He’ll give sleeping outside a miss tonight.
But Caleb knows he won’t be able to get to sleep. And on those nights when he can’t sleep, his only hoped usually is to take his quilt out under the stars.
Those stars, in that sky. How can he sleep under it ever again?
He feels hunted, a rabbit cowering in its burrow. Nobody’s knocked at the door. The phone hasn’t rung. The enemy hasn’t come for him. He hasn’t seen them roaming the streets for clues. That doesn’t mean they won’t turn up. They must be asking Misha about him. She’s bound to tell them where he lives. She hates him.
But if that’s so, then why haven’t they come for him by now?
He’s been within these walls too long, breathing the same air over and over. It’s an evening that’s gone on for days. He’s sure the ceiling’s coming down on him.
Out of the window he goes, dragging his quilt along with him. The base of his throat clenches to hold down the panic. He doesn’t want to be out here; he has to be out here. But he’s skittish, looking out for ambushes. He creates his quilt cocoon and lies down quickly, vulnerability driving him to snuggle down low. He thinks himself mad to be out here.
It’s a little bit thrilling.
This is how he imagines it would feel to feature on a Wanted: Dead or Alive poster, his face sketched in an evil distortion, a price underneath it. Going through every day wondering when the baddies will catch up with him or when someone will shop him to the baddies must make all the nerve-endings buzz…a lot like his are right now.
The monster in a human suit. That doesn’t give him a buzz. That makes him want to cry. Up until now, life’s been a dull and occasionally awful experience in plodding through the hours, but at least there’s been no actual monsters.
It can’t really exist. It can’t really be a monster. There must be another explanation. The sight of a man being buried had already scared him. Perhaps the fear had sent him briefly loopy. But if that was true, then why had Misha run away from the same thing? All his thoughts about that girl start with why. Like why am I thinking about her again?
There’s a sound approaching, a rhythmic sound amongst the usual sighing of the deepening night. It’s a call. Someone calling out. Caleb lifts his head a few inches off the pillow, concentrates on the sound. It’s a single syllable, repeated at intervals. He counts, like he’s calculating the distance of an incoming storm. Ten seconds. Every ten seconds someone calls out the same thing.
‘Kay.’
His throat is no longer flesh and saliva; it is dust and lava. He’s heard this voice already today, booming and crackling like an aged speaker, turned up too loud.
‘Kay.’
Caleb’s been outside barely five minutes. He imagines the monster lying low all day, only coming out when it caught his scent in the air.
‘Kay.’
Sinking down into the quilt, willing himself to be flat, Caleb tries to quiet his breathing. It’s far too loud. The rise and fall of his chest causes the quilt to whisper. Too loud.
‘Kay.’
People must be able to hear that in their houses over their TVs. He knows it’s getting closer, but how close is it now? Around the corner? In the street? A few doors away?
‘Kay.’
To Caleb’s ears that single word is booming. Hot tears bleed down the sides of his face.
He’s desperate to take a look. The monster’s either far enough away that he can sneak a quick peek, or it’s so close (and it sounds like it’s at the end of the drive) that he needs to run and never stop.
‘Kay.’
He rolls very slowly onto his belly, slides forward to the edge of the garage roof. Sliiiiiiiides, and what a thin, rasping noise the quilt makes on the coarse roof, the smallest of indistinct sounds that could give him away to the horrible thing in the street.
‘Kay.’
A pair of searchlights sweep the road. They rove at random like beacons on a lighthouse gone mad, swooshing across the sea of tarmac. They are beacons that search for him. He should push back away from the roof’s edge, push away, keep flat and pray. But then he won’t know exactly where it is. And the movement might catch its…lights. (What happened to its eyes, where are its eyes?)
The monster is five or six doors away, stops every few steps to scan around, and Caleb is rigid with fear.
‘Kay.’
The loud monotone intonation never changes. It is insistent, yet patient. It will search onwards and forever. It is ceaseless. It is an engine for hunting. It’s almost at the end of next door’s drive, and its lights scour everything: pavement, cars, tarmac, walls, and gardens. All of these things, when the light hits them, are painted cold and stark. Flowers are withered and sharp. Vehicles are torture mechanisms made of cogs and needles. There are no bricks in the walls, only bones. Caleb hates looking at all of this, at the hidden dead world beneath the one he inhabits, yet it’s fascinating. It’s incredible. He bets no one’s ever seen anything like it.
His mouth is dry like stone.
The monster is outside his house. A demon summoned in a graveyard, loose in the streets. It stops, turns its beams on the front door.
Does it know he lives here? It can’t, it can’t possibly. Unless one of the suits sent it. Or Misha did. (She didn’t she didn’t she didn’t.)
‘Kay.’
It’s calling him out. It knows he’s here. It knows.
It moves on. Left to right it searches, left to right.
Caleb’s chest burns hot from holding his breath so long. He lets it out in a long tight stream, watching the monster walk away. It stops again two doors down, casting that phosphorous gaze over the neighbour’s house.
‘Kay.’
Gradually it tromps away. Hunting.
Caleb has no idea what he’s going to do about this. He doesn’t know who he can tell that will believe it. The only people who have actually seen it are the suits and Misha, and they’re all enemies, so he can’t turn to them for help. Well, the suits are definitely enemies. Misha is…difficult. He doesn’t know about her. Not at all.
He doesn’t know about a lot of things lately.
He really hates that.
So Caleb lies incredibly still, telling himself to get up and get back inside before that thing returns, get inside and stay there for good, but he’s too scared to move quite yet, too outright jelly-bones terrified to twitch even a pinky. I’ll go inside in a minute, he tells himself, when it feels safe.
But it doesn’t feel safe, and he doesn’t go inside, and sleep refuses to come.