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“Shouldn’t you call someone?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you—find him?”
The sergeant looked up at her. “He’s there,” he mumbled. “He was really here.”
She didn’t say anything, but the sergeant’s tone was so changed, sounded so like a lost child, that she paused her nervous pacing.
“And you—those kids. Christ.” He shook his head. “Shit. Just, all right.”
As if the images on it had made him physically weak, the sergeant limply placed the camera on the bench beside him. He took out his cell phone and hesitated a moment before dialing.
“Yeah, hey, it’s me,” he said to the phone. His elbow propped on a thigh, he leaned his head heavily into his hand and rubbed his forehead. “I need everybody out here.” The sergeant listened. “Yeah. I know. I know what I said, but.” He breathed deep. Exhaled. “You won’t believe what I’m sitting here looking at. She’s got a goddamn vid—”
Behind the sergeant, the Corner stepped out of the darkened kitchen. A scream froze in her throat at the sight of such an impossibility, the figure of the Corner so massive over the officer he looked like an entirely different species. Indistinct weapon in hand, in a single step he stood beside the sergeant. With no break in his motion, no hint of hesitation, the Corner hit the sergeant once, twice, three times in succession on the crown of his skull,tap-tap-tap.
For a moment, the sergeant stayed upright on the bench, mouth forming a silent O. Then black blood slid thick down his face. The hand that held his phone dropped to his side, loosened, and the phone clattered to the ground, the sound of it hitting the brick floor of the entryway preternaturally loud. The sergeant listed to the right and crumpled onto the bench. His body settled shrunken over the camera, as though something so essential being taken had hollowed him.
She couldn’t move. She was rooted to the spot by terror, unable to understand.
But he’s outside. You’re safe.
The Corner turned to look at her. Immobile, stiff, and conscious only of the hard, icy knot at the small of her back where all her fear-induced sweat had pooled, she watched as his lips pulled back into a smile.
“You,” he snarled. “Don’t you move.”
It was simultaneously a command and a simple statement of fact. Every bit of her felt frozen, any motion completely impossible.
Just like in your dreams. But this is real. How is this real?
Staring at the Corner, at the body and blood of the sergeant, she understood that if either she or the sergeant had watched the full twenty minutes of video recorded as she searched for the camera, they might have seen the Corner sneaking in the background toward the house to lie in wait.
This is your fault. You didn’t think. Think!
The Corner looked down at the sergeant, reaching for the wildlife camera. With a jolt, she understood that this was why he’d revealed himself. Why he’d killed the sergeant instead of waiting for him to leave the house. He had overheard their conversation. He knew the sergeant had seen him. He knew his image was on this camera.
First the sergeant, then the camera, then you. He’s destroying witnesses in order of believability.
Small and empty as the sergeant now appeared, the Corner struggled to pull the device from under his wilted body. The sergeant’s blood had pulsed over the camera, pooled on the bench, was already dripping to the floor. The Corner couldn’t seem to grip the slickened camera. He was shoeless, had come upon them quiet in stocking feet, and blood from the floor soaked bright red into a white cotton toe. He grunted as he shoved the sergeant with one gloved hand, trying to yank the camera from beneath the body with the other.
The sight of the Corner’s awkwardness, his human annoyance, the small hole in his sock next to that reddening toe, the way his pale fingers slid from any grip on the camera, shifted something unidentifiable in the air that made her muscles contract. An ancient part of her brain flooded with the understanding that the Corner was mortal, that prey could escape, that though everything was all at once wrong, it wasn’t over. Her whole broken body tensed, filled with instinctual certainty that only movement could save her now.
She whipped around, unlocked the door behind her, opened it, slammed it closed the same way she had hundreds of times before, and fled into the night.
Her legs were weighed down by injury, by the snow. Her lungs, her muscles, were so exhausted it was as though she were traveling through air turned thick and viscous. All things were flattened ahead as her hurt eyes tried to see in the dark.
Go. Run. Don’t look back.
There’s blood on the track.
She bolted in irregular leaps along the foot-trodden path toward the graveyard and the trail, willing herself to go faster, to break through the pain, the drifts, stop the horrible softness of fear bending her joints in ways unnatural. The choice of direction was unconscious; she was a hunted creature running for the primordial shelter of the woods.
Through thewooshof wind through trees, through the sound of the frozen air scraping in and out of her lungs, she heard a laugh, the mocking voice of the Corner screeching, “Run, run, fast as you can!”
Can’t catch me I’m—
But she knew how that story ended.
Delicious.
Don’t look. Just run.
