Page 38 of Stay Buried

My, what big teeth you have.

All the better for ripping you to shreds, my dear.

As if reading her mind, sensing her fear, the horse pulled back its lips and whinnied, showing a frothy mouth full of square yellow-white teeth.

Ashley shuddered.

She remembered, for a split second, the hallucinations she’d had before she checked herself into the hospital a few weeks after her mother’s supposed suicide.

She’d never accepted that her mother had jumped off that bridge, and was horrified at how easily Gram and Malcolm did. “If she’s dead, where’s the body?” she’d demand, and they’d respond with nothing but platitudes and worried glances at each other.

Ashley had tried to keep herself from falling apart. She’d tried to keep up with school, with classes and clinicals and exams; to put on a brave face and keep going, because that was what doctors did, wasn’t it? And if she was going to be the amazing doctor everyone always told her she would be, she needed to learn to put her emotions in a box, to do the work that needed to be done and move on.

But then her mother started visiting her.

Over and over, Ashley saw her mother in her room, back from the dead, her face swollen, head cracked and bleeding. Ashley’sunconscious mind playing a cruel joke, pulling every horror lever in her brain—sometimes her mother showed up riding a white horse with yellow eyes. Ashley would hear the clip-clop of hooves in the hall at school or in her apartment building, and play the game of not looking, of telling herself she knew it wasn’t real, but always, she’d turn. She’d turn and see the white horse, her dead mother sitting bareback on it, wearing her good camel-hair coat. Her face a gory mess like an overripe plum that had burst its skin and was now fetid and rotting.I’ve come to tell you something, Ash. Something important. You need to listen. You need to remember.

Ashley shook the memory away.

Grief-induced psychosis. That was how her psychiatrist in the hospital had explained it. Sometimes grief, especially when the loss was sudden, traumatic, or unresolved, was simply too much to bear and the human mind snapped.

That was what had happened in the lawyer’s office on Friday. Gram’s death, the shock of the inheritance, it was all too much.

She closed her eyes. Heard her mother’s voice, firm and loud in her head:Listen.

“You okay, Sis?” Malcolm’s voice snapped her back. He’d given up on trying to play his self-help books and had the radio tuned to a far-off classic rock station, “Smoke on the Water” crackling through the speakers.

“Yeah,” she said, rolling down the window, catching the scent of moldering leaves, woodsmoke.

Houses were starting to dot the road ahead now. They passed a woman who watched them from a rocking chair on a porch decorated with cornstalks and pumpkins. Ashley waved, but the woman didn’t wave back. A man in overalls leaning into the engine of an ancient Ford pickup lifted his head and watched as they drove by. Two kids kicking around a soccer ball on a brown grassy slope turned their way. Ashley felt the eyes of the whole town on them—humans, cows, and horses alike—and it made her shudder.

“I thought we’d go find the motel, check in, then maybe take a walk and explore on foot,” Ashley suggested.

“Good plan,” Malcolm said. He glanced up at the navigation display, which still showed them driving in a blank sea of green. No town here. No streets. No cell phone towers.

A place that didn’t exist.

Here there be monstersterritory.

Ashley held tight to the printout of the map, traced the way the forest road became Main Street, following their route with her finger. “Keep going on this road,” she told her brother.

“Aye, aye, Captain!” he said, turning the music up.

The houses got nicer-looking as they moved closer to the center of town. The paint jobs were fresh, the landscaping well-kept. Ashley felt slightly less tense as she looked at the trimmed hedges, front steps decorated with potted chrysanthemums in festive autumn colors, cornstalks, grinning jack-o’-lanterns. She smiled at the thought that Malcolm’s old Chevy Silverado fit right in, in this landscape of pickup trucks and tractors.

They passed a beautiful two-story colonial brick house with a plaque by the door that said:STODDARD HOUSE, CIRCA 1858. There was a scarecrow on the porch, watching them as they passed.

The road was in bad shape—the pavement cracked and full of potholes—contrasting with the picture-perfect, autumnally decorated homes. If there ever had been two yellow lines separating travel lanes, they were long gone.

Mal slowed down as they passed a dark-haired boy in a red jacket who was heading the opposite direction on a bicycle. When the kid’s eyes met Ash’s, he quickly made a U-turn and began to follow them, ringing the bell on his bike.

“Looks like we’ve got ourselves an escort,” Malcolm said with a laugh, eyeing the kid in the rearview mirror. Another boy on a bike pulled out of a side street and joined him; then a third joined the little parade—a girl with pigtails in a white coat. Ashley turned back to lookat them. They were all pedaling hard to keep up with the truck. Ashley raised her hand to wave at them. The pigtailed girl, who was clearly the youngest, threw something at the truck.

“Little juvenile delinquents!” Mal shook his head, eyes on the rearview mirror. “That was a damn glass soda bottle!” He hit the brakes and the kids scattered, turning off down side streets.

Mal and Ash continued slowly down Main Street and passed the low brick Boone’s Ferry Post Office. Beside that was Pops’ General Store, which was fronted with a large porch with benches and an old carved wooden cigar-store Indian standing guard by the front door. Across the street was Loon’s Call Pub, with a neon Pabst Blue Ribbon sign glowing in the window and a sign above the door that declared:GOOD DRINKS AND COMPANY SINCE 1899. A woman was standing in front of the pub, her back to them. Her dark, curly hair fell on her shoulders. Her slim frame and the way she held her body, with her hands buried deep in the pockets of her camel-colored coat… it was all too familiar. Ashley’s heart thudded as she waited for the apparition to turn around, show its dripping bloody face, the exposed skull, the ruined jaw. But instead, she walked right into the pub.

“Did you—” Ash started to say, but Mal hadn’t heard her, his focus on something up ahead.