Page 33 of Night Falls on Predicament Avenue
“Maybe now that she’s an adult, she needs you to be her father—not protecting her from the truth but trusting her with it instead.”
Sebastian chuckled. “Sometimes findin’ out the truth is too painful. It’s easier to figure out how to get by an’ pretend the past doesn’t haunt you.”
Norah didn’t answer. She couldn’t. She understood Sebastian’s point all too well.
Feeling chilled, Norah rolled over, tugging her blanket higher around her neck, unwilling to open her eyes to the night that enveloped her bedroom.
After a quiet drive back to Predicament Avenue, she had parted ways with Sebastian and retreated to her room on the first floor. For the next hour, she could hear him pacing the floor of his bedroom on the upper level. Murmurs through the vents told her he’d chatted with Harper for a bit.
By early evening the sky had grown dark, and the sounds from her upstairs guests stilled. The entryway clock chimed nine and then ten, at which time she must have drifted off to sleep. Now she’d been awakened by the cold pinpricks on her skin as though it were winter, and she’d failed to turn on the heat.
Norah’s head felt weighted down, and she allowed it to sink deeper into her pillow. She drew a shaky breath, pulling in her knees and curling into a ball beneath her down comforter. Her mind raced to unravel the confusion that swirled like a fog. She’d been dreaming. Hadn’t she? Of a dark opening in a forest. A dirt path that wound its way into the bowels of the woods. Clods of mud were kicked up along the trail, and there was a tree that had fallen during a storm and crashed across the pathway, leaving a trunk that had rotted with age, its leafless branches like scraggly arms reaching out to capture anyone who tried to cross over it. She had been hiking along the trail, squinting into the blue-black depths of the woods. Listening. Always listening.
Norah.
The whisper was a chilling reminder that she wasn’t alone. Was never alone. In her dream she had stopped, her shoes sinking into the earth, the trail turning mucky and wet. Likeswampland rising to drown the earth, and yet it wasn’t sticky and humid, but cold. So cold. Like the winter when raindrops became icicles, and the air suffocated a person with the chill of its breath.
Norah squeezed her eyes shut against the memory of the nightmare. The dirt path. The woods. She’d seen them before. The muddy pools of slimy clay earth, the chilling sensations that hugged with a violence she wrestled against, even now as she was gaining awareness.
She could hear the song of a lone bird. A high-pitched musical string of chirps. It broke through the silence of her iridescent thoughts. Insistent. Pleasant and yet out of place. The woods pulled away from Norah, growing black, the opening in the forest narrowing.
The bird continued to chirp and then there was a clinking sound, like a lid snapping shut. The bird was silenced, as if someone had reached out and snapped its feathered neck.
Norah’s eyes fluttered open. Her bedroom was completely silent, shrouded in vampire black, the space a dark cave of isolating outlines. The walls, the wardrobe—she could barely make out its form. Norah lay in her bed, shivering, unable to move. Stiff like a corpse, her breathing was the only sound that drifted to her ears.
In.
Out.
In.
Out.
And yet she wasn’t alone. Norah could sense it.Feelit.
A click.
And then ... the bird began to chirrup once more. A lone shrill whistling breaking through the night.
Norah’s body tensed, her calves so tight that she felt the onslaught of a leg cramp.
Whistling. A bird flitting among the trees on a summer day.Only it had to be past midnight. She was in bed at 322 Predicament Avenue. The only bird in her room was the—
The birdsong was shuttered, once again by a metal clap.
“Shhh.” The whisper dissipated as the shadow of a woman drifted past Norah’s bed and disappeared through the open crack in her bedroom door. A door that had been firmly shut when Norah had gone to bed.
And then, in the gutting silence, a single chirp, like a bird gargling for its last note before death made sure the poor bird lost its song forever.
12
SHEHADN’TMEANTTOSCREAM, hadn’t meant to awaken the house. But now Harper wrapped arms around Norah as she sat on the mattress next to Norah. Harper’s oversized red hoodie fell to her knees, which were clad in black leggings. She sat cross-legged while Norah sat on the edge of the bed, her feet pressing against the bed frame. She was too afraid to put her feet on the wood floor. Like a child, Norah was terrified that skeletal hands with decomposing skin and black fingernails would slide from beneath the bed and grab on to her ankles.
No. Her feet would stay wedged against the bed frame.
A shiver rattled through her, and she felt Harper’s arms tighten. Harper looked up at Sebastian, who strode across the room to peer out the window.
“Dad, she’s trembling.” Harper’s observation met Norah’s ears.
