Seed
: Chapter 12

The drive to Rosewood was a long one—over eight hours one way, but Jack decided to get an early start and leave that night instead of waiting until morning. Getting there early would give him an extra half day of daylight, and though Aimee didn’t like the idea of Jack driving at night on his own, she was too tired to argue.

The Louisiana darkness was oppressive. If the night sky had torn itself open and bled ink onto the earth, it still wouldn’t come close to the depth of shadow that swallowed the levies and live oaks. It was liquid darkness: a darkness so heavy it blotted out the brightest headlights. But the weightiness of night was, for Jack, more than appropriate. It was the perfect backdrop to a battalion of unwanted memories; the perfect color for the nightmare that had become his life.

He remembered being locked in his room, but he didn’t remember exactly what had pushed Stephen over the edge. Something had happened to reduce his mother into an emotional wreck of a woman, weeping, trying to talk around the hitching in her throat. He could hear them yelling at one another outside his door, but everything was muffled; underwater. Jack made out a few words, words like ‘safety’ and ‘away’ and ‘not right’ and ‘no choice’. Otherwise, all he could recall was that their argument was stop and go. One minute they were yelling, and the next minute there was nothing but silence—off and on like a blinking streetlight.

Beyond that memory, he had no idea how he had escaped his bedroom. He had been lying on his bed, staring up at the ceiling, and suddenly there was damp grass beneath his feet as he sprinted across the lawn. He had been absent, maybe asleep, but as time had gone on he had grown used to losing time.

At first it had been just minutes. Then, eventually, inevitably, those minutes had grown into hours. Sometimes he’d wake up in random places: parking lots, the football field behind the high school gym. The only time it had thrown him was when he found himself in the graveyard a few acres from home. That was the night Stephen lost his nerve and hammered old boards across Jack’s bedroom window.

Jack hadn’t considered it then, but the idea chilled him as he drove on: maybe his condition was contagious, like smallpox or the plague. Maybe it had gone dormant, but he’d been infected all along.

“Impossible,” he muttered to himself, shooting an arm out to Arnold’s stock stereo. Nothing but talk radio riddled with static. Out in the middle of nowhere, nothing survived—not even rock and roll. He could have pulled the car over and blown his brains out if he wanted. Nobody would be there to hear the gunshot. Nobody would call the cops. He’d just lay there, his brains oozing out of his skull, dead and waiting for the animals to drag him away.

He blinked.

Suicide had never crossed his mind before, and now he was picturing himself mouthing the barrel of a gun.

“What the fuck, Jack?” he murmured, glaring at the road. He punched the gas, challenging the ridiculous thought by blasting toward Georgia’s border faster than before. But speed didn’t keep those thoughts from slithering into his ear like a parasitic worm. It was a story he hadn’t thought of in God knew how long, a story every kid knew; the tale of the phantom hitchhiker sitting in the back seat of a dark car, waiting to be discovered in the rearview mirror. But instead of it being a rotten-faced ghost in the back of Arnold’s Olds, Jack imagined a razor-toothed shadow wearing an ear-to-ear grin.

Mr. Scratch.

That’s what Charlie had called him. Twenty years ago, it hadn’t had a name.

He fought the urge, but his eyes jumped to the rearview. The back seat was empty: nothing. Mr. Scratch had more important things to do than take a road trip back to Rosewood. Mr. Scratch was busy with a six-year-old girl that, for all Jack knew, would no longer be his daughter by the time he got back home.

A few minutes past three AM, the bang of the screen door jerked Aimee awake. Someone was in the house. That serial killer she’d been waiting for had finally found her, and now he was going to murder her in front of her girls.

She heard a quiet bleat slip through the bedroom. Had it not vibrated in her throat, she would have sworn it had come from someone other than her.

“Think of the girls,” she whispered, psyching herself up. If Jack had been home, she’d have sent him out into the hall to investigate, sacrificed her own husband so she could make her escape. But Jack wasn’t there. She was left as the protector.

Grabbing a framed photograph of she and Jack on a trip to Charleston as a weapon, a ridiculous though came into her head: would she beat the serial killer over the head with it, or show him what a nice family she had? As she crept into the hallway with the picture clasped in her hands, she was sure there was something wrong with her maternal instinct. All the things she’d read about mothers protecting their children, her first impulse was to run out of the house screaming bloody murder.

Finally making it to the living room, she nearly choked on her heart. The front door was wide open. She veered around, her eyes as wide as possible to help her see in the dark, but she didn’t see anyone. Telling herself there couldn’t have been anyone in the house because Nubs would have gone ballistic.

And then she remembered that Nubs couldn’t warn them because Nubs was dead.

