Woolman Road, A Tonight's Terror Original

A couple leaves everything behind for a quiet house in the Vermont woods, hoping distance will finally make them safe. But the past has a way of following you down even the longest road.

No AI Writing. No AI Narration. 

Intro/Outro: D. Moore

Tonight's Terror. Original horror stories told in the dark. 

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This audio is an original short horror story written and performed by Tonight’s Terror (C.S. Austin). It is not adapted from, based on, or affiliated with any existing novel, audiobook, film, or copyrighted intellectual property. All writing, narration, and production elements are original and owned by the creator unless otherwise credited.

Transcript

Cold Open

SPEAKER_01 0:01

There's a kind of quiet that distance buys you. A house set back from the road, trees grown up close around it, so that whatever you left behind has a long way to come to find you. People move for that quiet. They tell themselves that the drive was far enough. They learn the new sounds the house makes after dark, and decide, one by one, that each of them is nothing. It usually is nothing. We're good, most of us, at knowing where to aim our fear. The dark yard, the headlights that sit too long behind us, the face we'd hope we'd never see again. We watch those places so closely, we get so good at watching them. Tonight's story is about a couple who move to the woods to feel safe. And for a while, they were.

Channel Intro

SPEAKER_00 1:06

And now, tonight's story.

Story

SPEAKER_01 1:13

The house sat back from the road far enough that you couldn't see it from the road. That had been the first thing Everett noticed in the listing photos, and it was the thing that he kept coming back to in the weeks after they made the offer. The tree line swallowed the driveway. The house appeared only gradually, like it was being unveiled to whoever drove in. They'd moved in on a Thursday in late September, while the maples were just beginning to turn. Maya had stood on the porch with her coffee the first morning and gone quiet in a way that Everett recognized. The particular stillness she settled into when things were good in her world. He didn't interrupt it. He'd stood in the doorway and watched her, smiling. Vermont had been his idea. Maya hadn't needed much convincing. They both worked remotely, Everett in financial consulting, Maya in web design. And the practical math was simple enough. The Vermont house cost less than their last place and offered more. Two floors, a front porch that ran the full width of the house, land enough that the nearest neighbor was a quarter mile down the road. His parents had helped with the down payment. His father had called it an investment. Everett called it a gift, but didn't push the distinction. What the practical math didn't account for was Teagan. Tegan and Everett had ended three years before he met Maya. It hadn't been dramatic, or at least it hadn't started that way. They'd wanted different things, he'd thought at the time, which was how people talked about endings they didn't fully understand yet. He hadn't understood it fully until Maya. He didn't like to give Tegan too much space in his thinking. And in the months since the move, he'd been largely successful at keeping her to the margins. But it would be dishonest to say that she wasn't part of why they left. She was most of why. The town where he and Maya had started their life together was a town where Tegan had also decided to stay, and she had made her presence felt in ways that started as an inconvenience and became something else. The social media accounts for first, a series of them, each deleted and replaced when reported, each dedicated to the same project, Maya's character, assembled from fabrications and warped half-truths and posted for anyone who cared to read. Co-workers had seen them. Maya's mother had called once, her voice careful and sad, asking who was doing this and if she needed to be worried. Maya had been devastated. Everett had been ashamed. Then the appearances. Tegan turning up at their door on a Wednesday evening without warning, her voice high and sweet when Maya answered, asking for Everett by name. The look on Maya's face when she came to get him. He'd asked Tegan to leave. She'd left. He'd stood by the window for 20 minutes after. The welfare checks pushed them to their breaking point. There were two of them in the span of a year, each preceded by a call from Tegan, 911, reporting domestic violence in Everett and Maya's house. The officers had been professional and plainly skeptical, and both times the matter was closed without incident. But the second time, standing at the door in the gray morning light, watching a patrol car idle in his driveway, Everett had understood that there was no version of this that got better, only versions that continued and got worse. And he'd been right. His therapist had used the word escalation. Everett had not liked how casually she'd said it. They'd started talking about leaving that winter. They'd made a spreadsheet, they researched towns. Maya had found the Vermont listing on a Saturday afternoon and turned her laptop toward him without saying anything. He'd looked at it for a long time. Two days after they'd put the for sale sign in the front yard, Maya's dog died. He was Everett's dog, too, but Maya had adopted