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Make me stay. It’s enough to drive me to madness, Rae, wanting you so fucking badly.
It may have just been a result of the rain, but the woods around my house were getting quieter. No crickets. No birdsong. No deer in the yard in the early mornings. Just the endless patter of rain, and the trees groaning in the wind.
I was probably just being paranoid, but when I’d go out to my car to leave for class, my neck would prickle as if eyes were on me. But no matter how many times I scanned the trees, there was nothing there.
Nothing I could see.
The severed heads Leon had brought were beginning to fall apart, crumbling and rotting as they fell from their stakes and became one with the soil. With them gone, how long would I be safe? How long would the Eld stay away? I bought more cinnamon and rosemary, and found a shop in town that sold bundles of sage. I called my grandma, and of course she was ecstatic to have me over for Fall break. But that was nearly a month away.
I spent hours after sundown staring out the window into the yard, watching. Waiting, my camera in my hands. I’d play back the footage of Leon sleeping, comforted by the sight of his face. I’d recorded it in hopes of sending it to somebody who could help me, but now I felt strangely protective of it. The closest I got to reaching out to anyone was an email to a local pastor, but all I managed was to writeDear Father Pattersonin the body of an email before I deleted it. A priest couldn’t fight monsters.
I wasn’t getting nearly enough sleep. My nightmares were getting worse. The rain just kept pouring, but I was still waiting on the storm.
Something was coming. Something was watching.
The weekend before Halloween, I jumped at the chance to spend a Saturday at Inaya’s apartment, just the two of us. I tucked a bottle of wine in my bag, bundled up in my coziest sweats and hoodie, and was hurriedly trying to lock my door as the rain poured around me when something on the porch railing caught my eye.
Dangling from a length of twine tied around the rail, was an X, formed of twigs and thin white bones tied together. Something round and lumpy was pinned with a needle in the center of the X.
I gave the lumpy thing a poke with my finger, and my stomach curled in revulsion.
It was aneye. A fish’s eyeball, pinned in the center of the twigs and bones.
It dropped from my hands, swinging back and forth on its length of twine as cold dread flooded me. I looked frantically around the yard. Who the hell had left this here? It hadn’t been there the day before, which meant someone had to have come through the night, come into my yard, and tied this hideous thing outside my door. Nauseous, I ran back in the house, grabbed a pair of scissors, and cut the thing loose from the porch. I went to the edge of the trees, and with as much strength as I could muster, I hurled it into the forest.
As I stood there, shaking, I heard a twig snap.
I froze, staring at the kaleidoscope of shrubs and branches. The sound of the rain was like static in my ears, dripping off my hood and pooling in the mud around my feet. Something had moved. Somewhere out there, in the shadows, something was watching.
Too scared to leave him alone, I put Cheesecake in his harness and packed him into the car with me. He’d gone on enough car rides to be calm, and he stared curiously out the window as I drove to Inaya’s apartment. I wanted to keep driving and driving until I was out of this town, this state. I’d keep going until I was back in California, or hell, I’d pack up and join my parents in Spain.
I didn’t understand what it meant, but finding a trinket with a fish eyeball tied to my porch couldn’t possibly be anything good.
“Hey, girl—oh, oh my God, are you okay?” Inaya’s face fell the moment she saw me.
“I’m fine, I’m good, just a little...uh…” I gulped, shaking as I stomped the rain from my boots. “I brought Cheesecake, sorry, I just, uh…”
I was scared. I was so goddamn scared.
“Woah, woah, yeah, you should sit down.” I let Cheesecake hop to the floor and Inaya led me to the couch and got me to sit. For a few minutes, all I could do was take deep breaths to fend off the panic as she rubbed my back. Cheesecake, eager for attention, hopped up next to her and began head-butting her side in hopes of chin scratches.
When I raised my head to see Inaya with one hand rubbing my back and the other petting my cat, I nearly sobbed. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry to come over such a mess.”
“Rae, please, stop apologizing,” Inaya said gently. “You know you could come over here with a body in your trunk and I’d go grab a shovel.” She gave me a little smirk and side-eye. “But I do hope that’s not what’s wrong.”
I giggled, snorting grossly as I wiped tears from my face. “No bodies in the trunk this time, babe. Just some creeps leaving Blair Witch shit in my yard.”
I told her about the trinket, the feeling of being watched, even my trip out to St. Thaddeus and my fears that it may have attracted some attention to me—although I didn’t specify attention fromwhat. She listened quietly, Cheesecake happily curled up on her pink sweatpants as she stroked him. When I finally took a breath after describing the horror of the fish eyeball, she said, “Well, that’s weird as hell. Rae, seriously, you need to stop going to those creepy places alone. What if someone had snatched you? What if you’d gotten hurt? What—”
“Yes, yes, Mom, okay, next time I’ll drag you with me!” We both giggled as she rubbed her face in exasperation.
“Look, we both know how weird people can be around here,” she said. “Honestly, someone probably saw you go to the church and wanted to freak you out. Or maybe Mrs. Kathy thought she was being neighborly.” She rolled her eyes. “Or, if you really think about it, it’sOctober. It was probably someone pulling a Halloween prank.”
“Yeah, you’re...you’re probably right…”
“Stay here a few nights,” she said. “Trent is in San Francisco for the week; we’ll go pack a bag for you tomorrow, and we’ll just hang out. It’ll be good for you to get out of the woods for a while.”
My shoulders sagged with relief. Getting some time away from the cabin was desperately needed. The longer I stayed there, the more trapped I felt: netted in by trees, wrapped up in darkness, the rain and fog making it seem as if I was alone in a gray, wet world.
