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If you hear your name called in the woods at night, no you didn ’t.
Once again, Levi finds himself ignoring the first lesson his mama ever tried to teach him.
He’s got light footsteps despite the heavy pack on his back, but even so, the woods are so silent he feels noisy as Sasquatch (the hairy bastard’s like a bull in a china shop, but he makes a mean BBQ). Dry pine needles, dead leaves, and twigs crumble under Levi’s boots. The frogs and crickets are silent. Those things never shut up, save for when something’s there that doesn’t belong.
And these woods run in Levi’s Ackerman blood, so it sure ain’t him who don’t belong here.
“Levi.”
The whisper slips through the darkened trees, light as mist, far away and close up at once. The hairs on the back of his neck prickle cold. Levi hoists up his pack and walks faster.
“Levi.”
His pants snag on a bramble. Then his sock. Then a bramble reaches out and brushes the back of his hand that grips a machete.
Moonlit silver slices up in an arc, severing the bramble in two, and the woods cry out.
“C’mon, that didn’t hurt.”
Levi uses the machete to push a small tree branch out of his path.
“You surprised me,” the woods reply, warm in his ear.
“What d’you want?” He catches a whiff of woodsmoke. “I’m almost home.”
“You were bleeding.”
Levi tsks. “You know I hate it when you do that.”
“A dog cannot help but follow its nose.”
“Last I checked, you ain’t no dog.” Levi hears the crick before he sees it, that’s how quiet the woods are. As he kneels beside it to clean off his machete from this evening’s ventures, he says, “It was barely a scratch. You should’ve seen the other guy.”
Ghostly lips brush the back of Levi’s neck.
“Did you dispatch it?”
“’Course I did.”
A low, pleased smile moves against Levi’s skin. Levi dries his machete and sheathes it as he stands.
“You’re bein’ awful affectionate. Miss me?”
“Always.”
“Did you forget to take the chicken out of the freezer?”
Pine needles crunch under Levi’s feet.
“No?” the woods say.
As if to drive home the point, the crickets and frogs burst back into agitated song, and Levi walks the rest of the mile-long driveway alone.
He hangs up his pack, machete, and boots in the cabin’s mudroom. The local folk said the woods were haunted, and Levi did his best to encourage those rumors. Meant people left them alone. He’s a settled man now, or at least more settled than he’d ever thought he’d be. Fixed up this old cabin far out the way of any cities or interstates, amongst trees so old they’d outlived the loggers.
Levi washes up, cleans the thin scratch on his forearm where the haint had got him—it’d dried hours ago, how the hell does Erwin do that?—and enters his kitchen to find the chicken laid out in the basin sink, perfectly defrosted.
Levi frowns and goes to stand in the doorway to the tiny living room.
“The hell’d you do?”
Erwin is lounging on their overstuffed sofa, the sleeves of his shirt sinfully rolled up to his elbows. He looks up from the massive tome spread across his lap.
“Pardon?”
Levi grinds his jaw.
“The chicken.”
Erwin smiles gently.
“It’s in the si—”
“That ain’t chicken.”
Erwin blinks at him.
“Beloved, it’s the same chicken you told me to defrost this morning.”
“What’d you do it?”
“Took it out of the freezer.”
“Yeah, ten minutes ago.”
“No—”
“What kind of Eldritch shit did you do to that chicken? You send it to a hell dimension or something?”
Erwin frowns. “Of course not.”
“I’m not serving our guests Eldritch chicken.” Levi jerks his thumb over his shoulder. “You know Mothman’s a prissy bastard. Put down the Necronomicon or whatever the hell you’re reading and come help me.”
“It’s Infinite Jest.” Erwin rises and follows him back into the kitchen.
“Don’t know what that is, and I don’t care. We’ve got an hour ’til people start gettin’ here.”
“Tell me how I can be useful.”
Levi stands before the sink. It looks like a regular chicken.
Well, the hell with it.
Rolling up his sleeves, Levi reaches for some paper towels.
“There’s a pail right down there and a bushel of peas that need to be shelled. And start some water boiling for the potatoes.”
As he begins to pat the chicken dry, a pair of warm hands settle on Levi’s waist.
“I did miss you today,” Erwin says against his hair.
Levi nudges his shoulder, welcoming Erwin’s presence against his back.
“I wasn’t gone for that long.”
Erwin kisses his ear.
“What’re you doing?”
“Helping.”
Helping. “My ass.”
“I can help that.”
A third hand squeezes his asscheek as Erwin kisses the back of his neck, while a fourth eases over the crease of his thigh.
“Stop fuckin’ around.” Levi brings the wooden spoon down, but it only whooshes through the air and thwaps his own damn hip. “You got four hands today? Use ’em to shell peas.”
He nudges the pail with a socked foot. Erwin sighs through his nose, and warm air tickles his hair.
“Bye,” says Levi.
There’s the hint of a grumble and what Levi would swear is the soft hissing of a forked tongue, but the pail disappears from sight.
*
Not ten minutes later, Erwin is shelling peas on their back porch—he could move some space-time around and get rid of them all at once, but that always causes some kind of unforeseen consequence and he doesn’t want to try his luck with Levi twice in one day—there’s an unholy screech from inside the house.
Erwin clears his throat. Trims the ends off another pod.
Thunk. Erwin winces. Squelch. THUNK.
The peas plink into the pail between his feet.
Footsteps stomp closer, and the back door swings open so hard it bangs off the wall.
Levi stands in the threshold, breathless, machete in hand, his apron thoroughly spattered in some kind of rapidly evaporating blackish liquid.
Erwin, who has faced down gods of other dimensions so terrifying they would break the average human’s psyche, rises to his feet.
“I’ll go to Harris Teeter.”