The forest is too dark for dusk, even for early winter. I lean forward suspecting one of my headlights is out. And that’s when I see it. A mass of red fur curled in the road. I slow to a stop, switch on my high beams and squint into their spray of light.
“Finn?” I pop my seat belt, open the door into darkness. Cold air stabs me.
My heart reels as I kneel beside the lump of fur. “What’s happened to you?” I gather his head into my lap. He is warm. His middle labors with the rise and fall of breath. I reach over his fur, under him. My hand returns free of blood. “You’ll be okay.” It is a promise I want someone to make me. “I’ll get you to the vet. Come on.” I cradle him in my arms, set him onto the passenger seat. He lets out a groan from the faraway place he inhabits. “Stay with me, buddy.” I pet his head and something catches the dim interior light, throws it back at me like a knife’s edge. Something that is not his collar.
It is shiny.
And sharp.
My necklace. The heart Alec gave me at Christmas.
It hangs around Finn’s neck.
My own heart catapults, leaping my pulse.
The air swallows me, the woods scurry too close. I run to the driver’s side and lock the door.
I can’t go to the vet; that is what Alec wants. I try to imagine where he’d be waiting for me along the way. Fear propels me to the house where it is warm and bright and I can shut out the dark.
Chapter 38
I bolt the door behind me, swim into the light that floods the kitchen. “Mom?” I call.
I place Finn onto the couch, recheck the locks. I find the card for the twenty-four-hour emergency vet clinic and pluck it off the fridge.
“Mom!” Only stillness answers, reminding me it’s Monday. Date night. I fumble in my pocket, my keys falling to the floor. I pat my jacket, my phone is in my car’s console.
I pick up the landline, dial Mom’s cell. It takes too long to connect. There is only the static silence of a dead line, and that’s when I know I’m not alone.
I drop the phone onto its cradle and eye the door, my car keys on the floor in my path. In seconds I calculate how my body will need to scoop the keys as I run from the house. I move just as a metallic snap echoes from under the house.
The breaker.
In the basement.
Someone has thrown the main switch, pitching me and this house and my escape into blackness.
Fear roils in my blood. Becomes me. I kick around for my keys but with each sweep, I am losing time.
I reach for the island, my eyes adjusting, carving light into the shadows. The smell of spearmint bleeds through the air, through my memory, as my senses conjure the last time panic joined me in this space. And how my fingertips reached for the knife set even then. But the block of knives is gone now. The counter cleared. I open a drawer, rifle for utensils, scissors. My fingers meet with the smooth wood of inner drawer and nothing else. I fumble around the sink, but even Mom’s pruning shears are missing.
The phone rings and I freeze from the impossibility of its sound. A second ring sears through silence. I wade across the black, remove the handset, place it at my ear.
I pray that it’s anyone besides him.
Terror climbs the ladder of my spine. My voice, reluctant. “Hello?”
Silence.
Then the dial tone cries beep beep beep and I hang up, quickly dial 911. But he’s quicker.
The line falls dead again.
He’s in the basement, where the phone line enters the house.
But then, no.
He could be outside. At the junction box.
All at once the woods feel too hungry, haunted.
My body tells me I need to flee, protect. My brain tells me to fight, engage. I tuck into the forgotten corner of the laundry room, quiet as my fear, and wrap my hands around the butt of my field hockey stick. I hold it tight against my chest, a weapon.
I try to reverse my breathing. Make it soundless. Make it so I cannot be found. The darkness is a comfort, a cloak. I blend into it. For anonymity. For safety. There was a time when I feared darkness. As a child. Alone.
Not now.
Darkness doesn’t have fingers that twist into my flesh. Darkness can’t stalk me. It can’t drive me into the shadows because darkness is fleeting. Not like the threat before me.
Then, impossibly, Joan Armatrading joins me. The familiar steel guitar notes creep over my skin, unseaming my flesh. Alec manipulates electricity now, just as he did in our forest bed. I grip the stick tighter and trace the music to my bedroom. I picture him at my desk then, a flashlight in hand. He will be so much more prepared. All of this carefully planned.
Does his beam of light scamper over my Boston College catalog? The faces of friends in photos? Does he see the absence of his tokens? How they are smashed into the well of my trash can?