him years before they'd met. Everett noticed him walking oddly in the front yard just before he staggered to the ground, already gone. They couldn't afford a real autopsy, but as they stood with a veterinarian in front of a golden retriever on the steel table, the doctor said she could see all the signs of poisoning. He tried not to think about the dog. Tegan had been his problem to deal with, and he hadn't dealt with her. Sometimes he and Maya talked about getting another pet, but it hadn't happened yet. Those things felt blissfully far away from his vantage point on their porch, nestled in the woods of Vermont. The house was older but well maintained. Two floors with wide planked hardwood floors that creaked in specific, learnable places. There was a wood stove in the living room they hadn't needed yet, but wood. The kitchen faced east, and in the mornings the light came in low and long across the counter. Everett had started making coffee earlier just to catch it. He'd set up his office in the second bedroom at the end of the hall. Maya took the room across from it, smaller, but with better light. In the evenings they cooked together and ate at the table in the dining room, which still didn't have chairs they liked, but had two mismatched ones they'd brought from the old place. They were in no hurry. That was the thing. For the first time in longer than he wanted to calculate, there was no urgency underneath the ordinary. No edge to a quiet evening, no checking the driveway when a car passed slowly. He stood, watching Maya as she left the porch and walked the perimeter of the yard with her hands in her sweatshirt pocket. Everett thought, this is what it's supposed to look like. All of it. What they'd been building toward before something decided to get in their way. He watched her reach the far edge of the yard where the trees began and stopped, looking up into the canopy. The maples would go full red overnight any day now. She stood there a moment, just looking. They'd driven into Montpelier for dinner on a Friday in mid-October, the first time they'd made a trip at night. It had felt like a small victory, getting dressed, making reservations, sitting across from each other at a table with a candle and a wine list. They were laughing so hard at something he'd said they'd scarcely noticed the waiter arriving for their order. Everett thought, this is the version of things. This is what the move was for. They left the restaurant a little after nine. The town was quiet. The streets were still wet from an earlier rain that had turned the pavement into black mirrors. Everett pulled out of the parking structure and headed for the highway. He noticed the headlights when they were about ten minutes out of town. High beams, sitting back far enough to still be polite. He changed lanes. The lights changed with him. Good dinner, Maya said. I'd go there again. She was looking out the passenger window at the dark trees sliding past. Really good, Everett said. He moved back to the right lane. The lights followed. He told himself it was nothing. The highway narrows outside Montpelier. There aren't many routes. Plenty of people drove out this way at this hour. He turned the radio down without thinking about why. Maya noticed. You okay? Fine, he said. Then there's this car behind us. She turned in her seat. He watched her look, then turned back. She didn't say anything. Probably nothing, Everett said. Probably. They're not too close, Maya said. He took the exit earlier than he needed to, hoping the car would continue on. It didn't. The road wound toward the house, slower, less direct. He was in a hurry now. His knuckles were going white on the wheel. Maya had gone still in the passenger seat, her elbow on the door and her face angled forward, not looking back. He appreciated that. The car behind him closed the gap. It came up fast, no signal, no brakes. Soon its headlights filled every mirror. Everett could feel the proximity of it, the specific aggression of someone using their car to say something they wanted you to hear. Everett, Maya said quietly. I know, he said. He pressed the accelerator. The car stayed on him. He eased off, hoping the driver would pass. The car eased off too. The gap held, too close, unvarying, as if they were attached. He turned onto Woolman Road. The car turned with him. The trees on either side went thick and dark. Everett's eyes kept going to the rear view. Just the headlights. He couldn't see the car. Make, model, color, only the two lights in the dark. The driveway appeared on the left, and he took it hard, tires loud on the gravel, and pushed up through the trees toward the house. He was out of the car before he'd fully registered parking it. Maya was right behind him. They went inside. He locked the door and stood with his hand still on the deadbolt. Through the narrow window beside the door, he could see the road. After a moment, a car rolled past slowly, in the opposite direction from the one they'd come. Maya was standing in the middle of the kitchen with her arms crossed. Her expression was drawn. Did you see the car? Everett asked. I saw headlights, she said. Could you tell what kind? She shook her head. He went to the kitchen window and looked out at nothing. The road was empty now, the tree line still. It was probably someone who lives out here, he said. He didn't believe it when he said it, and could tell