“Dad?”
“Hm?”
I looked up at him from the stiffened hand I was massaging. The body had been dead long enough for rigor mortis to make it heavy and rigid. Dad massaged the other arm, the pair of us working to cut the embalming time in half.
“What happens…” I chewed the inside of my cheek, choosing my words carefully. “What happens to people who die, but they weren’t supposed to.”
My dad glanced at me, brows low over his eyes with confusion.
“It’s kind of hard to die by mistake, honey,” he said. “Barring acts of God or some serious foolishness.”
“Yeah, no. What I mean is… bodies that aren’t supposed to be dead. Like a person who accidentally dies during a hiking accident. What happens to their body?”
“I suppose a rescue mission would follow,” he mumbled.
“Okay, but after that,” I said, my irritation jerking the arm hard enough to move the body on the gurney. I couldn’t hurt the guy any more but the body was being prepared for viewing. Decomposition already did a number on the human body, I didn’t need to damage it even further with posthumous bruising or denting.
“Then his body would end up at a morgue. Police would get involved. Identification—”
“No, okay, how about this,” I said, changing tack, my nostrils flaring with frustration trying to figure out how to ask what I want to without actually saying the words that would draw too much suspicion. “Let’s say there’s this… gang.”
Like that.
No taking it back now.
“Okay,” he said, drawing out the word, his focus on the task at hand intensifying, betraying the guilt he tried to hide from me.
“And this gang, they kill someone in a bad drug deal or something. Whatever. Someone is killed who isn’t supposed to be killed.”
“That’s what kill means, Emily,” he said, his tone accommodating, but growing weary. Trying to put an end to the conversation.
“Okay, okay. So he’s dead and they don’t want anyone to find out. What happens to that body?” I asked, blinking expectantly. I was trying to get him to pick up what I was putting down and either I was doing a bad job or he was too literal for his own good.
He sighed, moving to the body’s leg.
“I don’t make it a habit to kill people but if I did, I suppose I’d get rid of the body.”
“Yeah, so how would that happen?” I asked. Not through a small, unassuming, family-run mortuary, would it? Where the owner was paid off for committing what was probably considered a very serious crime, would it?
He huffed another heavy sigh.
“Have you been watching crime shows or something? Where is this coming from?”
My mouth went dry.
The only thing I’d been doing in my free time was reading Tessa’s books. I was halfway through the second and worried that I only had one left. They were dark, but the words in those books weren’t to blame for my line of thought right now, he was.
“I don’t know, I was just thinking maybe like the mafia or killers or whoever sometimes use the police and other institutions to cover up their crime,” I said, staring at him to gauge his reaction. He deftly worked the rigor mortis out of the body’s left leg, not even glancing up at me.
So, nothing.
No guilt? No discomfort? He felt nothing?
This was so much worse than I thought.
“Of course, that happens. Corruption is everywhere,” he said. I came to join him working on the other leg, sliding my gloved fingers over the stiffened skin.
Swallowing, I pressed on, needing something from him. Something more than surface level guilt. Maybe whoever was here was forcing him to get rid of the bodies. Maybe they said they’d kill him if he didn’t do it. Or something even worse than that.
But if that were true, he’d be showing guilt, right? He wouldn’t be getting annoyed with my questions, he’d be trying to deflect, or maybe he’d admit it outright. Start sobbing over the corpse between us. Tell me he didn’t know what to do.
But he wasn’t doing any of those things.
“Have you seen anything like that?” I blurted before I could take it back.
He lowered the leg to the gurney, fixing me with an exhausted gaze that made my stomach clench, worried that he’d see the truth in my eyes.
“Let’s focus on this body and talk later, okay?”
Later never came.
Embalming took most of the afternoon and I took care of cosmetics before we closed for the day.
I guessed I wasn’t really expecting him to admit anything or incriminate himself. What I wanted, needed, was confirmation that these things weren’t impossible.
Even having seen what I’d seen, I felt like my grip on reality was unraveling little by little every day. Did I really see what I thought I did?
Was that truly what was happening or did I just misinterpret it?
I wanted Dad to look guilty. Scared. To show signs of discomfort when I started asking questions. Anything that said he wasn’t a willing accomplice. But he didn’t even flinch. If it was true and he explained himself, maybe I’d understand. I’d at least try to but right now, if I was right, I didn’t know who that man was anymore. He wasn’t the father I looked up to and tried to impress all my life.
He was… a criminal.
An uncharacteristically cold breeze blew down from the road as I walked back to my cabin. I hugged my arms tight around myself. A hot shower before bed was exactly what I needed.
