The writhing, p.1
The Writhing, page 1
THE WRITHING
ABE MOSS
Copyright © 2019 by Abe Moss. All Rights Reserved.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Cover designed by germancreative from fiverr.com
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Visit my website at www.abemoss.com
Printed in the United States of America
First Printing: 2019
ISBN-9781797047027
CONTENTS
Prologue
Part I
Chapter ONE
Chapter TWO
Chapter THREE
Chapter FOUR
Chapter FIVE
Chapter SIX
Chapter SEVEN
Chapter EIGHT
Chapter NINE
Chapter TEN
Part II
Chapter ELEVEN
Chapter TWELVE
Chapter THIRTEEN
Chapter FOURTEEN
Chapter FIFTEEN
Chapter SIXTEEN
Chapter SEVENTEEN
Chapter EIGHTEEN
Chapter NINETEEN
Chapter TWENTY
Chapter TWENTY-ONE
Chapter TWENTY-TWO
Part III
Chapter TWENTY-THREE
Chapter TWENTY-FOUR
Chapter TWENTY-FIVE
Chapter TWENTY-SIX
Epilogue
To my mom, Patty. Thank you for always believing in my abilities and encouraging me to hone and follow them. Love you.
Prologue
Come home, Alex.”
Standing barefoot on the side of the dark road, she rubbed stinging sweat from her eyes. The car’s headlights were bright, harsh, like two sun-glared coins. She stood shielding her face from the light and their gazes, listening to the idling engine, the breeze through the woods at her back, the leaves rustling like paper wings.
“Where are you going, anyway?” one of the men asked. There were two—one in the passenger seat and the other standing just outside the driver’s, speaking over the open door. “What’d you run all this way for? You worried us.”
Alex remained silent. There were too many questions of her own to choose from, and she didn’t even know if she had the answers to his.
After nearly a minute of waiting, the man said, “Why don’t you just come home? Your mom’s worried sick.”
“She’s not my mom,” Alex said, and dropped her hand and stared into the blinding light. “And this isn’t my home.”
The man bent his head, peered in at his partner in the passenger seat, and they both shook their heads as if to share their confusion.
“What’s this about?” he asked. “Why’d you run?”
It’d all been so disorienting, she wasn’t sure anymore. It was an impulse, she supposed, an instinct. Was fear a good enough excuse?
“Who was that boy?” she finally asked. “I saw you dragging him out of that car. He was screaming like… like…”
Standing like a black cardboard cutout in the dark, the man said, “He’s a troubled kid we’re trying to help, is all. Is that why you ran?”
“But who is he?”
The man shifted his weight from one leg to the other, and peered around at the woods, down the lonely road.
“He’s nobody important to you. Just a kid who needs help.”
“Is he like me, then? Like I was?”
Alex could make out the tiniest movement of the man’s shadow in the dark as he shrugged and nodded. “You could say that, yeah.”
They stood a while longer. A standoff of sorts. Alex couldn’t decide what it was she wanted from them, but going back gave her an uneasy feeling, a cold twisting in her gut, like nothing good would ever come of it.
“You can ask Helen all the questions you want when we get back. I know she’d be glad to know you’re safe, and not out here alone.”
Helen doesn’t give a shit about me, Alex thought. She was now beginning to understand after six years. She still didn’t really know the woman. Not deeply, or personally. She often seemed one way to her, and then entirely different in an instant. Tonight, Alex witnessed a side of her she never expected. Vicious. Ruthless. To put it plainly, Helen was… unpredictable.
“Will you let us take you home?”
She could always keep running, she thought. But again, she didn’t know what she was running from, or better yet where she was running to. The road on which they stood, lit under a midnight moon, only ran two ways—like most roads—and only one direction’s destination was certain.
She sighed, defeated, and went to the car. The man opened the back door for her and she got in, that terrible doubt alive and writhing inside her. It was done, she thought. She’d chosen this fate. It was a longer fuse in place of a shorter one, which would ultimately achieve the same result in the end. She would go back to them. To Helen. To Amberton.
She smiled at the thought… as if she had anywhere else to be.
Part I
The Woman and Her Ghost
Chapter ONE
Loneliness
Lucy froze. Her husband was making his way down the hallway. She raised a hand to him. He came to a stop and his eyes flickered between her and the front door.
“What is it?” he whispered.
She straightened her arm out again, emphasizing the flat of her palm. Wait.
Another knock on the door. Aaron didn’t seem to understand why she wasn’t answering it, but he obeyed anyhow.
After another moment he whispered, “Why aren’t you answering the door?”
She mouthed one word, enunciating it silently with perfect clarity: Brenda.
Aaron shrugged and continued toward the kitchen.
“Hey,” she whispered after him. He turned and she jabbed a finger toward the floor, her eyes bulging. “Feet!”
He stopped, hands raised by his head, and mouthed: Okay.
