Page 76 of Call Off the Dark

“Helen,” her mother began delicately. “They haven’t even caught . . . him yet.”

Her mother thought it was possible the killer would come back to the apartment looking for Helen. It was a reasonable fear. Helen also thought it was possible.

Which was exactly why she wanted to go back.

Because she had bought herself a Glock 9mm.

Helen was ready.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Present day

The night after Wade tried to shoot his own brother, Helen dreamt of the farmhouse. In her dream, the house was alive with thoughts and feelings, but it was sick and it was dying. When the house exhaled, it wasn’t breath that flowed from its windows but smoke. Raccoons and vultures and coyotes circled the house, waiting for it to die so they could pick apart its remains. The coyote that Helen had seen in the woods eating the rabbit was there. She recognized it because of its bloody mouth. The raven she had shot was there too, sitting on top of the chimney, engulfed in the home’s smoke. Helen stumbled out the front door, desperate for fresh air, and saw Isaac standing among the wild animals waiting to scavenge the ruins with them. “Where’s Wade?” she asked him. “Do you care?” he answered.

Helen woke from the dream with strands of damp hair stuck to her forehead. She often had nightmares, but this one gave her the overwhelming sense that she had caused some kind of shift in the universe that couldn’t be undone.

She turned toward Wade and realized his side of the bed was empty. The room was dark, with only a glint of moonlight stealing through the window. She looked around the room. The door to the bedroom was slightly ajar.

“Wade?”

There was no answer.

On any other night, she would have gotten out of bed to check on him, but something kept her suspended there. Perhaps the final remnants of her nightmare.

She ran her fingers through her hair, pulled the loose strands away from her face, and felt a sentence unfold in her blood.

To be buried alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality.

The words passed through her as if she had perfected them for a recital, except she wasn’t even sure where they came from. She just knew they were not an original thought. And then in her mind, she saw a wooden coffin, imagined it entombing her, and she smelled the musky decay of dirt that never sees sunlight. She’d held this exact vision in her mind once before. Weeks earlier.

Suddenly, she knew.

Those words were from Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Premature Burial.” She’d only read the tale of a man being buried alive that one time, so there was no way she could have memorized the sentence verbatim.

And yet she had.

Her bedroom felt like the coffin now.

She needed to find Wade.

Helen tossed the blankets aside and dangled her stocking feet over the side of the bed, suspended in air momentarily.

On her inhale, she sensed the presence. She felt it in the way that it disturbed the air around her feet, in the way that she went cold all over her body before she even knew what was happening. As her toes touched the floor, she froze on the edge of the bed, and the only sounds were the night wind whining outside and the rattle of a loose board faintly thumping against the house.

From beneath the bed, something encircled her ankles.

Helen gasped and fell forward to her knees, yanking herself free from its hold. She scrambled to her feet and dashed for the door. When she reached it, she grabbed the frame and spun around.

No one was there.

The room was silent except for her ragged breathing.

She lowered to her knees and peered under the bed, but all she saw were dark and dusty floorboards.

She stood again. This time she hadn’t just seen something; she’d felt it too. The sensation around her ankles had felt real. It had yanked her to the floor. The pain in her knees told her it had happened.

Helen stepped into the empty hallway, careful not to touch the walls. They might be complicit in whatever this was.