They dont come home anym.., p.1
They Don't Come Home Anymore, page 1
They Don’t Come Home Anymore
T.E. Grau
Contents
About the Author
Praise for T.E. Grau
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Also From This Is Horror
About the Author
T.E. Grau is an author of horror, crime, and dark fiction whose work has been featured in dozens of anthologies, magazines, literary journals, and audio platforms. His debut book of short stories, The Nameless Dark: A Collection was nominated for a 2015 Shirley Jackson Award for Single-Author Collection, and ranks as the bestselling book published by Lethe Press in both 2015 and 2016. Grau lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter, and is currently working on his second collection and his first novel.
@TedEGrau
www.tegrau.com
A This Is Horror Publication www.ThisIsHorror.co.uk
ISBN: 978-1-910471-04-3
Copyright © T.E. Grau 2016
All rights reserved
The right of T.E. Grau to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2016 by This Is Horror
Editor-in-Chief: Michael David Wilson
Interior Design and Layout: Pye Parr
Cover Art: Candice Tripp
Front Cover Design: Ives Hovanessian
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owners.
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Praise for T.E. Grau
Major new voices don’t come along often. This is one.
MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH, author of EVERYTHING YOU NEED
T.E. Grau has that special touch that leaves part of a reader trapped inside his tales, and that’s always a sign that others should proceed, wide-eyed, into these stories. For me, he’s right up there with the best new generation of horror writers …
ADAM NEVILL, author of LOST GIRL
T.E. Grau’s writing is dynamic and vital and reinforces the notion that the 2000s and 2010s are a high watermark in the tradition of horror and the weird.
LAIRD BARRON, author of SWIFT TO CHASE
T.E. Grau’s odd, edgy stories shine a new light into the dark corners of human experience. These stories shine with smart prose, clever—often quirky—insights, and enough weirdness to make any genre fan froth at the mouth with glee.
GARY MCMAHON, author of THE CONCRETE GROVE
Some authors become contemporary favorites of mine on the merits of only a story or two. Such was the case with T.E. Grau … Even as a relative newcomer, he’s writing stories that can stand tall alongside those of much more established writers of modern weird fiction.
JEFFREY THOMAS, author of PUNKTOWN
The shadows evoked by T.E. Grau have teeth, and they shall endure.
RICHARD GAVIN, author of SYLVAN DREAD
For Ivy
My Eternal, My Home
“A cage went in search of a bird.”—Franz Kafka, The Third Notebook, November 6, 1917
1
Hettie stood in the doorway, unable to cross the threshold. The sounds coming from within were strange, too coldly official. A low register beep. The whisk of a respirator. There was a smell in the room, something that you would never associate with a seventeen-year-old girl. Not death itself, but what waits for the body afterward.
The room looked massive and the bed small. The girl on the bed smaller still. She was tiny by this point, a good six months into her treatment. A papery husk shoved under a mound of expensive blankets brought from an expensive home. That midnight waterfall of black hair was gone, replaced by mouse brown wisps, like dirty cobwebs caught on the textured white fabric. The sickness had pulled the color right out of it. Hettie couldn’t see her face, as the girl’s head was turned away from the door. She might have been looking out the window when she fell asleep, into the night sky or the pink glow of magic hour, but a black satin sheet had been tacked up over the window some time ago. Even with its high thread count, it still looked like a cheesy theatre curtain. The girl in the bed obviously didn’t want to see what was happening on stage. Or maybe it was to keep out those who had gathered in the parking lot from the first day the news got out. No one was standing out there tonight.
Hettie looked up and down the hallway, wondering where everyone was, even at this hour, considering the status of the girl wasting away inside this room. That she was left alone, even for a minute, was shocking. Outrageous, even. Hettie would never have abandoned her bedside, were she invited in to stand vigil. She would have moved her life into this lifeless room, holding the girl’s hand and guarding against anything and anyone who came for her. Even death itself. She would have brought flowers—hydrangeas, most likely, white and fluffy like snow cones—and books to read aloud. She would sing to the girl buried under the blankets, and wait for her eyes to open and recognition to come. They would be together, breathing the same sanitized air, accustomed then to the other odors just underneath, dreaming as one when sleep came for both.
But the unclaimed parts of the hospital remained empty and quiet. It was late, slipping toward early morning, and no one stirred in room or corridor, aside from the woman moaning several doors down, her voice rising and falling in that same steady rhythm of the heart monitor and respirator flanking the girl in the bed. It was almost musical. She had continued this refrain for almost an hour, which was as long as Hettie had been standing in the doorway, watching the rise and fall of those blankets, her mind sketching out what was beneath them, colored in by years of memory and a thousand study hall fantasies. She listened to the unbroken meter of the machines keeping Avery Valancourt alive.
