Page 10 of Dread

I tucked her in. The sheets were cool and smelled like the detergent someone had stocked in the townhome’s laundry closet -- plain and unscented, fabric smelling like nothing at all, which was its own mercy. Ellie’s head found the pillow and stayed there, her body already surrendering to the gravity of a child who has exhausted every calorie available to her.

I picked a book off the shelf -- a story about a bear, illustrated, the pages soft with handling -- and opened it to the first page. She was asleep before I finished the second. Her breathing evened out into the deep, slow rhythm of someone sailing comfortably into dreams, one hand curled loosely around the edge of the blanket.

I closed the door softly. Stood in the narrow hallway with my hand still on the knob, listening to the silence on the other side. No rustling. No murmured half-words as she drifted off.

The living room was dark. I didn’t turn on the lamp. Didn’t reach for the remote. I sat on the couch -- the same couch where Ellie had dozed yesterday while Dread stood in the doorway delivering his card and his instructions -- and pulled my knees to my chest. The cushion sighed under me. Somewhere in the springs, a coil had given way, creating a shallow depression that my body fit into as if it had been molded specifically for me.

Outside, the compound breathed. Distant laughter from the direction of the clubhouse, the sound of adults relaxed enough to raise their voices. A motorcycle idled somewhere beyond the trees -- a low, patient rumble that held for several seconds and then cut to silence, the engine dying with a finality that suggested someone had reached their destination and saw no reason to hurry from it. Cicadas. Always the cicadas, their collective rasp rising and falling in waves that had nothing to do with human concerns and everything to do with the ancient, mindless work of summer.

No footsteps on the stoop. No headlights sweeping the curtains, that sweep-and-hold of a vehicle slowing to check an address. No sound of a door handle testing its latch. No raised voices from the lane. No car doors. No engines that didn’t belong.

I stayed on the couch until my eyes grew heavy. The darkness held. The compound held. My knees ached from being pulled to my chest for so long, and when I finally unfolded myself and stood, the blood rushed back into my calves with a pins-and-needles insistence that felt almost welcome -- proof that my body was still there, still functioning, still capable of registering sensation that wasn’t fear.

I moved to the bedroom. I changed out of the clothes I’d sweated through and pulled on a clean T-shirt and shorts. That was all the effort I had left. I didn’t brush my teeth or bother with my damp hair. I lay on top of the covers and stared at the ceiling.

My phone was on the nightstand. I could see its darkened screen from where I lay, the case a dull rectangle in the shadows. I didn’t reach for it. Didn’t open the weather app to check the forecast for tomorrow or the maps app to calculate the distance to St. Louis or the news app to scan for reports I was afraid of finding. I left it where it was.

I did not get up to check the locks. The front door was locked -- I’d turned the deadbolt after Ellie came in for her bath, a motion so automatic I hadn’t registered doing it. The sliding door was locked. The windows were locked. I’d checked them earlier, then checked them again, my hand returning to the latch like a tongue to a missing tooth.

I did not lie rigid. My shoulders found the mattress and stayed there. My arms rested at my sides, palms up, fingers loose. The position felt foreign. My body had spent so many nights arranged for vigilance -- curled on my side, one ear tilted toward the door, muscles tensed along the spine -- that flat-on-my-back felt like a language I’d once spoken and forgotten.

I slept. Not the jagged, interrupted sleep of the past two days -- the sleep that came in twenty-minute increments between sweaty jolts of adrenaline -- but deeper. A pull that dragged me under without negotiation and held me there, loose and untroubled, while the compound’s night closed around the townhome like a hand placed gently over a sleeping child’s brow.

And for the first time in longer than I could honestly remember, nothing woke me.

Chapter Four

Dread

The pen had tapped the edge of the folder twice before I caught myself doing it. I set it down. Picked it up again. The overhead vent pushed cold air across the back of my neck at a steady angle I’d stopped noticing three years ago and had started noticing again sometime this afternoon, though I couldn’t have said exactly when.

The office was narrow enough that I could touch both walls if I extended my arms, which I’d never done but had calculated once, a long time ago, when the walls had felt particularly close. One frosted window faced the alley. On cloudy days it let in no useful light. Today wasn’t cloudy. The sun pressed through the glass in a pale, diffuse panel that stopped about a foot short of my desk and illuminated nothing. The chart in front of me was Mrs. Alderman, sixty-three, hypertension management, follow-up bloodwork from two weeks ago. I’d read the first line four times.

My coffee was cold. I knew without touching the mug because I’d made it at two o’clock and it was now closer to four and I’d taken exactly one sip before setting it on the corner of the desk and forgetting about it entirely.

The patient files on the wall were in order. They were always in order. I kept them that way as a matter of practice, the same way I kept my instruments clean and my hands washed and my surgical notes legible. Order wasn’t a preference. It was infrastructure. Without it, things failed at the worst possible moment.

I tapped the pen again. Set it down. Left it there.

The phone buzzed on the desk, screen-down, vibrating against the wood grain with a sound like a trapped insect. I answered on the second ring.

“Hector.”

“Yeah, Doc.” His voice came through flat and uninflected, the voice of a man who delivered bad news often enough that he no longer padded it. “Parts aren’t in. Called three distributors. Best I’m getting is three days, maybe four. Hub assembly and the bearing race both need replacing, so it’s not something I can source locally.”

“I understand,” I said.

“Sorry about it.”

“Not your fault. Call me when they arrive,” I said.

“Will do.”

I ended the call and set the phone face down on the desk. The vent hummed. Mrs. Alderman’s bloodwork sat in its folder, unreviewed. Three days, maybe four. The SUV would remain in Hector’s lot, and the townhome would stay occupied. The woman with her rehearsed explanations and the little girl with her caterpillars and watchful eyes weren’t going anywhere while I figured out what had sent them down a Missouri highway with everything they owned and a wheel bearing giving up the ghost.

I gave the bloodwork one last glance, then left the office.

The waiting room held four plastic chairs along one wall and a magazine rack bolted to the other, which currently contained three issues of a farming periodical from last year, one issue of a home improvement magazine with the cover torn, and what appeared to be a bus schedule that had been there since before I started this practice. The overhead lights buzzed at a frequency that technically fell below the threshold of human perception and technically didn’t bother anyone, which was technically untrue. The smell was what waiting rooms always smelled like -- recycled air and antiseptic and a staleness underneath both of those, human and old, the accumulated residue of anxiety stored in upholstered seats.