October's Gone by Sean Platt & David W. Wright

Author:Sean Platt & David W. Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sterling & Stone

Nine

October 16, 2011 …

Liz had been alone for hours.

She was still crawling out of her skin with worry, but no longer willing to lie around doing nothing.

Junior — Andy! — had spent so much time afraid of his own shadow that she could scarcely believe he was out there on his own right now. The first hour felt especially excruciating since Liz expected the door to swing open and her son to return at any moment. He would probably be crying, confessing his fear, and making Mommy promise that she’d never ever leave his side, no matter what.

The second hour felt even slower as her softer worries darkened into something more horrific. Strobing images of the worst things that could have happened, starting with a simple fall that sent Junior spilling down an embankment into the river where he might drown, almost for sure. Or maybe he fell and wound up shooting himself in the head with the rifle. She wasn’t sure if that was even possible, but she couldn’t rule it out. She never should’ve let him take the gun.

The short films in her mind kept getting increasingly awful until Liz was finally seeing her son defiled and dismembered. She found herself whimpering on the couch, imagining his empty eye sockets crawling with maggots, just like in the nightmare she woke to a couple of mornings ago when all of this started.

Liz struggled to wrangle her out-of-control imagination to something resembling normality.

Like mother, like son.

Pondering Junior’s imagination made her consider how insistent he’d been about protecting his sketchbook. Not just barring his current work from her eyes, he’d made sure to hide it before leaving. Liz wondered what it was he didn’t want her to see, then decided she needed to see whatever it was more than she needed anything else in the world right now.

She thought back to all of those terrifying drawings Mr. Richter had shown her and Anderson in his office two years ago. The ones she had spent several months ruminating over before finally telling herself that they weren’t a big deal; Junior was just a child with an overactive imagination working to figure out the world using the darkest crayons in his box. With tremendous effort, she forgot the details, but now they kept bubbling up to the surface as she lay with her knee screaming on the couch.

Waxy reminders flashed through her mind.

A black rainbow, their abandoned home, and an unforgiving tornado. Skyscrapers and bodies and monsters made of liquid shadow. Most horrifying, Liz suddenly remembered Junior’s drawing of a cabin in the woods and that morbid trio of headstones like crooked teeth in front of it.

Was that supposed to be this cabin?

No. That was impossible.

Her son couldn’t see the future.

And if he could, then what about that last picture of the planet on fire?

She needed to find his sketchbook.

But it wasn’t on the coffee table, or anywhere in the living room. That meant she would need to limp around the cabin until she figured out where he’d hid it.

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