I didn’t want to see or talk to anyone to do anything. I just needed to escape into the blissful release of sleep. Maybe I’d finish that book tonight. Throwing a glance over my shoulder at the mortuary, its darkened upper windows and the chimney from the incinerator sent a shiver up my spine.
Ghosts and vampires and ghouls weren’t real. My parents made sure I never believed any of that crap. They taught me death wasn’t something to be afraid of. Everyone died. That was a simple part.
How people died was where it got complicated. Some people died because they were old, some because they were sick, others in horrible–but mostly preventable–accidents.
And then there were others still—those who died because someone wanted them to. I heard the swish of the trees in the wind, and the distant high-pitched chirping of bats. Climbing up the patio to my door, I unlocked it quickly and let myself inside, accidentally slamming it in my haste, throwing the latch to lock it shut.
I fired up the stove to heat the chilly cabin and went to the kitchen for something to drink, stopping dead in my tracks.
The chest that used to be in the main house gaped at me with an open drawer from where it sat next to my couch.
My chest tightened as I approached it.
It’d belonged to my mom. Three drawers with ornate, gold-plated handles. An antique. I didn’t know where she got it but when she died, I knew I wanted it.
I didn’t keep anything of value inside it. Just chargers, change, random Allen keys and bolts left over after assembling Ikea furniture. I didn’t have to open it often which meant I never left it open by mistake.
The second drawer’s edges protruded from the drawer’s straight face, like it, too, had been opened, then pushed closed but not all the way.
Cold seeped into my gut and spread in tendrils out to my limbs, making my teeth chatter. My feet carried me to the drawers and I pulled them open one by one, expecting the worst.
Except everything was exactly the same. Just as I left it. But…
I didn’t open it.
I chewed the side of my lip, doubtful. Unless I did by accident? The cold deepened, it burrowed into my lungs, making it hard to breathe. If it wasn’t me, then who? Tessa?
No, I would’ve noticed it open sooner if it’d been her.
I whipped my head over my shoulder, fully expecting to see someone standing there. A ghoul. A ghost. Whatever terrifying apparition haunted me.
I swallowed. Ghosts didn’t exist.
Plucking up my courage with a mental kick, I straightened back to my full height, checking the rest of the cabin to set my mind at ease.
I scanned the kitchen. Running a palm over the top of my refrigerator, two plate burner, and counter space, nothing seemed out of place. No open drawers. Nothing where it shouldn’t have been.
Two forks stood upright in the drying rack. I doubted whether I’d seen them that morning and gave myself another mental boot for my mounting paranoia.
I went up to check my bedroom, anxiety fluttering in my ribcage like a trapped sparrow.
Finding something out of place there would be somehow far worse than in the living room.
This was my space. Where I slept, where I was at my most vulnerable. I winced as I peered inside, saying a silent prayer to whatever gods would hear me that nothing would be out of place.
Or more accurately, that my tired paranoid mind wouldn’t see something that wasn’t really there. I’d never had an issue living out here alone at the edge of the property and I didn’t want to start out.
This cabin was my home. My haven. And I’d be damned if I was going to let that be ruined by one tattooed man in a suit and an unidentified body on a slab.
The bed was made, the same way I left it that morning. The nightstands looked undisturbed. The latest book I was reading lay on my pillow where I left it too. Squinting, the memories of my day blurred with fiction and possibility. Did I take the book out into the main cabin with me? I was pretty sure I read it while I had coffee that morning.
No.
Wait, that was wrong.
I was texting Tessa in the morning, so I wouldn’t have been reading.
An unsettling tremor ran through the air and the cabin. I sighed, suddenly hyper-aware of my breath, my movements, everything around me. The uncanny feeling that there were eyes on me returned and my brows drew.
“Not now,” I whined to myself in the dim, biting my lip.
It’d been happening more and more lately. Sometimes I’d be here, completely comfortable, and then suddenly, the hair on my neck would stand up. The air felt different. The cabin’s walls like barricades keeping something out instead of holding me in their warm embrace. I felt naked.
Watched, but with no watcher I could see.
Who the hell are you?
A ghost.
I shook, insecure in my own fucking house. I was not having it.
Fuck this.
I went down the stairs, straight to the kitchen. Sliding a drawer open, I pulled out the longest knife that I had. It needed a good sharpening but it’d do the trick if I needed it to.
I opened the door and carefully locked it behind me. Pausing, I made sure I remembered this moment so I couldn’t gaslight myself into thinking I didn’t do it later.