from Maya's silence that she didn't either. There were very few houses on Woolman Road. The people who lived on it knew it, and the people who knew it didn't drive like that. Whoever it is knows where we live now, Maya said. Let's not go there, Everett said. It was just someone driving like an asshole. Maya unfolded her arms and set her hands flat on the counter. She stood like that for a moment, and they exchanged a look. I'm not going to say it, she said. You don't have to, Everett said. She nodded and pushed off the counter. In a moment her steps receded up the stairs. Everett stayed in the kitchen a while longer watching the window. The road was empty. After a time he turned off the kitchen light and stood in the dark, looking out at the trees. Maya was quiet in the morning, and he didn't push her. By midday they were moving through the house in the ordinary ways, coffee, laptops, lunch, and neither of them brought up the car ride. There was nothing to say that didn't require saying her name, and they had both decided without discussing it that they wouldn't be doing that. She was in the past. She was four states away. She was not on Woolman Road in the dark. Maya called on a Tuesday afternoon, two weeks after the car ride. Everett was at his desk halfway through a client report when his phone buzzed against the wood surface. One of my tires is flat, she said. Not flat. Slashed. Her voice was raised, though she sounded more annoyed than frightened. He was already pushing back from his desk. Are you okay? I'm fine. I'm standing in the Shaw's market parking lot feeling like an idiot. Well, you're not an idiot. Stay there. The drive into town took the better part of an hour. He found her leaning against the car with her arms crossed and her grocery bags at her feet, squinting into the afternoon sun. As he pulled into a parking spot, they locked eyes and she offered an apologetic shrug. He climbed out and hugged her. The rear driver's side tire was destroyed, not slowly deflated, but opened. The rubber peeled back from the rim. Everett crouched and looked at it. He didn't say anything. He put the groceries in the back seat and called roadside assistance. They waited together on the curb. Maya drank the last of the coffee she'd picked up inside and didn't say much. Everett watched the parking lot. Cars came and went. Nobody looked at them. The technician arrived in under an hour and had the spare on quickly. Everett tipped him more than he needed to. They drove home in separate cars, Maya in front, Everett behind her. He watched her taillights the whole way. He didn't sleep well that night. Maya didn't bring up Tegan, and neither did he. He found it the next day. He'd gone out to the car to retrieve a jacket he left on the back seat. It was early evening, the light going flat and grey, and he'd almost missed it. Something on the trunk caught his eye on his way back to the house. He stopped. It was a handprint. The fingers were splayed, pressed flat like someone had steadied themselves against the car, or pushed off from it. The color had gone dark against the black paint, brownish, the way dried blood looks when it isn't fresh, or the way cheap paint dries. He stood and looked at it for a long moment. He set his jacket on the ground. Everett leaned down slowly and pressed his ear to the trunk lid. The metal was cold against his cheek. He stayed like that, perfectly still, listening. Nothing. The ordinary sounds of the yard, wind in the trees, a bird somewhere. Nothing else. He felt suddenly as though he was in the presence of something sinister. He looked around him. The tree lines in the woods were still. Teagan hadn't been unstable immediately after they'd broken things off. In fact, Everett had seen her socially a number of times in the years prior to meeting Maya. It was after he'd started dating Maya that Tegan seemed to begin to fray. She'd never threatened violence. Her affect was uneven, even manic, but always in a protective, possessive way. That never made Everett feel any safer around her. He straightened. He looked again at the handprint. Then he found his keys and unlocked the trunk. He flung it open and leapt back. It was empty. A road flare, a bungee cord, the small tool kit that had come with the car that he'd never opened. He picked up his jacket from the ground, brushed the gravel off of it, and went inside. Maya was cooking. The kitchen smelled like garlic and olive oil. Find your jacket, she called from the stove. Ya, Everett said. He hung it on the hook by the door. Sorry, you need help in there? I'm good. Ten minutes. He washed his hands at the kitchen sink and looked out the window at the car in the driveway. From here he couldn't see the trunk. He dried his hands and set the dish towel on the counter, and went to set the table. It was a Saturday night in late October. They'd made a fire in the wood stove and were watching a movie on the couch. Maya's feet tucked under Everett's leg the way she always did. The stove ticked and settled. Outside the wind moved through the trees in long, slow passes. The movie was loud in places, a horror film by a young Irish director everyone was talking about. Something Maya had cued up after reading the review. During a quieter scene, Everett heard something, or thought he did. A noise at the front of the house, there and gone before he could place it. He reached for the remote.