With the picture frame pressed to her chest like a shield, she crept toward the door. Outside, the wind had picked up. She could hear the branches of the oaks groan and complain as they swayed back and forth. They were the kind of trees you wanted on your property because they were ancient and mystical, but that you regretted having when the rain fell sideways and the wind howled through the leaves.

Stopping at the threshold of the door, her toes brushed the frame of the screen door as she looked out into the yard. Out on the road that ran in front of the house, in the exact spot where Nubs had expired, a shadow lurked in what looked to be a crouch, hunched over something unseen. It looked like an animal—maybe a wolf that had crawled out of the trees to sniff at the blood-soaked road. But when it moved Aimee knew she was wrong. The shadow shifted its weight with jerky, unnatural motions, like an old movie reel hitching on its spokes. She drew in a breath—silent beneath the whisper of wind and shivering leaves—but the small sound of drawing in air did something to that blotch of darkness. It froze as if listening. Aimee’s eyes went wide when it went static, knowing that she’d been heard. The idea of this thing, whatever it was, knowing that she was standing in the doorway made her blood run cold. She pressed her hand over her mouth to muffle her breathing, but the shadow liked that even less. It bristled when it sensed movement. It reeled and shot a stare across the lawn, its black eyes unspeakably dark—twin black holes, devouring light.

Aimee’s breath caught. Her heart ceased to beat. She stared at the thing that was leering at her and stumbled away from the door. It had fangs—cannibal teeth as sharp as the points of her best kitchen knives. As soon as it saw her step back, its mouth twisted, those jagged teeth shining red with blood. Beyond its shoulder she could see the remnants of what could have only been Nubs’ body, torn to pieces, glistening against the asphalt.

She exhaled a yelp and shoved the front door closed, throwing the dead bolt into place. As soon as the door slammed shut, she ran to the window to see if the shadow was still out there, still eating her dog.

It was gone. So was Nubs: he had long since been buried in the backyard. Aimee squeezed her eyes shut.

“You’re seeing things,” she whispered, pressing her forehead against the cool glass. But the longer she stood there, the more reality drummed at her brain. The door, she thought. That wasn’t my imagination. The door had been open; she knew this because she had just slammed it shut. Her body went tense at the thought; she had assumed someone had come in, but the more she put it together the more it seemed like someone, or something, had gone out.

Jack pulled over at a gas station just shy of the Georgia state line, drawn to the place by its cold fluorescent glow. The place looked out of business, like a photo out of a ghost town picture book—the kind of place you put behind you as fast as possible because the vibe is wrong; the kind of place that, if you ever caught a flat, would be the last place you’d want to stop to ask for help. But Jack stopped. He didn’t need gas—he had a half tank that would take him well beyond Rosewood—but he stopped anyway, drawn to the place by some unexplainable pull.

Fluorescent lights buzzed over two rusty gas pumps in the middle of the cracked parking lot, flickering and popping, giving the place that classic horror movie vibe. There was something cinematically surreal about it, something that matched his situation to a T.

Loose gravel crunched beneath his shoes as he walked toward the building he hoped at least had a working soda machine. He was fiending for a Milky Way but doubted he’d get lucky. Passing a grungy window, he spotted a guy sitting behind a counter—mangy beard, bushy eyebrows, wild eyes and a trucker’s cap. A bolt of anxiety shot through his veins, then subsided. Déjà vu. He’d done this before; maybe in another life.

The guy didn’t say anything when Jack stepped inside, but he did move a hairy arm to tip the brim of his hat in greeting before spitting a wad of black tar into a plastic drink cup. Unease churned in the pit of Jack’s stomach. He turned to search the barren shelves for a snack and found nothing but lukewarm bottled water and a pack of pink snowballs, half-crushed and two years beyond their expiration date. He grimaced and slid his hands into his pockets. He’d have to drive through half of Georgia on an empty stomach.

Just as Jack turned to shuffle out of the place, the guy behind the counter stopped him with a few gruff words.

“What’cher lookin’ for?”

“Just a candy bar.” Jack focused his full attention on the guy. He looked more like a trucker than a gas station attendant. He was huge: probably towered close to seven feet.

“You’re drivin’ down this road at four in the mornin’ lookin’ for a candy bar?” The guy spit another mouthful of black saliva into his cup. “Must have a hell of a sweet tooth.”

Jack offered him a compulsory smile. That dirty trucker cap gave him the creeps. Something about him just didn’t sit right, like maybe this guy didn’t actually work the station at all. Like maybe he just had a key and he flipped on the lights and waited for a car to pull into that shitty parking lot so he could sink a knife deep into a stranger’s belly.

“Thanks anyway,” Jack murmured, continuing his trek to the door.

