“Uncle Bill?” I repeat. When the dead quiet stays that way, I dial him again.
A faint buzz that I can delude myself into believing might be coming from my own phone. Then his ringtone trills loud and clear, farther into the house.
I find it in the bathroom, face down and vibrating slowly toward the edge of the counter. The locked screen displays notifications of twelve missed texts, four missed calls, and a bunch of Facebook messages. The battery blinks red: 6 percent.
Uncle Bill’s never without his phone. Half the time I see him, he’s on the phone with someone. But Uncle Bill’s not here, and his phone is, and something is definitely wrong. When I catch my own eye in the bathroom mirror, I look wrong too. Lank and sweaty and spooked. At the angle I’m standing, the corner of the mirror catches a sliver of Uncle Bill’s bedroom through the open door.
He keeps a safe under his bed. I only know because he told me, once, with an unusual urgency, that the combination was my birthday. Like it was proof that he cared about me. When I asked why he was telling me, he grumbled something like “Someone should know, in case something happens to me,” and refused to elaborate. Then nothing happened to him, and I mostly forgot about it.
But the safe’s not under his bed now. It’s lying on its side in the middle of the shitty beige carpet, still locked. Did he leave in a hurry, no time to shove it back into its hiding place?
The house is starting to smell like sand and rot, like chaparral baked brittle by heat, like miles of tiny, dazzling grains hiding the ground beneath, cracked open by thirst.
Inside the safe, I find the deeds to the house and to Uncle Bill’s truck, a couple of expired driver’s licenses, a yellowed snippet of aReview-Journalarticle about a woman who died in a hiking accident, and a receipt for a handgun. That’s just like Uncle Bill, to keep the receipt locked up but the gun itself lying around somewhere. Maybe he took it with him, wherever he’s gone. I scrape the contents of the safe out onto the carpet, and a battered Nokia phone I hadn’t seen tumbles out after them. Prepaid, probably ten years old and built like a brick, with a strip of masking tape over the back. Scrawled in black Sharpie over it, in Uncle Bill’s juvenile handwriting, is a note:Emergencies only!!!I jam my thumb into the little on button, but the battery’s dead.
I plug Uncle Bill’s iPhone into the charger next to his bed and shove the Nokia into my pocket as something surprisingly close to a sob rises in my throat. I don’t know where Uncle Bill’s gone, I don’t know why, I don’t know when—if—he’s coming back. And I don’t know what to do.
It’s just the hangover, I promise myself, and the eeriness of the empty house. It’s just because we rely on him, and he keeps letting me down.
Outside, a dog yips and whines. Right. There’s a world outside, sun and road and patients waiting. I’d better get to work.
The dog barks, louder this time. Louder than is reasonable, given I’m inside the house. I breathe in, and the smell of carrion grips me by the throat. Then comes the wind.
Desert winds always sweep through Las Vegas with the changing of the seasons, whipping sand into your eyes and swaying long-haul trucks on Highway 95. But this wind smells wrong, like sun-bleached skulls and withered limbs, like biting into rotting fruit.
I don’t want to find out, but I have to.
Someone’s smashed the window of Uncle Bill’s office. Glass like grains of rice scatters the desk. Beneath it, half-soaked into the tufted carpet, is a spreading pool of liquid about the size of a pair of footprints. From the smell, I know it’s blood, but there’s something wrong with it. Not red and drying, but viscous and oil colored and stinking of decay.
It doesn’t smell like Uncle Bill. I don’t know whether or not to be relieved by that.
A noise like static in my ears. At first I think it’s the computer—who breaks into a house only to leave the computer and the safe?—but then I realize it’s my fear, transmuted into a buzzing plea to be anywhere but here.
When I try to back out of the room, my sneaker meets the computer tower nestled under the desk. The monitor screams to life in a blaze of white light. He doesn’t have a password, so when the screen fades into a perceptible image, it’s his inbox.
The wind spits through the broken window, whipping my hair into my eyes. There’s nothing from the past week in his inbox. The older stuff is all automated bill pay reminders, a few months-old personal emails, and something from an email group calledmap-western-usthat is either blank or won’t load. There’s nothing recent in his sent mail either.
I find something in his drafts.
Hey man, it reads. There’s no subject line, and no address in the “To” field.I couldn’t get you on the phone. I know this sounds crazy, but
That’s as far as he got. But there are notes underneath, things he wanted to say but hadn’t decided on the right words for. The first one reads,Flayed man… what do they call them here?
Has my mom been tormenting Uncle Bill with this flayed man stuff too?
The other notes don’t give me any answers:
Telepathic?? Waking dreams?
MR and RV both 2017, Mt Charleston disappearances (unconfirmed)
The wind picks up even more, scraping cold fingers over my neck as I copy what he’s written into my phone. I’ll search it later, see if it means anything.
“Flayed men are just a story, right?” I asked Uncle Bill once, trying to make it sound like I didn’t care, like I already knew the answer. Like my mom’s threats of calling him didn’t work on me anymore.
He swirled the coffee around in his mug, staring at it like it was the most exciting thing in the world. “Sure, Ellie. They’re just a story. Same way that when politicians make promises, it’s just a story. Or in court, when they’re trying to convince the jury.”
“Okay,” I pressed, “but he’s not really hunting us, is he? He’s not actually real?”