The shapes and shadows of the night felt loud and obtrusive as if seeing and hearing them for the first time. I checked both sides of the cabin from the patio platform, seeing nothing.
I tightened my fist around my knife, carefully stepping down off the patio, feeling ridiculous but not enough to stop me.
The forest’s tall black trees loomed above with branches like reaching claws, swaying in the wind.
I squinted to see into the abyss of the thick wood. Dark and impenetrable enough to hide anything that I tried to find.
Tugging my phone from my pocket, I thumbed the screen, turning on the flashlight as I thudded down the porch steps and crouched down, shining my flashlight under the cabin. Built on a slight incline, a stone platform supported the front, keeping the floors inside more or less level.
Nothing but cobwebs to be found underneath.
Rising, I spun in a slow circle, looking for the glow of eyes in the brush or the trees. It would almost be relieving to find them. Little red beady eyes. Even reflective ones. Fuck, I’d take a wolf or a feral racoon over the haunting danger my imagination kept churning.
I clenched against a chill, trying not to shiver.
Outside surrounded by open space, I felt like there was nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.
Going around the back of the cabin, I gripped the dull kitchen knife tighter in my sweaty fist.
Over the sound of my drumming pulse, I hurried across the back of the cabin, eyes sweeping left and right, until I wound up back at the base of the porch steps.
Nothing. I didn’t see anything out there or around the cabin.
My stomach twisted as I watched the calmly swaying trees, heard the soft sounds of the forest at night. Like it was mocking me.
I almost wanted a monster to burst out of the trees. Something, anything that told me I wasn’t crazy.
Something was out there. I could feel its eyes on me.
“What do you want?” I howled into the dark, my voice cracking with the sudden surge in volume. My breaths came heavier, faster.
“I know you’re out there!”
A gust of wind kicked up, lifting my hair from my shoulders, but other than its soothing whisper, there was nothing but a deep, calm evening staring back at me from the porch.
My body sagged and I dragged my paranoid ass back inside, slamming the door behind me. I locked it, stalking back to the kitchen.
I barely managed to sit still for a second before the quiet started to feel too oppressing. Like it could crush me if I let it.
With shaky fingers, I tapped my phone, needing to hear another voice.
“Hey girl, what’s up?” Tessa asked as she answered the call and I swayed with relief, stumbling to the sofa.
“Hey, can you talk?”
“Uh yeah, is something wrong?”
My hand tightened around the phone.
You’re being paranoid. You’re being paranoid. You’re being paranoid.
“Someone is stalking me.”
And now your BFF is going to think you’re insane.
“I’m sorry?”
“Today, I came to the cabin—”
“Try some lead-up before dropping something like that on me first, god.”
I sighed, feeling my rattling bones settle back into place, Tessa’s attitude giving me some much needed grounding. Taking a breath, I started at the beginning, telling her about the first night I thought there was someone out there. I kept going, telling her about the drawer and how I was certain it wasn’t me.
I couldn’t risk telling her about the man I saw in the basement of the mortuary, or the cash or gun or doctored envelopes in Dad’s office. I wouldn’t implicate her. Couldn’t make her an accomplice to whatever the hell was going on in there after midnight.
“Have you seen footprints? Heard noises?”
“No. Nothing. I just know… it’s like a feeling,” I said, realizing how pathetic I sounded but unable to give her any more to go on. I just needed someone to know. I needed her to tell me I wasn’t crazy. I needed her to have an explanation for Dad, for the police, if I suddenly vanished in the night.
“Right. Well, babe, it’s like I’ve said since the start. That kind of shit is bound to happen when you agree to live on the same property as a fucking dead-people closet in a tiny ass run down cabin right next to the woods. I mean, you’re lucky I even visit. Your place gives me the creeps.”
“I’ve lived here all my life,” I deadpanned. “This just started happening.”
“Okay…”
I waited. This was the part when she told me I wasn’t crazy. The silence continued, then it kept going.
Then it went on some more.
“Oh my god. You don’t believe me,” I put my forehead in my free hand, sighing down the line.
Of course, she didn’t.
“I’m sorry. It just sounds so out there. I’m not saying you don’t deserve a stalker. I mean you’re great, you got that whole Snow White thing going on, minus the dwarves, but this came out of nowhere. You don’t see anyone but me. You don’t go out places, meet anyone. No one would have a reason to stalk you because no one even knows you’re out there, babe.”
There was the brutal honesty I didn’t ask for. Why did she have to call me out like that.
I gritted my teeth, sitting back to sag into the over softened sofa cushions.
