Page 23 of Echo
While the blanket was singed, it wasn’t nearly as disintegrated as I would think yarn would be in a fire.
Yeah. Pearl was a fucking nut job. Unless her son did this. But why would either of them burn a blanket I hadn’t even seen in almost two decades.
If she felt the need to burn my things, why would she give me a house?
I would probably never get any answers to the list of questions that grew with each passing thought. It would be best to toss this far into the back of my mind and pretend it never happened.
My grandma’s voice came to mind. Whether it makes sense to us or not, people do everything for a reason.
Pearl was probably insane.
Mark had mentioned my grandmother the night before. My grandmother ran off a cliff after escaping the institution she’d been at. On paper, it looked like she killed herself, but she’d been running from monsters in her mind for two years before that. To her, what happened that night made sense.
To Pearl, this was probably prudent decision making.
What was she trying to accomplish?
I huffed and put the blanket over my arm. Grandma Ruby made it for me. Even if it resembled an overcooked pastry.
Ranger snarled and barked at the trees. My eyes came up fast enough to catch a large shadow, darting behind a tree.
“If you’re going to stalk me, the least you could do is get my ex out of my house,” I mumbled to myself and rolled my eyes. Then spoke up, “I have pepper spray, my dude. Bother someone else.”
A dog barked in the treeline, and it hit me. The sound connected the dots I’d been missing. It was the dog that came into my house the night before.
It had that same weird echo to it that turned my blood cold. Ranger picked up his barking, and I slowly backed up.
Don’t run, but don’t turn your back on them either,my dad’s voice filled my mind. I slowly stepped backward to create space. How did the dog get out of my house?
Ranger followed me, along with the heated gaze I was becoming intimately familiar with. There was a sense that the person was stalking me, like a fox would a rabbit.
Stay calm. Don’t show them any fear.
I kept a calm, steady pace as my heart beat loudly in my ears. Between that and my dog, I couldn’t hear any footsteps, no matter how hard I tried. I clenched my hands at my sides so whoever it was wouldn’t see them shaking.
The vague shape of a human kept weaving through the trees, but they never stayed visible long enough for me to make out any features. They were strange, as if an artist blurred the outline of their drawing. I’d seen something like this high on shrooms before.
That could actually explain everything. Maybe I’d stepped on something I shouldn’t have and spores had gotten in the air.
As much as I wanted to commit to that simple explanation, Ranger was still acting like I was under active attack.
Wait.
If spores affected me, they would affect him too. Maybe I wasn’t the only one tripping balls.
“Madison,” Mary Ellen yelled in the distance behind me. The way it carried, echoed, said she was a good distance away.
I whirled around to find the voice, only to find a tree I was about to run smack into. The hallucination unknowingly saved me from a bonk to the back of my head and probably an ugly tumble.
Don’t run. Never run.
“Madison.” This time the whisper came from where the figure was falling behind.
I’d never met Pearl before, but I’d heard her voice over the phone a thousand times. She’d call my grandma at least once a day, and they’d bicker about anything and everything. Anytime I mentioned that it seemed like they hated each other, Grandma would laugh and say Pearl was born disagreeable.
If Pearl stood before me, I’d never know it. But I recognized that voice. What I didn’t recognize was the disgusted contempt filling a single word.
My feet halted in their tracks as I tried to make sense of the situation. My stomach flipped and nausea threatened to make me evacuate my breakfast from the premises of my stomach.