SPEAKER_00 18:23

What?

SPEAKER_01 18:24

Maya said. Hold on. He paused the movie, and the room went quiet. Just the stove, the wind, the ordinary sounds of the house settling into the cold. I thought I heard something, he said. Maya was already sitting up straighter. Where? In front of the house, he said softly. Not cool, Everett. This movie is scary enough, Maya said. I'm not joking. Stay here. He set the remote on a cushion and got up. Maya chuckled. Did you take an edible? she said as he stepped away from the couch. Everett didn't answer. The hallway was dark. He moved through it slowly, giving his eyes time to adjust. Through the front window beside the entryway he could see the porch, the railing, the dark shape of the yard beyond. Nothing out of place. Then he felt cold. He paused. There was a strong, cold draught wrapping around him the nearer he got to the front of the house. He rounded the corner and saw the door. It was standing open. Not wide, maybe eight inches, but open. The night air coming through in a thin, cold current. He stood there for a moment. He was certain he had locked it. They were both so predictable with the habit. He pushed it the rest of the way open and stepped onto the porch. Darkness. Nothing. The porch was empty. The railing ran its length uninterrupted. Beyond it the yard fell away into heavy, inky dark. Beyond the yard the tree line stood black against the sky, no movement, no sound except the wind, and somewhere, deeper in the trees, a branch creaking under its own weight. He stood there long enough that the cold began to work through his shirt. He stepped back inside and closed the door. He checked the lock. The bolt was thrown but hadn't caught, or hadn't been thrown at all. He couldn't say which. He stood there running his fingers over it, replaying the last time he'd used the door, trying to remember if he'd heard the bolt. He couldn't. Maya appeared at the end of the hall. Well, she said. Door was open. She looked at the door, then at him. The wind? Maybe, Everett said. She waited. I thought I locked it, he said. Maya frowned and leaned against the wall. Maybe you didn't, she said. Maybe. They stood there for a moment, then Maya pushed off the wall. Come back and watch the movie, she said. I'll make some sleepy time tea. He followed her back down the hall. When they'd each settled back onto the couch, and Maya restarted the movie, Everett found he couldn't follow it. He was replaying the sound in his head, that brief, indefinite sound, trying to fix it in his mind as something ordinary. A branch against the siding, the house contracting in the cold. Certainly not a door being forced open. He'd checked the locks again before bed. He was sure of that. Everett got sick on a Tuesday morning, the first week of November. He was at his desk when it hit him. Nausea, sudden and rolling, followed by a fatigue so complete it felt structural, like his limbs were made of concrete. He made it to the bed and didn't get up for the rest of the day. Maya brought him water and crackers and checked on him between calls. She took his temperature five times a day and reported the numbers with a nurse's persistence. Low grade, nothing alarming, but enough to suggest he wasn't right. He slept endlessly. By the end of the third day, he felt well enough to sit up and open his laptop. He managed an hour before fatigue pulled him back down, and he lay with his forearm over his eyes and waited for the nausea to pass. You should see someone, Maya said from the doorway. It's just stress, Everett said. Or a virus. Work is brutal right now, and that's why I need to get things done. She didn't answer right away. He could feel her looking at him. The laptop slid noiselessly from his lap to the bedspread beside him. You said that before, she said. He had, three times in the last four years, maybe four, he'd gone down like this. The same sudden onset, the same nausea, the same gray feeling that settled over everything, and then after a week or ten days, lifted. Each time he attributed it to something, a difficult quarter at work, the strain to the move, and before that, the months of Tegan's constant presence. There was always something to point to. He was not someone who got sick without a reason, and stress was a reason. I'll see someone if it doesn't break by the weekend, he said. Maya brought him more water and left without pushing it. That was one of the things about her. She made her point and didn't repeat it. But the look on her face as she left the room was undeniably pained. He didn't call a doctor. By the following Monday he was upright and functional, the illness receding the way it always did. Not all at once, but by degrees, leaving him feeling hollowed out and vaguely grateful. Five pounds later he went back to his desk. He answered emails. He told himself it was the stress of the last few months catching up with him at last, the body sending a bill that was long overdue. By Friday, he was up. Not fully himself. He could still feel the fuzzy edges of the illness, a faint slowness in his legs, a lack of urgency to his appetite, but upright and clear-headed enough to move through the house like a person with things to do. He stripped the bed and put the sheets in the wash, he wiped down the bathroom, he took out the recycling that had been piling up by the back door all week, and stood for a moment in the cold morning air, just standing, which felt like its own small accomplishment. He didn't open his laptop. It was Friday. Whatever had accumulated in his inbox had waited this long. Maya appeared in the kitchen doorway in her robe, coffee in hand, and told him she was taking the day. You don't have to do that, Everett said. I know, she said. They spent the morning unhurried. Maya read on the couch while Everett slowly moved from room to room doing small things, putting the house back in order as he saw it. There was something steadying in it. The ordinary mechanics of a life, dishes and folded blankets and a throw rug nudged back into place. He felt for the first time in a week, like himself. At noon, Maya made lunch. She buzzed around the kitchen in a celebratory mood. Everett sat at the kitchen table reading. At turns he watched her move around the kitchen with the efficiency she had when she was cooking something she knew well. She dressed arugula and the vinaigrette she made herself, shallots, good mustard, red wine vinegar, and laid burrata and prosciutto over the top. She knew just what might reignite Everett's appetite. She brought both plates to the table and sat across from him. It was the first real meal he'd wanted in days. They ate without urgency, which was its own kind of treat. At some point Maya reached across the table, and he took her hand. He