Page 15
She gripped the kitchen knife tighter and pushed open the door. Her boots crunched gently down the porch steps and onto the snow-covered grass. She turned toward the elaborate holiday display. It looked unnervingly similar to one she’d seen at the hardware store, and she imagined her neighbour picking up the whole triggering arrangement and relocating it here, knowing exactly what it would do to her. Even now, at two in the morning, he persisted in his endless torture.
This was obviously how serial killers eased into their grand plans, tearing down the security of their victims, one blinding light after another, until they were completely defenceless.
But Devra was not defenceless. She was armed.
She took another step forward, and then another. The whir of the motors was loud in the stillness of the night, the glow of the bulbs even harsher, more mocking.
She raised the glistening blade above Frosty’s belly and—
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
Devra jerked back, and the knife fell from her hand. She looked down at it in dismay, as if the object had magically appeared before her. She could barely remember pulling it from the block, walking out here, making this outrageous decision.
“I’d be in my right mind to call the cops.”
She flung her gaze to where he was standing on his front step. A shadowed spectre with the porch light illuminating him from behind. When had that turned on? How had she not seen it? What was she even doing out here?
“I…” she started, unsure where the sentence was going.
“And you accused me of breaking the law?” he said. “Pretty sure destruction of property hosts a much bigger penalty than inadvertent lawn crossing or unwelcome cat petting.”
“I wasn’t going to…” The lie died in her throat. “I couldn’t sleep. The sound. It’s so…so loud. And the lights. They’ve been keeping me awake. It’s two in the morning. I couldn’t sleep. I can’t sleep. I can’t—”
“Hey.”
The man was in front of her now, and she wondered how she’d missed his movements yet again.
“Are you okay?”
Her head thrummed with a headache. Too much coffee and too little sleep. How many cups had she drunk today? Maybe his holiday village wasn’t the only culprit causing her sleeplessness.
“Just try to breathe,” he was saying, the edge of anger in his voice giving way to a hint of concern. “Deep breaths.”
Devra had no choice but to comply. She felt as though she’d been sleepwalking and was now returning to the waking world. She breathed. Then she looked up at this man’s face. Bradley, she recalled suddenly. He’d introduced himself as Bradley, and she’d barely heard him, had only continued to shout at him. She relived their earlier encounters from an outside perspective, hearing how she’d kept repeating herself, refusing to listen. How she’d been spying on him all weekend, attributing his every benign action to some malicious intent with limited supporting evidence. How he’d offered to clean her wound today, and she’d only hissed at him and run away like some rabid animal.
“That’s right. In and out. No harm done, I suppose. At least not yet.”
And now here he was, speaking to her in calming tones, trying to ground her, and being…so incredibly kind.
She burst into tears.
“I’m sorry,” she sobbed. She’d been letting the curse win, letting it drag her down to its level. “I don’t know what I was thinking. This was…” She flapped a hand at the knife on the ground. “This was…”
“A little extreme?” His voice was touched with humour, which was so unexpected she couldn’t help but bark a laugh through her sniffles.
“You have to understand. Bad things happen in December. My family is—”
She hadn’t tried to explain the truth to anyone outside her immediate family since Noah in grad school. Where academic camaraderie had bloomed into a relationship she thought would last awhile. Forever, if she was being honest with her heart. That year, on November 30th, she’d decided to tell him everything. About her family history. The curse that was upon them. But she explained to him that he didn’t need to worry, because she had a plan. They would take a short break, just one month apart, until the curse had swept through her life and done its worst. A temporary breakup. Then they could continue on where they’d left off. A perfectly logical plan to her.
Noah, however, had been entirely freaked out. Not by the curse itself, as Devra had initially feared, but by the fact his girlfriend believed in something so preposterous. He couldn’t grasp the big difference between believing in unseeable supernatural forces and experiencing their effects first-hand, how not believing slowly became more irrational than accepting the facts before her. They fought for weeks, in-person feuds fizzling to passive-aggressive text messages. Until he finally dumped her for real, right on cue for the big day.
She quickly redirected the conversation away from mystical forces. “I just mean a lot of bad things have happened to me around the holidays. And all of your decorations and music bring up some bad memories. Which, I guess, puts me on edge and makes me a little—”
“Extreme?”
“Yeah,” she exhaled, tinged with embarrassment.
How was this man so calm, so mild-mannered in the aftermath of a woman holding a knife to the stomach of a beloved children’s icon in the dead of night?
