Black Creek Crossing

Chapter 17

NGEL?” MYRA SAID. “ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?”

Angel nodded automatically, though she barely heard the question.

“You’re sure?” her mother fretted, eyeing her critically. “You look a little peaked. Do you feel like you have a temperature?”

“I’m fine, Mom,” Angel said, digging resolutely into the almost untouched bowl of fast-cooling oatmeal her mother had put in front of her five minutes ago. But despite her words, she wasn’t fine at all, and hadn’t been fine since she’d awakened. Almost as soon as she opened her eyes, the memories of last night came streaming back.

The creaking of the floorboards.

Her father coming into her room.

The touch of his hands on—

She’d shuddered as that memory came flooding back, tried to shut it out, and failed.

Then, as the rest of it came back, she decided that nothing had happened — it had been nothing more than a dream. It had to be, didn’t it? Her piggy bank hadn’t flown off the dresser all by itself, and she hadn’t seen anything in the closet. She couldn’t have smelled the acrid aroma of smoke, since there hadn’t been a fire in the fireplace last night, and the house certainly hadn’t caught on fire.

So if all that had been a dream, her father coming into the room must have been a dream too.

But then as she got out of bed it all changed.

First she saw the marks on the mirror — a drawing, scrawled smearily in what looked like blood.

There was a stick figure, like one she might have drawn in kindergarten, and a jagged line that almost looked like stairs. In fact, it almost looked like the stick figure was going down the stairs.

And under the jagged line was something else — something that looked like a small square.

For several long minutes Angel had stared at the strange marks, her heart racing. Where could they have come from? Then, as she started to get out of bed, she saw that it wasn’t just the mirror that bore the bloodred smears.

Her sheets were stained as well.

And the forefinger of her right hand! She instinctively put the finger to her mouth, as if she’d cut it. But instead of the almost coppery taste of blood, she felt something else on her tongue.

Lipstick!

She’d pulled her finger out of her mouth and stared at it for a moment. How…? Then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw something lying on the table by her bed.

The lipstick from the vampire kit — the same one she and Seth were experimenting with yesterday afternoon! Its cap was off and most of it was gone. She felt almost dizzy now as her eyes moved from the ruined lipstick to the marks on the mirror to the stains on her sheets and on her finger.

Had she done it herself? She must have! Then why didn’t she remember?

A wave of panic rose inside her, and she almost called out for her mother. But what would she say to her mother? She had no idea how the markings had gotten on the mirror. And what about everything else? The things that seemed like memories but must have been dreams?

The memories, or dreams, or whatever they were, began churning in her mind, mixing in with the images on the mirror.

She turned to the dresser. The piggy bank was exactly where it should have been.

But the teddy bear was no longer in its regular spot, leaning against the mirror, watching over the piggy bank. Now it was at the end of the dresser, lying facedown.

She was mired in confusion again, and all she wanted was for things to look right — to look the way they had last night, when she’d gone to bed.

She moved the teddy bear back to its regular place, then grabbed some Kleenex from the box on the dresser and began rubbing at the markings on the mirror.

A moment later the stick figure and the other markings had vanished, leaving only a reddish smudge.

A second handful of Kleenex wiped even that away.

Wadding up the tissues, Angel was about to throw them in the wastebasket when she changed her mind. Taking them into the bathroom, she flushed the whole mess down the toilet. Then she scrubbed her hands until every trace of lipstick was gone.

Back in her room, she stared at the lipstick-smeared sheets and pillowcase. A moment later it all vanished beneath the bedspread — this afternoon, when she got home from school, she would wash them. By the time she was dressed, everything was almost as it had been when she went to bed last night.

Except that everything had changed, and the minute she’d come downstairs, her mother knew that something was wrong. And now, even though she’d already said she was fine, her mother was giving her one of those penetrating looks that always made Angel feel as if she couldn’t hide anything, no matter how hard she tried.

Then her father came into the room, and Angel felt a terrible chill pass over her. There was a bandage on his left cheek, high up near the temple. Though she wanted to look away — look anywhere but at the bandage — she couldn’t tear her eyes from it. As the seconds ticked slowly away, her father’s eyes finally fixed on her, and when he spoke, his voice was as dark as his expression.