Just walk into the room. Go to her. It’s so simple. What are you afraid of? The silence between the mechanical sounds felt suffocating, aggressively condescending, daring her to step up and get knocked down. Hettie knew that if she moved she’d break the spell, and something terrible would happen.
Without a ding, an elevator door rumbled open somewhere on the same floor. It was impossible to tell from which direction the sound came. She couldn’t hear the footsteps but was certain they were there, heading in her direction. The girl had been left alone too long, and now someone was coming. Hettie had to make her move. Now or never. She gathered her strength, raised her foot, and stepped into the room.
2
It happened during fifth period AP physics. As with all of Hettie’s classes—except for trigonometry, oddly enough—Avery wasn’t in this class, and she would have already checked out of scholastic endeavors for the day. In the fall and winter, she would have been at cheerleading practice. Or show choir if it was spring. But she dropped out of both. She dropped out of everything, showing up each morning later and later, but still arriving, to make her appearance. Not for social reasons, it turned out, but to keep the school from getting her mother involved in the rapidly growing and difficult to conceal situation in which she found herself. Avery’s father was contacted via e-mail, as he didn’t live in town anymore, staying present in his only daughter’s life through sizable “school supply” checks, and the occasional Skype session when he was drunk and feeling paternal guilt.
Avery’s near complete withdrawal from the school that she once ruled with a disinterested hand sent her fiefdom into a spiral of anxious confusion, throwing the entire construct off-kilter. It was as if the brightest bulb of a neon store sign had gone out, leaving the whole text unreadable, the establishment meaningless and therefore irrelevant to passers-by. School dances were poorly attended. Fights broke out amongst long-standing friends. The janitor quit. Even the football team stumbled, choking away an easy third-quarter lead in the state play-offs to a far outmatched foe. The starting middle linebacker didn’t bother to show up for the game. He had dated Avery for two weeks through love notes in seventh grade.
The administration was finally forced to take action, even at the risk of social impropriety. A report sent to the Valancourt home from the school guidance counselor expressed that Avery was “becoming distant” in her interactions with her friends and teachers, and that she seemed “disconnected” from her usual social and civic activities which had been so carefully curated from an early age to give her maximum exposure in the present, and every benefit later in life. The abandonment of this life plan was baffling to the faculty, and was the topic of cheap coffee conversation not just in the teachers’ lounge, but across many dinner tables throughout town.
The kids in the school weren’t so circumspect in their appraisal
But Hettie didn’t care about any of these things. Rumors. The changes. All she knew was that Avery had spoken to her, and what she said had changed Hettie’s life.
“You going to tell on me?”
Avery phrased the words as a weary question, but it came across more like a dare. Or maybe a secret pact stated with a guarantee of complicity.
Hettie stood bolt upright, trying to process the scene in which she now found herself while Avery smoked a cigarette on the one toilet in The Weeds. This was the name given to the furthest flung bathroom in the school, squeezed between the boiler room and the back emergency exit as if built in a hurry to satisfy some antiquated building code regulating the secret ratio of student enrollment and corresponding toilets. The filthy interior, scrawled with bootleg gang slogans, poorly rendered caricatures of genitals captioned with specific student names, and every wall polka-dotted with cigarette burns and fist-size dents, was hidden away from the cleanliness of the school at large by a nondescript door. Outside of smokers and amateur graffiti artists, it was never used by any God- or microbe-fearing student or teacher or sentient biped other than Hettie, who had ‘privacy issues’ when she needed to perform certain necessities in the bathroom, and so always slunk her way to The Weeds. She had tried to train her insides to only have to go in the morning or at night in the safe confines of her home, and it usually worked. But today it happened in physics, and was a situation that couldn’t wait two more hours, so she asked for a hall pass and headed out past the lockers, the vending machines and the gym, and made her way to The Weeds, looking behind her the whole way. No one showed any interest in where she was going. No one ever did.
When she arrived at the door, she didn’t even think to knock, which is how she discovered Avery Valancourt sitting on the toilet, legs sprawled out in front of her, not bent and dainty and balanced on tiptoes like one would imagine. Her cigarette was mostly gone, but Hettie could tell by the filter that it was one of those long ones. The sort of cigarette that you smoke when you really enjoy smoking.
