Chapter Text
It was the brightest spot of the day, that unbearable hour where the sun seemed to beam down on you with concentrated venom, spitting down an impenetrable laser which fried your skin to a lobster red and sent beads of sweat gathering at the base of your neck. Somewhere between the fourteenth and fifteenth hour, it was a perpetual slog; each second bent itself to the cadence of your breath, sporadic as it was strained, contorting itself into an impressive preview of hell.
Nicky Roth stumbled through the centre of the street. He had long since offered up his direction to chance; he flailed about the concrete jungle like a tumbleweed caught in desert winds, tripping and stumbling over invisible objects. His parents had long since warned him about road safety, but the heat had washed his mind as clean and smooth as a stone on the beach. Even if he did have the capacity to render his own safety, he still wouldn’t have moved, for at least a car had the decency to bless him with a quick and timely death, and cut short his heat-induced misery.
Sweat soaked through the spine of his shirt. He could feel it trickling down his back, gathering at the base of his torso in an intolerable puddle that itched his skin terribly. Try as he might to scratch it, the sweat had seeped into the flimsy fabric of his shirt, and left little point for any resistance. If Nicky was confident – that is to say, if Nicky was another boy entirely – he would have taken off his shirt and tucked it into the waist of his shorts, before strutting down the street like some of his more boisterous classmates. But he didn’t, for that would mean exposing his awkwardly pubescent body to the world, the composition of which he was far from proud of.
His feet found the energy to kick his inflatable ball – a miserable excuse for a birthday gift – down the quaint street, nerves sharpening at the plastic shriek the thing made whenever it so much as grazed another surface. The thing ricocheted off the rusted ‘Friendly Court’ placard; Nicky coughed out a dehydrated chuckle. There was nothing friendly about this court!
He had never wanted to go out in the first place, but his parents had all but forced him out the door.
“We’re going out.” Mom had said, fussing about the kitchen with all the rigour of a military captain. It was a rather impressive feat, considering Dad had been hanging off her neck since dawn.
Nicky understood, and wished he didn’t. They both worked – somehow, this was a point of shame for Nicky, who always felt envious when his friends’ pulled out homebaked cookies from their lunchboxes. Despite being a little charred, they somehow put his pre-packaged, mathematically arranged ones to shame. Consequently, his parents didn’t get all that much time together – much less time alone together – and jumped at every opportunity to escape their only son.
“And you’re not staying home alone, not after last time.”
Nicky remembered last time all too well. Seriously, he didn’t intend to smash the window! He’d sworn to god it was an accident, but apparently his parents didn’t believe in either of those two things.
“But I’m not supposed to be out alone anyway!” He lamented, stamping his foot in the way of children everywhere. “You want me to end up like those missing kids!?”
The guilt trip; an infallible strategy. Sadly, it seemed that his mom had grown immune.
“Of course not!” Sarcasm dripped between her saccharine vocals. Nicky fought not to roll his eyes. “That’s why I’ve already called Brian’s mom, and arranged a… what do you kids call it, a ‘hang-out’? Either way, you’ll be spending the afternoon with him. Just the two of you, like old times.”
Lies. Nicky was beginning to suspect that Brian was permanently enclosed within a shell of lackeys. It wouldn't be absurd to suggest the boy was part snail, what with his wide-set, freakishly big eyes, and his slouching, indistinct torso that seemed to melt into equally ill-defined limbs.
“Come on, Narf.” His Father had finally said, ruffling Nicky’s hair like he was a child of much fewer years.
Somewhere deep in his chest, Nicky felt an icily dull sensation, like a blunt screw had been hammered into his heart. Though he protested the nickname at every opportunity, ‘Narf’ had a special kind of sentimentality attached to it; the kind that teenage boys despise for all the wrong reasons.
“It’s just one night. Most other kids your age would be ecstatic for such an opportunity.”
Behind the trapdoor of his lips, Nicky clenched his teeth so hard his head hurt. He didn’t have the heart to tell his father that he wasn’t like most other kids.
“Don’t encourage him!”
“What?! It’s a factual observation! I thought you were all for those things, being a scientist and all…”
His mom tutted, and busied herself with the remainers of the washing.
Dad rolled his eyes playfully, a smile playing on lips that looked such like Nicky’s own. “We’ll be back before you know it.
