Chapter 3: His Name Is…
“Slow down, lass,” he said. “It won’t chase us down the road in the middle of day.”
The speedometer read 45 MPH. I had spun down the driveway, onto Lotomaw Drive, and pulled a hard right onto Rainier. A residential neighborhood, it was posted for 15 MPH during school hours. Shit.
I tapped the brakes, shooting a look at my passenger. “What was that thing?”
He hadn’t buckled in or locked the door. Instead, one hand rested on the door handle, his head angled at the passenger-side rear-view mirror, watching. “That, friend, depends on what you saw. What did you see?”
“A—a thing.” I tried to explain the horror. Twice now I’d seen it, though no more than a second each time. I described the humanoid figure, a shape slick with mud or oil and decay, the hollow crimson cylinders in the place of its eyes.
Mystery man didn’t laugh or even look surprised. He just nodded, turning his head forward again. Apparently, nothing pursued us. “Red tubes for eyes, aye. I saw it that way, too.”
“Well?” I prompted. “What is it?”
“I can’t be sure until I talk to some people, but it must be why I’m here.”
“What people? What are you talking about? How could you possibly be here for—that?”
He smiled, an unexpected look of mirth crossing his face, chasing away a shadow or two. But he didn’t answer my question. We drove on in silence. After a few minutes, he raised his hand and pointed to a nearby row of commercial buildings. “You can let me off at the café.”
I followed his finger, turned into the parking lot in front of Jakarta Joe’s. It was the best indie coffee shop in Port Selkie and not far from my office. It surprised me that mystery man knew it. He looked more like a whiskey and beer sort, one of the lads. “Here?”
“Perfect, cheers.” He pulled the door handle.
“Wait!”
There are times in your life when everything gets so overwhelming you don’t know what to do or say. It feels like your brain has lost the ability to think in complete sentences. You can still breathe, walk, and even perform rote, mechanical actions. I could, for example, still drive. But trying to make sense of this morning’s encounter—that unwelcome intrusion—felt like the day my grandma died.
I took a deep breath, sucking wind up from the gut. I held it in my lungs, chest swelling, and then released it in one long, steady exhalation, like a dolphin breaching the surface. It was how we practiced in Concordance Therapy. My trainer would’ve been proud.
Invincible Irishman looked at me, expectant.
“I don’t even know your name,” I said.
“Colin,” he smiled.
“Colin,” I said, measuring my words with care. “What’s going on?”
“Can’t say, lass.” He said it with such a gentle tone, full of regret, that I believed he meant it.
“Look at my hands. I’m shaking.”
“I know.” After a moment, he asked, “How deep are you involved?”
“What do you mean?”
“What do you know about that place?”
“It’s a lemon! I hate that house. It’s been with our firm for about a year. It won’t sell. It’s a bad place.”
He nodded. “Something happened there, I’ll wager.”
“It’s a murder house,” I said. “A hundred years ago, someone killed six people. It’s no secret. Every couple of years there’s an article in the paper. There’s even a website, Lotomaw Murder House Dot Org, or something. It’s notorious enough that, legally, I have to disclose that to potential buyers.”
He nodded again, moved the door handle an inch downward. “Then it’s the right kind of place to use.”
No, please don’t leave yet. I have to know. I have to. “Colin, why do you think I’m involved? What do you mean?”
“I don’t know yet. Do you have a card, some way I can contact you?”
I handed over one of my real estate cards. No point trying to hide. If he was my stalker—and I didn’t think he was—then he already knew all about me anyway. Real estate agents are accessible. Twitter, Tumblr, Craigslist, you name it, we do it. There’s not a shitty social media site out there that Jill hasn’t forced us to spam with our listings.
He took the card, studied it for a second. A smile creased his lips. “Rowan Butterfly Sparks. Now that’s a name, isn’t it?”
“My mom was, uh, different,” I said. “A hippie right through the nineties, followed Phish around.”
He tucked the card into the breast pocket of his bomber jacket. Then he took out another card and laid it face down on the dashboard. “There’s mine, now. If anything else strange happens, anything at all—give me a call. I’ll come running if I can. Best you avoid showing that house to any more customers.”
“What if—”
But the door opened and he stepped out, headed towards the coffee shop.
