Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner (37 page)

Sully was stunned. He had not known
what was going on with who was, at the time, his wife. Of course,
he had not been trying too hard at that point. But Anna. He had
thought he had known what was going on with her. He hadn’t always
known what she was thinking, but he had been fairly sure that she
was happy.

But this went way back. All his life,
people had kept secrets from him. Important secrets. What was worse
was that, in the end, everyone, his dad, Anna, Faith, had to get
away from him. Faith’s voice brought him out of his
head.

“I had planned to come back for Monica
after. . .”

Faith couldn’t finish the sentence. So
Sully did. “After I died.”

“Yes,” Faith said. “I was coming back
for her, but then it happened. You came back. You were just
suddenly alive again.”

Sully wondered how that had been for
her. She had made plans for his death. But with the dreams she had
experienced, did part of her know that he would return? Fear he
would return?

“I couldn’t come back after that. I
wanted to be with Monica, and in a lot of ways, I still wanted to
be with you. But I couldn’t come back. I knew I would just keep
having the dream, and it would drive me crazy. I thought I might be
crazy anyway. So I did the only thing I thought I
could.”

“You kept away from me.”

“Yes,” Faith replied before she broke
down again. She had moved away from the phone, but he could still
hear her crying. Sully felt bad for her. He felt bad because he had
thought she was a lot worse of a person than she actually was. But
more than that, he was scared. What she said confirmed to him a
little more that something had come here, and it had come here for
him.

After a couple of minutes, Faith came
back on and asked, “Do you think I’m crazy, Sully?”

Even as horrified as Sully was, he
still couldn’t help but laugh. “No, Faith. Not at all.”

He heard her sigh. His mind went to
the ramifications of everything. He went to his first
priority.

“Listen, Faith.”

“Okay.”

“I’m not sure that I’ll be able to
pick up Monica next Sunday. So I might need you to keep her
longer.”

“That’s fine, Sully. Take as long as
you need.” There was relief in her voice. She had just told him
what might have sounded like madness under a different set of
circumstances. That he would let her keep his daughter probably
confirmed that he really didn’t think she was crazy.

“I’ll call you and let you know when I
coming. Under no circumstances do you give her to anybody else. I
don’t care who. Not Anna, not my parents, nobody but
me.”

“Okay.”

There was no question of why from
Faith. For that, Sully was grateful. Even though she had revealed a
lot to him, he didn’t want to go into the details of his current
life with her.

Less than a minute later, he hung up
the phone. There were now even more questions in his mind. He had
no doubt that something had come. Whatever Faith had sensed,
whatever had scared her away, had been real. Now it was here. But
what was it?

#

Night was approaching fast. Sully felt
anxiety over that. But he tried to keep it at the back of his mind,
because he had other things to think about now.

He sat in the study on the couch. The
playoffs were on again, hockey and basketball, but he was not
watching. On his lap was a notebook. In his hand was a pencil. He
had to do the math.

At the top of the page he wrote, “the
old pattern.” It was his dad who had noted it first. The old
pattern was for him to take Monica to her mother on a Friday night.
That resulted in the horrific visions. It seemed to result in
people dying. But it was more than just dying. They were being
charred. Or at least, their cadavers were being charred. Why? Why
was it always fire?

The answer seemed simple enough. He
said it out loud. “So any damage done to them before the fire would
be erased.”

Somebody, or what seemed more likely,
something, wanted no traces left of its presence, and from the
smallest germ to the biggest cities, nothing could take away like
fire.

That was the old pattern. But
why?

And the new pattern. One time he had
driven and none of the horror had taken place. What was the
difference? What was the common factor in the first three trips
that was not present during the last trip?

Monica? The absence of Monica? Monica
hadn’t been with him on the way home during the first three trips.
But she had been there during the last trip. But what could she
have to do with it? She was a child. And if it did have something
to do with her, then it probably had to do with him leaving her.
And if that were the case, then it probably wouldn’t have just been
on the return trips he had made without her that he would have had
the visions. It seemed likely that they would have continued
throughout the week while she was gone. Monica was ruled
out.

“I made the trip straight through the
last time, but I stopped during the first three trips,” Sully said
out loud.

But that didn’t seem like an important
factor. Because it hadn’t been that he stopped, then had the
visions. No, when he had stopped, it had been because of the
visions. The visions came first.

“
I stopped at night because
of the visions. I had the visions at night.”

Sully had it. Sully had his common
factor.

“Night.”

#

After a simple dinner of canned stew
and crackers, Sully picked up the pen and notebook again. It was
just so much easier to think that way. He was a teacher. He wrote
down what he thought. At least, when the thinking was complex, he
wrote down what he thought. And this was a real mind
puzzle.

The next thing he wrote at the top of
the page was the word, “Night.”

He wracked his mind on that. Something
about being gone at night was associated with all the madness he
had experienced on the road.

And what was the madness? First, there
were the visions. They horrified him. They made him
stop.

Was that it? Was he supposed to stop?
For some reason, did he have to be afraid to drive home at night?
Was there something at home he wasn’t supposed to see?

No. Because the visions ran deeper
than that. Their message wasn’t stop driving now. The worst of
them, though it occurred at night, had its setting as day. It
wasn’t that he was supposed to stop then and there. But maybe it
was that he was supposed to be afraid of traveling all
together.

