314 Book 3 (Widowsfield Trilogy) Read online

  “Jesus,” murmured Rachel as the group listened. “Is that even possible?”

  “I don’t know,” said Paul. “They tried, but Terry wasn’t dead. They put her in the tub and poured the cleaners in. Then Ben poured boiling water over her and she woke up. She grabbed him and pulled him face-first in with her.”

  “Right,” said Rosemary, providing Paul with a sense of balance as he tried to determine if what he’d learned was true. “That’s when Alma came up the stairs. She could hear Ben crying, and she got a knife to try and protect him. Terry was blinded by the chemicals in the tub, and she was trying to run out of the room when Alma came in.”

  “And I killed her,” said Alma matter-of-factly.

  “You stabbed her,” said Rosemary, “but your father was the one that killed her. He gutted her.”

  “That’s why the mannequin was on the floor in there,” said Rachel. “But why were the two child-sized mannequins still on the couch?”

  “Because I was trying to trick Oliver,” said Rosemary. “I lied to him to change his perception of what had happened, the same way The Skeleton Man started to try and hide from The Watcher.”

  “How?” asked Stephen.

  Rosemary tried to explain, “The Skeleton Man kept The Watcher’s lies intact. All of the timeframes exist in the same short period of time, but The Watcher is the one creating the new ones. The Skeleton Man was the one that kept them in order. It’s sort of hard to understand, but the best way I can explain it is to think of someone knitting one long scarf, and there’s someone behind him carefully laying the scarf down and making sure the pattern stays correct. The Watcher is the one making the dreams, and The Skeleton Man was behind him, keeping the whole thing in order so The Watcher can change things if he wants to. Does that make sense?”

  “Not really,” said Jacker.

  “I get it,” said Stephen. “Instead of thinking of it like a scarf, think of it as a fifteen minute video clip. Pretend I’ve got the clip, and I keep making little changes to it and then sending you a copy. Your job is to keep all of the versions in order, so that if I ever need to go back and make a change I can do it easily.” He looked at Rosemary and asked, “Is that right?”

  She raised her brow and nodded in satisfaction. “Sure, if that makes more sense to you. The Skeleton Man started making changes of his own to what was happening in the town. He did it because he wanted to try and trick The Watcher into forgetting him.”

  “He wanted out,” said Alma.

  Rosemary looked at her and asked, “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. He used his lies to hide, and then he tried to get me to take his place. I think it worked.”

  “Why do you say that?” asked Rosemary, her concern becoming more apparent.

  “Because he made me switch places with him. I was the one that put the chemicals in the tub, and I was the one that Terry tried to grab. Then he stabbed her, and then The Watcher tried to catch me. I got away, and that’s when I met you,” she said as she motioned to Rosemary, “or some version of myself that you put there. You explained that I needed to get out by going over the cliff and into the reservoir so that I could go and bring The Skeleton Man back. Then we ended up back in the van, and we saw my father driving away with Ben sitting in the back seat instead of me.”

  “I remember that,” said Rachel.

  Stephen agreed and then Jacker added, “That’s when you took the wheel and made me sit in the back with Aubrey.”

  “That’s why you plowed over that cliff?” asked Rachel. “I thought you’d lost your damn mind.”

  “I’m not sure I didn’t,” said Alma with a quick laugh.

  “Don’t worry,” said Rosemary. “I’ve been trying to make sense of this damn town for five years and I still don’t understand most of it.”

  “I’m still confused about Ben,” said Paul. “Are he and The Skeleton Man the same person or not?”

  Rosemary shook her head and said, “No, but I don’t think they exist separately either. I’ve always gotten the sense that The Skeleton Man is a jumble of a bunch of people.”

  “Well that makes sense,” said Jacker sarcastically.

  Rosemary wasn’t amused. She continued like a teacher trying to ignore the class clown. “The Skeleton Man was created by The Watcher’s twisting of Ben’s fears. Without Ben, he wouldn’t exist. That’s what I mean by saying they can’t exist separately.”