If Nicky had one weakness, it was his father. With a slow and melancholy hesitation, he dipped his head in nonverbal agreement. The movement looked like he had been sandwiched between a hydraulic press, but his parents didn’t seem to notice. His dad turned back to his mom – did it really take that little to pry them off him? – resuming their mystifying adult game of seeing how close one could get to the other before it became obscene.
“Well, what are you waiting for? Get out of here, we’ll be back before ten!”
And so, what choice did he have? Braving the suburban wilderness was something Nicky was vastly ill-equipped for. He much favoured the comfort of interiors, the blessing of aircon, the entertainment of video games; at times like these, he wondered why anyone even desired to go outside anymore.
Especially not if you lived in Raven Brooks, Missouri. The city was a cultural desert, the endless cross roads of houses only occasionally punctuated with the thoughtful addition of a run-down playground, all of which were littered with graffiti and shattered glass. If you were lucky, a leftover pack of cigarettes and a lighter. Nicky fondly remembered when Brian had stuffed the whole pack into various orifices and swaggered about in a piss-poor impression of a teenager; back when they were still friends, of course. Now, Brian smoked cigarettes for real, and left a lingering, carcinogenic stench wherever he walked.
That might have been when they first started growing apart, when the simple bond of friends matured and became something far more complicated, as everything in the ‘adult world’ seemed to be. Nicky, though not a snitch, was habitually obedient, and had on numerous occasions warned Brain against cigarettes, how the television said they rotted your lungs and turned your brain inside out like something the aliens would do. Unfortunately, Brian didn’t seem to believe in aliens any more, and had brushed Nicky off with a lacklustre wave, as if he were swatting a fly away.
When he hadn’t listened to his warnings, Nicky had taken to stealing them from his pocket and burying them in whatever unfortunate patch of dirt was closest. And then, inevitably, Brian caught him, and hadn’t let him live it down ever since.
He’d replaced him frighteningly fast. A transfer student from Europe who spoke little English; in other words, he couldn’t protest. Tomasz was shorter than Nicky, but made up for his lack of height in muscle; Nicky reckoned he’d been enrolled in wrestling classes since conception. Most of their interactions had been filtered through Tomasz’s fist – the boy wasted no time in applying the most deadly of force, and did so with such ferocity that he seemed to be atoning for his lack of bilingualism.
It was an unfair fight from the beginning. Tomasz threw Nicky around like a pitbull with a ragdoll, and the rest of Brian’s lackeys found great amusement in watching Nicky be chased around the park, dragged down from a tree, and chased around again. It was utterly humiliating, and Nicky had no choice but to sit there and take it, lest he open his mouth and get his teeth knocked out.
So, Nicky severed the connection between brain and mouth, and spent what should have been a beautiful afternoon being pushed between twenty odd boys, all the while the grating chant of “Nicky’s got a girl’s name! Nicky’s got a girl’s name!” bruised his eardrums.
He had escaped, somehow. His memories were blurred – that’d be the heatstroke – and one thing seemed to bleed nonsensically into another, like the remnants of his schoolbooks when he’d come home drenched in rain. The most likely explanation for his unlikely escape was that the boys had gotten tired of toying with him, and promptly deposited him and his ball in a nearby trashcan. That certainly explained the stench that radiated off his skin.
His ball caught on a speck of gravel, and gave another plastic squeak. Nicky sighed with all the weariness of a twice-divorced single father, and mustered up the last of his energy to reel his leg back, and free the damned thing with a kick he wished he could apply to Brian’s face.
The heat caused him to overestimate his shot; the ball soared above the nearby houses like a missile, vibrant sections spun into a purplish blur that mimicked the tail of a comet. Nicky scratched his arm. Perhaps he should take Coach’s advice and sign up for the soccer team.
Nicky then spent the next five seconds, rather stupidly, watching it roll down the hill.
Suitably ashamed, Nicky scuttled after the ball, legs moving before his body in a stiff, cartoonish motion. He had always exuded an aura of awkwardness, as if his body was maladjusted for human life – but with the recent onset of puberty, what could have been excused as childish clumsiness morphed into an alien affliction. He adjusted his cap, if only to obscure his identity from any prying neighbours, and felt a droplet of sweat snake its way from his forehead to his chin. He smeared it away, hand catching on the newfound stubble that had begun to blossom on his cheeks.