I took his card and turned it over. No name, email, website, or Twitter. Not even a logo, a street address, or a full name. Just the words ‘Braden Services’ and a phone number with a 707 area code, same as mine.
I looked up, searching for Colin, but he’d already vanished. Braden. C. Braden. Wasn’t that the owner of the house? But he pretended to know nothing about the place.
Monsters and mysteries, I thought, worried. In any other circumstance, a man like that… But I shut down that line of thought. After the nightmare marriage, the grinding divorce, and three months of living on a knife’s edge of terror, I wasn’t ready for mysterious strangers, handsome, Irish, or otherwise.
“The clients didn’t like the house,” I told Jill over the phone. I was in my bathrobe, sitting at home in front of my laptop, drinking herbal tea and searching ‘Colin Braden’ to no avail. “And I don’t feel well.”
Pookie yowled and rubbed at my feet. I hated to use the sick card again so soon after the last one. But after the insanity up at the murder house, no other option remained. I didn’t tell Jill about the monster or hitting Colin with my car. How could I? She’d think I was nuts.
Besides, to Jill, everyone—even mystery men—were prospective buyers. She’d want the creature’s contact details, maybe. Even monsters needed to live somewhere.
“What didn’t they like about the place?” Jill demanded. “The location? The size?”
“Oh, gee, I don’t know, maybe the fact a madman killed six people there and kids spray paint shit all over it? I’ll call them tomorrow, do a proper follow-up. They might like that duplex on Umawa Drive.”
She sighed. “I never should have taken that listing. It’s wrecking my average.”
“It’s a terrible house, Jill. I never want to see it again.”
“Concordance Therapy. Power through the positive.”
“Uh-huh.” I didn’t want to talk about that right now. I had double-checked my real estate paperwork, but contrary to usual procedures, it lacked the seller information. “Who owns that place? Someone named Braden, right? Clients have asked.”
“Yes, Braden. Private person, I’ve only dealt with her lawyer.”
“Her? It’s a woman?”
“Yes, one Cherise Braden. That’s all I know.”
“Okay, thanks.” I faked a cough. “I better get some rest. The cough syrup’s kicking in.”
“I’ll see you at Morning Pep.”
“Great.” The idea of going to the office tomorrow for the inanity and drudgery of selling houses after a psychotic break with reality didn’t appeal to me at all. But let tomorrow worry about tomorrow.
She hung up and I massaged my temples. Searching the internet for Colin Braden proved impossible. People with similar names popped up but nobody local or who even looked like him. Running his phone number into a search engine also failed. Whoever Colin Braden was—if that was his real name—he kept a low profile.
Searching for ‘Cherise Braden’ didn’t turn up anyone local either. I didn’t like that name, didn’t like her being the owner of the house. I’d never met her, didn’t know a thing about her, but her name alone suggested that Colin might be married. Which shouldn’t bother me, but it did. Maybe she’d sent Colin out to check on her property, to make sure the Jill Thorman Real Estate Agency was doing its damn job.
It also made Colin a liar and a married man to boot. Typical.
I needed a hot shower to de-stress. Problem: I’d just taken one. So I scooped up Pookie and settled into the couch for a good pet. For a while, I just ran my fingers though his fur, taking the occasional sip of tea, thinking.
There’s a certain art to petting a cat. They tend to set the terms, responding to what they like with purrs and contented blinks and what I like to call a kitty smile, a relaxation of the jaw that shows a bit of teeth. With Pookie, he liked to be scratched behind the ears, slow, with a deliberate angling of the nails. Then he’d stretch out and fill my lap, flick his tail, and dig his claws into me. That was the signal that it was okay to start stroking his whole back, including the base of his tail.
It’s a great way to think and I had plenty on my mind. The enigmatic Colin Braden. The Mysterious Enemy. The horror in the window. The Lotomaw Murder House. How did it all connect? I needed a timelord of my own, a Doctor Who to come out of the TV and dispense advice.
Instead, a nasty idea took root: Colin had arranged this whole thing. My fears pushed him back into the role of my stalker, the Mysterious Enemy. He’d punctured my tire to make me late to the showing. He’d arranged for some confederate or maybe even just a video projection—some Scooby Doo-type bullshit—to scare the stuffing out of me. Then up he comes, heroic man to save the day and “protect me” from the monster, from the stalker, from the Big, Bad World.