  “Then did my dad really kidnap Ben?” asked Alma. “Or did he take The Skeleton Man?”

  “Both,” said Rosemary. “And we have to get them back.”

  “Or what?”

  Rosemary looked as if the answer should be easy, but then struggled to explain. She looked down and sighed before she finally said, “Honestly, I have no idea. I don’t know what sort of things a creature like that would be capable of in the real world.”

  “Maybe he’ll be just like those girls out there,” said Paul as he motioned to the other room where the sleepers were. “If he’s been in a coma for sixteen years then he’ll be just like them. Right?”

  “Physically, sure,” said Rosemary. “But what can he do mentally?”

  “You think he’s a psychic or something?” asked Rachel.

  “The Skeleton Man spent at least the past sixteen years creating nightmares. Now that he’s out, there’s no telling what he’s capable of,” said Rosemary.

  “But he’s in Ben’s body,” said Paul. “He won’t have any of the abilities that he had in Widowsfield.”

  “Won’t he?” asked Rosemary. “Before today, would you have ever believed in psychometry? No one’s sure what the human brain is capable of. The Skeleton Man lived his entire life learning how to warp the world around him into nightmares. He’s got no reason to believe he can’t do the same thing in the real world. I’m scared to think of what The Skeleton Man can do now that he’s out of Widowsfield.”

  CHAPTER 2 – Watch

  Philadelphia

  June 15th, 1943

  Lyle Everman pled for his life.

  He slapped his raw palm against the steel wall and cried out for help, exactly as he’d been doing for what felt like hours. The room was perfectly square, with featureless, metal walls. Even the door was hard to discern, the edges nearly hidden when the room was sealed. The tips of his fingers were bleeding from trying to fit his nails inside the nearly nonexistent gap between the flat door and the wall.

  He pounded his hand again, leaving faint fingerprints of blood behind.

  “Vess!”

  Lyle put his hands to his ears to block out the sound, but it didn’t help. He moaned, and clenched his eyes shut while saying, “Make it stop. Please, please, make it stop.”

  The hum was getting louder.

  It had started as faint as the buzz of the single Tungsten bulb that looked down from above, just the mere passage of electricity through a wire filament. Then the hum grew more intense and pervasive, causing the thick black hair on Lyle’s strong forearms to rise. The steel walls of the room vibrated with the incessant single note that tortured the young man within.

  Lyle pulled at his hair as he clenched his teeth and moaned. His eyes were shut tight, and tears were beginning to force their way out between the lids. His eardrums pulsed, and the electric hum was joined by the beat of his own heart as blood pumped fiercely through his veins.

  “Vess!”

  It felt like his eyes were bulging, and the watering continued to get worse. Finally, he opened his eyes as he screamed out in pain, but this time the room was different.

  He was no longer standing in a square room. He was at the bottom of a sphere.

  “What?” He staggered and fell to the curved floor. “What’s happening?”

  The electric hum was still present, but seemed to emanate from further away now. He put his hand on the wall and felt the curvature of the cold steel. This was no trick – the wall was undoubtedly curved now.

  “Vess?”

  He tried to stand, but had diffi
culty bracing himself on the rounded floor. Lyle felt the room move as he stood, as if he were in a ball that had been placed on a flat surface, and any movement by him threatened to send the sphere spinning.

  Then the room began to change. The walls stretched as the sphere was pulled upward, with him anchoring the bottom, turning the space into an oval as the walls ascended. He looked up and saw the ceiling had turned black, as if it were too far to view, but the single shining bulb still existed in the distance, like the light at the end of a tunnel that was moving further and further away. Then the blackness snaked forth, pulling itself down the wall like the tentacles of a squid that was trying to draw him in.

  “No, no,” said Lyle pathetically as he stared up at the beast. He shrunk, pulling himself into a ball at the base as the oval continued to stretch upward. There was no single bulb anymore, but at least a dozen of them. He wiped his teary eyes, hoping it was a trick of the light, but it didn’t help. Instead, the array of bulbs had become eyes.