Sully smacked himself on the forehead.
“Think,” he demanded.

The semi scene had been at day. The
scene had been his would be trip in March. In March, he would have
left in the afternoon and dropped Monica off.

“Then I would have driven home at
night. I’m not supposed to drive at night.”

But he did drive at night. He drove a
lot at night, and yet rarely had any kind of angst at all. But that
had only been around Little Axe.

“I wasn’t away long. I was always back
early. I’m supposed to be here early and sleep here at
night.”

#

It was dark. Sully suspected he would
soon grow tired, and like the nights before, he wouldn’t be able to
resist sleep.

At the top of the page, three linked
words were written: “night-deaths-immortality.”

Sully, if what his father had said was
true, was, if not immortal, nearly immortal. He would live a long
time. He had a great deal of life.

And the deaths. They were all fiery
deaths when he had been gone at night. He wondered if it could be
that he was some kind of supplier. Did something feed off the
abundance of life inside of him? When he was not there for it, did
it take surrogates?

But there were other nagging
questions. Questions he didn’t want to consider. Faith had dreamt
that something was coming for him. Something that wanted only him.
What had come after Faith left? What needed Faith out of its way?
What remained here when Sully was gone at night?

The answer was clear. He hated to
believe it. But he couldn’t deny it. The answer to all three
questions was the same.

She had all but begged him not to
leave. She had not wanted him to take the trips that would keep him
away at night. But when he left on the Sunday morning to go pick up
Monica, she had not protested.

“Because I would be home early that
evening.”

The answer was clear. The answer was
Anna.

Sully grew tired. He went to
bed.

Chapter Eight

Sully would not neglect his classroom
duties on Monday. With all that was happening in his life, he
didn’t want that to be impacted too. That he was a good teacher was
something to hold onto, when so much else was slipping away. But in
the times that he was not dealing with students or their work, he
thought of Anna. He kept his notebook handy, jotting down notes
throughout the day.

Sully was surprised about how little
he knew about this woman. He knew that her dad had died when she
was young. Her mother had left, and Anna was raised by her aunt.
She spent a couple of years in college before she decided there was
very little she could learn about writing there. She had then begun
traveling about the country, taking waitressing jobs to get by, all
the while observing, recording what she saw. After she had
published her first novel under a penname, she had made enough that
she wasn’t rich, but could get by for a while without the
waitressing jobs. That’s when she had come to Little Axe. She had
been there a few months, a strange woman in town who nobody knew
anything about, before she met Sully.

The rest was just not there. Sully
didn’t know about specific places she had been, just that she
traveled a lot. He didn’t know about past friends or significant
others. He didn’t even know the name of the aunt whom had raised
her.

The next consideration for Sully, as
he made his way home from school, was why he knew so little about
someone that he shared his bed with. It wasn’t a hard thing to
understand. Part of it was Anna. She had two states, one where she
was writing and he just left her alone. In the other, she was so
intense for him in the here and now that there was very little
desire for him to even think about her past. Besides, her
mysterious nature did have a certain appeal. He liked reading her
stories, and slowly learning a little bit more about her through
each one, even if what he learned was that she was even more of a
puzzle than he had thought.

Another part of the reason was Sully.
He spent a lot of time and energy analyzing the intellect of each
of his students, not their personal lives but the way they best
went about solving math problems. Otherwise, probing into the lives
of other people was not his nature. He hadn’t even known the
details of his own birth.

At home, Sully decided it was time to
find out the details of Anna. He started with her personal things:
her clothes, jewelry box, dresser drawers and a few other things.
He searched thoroughly, digging through pockets of folded clothes,
looking under the bed, searching every place where it would be
possible to hide something.

A part of him thought this was crazy.
Maybe, instead of looking through her things, invading her privacy,
he should put out a missing person’s add or call the police. But a
bigger part had given up on the hypothesis that this was all in his
head. It was time to focus on looking around him, instead of
looking inside.

After about an hour of searching,
Sully had found nothing more than personal items of hers that he
had already seen. But he wasn’t done. What was next was the
violation of all violations. He went to the study, to Anna’s
workstation. He started with her laptop. He looked through her
document files. There, he found all of her novels and short
stories. There were also files containing notes Anna had taken. It
would have taken him forever to search every page, so Sully just
scanned them. Again, there was nothing out of place, just the notes
of a horror writer, nothing to implicate her of
wrongdoing.

He searched through Anna’s notebooks.
What was written in ink was similar to what was on her computer. He
found one notebook titled travels. Inside were the places she had
been and descriptions of them, what the people were like, what the
terrain was like.

Again, the best Sully could do was
scan. In the end, he was amazed. Anna wrote things about people and
places. She wrote down observations about the world. She delved
into speculation about the unknown. But what wasn't contained in
the computer files or in the notebooks were observations about
Anna.

There had to be something, Sully
thought. A person as incisive as her had to engage in
self-reflection, in self- speculation. But that would be hidden.
That would be the most protected of her writings. Maybe she kept
the Anna files with her.

If there were Anna files, they weren’t
here. He had searched the entire house. Except. . .