to start thinking
of what might take advantage of that.”

That was the last thing Sully
remembered before waking up in his bed.

#

The dogs woke Sully again. And again,
he was too tired to get up.

Chapter Seven

Sully woke up the next day, and the
fear seized him immediately. Something had been there last night.
And this time, it wasn’t just him. His dad had noticed it too. That
made it more real. He couldn’t be alone.

Sully refrained from rushing out of
his home. He took the time to get cleaned up and put on slacks and
a nice shirt, an outfit suitable for church. He would spend the day
with his parents. Or, at least, he would stay with them until the
fear decreased. Then, maybe, he would come home.

By the time Sully got to his parents’
house he had calmed down somewhat. The prospect of spending the day
with them eased his angst a little. Whatever his dad remembered,
Sully still felt he was safe with them. Nothing bad could happen
with good old Mom and Dad around.

But what he saw at the farm shocked
and angered him. His parents’ RV was not parked in the yard. He
thought of the last time he had been there. It had been on Thursday
to pick up Monica. With her going away for a week, he had succumbed
to his mother’s request to let Monica stay Thursday with Grandma
and Grandpa instead of at daycare. In the picture of memory he
could see the RV when he had pulled up on Thursday. So it should
have been there now, unless they were gone too. But they had said
nothing to him about going anywhere.

Sully walked up to the front door,
thinking maybe there was some explanation that he wasn’t
considering. His dad wouldn’t leave him. Not now.

On the door he found the note. It was
in his mother’s handwriting.

Sully, there’s roast in
the fridge. Help yourself. We love you. And we’ll see you when we
get back from the hole.

Sully crumbled the note in rage. How
could his dad do this to him? The hole his mother referred to was
Trout Hole in New Mexico. It was a rustic lake resort, set in the
lower Rocky Mountains. His parents made quick little fishing trips
there once or twice a year.

By the note, his mother had fully
expected him to come here. That meant she had been tricked. One of
them usually called before leaving, just to say how long they would
be gone and ask if Sully would check in on the farm. No doubt, his
dad had told his mom that he had made that call. That way she
wouldn’t talk to Sully and let the cat out of the bag. His dad was
getting them away from him.

Sully shook with anger as he walked
back to his car. It was just easier to feel angry than afraid right
now. How could he have known this would happen? Three days ago he
would have thought it impossible. But as it stood, the two people
in the world he trusted the most had abandoned him.

Abandoned.

#

Sully waited until late in the
afternoon to make the call. He had struggled for hours with what to
say. But he knew his struggles didn’t matter. There was no right
way to pose the question. No matter how he asked, it would come off
as crazy.

Faith picked up on the third ring.
“Hello.”

“Hi, Faith. It’s Sully.”

“Oh, hi. Do you want to talk to
Monica?”

Sully paused. Did he really want to do
this? He hated to. It had all been left unsaid. It had been easier
that way. He had gotten what he wanted when she left. The rest
hadn’t mattered. But now, he had to know.

“Actually, Faith. I need to talk to
you. It’s important.”

“Okay,” Faith responded, hesitancy
apparent in her voice.

“Are you somewhere
private?”

“Well, Scott went to the store, but
Monica’s right here.”

“Can you move away from her, so she
can’t hear?”

“Well, yeah. I guess. Just a
second.”

Sully waited as Faith moved to
wherever she was going. It felt so weird to talk to her like this.
And he knew it was going to get worse, way more awkward. Even in
their marriage, especially in the later part, they had not much
opened up to each other.

“Okay,” Faith finally said.

“All right. Now I have to ask you a
question. It may seem kind of strange for me to be asking it now.
But it’s important.”

“Okay,” Faith’s shaken voice said. He
wondered if she knew. For years, it was a question left unasked,
and finally it had come home. Sully wanted badly to leave the
question as it was, just an occasion tingle in his head, just a
question left to his mother’s brooding on right and wrong. But now
he couldn’t ignore it. Given the circumstances, it just seemed too
relevant.

“Faith. I need to know why you
left.”

There was a long pause, and then he
could hear her crying. He felt a tinge of guilt. But mostly, he
just hoped that she would be able to talk about it, willing to talk
about it. “We weren’t happy,” she finally said.

“No, Faith. We weren’t. But I know
you. That wasn’t enough reason for you to abandon us, not under the
circumstances.”

She began to sob loudly. She tried to
say something a few times but couldn’t get it out. Sully wondered
if she were capable of having this conversation now. Maybe he
should give her time to think about it. Maybe he should call back
later.

“Why, Sully?” Faith finally asked.
“Why do we have to talk about this now?”

Sully took his time, not sure of how
to answer Faith’s question. How much explanation should he give
her? She had his daughter. Should he say that people had died?
Should he say that people he had trusted had left and that some
scary presence had entered his home? Could he say these things and
still expect her to send his daughter back to him next
week?

Sully formulated what he thought were
the right words. He hoped she would accept them and not inquire for
further details.

“Listen, Faith. There’s something very
strange going on around here. I don’t know how to explain it,
because it’s beyond what I understand. And I just think that if I
know—”

“I was afraid!” Faith said,
interrupting him. “I knew something was coming, and I was
afraid.”

“What? I mean, how?”

“Just a second,” Faith
whispered.

It took a couple of minutes for Faith
to come back on the line. When she did, her voice was calm but had
a forced quality to it.

“Sully, are you still
there?”

“Yeah, I’m here.”

“I’m sorry, but this is
hard?”

“I know,” Sully said. “It’s
fine.”

In a way, he was glad it was difficult
for her. It would have been a lot worse if he was the only one who
felt weird about this conversation.

“It was nothing like you think,” Faith
said. “At least, it was nothing like what it must have seemed like
to you and everybody else.”

Not wanting to be misunderstood, Sully
resisted the urge to smirk. He was all too aware of what it was
like to be alone. He knew what it was like to have everyone around
you thinking things were a certain way when they were
not.

Faith continued. “We had our problems,
but I had no intention of leaving the two of you. I didn’t stop
loving you, Sully.”

“Okay,” Sully said, knowing he could
not say the same. He had never hated her, but he had stopped loving
her long before she left. But he would not bring that
up.

“It started right after Monica was
born,” Faith continued. “Every night, I would have these dreams.
And they seemed so real. We’d be at home, just like we were most
nights. And then something would come into our house. I don’t know
how to describe it. It was just this thing.”

“Like a presence,” Sully interjected,
wondering if she could be talking about the same thing that had
been there the night before.

“Yeah, I guess,” Faith replied. “But
it was more just like knowing. Like it was just there and I somehow
knew what it meant.”

“Okay,” Sully said. He didn’t think it
was the same thing as the night before. What had been there last
night was almost tangible, like an unseen stare can sometimes feel.
And it wasn’t a dream.

“It was a warning, Sully. At least,
that’s what it felt like. I just knew when it was there that
something was coming.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. I just knew it was bad.
And I knew that it was coming for you. It only wanted you, but it
would hurt anyone that got in its way.”

The idea seemed wrong to him, but
Sully asked the next question anyway. “Do you think the dreams
could have been foretelling the tornado?”

“Well, I did. But then you had your
accident, and the dreams didn’t go away. There you were, dead, I
thought. And the dreams that something was on its way to take you
still kept coming. I couldn’t take it anymore. I left. And after
that, I stopped having the dreams.”