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LATE AT NIGHT
Lisa opened the door to the roar of spring peepers. Blond-haired, blue-eyed Wyatt stood on the porch. I searched the shadows, but the rest of the yard was too dim and dark to determine details beyond his car's headlights. With a peck on her cheek, he took his hat and jogged to the car. Baby Coop was asleep in the backseat.
Lisa shut the door and rolled her eyes. “I get you’re spooked, Marcy, but quit acting like you're twelve.”
“Something slashed our window and the cats are acting strange.” I dragged her into the kitchen and gestured at the now pair of cats in the sink. Samson and Igor remained vigilant, bellies wet with stale milk and cheerios, tails soggy question marks. “Stranger than usual.”
Unimpressed, Lisa’s blue eyes narrowed. “Those screens are original to the house. They’ve been torn since I moved in. You’ve noticed because, one; your brain’s stuck in Friday the 13th survival mode and two; it’s warm so the cats are back to moth hunting.”
Promising to cool it on the lunatic ravings, I dried the cats and brought a cup of tea to my room, although not without instructing Lisa to leave all the outside and downstairs lights on.
Upstairs was nothing too large or extravagant— a master with an attached bath suite (mine), my grandmother’s old sewing room which I’d converted into a studio/laundry, another full bath and my old bedroom (now Lisa's).
Grandma died two years ago, but the master remained largely unchanged. I'd always wanted to make the space my own, but after the sewing supplies were moved to the basement and her yards of fabric donated, her final sanctuary I couldn’t alter. Being surrounded by her memory was a comfort, and the main reason the paint cans, new curtains and many of my decorations remained stacked in a dusty corner.
She'd left the house in my name; we had no other surviving relatives. After Mom’s breast cancer diagnosis, my mother, father, sister and I had moved into my grandparents’ cottage in upstate New York.
Only Grandma and I left alive. Time helped, but nights like this and last Halloween’s backyard invasion of lost teenagers brought the memories back with a biting intensity.
Grandma had taken me in and showed me the tattooed numbers on her arm. She gave me a sketchpad and twig charcoal and brought me into her world of artifacts and history. She was the reason I wanted to be a conservator; and tonight she was the reason I sat in bed with a pillow propped against the oak headboard, sketching by the glow of a candle that wicked summoning.
Samson pawed at the door sometime after I’d laid my head on the pillow. Igor slunk through behind him. The pair resumed their usual positions of trying to suffocate me in my sleep.
But I didn't sleep. In the dark with Samson and Igor acting as a set of purring headphones, my heart continued a hare’s accelerated beat.
Teenagers. I’d seen teenagers. Why would they be in the woods at night wearing costumes in the middle of spring? ‘Teenagers’ was as sufficient an explanation as ‘cats.’
But I had an eye for fakes.
The hand was real.
Well after midnight, Samson mrowled his displeasure at my tossing and turning. I got up, buttoned the smock over my tank, popped one of the room’s two backyard-facing windows and carried over my painter’s stool. The yard, dark green and pristine, lay quiet except for the distant amphibian chorus and the hum of a mosquito foiled by the screen.
The banshee scream of a fox dug itself out of the same wooded grave the moon had fallen into.
A short while after we’d moved in, Grandma and I had been on the deck using a telescope to plot constellations when we’d heard a similar wail. I remembered shrieking and jumping for the slider, remembered Grandma wiping my tears and directing my attention back onto the brass spyglass.
“Hush, child. The only monsters in this world are men,” she had whispered. “And men can die.”
But from time to time I would glimpse her sitting at the kitchen table late at night, chair oriented toward the backyard, with all the lights off and a gun an inch from her hand.
???
The cats were scratching the base of my door. Igor was loud, so loud I worried she’d disturb Lisa’s attempt at catching an hour or two of sleep before her alarm. I thought I’d closed them in with me, but the open window must’ve blown the door a crack, enough to draw their attention, then closed them out on a second breeze. With my eyes barely open, I zombie-walked to the door. The hall was silent, the rooms dark except the filtered glow of the porchlight illuminating the entry.
“Alright, you guys. Come on in.”
Samson looked up at me and meowed. Curious, Igor peered around my leg, but stayed in the hall.
I frowned. “In or out. Now, please.”
They continued to sit, even turned away, until I sighed and moved to shut the door, at which point they darted inside. As Samson kneaded my pillow into submission, Igor leaped onto the nightstand. My phone clattered back against the wall. The rejection letter, and the candle I’d intended to burn it over, hit the ground and disappeared under the bed’s dust ruffle.
Igor instantly gave chase. If she caught it, she’d be rolling the damn candle around the bed frame until dawn.
I swore and lunged for the cat, catching her by the haunches as she squeezed under.
Igor protested, but I plopped her on the bed. Several pale, wriggling segments flew from her pelt and hit the bed. She batted one toward Samson, who gave the tapeworm a sniff as it whipped across the pillowcase.