  The Devil stared down, Lyle was certain of it. No God had eyes like those.

  The tentacles were like the shadows of snakes on the walls, distorted by the stretched sphere, undulating and writhing, twisting in and out of one another without ever knotting. They grew, and soon the upper half of the room was lost to them.

  Above the maelstrom of twisting arms, the mass of eyes stared down. The whites of the eyes looked like stars, but the pupils were hellish proof that they were anything but celestial. They all blinked independently, and they were glassy, as if tearful.

  “Bind the lamb,” said a deep, male voice from inside the room.

  A black wire descended from the mass, followed by a second, and then a third. Lyle tried to move away from them, but they inched closer, unattached to the walls as opposed to the rest of the shadows. The wires came too close to avoid, and he tried to swat one away.

  The black cord wrapped around his wrist, and then another snapped out like a whip to sting his other arm. The second cord gripped his other wrist, and then Lyle was pulled up. The wires dug into the flesh of his wrists, and his blood spurted forth as the cords continued to draw tighter. He cried out in pain as he was lifted. The third wire coiled around his neck, choking away his voice, and he was forced to stare up at the approaching gloom, all the while the crying eyes stared down.

  Widowsfield

  March 14th, 1996

  Raymond was sitting alone in the Salt and Pepper Diner. He was at the table where he and his father normally ate, but Desmond wasn’t where he was supposed to be. Nothing was as it had been, or ever would be again. The world was different now – lonely and desolate.

  “Dad?” asked Raymond, desperately hoping for an answer. “Hello?”

  Only the faint static from a distant radio could be heard. Other than that, the restaurant was silent.

  Raymond got up from the plastic bench that was affixed to the floor. He looked down at the steel-rimmed tabletop and saw a set of silverware that was wrapped in a napkin. He unrolled the set, but knew there wouldn’t be a steak knife. His father had brought him to this diner hundreds of times, and Raymond knew that the rolled napkin would have a spoon, fork, and butter knife in it, and that the steak knives were kept behind the counter for customers that ordered a meal that required a proper knife. He picked up the butter knife to defend himself with as he dared to explore the empty diner.

  He looked out of the large window to Main Street and saw that it was also devoid of life. Raymond walked to the counter where the register sat beside a cake that was displayed on a covered, glass pedestal, but the cake inside was lopsided, as if it was slowly melting.

  “Grace?” he called out loudly for the waitress, but no one answered.

  Raymond took the opportunity to rush behind the counter and replace his butter knife with a serrated one that was kept in a cup under the register. He took two, holding one in each hand, and then moved to the white, swinging door that separated the dining area from the kitchen.

  “Juan?” He looked for the cook, but the kitchen was deserted as well.

  The cook’s small radio sat on the counter and was turned on. Its antenna was stretched out at an awkward angle and it wasn’t picking up anything but static.

  “Hello?” called out the boy as his dread grew.

  Raymond walked to the entrance of the Salt and Pepper Diner and opened the door, causing the bells tied above to jingle. He stepped outside, and looked around. The blue sky was marred only by a scant few wisps of clouds, but it was still oddly grey out. He looked around for any sign of the sun, but it was nowhere to be seen.

  Raymond couldn’t recall ever being more fearful. There were no signs of life in Widowsfield: No chatter of voices, no birds breaking the still pool of sky above. While Main Street was never congested with traffic, he’d also never seen it empty. There always seemed to be at least one or two people milling about, but today he was alone.

  “Dad?” He screamed, but no one was there to hear him.

  Raymond looked to his right, but saw no cars driving in the distance. He looked left and saw a UPS truck parked in front of the Anderson Used Book store. There were other cars parked along the road, but Raymond knew that if the UPS truck was still in front of Winnie Anderson’s store that the delivery man was probably inside. He walked over to the store, which always looked closed due to how Winnie kept the lights off to conserve energy, and he gently eased the door open.