The ball, thankfully, did slow to a halt, its chemical colours winking at him in the late afternoon sunlight as if to tease. Nicky rolled his eyes as he bent to pick it up, nearly tripping over his own laces in the process. He was still in the process of getting used to his own height. That, paired with his usual jitteriness, had left him unsteady on his feet, stumbling and faltering over invisible objects like a deer on a lake of ice.
A scream pierced through Nicky’s thoughts like a bullet through his temple.
He had barely registered the sound before his body was catapulted into action; some ancestral instinct piloted his brain, whipping his head around to where the noise came from, shrinking his arms to his chest, legs automatically backing him away. His heart revved into a thundering pace, beats pummelling his ribs so hard he feared he might succumb to internal trauma right then and there.
Nicky was used to screams; why, he’d thought he had become immune to such trivialities after the millionth time Sasha yelped at the news of Jennifer’s new boyfriend. But this scream was different. It was strangely feline – one could mistake it for the hiss of a cat – but had the sheer volume of a child in petulance, the vitriol only a human could replicate. Yet, it was something without reason; an aspiring scientist, Nicky knew from the moment he heard it that this scream was something that no amount of engineering could ever replicate. It was the incarnation of fear, an irreplicable frequency which drilled a hole of terror in Nicky's brain, pricking the hairs on the back of his neck to attention and heightening his senses to a disturbing degree.
Pupils dilating, he slunk his head up. The sound seemed to be contagious; animal to animal, Nicky was no longer operating on any will of his own, but an ancient, historical one, one that had guided countless ancestors to survival.
As such, he did not immediately register his neighbor’s house, but rather the origin of danger. And then, like a head surfacing from underwater, the rational part of his brain ascribed a name to the place; the revelation chilled his bones.
There it was again.
The second time was worse. Torture was the only applicable term. Originally, the sound had caught him by surprise; if that had been all, then he might have dismissed it as some bizarre hallucination conjured up by his brain as a punishment for subjecting it to such oppressive heat. But now, he was forced to pay attention; the scream was most definitely human, and was most definitely being accompanied by some sort of movement. The oscillations of the yell synchronised with a struggle – Nicky could practically see it, limbs flailing and head thrashing as it attempted to get away from someone, something. It was phlegmy, too— oh god, was someone being choked?
Against all instinct, Nicky approached Mr Peterson’s house.
Nicky had never been a particularly brave boy. He didn’t volunteer to answer questions, he spent his lunch with his head firmly down, he looked the other way when he saw the nerds being pummeled blue. He was a coward. But his body seemed to be operating on a will of its own; some type of higher power was pushing him further and further from the safety of the street, even as the rational part of his brain begged to turn back around and barricade himself in his room. The scream was hypnotic, drawing him in, closer and closer, until he was sure he would fall into its depths forever.
Grass crunched beneath his steps, dry from the summer flush. A small, frightened animal crept up the Petersons’ front lawn.
The adjacent household was painfully normal. It blended right into the labyrinth of suburban houses; not small, yet not so large as to attract attention. A misshapen clone of Nicky’s house, the walls bore marks of a few extensions that were clearly a DIY experiment gone neither right nor wrong. It had a porch, boards hastily fastened to the ground with little care for longevity. Stained glass adorning the front door. A bright periwinkle paint sported by the boards, a strangely effeminate touch to the quadrilateral blade of the property.
Like his house, Mr Peterson was, up until a few weeks ago, normal. Nicky only saw him on occasion: scrubbing dishes in the window, shooing birds off his lawn, the usual. For some inexplicable reason, he was always carrying a shovel.
Nicky would be lying if he said that Mr Peterson didn’t unnerve him, if only for the reason that he had never seen the man look anything short of pristine. His hair was always swooped in that babyish curl on the crown of his head, mustache curled into two spirals of perfect symmetry, clothes always neatly pressed. It was perhaps this outward perfection that gave life to his monstrosity, for someone who was always so well preened could have nothing short of nefarious intentions.
An avid fan of the nuclear model, he held reproductive success over the Roth family. He bore two children; a boy and a girl. Slight little things, Nicky found no interest in playing with them. It wasn’t like Nicky had much interest in playing with anyone – video games were available all year round, and didn’t fight back – but the siblings were so infatuated with each other that there was no way Nicky could jam himself into that kind of codependency, even if he wanted to. He’d waved at them once, and the boy had wrapped his arms around his sister, slinking back out of sight like Nicky was some sort of overgrown maggot.
