As I dress, pulling on yesterday’s clothes that smell like her house—earth and old wood and something indefinablyher—I feel the web tighten another notch.
Then she kisses me goodbye, and I have to physically and mentally shut down my automatic response to her so that I can leave.
It’s too dark in the hallway to see shit, so I scrape my hand along the wall until I find a switch.When the light snaps on, I freeze.
On the wall beside the door, crawling up toward the ceiling in defiance of gravity itself, are footprints.Dark red-brown against the faded wallpaper.While my mind tries to process, I reach out a finger to touch one.Still wet.
They walk up the wall, across the ceiling, and disappear into the shadowed corners where the ceiling meets the far wall.
Just like in my dream.
I take a step back, then another, my eyes rejecting what they’re seeing.
“What the fuck.”I open her bedroom door without looking away from the hall.“What the actual fuck, Sera.”
“What?”she asks sleepily.
“Footprints.”I point.“There are footprints on the goddamn ceiling?”
“You see them too?”
Not surprise or shock, but ayou see them too?
“What?”I whirl on her, wild, desperate.“Tell me I’m losing my mind.Tell me I’m seeing things.Tell me—“
“You’re not crazy,” she says quietly.
“Then what…” My hand goes to my gun instinctively, then falls away because what the hell am I going to shoot?“Who did that?How did they do that?It’s fresh blood, Sera.It’s still wet.”
The house settles around us with a groan.The temperature drops five degrees in the space of a breath.
Realization crawls over my skin like frost.I’m a detective.I’ve seen crime scenes, autopsies, the worst humanity has to offer.But this?This breaks the rules.This is other.This does not fit reality’s narrative that I’ve believed since day one.
In the footage James showed me, the house had quaked and the front door had flown open, but I chalked it up to wind, but…
“The thing in your house,” I say slowly, each word dragged from some place deep and dark.“The cold.The door.The shadows.You said… You called it…”
“Daddy,” she says, her voice steady.“I call him Shadow Daddy or just Daddy.”
I look at the footprints again, at the size and shape.My size.“What did he do to me?”
A long sigh heaves from Sera as she gazes up at her bedroom ceiling and sticks there.She must see something I don’t because she stares at it for several moments even though it’s just a regular ceiling.
Finally, she says, “I don’t know.”
***
Istillfeelshakenwhen I pull up to Michael Devlin’s house just as the uniforms are stringing yellow tape across the porch railing.
I kill the engine and sit for a moment, watching the scene through my windshield.Two patrol officers stand near their cruisers, talking in low voices.One of them laughs too loudly, forcing it with nervous energy.They’ve seen something that rattled them.
I have too.
I push the door open and step into the crisp morning air.
“Detective Crowe.”Officer Palmer approaches me.“We got the call at oh-five-hundred.Anonymous tip said this Michael Devlin guy got into it with David Farley at a bar, and it got pretty heated.Found it in the garage.”
“It?”I ask because I’m supposed to, not because I don’t already know.