  “Hello?”

  No one answered him.

  A staircase behind the counter led up to Winnie Anderson’s apartment, and there was a light on up there. Raymond made his way around the counter, feeling like an invader as he did. He’d been to the book store many times, and his father often bought him Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books that Raymond eagerly read, but in all the time he’d spent in the store he’d never wandered behind the counter. It felt like an invasion to be back there.

  “Miss Anderson?”

  Raymond walked up the creaky, wooden stairs, his hand gripping the railing as if he might slip at any moment. He got to the top, uncertain if he wanted to find someone or not. He struggled to recall how he’d gotten to the diner, vaguely remembering a planned fishing trip with his father, but everything that led up to him sitting alone at the Salt and Pepper Diner felt like it was just a faint, distant memory.

  The apartment above the book store was empty as well. There were signs of life: a half-eaten bowl of oatmeal on a tray table, a book set on the arm of the sofa, marking the reader’s place, and the dishwasher was churning in the kitchen. But no soul survived to claim ownership of this place or its contents.

  Raymond’s heart began to beat faster, but he wasn’t sure what he was frightened of. His palms became clammy, and his brow began to sweat, as if some part of him knew something bad was about to happen, but he had no idea what it was. He raced back down the stairs and out of the building, feeling safer outside, as if he’d suddenly realized that the building was haunted. When he got to the sidewalk he paused and took a breath, but there would be no respite.

  A thunderous bang shook the world, causing the alarms of nearby vehicles to come alive. The rumble was sudden, but lasted for several seconds, causing the ground to tremble with its force. When the aftershock faded, Raymond looked north and saw a billowing cloud of white smoke rising above the trees in the distance. The cloud swelled, and began to mushroom over the woods before cascading down, as if the tree line was an edifice that the smoke flowed over. The fog fell to Main Street, and then surged forward like a tidal wave.

  Raymond was hypnotized, gazing at the coming wave as if paralyzed by its magnificence. Then he saw the twisting shapes within. The fog was hiding something dark, and Raymond was reminded of staring through the glass door of a washing machine as a single black shirt tumbled with white clothes. The fog was a shroud, and the creature within was headed his way.

  There was no escape, and even though Raymond tried to run, he knew he would never escape the God that bore down on him. D
espite his cries for help, he understood there’d be none. When it caught up to him, there would be no pleading for safety. This wasn’t an animal he ran from; it wasn’t something that could be reasoned with. It had no concept of pity.

  The thrashing of wire, that metallic grind, was the only sound Raymond could hear once the fog descended. Smoke swept under his feet, and the ground disappeared. The sound of The Watcher’s approach was like that of a great machine breaking itself apart. The groan of metal, and the squeal of bending steel, the grinding of gears, the crash of breaking concrete, it was the cacophony of his existence. And as the chaotic noise persisted, a fateful sound pounded a maddening rhythm, steady and heavy, like a hammer striking a bell that had fallen to the ground, the vibration trapped within.

  The tendrils snaked through the pavement, and up the walls of nearby buildings. They broke apart the concrete, shattered windows, and crumbled bricks, but the remnants of their destruction didn’t fall. The pieces of Widowsfield that were torn apart by The Watcher’s tentacles revealed themselves as part of the mass. The fragments turned black and eroded into dust that joined the tentacles themselves. As the world evaporated, the creature grew.

  Raymond tried to swipe his knife down at the fog, but the parts of the blade that touched the smoke disappeared, as if he’d dipped it in acid. He dropped the weapon in fear, and it vanished beneath the mist.

  Raymond was lifted off the ground, but felt no force pulling him skyward. It was as if the ground had disappeared, and he was left weightless in the fog. His clothes shredded, pulling away from him as if burning, the ash melding with the fog. His cries for help were lost, despite the pain in his throat as he tried to scream. The blackness overcame him as the tentacles blocked out the light. He was left in what felt like darkness, but when he looked down at his body he could still see himself as if it were the middle of the day.