“I called to order a little sympathy,” I groused. “Not a steaming pile of brutal honesty with a side of bitch-you’re-paranoid.”
“No, don’t be like that. You just need to get out of that stupid place for a hot minute.”
I kicked the ground, pursing my lips. “Uh-huh.”
“I can get you to Portland on a work trip with me if I ask now. The author requested two assistants but we couldn’t find a second on short notice.”
Portland wasn’t really Hawaii, and it wasn’t a vacation, but it was something. It would get me out of here.
Was I really considering this?
I never left.
Dad needed me too much here.
The hairs on my arms stood on end and I whirled in my seat on the couch, giving myself whiplash as I searched for foreign faces in every surrounding window, my heart in my damn throat. I swallowed past the battered lump, finding nothing out there. I pinched the bridge of my nose and took another steadying breath.
“Babe?” Tess prodded.
“Okay.”
“Okay? Really?”
“Send me the details. I’ll talk to Dad. If he can handle things without me that long, then I’ll come.”
Tess squealed and I could practically see her clear green eyes crinkling at the edges as she no doubt did a little happy dance in her living room. She’d been asking me to go to one of these events with her for literal years.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” I warned.
“Too late,” she trilled. “Check your email. Deets incoming. And go open a bottle of wine, you need to chill, girl.”
The cabin felt a thousand times bigger than it was when I finally ended the call. Like there could be more than one someone hiding in every nook and cranny I couldn’t see from the living room. Which admittedly wasn’t many since the place was a whopping eight hundred square feet.
I definitely wasn’t hungry enough to eat despite skipping lunch earlier and wine sounded like the antithesis of a good idea right now, so I dragged my sorry ass into a shower and straight to bed.
I couldn’t bring myself to turn off all the lights, and it took me three tries to get back into the book I’d been reading, jumping at every creak and groan of the old cabin, but once it caught, it fucking caught. I tore through the second half of the book and for a while thought of nothing else but the story. The characters. Their problems instead of mine.
If I went to Portland with Tessa, maybe I could score a couple more of these things. I hadn’t told her yet, because she was going to rub it in my face when she found out she was right, but the books she kept unloading on me weren’t just good, they were fucking phenomenal.
The writing itself was good, flowing, easy to follow, but something about the crazy, scandalous things the characters did together was what really kept me turning the pages.
Not that I personally wanted a guy to fuck me with a knife to my throat. Not really.
But, I mean, maybe it depended on the guy. If he was like this dude I’d let him do whatever he wanted to me. No questions asked.
Well, maybe not, but it was fun as hell to imagine.
I kept reading from the chapter I left off on, vivid images saturating my mind as the pages turned. My thighs clenched getting into a sex scene and I bit the inside of my cheek, wishing I’d remembered to charge Timmy since I’d last used him.
She wept, I read, partly from the pleasure, partly from the shame. Her body exploded with sensation.
“Please stop,” she sobbed. She squirmed, trying to escape but there was nowhere to run. Thrashing desperately against him, she only succeeded in sinking his cock further into her pussy. She moaned at the invasion, greedy for more, aching for him to press into her even deeper, and hating herself for it.
“Please,” she whispered. She was saving herself. She was a virgin. Lust and fear and regret swirled inside her. “Don’t.”
“I’m not the one moving, pet,” he snarled in her ear, “you are.”
He licked the tears running down her cheek.
I audibly gasped. Was he…
I quickly read the next few lines.
He was.
And was I…?
I didn’t need to reach a hand down there to check, I knew I was. Reading through the rest of the scene, I didn’t move my hand, letting it rest between my thighs until I couldn’t help it.
I slid my hand beneath the waistband of my panties and found myself hot and wet as I restarted the scene from the beginning. Lower lip between biting teeth, I swirled my fingers in my wetness and rubbed myself as the scene came to life again in my mind.
I moaned, my toes curling as I became her. A girl losing herself to a dangerous man as he had his way with her, taking what he wanted. Completely consuming her.
I swirled my fingertips in my wetness, flicking them faster over my clit as I began to thrust my hips to increase the pressure, to simulate the action of being fucked.
Was it watching? My stalker. My monster. My ghost.
Whatever it was. Whoever it was.
The eyes peering over my shoulder. The presence filling the shadow cloaked spaces of my bedroom.
I hoped it was. The thought of it watching as I touched myself sent a bolt of pure pleasure straight to my greedy cunt, making me ache with taboo desire. I threw my head back, letting out a raw cry of ecstasy as I dropped the book to the ground and rode the wave of my orgasm, more turned on than I’d ever been in my entire life.
