Feral (11 page)

All of this stuff, down to the abandoned textbooks, was sacred in its own way.
 
Each brought here and left in trust to the next generation of kids who would make this place theirs.
 
The rest of the house, ground floor, upstairs, and even the attic, she supposed, had been looted and trashed, but the cellar was a sacred place.

She wondered when this place had last been used.
 
Had this generation of kids forgotten about it, or simply abandoned it for a better place?

Shannon walked to the couch, ducking under the ceiling's low-hanging bulb, and took a seat on the old couch.
 
Dust puffed up around her, making her cough.
 
Still looking around dreamily, Charity sat down next to her.

“It's kind of like a clubhouse, isn't it?”

“Yes, kind of.”

“It wouldn't be so bad if someone cleaned it,” Charity said, and Shannon accepted the comment for what it was.
 
Charity knew the place was special to her, and was trying to accept it in that spirit.

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

“About what?” Shannon asked, though she knew what the girl was talking about.

“Why you came here.”

“I can't,” she said.

Instead they sat next to each other, close enough to feel each other's body heat in the cool cellar.
 
It didn't take long for Charity to fall asleep again, and when the nightmares started, Shannon held her close and calmed her.

Shannon, on the other hand, couldn't sleep.
 
On top of the horrors of the night, the restless memories of the monster that drove her into the cellar kept her awake.
 
Too many memories for one night, again making her wonder why the big people of the world too often forced the small ones to grow old before their time.

When she did finally sleep, those dusty memories followed her down.

S
hannon was fourteen when her mom died.
 
It was nothing prolonged or dramatic, she simply got too drunk one night, and like Jared's rock and roll hero, Bon Scott, choked to death on her own vomit while she was passed out.
 
Barely a month later, her father, Ferris Cruse, Jr., moved her stuff into his room.

He said it was for her own good, they couldn't afford to get a house where she had her own room, and it wasn't proper for her and Jared to be sharing a room at their ages.
 
She fought the move.
 
She was honestly shocked that he would think such a thing might happen—they were brother and sister for Christ's sake.
 
As was typical for him, her father took the passive-aggressive road.

“Fine,” he said. “Sleep on the couch then, but your bed and dresser stay in here.”
 
The next thing he said blew her away completely.
 
“People will start talking you know, about you and Jared.
 
It ain't proper for you two to be sleeping together.”

Her retort, an observation on the properness of a father and daughter her age sleeping in the same room, never left her mouth.
 
He didn't say ‘sleeping in the same room,' he said ‘sleeping together.'
 
That phrase said more to her than the mere sum of his beer-scented words.
 
He honestly thought they were sleeping together, in his mind they could be doing nothing less.

When she told him she'd choose the couch, he began to cry, the oldest trick in the book, but it worked for him.
 
He told her that he'd been so lonely without her mom, that he
needed
her; he couldn't take being alone at night.
 
He said he would kill himself if she didn't stay with him, because she was all he had left.

As uncomfortable as it made her, she did sleep in his room.
 
She tried to ignore the new way he looked at her, and the way Jared looked at both of them.
 
She tried to ignore how her dad became increasingly cold toward Jared, and how he was often too warm toward her.

Two weeks after she moved into his room she awoke in the dead of the night with his hands on her.
 
He had crawled into her small single bed, perhaps hoping she wouldn't wake, or hoping that if she did she wouldn't mind.
 
That was the moment he forced her to grow up before her time.
 
When she got out of bed and left him, grabbing clothes from her drawer at random before leaving, he didn't follow.
 
Perhaps he still had enough shame left to stop himself, or perhaps he had fallen asleep before she had awakened.
 
She never knew, never asked.

She had gone straight to Jared's room and lain down with him, hoping her father was wrong about him.
 
Jared woke up, and they talked.
 
Then he had driven her out to Crazy Ernie's Cellar.

Jared stayed at home for another two years, but Shannon couldn't.
 
She spent winters on the couch in her father's house and stayed with friends whenever she could, but the rest of the year she spent most nights in the cellar.

T
homas Pitcher had been a better boy than he ever was a man.

He had known she was using his dead uncle's cellar, and made it as comfortable as he could for her.
 
He never told his father, who would have undoubtedly kicked her out.
 
They started dating when she was sixteen, and she lost the virginity she had saved from her father to him in this very cellar.
 
They dated for several years before marrying.

The changes in Thomas were almost too gradual to detect, a slow Jekyll and Hyde transformation, but to his credit he never cooled toward their daughter; he loved Alicia more than anything else in life.
 
He simply had too much of his father in him, and over the years they spent together he turned slowly from Thomas the Boy, who had once been her shining prince, to Thomas the Bastard.
 
It could have been the stress of living in his father's extra-large shadow, both literally and figuratively, which turned him bad.

Over the years, Simon Pitcher had acquired much of the property in and surrounding Normal Hills through various means, some scrupulous, others not.
 
While he only owned a few of the larger businesses, the grocery store, a small motel, the truck stop, and the mill across the river, he collected rent from every other business on Main Street.
 
