Chapter Nineteen – Molly

 

Heidi’s office in the back corner of the house had the most windows per room in the house, with the least amount of furniture or shade. It also had the most electric sockets, which was perfect for the six lamps I’d managed to find from around the house and cram in there on every available surface. They seemed to loom like nosy neighbors in the background, their exposed light bulbs like the heads of nosy neighbors as they looked over my shoulder at the computer screen.

“Capcaun,” I whispered around my thumbnail as I read through the clickbait article I’d found when I searched for shadow dogs and gold coins. My foot wouldn’t stop twitching, and my eyes just scanned through article after article. “Means ‘dog-head’ in Romanian. Okay. Steals young girls and women in faerie tales, can only be defeated by Fat Fruomo, or the Romanian version of Prince Charming. Ogre? Didn’t seem very ogrish, but all right.”

I leaned back in the chair, my arms crossed. Fruomo? The word was like a bell ringing in my head. Wasn’t that the password they’d used the night before? I pushed my hair back behind my ears and let out a shaky breath. Did that mean these people were in on it, too? Was there some kind of ring of killers who were related to that thing?

“Jesus Christ. Luke’s never going to believe this shit. If I tell him, he’ll be the one to commit me. I’ve gotta come up with something, here, or he’s going to think I’m insane.”

Too late. From out front came the sound of a car pulling in from the road. Gears shifted from drive to park, and the engine turned off.

I swallowed hard as I stood up from the desk, my eyes fixated on the wall as if I had Superman’s X-ray vision and could see straight through to the front door where Luke was about to knock. It was okay. Assuming it was Luke, and not some door-to-door salesperson or something, I’d just open the door as soon as he got there, chat him up, explain that I needed him to look at something. And then we could go from there.

Easy.

I went to smooth out the front of my clothes, and nearly died as I realized I was wearing my still slightly damp swimsuit. I’d been so freaked out, and so intent on getting safe, I hadn’t bothered changing into normal clothes. “Shit,” I groaned as the blood drained from my face.

Three knocks on the front door. “Molly? It’s Luke!”

“Just a second,” I called as I ran out of the office and into my bedroom. Door still open, I peeled off my swimsuit like a snake molting, and tossed it aside as I scrambled for fresh clothes. I shivered as the cold air hit my damp, clammy skin. I found fresh panties in my nightstand and pulled them on, along with an oversized shirt from a now defunct boy band I’d liked in middle school.

I shimmied into my jeans from earlier and, with my hair still a rat’s nest, went out to answer the door. I consciously shielded my eyes from my and Heidi’s wreck of a living room as I passed through, even though I’d been the one to pull the couches and chairs away from the walls to expose the lamps’ power cords.

I checked through the peephole, and was more than satisfied to see Luke’s broad back. The way the shirt hung off him was perfect as he stood there with his hands on his hips, surveying the neighborhood’s lengthening shadows for any kind of threat. Or maybe just out of boredom. My heart leapt a little as I realized he’d actually come.

After a second or two of my open-mouthed staring, his back stiffened a little, and I had the sudden sense that he’d somehow detected me spying on him. He glanced back over his shoulder at the door, his face stony.

I pulled back from the eyehole, ran my fingers through my hair really quickly to try and make it not quite a nightmare, then went to open the door. “Hey,” I said, pulling it open all the way for him, “glad you could come.”

“Yeah,” he said, stepping inside. He looked like he was about to continue, but he paused as he took in the general disrepair of the place before looking back at me, his brow furrowed. “Redecorating?”

“Well, you know…” I said, trailing off when I didn’t really have any kind of explanation.

“You have it?” he asked, taking a few steps deeper into the house, his eyes still searching, his nose flaring a little.

I didn’t reply.

“The coin, Molly?”

“Oh. Right.” I stepped past him and went into the small kitchen. I’d left the coin on the kitchen counter, atop a folded dishrag. “Sorry, it’s in here.”

He followed after me. “Did you go swimming earlier, or something?”

“Yeah,” I said, a little color rising to my cheeks. “ Hoped it would clear my head. How’d you know?”

“Chlorine,” he said, turning his attention to the strange golden coin sitting on the counter. He leaned down over it on his elbow as he patted his pocket, as if he were searching for his keys or phone. “Still smell it on you.”

“Better than it being because of my messy hair, I guess.”

He sniffed again, frowning as he glanced from the coin to me.  “Where’d you find it? Did I miss it in her closet or something? Because I’m positive it wasn’t in there before. It couldn’t have been.”

I bit my lower lip and stepped back away from him, till my bottom hit the cabinet behind me. “Not exactly, no.”

He turned around and leaned back against the counter, his arms crossed as he looked me over.

