The Neighbor by London Clarke

Author:London Clarke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: London Clarke
Published: 2021-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

35

“Can I come over and talk to Hyo?” I try to keep the panic from my voice. “I’d really like to hear what she has to say about all of this.”

Linda laughs. “Why do you think I’m here, enjoying some time to myself this morning? No, she’s visiting her sister in Winchester. But she’ll be back in a few days for Thanksgiving.”

Linda soon heads home and leaves me in her wake, trying to keep my head above the waves of distress.

Afterward, I sit in the kitchen and watch Dawn place canned biscuits on a metal baking sheet.

“You know my father was an exorcist,” I say.

“What?” She raises her eyebrows. “No. I had no idea.”

I bob my head. “I saw him do it once.”

“That must have been...”

“Terrifying. Yes, it was. I don’t tell many people about it—about what he did. By the time I was in middle school, he’d quit the church altogether.” I drag my hand through the tangles in my hair. “My mother felt he had somehow ‘caught’ something when he was involved in the exorcisms. She said performing these rituals wore him down and eventually turned him into someone else. He began to exhibit reckless and unfaithful behavior. He couldn’t cope with the things he’d seen and heard.”

One of Dawn’s cats paws at her leg. She reaches into a cabinet behind her and takes down a bag of dry food. “That must have been hard on you.”

My gaze sinks to the soiled knees of my sweatpants. “I convinced myself that my father was a victim of mental illness. I convinced myself that these things didn’t exist—that all of the people he supposedly exorcised of demons were actually mentally ill.”

Dawn pours brown kibble into a shallow bowl and places it on the ground.

I rub my hand harder over my face. “Now, I’m not so sure.”

“You’re thinking about your house?”

I close my eyes. “I don’t know if I can go back to the house, Dawn.”

“You could spend the day with me. We’ll go Christmas shopping.” Dawn pours herself another cup of coffee and holds the pot toward me.

I hold up a hand. “No, thanks. I’m jittery enough.”

She replaces the pot and leans against the counter. “Are you going to call the police? About Steel?”

“And say what? My boyfriend lied to me, yelled at me, made me feel creepy? He engineered some sort of website and sent it to me?”

“What about the Frankensons?”

“All I have is that I saw the same cards with that URL in Tommy’s room. It’s not real evidence of anything.”

“Well, there’s cyberstalking.”

I shake my head. “Other than the fact that he had those cards, I don’t have any proof.”

Dawn pulls out a stool and sits. “Maybe this website is like, a thing, and we just don’t know about it.”

“Can’t be a good thing. But I mean, otherwise, Steel hasn’t done anything to me that I can prove or that would warrant an arrest or something. At least not yet. He just seems weird, unhinged. There’s a lot of creepy stuff in his house, objects, shadows.

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