After it was safe to assume she’d left, Lucy tiptoed to the door and peered through the tiny peephole, spotting the back of a green, hand-woven sweater in the dark making its way down the front porch and over the lawn. Lucy turned, back against the door, and sighed, her shoulders sinking dramatically with relief.
“That was mean,” Aaron told her, grinning smugly as he entered the kitchen and made his way to the refrigerator.
“Oh, don’t even. You’d be doing the same if you were me. She’s crazy.”
“She isn’t crazy.”
“But she is. You know what she does.”
“The stuff she does isn’t crazy,” he said. “It’s more… desperate.”
She followed him into the kitchen, staring skeptically at the back of his head.
“Desperate? Maybe. She thinks we’re best friends. A delusion. Delusions are crazy.”
He poked his head in the fridge. “What do you mean she thinks you’re best friends? Maybe you’re the only… or the closest thing to a friend she’s got.”
She paused, unable to refute the possibility. That she might be an asshole occurred to her, too, but that didn’t matter. “Why can’t she find literally anyone else?”
“I’m no psychologist…” Aaron said, pulling his head out with half a turkey breast in his hand. He took a big bite. “…but…I would think someone in her position would have a hard time meeting anyone new. Her husband died for crying out loud, you know? And she’s known you for a bit, you see each other every day, in passing…”
He stood by the sink and took another bite of his sandwich, and Lucy stood quietly behind him, arms folded. She wanted to say something, anything, to make herself feel better, like she wasn’t a horrible person for ignoring the poor, lonely, bereaved woman. But nothing came to mind so she continued standing there, angry at her husband for putting such contradictory ideas into her head.
“You’re right,” she told him. “You’re not a psychologist.”
He laughed. “I bet I’d make a great best friend.”
“Have at it. Look at what happened to the last guy.”
“There you go being mean again.”
“What do you want from me? He died almost two years ago! We barely knew her when it happened, and I still felt bad when she told me. I mean, you haven’t been in there. Her upstairs… it’s all sorts of sad. I know people mourn and junk, but she was… I don’t even know what to call it, but she had a fucking shrine for the guy. I mean, not exactly a shrine, but she had an entire bedroom just full of all his junk. After two years?”
“That’s what some people do when they mourn. Why would she just up and get rid of everything? Two years isn’t that long.”
“That’s not the point.” She hunched her shoulders, arms hugged around her middle. “I felt bad for her and thought I’d give her some company once or twice. I didn’t expect it to be a regular thing. And I even had a good time at first, until she started watching for me to come home, or even leave. I’ve told you all this before.”
“Yes, you did tell me—”
“She would wait for me to pull out of the garage. ‘Oh you goin’ to the store? Mind if I come along?’ She ran behind my car. I couldn’t take it after a while.”
“You’re a saint to have put up with a crazy, bereaved woman for so long. What was it, like a month?”
Lucy shot a nasty glare his way, only to be disappointed to see he was making his way down the hallway to the bedroom.
Why did he always have to pretend to be the good guy, she wondered?
✽ ✽ ✽
It was cool out. Crickets chattered to her right, down in the bushes on the side of the porch. She knocked again, knowing full well she had seen their car pull in only seconds ago. She didn’t know for sure whether it was Lucy or her husband.
She waited a moment longer before she heard the faint tapping of shoes on the floor inside. Someone was indeed there. They were hiding.
She turned back, faced the inky black sky. Full of defeat, she stepped down from the porch and made her way over the sprinkler-dewed lawn, flip-flops flapping.
Why do I do this to myself? she thought. Lucy Frampton wasn’t a nice person. So why did she want her company so badly? The more she thought about it, the more she thought she didn’t even like her. She was possibly even starting to hate her. Hiding from her like that—like an uppity snob, Brenda thought as she crossed the street—she almost thought it would feel good to slap her around a little, show her she’s not the queen she thinks she is.
As she approached her own home just across the street, the sounds of the crickets died, and even the sound of stirring evening air dissipated. She came to the door, reached for the knob. She imagined a hand on the other side, feeling the knob with dirt-coated fingers, the skin peeled back from the fingernails, the flesh eaten away to reveal thick sinewy strands flexing back and forth.
But that was impossible. The dead stayed dead. Only crazy people believed otherwise, and Brenda was definitely not crazy. Lonely, yes. But crazy? No.
She opened the door. It cried shrilly. She stepped inside. She was alone. No animated corpses here.
She walked down the narrow entrance hall, checking each dark doorway as she passed, and then continued up the stairs to the upstairs hallway. Her bedroom waited at the hallway’s end, opposite the guest bedroom whose door stood ajar, a dim blue light flashing from its gap.
Of course, she thought.
She stepped into her quiet bedroom, turned around, checked the hallway once more, shut the door behind her, and fastened the lock. She sighed.
