Page 79 of The Haunting of Paynes Hollow

“Do you think he was a fake?”

“No. I’m making a point. Protect yourself, okay? Ask for cameras. Buy more if you want them. Demand strangers get off your land. Tell me to leave your cottage because it’s past dark.”

“That’s not—”

“And get out your aunt’s gun, for God’s sake. You have it. Use it.”

“On you?”

“Sure. If I attack you in the night, you absolutelyshouldshoot me. You have my permission to do so. Now get some sleep.”

I do sleep. Again, I’m not sure how, and even when I do drift off, my mind lashes me for the insensitivity of falling asleep while my aunt is missing.

I’ve spent the last two days silencing the voice that screams that I’m not doing enough. I should forget this stupid inheritance and take her car and…

What? Check her apartment in case she went home and failed to tell me?

Canvass the residents of Paynes Hollow, who already know she’s missing and have been on the lookout?

Drive up and down the back roads in case she’s lying alongside one?

Forget leaving. I should be out there walking the property every daylight hour, in case she’s lying in a thicket, injured. I should be out on the lake, in case… I don’t know. She washed up alive on a sandbar somewhere?

I know I can’t do more than I have. I know I need to leave this to the authorities, whom I trust. This must be how every person who has a loved one disappear feels. Guilty over not searching twenty-four hours a day. Guilty over sleeping, eating, laughing.

I know someone who did have a loved one vanish. He’s outside in a tent. It’d taken nearly two days for Austin to be found, the same amount of time Gail has been missing. I could talk to Ben, reassure myself that what I feel is normal or get tips on how to deal with it.

Yeah, I could do that… if it were anyone except Ben Vandergriff, who will neither answer my questions nor appreciate me asking.

The only thing I can do is reassure and comfort myself, which works reasonably well… until I’m asleep. Then I dream that my aunt is half drowned and washed up less than a mile along the beach. That she went for a walk at night, was hit by a car, and is lying unconscious in a ditch. That she was kidnapped by Caleb, who forced her to play the drowned dead last night. That she had been kidnapped by the cyclist-camper, who’d had her in his tent the whole time we were out there arguing with him. Or that she’d been kidnapped by Ben and is apparently inhistent, thirty feet away. And each time I find her, it is by accident, me having a fun time at the cottage and stumbling over her as she gasps her last breaths.

Then comes the last segment, where I’m the one who kidnapped her. Where I’m holding her hostage in the shed, and then I take the hatchet and I step toward her, and she knows what is coming, and she screams a bloodcurdling shriek that has me rocketing out of bed, hands to my ears, vomit in my mouth as I gag.

And yet the screams keep going.

Distant, horrible human screams.

I hover there, sour bile dripping before I slowly wipe it away. And the screams continue.

I’m still asleep. I’d only dreamed that I woke up—

Banging sounds on the front door.

“Sam!” Ben shouts. “Samantha!”

I turn slowly in that direction. The dream lingers, hazy, and I can’t focus. Ben curses and then the front door slaps open.

“Sam!”

Footsteps pound. My bedroom door swings open, and Ben is silhouetted there for a heartbeat before he jumps back.

“Jesus!” he says, retreating fast until he’s out of sight. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—I thought—Someone’s screaming, and I thought…”

He thought it was me. That much penetrates as my brain turns on, but it’s still sluggish, and I can only make out bits of what he’s babbling in the next room. Something about a key. That he still had the cottage key. That he should have returned it to me.

Then, “You heard the scream, right?” he says.

I rub my face and croak, “Yes.”