held it for a moment, smiling. Outside the light streaked through the kitchen window. The November yard striped with sunlight, and still. He thought about how close they'd come to not having this. This house, this table, this life in the quiet of the Vermont Woods. How long the last few years had been, how much had been thrown at them as they tried to build something happy and humble. Oh, your smile is back, Maya said. I feel good, Everett said. I feel like myself. She squeezed his hand once and let it go. Good, she said. Eat. Maya left the house a little after one. She'd been reluctant. He could see it in the way she lingered in the entryway, keys in hand, looking back at him on the couch. He'd had to tell her twice that it was fine, that he felt good, that missing her bar class on his account was not something he was going to allow. I'll be two hours, she said. Her face was scrunched up the way it was when she saw those commercials for orphaned animals. Go, Efred said. I'm gonna watch something stupid and fall asleep on the couch like a garbage person. He stood and hugged her. Maya smiled and pulled the door shut behind her. He listened to her start her car. He stepped to the window and watched her back down the gravel drive and pull onto Woolman Road. He watched as the car disappeared through the trees. Then his legs went out from under him. It came back all at once, not gradually, not building, but sudden and total, like a trapdoor opening beneath him. He was on the floor before he knew what was happening. The nausea rose fast and mean. He flung himself to his stomach and took stock of the room. It tilted and spun away from him. He stayed there for a moment, one hand on the baseboard, waiting to see if it would pass. It didn't pass. He moved down the hall on his hands and knees. The bedroom door was open. He reached the bed and used the frame to pull himself up. Got one knee onto the mattress, then the other, and collapsed onto his side. The room tilted. He reached for the nightstand, felt the edge of his phone and pulled it close to him. He'd call Maya in a minute. He just needed a minute. He was asleep before he finished the thought. He didn't know how long he'd been out when he heard it. A sound from downstairs, unhurried and sharp. Everett opened his eyes. The room was dim, the afternoon light gone grey at the window. He tried to sit up and couldn't. His arms had no strength in them. He lay on his back and listened. Footsteps. Slow on the hard wood, moving from one room to another without urgency, without caution. Maya had come home. He turned his head toward the door. It was open. The hallway beyond was dark. He tried to call out. What came from his throat was barely a sound. The footsteps moved toward the stairs. He watched the doorway. His heart was knocking hard against his ribs, the only part of him with any force left in it. He could feel the phone somewhere beside him on the bed, but his hand wouldn't close around it. He tried to roll toward it and managed only to shift his weight. He had never felt such overmastering weakness. It was as if his body were draped in a soaking lead blanket. The footsteps reached the top of the stairs. They came down the hallway slowly, one step at a time, unhurried, as though whoever was out there had nowhere to be. Everett watched the open doorway. It could not move, and could not speak, and could only watch. Tegan walked past the door. She didn't look in. She passed through the line of sight the way someone passes through a room they know well, her eyes forward. She was wearing the clothes he'd always known her to wear, a dark jacket, jeans, and her hair was down. She looked entirely ordinary. She looked like a person who lived there. Everett stared at the empty doorway, unsure if he'd really seen her. Then he heard her moving down the hall. A door opened, the door to the room he and Maya used as a second closet, where Maya kept her off season clothes. He got his hand around the phone. The screen was dark. He pressed the button and the light came up, and the brightness of it drove a spike of pain directly through his skull. He squinted at it. Maya's name was right there. He pressed it, and put the phone to his ear. It rang once. He couldn't hold the phone up, his arm dropped. He heard Maya's voice, small and far away, against the bedspread, asking if he was okay. He couldn't answer her. Tegan appeared in the doorway. Everett closed his eyes, like a child trying to will away a monster in the night. He hoped when he opened them she'd gone. Worse yet, if she caught his gaze she might speak to him. Unable to move, completely helpless, he preferred she leave him be. She wasn't moving. He knew from the sound. He felt her standing in the doorway, looking at him. After a terrible pause, Everett heard her move again, closer. He chanced a look, terrified of what she'd do. She was staring right at him, at the foot of the bed now. She was wearing Maya's clothes. A cream colored sweater Everett recognized, dark pants. She did not speak. Her expression was not cruel and not satisfied. It was something worse. It was tender. She looked at him like he belonged to her. Then she turned, without a word, and moved down the hall toward the bathroom. He heard the medicine cabinet open. He heard the small sounds of things being picked up, moved, set back down. Drawers opened and closed. He lay on his back and stared at the ceiling, still too weak to move. He heard the rummaging stop. From outside came the crunch of tires on gravel. Maya's car. The bathroom was silent. A beat of total stillness. Then fast, light footsteps, down the hall, down the stairs, and gone. A door somewhere below, opening and closing with barely a sound. Everett closed his eyes. He heard Maya's key in the lock, her footsteps in the entryway, her voice calling his name from the bottom of the stairs, bright and unsuspecting. Up here, he said. It came out as a whisper. Maya couldn't have heard. Soon he heard her footsteps on the stairs. She appeared in the doorway and crossed the room. She sat on the edge of the bed and put her hand on his face. You're burning up, she said. What happened? You called me. He looked at her. Tegan was here, he said. Maya went very still. She was in the house, he said. She was wearing your clothes. Maya stood up from the bed. She looked at the doorway, then at him, and at the doorway again. Her hand came up to her mouth. We need to leave, she said. Everett, we need to go. Everett. We're calling the police, he said, and then we're changing the locks. This is our house. She looked at him for a long moment. He could see her working through it, the fear and the fury, and the practical question of whether she believed what he was telling her. She believed