The Waiting: A Supernatural Thriller (29 page)

That was enough to kill the urge to try anything physical with Selena. Instead
, he opened the door for her and waited as she stopped by his side.

“Tomorrow?” she asked.

“Tomorrow.”

She leaned in
, and for a second he readied himself either to commit toward her or to pull back. Caught in his indecision, he stayed still as she placed her lips on his cheek and kissed him lightly before stepping back.

“Get home safe,” he said
, a huskiness in his voice.

S
he smiled over her shoulder and walked toward her beached canoe. Evan shut the door and touched the place where she’d kissed him. It burned a little, and he could still feel the softness of her lips there.

Moving back into the kitchen, he clapped his hands together, startling Shaun
, who grinned at him.

“Let’s m
ake some la
scag
na, Shauny!” he said, intentionally mispronouncing the word as his mother had done when he was a child.

Shaun laughed
, and Evan began to cook.

~

He recited the last page of
Goodnight Moon
and glanced at Shaun, whose eyes were closed and mouth was open a crack. He breathed deep, in slow measures that never failed to make Evan feel at ease. Sleeping. He couldn’t get hurt while he was sleeping, couldn’t fall or tip from his chair, couldn’t choke on food.

Or hair.

Evan grimaced. “Night, honey, I love you.”

He kissed Shaun’s scar, feeling the puckered flesh there, soft but ridged where his head had been split open like an egg.
He left the bedroom, not closing the door all the way, and walked to the kitchen, already knowing where he was headed.

The basement
was cool, and for once Evan welcomed it. The air outside the house had taken on a thick and heavy feeling as a single thundercloud approached from the west. Maybe the rain would wash the air clean. Maybe it would wash away the blood outside. The thought slowed him as he was about to sit at the worktable. He could see the poor animal limping, its awkward movements disturbing and strange.

Something clicked in the silence of the basement, startling him. Evan turned toward the sound, toward the clock. He
stepped forward and set his hand against the side of the closest encasement. Maybe the humidity in the air caused its joints to shift.

Maybe it knows you’re close
.

He
shivered and stepped back, focusing on the work he’d done the night before.

The schematics and diagrams had seemed impossibly complex, but the more he looked
, the easier they were to read. After several hours of toiling the night before, he judged that the clock was almost completely back together.

Evan
started working again. Untangling the weight cables had been the most challenging aspect of the repair so far. Someone had yanked and pulled on the cables until they’d become a snarled mess. The timing mechanism itself didn’t look damaged, but the one thing that stood out was an extra rocking switch mounted under the chime hammer. The switch wasn’t listed on any of the diagrams, and when he’d tried to flip it back and forth, it wouldn’t move a bit. All he could gather was that it would need to be flipped after the clock was fully reassembled and wound, which would be soon.

Wound.

The word made him freeze in place as he hung the last of the three brass weights on its cable. He would need to wind the clock, and for that he’d need—

“A key,” he said.

A small sliver of panic lanced through him. He hadn’t seen a winding key on the table, or inside the clock for that matter. Evan finished hanging the weight and sifted through the papers on the table, picking them up and setting them aside with care. After scouring the table, he searched under it. Nothing. He opened the clock door and half crawled inside, running his fingers along the base. He bumped the pendulum with his shoulder while standing, causing the chime to utter a muted bong. It sounded ominous, a single drumbeat in the middle of an uninhabited jungle. Licking his lips, he stepped back and closed the encasement door. His eyes traveled up its length, to the very top, where the two carved points—
horns
—came together.

Evan
grabbed the chair and pulled it close to the encasement, and stood on its seat. The top of the clock was level with a small trim piece that ran its entire edge. Nothing but cobwebs and dust lay on its surface.

“Shit,”
he said, stepping down from the chair.

His gaze
fell on the three holes at the bottom of the clock’s face. Three holes that would accept a single, specially made key, which wasn’t here. A black anger began to flow through him. Even if he put the clock completely back together, he would have no way to make it work without the key.

He raised a fist, sure in that moment that he would smash it through the glass door, pull
out all the work that he’d done in the last two nights. Destroy it, burn it.

Slowly his fist fell to his side
, and tears flowed into his eyes like rain filling cisterns during a storm. Why? He pulled the chair close to the table and dropped onto it. Why? Fate had brought them here, he knew it, for one single purpose: to go back.

“It wasn’t supposed to happen,” he croaked. “We weren’t supposed to get hit, Elle wasn’t supposed to die.
” He ground his teeth together. “We’re supposed to go back and fix it.”

Evan sniffed once and wiped his palms across his eyes, smearing the tears away
, disgusted. He stood and opened the encasement door again, making sure that the long chime rods were securely in place.

It’s ready, and the key has to be here somewhere.

He started by searching every drawer and cabinet in the workbench and found nothing. He pawed through boxes of fabric and knickknacks that lined the opposite wall. He crawled from one end of the basement to the other, his face inches from the cool floor as he tried to spot the shape of a key lying somewhere.

Somewhere.

Evan tramped up the stairs, a sheen of sweat standing out on his face. The palms of his hands were dark with dust and dirt, but he barely noticed the smudges he left on the kitchen counter and drawers as he sifted through their contents. Towels, silverware, pens, pencils, pots, pans—everything went on the floor.

When he finished with the kitchen
, he continued in the living room, pulling the cushions from the couch and looking behind the entertainment center. The front closet held only an old rain slicker and an ancient tackle box. He dumped the tackle out and left everything in a heap on the closet floor, finding nothing.

His room
didn’t take long since there weren’t many places for a key to hide. As he pulled the last drawer in the bedside table open, a growl left his throat, sounding more animal than human.