Nicky promptly showed them the middle finger.
Alright; that was on him. But even if he warmed up to them, Mr Peterson was sure to stomp out the friendship before it even had a chance to bud, and that was before his wife had died.
It was all a very sudden affair. There had been four, and then there had been three. Her obituary in the local newspaper had been awfully factual – Nicky remembered peeling it from his father’s unconscious hands on one of those few occasions he could be bothered to read.
Her picture had been next to the column, printed in such a small square that it was hard to conceptualise that only a week ago, this picture was a person with a brain, with a husband and children, with desires and nightmares that now would never be fulfilled. A dazzlingly pretty woman, eyes sparkling with the joy of people who were doomed to die young.
Her fate was ironic. A car crash. No body could be recovered.
It was understandable then, why Mr Peterson’s grief turned him inward instead of outward. Learning that the world was unpredictable even with your hands firmly planted on the wheel, he vowed to keep safe the two that remained. He kept a close eye on them; always watching from the windows, positioned carefully in a vantage point where he could see them, but they could not see him. The children may as well have been exotic birds, caged between the white picket fence of the lawn, forbidden to enter the street.
It was strange then, how they went missing.
Nicky winced as the wooden steps creaked beneath his weight. A few more steps, and he’d be able to peer in through the window; the thought both terrified and excited him.
It was a secret to no one that Nicky didn’t get out much. What with his dad’s eternally failing business endeavours, the Roth family had been bounced around the states like a basketball; born in New York, only to take his first steps in Ohio. Kindergarten in Washington, seven birthdays in California, before being hurtled into South Carolina for a foreign graduation at an elementary school he had only attended for a semester – Dad had sworn Missouri was their final move (just like he’d said the last time, and the time before).
Not like that made any difference. Nicky had long since learned that friendships were fickle, easily swayed by the passage of time, like sands dusting over ruins. His social skills were, to put it bluntly, atrocious, for his mannerisms were swirled in a cross-country cocktail that made little sense even to him. He’d heard once that Europeans frowned on America, believing it to have no culture; how wrong those wine-glugging, cigar-smoking, prissy and uncivilised swines could be.
As such, he was left with two choices; spiral into depression, or find a vice. He’d settled for the latter – a considerably harmless one at that – video games. Unlike reality, socialisation through a screen came with no backlash, no pummelling or namecalling. No adults to discipline you for forgetting to call a lady ‘ma’am’, no boys to call you names, no girls to gossip behind your back and conspire a plan to humiliate you. No screaming babies, nor lousy teenagers. No one. That was how Nicky liked it.
He would be lying if he said he didn’t miss the excitement, though. Pixels only came with a set number of dialogue options, and there was little chance for the strange and unusual that Nicky had a soft spot for. He had yet to find a character that shared his enthusiasm for alien life, much less talk back… in other words, video game characters were perfect, and that was the problem. Nicky needed connection, he craved it, but he’d long since resigned himself to his room and other such material pleasures.
Thirteen, and already a lost cause. Pathetic.
Arguably, investigating a potential murder to bloat his own ego was even more pathetic. Now, Nicky was far from heartless; yes, he was remarkably self-absorbed, but not in a cruel way. It was an attribute he’d picked up from years of isolation, sort of like a fog smothering his perception of the world – more of a defence mechanism than anything malicious. More than that, he was an impossibly anxious child, clinging to childish fears even as he neared maturity.
That is to say, he could not have ignored that piercing scream even if he wanted to. But it was nonetheless true that he was propelled forward by a selfish desire for superiority… or perhaps, a longing to be seen.
A flurry of movement caught Nicky’s eyes. He approached the window.
Ten crooked fingers curled around the sill, gripping the wood so hard that the sharp angles of half-gnawed nails left small crescents in the white paint. Nicky pulled his eyes to the window so that only his eyes and nose were visible, breath dampening the glass in rapid puffs.
A few moments later, and he would have missed it. With savage brutality, Mr Peterson wrenched something up from the floor, rubber gloves clamping over the mouth to silence the creature. Nicky had always presumed those gloves were for gardening, but now he couldn’t be so sure.
