the front walk. The shopping cart is still out there, unmoved, unbothered.
He heads back out to the landing and confirms what he suspected all along. His footsteps come down from the upper floor, from the attic where his bedroom was.
And they don’t go back up.
However this started, it started up there.
He shines the torch up the second flight of stairs. There’s only a small landing up top as the house narrows to the peak of its roof. The door to the attic bedroom is there.
It’s open.
Seth can see a dim light coming through it, no doubt from the skylight that served as the bedroom’s only window.
“Hello?” he says.
He starts up the second flight, torch still out in front of him. He can feel himself breathing harder. He keeps his eyes on the door as he climbs, stopping on the last step. The sweat on his palms is making the torch slippery in his hands.
Dammit,
he thinks.
What am I so afraid of?
He takes another deep breath, raises the torch until it’s practically over his head, and leaps through the doorway and into his old bedroom, ready to fight, ready to be fought –
But there’s no one there. Again.
It’s just his old bedroom.
With one big difference.
There’s a coffin sitting in the middle of the floor.
And it’s open.
Everything else is the same.
The crescent-moon wallpaper is still on the walls, the water stain still spreading through it under the skylight in the sloped ceiling. He thinks he can even see the face patterned there that he always used to scare Owen with, telling him that if he didn’t fall asleep in the next
one minute,
the face would eat him alive.
Their beds are there, too, unbelievably small against two corners, Owen’s little more than a cot, really. There’s the shelf with all their books, very roughly used but still favorites. Below it is their box of toys, piled with plastic action figures and cars and ray guns that shot out little more than loudness, and on Owen’s bed is a whole array of stuffed toys – elephants, mostly, they were his favorite – every single one of which Seth knows is across the ocean in his brother’s bedroom.
And taking up the middle of the room, on the floor in the space between the beds, sits the long black coffin, the lid opened like a giant clam.
The blind is down over the skylight, making the light vague in here, but Seth doesn’t want to step past the coffin to raise it.
It takes him a moment to remember that the torch has other uses than as a weapon. He shines it on the coffin. He tries to remember if he’s ever actually seen one in real life. He’s never been to a funeral, not even in ninth grade when Tammy Fernandez had a seizure on school grounds. Nearly everyone went to that one, but Seth’s parents weren’t going to be swayed from an overnight trip to Seattle. “You didn’t even
know
her,” his mother had said, and that was that.
This coffin, though, is definitely shining back at him, and not like polished wood might. It shines back almost like the hood of a really expensive car. In fact,
exactly
like the hood of a really expensive car. It even seems to be made of a kind of black metal. The corners of it are rounded, too. Seth’s curiosity gets the better of him, and he moves closer. It’s strange, stranger than even at first glance. Sleek and expensive looking, almost futuristic, like something out of a movie.
Definitely a coffin, though, as the inside is all white cushions and pillows and –
“Holy shit,” Seth says, under his breath.
Crisscrossing the bedding are streamers of metallic-sided tape.
They look as if they’ve been torn and pulled against, as if someone was tied down by them and that person struggled and pulled with all their might until they were free.
Free to stumble blindly down the stairs before collapsing on the path outside.
Seth stands there for a long, long time, not knowing what to think.
An ultra-modern coffin, big enough to hold the nearly fully-grown version of him, yet here