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34
He’s here, he’s here!”
Even in the dark, even through her panic, she saw the hardness of the sergeant’s expression. He wasn’t wearing a mask, and his jaw was so taut with anger she stopped short of where he stood by his cruiser.
“Ma’am. You’ve got to stop all this.”
She looked around frantically.
“Where’s the others?”
He crossed his arms and tipped his head at her.
There’s no backup. He thinks you’re lying. Hysterical.
“I was headed home anyway. Told them I’d stop by. Why don’t we go inside, yeah?”
“But he could be in there. He could have gone inside. When I left, I left out the garage, see?” She gestured wildly at the open garage door visible from where they stood. “That means I left the house unlocked, and when I went to the woods, I didn’t reset the new alarm. I wasn’t thinking, I was—he could be in there!”
You sound crazy. Slow down. Explain.
But she couldn’t slow her tremor, couldn’t choke out a decent explanation. “He was here!” her thickened, desperate voice said. “You can see—look, look!” She shakily pressed the camera on the sergeant.
He stepped away from the camera like it was a thing diseased. “What is this?”
“I got him. I got him on camera.”
The sergeant took the device in his hands. Turned it over. The screen lit up, and she watched him fiddle with the buttons.
“Use the arrows. Click past me. Click past the deer. You’ll see.”
He stared down at the camera as she twisted around, eyes searching the darkness for the Corner. It was useless. The lights of the house cast her and the sergeant in a yellow circle that blinded her to anything outside it.
Wild things are invisible as they circle the people around a campfire.
The clench of the sergeant’s jawline loosened. He looked up at her, then clicked again, watching. Clicked a third time, then raised his head slowly, eyes connecting with hers.
“I think we’d better go inside,” he said.
“B-but—he could be in there! Don’t you get it? I left the garage door open.”
The sergeant didn’t say anything, just turned and walked into the garage.
She didn’t follow, trapped by fear in the liminal space between her home and the woods. “He could be in there,” she called out.
The sergeant paused and turned to face her. He pointed to the camera, said calmly, “You saw the video, right? Looks from this like whoever was here is still outside. Camera would’ve caught him going back into the house.”
Her mindflick, flick, flickedthrough the videos. The last sign of the Corner was him vanishing behind the pine as she pulled in the driveway at 4:00 p.m. Instinctively she looked in the direction of the tree, but only its swaying top was visible against the night sky. She knew she wasn’t thinking logically, jittery with terror and cold.
Are you missing something? It feels like you’re forgetting something. But thesergeant has to be right. He has to be thinking more clearly than you are. The Corner’s outside, and that’s where the danger is. Outside!
The darkness immediately seemed more threatening, the lights and warmth of the house like safety. She followed the sergeant inside, hit the button to close the garage door. She locked the entry door to the garage behind her and hurried to peer through the window by the garden door, reminding herself of the neighbors searching the night for any sign of the Corner. She couldn’t make herself sit down. Nervous energy, adrenaline, forced her to shake out her hands, to pace tightly but erratically back and forth in front of the door, checking that the doors were locked, that the alarm was activated, glancing again and again into the night.
The sergeant sat down on the small bench in the entry nearer to the kitchen, oblivious to her agitated pacing fifteen feet away from him. He stared down at the little screen, wide thumb gentle over the buttons. He sagged into himself as he scrolled, didn’t look up as she tried to explain, babbling at him from the opposite side of the entry.
“I remembered the camera, in the woods. To see the deer? The animals? My husband put it up. Last year? For the kids. I’d forgotten. Then I saw him. On the video? So I called the police. You see the time stamp? He was there, waiting, hiding behind the tree. I think—I think he has to be close now. Behind the tree? Or in the woods? He could be anywhere. I don’t know. I don’t know where he is.”
“Okay,” the sergeant said softly, eyes still fixed on the screen. “All right.” His face was drawn, growing older as he accepted what he was seeing.