From out in the hall came the creak of an opening door. She waited. She didn’t know if she actually heard footsteps or just imagined them, anticipating them. It was so quiet, even the silence seemed to hum. A silence that could drive a person mad…
A knock on the door. The knob rattled.
“No, this is my private time,” Brenda said. She rolled her eyes as if she’d known it all along and turned to her closet. She flung the door open, the fists still tapping in the hall.
She pulled a large, silky, lavender nightgown from its hanger, held it up. It fit right, but she couldn’t help but look at it disappointedly. She was a larger woman. Stout. Sometimes she wished to change that, but then she always thought, for whom?
She folded the gown over her arm and walked into the adjoined bathroom. She got the shower going, and while she waited for the water to warm she looked in the mirror.
What’s happened to my face? she wondered. She was only in her mid-forties, but she looked so much older. Her mouth was sad, the corners drooped and tired. Stress and tragedy had aged her, she thought.
She undressed and stepped into the shower. Chills covered her shoulders and the backs of her legs at the water’s touch. For a moment, she smiled. She felt her face, ran her hands through her thinning brown hair.
“Lucy…” she muttered.
She both envied and despised her. Not only did she have a perfect life, a perfect husband, a perfect, beautiful body, but she had to be a skunk, too. And Brenda hated skunks. Too good for Brenda. Try to be a nice neighbor, a good friend, and what does it get you? Nothing. Shunned. Because they were happily married, that made them better than her? They probably laughed while she waited on the porch. Now they were probably making love. Enjoying each other’s bodies, possibly creating their own equally mean-spirited spawn. Why should such nasty people have the best in life?
Although she was standing under a hot torrent of water, she felt a cold pressure against her back. She turned quickly, almost slipped but braced herself against the shower wall, and saw that nobody was there.
She ripped the shower curtain open, expecting to see the face of a dead man staring back. There was no one of course. She threw a towel around herself, stomped into her bedroom, and saw that her door was closed and locked just as she’d left it.
Her bedroom window was cracked. Maybe it’d been a breeze…
She finished up in the bathroom, slipped into her nightgown, and returned to her bedroom door. She didn’t want to do it, but she didn’t want the television on all night either. It would upset him, but she could live with that. She grinned. She could live with that.
She unlocked her door and stepped into the hall. The guest bedroom, previously ajar, was now fully open. The television was still on.
She approached the door and stopped. This was where she kept all his things, everything that stirred memories of him, stored in boxes, on shelves, in desk drawers, and stuffed into suitcases.
Like the pillow he’d once tried to smother her with. She didn’t like to remember these things. She often asked herself why she didn’t just throw the items away, trash them and forget them. She didn’t know.
The golf set was the worst. He’d adored it more than anything. More than her, which wasn’t saying much. When he wasn’t ridiculing her, or accusing her of something outlandish, he was golfing. By himself, of course. Much like Brenda now, he didn’t have friends. But the clubs she remembered most. It was the closest he’d ever come to killing her.
One afternoon, Brenda was standing at the kitchen sink, staring at the mountains in the distance. A great storm was moving in. The thunder and the wind pleased her, watching the trees shimmy and bob.
She was washing the dishes but her mind was elsewhere. She stood frozen at the window, plate in hand, smelling the citrus of the dish soap, gazing dreamily into the afternoon gloom. Only her eyes moved, darting from one flash to the next.
“The hell you staring at?”
Startled, she dropped the soap-slicked plate into the sink where it broke. Dazed, she looked down at the blue shards of glass.
She turned around and said, “You startled me… Back from the river already?”
“Yeah,” he said, eyeing the sink. “Too stormy.”
She hesitated and followed his gaze to the broken plate. She cleared her throat. “That’s a shame. You love the river…”
He smiled. He was aware of her attempt to distract him from the mess she’d made.
“Yeah, I do.”
She could see each and every tooth into the back of his grinning mouth now. She returned a trembling smile. He bent his head to get a better look at the broken dishware and Brenda shifted her weight to place herself further in his view.
“You break another plate?”
He nudged her aside to look for himself. He bit his lip and Brenda caught sight of his white-knuckled fists. He turned to her, his face reddening. Only it wasn’t anger that made his cheeks hot. He was giving himself a reason.
“Let’s check what plates we have left…”
Brenda didn’t hear him. She was too entranced by the bulging vein in his forehead. He opened the cupboard.
“Ah, we have one matching plate left!”
Brenda followed him with her eyes across the kitchen, where he set the plate on the counter. His eyes wrinkled into slits. From the plate to her face, then back to the plate, his eyes targeted the two.
“It’s only… a plate,” Brenda said.
“You know I hate setting the table with mismatched dishware.”
Brenda didn’t move. Her arms were glued at her sides, and she suddenly became aware of how terrified she must appear.
“You stay there.”
He turned and left the kitchen. Brenda shuddered. She knew it was far from over, but if she could keep silent and let him have his tantrum, maybe he’d get bored and leave her alone.
