A dark shape emerged from the fog, and Evan swerved hard, sure that he’d run up to another boat. Then he saw it was his own dock, as the rest of the island materialized in a looming, grandeur way he would have found majestic any other day. Now, it made him cringe.
Evan didn’t bother tying the pontoon to the dock. He ran the boat onto land, rocks and sand playing a horrid symphony on the aluminum pontoons. When he leapt out of the boat, his right ankle turned and he sprawled, a cry of pain coming from him as he braced his hands on rocks and pine needles. His face scraped what he thought was ground, but when he looked up, he saw it was Selena’s canoe.
Except it was different.
The canoe had been old before, its hide stained and worn by years and years in the water. Something to be expected from being handed down two generations. The thing that lay before him now would never float. Its sides were broken, with white fungus growing from the cracks. The bottom had a long gouge in it, revealing a smile of darkness. A few dry pine branches, looking like peeled bones, lay on top of it.
“Oh God.”
Evan limped up the hill to the house and went inside, the dimmest ember of hope glowing feebly.
“Shaun! Shaun!”
He stumbled across the living room, knocking over a floor lamp on his way through.
“Shaun!”
Sobbing, he opened the door to Shaun’s room, the ember inside dying at the sight of the empty bed. Evan staggered to his own room, barely pausing to sweep it with his eyes before continuing to the kitchen.
“Shaun?” A plea now, a prayer.
The kitchen was empty. When he turned toward the basement, any surprise he should have felt bled out of him with the air in his lungs. The door stood partially open, waiting, beckoning.
Come see, come see, I can’t wait to show you.
Evan could hold it no longer. He bent at the waist and threw up on the kitchen floor. Runners of snot hung from his nose, and he fell to his knees, wetting them in his mess. He gagged again, feeling something tickling the base of his throat. Knowing already, he heaved again, his stomach crumpling like an accordion inside him and— —forcing the wet lengths of white hair out onto the floor. He let out a shriek and skidded away from the pile of vomit, watching the clumps of hair soak into the bile. He slid to the nearest wall and managed to stand, and forced the basement door open.
Pure darkness held sway, blacker than a mine at midnight. Evan took the first steps and then remembered the light switch. Flipping it on produced nothing like the glow earlier that morning. It looked like the bulbs were less than half power, flickering below him, their light a sickly yellow that barely drove the shadows down.
Evan stumbled on the stairs, hitting the landing and almost falling to his knees. He wiped at the stinging acid on his lips and flipped the next switch, lighting his way with the same urine glow.
“Shaun? Selena?”
Again the hope that she would answer and make this a waking fever dream. He would take insanity now, take it and call it his own with a smile. Anything compared to the anticipation of what reality had in store for him.
A small scuffling sound came from near the worktable, and his heart lost a beat.
“Shaun?”
He moved closer, his shoes rasping on the concrete, his eyes twitching to the clock, to the floor, to the stairs behind him. A silver strip lay on the concrete, and when he tilted his head down, he saw it was tape—the duct tape from the doll’s mouth.
The sound again, louder.
Evan slowly walked, rounded the end of the table, and saw the doll standing at the base of the clock. Its head tilted up as its mouth cracked open with a popping sound.
“Go back.”
He heaved in a breath to scream, as the doll fell backward, its legs and arms bursting from its plastic sockets. Its head rolled away, its blue eyes flashing, gone, flashing, gone, until it came to rest against the far wall. Evan shuddered, the strength sapped from his legs, his arms cold. His breath plumed out before him.
“Where’s my son!”
A small click answered, and the center door of the clock swung open a few inches. The light bulbs began to hiss, and their luminance dipped before flaring. The three bulbs burst, one after another, snap, snap, snap. Glass rained down, and Evan sidestepped some of the shards that came his way. Darkness, except for the sallow glow from the stairway, claimed the basement. Silence rushed in.
Evan inched forward, waiting for the dismembered doll to spring into life again. It lay still, and he moved around it, gripping the clock’s open door in one hand. Until then he hadn’t noticed, but now he saw with utter clarity that the weights were all wound to the highest position, hanging like alien eggs waiting to hatch.
With a last deep breath, he pushed the pendulum aside, ducked his head, and stepped into the clock.
27
The first thing he noticed was that it was much larger inside.
Evan knew his left shoulder should be rubbing against the clock’s interior wall, but it wasn’t. He put out a hand to keep from running into the back panel, but it met only empty air. His footsteps clacked and rang out, reverberating as though he stood not in a three-foot-by-three-foot space but in an empty auditorium. A quiet snick issued from behind him, and though he could see nothing when he turned, he knew the door had closed behind him.
“Shaun?”
His voice bounced back to him, coming from too far away. Impossibly far. The darkness around him was complete, like he’d never known before. He imagined this was what an astronaut felt like staring into the void of space—no end, only pitch black to eat up an eternity in every direction. At least he could still feel the floor.
Something touched his back.
Evan spun, swinging a fist through the darkness before he wondered if it could be Shaun.
“Shaun?”
A slithering sound came from his left, the direction of the door, he thought. It sounded like something long crawling through dead leaves, a snake burrowing into a carcass to feed.