He fell asleep while falling. Passed out from terror, really. He screamed and cried out in midair for Teresa and the kids, and then he blacked out. No dreams.
When Ben woke up, he was on a beach. One side of his face was buried in the cool sand, little grains of it stuck to the corner of his mouth. He had left a small pearl of drool down on the sand that looked like a tiny jellyfish. The waves were crashing in twenty yards away and the sky had a very thin cover of sheet clouds, the kind that would anger you if you wanted a full day of hot sunbathing. Behind him, the sun shone opaque through the sheer cloud cover. A series of rolling, grassy dunes provided cover for a single row of houses.
Houses.
He got up and beheld them. In front of him, two long lines in the sand ran parallel along the beach, as far as he could see, never turning into any of the houses. The path? The path. Screw the path. Those are real houses.
The dune grass was sharp and lashed against his ankles as he sprinted toward the house closest to his landing spot. It was a blue house with white shutters, and it stood up on stilts for protection from high tides. Ben waved his arms and stared into the windows.
“Hello! Hello! Can anyone help?”
As he drew closer to the house, he saw a worn-out dirt road behind it that stretched along the row of neighboring units. On the other side of that road was the sea. There was no land to be found past the expanse. He was on a massive sandbar. There were no telephone poles outside the house. No visible power lines. No cars. No bikes. No wagons. No vehicles of any kind. And no people. He was getting used to disappointment. He went up the loose plank stairs to the front door of the blue house (which faced away from the first expanse of ocean he had encountered) and began rapping furiously on the door.
No one answered. He dared to turn the knob and the door came open with ease. Inside was a spartan summer home designed to be lived in for only ten weeks a year. There was a little kitchen with ancient appliances, but no cookware of any kind. The kitchen opened to a living room with a pair of cute old lounge chairs and a cracked pleather sofa. Ben scoured the walls for outlets and phone jacks but saw nothing. Upstairs, he found three bedrooms with empty drawers and bare mattresses. He ran into a bathroom and turned on the faucet but no water came out.
“Hello?”
The closets were empty. Pacing from window to window, he could see that the neighboring houses didn’t seem to be harboring any traces of life either. He booted up his phone on the off chance that it would power up for just a moment and give him a signal. If you left the phone off for a while, sometimes the battery was resurrected just long enough for you to get angry at it again. But this time, it couldn’t even make it past the greeting logo. He pocketed it once more. His whole life was just taking his phone out and putting it back in again.
Up and down the sand spit, each house offered him the same kind of nothing: no people, no communications equipment, no food in the fridge, no water. It was a ghost resort. A trap, like the yellow light in the forest. Every sign of life was just a piece of bait to draw him away from the path.
And now the sea began to swell up. The whitecaps rippled and churned and, from the front porch of a three-story red Victorian, he saw a massive wall of water forming on the horizon: a wave higher than any building he had ever set foot inside of. Seagulls flew away from the wave with supreme urgency, but the water enveloped them as it drew closer to the coastline, their caws snuffed out by the coming catastrophe.
He ran down the porch steps through the bristling dune grass until he came to the parallel lines in the sand that had probably been drawn for him by some cruel God. The tsunami was arriving, ready to claim the sandbar. Ben reached into the seed pouch and took out the final hard nut. He threw it at the wet sand just as the wave was gathering up the front of the ocean and preparing to throw it all back on top of him.
The fire immediately blazed up and down the coastline, reaching past the cloud sheet and into the stratosphere: a wall of fire with no limit to its height or width. Ben got down and the hot sand began baking him like a buried clam. He could hear the fire snuffing out the wave, steam loudly hissing all above him.
And then the wall died down and the ocean returned to its resting state, gently lapping at the edge of the beach. Wisps of steam rose up and broke apart in the air—ghosts of the tsunami—as thin and frail as the little clouds above him. That was his final warning. No more seeds to save him. No more leaving the path. He sat up in the sand and wrapped his arms around his knees and started to cry again. The hysteria had ebbed and flowed, and now it was walloping him again. He began saying I miss you over and over, in his hushed and croaky voice, hoping all the I miss yous would be carried like a signal through the atmosphere back home.
“I miss you all so much. Someone . . . someone please help me.”