it. He could see that too. She picked up his phone from the bedspread and dialed. Everett laid his head back on the pillow and slept. The police arrived a little after sunset. There were two of them, a state trooper out of the Montpellier barracks and a deputy from the county sheriff's office, the overlap of jurisdictions that came with living where they lived. Maya met them at the door. Everett heard the low murmur of their voices downstairs, the scrape of chairs in the kitchen, and then, after a while, footsteps on the stairs. The trooper took his statement from a chair Maya carried in from her office. Everett gave it lying down. He couldn't sit up for more than a minute or two without the room beginning its slow rotation, and so he lay propped against the headboard and told it in order. The footsteps, the closet, the clothes, the bathroom. The trooper wrote in a small notebook and asked questions only when Everett paused. How did she enter? Did he see a vehicle? Had there been prior incidents? Prior incidents? Everett almost laughed. Maya stood in the doorway with her arms folded into her sweater while he laid it all out. The social media, the 911 calls, the dog they couldn't prove anything about. The trooper's pen kept moving. The deputy walked to the house in the meantime. Everett could hear him below, the front door opening and closing. They were thorough and unhurried and entirely without urgency, which Everett came to understand was its own kind of message. There was no broken window, no forced lock, no witness but a man who'd been semi-conscious with a fever, and nothing missing that anyone could name. The clothes Everett had seen Tegan wearing were gone, Maya thought, but couldn't be certain. The deputy found no footprints worth photographing. The gravel drive gave them nothing. The trooper closed his notebook and said they'd file the report. They would contact the police department back home where the prior complaints were on record and request the file. A be on the lookout would go out on Tegan's vehicle. He read the make and model back to Everett to confirm. If she was in Vermont, a traffic stop or a plate reader might find her. Might. Maya had started crying then. The deputy wore a shocked expression as both she and Everett rattled off Tegan's license plate number from memory. She was still trailing them like a ghost. It felt like they were farther from being free of her than before they'd moved. What the deputy recommended in the meantime was practical, changed the locks, all of them, including the basement bulkhead, motion lights, cameras at the entry points, the kind that recorded to the cloud. Keep a log of anything unusual, with dates and times. Call immediately if she appears. And do not engage. Before they left, the trooper gave Everett an assessing look and then spoke to them both. I'm sure sorry you folks are dealing with this. And then to Maya. Take care of this one, nodding to Everett. Looks like he needs it. Then they were gone, tail lights sailing down through the trees. Everett and Maya were alone again. Whatever that meant now. The locksmith came the next day. He was an older man who worked without talking, and by early afternoon every door in the house had a new lock. The day after, a kid from a security company spent three hours on a ladder, mounting floodlights at the corners of the house and cameras over both doors. He showed Maya and Everett the app on their phones. That night, lying in bed, Everett watched the front yard on his phone screen, the porch, the gravel, the gray rendering of the tree line in infrared. Nothing moved. He checked it four more times before he slept. It would be another two days before Everett was himself again. At Maya's urging he'd agreed to at least make an appointment for a checkup. An item of well being maintenance he'd been ignoring for a few years now. It's the least you could do, Maya admonished. I was this close to dragging you to my car and taking you to the ER. She held her thumb and pointer finger an inch apart, holding his gaze. Everett smirked. I've never felt more powerful, he joked, flexing like a cartoon bodybuilder. Maya leapt on him with mock outrage. The two moved in a tight orbit, perhaps by design, around the kitchen as they made a celebratory meal marking Everett's recovery. Maybe skip the barata this time, he teased. Maya stepped close to him and rested her forehead against his chest. Just don't scare me like that again, she said softly into the fabric of his flannel shirt. The sun set early at their house on Woolman Road. The trees and hills stole the last forty minutes of light they might have savored if they lived elsewhere. Maya turned on every light on the first floor shortly after the shadows crossed their lawn. There were many, many nights in this house and their old place that felt like they weren't alone. They'd grown accustomed to ignoring the ghost at the feast, as Maya had called her. Everett used to jab at her for referencing Shakespeare on such a grim and personal topic, but as time went by, Tegan was like a spectre. There whether or not they could see her, waiting in the wings to ruin their dinner. Ruin their lives. Mercifully, the night was uneventful. Everett took a long shower and returned to the bedroom to find Maya reading. She was working her way through Peter Swanson's latest mystery. Everett crawled into bed and kissed Maya's hand, an affectionate signal they knew to mean I'm too tired to read, but enjoy your book. He slept like a dead one that night for the first time in what felt like months. In the morning, he dressed for work. More than a week passed. Everett's strength came back in full. He stopped checking the cameras every night and then stopped checking them most nights. The floodlights clicked on for deer and once for a fox that crossed the yard at dusk, and each time the app chimed on his phone. Each time it was nothing. Nothing was a gift. He was learning to appreciate it. He'd gone back to work and found the backlogs less punishing than he'd feared. By the end of the second week he'd caught up and then he was ahead, the steady rhythm of it almost pleasant. He worked at his desk in the second bedroom, the door open, and the house quiet around him. In the late afternoons the light came through the window and lay across his floorboards in a way he'd started to look forward to. Maya knocked on the door frame a little before four. She was dressed to go out, boots, the green jacket she liked. Sarah should be here to pick me up any minute. Dinner with the studio people, she said. I told you Tuesday, remember? You'll feed yourself? I'll feed myself, Everett said. Have fun. Tell them I'm real and not just some man you invented. She laughed and told him she'd be back by