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The old rock house stood as sturdy now as it ever had, looking exactly as powerful as the first day Shandi saw it as a kid. Locals called it the old schoolhouse, but it had been a home far longer than it had ever served as a place of education. She wondered when those stones first came together to form a house, and took a mental note to look it up when she got back to the office. Her parents hadn’t gone to school there and her grandparents had died before Shandi shed the immature bonds of adolescence and grown to care about their remarkable history. She wished she’d turned her journalistic talents towards documenting her own family.
The owner of those rocks had changed many times over the years. She vaguely remembered that Jake’s grandparents owned it in the sixties. His grandparents had left their mark on a great many things in Rose Valley. The immediately previous tenants had been the Hargrove family, but now it belonged to the Phillips family. Karen’s father had deeded it to her after her mother passed away. Now she lived there with her family and her ailing father. It seemed like a lot of mundane detail to know about a person that she barely knew, but Rose Valley held so few secrets.
Jake desperately wanted to go with her on this visit, but she insisted that he stay behind. Though he seemed like his old self again, she couldn’t help but believe that the effects of the drugs still made him weak. Shandi fought the doctor’s decision to release him so soon after he awoke, but she also understood her own overprotective streak.
She walked up the stone steps to the front porch, impressed by their sturdiness. She wondered if they had been an original part of the house, or if they had been built some time later.
The screen door squealed as she opened it. With no doorbell, she knocked, instead.
“Coming!” she heard inside.
It felt like minutes before the door cracked open. Karen Phillips stood in the doorway. She exceeded Shandi’s age by almost ten years. Her brown hair struggled against faint streaks of gray that looked more dignified than old. Her face still shone with a smooth freshness, and her alert light brown eyes danced with excitement. Though larger than some, Karen still boasted a shapely and appealing figure.
“Shandi? To what do I owe the pleasure?” she said with a smile.
Shandi extended a hand. Karen shook it dutifully before Shandi answered, “This is going to sound really strange, but are you related to someone named William P. Hargrove?”
Karen nodded almost immediately, clearly recognizing the name. “Yeah. I never met him, but he was my grandfather.”
Shandi dropped her shoulders. “Would you mind if I come in and ask you a few questions about him?”
Karen motioned inside. “I don’t know how much I’ll be able to help, but sure.”
Shandi found herself in the living room of the old house, impressed by its nice appointments and surprised to find the insides much more modern than she expected. The air smelled vaguely of cinnamon. She took a seat in a recliner next to the couch.
Karen did not sit. “I’ll be right back. I’m just going to get us a little snack and something to drink.”
Karen disappeared into the kitchen before Shandi could tell her she wasn’t hungry. As a journalist, Shandi had learned long ago that going along with someone proved to be the most reliable way to put them at ease. The more comfortable she could make them, the more information they might share.
Shandi suddenly became aware of someone watching her. She looked towards a hallway to her right and saw an old man in a wheelchair. She awkwardly smiled at him and managed a small gesture that vaguely resembled a wave. He stared and said nothing. Shandi couldn’t bring herself to look away, as if turning her back to him would cause him to get up from the chair and devour her.
“Here we go. I made this fresh this morning. It’s my grandfather’s recipe.” Karen floated into the room. Shandi found a sweet potato pie in her hands and a glass of milk on the coffee table in front of her. Clearly, the cinnamon smell had come from the baking.
Shandi motioned towards the man in the wheelchair. “Is that your father?”
Karen nodded. “Yes, ma’am. He’s pretty despondent these days. I apologize if he was staring at you. I don’t think he knows what he’s doing anymore. He just roams around the house. He just celebrated his 78th birthday last week.”
Shandi made an effort to meet his gaze. “Happy Birthday, Mr. Hargrove!”
He did not respond. Shandi took a bite of pie so that she had something to do to fill the awkward silence. She immediately forgot about all of that, though, when the pie hit her tongue in a euphoric explosion of sugar.
After savoring a couple of bites, Shandi decided to get down to business. She took out her cell phone. “Do you mind if I record this?”
“Oh no. Not at all.”
She seemed to have no reservations about sharing her family history, which relieved Shandi. Too often, getting information from people proved difficult.
“So, what can you tell me about your grandfather?”
