Gina Ranalli - House of Fallen Trees

And then it stopped.

She didn’t dare blink, didn’t dare breathe. Frozen and staring, everything else forgotten in that moment. There was only her and the computer. After nearly a full minute had passed, she slowly moved her hand towards the laptop, intending to slam it shut when it bleated at her again.

The message again, abbreviated this time, coming faster than she thought possible. Could anyone type that fast?

TWOMEN.

TWOMEN.

TWOMENTWOMENTWOMENTWOMENTWOMENTWOMENTWOMEN .

Over and over and over. Filling up the entirety of the message box. The computer’s beeping became a constant drone and then, finally, she found the strength to reach out and slam the thing closed.

The beeping stopped abruptly, casting her into complete silence, the candle flame still the only source of light in the room.

She released her pent up breath in a long slow whoosh that tasted bitter on her tongue.

Sometime later — maybe five minutes, maybe sixty — she stood, picked up the candle with its excited, happy flame and left the room, leaving the laptop behind, as well as the wine.

She didn’t feel like drinking anymore. Or walking in the crisp night air. She didn’t know what she wanted now, if anything, except to sleep. She was suddenly very tired. Exhausted, really. And her head was beginning to hurt with the first twangs of a hangover.

She had to sleep, though she had no intention of sleeping in that bedroom tonight. The couch would do just fine. She would sleep and then when she woke up, she would be clear-headed enough to figure out just what the hell was going on. Maybe figure out who was playing such an evil trick on her and why.

But, sleep first. Sleep was her friend, almost a lover, and now she needed to mate with it, become one and just disappear for a time.

Disappearing sounded perfect right now.

It wasn’t until the next afternoon that it occurred to her she should perhaps call the police and tell them she was being harassed. It seemed like a good idea for exactly fifteen seconds and then the reality of it slammed home. The cops wouldn’t do shit. They never did. Even if someone was physically threatening her, they probably wouldn’t do anything about it. She had no faith in the system, which was only in place to protect the guilty and punish the innocent. No faith in cops, most of whom only became cops in order to bully people and make themselves feel superior.

Karen was on her own but she didn’t think she was completely helpless. She didn’t have to take this harassment. She could try to figure out what was going on, try and make it stop, find out who was behind it and why.

The more she thought about it though, the more she drew a blank. She could think of absolutely no one who would want to pull this kind of prank, couldn’t even think of a single motive for such a thing.

Frustrated, she called and left a message for her parents saying a work thing had come up — a deadline for a short story — and she wouldn’t be able to make the birthday gathering after all.

She was relieved she didn’t have to talk to her mother in person. The woman would almost certainly have sensed the lie and pressured Karen to come clean and then proceed to guilt her into attending the birthday dinner, whether she wanted to or not.

That done, she went into her kitchen to brew coffee and took a mug of it into her office with her so she could do Internet searches on her PC. She didn’t quite have the courage yet to touch the laptop, fearing the same message would start popping up all over again.

Sipping coffee, she did her best to dig up info on Sean, which consisted of a few articles in Washington newspapers about his going missing without a trace. She found nothing she didn’t already know.

Next, she searched for anything regarding his partner, Rory Luden, and also turned up next to nothing, except that he was a summer school teacher of social studies in Indigo Bend, Washington, and often traveled to Spokane to run marathons. He had no personal website she could find and, from what she could gather, was about as private a person as she herself was. Of course, being a gay man living in East Bum Fuck Nowhere could have had something to do with that. She doubted the lumber town he called home could be an easy place to be gay in. Most small towns, she knew, were filled with less than liberal minds.

Though she continued to turn up nothing, she kept searching anyway. It wasn’t until her coffee had grown cold that she sat back with a sigh and admitted maybe she couldn’t find anything because there was nothing to find.

Drumming her fingers on the desk, she wracked her brain, doing her best to remember any friends Sean had had before he moved away to the Northwest.

She could think of no one. Even his high school friends remained elusive in her mind. She just hadn’t paid much attention to them at the time.

Maybe her mother would remember some of them, she thought. But asking her mom would be opening up a whole new can of worms to wade through.

“Fuck,” she whispered, reluctant to give up so soon.

After several minutes of trying to think her way out of the box, she decided to give it a break. Work on her novel for a while. That at least would cheer her up some.

She clicked off the Internet and went into her Microsoft Word program, opening the file called DMASQUE and scrolling down to where she had left off the last time she’d worked on it. Her eyes flicked over the words, rereading what she’d written as she grabbed her mug for a sip of coffee. The instant the liquid touched her lips, she grimaced. There was nothing worse than cold coffee, as far as she was concerned.

A new cup was in order. She went to the kitchen, refilled the mug from the still warm carafe, nuked it a minute for good measure, then returned to her office, chilly hands wrapped around the hot porcelain.

The mug tumbled from her hands, splashing her lower body with hot coffee, but Karen barely noticed.

On the screen, the words TWO MEN HAVE THE CARCASS were repeated endlessly on the page, the cursor blinking at the end of an unfinished line: TWO MEN .

Still, Karen did not scream. She sank to her knees, a squeak of confusion escaping her throat.

She was losing her mind.

That was the only explanation that made sense. Hallucinating, maybe. Or asleep. This could be a dream.

She clung to that thought like the victim of a shipwreck clinging to a rotten wooden board in a vast black sea, no moon, no stars, no land in sight.

Just sleeping. Dreaming. A very bad dream, but still just a dream.

On the floor, she curled into the fetal position and closed her eyes, lips moving silently, repeating the word “Asleep” over and over, until she finally was.

When she awoke, she realized she was cold and wet. Sitting up, she remembered everything and saw that she had curled up on the floor in a puddle of coffee, among broken shards of the mug she’d dropped.

Running a hand over her mouth, she stared suspiciously through the dark up at her computer monitor. It was blank.

No matter.

She knew what she had to do now.

Whether Sean was dead or alive didn’t matter anymore. She had to find him. That was what her subconscious had been trying to tell her with all its sleight of hand tricks. Trying to wake her up to the reality of the situation. No one was doing anything to find her brother — or his remains, if that turned out to be the case. Everyone had given up, even her parents. But Karen couldn’t give up. Didn’t want to, though if anyone had said this to her a few days before, she would have scoffed and said, “The past is the past. We can’t wallow in it.” And she believed that still, but now she knew the situation with Sean wasn’t the past at all. It was the present. It would only be the past once he was found and buried, if that’s what it came to. Otherwise, it would continue to haunt her.