Night Witch: Part V

A short story

Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | Part VII | Part VIII | Part IX | Part X

Photo by thomas shellberg on Unsplash

Night 7

That was how the insomnia started. She didn’t get to bed the night after she found Dan. Couldn’t, even if she had wanted to. Police and a small team of investigators mulled around the property. Pictures had to be taken. She was interviewed at length by a young officer with blonde hair and earnest, gentle eyes. He had to keep saying her name. Had to keep bringing her back. Back. Back from what?

“June?” 

There he was again. Eyes steady and pulling at hers. 

“I’m sorry. What was the question?”

“What time did you make it back from the woods?”

“Oh. Ummm—three o’clock?”

“And how did you know that?”

She could feel the hot sun on her face as she climbed the hill. The weight of the loppers and shovel in her hand. The yellow gloves, hanging and blackened. The sound of flies. So many.

“June?”

“I guess I don’t know exactly. But—“

She thought about it for a second and then finished.

“The sun. The sun is how I know it was mid afternoon.”

He smiled, then glanced down and jotted something, short and sweet.

“Have you seen anything around the property? Anything that could have done this?”

Her head had been turned to the side, eyes on the porch, following the waving lines in the wood when he asked her. She looked up at him and her eyes met his.

“What?”

“Animals. Maybe you heard something at night?”

Her hands could feel the coarse black fur. Smell the stench of neglect. The cool of the chains as she felt for a break. And then the steady rise and fall of the dog’s ribcage as her right hand rested on its’ spine and they fell asleep.

“No. Nothing.”

The lie came easy. She stared at him unblinking, waiting for him to call her on it. For a moment his eyes lingered. She thought they were searching hers. Looking for something there. But then he looked down and wrote a few more words.

“Well, if you think of anything call me.”

He handed her a card. She smiled a little and nodded. He stood up and turned to walk to his squad car.

“Sir?”

That turned him back to face her. His eyebrows were raised, his golden brown eyes alert and prepared to answer anything, anything at all.

“When can I go back inside?”

“After the cleanup crew is done.”

When she was alone again she thought about that. The cleanup crew. A team that specialized in sopping up blood and guts from your floor, brains from your popcorn ceiling. Anything that made its way out of a body and onto your walls and wood paneling and kitchen appliances, they cleaned it. 

The smell inside was sickening. Harsh chemicals stung her nose when she breathed. And there was something underneath it, coppery and warm—

(Blood.)

—that she couldn’t quite contend with. Not without the first night’s nausea returning. They had asked her if she had any place to go. Any family? Any friends? She thought about her parents. Their tired eyes grown tireder after the troubles she had put them through in the last five years. That was all the family she had, and it was a no. 

Maria was the closest thing she had to a friend. But she wasn’t really a friend at all. She was her sponsor, and she lived in tight quarters. A one bedroom apartment with two teenaged boys in the middle of town. Her sons, Cliff and Antonio, shared the only room. Maria slept on the couch. She knew that if she called, Maria would invite her to stay. Might even sleep on the floor and give her the pullout. No, she decided. She couldn’t do that to her.

“I’ll be fine.”

The officer eyed her a little too closely. She caught a slight glance up and down her body before his eyes flashed from predatory back to sympathetic. 

“Make sure you lock up tight. Whatever it was, it’s probably rabid, and it’s still out there. You don’t want it coming back for its kill tonight.” He smiled.

She knew she should be scared after what happened here. Nearly right here in the entryway where she stood. But she wasn’t. The police thought it was a predator of some kind. Maybe a group of them. They had found scratch marks on the porch, but not enough to indicate exactly what it was. 

“We’ll be able to tell more after the autopsy,” the nice officer with the eyes had said. “Look at the bite marks. See if we can tell what got him.”

Animal control was coming in the morning. Light would break in three, maybe four hours. They would set traps and bring search dogs. If they found the animal, they would sedate it. 

“We check the stomach contents to ensure we get the right one.”

“You mean—,” she couldn’t quite bring herself to say it. 

He put a hand on her forearm. It lingered for a moment before he said, “If it’s the right animal, we’ll know,” and then he lifted it again.

She closed up after they left, followed instructions to sit tight until help came in the morning. Her plan was to go upstairs and take a shower. Get clean and hit the hay. Her mother’s voice rang out from a thousand humid summers spent at their family cabin by the lake deep in the Michigan woods. 

When she got to the staircase she stopped. The smell was strongest there. The wood stain had lifted in places where the chemicals had been dumped too liberally. She could trace the outline of Dan from stair to stair. It was nothing that the casual observer would notice, not the obvious chalk outline of a body like at a crime scene. But enough for her to relive finding him there, her shoes sticky with his blood, the torn gore sticking out of his clothes. And the worst, echoing thought.

You could have saved him.

The wounds he had were mortal. His arm and leg had been mauled and ripped apart. He had crawled into the house to escape. He probably would have died even if she had been home. But she could have called 911. Maybe they would have made it out in time. He might have lived. 

Unless it followed him in here. Finished him off.

If it could have, it would have. She knew that. The question was, why didn’t it? She turned her eyes to the front door, white with four panels and a sliver of rectangle patterned in rosy and clear stained glass for a window. The porch light was on. The yellow of it illuminated the glass. Through it, June could make out the flit, flitting of a fly. Just one. It lifted, then landed. And before she thought it, buzzing echoed in her thoughts.

It can’t get in.

Not because the door was closed. After all, it hadn’t been.