ten. She kissed the top of his head and went. He worked another hour. The light moved off the desk. He was deep in a spreadsheet, half aware of the room going dim around him, when a welcome protest of hunger jabbed his stomach. He'd been relishing the feeling since his last bout of nausea. He was already thinking about the leftover chicken parmesan sitting in the refrigerator as he left his desk and walked down the hall. At the top of the stairs he paused. A sound found his ear. A car engine? Yes, maybe. But something under it. Everett instinctively reached for his phone and opened the security app. As it loaded, he scolded himself for being so anxious, but he couldn't help it. At last the security dashboard appeared on his phone. An unfamiliar symbol hovered over each camera. He jabbed at one. The app alerted Feed unavailable. With rising panic he tried the other. Feed unavailable. Now, feeling the burn of frustration melding with fear, he began down the steps. The sound from outside grew more pronounced. There was a car outside. Not Maya's, he knew her car by the sound. The particular note of it coming up the drive, and this wasn't that. Her friend's car. Sarah, was it? Back early, though, he considered. The car was idling, stationary, and under the engine sound, faint, something else. Music. A song, muffled by glass and distance. The bass coming through first, the way the bass does. He knew the song before he knew he knew it. When he reached the first floor, he stood very still. Yes, he knew the song. Everett took a breath and approached the front of the house until he could see through the front windows. Tegan was standing in the yard. Her car was behind her, pulled up short of the house, the driver's door hanging open and the headlights on, and the music pouring out of it into the cold. He knew the song well. Of course he did. It was the Smiths. How soon is now. He and Tegan had played it a hundred times in another life, pumping through their headphones on early morning runs together. Moments like that belonged to a version of him he could barely remember being. Morrissey's voice spilled across the dark yard, theatrical and aching. Teagan saw him at the window. She started screaming. He couldn't make out the words at first through the glass and the music, only the shape of her, arms moving, her face contorted in the floodlight glare. He stepped closer to the window. The motion lights had caught her and thrown her into hard white relief, and he could see that she was crying, that she'd been crying for a while. He caught the words on a second pass. She's going to kill you. Everett's hand was already moving toward his phone. This was the call he'd been told to make. Do not engage. Call immediately. He had the number ready. He had the whole thing ready. He'd been ready for a week and a half without knowing he was waiting. But she kept screaming, and against everything he knew, he reached up and unlatched the window and slid it open a few inches. The cold came in. The music came in with it, louder now, unbearable. What are you talking about? he called through the gap. Teagan stopped screaming. For a second she just looked at him, her chest heaving. Then she lifted her arm and pointed. Not at him, past him. Up. At a window on the second floor. You can still get out. Come back, she screamed. Her voice broke on it. Everett, it's not too late. He turned and looked up the stairwell behind him and then back at her, and something cold worked its way down through him that had nothing to do with the open window. She was pointing at the bedroom. The room she'd been in some ten days before, the room where she'd stood over him while he lay, unable to move, looking at him with that tenderness that was worse than hate. And he understood, or thought he understood. This was what she did. This was the whole architecture of Tegan, laid bare in the front yard. She had stood in that room. She had worn Maya's clothes, she had searched their cabinets for God knew what, and now she was back, pointing at the scene, screaming about a killer in the house. And she could not see. She was too far gone to see that what she was describing was herself. The thing in the house was her. It had always been her. She'd come apart so completely that she'd split herself in two and put the worst half up in that window, and was standing in his yard begging him to be afraid of it. It was sad. He felt absurdly a flicker of pity for her. Tegan, he called, I'm calling the police now. You need to leave. She screamed again, wordless this time, maybe some version of no, and pointed harder, both hands now jabbing at the upstairs window like she could break it from where she stood. He should have shut the window and dialed and waited for the cops. He knew that. But the pointing got to him, the certainty of it. Whatever was wrong with her, she believed what she was screaming, believed it with her whole body, and some animal part of him needed to go up there and look at the empty room and prove to himself what he already knew, so that he could come back down and tell the police a lunatic was on his property, then this would be over. He started up the stairs, with his phone in his hand, thumb on the screen, the digits nine one already typed. The hallway was dark. He didn't bother with the light. The bedroom stood half open. Everett took a breath and pushed it the rest of the way. He looked in. The room was empty. Of course it was empty. The bed was made. The window was a pale rectangle of floodlight glow. Tegan's voice still rising faintly through the yard below. Nothing, no one. He let out a breath. He felt foolish, and felt relieved. He took two steps to reach the window to shout down at Tegan in triumph. See, you are crazy. He saw her, beside her car, leaping frantically in the unnatural white blue glare of the floodlights. From behind the door, Maya moved. He felt the needle before he understood it. A bright, hot point at the side of his neck, precise, almost gentle. His hand opened, the phone hit the floor. In the next second, the heat blossomed from his neck down his back and over his scalp. His legs went next. He was on his knees, and then he wasn't. The floor coming up slow, and then all at once, and Maya was lowering herself down beside him with one hand still steadying the syringe, the way you'd help someone who fainted. I'm sorry, she said. Her voice was soft. There was something in it that he'd never heard before, and would not have time to name. This was never how it was supposed to end, she said. You were just supposed to need me. The room was going dark at the edges. Outside faint, the music played on, and under it Tegan, screaming. Maya brushed the hair back from his forehead. Blame the ghost, she said. She did this.