He banged
the door open and moved to the far end of the house, not pausing before walking straight into the master bedroom. Evan strode to the bed and flipped up the mattress and box spring to look beneath them. He dropped both and went to the closet, pulled the double doors open, grunting upon seeing the empty space.

One place left.

He went to Shaun’s room, his eyes casting back and forth as he walked, thinking that the key could be sitting in plain sight, and had been the entire time they had been there. He pushed through Shaun’s door and slowed, seeing his son’s thin body beneath the blanket, the rise and fall of his chest, a shadow clinging to the opposite side of his head, the side with the scar.

An overwhelming sense of defeat crashed in
to him, and he stumbled with its weight. In slow motion, Evan fell to his knees beside the bed. His head hung down, chin against breastbone. He’d been a tornado until that point, sure that the key must be somewhere within the house. Life couldn’t possibly be that cruel, but it was, he knew it was. And he also knew that—

“It’s not here.” Evan lifted his head
, speaking in a trembling whisper. “It’s not here, honey. I was hoping, really hoping.”

He sniffled
, and Shaun turned a little in the bed, so that he faced Evan more. Evan reached out and stroked his smooth cheek with one finger.

“I wanted to fix it all, buddy, take you back and we could try again.” A small laugh slipped out. “We could be a family again.” A wrenching tightness in his chest squeezed
, and then broke. “But that’s not going to happen, buddy. I’m so sorry, son, so sorry all this happened.”

Evan sobbed into his forearm to stifle the sound. Hot tears streaked down his face
, and he remembered the last time he’d cried this much. It was when Elle had slipped away. She hadn’t been awake for almost a day when it happened. The morphine in her system was blunting most of the pain, the doctor said, but Evan wondered, he really wondered. He remembered how she’d twitched and then moved her legs and arms, so strong before, now just sticks with drying flesh coating them. It was as though she’d already died and was decaying before his eyes.

He remembered her turning toward him. He supposed it was because
of the window; the light had been behind him. She turned and then—

—
opens her eyes. Her beautiful eyes. He stands and clutches the hand she holds out to him, a skeletal thing that grips his palm with no strength. He waits, hovering there beside the god-awful bed, in the god-awful hospital, with the god-awful smell of death. She purses her lips, their surfaces dry and cracked no matter how much water she drinks or how many layers of lip balm they apply.

“Be
...” she begins, and her eyes roll back before returning to focus on his face.

Something is
tearing within him, and he realizes it is her leaving his side after almost a decade of being together. His other half that carried his child. His soul mate.

“It’s
okay, honey, it’s okay,” he says, knowing full well it isn’t. It isn’t okay that she is dying. Nothing will be okay ever again.

Her eyelids flutter
, and she seems to compose herself for the last time on earth.

“Be happy,” she says
, with an effort that looks equivalent to moving mountains.

He bit
es down on the choked moan of grief that wants to spill out, has to spill out, and nods, smoothing the last thin tangles of her hair away from her burning forehead. She rolls further toward him, as if she wants an embrace, and he gives it to her, holds her as he feels the life flow out through a few gasps and tremors. When he finally lets her go, the shoulder of her nightgown is wet with his tears and her eyes are closed.

Evan awoke to the sound of Shaun moving. He sat up, his arm cocked in a funny angle above hi
m. Pins and needles coursed in jigging lines of fire up and down his leg as he unfolded it from beneath him.

“Wawee.”

Shaun’s voice made Evan start, and when he glanced at him, he saw that Shaun’s eyes were still closed. Dreaming. He waited, the feeling returning to his limbs little by little.

“Wawee.”

Shaun spoke the word quieter now, as if falling back into whatever dream that prompted his speech. Evan smiled and touched his hand, holding it for a moment as the tears from his dream dried on his face. Shaun’s eyes shot open, along with his mouth, and Evan thought he might scream. But his face twisted into a semblance of a sneeze and his body snapped tight, his small muscles rigid as he bucked off the bed’s surface.

Seizure
.

“Oh God
, no!” Evan said, leaping to his feet. “Shaun, Shaun, can you hear me, son?”

He
sat on the bed and slipped a hand beneath Shaun’s arched back while leaning over him. His eyes were wide open and staring at the wall, his breath hitching and a strained wheezing sound coming from his mouth.

A million impulses tried to hold sway over Evan as he stood a
nd turned the light on. The floor shifted, and at once he bit down hard on the insides of his cheeks. Blood filled his mouth, and the room came back into focus. He stood over his son, who held the arch of his back like a strange sculpture of pain.

“Oh God, Shaun, no, no, no!” Evan said
, picking him up. It was like trying to cradle a mannequin.

A doll.

Shaun’s normally weak arms lashed out and froze in an unnatural way.

“Okay, okay, okay
.”

He ran to the couch and wrapped Shaun’s convulsing body in the heaviest quilt
he could find and picked him up again, making sure he still heard his ragged breathing. When Evan opened the door, the wind pulled the knob from his hand and slammed the door into the inside wall. Squalls of rain spit at them, as the trees rocked in the wind, caught in the throes of the storm. Evan spun and opened the closet, grabbing the rain jacket from its hanger. After slamming the door behind them, he ran into the roaring weather, clutching his son’s stiff form through the blanket.

He made a makeshift tent out of the slicker
, providing Shaun some cover on the floor of the pontoon. The muscle spasms seemed to be retreating, leaving Shaun to lay flat against the pontoon’s carpet, but his eyes still stared and his chest continued to hitch in a way that made Evan sick to his stomach.