The Creeping

Zoey has her stomach pumped to get the booze up. I guess it was suspecting that Caleb was hiding something that caused her to drink enough to pass out; she couldn’t stand reality and so she tried for alcohol-induced nothingness. The entire time the doctors work over me, musing at my tissue’s rapid recovery from exposure to detrimental temperatures—their mumbo jumbo, not mine—I consider asking them to slice me open. Crack my rib cage. Take a peek at my heart. Fillet my scalp. Drill a hole in my skull. Look at my brain. I want them to diagnose the fatal flaw in me. The thing, however buried in my flesh, that made me blind to the monsters around me. I want them to remove it as they would a tumor.

Once the doctors have left, I stare hypnotized at the fifteen black stitches sewn in my skin. They remind me of the bramble growing through the strawberry vines. They’re meant to piece me back together. Fat chance. I’m the relic of a child who saw brother kill sister. Child kill child. No wonder I didn’t remember.

A nurse bustles around me, tucking me into a hospital gurney. She lets me borrow a compact mirror. I run my fingers over the skin of my bloodless lips.

“The stiches look worse than they are,” the nurse clucks, attempting a reassuring smile.

She’s wrong. Everything is much, much worse than it looks. But why bother telling her? She wouldn’t understand. She didn’t half drown saving her best friend from said best friend’s brother. She wasn’t attacked by a man who killed his sister and his mother.

Eventually, the doctors decide that I’m stable enough for visitors. Dad, Sam, and Shane are ushered into the hospital room. Dad hugs me until he catches me grimacing from the twinge in my shoulder. I take shallow breaths and promise him it doesn’t hurt badly. It does, but not so much as the razor-sharp puzzle in the soft gray matter of my brain. Monster. No monster. Daniel and Caleb. The Creeping. Jeanie’s killer. Jane Doe’s killer. Betty Balco’s killer. It’s so many shapes, it’s shapeless.

“Looks like you put that through a meat grinder,” Shane says, pointing to my right hand and torn-off fingernails. Two cigarettes are tucked behind his ear, and his whole face is carved up with worry lines. His big oven-mitt palm pats me on the head. “I’m glad you’re okay, kid. You told me enough of what happened for now. We’ll talk about everything once you’re up to it.”

Shane turns and heads for the door, broad shoulders collapsed forward.

“Shane,” I call. “Did you find Daniel and Caleb?”

He turns partially around, half his face shadowed. “No, but there were traces of blood. Signs of a fight. We were able to re-create what happened. Caleb and Daniel chased Zoey out onto the water. They held you against your will. They confessed to killing Jeanie and Bev Talcott. Caleb and Daniel fought. There are signs of an escalating struggle. We’re not sure if they fled into the woods when they heard our sirens or before. The boys will turn up,” Shane assures my dad.

Dad nods, satisfied at the promise of justice. After Shane leaves, Dad claps Sam on the back and kisses my forehead. “I think I’ll go see if we can find you a decent cup of coffee and a muffin in this place.” He kisses my cheek. “That will fix you right up, Pumpkin.” He pads out of the room, relieved to find some way he can help.

Sam leans over the hospital gurney, his round eyes dilating as he studies the bruises on my neck. I have the imprint of his hand from him fishing me out of the lake. “I’m sorry I did that to you,” he whispers, skimming the injured skin with his fingertip. “If—if something had happened to you . . .”

I duck my head and kiss the top of his hand. “I’m so sorry for what I said this morning. You got hurt, and I was scared that something worse could happen to you. And then you were asleep and I was confused and suspicious. But Sam, you saved me.” He probably thinks I mean by rescuing me from drowning. I mean more than that. I lace my fingers in his. Blisters forming on his palms from rowing across the lake catch on my palms.

He inches farther onto the bed. “The day Jeanie died, my dad had too many beers on his lunch break and dropped a piece of canning equipment. He broke his leg in two places, and my mom and I were in the emergency room with him.”

I hide my face in the crook of my elbow. “I shouldn’t have asked. I shouldn’t have needed you to tell me,” I say, my voice muffled by my skin. Sam pulls my arm down and kisses my cheek. I blink, surprised. “You forgive me?”

His eyes crinkle at their corners, and he laughs softly. “What do you think?”

I appraise him, trying to understand what I see. I am the lucky one. I have Sam and Zoey. They’re both alive. “Daniel and Caleb killed Jeanie,” I whisper, closing my eyes. Caleb’s face flashes across the inside of my eyelids; I see him every time it’s dark. Caleb on his knees, bloodied knuckles dragged across his mouth, rocking and ranting. Caleb wailing that it was the monster setting them up. That it was the appetite that haunts Savage, crawling out of the darkness to enact its revenge because Caleb and Daniel had taken something that it craved—Jeanie—that reopened the case. How could I have been so wrong about them? I trusted them. I loved Caleb.

“But what about Jane Doe?” Sam’s eyes search mine.