Page 23 of The Bright Lands

“Ready for what?” she said.

“The big game.”

She heard her phone ringing, chirpy and distant, and a single strand of white Christmas lights stuttered to life above her bed. They revealed that she wasn’t in her childhood room after all. She had somehow been dropped into a black box with nails jutting from its walls, pale floorboards, a little kitchen. She recognized the droning. A mass of writhing flies glittered above her, gleaming like the garnet shawls her mother had always worn.

Clark went cold at a sight past the end of her bed. She and Dylan weren’t alone. There, in a dark corner, she could make out the leathery shape of another man. A man, but not a man: its fingers too long, its arms bent with too many joints. The man-shape, a blackness where its face should be, was coiled in a ball on the floor and rubbing itself, slowly.

Clark didn’t dare to move. She’d seen this shape’s work before but never the shape itself. It was death, she thought at first. Death, pleasuring itself with a little whimper.

No, her dream-self said. It was something much worse than death.

“Dylan,” she whispered, because now Dylan Whitley, standing at the end of her bed, had turned to study the thing with her. “Dylan, what is that?”

The droning mass of flies above them began to cheer, the engine outside sputtered and when the black man-shape in the corner rose to its feet, a stench of rot filled the room: a smell that was putrid and sour andold. A low whisper escaped the void of the thing’s face.

Dylan Whitley smiled at her. Where his right arm should have been there was nothing but a single piece of collarbone jutting from his jersey, the wound weeping blood onto her floor.

“That’s only the best years of my life right there, Officer,” he said with a laugh, and the man-shape forced its hand inside the boy’s open mouth.

She startled awake. The phone stopped ringing the moment she grabbed hold of it: 6:02 a.m. The smell of rot lingered in her dark room. After some of the things her crazy mother had told her as a girl, Clark couldn’t help but crawl to the end of her bed where Dylan had been standing in the dream and reach out to ensure that her floor was dry.

The phone began to ring again. Investigator Mayfield.

She was at the intersection of South Street and the highway when she heard a siren behind her. Deputy Jones pulled into the oncoming lane and rolled down his window.

“Stay close,” he shouted.

Clark nodded. She leaned on the gas, eased the clutch.

Go.

To the left they passed the school, the bar, the sheriff’s station. To their right, the empty eastern Flats flew by, the shaggy scrub and wild grass burning in the dawn. Soon they were passing the football field. Its rows of dead lights all cupped the crimson sun.

Only the best years of my life.

She debated calling Joel Whitley and decided against it. Let him sleep, if he was sleeping. If her suspicions were correct he wasn’t about to get much rest for a while.

The two deputies made it almost thirty miles north of town at top speed before Jones began to tap his brakes. Clark followed him around a tight turn, her shocks letting up a moan of protest.

Pebbles scattered as they bustled down what looked to be a private drive. Clark lowered her visor against the molten sun. Soon she caught the shape of a wooden fence, a wooden house in the distance, a scattering of outbuildings: a toolshed, a chicken coop, a horse stall.

A semitruck loomed over three SUVs and a Dodge Ram. Three men were smoking in the shade of the tall truck’s cab. Clark recognized Sheriff Lopez, Investigator Mayfield and Jack Spearson, the owner of the semi.

Jones and Clark clambered out and gave the men hollow little nods. Lopez gestured the two deputies closer.

“You don’t spook easy, do you, Clark?”

A bird whistled from among the leathery leaves of a nearby pecan. A woman’s face watched her from the house’s screen door.

“I don’t believe so, sir.”

Lopez glanced at Mayfield as if for his assent. The investigator nodded.

“The ATV don’t seat but four,” Spearson said. His eyes were glassy, like he was coming off stimulants. “One of y’alls could stand on the fender but—”

Jones said, “I’m fine right here.”

Spearson led them to a rusted red ATV. Clark sat in the back, next to Mayfield, and they went bounding around the house. There was nothing awaiting them on the other side but open country.