More struggle. With terrifyingly impressive strength, the neighbor hurled his victim into one arm, kicked open the basement door in bestial rage, and tossed his hostage down with such turbulent velocity that Nicky was sure he had broken their neck.
He slammed the door shut. The force rattled the glass pane.
Nicky wanted to vomit. He wanted to do anything, anything to get away, anything to escape the nightmare he was trapped in. But, his legs would only shake in place, eyes tracing Mr Peterson’s wide silhouette. He watched as the man locked a padlock with a red key. The key was handled with extraordinary care compared to the violence that just transpired; Mr Peterson clutched the cold metal in his hands like a newborn baby. He waited only a moment before holstering it into a carabiner on his black leather belt.
Cue more screaming, this time accompanied by a ferocious banging on the door. Judging from the quality of the hisses – which Nicky reckoned had somehow managed to get louder despite being muffled from a door – the victim’s neck was in great condition, and most definitely not broken.
A sigh collapsed Nicky’s lungs. Overcome by the relief that Nicky had not been privy to a murder, he failed to notice the neighbour pressing his back against the basement door, sliding down it with an almost religious gratitude. He failed to notice the hollowed green eyes flicking towards the window; he failed to flinch away. And by the time he noticed that Mr Peterson was staring right at him, eyes blazing through his soul like hot pokers, it was far too late to do anything except run.
He had barely made it down the rickety steps when he heard a terrible clamour from behind him, a banging and a clattering, complete with a metal clanging that was almost certainly the brandishing of a shovel.
Mr Peterson launched from his doorway like a bullet from the nozzle of a shotgun. Despite his size, he was impossibly fast, and pounced after Nicky like a foxhound that had caught the scent of blood
He was gaining on him. A few more paces and he’d be able to scoop Nicky off the ground. A few less and he’d be able to whack him with the shovel. It suddenly occurred to Nicky that he didn’t want to die.
Nicky snapped his head back forwards, powering his limbs with a final burst of speed; he didn’t think he’d ever moved this fast. Running, stumbling, he tripped over something small and bony; by the squawk he knew it to be one of the ravens that flocked the neighbourhood in thick, black clouds.
At the disruption, they all seemed to take flight, croaking and cawing in a language Nicky could only interpret as the one of his doom. They were going to claw at him, these stupid birds, slow him down and drag him back to those gloved hands, to a final, suffocating embrace between bloodstained hands, and an eternal sleep in the dirt of the lawn.
But that kind of capture was rather predictable, and unbefitting for Nicky Roth. Instead, something much more curious happened; with a pulsing of wings, the flock darted behind Nicky, feathers stroking gently against his narrow cheekbones as they sailed by.
There was a cry; this time, it was human.
Nicky chanced another glance behind him. The birds had covered Mr Peterson, shiny feathers glinting with the dark opalescence of an oil spill. From between the flutter of feathers, Nicky caught sight of tiny claws burrowing into Mr Peterson’s hair and skin, tugging and scratching at him despite the way he swatted at them with his shovel.
Strange as this was, Nicky had no time to debate the ethics of birds, as he could hear the slap of his shoes on tarmac, and knew he had bolted onto the road without a care for oncoming traffic. A car screeched out of Nicky's way, horn blaring and censoring the amalgamation of creative curses that spat from the driver’s mouth.
The terror of his near-death experience only reached Nicky when he leapt onto the stretch of his lawn, familiar weeds slithering over his shoes like tiny snakes. Only then did he allow himself to swivel his body around, dilated pupils flicking frantically in search for his would-be captor.
At first, he saw nothing. Surely he hadn’t made it all up? His parents had always said that Nicky had an overactive imagination, but to conjure up something this fantastical…?
The screaming was gone. The birds were gone. Mr Peterson…
No. Mr Peterson wasn’t gone.
He was right there, hidden in the slight gap of the door like an injured animal. The glint of his shovel caught the sliver of evening light. In his visible hand, he clutched the corpse of a bird.
And then, glinting at him like a deep-sea treasure, an eye of the most brilliant green peeked at him, light trembling in the iris with a sort of hysteric fury that could not, under any circumstance, be reasoned with. Nicky knew at once that it was the look of murder.
The door slammed shut with a deafening boom.