She backed up and tugged at his jacket sleeve.
“Let’s go,” she whispered.
# # #
Once they had crossed back over the stream, they were on the safe side according to Jan. Amber slowed and Alan walked alongside her.
“Assuming he’s in a new form, you think that’s where SE Prescott hides?” he asked.
“Don’t you?”
“Something is under that dirt. I don’t know though.”
“We get shovels and the brothers and we come back in the morning,” Amber said. “Ricky is finishing a double tonight, and I think he has tomorrow off. He’s just going to have to stay up and we’ll pull George out of class. We can leave at sunrise and we’ll have to bring stakes and seeds too, just in case.”
“Amber, if that’s him then he has been at this a long, long time. I don’t know how smart these things are, but we have to assume that they’re cunning, at the very least. You don’t stick around that long without some really good survival instincts.”
“As far as we know, nobody has ever really hunted them.”
“You don’t think the townspeople back in the day tried to settle the score. Jan still sounds angry about what happened, and she is three generations removed, at least.”
“So, what, we’re not even going to try?” Amber asked. She stopped and faced him.
“That’s not what I’m saying. I just think that maybe we should do some more research first. We could put a camera on one of those trees. They make these cameras for hunters. You can set them to be motion activated or just take a photo every so many seconds. We could come back tomorrow with one of those and get a first-hand look at what comes out of the ground overnight.”
“You think that’s a better way to get a look than just digging?”
“Not better. Maybe safer.”
“What we should do is get some shovels right now. Who knows—he could come out after dark, smell the fact that we were there today, and move on. We’ll be lucky if we even find anything tomorrow. You want to delay that even more?”
“We can talk about this in the car,” Alan said.
“Fine.”
Twenty-Two: Alan
“Yeah,” Liz said. “That sounds reasonable.”
Alan stood up and paced to the sink and then back to the island of light around the kitchen table. In the distance, he could hear Joe’s video games. Their son wasn’t even trying to hide it. Somewhere along the way, their rules had been rewritten by Joe and they hadn’t sufficiently set him straight. His grades were dropping and he wasn’t engaging with the work anymore. Alan felt like everything was a problem that needed his attention.
“Can you just tell me what you really think?” Alan asked.
“I just did.”
“No, you gave me that passive aggressive nonsense where I’m supposed to come around to your way of thinking without you actually having to disagree aloud.”
“Who are you trying to convince? Me? Or yourself?” she asked.
“Okay,” he said, throwing up his hands. “Okay. Let me work this from a different angle. If you were in my position, dealing with Amber and Ricky who are gung ho to run off and take the most dangerous approach, how would you proceed?”
Liz pushed away from the table a little and leaned back.
“Well… Honestly? I guess I would consider pulling back. I wouldn’t ask them to, but I would allow them to do their high-risk approach without letting myself get dragged into it. You can’t always talk sense into everyone. Sometimes you have to let them succeed or fail on their own.”
Alan sat down in his chair, absorbing the weight of what she was saying.
“That feels so cold.”
Liz nodded. “It is. I’m glad I’m not in that position because it’s a really tough road either way. You can beat yourself against the wall, trying to get them to change their minds, or walk away. Neither one is going to feel good.”
“There’s a third option,” he said.
Liz looked confused.
“The third option,” Alan said again. “I could bite the bullet and go along with their high-risk approach, trying to keep everything as safe as possible.”
She blinked several times. He knew what she was doing. Sometimes Liz was like a computer, systematically walking through all her possible responses, analyzing each one for its ability to deliver her point, and then firing off a reply.
“If you decide that, you know I’ll do whatever I can to help,” she said.
He couldn’t tell if this was intended as earnest or some new guilt trip. Alan decided that he had to believe she was being supportive. He couldn’t deal with her if she wasn’t.
“I’m going to sleep on it,” he said. “They’re planning to leave at sunrise. I’ll get up before then and make my decision.”
Liz nodded.
“Sounds like it will be a restless night either way.”
“True.”
# # #
The second time Liz got up, Alan knew that he was wrecking her sleep. While she was in the bathroom, he put on his robe and slippers and headed for the stairs. Their house had been safe for years. After all the trouble they had after they first moved in, everything had calmed down. The house was still alive in a way that Alan wasn’t comfortable with, but the spirits that inhabited the place all seemed to be on their side at least.
He took a left at the bottom of the stairs and doubled-back towards the kitchen.
It was just before three when he clicked on the light and sat down.
He found that he couldn’t sit at the table. Sitting there just brought back the conversation from the night before. The discussion went back and forth in his head. Each time he felt like he couldn’t really articulate what he wanted to say, and Liz would never really understand.
Alan wandered back towards the living room.
The floor creaked as he made his way to his