Karen looked towards the ceiling, as if trying hard to remember obscure facts. “He was in the army. I think he was a Major, maybe? He died in the war in 1942 when my dad was only three. He didn’t go by William. Everyone called him Billy.”
“Did he live here in Rose Valley?”
“He grew up in Mississippi, I’m pretty sure. But they moved to Rose Valley in 1940, I think.” She looked over at her father. “Is that right, daddy?”
The man offered no answer. Karen waved her hand at him in minor annoyance before continuing. “I think he was assigned here. To help with some sort of research, maybe? I guess at Arrowhead. I don’t know where else it would have been. But then they shipped him overseas and he died somewhere in France, I think.”
Shandi contemplated how best to navigate the next part. She didn’t want to alarm Karen, but she also felt obligated to tell Karen what she knew. She decided that leading with a prop might be easiest, so she pulled the dog tags out of her pocket and handed them over to Karen.
“These were found here in Rose Valley,” Shandi said. “In a cave.”
Karen’s eyes lit up as she processed the meaning of the thin metal offering. “This is neat! I wonder how they got there. Can I have them? I’d love to add them to my scrapbook.”
Shandi hadn’t anticipated that, but it made sense that Karen would want them. She hoped that Karen would trust her enough to let her hold on to them. “Um, sure. But would you mind if I held on to them a while longer? I’m working on a story and I might need these still.”
Karen didn’t answer immediately, warily looking between Shandi and the dog tags. With a sigh, she finally replied, “Of course. I know where to find you if you don’t bring them back.”
Shandi smiled. “So are you sure that William—sorry, Billy—died in France?”
“That’s what my mom always told me, yeah. Daddy didn’t like to talk about it much. It was hard for him growing up back then without a father.” Karen cheeks flushed suddenly. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I don’t mean that it’s bad. You’re a wonderful mother, Shandi. It was just harder back then, you know?”
Shandi took no offense. Though she hardly could claim mother of the year, she delighted in the woman that Macy seemed destined to become. “Don’t worry about it. I understand what you mean.”
Karen’s father mumbled something. Shandi couldn’t make it out. She looked towards him, as Karen stood up and crossed the living room to his side. “What was that, daddy?”
He spoke louder this time. “Never sent home his body. Mama cried for days.”
No body. Perhaps he had never gone to France at all. Perhaps he never left Rose Valley, now inexplicably old and tragically altered. Shandi wrestled with whether or not she should share her suspicions with Karen, especially with her father nearby. She decided not to. She couldn’t be sure that Billy Hargrove had become the beast.
“I didn’t know that, daddy,” Karen said, tenderly stroking the few tendrils of gray that clung to his pate. “Thank you for sharing that.”
He spoke again. “Mama saw him after he died.”
“Like she saw his spirit, you mean, daddy?” Karen asked.
The old man shook his head, jerky and labored. He took a deep breath. “No. He came to visit one night. She saw him in the yard. I remember looking through the window. He got stronger while he was in France.”
He took another strenuous breath. Shandi thought for sure that he lacked the strength to go on, but he did. “Mama cried again that night. Like she had when she learned he died. She didn’t know I saw. He never came back after that.”
A chill ran down Shandi’s spine. The beast had come to see his wife. Some part of his humanity must have remained back then, and maybe some part of it existed even now. Did he know his son was nearby?
None of this information provided definitive proof. This all could just have easily been a coincidence and the overactive imagination of a young child who had lost his father. It seemed impossible to believe that he would remember something like that from the age of three. Though maybe this memory sprung from an event from much later than 1942.
Clearly, the beast had been in Rose Valley for many years.
Something turned Shandi’s mind to the night the beast had attacked her house. He had taken one of Macy’s stuffed animals; a cartoon potato that they called Scallops. Had held onto it even while he chased them. It hadn’t been at the house or on the road when Cam had gone back, so perhaps he had taken it with him. Had it reminded him of something from his previous life?
Shandi thought of another question. “Back before the war, what did Billy do for a living?”
Karen looked at her father, frowning when she realized his focus was wandering. “He was a farmer in Mississippi. I remember because of his amazing pie recipe. He grew sweet potatoes.”
Shandi blanched as she remembered Macy’s stuffed animal. Her doubts about the relationship between Billy Hargrove and the beast evaporated. The beast and Billy Hargrove inhabited the same body. And more importantly, he knew it.