“You might better watch out,” the trucker said, bringing Jack to a halt. At first he wasn’t sure whether it was a warning or a suggestion. The jolly green giant spotted Jack’s confusion and continued. “You bein’ followed, chief, and you done know it too.”

“I’m being followed,” Jack repeated. He had meant for it to come out as a question, but it just sounded like an echo.

“You’re runnin’, but you’re runnin’ from something you’ve been runnin’ from all your life, aren’t ya? Runnin’ like it’s gonna make some sort of big difference this time round.”

Sourness crept into Jack’s mouth. He stared at the bearded giant, said nothing.

“I’ve seen your kind. I see you all the time, drivin’ down the road like the Devil can’t chase ya if ya step on the gas.”

A shudder shook Jack from the inside out—a tiny earthquake of the heart. He swallowed the spit that had collected in his mouth.

“Ain’t no use denyin’, chief. I’ve seen your kind plenty times before. Seems like the ones runnin’ are the only ones that ever stop on in here, lookin’ for an excuse to turn right around and head back to where they came from. They just tell themselves, Naw, I’m just stoppin’ for a Coke. I’m just stoppin’ for a Hershey’s or a HoHo, or maybe they got them one of those slushie machines, but we don’t got none of that do we?”

Jack cleared his throat. “Doesn’t look like it,” he said.

“Don’t look like it because we don’t got none of it, that’s why.”

Shifting his weight from one foot to the other, Jack contemplated making a run for it, sure that the giant behind the counter would lunge at him if he tried. But the longer he stood there the more his curiosity began to itch.

“Why is that?” Jack asked. “What’s the point of being open if you don’t have anything to buy?”

“Maybe I do got something to buy,” he said. “Maybe what I’m sellin’ you just can’t see yet.”

Jack chewed on his bottom lip. Part of his brain urged him to crawl back into that Oldsmobile and continue to Rosewood as planned. But another part of his brain, a bigger part, was convinced this guy knew things, that he was fated to meet this enormous man, a man who could have easily been a mass murderer, if only to prepare himself for the next round of his trip.

“You go to N’awlins quite a bit, don’t ya?”

Jack tensed.

“I can smell it. That place gots the smell of ghosts, chief, and that smell don’t wash off easy.”

“Why does that matter?” Jack asked. The guy exhaled a laugh.

“It matters cause you coulda found answers there, but instead you end up drivin’ in the middle of the night to find someone here. You’re lookin’ for a way out and you don’t know which way to look.”

Jack went silent for a long while, then eventually confessed: “You’re right,” he said. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.”

“I already told ya. You’re runnin’ like you’ve been runnin’ for your whole damn life.”

“Except I’m running toward something this time,” Jack assured him. “I’m running straight into the thing I’ve been avoiding, so that’s a start, right?”

“A start to what, chief?”

“A solution,” Jack said. “At least I hope it is. If it isn’t, I don’t know what else to do.”

The trucker took on a thoughtful look before offering Jack a knowing nod.

“I suppose that is a start,” he said. “But ya aren’t gonna like what ya find.”

Jack opened his mouth to speak. The trucker cut him off with a smirk.

“Let me guess, that’s a risk yer willin’ t’take, right? People always think they’ve got to be riskin’ something to get to the end of the story. But let me tell ya: it’s your story. The end of the story is gonna get ya whether you want it to er’not. You think you gotta go chase fate? Fate is chasin’ you, chief. But you know that, right? Better than any old body.”

Jack stared, frozen in place.

“I’m sayin’ it don’t matter,” the trucker said. “You want to turn right back around and go home. Ya do that. It ain’t gonna make one bit of a difference. The end is gonna find you no matter which direction ya drive. And if I’m right about what’s chasin’ ya…” He lifted his big shoulders in an almost childlike shrug, his expression shifting toward apologetic. “You ain’t gonna outrun it—at least, not by my experience. I’ve been around for a long time, been sittin’ here watchin’ people roll in and out for my entire life, and I gotta tell ya…” He leaned forward on the stool he occupied, its rusty metal legs whining beneath his weight. “I ain’t never seen anyone, not anyone outrun the Devil.”

Jack’s mouth went acrid, like someone had cracked open a battery and poured the acid onto his tongue. He took a step back, one of his hands drifting to his chest, pressing against his sternum, where his lungs had gone tight and raw.

“What do you know about the Devil?” Jack asked, but his inquiry was nothing more than a dry whisper. He was about to tell the guy that nobody knew more about the Devil than him, but when his eyes snagged on the guy’s face, his heart seized. The giant laughed, and when he threw his head back to chortle toward the stained ceiling, Jack caught a glimpse of needle points glinting inside that gaping mouth.

