Page 71 of Stay Buried

Maybe she was too late. Maybe whoever it was had given up.

Or maybe she’d imagined it.Don’t go there, she told herself.

“This is real,” she whispered aloud, the sound of her own voice grounding her, comforting her in some way. “I’m not imagining this.”

But hadn’t she told herself the same thing back then? Back when she actually believed that her mother had come back; come back to warn her?

She held her breath, counted to three, and yanked open the door.

She staggered back a step. She blinked in disbelief at the figure standing outside her door—shoulders impossibly broad, the hooded coat he wore, long and patched together with uneven squares of mismatched leather.

The creature before her had a skull for a head; not a human skull but an animal’s. A deer maybe…

No, she knew, looking at the length of the nose and the teeth: the huge white teeth. This was the yellow-white skull of a horse, black sockets for eyes, teeth gleaming. The loosely hinged jaw moved, opening slightly.

She tried to scream, but no sound came out, only the useless hiss of her own sour breath.

She slammed the door and threw her body against it, shoved the dead bolt into place.

A hallucination. A figure that had followed her from a dream. A terrible nightmare brought on by old Josephine and her stories and the creepy little knackerman doll, by seeing that blank gravestone with all the gifts.

But she was done with all of that. With seeing things that weren’t there. Right?

She thought of Gram, of the pain in her face when she’d said to Ashley in the hospital, “You need to concentrate on getting well. Take some time for yourself. You can finish med school later. Nothing matters more than you getting better.”

But hadn’t it been there, in Gram’s look, even then? The grim certainty that Ash would never recover completely, would never go back to med school, would never become the success story they’d all believed she was destined to be.

That she’d move back home, take whatever job she could find, pretend not to notice the headshakes and the whispers: “Such a shame.”

Ashley, who’d had such promise.

Ashley, who’d always been at the top of her class.

Ashley, who’d gone round the bend and seen her dead mother not just in the halls of her apartment, but in the cafeteria at UVM, near the nurses’ station on her med-surg rotation, once at the all-night convenience store where Ashley had stopped for energy drinks in the weeks after her mother’s death. She was terrified to fall asleep: she lived on coffee, energy drinks, caffeine pills. Because when she closed her eyes and slept, her mother was always there. But then the nightmares bled into the daytime and Ashley couldn’t tell what was real and what was dream. That was when she went to her grandmother and, over coffee and tears, told her she’d decided to check herself into the hospital, that she’d been seeing things. Terrible things.

There was another knock at her motel room door. The knob rattled, turning.

Ash leapt back, suddenly convinced it was her mother on the other side of the door now. Her mother with her face swollen, purple, parts of it looking like raw meat, her jaw dangling, unhinged.

I tried to warn you, she would scream.

I tried to explain but you wouldn’t listen!

“Ash?” Malcolm called from behind the latched door. “Hey, Ashley, are you okay?”

She unlatched the dead bolt and opened the door, threw herself into her brother’s arms. He held tight to her. He seemed to be trembling nearly as much as she was.

“I heard banging,” he said. “What the hell is going on?”

“I—I don’t know. I think I had a bad dream.”

“Ashley, someone was here.”

“Someone?”

Don’t you mean something?

She was sure she could still smell it: a dank, forgotten smell—old cloth, dirt, things long buried.