He heard a whimpering gargle that sounded like a cross between a cluck and a growl, maybe a broken meow. The laurels shimmered. Something was moving in there.
'Riley?' he whispered hoarsely.
The gargle.
'Come on out, dickwit,' he said, louder.
He saw a flash of fur, streaked and caked with dirt. He fled down the trail. His boots hardly touched the ground, were afraid to touch the ground, the ground that had been poisoned with blood magic. He thought he heard something following as he crossed into the yard, soft padding footfalls or slitherings in the brush, but his heart was hammering so hard in his ears that he couldn't be sure. He burst into the house and locked the door, then leaned with his back against it until he caught his breath.
Something thudded onto the porch, clattering along the wooden boards. Behind that sharp sound, a rattling like claws or thick toenails, came a dragging wet noise.
Clickety-click, sloosh. Clickety-click, sloosh.
It stopped just outside the door.
Dexter couldn't move.
'What the hell's wrong with you?' Mom stood under the archway leading into the kitchen. Her face was pinched, eyes distended, skin splotched. Greasy blades of hair clung to her forehead.
Dexter gasped, swallowed. 'The-'
She scowled at him, her fists clenched. He knew this had better be good. 'I was just out running.'
'You're going to be the death of me, worrying me like that. Nothing but trouble.' She rubbed her temples. Her smell filled the small room, sweetly pungent like a bushel of decaying fruit. Dexter put his ear to the door. The sounds were gone.
'What are you so pale for? You said you wasn't sick.'
Dexter shrank away from her.
'Now get up off that floor. Lord knows, I got enough work around here already without putting you in three changes of clothes ever goddamned day.'
Dexter slunk past her into the living room.
'Guess I'd better get that laundry in,' Mom said to no one in particular. Her hand gripped the doorknob, and Dexter wanted to shout, scream, slap her away. But of course he couldn't. He could only watch with churning bowels as she opened the door and went outside. Dexter followed her as far as the screen door.
The porch was empty.
Of course it was. Monsters were for movies, or dumb stories. He was acting like a fourth grader. Stuff coming back from the dead? Horseshit, as Dad would say.
Still, he didn't go outside the rest of the evening, even though the sky cleared. Mom was in a better mood after the first six-pack. Dexter watched cartoons, then played video games for a while. He tried not to listen for clickety-sloosh.
One of Mom's boyfriends came over. It was the one with the raggedy mustache, the one who called Dexter 'Little Man.' Mom and the man disappeared into her bedroom, then Dexter heard arguing and glass breaking. The boyfriend left after an hour or so. Mom didn't come back out. Dexter went to bed without supper.
He lay there thinking about magic, about blood sacrifice. About the open graves in the pet cemetery that should have been filled with bones and decaying flesh and mossy fur and shaved whiskers and scales. He tried to erase his memory of the creature in the bushes, the thing that had followed him home. He couldn't sleep, even though he was worn from tension.
His eyes kept traveling to the cold glass between his curtains. The streetlight threw shadows that striped the bed, swaying like live things. He tried to tell himself that it was only the trees getting blown by the wind. Nothing was going to get him, especially not all those animals he'd dismembered. No, those animals had loved him. They would never hurt him.
He'd almost calmed himself when he heard the soft click of paws on the windowsill. It was the sound the cats had made when they wanted to be let in. Dexter's Mom wanted them out of the house, because of the hairballs and the stains they left in the corners. But Dexter always let them in at night to curl on top of the blankets at his feet. At least for a week or so, until he got tired of them.
But he didn't have any cats at the moment. So it couldn't be a cat at the window. Dexter pulled the blankets up to his eyes. Something bumped against the glass, moist and dull, like a nose.
No no no not a nose.
He wrapped the pillow around his ears. The noise was replaced by a rapid thumping against the outside wall. Dexter hunched under the blankets and counted down from a hundred, the way he did when he was six and Dad had first told him about the monsters that lived in the closet.
One hundred (no monsters), ninety-nine (no monsters), ninety-eight (no monsters)…
After three times through, he no longer heard the clickings or thumpings. He fell asleep with the blankets twisted around him.
Dexter awoke not knowing where he was. He sat up quickly and looked out the window. Nothing but sky and Sunday sunshine.
Dad picked him up that afternoon. Dexter had to walk down to the corner to meet him. He kept a close eye on the woods, in case anything stirred in the leaves. He thought he heard a scratching sound, but by then he was close enough to get inside the truck.
Dad looked past Dexter to the house. 'My own goddamned roof,' he muttered under his breath.
'Hi, Dad.'
'I suppose she filled you up with all kinds of horseshit about me.' His hands were clenched into fists around the steering wheel. Dexter knew what those fists could do. There had to be a way out, a way to calm him. Riley's words came to Dexter out of the blue: Gotta tell 'em that you love 'em.
Yeah. Works like magic. He'd seen how that turned out. Got you what you wanted, but somebody had to pay.
'She didn't say nothing.'
'Any men been around?'
'Nobody. Just us. We… I miss you.'
Dad's fists relaxed and he mussed Dexter's hair. 'I miss you, too, boy.'
Dexter wanted to ask when Dad was moving back in, but didn't want him to get angry again. Better not to mention Mom, or home, or anything else.
'What say we go down to the dump? Got me a new Ruger to break in.' Dexter managed a weak smile as Dad pulled the truck away from the curb.
They spent the day at the landfill, Dexter breaking glass bottles and Dad prowling in the trash for salvage, shooting rats when they showed their pointy faces. Dexter felt no joy when the rodents exploded into red rags. Dad was a good shot.
They ate fastfood hamburgers on the way back in. It was almost dark when Dad dropped him off at the end of the street. Dexter hoped none of Mom's boyfriends were around. He opened the door to hop out, then hesitated, remembering the clickety-sloosh. He had managed to forget, to fool himself out under the clear sky, surrounded by filth and rusty metal and busted furniture. In the daytime, all the nightmares had dissolved into vapor.
Dexter looked toward the house with one hand still on the truck door. Dad must have figured he was reluctant to leave, that a son missed his father, and that no goddamned snotty-eyed bitch had a right to keep a father from his own flesh-and-blood. 'It's okay. I'll see you again in a week or so,' Dad said.
Dexter searched desperately for something to say, anything to put off that hundred-foot walk across the dark yard. 'Dad?'
'What?'
'Do you love Mom?'
Dexter could see only Dad's silhouette against the background of distant streetlights. Crickets chirped in the woods. After a long moment, Dad relaxed and sighed. 'Yeah. 'Course I do.'
Dexter looked along the street, at the forest that seemed to creep up to the house's foundation. 'You ever been scared?'
'We're all scared of something or other. Is something bothering you?'