But there was no response. Then Ben rose to his feet and shouted up at the sky.
“WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?! WHAT IS THIS SHIT?”
That was all he could muster up the energy to say. He was reduced to a random jumble of profanity and loud questions. There was nothing on this beach, nothing in these houses, no one to talk to. The stillness all around him made it obvious.
Up ahead, he saw a slight deviation in the parallel lines, so he walked toward it. Again, everything looked much closer than it actually was. All this grand visibility was making his feet ache. The padding between his skin and bones had worn down to nothing. He was a pillow someone had ripped open and emptied of feathers.
As he neared the veer in the path, he saw a faded billboard next to one of the ghost houses:
COURTSHIRE ESTATES! NEW CONDOS STARTING AT JUST $350,000!
This was Courtshire. Courtshire had nothing.
Stupid old lady.
His shoes were growing intolerable: wet and sweaty and stinking from all that running and fleeing and magic seed throwing. These sneakers weren’t accustomed to Ben being quite this active, and now they were falling apart like a lemon rolling off the used car lot. He kicked the shoes off and stripped away his socks, now flattened and brown (how did the bottoms of the socks get so dirty while contained within a pair of sneakers?). Then he mashed his feet into the sand and dug around. A piece of dead dune grass pricked his toe like a syringe. Stupid grass. Stupid path. Stupid goddamn everything.
After a mile-long drag, the path finally took a left, leading to yet another ghost beach house, this one a story taller than the rest. Maybe this one has new shoes. Ben dropped his shoes and socks in the sand, then made the turn and ran barefoot up the sandy front-porch steps. The parallel lines in the beach spread wide like an open mouth and faded away, giving him permission, at last, to safely explore an entire property. The house was unlocked. The people who had fled Courtshire—if any people had ever lived here—must have been in a hurry.
Another empty living room and kitchen. The faucets: dead. The closets: barren. He searched around for supplies and clean socks and shoes, but it was no use. Near a picture window looking out onto the surf was a small end table with a big glass vase on it. The vase was empty. Ben grabbed it and hurled it through the window. If he couldn’t talk to anyone, he would express himself in other, more violent ways. He ripped the cabinet doors off and smashed them on the floor. There were pipes snaking up from the bathroom toilet and he tore those out of the wall. Anything that could be broken, he broke. Who was gonna see? Who was gonna care? He broke it all. Then Ben went upstairs and tore the bedposts off their frames, the wood splintering and the loud cracks soothing his terrified soul. When it was all over and the place was trashed, he sat down, ate some bread from his pack, and passed out on the hardwood floor.
Twenty minutes later, he let his eyelids split a quarter open and noticed a staircase going up to the third floor. This was the only house in the row that had an extra level, and the path had led him here. Of course, this had all been a massive cosmic troll job. Ben fully expected to walk up those stairs and find a giant papier-mâché middle finger waiting for him.
He took his time getting up, still sore to the bone. Buildings have been constructed with more haste. These were the only unfinished stairs in the house. The rest of the place had scrolls of dull tan carpet going up to the second floor and down to the basement, the carpet you see in any new suburban McMansion that’s been thrown up by a contractor in under three months. But this upper staircase was just a bunch of old planks. There was a flimsy door at the top and Ben could sense a presence behind it. There was a thing there. There was something the path was trying to get him to discover.
I need a weapon.
Bereft of the powers to summon a wolf (more of those seeds would have been nice), he rooted through the backpack and found Mrs. Blackwell’s cheese knife. It wasn’t much, as weapons went. A bazooka would have been handier. The knife was about eight inches long, with a teak handle and a curved fork at the end. It probably wasn’t even all that great at cutting through a cheese block, much less a psychotic murderer. Hopefully, the only thing Ben would confront behind that door was an angry wheel of Brie.
The door beckoned. There was no alternative. No other place the path led. It would take him to the attic, and then give him further instructions. Any deviation from that would result in death. Besides, he had to know what was behind the door now, regardless of how terrible it was. It goaded him on: a scab you know you shouldn’t be picking at.
One step closer to the staircase and Ben could feel the door pulsing above him, the bolts just barely keeping it from flying open. And with his first step on the rickety planks, he heard something.
He heard the scratching.