Idon’t see the woman again, not as night falls, and not the next morning, either. I don’t have to sleep much—none of my kind do—and I don’t bother going back to my cabin. The night is warm enough and the moon is small enough, just a sliver of a fingernail against the sky, that I’m able to take advantage of the cloak of darkness and risk being out on the open beach.
The pier that I used when I was a boy has long since rotted into the lake, and the boat I keep in the basement of the cabin, along with a pair of polished oars, to use when the killing moon calls my name. Since I rarely have need to cross the water, I rarely go down to the beach.Beachwas always my mother’s word for it—really, it’s just a narrow strip of dirt where the lake laps against the shore, barely a foot wide. But the trees don’t grow there, and it puts me out in the open. It’s important that I stay invisible.
But I want to watch the woman’s house. Those big picture windows the houses all have show everything when people turn their lights on after dark—and they do, constantly, night after night. They think they’re alone out here, save for each other.
The new woman is no exception. Her house is lit up like a campfire, and it seems to me that it glows brighter than the otherhouses along the shore. It has a particularly large window on the first floor, one that’s practically the entire width of the house, and I can see the silhouettes of furniture against the backdrop of light. Occasionally, I see movement, too. Her? That, I can’t tell. I also can’t tell if she’s alone or not, although I don’t catch any other new scents on the wind.
I watch her by watching the light. First, all of downstairs is illuminated. Then it dims into a soft, neon glow. She must be watching TV. Then it flicks off entirely, and the light goes on upstairs, and my breath quickens, because there’s a big window up there, too, with a balcony that I can only assume leads into her bedroom. She passes in front of it four times—I count each one, certain it’s her—but I don’t see much more than that. She has the curtains drawn. Her silhouette is clear. Nothing else is.
Then that light goes off, and the house fades into the night.
I keep vigil, though. That’s most of what I do these days, anyway. Keep vigil in the forbidden woods across the lake. Make sure to keep the stories up. The ghost of Theo Shorn haunts these woods, after all, seeking vengeance for his murder. If you want to go hiking, stay on the eastern side of the lake, and definitely don’t cross onto the narrow peninsula that cuts into the water like a knife. ThoseKeep Outsigns are nailed to the trees for a reason.
It’s rare for me to keep vigil likethis, though. To watch someone specific. At least, someone I don’t intend to kill.
What if she crosses the lake?whispers a dark, raspy voice in the back of my head.Would you kill her then?
I mutter wordlessly in the back of my throat, the closest I get to vocal speech, and the sound of my frustration is swallowed up by the waves washing against the dirt my mother called a beach. I kill all trespassers.
Well, except for Oliver, when he showed up a few months ago, crashing through the underbrush. But in the sixty years since my first revival, he’s been the only exception.
I stay out on the shore until the light shifts into the cobwebby grey of dawn, and then I slip back into the safety of the woods. My stomach growls, reminding me I need to eat. I was so caught up in my vigil that I hadn’t noticed my hunger. It’s not the first time it’s happened, and I know it won’t be the last.
So I go home. Breakfast is a venison steak fried up with garlic from the far western side of my territory and a cup of coffee. The coffee is from the last camper I killed, about a month ago, and I’m almost out. I’ve been rationing it, saving it for special occasions. And glimpsing that woman, catching her scent, felt special enough.
After I eat, I go out on the porch to finish my coffee. I’m hoping I might catch the trail of her scent again, even though my cabin is set far enough back from the lake that I often don’t sense the humans out here. Still, I like being outside more than I like being inside. It’s been long enough that the cabin doesn’t remind me of my mother, of what my life was like before I died for the first time. But I still feel constrained by it. Enclosed.
The wind stirs the leaves around; I catch whiffs of the animals out in the woods. A raccoon burying into the underbrush. A pair of deer grazing off to the north. The opossums that live in the crawl space under my house, no doubt sleeping now that the sun has come up.
And then a human scent twines through. Not hers, not the woman’s. And not a hiker’s, either.
Oliver’s back.
I settle down on the old porch swing to wait for him; he knows his way through my territory well enough to make it from the beach to the cabin.
Maybe it’s hypocritical of me, letting a little human boy wander around my territory when I have a reputation to maintain. But for all my bloodlust, I’m not predisposed to killing children—they don’t provide enough of a challenge, for one. For another, they haven’t had the years necessary to accumulate any real sins. I assume anyone old enough has done something worthy of death, and I figure children ought to have the opportunity to transgress before I snuff their life out.
Oliver was the first child to ever step foot on my territory, though. It’s rough terrain, so the hikers and campers leave the kiddies at home. When Veritas was still around, gasping for breath, the few kids in town knew not to cross the lake. But no one ever told Oliver, and a little over six months ago, I intercepted him near the graveyard after tracking him for about half an hour, nervous about what a small boy was doing out here by himself. When he saw me, he didn’t react with fear, only curiosity. Then he made words with his hands. Words I recognized, because my mother had taught me that same way of speaking when I was a child, and it became clear I needed an alternative to my voice.
The second I saw him say,My name is Oliver! What’s yours?I knew I couldn’t kill him, and not just because he was a child. He reminded me too much of the first version of myself, the version that wasn’t a killer.
His small, pattering footsteps echo through the trees. I lean forward, watching for him, and a few seconds later, he emerges, looking a great deal like he did that first day, with a brown leaf tangled in his hair and his little blue-and-green dinosaur backpack. He blinks up at the porch, then waves excitedly at me. I gesture for him to come on up.
“You’re here early,” I say, setting my mostly-empty coffee cup aside to talk.
He shrugs. “Mom was yelling again.” Then he sits down on the swing beside me. Even after six months, I’m not totally used to how fearless he is around me. It’s like he can’t sense that I’m a predator.
I don’t mind, though. As much as I shouldn’t admit it, it is nice to have the company.
Oliver sets his backpack on his lap, unzips it, and hands me a stack of paper. I know what they are. More of his drawings.
At our second or third meeting, I made the mistake of telling Oliver that I did not cross the lake. I told him this because he wanted me to come over to his house and see his collection of rocks, which I gather is very impressive, and I, of course, don’t cross the lake unless it’s to kill. I didn’t tell him that last part. When he asked, I said I wasn’t allowed to leave and then, because I didn’t know what else to do, strongly implied that I’m a ghost.
Ever since then, Oliver has been bringing me drawings of what he calls the outside world. At first, they were things around his house: his rock collection, an expensive-looking television set, an odd boxy thing he explained was something called a video game console that belonged to his brother. Eventually, he expanded his subjects to include items from the woods across the lake, and then from Pinella, which had been little more than a post office when I was a boy but has apparently grown to replace Veritas.
The top drawing today shows a row of kids in what look like pajamas, their hands in fists near their faces. Oliver taps my shoulders so I look up at him. “My BJJ classes,” he says, and then rolls his eyes.
“You should take these seriously,” I tell him. “It’s good to be able to defend yourself.” As I can personally attest. I know what it is to be the strange boy who doesn’t speak with his voice.
