Page 12 of Don’t Let Him In

Maybe the breeze.

A flimsy excuse. One even I don’t fully believe.

Quakes of panic ripple through me, my knuckles aching around the phone clenched in my hand. I try to speak, force something out, but my voice snags on itself, my teeth chattering around the name before it finally leaves my mouth. “M-Manson?”

The name barely survives the hollow percussion drumming overhead. Mildew and decay saturate the air, worsening the nausea curdling in the pit of my stomach.

Rocking back on my heels, black spots begin to swarm along the fringes of my vision before a creak yanks me back into focus.

“Sorry,” he’s quick to amend. “It’s just me. Didn’t mean to frighten you again.”

My eye catches on his scuffed boot first as he steps from the shadows into a faint sliver of moonlight spilling through a cracked window nearby.

Throat constricting, I drift back a step. Something crunches under my shoe.

Glancing down, I lift my foot from a dust-coated shard of glass, my gaze sweeping across the floor before noticing dozens more pepper the warped planks around me.

Dread mauls through my chest and up my windpipe, but I ground myself by wedging the phone tighter between my palms, keeping it visible between us. His eyes never leave mine. There isn’t a flicker of hesitation in him, not a single glance toward the device in my hand. The realization unsettles me more than it should. It’s not like I know for sure he intends to hurt me. There’s no reason for me to overreact.

Besides the fact that I just watched him cave a squirrel's head in with a rock. The grotesque image keeps flashing through my mind.

My vision clouds, trapped in an anesthetic-like haze.

I blink, and suddenly, he’s in front of me, hands closing around my shoulders as I seize from his touch. A slow, unreadable sweep passes over me.

“You’re cold,” he says.

Expression blank. Matter-of-fact.

I wet my lips, pausing for a second to collect myself. “We probably shouldn’t be in here.”

Something beyond me tugs at his attention, a faint shift crossing his expression before fingers trail down my arm, squeezing once before releasing their hold as he steps around me. “Give me a minute.”

Pressing my teeth into my lip, I hold myself rigid as I turn to watch him move farther into the house.

His boots thump softly past an old table before he stops near the staircase, silver light filtering through the shattered window beside him onto a strip of moss-colored fabric gathered at the bottom step.

Hesitation gnaws at me, urging me to leave.

Run.

Never glance back.

But panicking won’t do me any good right now. Not when every instinct in me already knows I wouldn’t make it far.

A glint flickers between the floorboards beneath the table, pulling my attention away from him.

My keys.

Snapping into action, I move toward them, wincing at the crackle of glass underfoot as I duck under the table. My fingers close around the tattered lanyard just as a dull sterling sheen catches along the cracks in my periphery.

A ring.

Letting the keys fall quietly against the floor, I pry it out, tension throbbing in my throat as his legs stay turned toward the end of the staircase.

I set my phone on the slanted chair beside me before my attention snags on frayed ropes sprawled beside another chair, overturned on its side.

Fear thickens in my chest. Warning bells ring in the back of my mind, screaming for me to leave.