“What you looking at?”

“N-Nothing,” Angel stammered, at last managing to pull her eyes away from the bandage. But even as she looked back down at her oatmeal, she could feel her father’s eyes still fixed on her, and felt her skin begin to crawl as it had last night when she’d felt the presence of someone in her room and heard the floorboards creak as he came close to the bed.

Came close, and bent down, and—

“Gotta go.” Her father’s voice jerked Angel back into the present, and a second later she reflexively jerked away as his lips brushed her cheek. “What’s with you? Too old to kiss your daddy?”

Then he was gone, but it wasn’t until she heard the old Chevelle roar away that Angel finally tried to eat again.

Tried, and failed.

“Maybe you’d better not go to school today,” her mother fretted. “You look tired.”

“I’m okay,” Angel insisted. “I–I just had a lot of homework to do.”

Her mother frowned. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

Angel looked up at her mother, and once more her mother’s words from a few days ago echoed in her head: Your father loves you… he’d never do anything to hurt you. And he hadn’t hurt her, really. He’d scared her, and she was terrified of what might happen if he came into her room again, but he hadn’t really hurt her. And after he got cut, maybe he wouldn’t come back at all.

“Well?” her mother pressed. “What is it? You’d better tell me.”

Angel felt her resolve to say nothing about what had happened last night weaken. But even if she told her mother, how would she start? The answer rose as quickly as the question: “D-Did Dad tell you how he cut himself?”

Myra, caught off guard by the question, cocked her head. “What does that have to do with anything?” she asked.

“Did he?” Angel pressed.

“He cut himself shaving.” Now Myra lowered herself into the chair across from Angel. “What’s going on?” she asked. “Why are you so interested in a shaving cut?”

Suddenly, her fear and the exhaustion from the nearly sleepless night overwhelmed Angel, and the whole strange story — everything except the marks she’d found on the mirror this morning — came pouring out. She tried to make sense of it as she told it, but even as she spoke, she knew it sounded even stranger out loud than it had when she’d pieced it together this morning.

And when she saw her mother’s expression, she knew she’d made a mistake telling her anything at all.

“How dare you?” Myra Sullivan said, her voice hard. “Your father loves you, and takes care of you, and would never do anything to hurt you! And what are his thanks? To have you come to me with terrible stories? You must have been dreaming! How could you even make up such vile things?”

Angel’s mouth opened as if to say something, but before she could utter even a single word, Myra’s hand snaked across the table and slapped her hard across the cheek.

“Filth!” her mother shouted. “That’s all it is! Filth! And you will not speak it in my house! After school today you will go to church, and you will confess your sins to Father Mike! All of them!” Myra’s eyes narrowed to angry slits. “It’s that boy you had in the house yesterday, isn’t it? That’s really what this is about. Your guilty conscience!”

Seeing the fury in her mother’s eyes, Angel knew better than to argue. The house felt like it was closing in around her, and all she wanted was to escape, to get away both from the terrors of the night and her mother’s rage. Leaving her oatmeal half finished, she stood up. “I better hurry,” she said softly. “I’ll be late.”

“Yes,” Myra Sullivan said coldly. “You’d better hurry. And you’d better think twice before you tell me any more lies about your father!” As Angel picked up her backpack, Myra said, “Aren’t you going to give me a kiss?”

Angel hesitated, then gave her mother a quick peck on the cheek and fled from the house into the crisp sunshine of the fall morning.

Skirting around the house, she cut across the front yard and headed along the road toward town, but before she went around the curve that would cut the house off from her view, she turned to look back at it once more. In the bright morning light it looked just as it had the first time she’d seen it — a small white house with a peaked roof, nothing out of the ordinary.

And there was no sign at all of the black cat.

So her mother must be right — she must have dreamed it all.

But then she remembered the pictures Seth Baker had showed her yesterday, with flames billowing from her window in one of them, and something that looked like it might be the shadowed image of a face peering out of another.