The biggest grandfather clock she had ever seen stood there, its hulking three-towered bulk taking up most of the wall. Its black finish looked like fabric cut from a midnight sky, and its face seemed to stare at her, pinning her to the spot on which she wavered.
“Puppy?”
Her voice sounded weak and small. The word died so quick in the basement air she wasn’t sure she’d even said it.
“Hello? Are you hurt?”
A quiet whimper came from the other end of the room, and Becky squinted beneath a makeshift worktable set up in front of the clock. Shadows cloaked the area, and she couldn’t see if anything lay there.
“It’s okay, I’m not gonna hurt you.”
She waited for the jingle of a collar or another noise, but none came. She moved down the last few stairs and onto the basement floor. The air was definitely cooler down here, and it smelled. What was the smell? Something sharp and acrid but organic. She’d smelled it before.
Blood.
“Are you hurt?” Becky said, forcing herself to walk toward the table.
She ignored the sensation of being watched, and completely struck down the idea that the clock was the one watching. A clock watching. She nearly let out a strangled laugh through her tightened throat but cut it short.
The dog whimpered again, and she tried to make out its form under the table. A dark shape lay there, but it looked wrong somehow.
An overwhelming urge to backpedal to the stairs hit her like a bat to the head.
You should run.
Instead, she took another step forward and squatted by the table to examine the darker shadow. Becky placed her hands on the floor and leaned forward, trying to make out the shape of the dog.
Something wet touched her fingers, and when she looked down, she saw why the form beneath the table looked so strange.
The pool of blood that she’d thought was a dog rolled toward her, a black puddle moving like quicksilver. Becky pulled her hand up, revulsed, her face crumpling. She opened her mouth to scream—she had to, there would be no getting around it now—but the dog whined again, louder this time, and she realized where the sound came from.
From inside the clock.
“No,” she gasped.
Her muscles, the ones she’d meant to work on and tone up for Greg so he wouldn’t leave her for someone thinner, shook, and her attempt at standing resulted in falling flat on her ass. Her air left her, and all at once she was a child again, lying on her back beneath the weeping willow she’d been climbing until a branch broke and released her to the cruel arms of gravity. A small amount of air whistled into her lungs, and it was this sound she thought she heard as she tried to crab-walk backward. But when her breath heaved back out, the noise continued, drawing her eyes upward.
The three bare light bulbs were slowly unscrewing themselves.
“No,” Becky said, this time getting some force behind the word, like an admonition to the turning bulbs.
The bulb closest to the stairs dropped free of its fixture, winking out like a falling star before exploding in slivers of glass behind her. Becky yelped and stopped moving backward, a painful spine of glass poking into her palm. She watched in horror as the next bulb in line finished unscrewing and plummeted to the cement floor.
Darkness moved in closer, like something alive and ready to pounce the second the light vanished. Far away, she heard Shaun call out for her upstairs. Her arms shook, trying to hold her upper body up. Tears slid down her cheeks, but it was like watching someone else cry. The last light twisted with agonizing slowness, drawn out by an unseen hand, but it wasn’t this that held her attention.
Becky stared ahead, her eyes bulging as the grandfather clock’s middle door swung open, and the last light bulb fell, shattering on the floor.
15
Evan slowed the van to a crawl and read the fire number poking from the bushes beside the country road.
Checking his notes, he saw the number matched, and turned the vehicle onto the driveway. No tar or gravel covered the drive, unlike most of the other homes he’d passed on the way out of Mill River. After dropping Selena off in front of a low office building a short distance from the park, he’d taken Main Street north, leaving the quaintness of town behind for the truly rural feeling that only wilderness can bring. The road wound around massive stands of pines, their reaching branches forever green against the marbled sky, and beside Long Lake at times, before the water ran out and the vegetation of spring took over completely.
It hadn’t taken long to find Crux Drive, and Evan kept checking the clock, not wanting to be gone from Shaun more than a few hours. He’d actually driven past Cecil Fenz’s driveway at first, because there was no mailbox at the head of the trail. Now, as he bumped through the dense woods, the gray light from above dimming further amongst the budding trees, he wondered if the directions on his phone were correct. The narrow drive twisted twice, hard, like a bend in a river, before straightening out again. The van traveled up a short hill, and then the cover broke, a yard and house coming into view before him.
The house surprised him, not only because it was such a contrast to the one he’d just left but because it didn’t look like the home of a recluse. It was two stories and wide, a covered front porch adorning its front. The roof drew his eyes upward, with its slatted tile shingles and curved peaks. The eaves were delicately carved, ornamental wood, and it became apparent when he parked the van close to the house that the designs were constellations. A small garage stood next to the house, humble in its low shape, and a tilled patch of earth, nearly fifty yards square, sat beyond the garage, neatly placed stakes marking rows in the dirt.