the projector on that one image.
“I need to go now,” Scott said, rising from the chair and opening the door, the image of the skeletal LeRoy projected on the back of his coat. He walked out into the hallway.
Passing through the kitchen and into the living room, he headed straight toward the front door, throwing it wide and stepping out into the blowing snow. He bounded down the steps and around the car, hopping into the driver’s side door and shoving the key into the ignition. Bringing the Jeep roaring to life, he glanced back at the house. Harry was standing in the doorway, just staring at him. He dropped the car into drive and headed down the gravel driveway.
VIII
Sunday. November 13th
10 p.m.
Scott stared up at the ceiling in the darkened bedroom, the ceiling fan casting long shadows like arms from the blades. In his mind, he recounted the day’s events starting with the hat he had found in the kitchen. It all seemed surreal, as though he had seen it in a movie. He was distanced from it, somehow. The entire morning was enveloped by some sort of fog, some element that made it all seem as though it had never happened, yet the memories were still there. And they were definitely real.
After he had left Harry’s little house, he had driven straight down through the hills, focused intently on the road ahead, not even glancing to either side of the road for fear of what he might see. Deciding to spend the rest of the day trying to deal with the everyday aspects of real life, the things that he could control, he had stopped by the model home at the front of the development.
There had been a handful of cars parked out front, and he had parked about a half block down the street. He had walked across the street, ascending the front steps of the house and walked right in. He recognized three real estate agents right away, each guiding a couple through the main level. The living room—which had been converted to a sales office, complete with a desk for the agents, and one for the mortgage broker who sat there filling out paperwork with a younger couple, in the center of the room—was nearly shoulder to shoulder with people.
Passing through, he stopped in the kitchen, peering down the stairs in hopes of finding the senior partner in the agency. But, of course, he wasn’t there, most likely vacationing somewhere in the Caribbean or something. His stress level rising through the roof, Scott had decided to try to sell some himself, following the groups around as they were led through the house, pointing out the small details that no one would ever have noticed.
It turns out they had already sold four that morning, so the magic number was down to two. Feeling the smallest bit of relief, he had headed home, settling into the couch to watch the Avalanche take on the Red Wings. The game had gone into double overtime before Yelle had clinched it with a beautiful backhand that slipped past Osgood, right through the Five Hole. It had been incredibly nice, to have lost himself in the game for more than four hours, forgetting, for the most part, about everything that had transpired during the day. But as soon as the goal had hit the net, it had all come flooding back to him, overwhelming him as he sat in the conspicuously silent and empty room.
He walked to the kitchen, pacing back and forth as he stared at the telephone on top of the counter. There was one way to determine for sure whether this whole episode was real, or if it was all just in his head. He had to call Tim Williams’s wife. Surely, if he were, indeed, dead, then they would at least be looking for him.
Everything had just seemed so insane. Was it even possible that he had seen what he thought he saw? He had barely slept a wink over the course of the last week, and he knew that it was all-too-possible that his mind was just playing tricks on him. The old man he had run into out in the woods could just as easily have been some crazed, bordering on lunatic, psycho, but there was definitely a part of him that had been sucked in, mesmerized, by the old man’s story.
Grabbing the phone from the receiver, he stared at the number pad, waiting for the light green glowing numbers to form some sort of pattern in his brain. It had been close to five years since he had called Tim, and he hadn’t actually seen him since the wedding. He had always been far too busy to join the old crew for their Saturday morning golf games, and, truth be told, he wasn’t really a big fan of golf in the first place.
Opening the top drawer beneath the counter, he pulled out a phone book, dropping it onto the table with a loud thud that echoed through the kitchen. Thumbing through the pages, he stopped at the long line of Williams, his index finger tracing down the column of first names until he reached Timothy. There were two of them, but only one that actually lived in the city. Rehearsing the number in his head, he dialed, the phone ringing dully in his ear.
“Hello?” a female voice answered on the other line.
“Hi. This is Scott Ramsey, I was wondering if Tim was around?”
“No,” the voice said, an underriding level of hostility coming through loud and clear.
“Do you know when he might be back?”
“He’s not coming back.”
“Oh… um…”
“Coward just left. He went out for his morning jog, and just never came back. At first, I was really worried. I drove around the neighborhood looking for him, but I couldn’t find him anywhere. It wasn’t until after I called the police that I started looking around in the bedroom. Would you like me to tell you what I found?”
“That’s all right—”
“I found an envelope filled with pictures. Pictures of another woman. There was also a stack of love letters. I only read the first two before I started to feel like a complete idiot.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So do you really think that I care if I ever see him again? I tell you, if I ever see him again, he will rue the day…”
“You don’t think that something might have happened to him?”
“I’m hoping, because of he ever shows his face around here again he’ll wish that it had.”
“Is it possible that—”
“And the least any of you guys could have done was tell me. Don’t you think that I have a right to know if my husband is fucking some little slut?”
“I had no idea. I really haven’t talked to Tim in a long—”
“Well, if you ever do, you tell him that I said I hope he burns in hell.”
She hung up the phone with a crash.
Scott just stared down at the phone in his hand as the dialtone resonated through the kitchen. Maybe it was possible that Tim had just taken off, and everything he had seen that morning had been an illusion, but he knew that he was just grasping at straws. But there was something that was puzzling him even more.
As he lay beneath the swirling ceiling fan, mesmerized by the spinning shadow, he couldn’t help but think about what he had seen at the old man’s house. He was confident that he had understood everything that he had seen, but the question was why. Why had Harry shown him all of that stuff, what bearing did it have on anything at this point? Was the old man trying to say that the devil walked the woods around here?
The thought was ludicrous: the paranoia of the mentally deranged.
Rolling from his back onto his side, he cradled the pillow beneath his right arm. The sudden shift alerted him to the pressure in his bladder. Sighing, he clambered out of the bed and across the plush carpeting that pressed up between his toes. His heavy eyes guided him through the darkness to the open bathroom door.
Dim moonlight filtered in through the window opposite the sink, the lines of light that filed through the horizontal blinds crossing the mirror. Lining up with the toilet, he unsnapped the access hole in his pajama bottoms and stared up at the ceiling as he opened the floodgates. He yawned, his open mouth warping from side to side. Finishing the job, he lowered the lid and flushed, sliding over in front of the sink, his shadow only a black shape in the mirror as it interrupted the lines of light.
Running a thin stream of cold water, he shoved his hands beneath it, rubbing them together. Raising his wet hands, he ran them through his hair, finishing by rubbing his eyes.
He opened his eyes, small particles of water clinging to his long lashes. He glanced into the mirror one last time on his way back to bed.
He froze, his heart leaping into his throat. There was another shadow in the mirror.
The air in his lungs grew stale and he was unable to breathe. Slowly, he turned, his fists clenched at his