Avery just sat there, waiting for Hettie to answer her question that really wasn’t one. This was the first Hettie had looked straight at her since they were kids, without Avery talking to a friend, smiling at a hallway compliment or rolling her eyes to the ceiling. Even in her present state of physical disrepair, her features had bloomed somehow. Were more alive and luscious, like a show rose at the very peak of maturity, moments before it begins to lose its first petal. Under all that velvet, a certain hardness had crept around her eyes, but that didn’t detract from her unusual beauty. If anything, it enhanced it. Made it more mature and dangerous to the bland bowls of lukewarm oatmeal that surrounded her every day. Avery Valancourt didn’t seem like she was from this town, or even this part of the world. But through a series of unforeseen events and the existence of a condemned bathroom, she now sat low in front of Hettie, $300 jeans pulled down to her ankles, and waited for Hettie to answer her question and enter into a private confidence. She even arched an eyebrow, like a Disney villain.
Hettie felt her feet turning in. Her knees buckling. She didn’t know if it was because she had to go to the bathroom, or because she felt like she would fall over at any moment.
“N-n-no. Of course not,” Hettie stammered, her mouth suddenly very dry. There was no sink in The Weeds, which was another one of its repellent charms.
“Yeah, right,” Avery said, and took a deep drag off her cigarette, letting the smoke leak slowly out of her nose like a dragon without any breath left in its body. Hettie had never seen anything so amazing. “You’re all a bunch of fucking hens.”
“I’d never,” Hettie said, and meant it with every fiber of her being, unconsciously moving forward a step to emphasize her vow. “Never ever.”
Avery looked at Hettie for a long time, her perfectly shaped eyes expressionless, bouncing back the deep emotion flushing Hettie’s cheeks. She blinked several times, as if trying to unstick a microfiche scan back though the pictures of her mind, looking for a visual match to this unremarkable girl standing in front of her, that had shared the same grade and succession of bigger and better funded schools with her for the last eleven years but never registered an imprint on her personal lifetime yearbook.
Avery lowered her eyes, rubbing the front of her forehead with her fingertips. “You might be the only friend I’ve got.”
A thunderclap went off in Hettie’s brain, flattening everything behind. That was it. That was all Hettie needed to hear for the rest of her life. Any future words that supposedly had meaning, any congratulations, loving sentiments, any marriage proposals, job offers, or lottery winnings, would pale in comparison to those eight words. Nine, if you count “I’ve” as “I have,” which Hettie most certainly did not. People didn’t talk that way. Avery most certainly didn’t talk that way, especially when she was talking to Hettie, which is exactly what she did that afternoon at 2:16 in The Weeds, naming her as a friend. And not just any friend, but her one and only.
Fifteen minutes later, Avery collapsed in the parking lot, and was rushed to the hospital, nearly dying on the way. Some say she did die en route and was saved by EMT heroism, but that could have been just another rumor. Death always makes the best stories.
3
Find a safe place to die, the man with the glasses had said. And make sure it is away from the people and away from the sky.
Hettie recalled that the man didn’t use contractions, speaking as if he had learned English from precisely translated American television that didn’t exist. Or maybe reading too many bad novels written by frustrated academics who knew the language but not how to use it, filling self-pubbed books from cover to cover with stilted dialogue that had no music. This is the time of the Becoming. You only have a few hours left.
Dressed in an expensive party dress that bunched and gaped in all the wrong places, Hettie slowly dragged the high heels chewing up her feet deeper into the city’s industrial zone, heading for the canals. She needed to get into the sewer system and wasn’t strong enough to lift the cast iron manhole covers. She was hoping to find a missing one on her way, imagining herself scuttling down into the cool darkness like a shiny green beetle, but apparently the scrap metal thieves in this part of town were too lazy. Perhaps they were all dying like Hettie was and couldn’t spare the effort.
She clutched a red backpack to her chest like a floatation device as she pitched and staggered on the brutal heels, trying to stay on the sidewalk and not spill out into the empty streets that ran like mercury moats, eager to swallow an outlander. Boarded-up store fronts, machine shops, and small factory spaces that once made things that this country couldn’t remember, crowded in over the gum-spotted pavement. Faded signs. Corner diners that fueled a different era chased out of the American Dream by torch-bearing misers willing to trade the future of the United States for two dollar socks and ten thousand dollar automobiles. Cheap graffiti that was as bored as it was crude covered everything. All going through the motions of workaday degeneration. Every unguarded pane of glass was broken, leaving blackshot eyes staring at the teenage girl struggling on the cement in her stolen commencement dress, walking like a toddler that just discovered its legs, or more rightly, a person that was very old, and shrugging off the use of every limb. She had to get deeper into the city, to the edge, where she could hide her body.
