The Beast

FOURTEEN

“It’s up here.”

Jo Early eased off on the accelerator of her Volkswagen piece of crap. “Yeah, I know where it is, Dougie.”

“Right here—”

“I know.”

There was no reason to hit the directional signal. At seven in the morning, there were no other cars around, nobody to care as she went through the off-kilter, paint-flaking iron gates of the old prep school her mother had gone to a million years ago.

Wow. The Brownswick School for Girls had seen better days.

Her mother would so not approve of this landscaping at all. Or lack thereof.

Then again, the woman could throw an aneurysm over a single dandelion head in her five-acre lawn.

Driving down the pitted asphalt lane, Jo steered around holes that were big enough to eat her little Golf, and dodged fallen tree limbs—some of which were old enough to rot.

“God, my head hurts.”

She glanced over at her roommate. Dougie Keefer was Shaggy from Scooby Doo—without the talking Great Dane. And yes, his nickname was Reefer for good reason.

“I told you to go to a doc in the box. When you passed out here last night—”

“I was hit on the head!”

“—you probably got a concussion.”

Although any neuro consult on the guy would be tough to read because he was usually seeing double. And numbness and tingling was a lifestyle choice in his eyes.

Dougie cracked his knuckles one by one. “I’ll be fine.”

“Then stop complaining. Besides, half of the problem is that you’re sobering up. It’s called a hangover.”

As they went further into the campus, buildings appeared, and she imagined them with clean, unbroken windows and freshly painted trim and doors that didn’t hang at bad angles. She could absolutely see her mother here, with her sweater sets and her pearls, gunning for her MRS. degree already even though this had just been a prep school, not a college.

Twenty-first century mores aside, things had gotten time capsuled in the nineteen fifties for her mother. And the woman had the matching shoes and handbags to prove it.

And people wondered why Jo had moved away?

“You’re not ready for this, Jo. I’m telling you.”

“Whatever. I need to get to work.”

“It’s going to blow your mind.”

“Uh-huh.”

Dougie turned to her, the seat belt cutting into his chest. “You saw the video.”

“I don’t know what I was looking at. It was dark—and before you keep arguing, remember April Fool’s this year?”

“Okay, it’s October, for one thing.” The chuckle he tossed out was so him. “And yeah, that was a good one.”

“Not for me it wasn’t.”

Dougie had decided it would be fun to borrow her car for the day and then send her a photoshopped picture of the thing wrapped around a tree. How he’d managed to focus long enough to get the optical con job done had been a mystery—but it had looked so real, she’d even called her insurance company.

As well as had a breakdown in the bathroom at work as she’d wondered how in the hell she was going to cover her deductible.

That was the thing about leaving your rich parents in the rearview. A five-hundred-dollar, unbudgeted hit could make eating difficult.

With a frown, she leaned into the steering wheel. “What is tha—oh, crap.”

Hitting the brakes, she stopped in front of an entire tree that had fallen across the lane. Quick check of the clock and she cursed. Even though time was passing, she was not four-by-fouring in the Golf and running the risk of having to call AAA and paying for a tow truck.

“If we’re going to do this, we’ve got to walk.”

“Go around it.”

“And get stuck in the mud? It rained late last night.” She cut the engine and snagged her car key. “Come on. You want to show me, you’d better start hoofing it. Otherwise I’m turning us around.”

Dougie was still bitching as they set off on foot, stepping over the downed maple and continuing down the lane. The morning was bitterly cold, and surprisingly so—the kind of thing that made you glad you’d taken your parka on a whim, and pissed that you’d left your hat and gloves behind because in your mind it was “only October.”

“Now I know why I don’t get up before noon,” Dougie muttered.

Jo glanced up at the bare limbs above. She hated being a pessimist, but she had to wonder whether any of the suckers were going to go into a free fall and kill her. “Why did I let you talk me into this?”

He put his arm around her shoulders. “Because you loooooove me.”

“Nope.” She elbowed him in the ribs. “That’s definitely not it.”

And yet it kinda of was. She’d met Dougie and his stoner troop through an acquaintance, and they’d taken her in when she’d been in desperate need of a place to crash. The arrangement was supposed to have been a couch-crashing temporary, but then a bedroom had opened up in their apartment, and a year later, she was living in the mid-twenties version of a frat house. With a bunch of recalcitrant man-boys. Who she seemed to be in charge of.