Jack bolted for the exit, flinging the cracked glass door open so hard it hit the outside of the station and shook. Sprinting across that cracked parking lot, he nearly lost his footing on some loose gravel, the pebbles rolling beneath the soles of his boots like roller skate wheels. Regaining traction, he bounded toward the Olds, all the while hearing that laughter boom behind him—laughter that seemed to be less and less human with each passing second.

After what she’d seen outside, there was no way Aimee would be sleeping anytime soon. But instead of staking out in the living room to make sure nothing came in, she locked herself in the bedroom and pulled the covers up to her chin. The wind was picking up. The walls of the house groaned with each gust. She imagined the roof being peeled off the top of the house like a lid off an aluminum can. That shadow figure was probably lurking out there in the storm, peering through windows, licking panes of glass with its long serpent tongue. After half an hour of lying in bed with her eyes wide open, she rolled over, grabbed the phone off the bedside table, and punched in Jack’s number. There was no answer. Jack was out of range. And even if he had answered, what would she have said: that she was spooked by something she wasn’t sure was real?

“Get a grip,” she muttered, kicking the comforter from her legs, trying to reestablish herself as the owner of her space. Not the whole house: not yet. But at least the master bedroom was hers.

With sleep out the window, the only thing left was productivity. Padding across the room to the closet, she threw open the door and peered at clothes that hung from a badly sagging rod.

“Nothing like a late-night sorting session.”

She plucked an old shirt off a plastic hanger. The hanger spun, hit the top of the closet, and tumbled to the floor. She squatted to sweep the hanger up with a quick pass of her hand, but paused when she spotted an old shoebox on Jack’s side of the closet. It was half-buried under a pile of work jeans, peeking out from behind a pair of spark-scorched boots. In Jack’s haste to leave for Georgia, he’d left the corner of one of his secrets exposed. Aimee tugged the box out of its corner and took it back to bed.

Tipping the dented lid open, she first found a small stack of family photos. She smiled. The topmost was of Jack and the girls standing on top of a levy, the Mississippi glistening behind them like white fire. In the second, Jack pushed Charlie on a tire swing; Charlie’s expression that of sheer joy while Jack laughed behind her. There was one of Jack and his band mates in someone’s basement, and one with Jack and Reagan throwing up devil horns outside the Red Door on Bourbon. At first Aimee was charmed by these old memories, shuffling through the images one by one, laughing at some, shaking her head at others. But the more she studied them the more something unsettling occurred to her: she hadn’t seen these photographs before, which was strange, because she’d taken half of them herself. She frowned, picturing Jack sorting through them in the pharmacy parking lot before bringing them home, stashing certain ones away like a hoarder.

She tossed the photos back into their box and peered at them, knowing that her discovery would end up as an argument. She’d accuse him of keeping secrets; he’d accuse her of invading his privacy. She’d yell that in marriage, privacy doesn’t exist; he’d snap back that maybe they shouldn’t be married at all. And then they’d get bored, the argument would fade, they’d quote each other for a few days with stupid smiles and gentle teasing.

Aimee grabbed the box lid, ready to shove it back beneath Jack’s pile of denim, when something caught her eye. Narrowing her eyes at the photograph on top of the pile, she scrutinized the backdrop behind Jack as he stood in Jackson Square. A greasy bag of sugar-covered beignets in one hand, a fresh fried Louisiana doughnut in the other, his grin of utter indulgence had distracted her the first time around. But what caught her attention now was something hiding behind a tree: a shadow peering out from behind the trunk of an oak, glaring at the photographer while Jack mugged for the camera.

Aimee examined the image for a long while. She was just about ready to dismiss it as a trick of the light, when she flicked down to the next photograph in the pile. There, practically staring her right in the face, she saw the same thing. In the picture of Charlie on the tire swing, the same shadow lurked in the background.

The third photo was harder to spot. Jack and Reagan posed in front of the Red Door beneath a neon glow. Aimee held the photo a few inches from her nose, searching the details of that street scene for what she hoped she wouldn’t find.

But she found it. Half-hidden by a doorframe, it lurked across the street, standing next to a big bearded guy in a John Deere cap.

Her heart hammered against her ribcage. Those photos, they were all of either Charlie or Jack.

Wavy through a sheen of tears, she saw a picture of Charlotte standing in the front yard in her white summer dress, Nubs sitting obediently at her feet. And there, in an otherwise perfect background, the darkness lingered yards away. She shook her head, refusing to believe this was the root of Charlie’s problems, refusing to acknowledge that Jack knew—that he’d known all along. She swiped at her tears and looked back to the photo in her hand, only to drop it and scramble away.

Charlie stood in the front yard in her white summer dress, smiling with razor-sharp teeth, Nubs dead at her feet.