The scent of struck matches, still lingering on the spine. Like the one she always noticed whenever he passed by.He must light his cigarettes with something really old, she had always thought.Industrial cartons full of matchsticks thick as your finger.Bulk packs of ancient hotel brands from 1975.
It did fit his whole vibe, after all.
The sloppy denim, the worn old shirts, the near mustache amidst all that other aggressive facial hair. That thick but muscular body, that low gruff voice. He made her think of horror movies from some other era, full of pistols with skinny barrels and white-tiled mental hospitals and funny-colored blood. He’d be the mean, ornery sheriff, she suspected. The one who doesn’t believe the heroine about something horrible going on until it’s too late. But that didn’t make her feel better about anything that had just happened.
How could it possibly?
He had needed help, in a way that brutally embarrassed him.
And somehow she had shamed him into leaving it behind.
CHAPTER TWO
The plan came to her slowly. So slowly, in fact, that she tried to shake it off. She focused on dusting her tiny apartment over the store—much to Popcorn’s disgust. He grabbed her by her fluffy socks every time she tried to go over the blinds with a damp cloth, and wouldn’t settle until he had dragged her away from the window entirely. Then he demanded chicken, by plunking himself down in front of the refrigerator and glaring at her with his silly half-pug, half-chihuahua, half-god-only-knows-what face.
All of which was a great distraction. But eventually, the plan clawed its way back into her head. It just built and built despite her best efforts, until finally she had to face it. She was going to do it.
She was going to take the book he’d been reading to him.
Just to maybe show him that having this book was totally okay.
Though, good lord, was it ever hard. Popcorn didnotwant her to go. He barked when she started tidying her curly red hair and securing it back with a couple of flowery barrettes. Then he barked even harder as she chose her good glasses, with the purple frames, and a nice cardigan that matched her green skirt.
Like he knew exactly what all of that meant, somehow.
He even tried to bar the door when she grabbed her car keys. All of which only made her more nervous about everything she was doing. It took her about a thousand years to drive up to thecabin everybody knew he owned, in the woods. Then about a thousand more to get out of her car. For the longest time she just sat there, staring through the windshield at his ramshackle home. And honestly, who could have blamed her?
It looked like something the Evil Dead regularly spent time inside. The windows were narrowed eyes; the porch seemed on the verge of collapse. Plus everything was a sort of dingy dark brown, in a way that weirdly reminded her of dried blood. As if a lot of people had been massacred here over the years, and their insides had accumulated to eventually make this:
The place where the angriest man alive lived.
I’m going to be stuffed into a wood chipper if I do this,she thought, blankly.
Yet somehow, she still found herself grabbing the book. And getting out of the car. And walking up to the house. As if just going ahead made the idea of being chopped into bits ridiculous. It made her silly, for turning his probably normal house and much more normal than she had imagined manner into something angry and murderous.
He was just a dude. That was all. Just a really big, hairy, crotchety dude. And this was just a house. A really ramshackle, weird old house. She could deal with that. She was sure she could.
Until she stepped up onto that front porch.
The wood just creaked way too much beneath her sensible shoes. Like it was going to collapse at any moment and send her into whatever horrors lived below it. A million spiders the size of her fist, she imagined, as she crept forward. One foot pressing and testing out as she went. Then the other sliding next to it. Over and over, until finally she was halfway across.
But no better for it.
Now she could see the rocking chair that stood in one corner, moving ever so slightly, despite the lack of breeze. And the coil ofdisturbingly heavy chain, just beneath one of the windows. As if there was something massive inside that needed to be regularly restrained. A beast, she thought, and almost turned around there and then.
Doubly so, when she saw the front door.
It stood like a broken tooth in a rotten mouth, crookedly attached at the hinges. Grim enough under any circumstances, she suspected. But even grimmer once she realized it wasn’t closed. It stood ajar—as if someone had forgotten about it on the way in. Or hadn’t been able to shut it, because of whatever they had been carrying at the time.A dead body, her mind helpfully filled in.
Though somehow it wasn’t him carrying one that came to her immediately.
It was him being the thing carried. Or him having to drag himself.
TheHollow Brook Gazette hadbeen running a lot of rogue beast stories lately. Last week, there’d been one about a cow from Flannery’s farm with a big bite out of its side. As if some great white shark had grown legs, then wandered here from the nearest ocean. Now it was roaming around between the trees, taking chunks out of things, apparently. And as much as she wanted to scoff, it was not inconceivable that one of those things was Jack Jackson.
That Jack Jackson was in there, bleeding out of a big hole in his side.
And even if he wasn’t, there was a strong possibility that some far more reasonable calamity had befallen him. Maybe he’d had too much to drink, and stumbled in, and then face-planted somewhere. Or eaten something bad, before passing out just beyond the door he’d tried to go through. He could have even had an accident, and gone back and forth on whether he needed the hospital.
