Chapter 3: Hunt

Over the next few days, Thomas developed a routine in Brooke Haven. In the morning, he went for runs at the high school track, desolate at the hands of summer vacation. In the evening, he drove his rental car to the only grocery store in town to pick up the basics: chips, frozen pizza, and wine. They never had any of the kinds of chardonnay he liked, the ones he’d get back in New York. After the grocery store Thomas would come home, screw the cap off a bottle of $7 white wine, and watch an old movie with female protagonists and cathartic redemption arcs, like Working Girl or, as he saw it, Thelma and Louise. And every night, typically around halfway through the film he was watching, a gentle knock would arrive on the front door.

A finger rests on a doorbell, signaling an arrival at the front door.

The first time it happened, Thomas — surprised but unalarmed — got up from the couch, walked through the foyer and opened the door to find nothing but the deep expanse of a suburban evening. When it happened the next night at the same time, his curiosity was piqued. He picked up his pace as he headed to the front door, but once again found no human source of the knock when he stepped outside. It was just Thomas, Stephanie’s well-manicured porch, and the gentle midsummer breeze. By the fifth night in a row of its occurrence, Thomas had stopped responding to the knock altogether. He didn’t flinch, didn’t move from his worn-in spot on the couch with the cat, who also grew disaffected by the gentle disturbance.

It was in the middle of one of these endless loops of an evening, alone at his former home, the fat cat comfortably perched and asleep on his lap, that Thomas once again heard the knock. Except this time, it was different. The rap was harsher. The cadence quicker. Instinctively, Thomas felt moved to address the knocking, one final time. He gave the cat a look, then gingerly removed him from his lap and scurried to the door. He took a gander through the peep hole, but only saw the verdant front lawn of his sister’s home and the stretch of familiar houses surrounding it. Nary a parked car was visible on the street, as sweeping was reserved for early the next morning. Still, Thomas opened the door. Just to check. And when he did, as he had the first few nights he humored the phantom knocker, he found nothing. To the right, to the left, right in front of him, on his sister’s sprawling porch, he found absolutely nothing. Thomas stood still, taking in the evening that lay before him. The July air was thick, cut only by a light breeze that tousled his curly hair. Fireflies were littered across Thomas’s periphery, their intermittent glow providing one of the few reprieves from the blanket of mid-summer darkness sprawled over the neighborhood.

“Hello?” Thomas called out into the empty night, a feeble attempt at pacifying his activated nerves. As was usual, he received no response in return. He waited a moment and then went to close the door when he heard it, then saw it: a rustling in the bush between Stephanie’s driveway and the yard next door. “Hey!” Thomas yelled, making his way onto the porch and down the front steps. He picked up his pace as he approached the driveway, where he saw a figure darting across the next-door neighbor’s lawn. Their pace was increasing, and they were already moving onto the next yard. Thomas broke into a sprint himself. He cut through the bushes beside the driveway and into the next-door neighbor’s lawn, the figure now two lawns ahead of him. There were about five houses left on the block in that direction before the street descended into woods, the paved asphalt and concrete regressing to dirt and grass and all things unruly. Thomas was not going into those woods, so he needed to catch up to the figure before they made it there themselves. As Thomas trailed behind the figure, he was able to discern that they were dressed in black from head-to-toe, their face concealed by a hood. Thomas, a runner himself, began to close the gap between himself and the running figure, who took a more spastic approach to jogging compared to Thomas’s well-paced strides. Suddenly there was just one yard between them, and just three houses before the figure reached the woods. Thomas could tell they were growing tired, and his curiosity and adrenaline were fueling him. Soon, he was able to make out the figure’s heavy breaths, the squish of their shoes on the dewy grass.

“Hey!” Thomas screamed again, between his own uneven and heavy breaths. As the distance between them diminished, Thomas saw the the figure was dressed in dark sweatpants and a sweater, and a black beanie that seemed to conceal short hair. The figure itself didn’t appear to tower over its surroundings; rather, they were short and dense in stature. All of this was coming into focus as Thomas began to seal the gap between him and the figure, until there were just six feet between them, then five, then four. Thomas outstretched his arm, the fingers on his right hand spreading wide and ready to clutch the figure by the back of their sweater. But right as he went to close his grip around the figure, they whipped their body around and, within seconds, a thick liquid was burning Thomas’s eyes. He fell backwards onto his neighbor’s grass, writhing in pain and covering his face. The discomfort was searing, like tiny daggers repeatedly stabbing his corneas. He cried out, and he could hear people fumbling about inside the house of the lawn he was currently splayed across. Knowing he had just fleeting opportunity to to steal a glimpse of his assailant, Thomas attempted to pry open his eyes with his fingers.

The world around Thomas was smeared and foggy; he saw lights flicker on in the house and a door start to open. And then he looked toward the woods, just about twenty yards away. The figure was standing under an opening of trees, staring at Thomas as he lay propped up on the ground. Through his bleary vision, Thomas saw a child. He couldn’t tell if it was on account of the pepper spray distorting his vision, but the face of the child appeared disfigured. There was a smile spread too wide across their face, their nose crooked at a near-ninety degree angle; their eyes a glowing yellow. As a woman ran outside to help Thomas up from her front lawn, the child turned around and disappeared into the tangle of woods.