MELISSA STEPPED out of the decrepit house and back onto the dead soil. She looked out onto the landscape and let the current state of her childhood home overwrite her memory of it. Desolate. Quiet. It was a burned-out remembrance. She turned away from her car and walked to the back of the house. She noticed a fire pit in the back with charred ash in it. It hadn’t been used recently. Farther back in the trees, she saw the remains of a deer hanging from a tree. It appeared that it had been dressed, but wild animals had rendered it grotesque. It was little more than a bone ornament now. There was an assortment of old junk and rusting metal scattered around the house.
Dead.
Everything dead.
Farther around the back, she saw an old battered Aljoa trailer, its two wheels flat, its seafoam coloring stained. She raised her gun and walked toward it.
Her footsteps seemed louder than they had ever been.
She reached for the trailer door. It was unlocked.
She stepped in and saw that the inside was lived-in but clean. It was as if she had stepped through the looking glass, the interior not matching the slow decay outside. There was a small stove and icebox. In the back, the bed took up half the trailer but had not been slept in. The comforter was a solid color, cheap but fairly new. This must be where Michael lived. The house was all but falling down, but here, hidden away in a tin can, is where he spent his nights.
A space that would drive a normal person to insanity, but perfect for a person who had been conditioned to a prison cell.
What kind of life was this? She thought about how good she had it when her aunt had come and taken her away from this place. Even on those odd nights before her father died and when her mother would drift back home, it felt lonely. It was never a house of love after Michael had destroyed it. Just coldness. Three people living in the same confined space.
Her mother hadn’t bothered to come out of the house when she left. Hadn’t even ventured out of the bedroom that day. Melissa couldn’t recall the last time she’d seen her mother’s face, and now she couldn’t remember her face at all. When she thought of her, she could see only her silhouette, her face blurred, deleted from her memory.
There was nothing here now.
Her eyes glanced around the trailer, looking for nothing in particular, when a reflection caught her eye. Hanging from a lanyard on a nail over the stove was a key. A bright, newly fashioned key. She picked it up and examined it, then put it in her pocket.
Melissa turned and stepped back out into the parched yard.
She walked around to the front of the house, up to the porch, through the kitchen, and stopped in front of the locked door to her old room. She pulled the key out and slid it into the door handle. It fit perfectly.
She took a deep breath, as if she was about to expose a part of her life that she had kept buried from all prying eyes. This was the room that she had shared with her brother, where she had played with her dolls and had set up tea parties with imaginary friends. The room that held her last remaining happy childhood memories of her life here. Once she opened the door, she doubted she would be able to recall them again. They would be replaced by a cadaver of wilted recollection.
She gripped the handle and opened the door.
What she saw inside threatened to derail her plans entirely, and destroy the construct of the monster she had come to slay.