Tommy Nightmare(85)
She ran as fast as she could around the house, picking up speed when she saw her car. Jenny looked around. She couldn't see anybody, but someone could be watching from the upper floors of Ashleigh's house, or maybe one of the empty houses nearby.
She sat down in her car, closed and locked the door. Her hand shook as she tried to fit the key into the ignition.
“Calm down,” she whispered to herself. She inserted the key, cranked the car, and backed out of Ashleigh's driveway without bothering to look behind her.
As she pulled out, she thought she saw something move in an upper window of the house next door, the one that had never been lived in by anybody. But when she turned her head to look, nobody was there.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Jenny pulled into her dirt driveway, relieved to see her dad's rusty old Ram still parked there. After her creepy experience at Ashleigh's, the last thing she wanted was to be alone.
She checked over the fence first, but he wasn't working on the air conditioner anymore.
She ran up the front steps to her house and pulled open the screen door.
“Hey, Dad, I think I'll take one of those hoop cheese sandwiches now.” She walked into the living room. Her dad didn't reply.
Jenny checked his room to see if he was napping, but his door was open and he wasn't there.
“Dad?” She walked back up the hall. “Dad? Are you here?”
The kitchen table and two chairs were turned over on their sides. Jenny ran into the kitchen. “Dad?”
Broken dishes and cups littered the floor, including fragments of the Happy Days collector's glasses. Jenny's dad lay slumped against the kitchen wall, his eyes empty and staring straight ahead.
“Daddy!” Jenny screamed as she ran to him. Something was pinned to the front of his shirt, rumpled brown paper with letters from newspapers and magazines glued to it, like a ransom note. The letters across the top read:
SETH DIES TONIGHT
Beneath that was a crude marker drawing of an eye with a gray iris. The note was signed in smaller cutout letters:
YOU KNOW WHO
Jenny grabbed his shoulder and shook him. “Dad!”
He took a sharp breath of air, looking at her briefly—his eyes confused, seeing her and not seeing her at the same time—and then he rolled onto his hands and knees and crawled away from her, ignoring the broken glass and porcelain that cut his hands.
“Dad, stop! You're hurting yourself!”
He mumbled something and crawled faster.
Jenny wondered if he'd been drinking again, after months of being sober. But this wasn't his usual drunken behavior, either. This was just plain weird, and it scared her.
“Dad, where are you going?” She followed him as he crawled down the hall and into his room. He got up on his knees and peeked out the window, then ducked down as if something was about to come hurling through the glass.
“She's coming,” he said. “She's watching.”
“Who?”
“My daughter,” he whispered. “She killed my wife and she's coming back to kill me. Just a matter of time.”
“Dad, I'm...” Jenny decided not to finish the thought. If he was afraid of her, maybe it was best not to point out that she was, in fact, his daughter. “What happened? Was somebody here?”
“They're coming for me,” he whispered. He peeked out the window again. “They're coming for all of us.”
“Nobody's coming for us.” Jenny touched his arm.
“Get back!” He howled and pulled away from her. He tripped over a pair of his shoes, and his head knocked into the end table by the bed. The lamp and alarm clock toppled from the table as it crashed to the floor.
“Dad! Are you okay?”
He pulled his knees to his chest and lay on the floor in a fetal position, shivering.
“Dad, answer me!”
“They're coming,” he whispered. “They're all coming now.”
“Where's your cell phone?”
“It's all gone,” he whispered. “All this, it's all gone, they're taking it all away...”
“Is it in the kitchen? Wait right here, okay?” Jenny ran to the kitchen and found his phone on the counter, then ran back to his room. He was shaking, staring through her, terrified.
She didn't know what was wrong with him, but Seth could fix it. Jenny dialed Seth's cell.
“Hey, this is Seth, leave a message.” His voicemail answered immediately, which meant his phone was turned off. The voicemail beeped.
“Fuck!” Jenny said. “Seth, it's Jenny. This is my dad's phone. Call back now, okay? It's an emergency. Seriously. Okay? Please?”
She hung up. Her dad got to his feet and stumbled out to the hall, still muttering under his breath.
“Dad? Where are you going now?” She followed him up the hall. His shoulder kept banging against the wall, knocking down framed photographs, as if he were having trouble keeping his balance.