Epilogue

SPEAKER_01 50:39

The cruisers raced up a Woolman Road with their lights going, three of them, the red and blue raking across the trees in the front of the house. They hadn't been far. A welfare call brought them, a woman saying there was someone in her home who'd hurt her husband. The cars skidded on the gravel, and the officers were out before the engines died. The front door was open. The music had stopped by then. They found Everett on the floor of the bedroom. Tegan was on her knees beside him, with his head gathered into her lap. She was rocking, her hands in his hair, saying his name over and over. She didn't hear them on the stairs. She didn't stop when they filled the doorway. One of them shouted, and she looked up at them with desperate panic that stretched her eyes wide. She said he wasn't waking up. She couldn't get him to wake up. They lifted her off of him. She let them. The story was right there on the floor, and it told itself. A man dead in his own house. A woman with a history. There was a file, there were welfare calls. There was a town four estates away that knew her name. Found over the body, hysterical. They didn't need to assemble it. It assembled itself, the way the best lies do, out of true things, arranged in the wrong order. For years, Evered had woken sick and gone to bed sicker and come back to himself only when Maya decided he should. The illness had always been hers, hers to bring on, hers to nurse, hers to lift. Someone who needs you does not leave. A man who cannot stand does not look too hard at the hand that steadies him. She did not want him dead. She wanted him kept. Then Tegan, turning up at the door, breaking into the house, screaming her warnings into the yard, getting close, closer than anyone had come, to the center of it all. Maya could survive a great deal. She could not survive being seen. And a thing she could no longer keep, she would not leave for anyone else to have. Down the hall, an officer knocked softly on the locked bathroom door and called out that it was the police, that she was safe, that she could come out now. It took a moment, then the lock turned. Maya stepped out slowly, one hand on the door frame, the other at her chest. She was shaking. She told them she'd heard screaming and she'd run, that she'd locked herself in and called for help and prayed. She let them guide her down the hall and away from the room, away from what was in it, a blanket around her shoulders that someone had found. They walked Tegan out in handcuffs. She had stopped fighting and stopped speaking. She moved between two officers across the gravel toward the open door of the cruiser, her head down, the floodlights still burning white over all of it. At the car, she stopped and looked back at the house. Her eyes were tired and vacant. Something essential about her was gone. Maya was framed in the front window, lit gold from behind. She let the blanket fall from her shoulders and looked out at the yard, at the cars, at the woman being folded into the back of one of them. After a moment, Maya turned back into the warmth of the house.

Channel Outro

SPEAKER_00 54:45

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