Except that didn’t seem like him. I’d been wrong about men before—I could not possibly have been more wrong about Burke—but if Colin had arranged this whole thing as a way to weasel his way into my life, why hurry off with hardly a word? The loyal, married man scenario made more sense.
Then what about hitting him with my car? There was something spooky about that too. Because when I’d first reached him, he appeared unconscious. Eyes shut, labored breathing. Then, boom, he’d sat up as if nothing had happened.
“Let’s face it, Pookie,” I said. “It’s a mystery.”
Pookie yip-yowled in return, rolling over in my lap to offer his chin. “I gotcha, little guy.” Petting Pookie soothed me. Despite all that money wasted on Concordance Therapy with Burke and Jill, the simple act of stroking my sweet little guy relaxed me more than the deep breathing and recorded lectures.
Maybe the worst was over. Whatever that monster was, Colin would take care of it. Once he did that, the stalking would stop, too.
Yes. The stalking incidents had started around the time I started showing that damn house. It might even be a poltergeist-thingy. Not that I believed in things like that, but when confronted with the impossible, you have to consider the unthinkable. I had half a mind to call Colin, to ask. Maybe I just wanted to hear his warm, rich, reassuring voice. Because he did have a protective aura about him. When he’d sat in the car with me, it felt safe.
His rugged, good looks meant taken, though. Guys like that are always married. He’d probably fathered three children on this Cherise woman. They all lived happily together in a beautiful, modern ranch home with an English garden and a swimming pool, a parental moon deck off the master bedroom, and million dollar views of the churning, gray Pacific.
I sighed.
It shouldn’t bother me. Three months after the horrific divorce and all those bitter, courtroom allegations was not the time to think about men. Running them over with my car was no way to meet them either.
These foolish thoughts came from biological impulses, emanating from those parts of my body that only cared about their functions. Sometimes my body disgusted me. Not my actual appearance—which didn’t always thrill me—but how my body responded to the look, the touch, even the sound of a good-looking man at the most inopportune and inappropriate moments.
I dismissed this ‘Cherise’ person from my daydreams, taking her place in Colin’s beautiful seaside manor. I sat on our gorgeous sun deck as Colin brought me a homemade margarita.
“Thanks, dahling,” I would say. Our glasses would clink. “To ten years of beautiful marriage.”
“And to ten more,” he’d answer, turning toward the broad sweep of iron gray roods beyond the rail.
“Remember how we met?” I’d ask. “At the Lotomaw Murder House?”
“So romantic it was, lass,” he would say, winking. “Right after we spotted that hideous, dripping entity.”
What the fuck was that thing? I grabbed my head in frustration and fear.
The sudden motion annoyed Pookie and he scampered off my lap. He found a warm patch of carpet and yawned, licked a paw. His yellow eyes watched me, though. Easy to guess his thoughts: Silly human, can’t sit still like she’s supposed to.
I sipped my tea, giving up on the mystery. Red alders waved in a light breeze, their leaves a blaze of autumn amid the surrounding evergreens. Early afternoon turned to the end of day. I made supper, then re-watched some Doctor on Netflix as I ate. Whatever will be, will be—let tomorrow worry about tomorrow.
As I ate, I came to a decision. I didn’t need the stress of working for Jill while failing to sell real estate. And I’d never set foot within ten miles of the Lotomaw Murder House again. As for Colin, his card would go in the trash with the rest of my real estate career. He remained a possible stalker, even a potential accident victim who could sue me for running him over. Better to forget that we ever met.
A shame, but I couldn’t deal with any more shit. I would buy a gun. And some mace and a stun-gun. And a big dog, one Pookie could live with. He’d be a dog that can fly and defeat bad guys, like Supergirl’s dog, Krypto. Or Doctor Who’s robotic pet, K-9.
There you go again with your stress fantasies, sure signs of a psychotic break.
I would take a waitress job. Sure, less money, but also a lot less stress and fewer hours. With the free time, I could finish community college. Doing real estate math showed me I could handle bookkeeping. It just meant learning the lingo and arcane accounting rules, not—
Something smashed through the kitchen window, shattering glass. Pookie jumped three feet in the air then scampered into the bedroom, an orange streak. He ran so low to the carpet, his tail dragged on the ground.
I froze on the couch, unable to move, scared into silence save for the insistent pounding of my heart.