“We’re getting close.” He put his hands up to his head like it was blown. Which was a short trip. “I mean, body parts everywhere, and the smell. Worse than what’s in our refrigerator. I mean, we’re talking dead bodies, Jo. Dead! Except they were moving! And then that—”

“Hallucination of a dragon. You told me.”

“You saw the footage!”

“I know better than this,” she said as she shook her head. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice—”

“Jo. It was real. It was fucking real—I saw a monster and . . .”

As Dougie ran through the litany of impossibility again, Jo focused on the rise up ahead. “Yeah, yeah, you already told me. And unlike you, I still have my short-term memory.”

“Chooch, T.J., and Soz saw it, too.”

“You sure about that? ’Cuz when I texted them this morning, they said it was a bad trip. Nothing More.”

“They’re idiots.”

As they hit the incline, she smiled and decided maybe she had over-corrected. She hadn’t fit in with the stick-up-the-ass society types her parents were so into, but by the same token, hanging out with a bunch of going-nowhere stoners wasn’t exactly her bag, either.

Still, they were highly amusing. Most of the time.

And besides, the truth was, she had no idea where she belonged.

“You’ll see,” Dougie announced as he ran to the top of the rise. “Just look!”

Jo joined him—and shook her head at all the yup, okay, so what down below. “Exactly what am I supposed to be looking at? The trees, the buildings or the grass?”

Dougie dropped his arms. “No, no, this is wrong. No—”

“I think you finally broke your brain, Dougie. But that’s what happens when you feed it twelve hits of lysergic acid diethylamide in a six-hour period. At least you thought it was real this time, though, as opposed to that car-meets-tree thing you did for me.”

Yup, there was absolutely nothing unusual down below in what had to be the center of campus. No dead bodies. No body parts. And no smell, either. Nothing but more abandoned buildings, more cold wind, and more nothing-weird.

“No, no, no . . .”

As Dougie ran down, she let him go, hanging back and trying to imagine what the place had looked like when it had been operational. It was hard to think that her mother had gone to classes in these buildings. Slept in them. Had that first dance with her father in one of them.

Funny, the past as it had been seemed as inaccessible as the present currently was with both of those people who had adopted her. The three of them had just never clicked, and although being on her own was tough sometimes, it had been a relief to let go of all those exhausting attempts to fake a bond that had never materialized.

“Jo! Come over here!”

When she cupped her ear and pretended she couldn’t hear him, Dougie rushed back up to her with the messianic zeal of a preacher. Grabbing her hand, he pulled her into a descent behind his flapping Army surplus jacket.

“See how everything is trampled over there? See?”

She let herself get dragged over to an admittedly flattened section of the meadow. But a bunch of horizontal long grass and disturbed undergrowth was hardly a scene out of a Wes Craven movie. And it was definitely not whatever was on that video Dougie had insisted she watch over and over again.

She wasn’t sure how to explain everything. But what she was clear on? She really wasn’t going to give herself a brain cramp trying to reconcile it all.

“You saw what I posted!” Dougie said. “And someone took my phone because they don’t want anyone else to see it!”

“You probably just lost the thing—”

“I was up there.” He pointed to the tallest of the brick buildings. “Right there! That’s where I got the footage!”

“Hey, Dougie, no offense, but I have to get to work—”

“Jo, I’m fucking serious.” He pivoted around in a circle. “Fine, explain this. How did everything get crushed here? Huh?”

“For all I know, you and our three roommates ran around in a circle naked. Actually, let’s not even go there on a hypothetical.”

Dougie faced off at her. “Then how did I get the video? Huh?”

“I don’t know, Dougie. Frankly, it’s so grainy, I don’t know what I’m looking at.”

She gave him some time to hop around with all kinds of what-about-this and what-about-that, and then she was done. “Look, I’m really sorry, but I’m leaving. You can come with me or Uber home. Your choice. Oh, wait. No phone. Guess that means walking?”

As she turned away, he said in a surprisingly adult voice, “I’m serious, Jo. It happened. I don’t care what the three of them say. I know when I’m high and when I’m not.”

When Jo stopped and glanced behind herself, his expression turned hopeful.

“Do you mind if I drop you off at the bus stop on Jefferson? I don’t think I have time to take you all the way back.”

Dougie threw his arms up. “Aw, come on, Jo—let me just show you over here . . .”

“Bus stop it is,” she said. “And remind me of this the next time you drop acid. I want to be prepared.”