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Tammy, Carolyn, Sandra, Christy, and Trish made their way up the wood steps of the porch, no longer feeling the effects of the alcohol and marijuana they had ingested throughout the night. They hadn’t meant to stay out until the early morning, but they were all having so much fun that when the gray light of dawn had finally crept on them it had surprised them all.
Amanda had long fallen asleep on Chase’s sofa, and so at 6:30 when they finally decided to head home, they had left Amanda there to sleep. She had mentioned going into the paper later in the day and so Aaron and Chase thought it best to just let her rest until she needed to get up.
The front door wasn’t locked, which annoyed Trish, only because it was a reminder that she had already had to give Andy so many times in the past. When the door drew back from the frame, allowing in more light from the outside, they all stood stark-still in the foyer, seeing streaks of red spotting the hardwood.
They all looked at the bloody trail, running along the floor and moving up the stairs in loose obvious drips.
“Andy!” Tammy called as she raced up the steps, unconcerned about possible threats still inside the house.
She needed to find Andy; she needed to find her and make sure she was safe, though everything inside of her was telling her that none of them were.
“Tammy!” Carolyn called out, chasing after her, but Tammy would not hear her, would not answer. Nothing mattered except finding out what happened to Andy.
She reached the third floor, seeing the mess of blood lead out from Andy’s room like a line made in paint and showing her the way. She approached this cautiously, vaguely aware of the smell of rot and chemicals. It was obvious to her that there was developing fluid all over the place; how else could the stench of poisons be so strong?
Tammy regretted that they had all been out for the night, and that they hadn’t all made more of an effort to include Andy in their after-party plans. No one had been here for Andy, not a single soul.
She had been alone.
Tammy felt numb as she looked at Andy’s mattress. The blood was dark and drying, some of it still dripping on the floor as it coagulated and seeped into the cracks of the antique wood.
There was a crack in the dark room, and instinct told her to go to this, answers were awaiting her behind that door, ready for her eyes to see, for the moment when it could leave a visible imprint on the surface of her brain.
Why did she go in there; why did she flip on the red light?
All around her were Polaroid’s taped to the walls. They were all images of Andy with blood pouring from her mouth, and her brown eyes wide and frantic.
“Fuck!” she yelled. “God fucking damn it!”
Tammy began ripping the pictures off the wall furiously.
Something awful and fleshy caught her from the corner of the eye, and when Tammy turned to face it, she was met with a dried, severed tongue nailed to the wall.
She let out a scream and felt the disorienting wave of nausea take hold, and the night’s worth of liquor crawled up her esophagus. Tammy’s knees buckled and she lost her footing, her tailbone slamming hard on the wood as she fell to the floor. Those pictures surrounded her and the fear in Andy’s eyes looked at her from every angle.
“Tammy....”
She paid no attention to Carolyn picking her up and lifting him from off the floor, leaving those horrible photos behind her.
“Come on, let’s call the police. Let’s get out of here,” Carolyn said.
“We need to call Aaron. We need to tell him.”
Carolyn nodded, and wiped the tears from Tammy’s face.
“We will, baby, we will.”
“We need to warn him... we need to....”
She let her words trail off as Carolyn led her back out into the hall where the other girls waited. Christy hadn’t dared to go in, and Sandra and Trish had looked around the rest of the house while Tammy had been in Andy’s room.
Whoever it had been they were gone now, and Tammy was trying to figure out how she would explain this. How would she be able to tell them that what had taken Andy was a deceased teenage psychopath?
Just thinking it made her scoff at the absurdity of it.