Unable to meet his eyes, I fidgeted with the knuckles of my ringless fingers, which hadn’t even had a chance to prune up while I’d been in the pool, earlier. “I found it…” I began, then stopped, clearing my throat.

“Molly?” Luke asked, his voice the most tender I’d heard since I met him. “What’s wrong? Where’d you find the coin?”

“I found it…” I trailed off again as I locked eyes with him and returned his piercing gaze. The concern in his eyes. Something inside me, like some kind of emotional dam holding back my horror at what had happened outside, broke. It was like I’d been numb since this morning, and now it all was coming in a rush, with my eyes squeezed tightly and my tears flowing down my cheeks, my body racked with sobs as I just held myself more tightly.

Luke’s arms were around me, pulling me into his broad chest, his hands on my back trying to soothe away the pain.

I sobbed more loudly, burying my face in the front of his shirt as he held me close. My arms came up, wrapping around his back, and I clung to him like the only rock on a stormy coast as I cried into him.

“Molly,” he said, soothing the back of my chlorine-coated hair, “it’s okay. What happened? You can tell me. Just tell me.”

I thought of the dog-faced shadow thing I’d seen. Thought about how quickly it had just disappeared. About whether I actually had been the one to do the damage. That maybe it was something broken inside of me, and not just with the outside world. That I was the one wrong and at fault.

“Molly,” he whispered again. “Tell me where you found it, okay? Let me go catch this bastard.”

I cried more loudly. “How?” I sobbed. “You can’t hurt that thing.”

He pulled me back to his chest, his rough and callused hand returning to my hair. “Thing?” he asked. “What are you talking about?”

I pushed away from him, tears streaming down my face as I shook my head. “No, Luke. You can’t do anything to it.” I tried to wipe the tears from my eyes, but it was like trying to stop a river with a bucket. The more I wiped away, the more there were.

He grabbed me by the upper arms, squeezed lightly. “Molly,” he said, as he got level with me and locked eyes, “what is it? What did you see? Did he come here?”

I tried to shake my head at first, but that head shake turned into a reluctant nod, followed by, “I don’t know, okay? I just saw something.”

“A man…?” he asked, trailing off. His face didn’t get the perplexed look I’d been expecting. Instead, there was fear. Not the fear of the unknown, either, but fear for me. “Or something?”

“S-s-something,” I said, my tears beginning to dry, but my nose still full and stuffy. Did he believe me? Was he just taking me at my word?

He squeezed my arms. “Show me. Now.”

I nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, sure.”

He reached back behind him, scooping up the golden coin in one deft gesture, and I took him out of the kitchen and to the back door. We stopped in front of the door, and a sudden dread filled me. What if he was believing me on just my word, but I was actually wrong? That I’d been fantasizing about the porch the whole time? That it had all been just a dream?

But, then how could I explain the gold coin riding around in Luke’s pocket? The gold coin he’d seen just as clearly as I had, was able to touch and feel and sense the same as I could?

Then reality came crashing down like an imploded building.

This might actually be real. This might be more than just a sunstroke-induced fever dream. That thing that had been on the porch, that I’d run off with just the reflection of my phone, was really real. A creature right off the pages of some Romanian folk tale.

I suddenly didn’t know which was worse.

Luke’s hand enveloped my own, the rugged warmth of his hands swallowing mine in one bite. “Out here?” he asked, his voice barely more than a rasp.

“Yeah,” I whispered right back. “Out there.”

Luke didn’t reply. Didn’t say a word. Wrapped in stony silence like a cloak, he reached out and unlocked the door, pulled it open.

He whistled low.

The destruction from earlier was still there, with one of the fence posts snapped like a twig, and the other adorned with a deep gash. The Pavestone stained black, pitted and defiled with the thing’s saliva. The furniture tossed aside like a car had come barreling in, or a one-ton baby had thrown a fit. Beyond the porch, the afternoon shadows had lengthened considerably as the sun continued to dip in the east. Growing up back home in Washington, I’d always joked about how it was “going out to sea.” Even in Arizona, I guess it still wasn’t far from the truth; it just had to go through California first.

“You see it too, right?” I whispered as he squeezed my hand again.

He nodded. “Of course. Did you? See it, I mean?”

I just squeezed his hand, trying to pull him back as he began to go outside to investigate. “No, Luke,” I said, a little bit of a whine creeping into my voice. “No, you can’t.”

He didn’t even look back, just released my hand. “I’m a professional, okay? I know what I’m doing.”

I reached out to him, but he was already beyond my hands. “Luke, no! This isn’t just some guy you can find for the police. This isn’t a normal killer. This is some kind of, of, of, thing!”

He crouched down next to the black spot on the porch. “I know, Molly. I know.”

Wait. He what?