He held the deeds on much of Normal Hills' residential property too.

Few people actually knew how much he owned, and Shannon was one of them.
 
Shortly after joining the family, Simon hired her on as bookkeeper.
 
He kept meticulous records, so that part of her job was easy, but it also fell on her to
clean up
his other capitol ventures.

Of course, people suspected him of being less than ethical.
 
No one got as rich as he was from property alone, not in Normal Hills anyway, and over the last couple of years the lumber market had been poor enough that he was considering closing the mill down.
 
The rumors of his vast drug empire were greatly exaggerated though.
 
He was only a middleman, trafficking in bootleg liquor, marijuana, and black market cigars and cigarettes for some back east associates.
 
He refused to deal with the hard stuff like crack and meth; they were simply too risky.

The men fought often concerning matters of the family business, which Thomas would take over when Simon finally retired, but outside of work they were thick as thieves.
 
When they weren't making money together, they golfed, fished, and drank.
 
They also belonged to the Normal Hills chapter of the Masons.

After Alicia was born, Shannon saw less and less of Thomas outside the office, and when he was home their exchanges were uncomfortable at best.
 
At the end, he became emotionally abusive, accusing her of cheating, and treating her like a whore.
 
Finally she decided to divorce him, and his only comment on the subject was, “Good riddance.”

Simon made sure their work relationship remained amiable enough, and Alicia kept them in touch on a more personal level, but from that day forward he would always be “The Bastard” to her.

The night she had left him, following The Bastard's Good Riddance farewell, she had gone back to Crazy Ernie's Cellar and cried herself to sleep on that smelly old vinyl couch.

“W
ake up,” Charity said, giving Shannon a gentle shake. She awoke with those bitter old tears in her eyes, and was struck afresh with the realization that The Bastard was now dead.
 
That realization had lost its ability to affect her, but with it came the memory of her last day with Alicia, and of Jared.
 
Beyond those things though, she was struck with a sense of enveloping dread, she would likely be dead by the time the sun rose again.

“You okay, Shannon?”

“Yeah, I'll make it,” she said, wiping her eyes self-consciously as she sat up.

“I'm getting hungry.
 
Is there anything to eat here?”

“Not likely.
 
Unless you like filet of rat,” she added with a wink.
 
She wasn't feeling light and she wasn't feeling particularly strong, but she wouldn't let Charity see it.

“Gross,” Charity said, making a face at her.

Charity had turned the television on, a snowy version of everyone's favorite daytime game show played.
 
One of Barker's Beauties, clad in an almost absent bikini, was stroking the side of a new Corvette like nobody's business.

“Will you be okay by yourself for an hour, Charity?”

“Yes.”

“Good, I'll get us something to eat.”
 
Stretching the morning tightness from her muscles, she walked to the steps.
 
She stopped at the door and turned. “Stay put.”

“I will,” Charity said.

T
he old trail was overgrown, the ground covered with dried needles and crowded by encroaching brush.
 
The forest was slowly swallowing it up again.
 
This, Shannon supposed, was as good of sign as any that the kids of Normal Hills had abandoned the old cellar.
 
It was still passable though, and she found the walk calming.
 
It was a half-mile walk to the truck stop outside of Normal Hills from this point.
 
If she moved quickly—in for some food, pay quietly, and then out to the trail again—she might go unnoticed.

What to do about Charity
?

She didn't know what to do, or if anything
could
be done.
 
Charity was cursed, and now she was too.
 
Or perhaps she had been from the beginning, her and Jared, from the moment Charity's monster had shown himself in that little room they once shared.
 
If so, Alicia had been doubly cursed, for being born her daughter and for sharing Charity's build.
 
She couldn't blame her daughter's death on Charity's need for a new wardrobe.
 
Shannon didn't believe her daughter had been nothing more than a discount store mannequin to the Bogey Man.
 
She had been chosen, like all of them were.
 
She wondered if the other dead children's parents hadn't suffered the same visitations she had as a child.
 
She wondered, if Jared had raised a child, would that child be dead now too?

Had Charity's mother had the same curse, or her father?
 
That thought brought her to a sudden halt.
 
What about Charity's father?
 
She had told them at the park that the Bogey Man had killed her mother, but she didn't mention her father.
 
Was he still alive, and if so, where was he?

And what about Feral Park?
 
Where did the insanity of Feral Park fit in?
 
It was where, by amazing coincidence, she had found the girl in her dead daughter's clothes, but it was more than just that.

He killed my mom and took me away
.

Away to where?

I think he wants to marry me
.

Why did he keep her when he'd simply killed the others?

The kids who live there told me if I came here the Bogey Man wouldn't be able to get me again
.
 
I think that's why they came here, to keep their bad people from getting them
.

Everybody has monsters
.

What to do about Charity, and what to do about the Bogey Man?

The only thing she knew was that he did not like the light, that it hurt him.
 
But even that would not save them in the end, because the sun always sets and darkness always falls.