Where He Can't Find You

by Darcy Coates

The air was rotting. Biting cold and heavy with moisture, it filled January’s throat with every inhale, so dense that it felt as though it was suffocating her.

something delicate and disgusting. Threads, crisscrossing the darkness ahead of her. They were as fine as spiderweb and slimy from the damp. When she tried to swipe them away, they refused to break.

It couldn’t see well in the dark. The maze held no light; January had been staring into the nothingness for so long that she’d started to hallucinate things moving around her. Unnatural shapes danced, taunting her, only to vanish when she looked at them directly.

The nightmares were always the first warning. They came before any of the other signs—before the birds that plunged out of the sky, before the streetlights all died, before the sickness. Before the disappearances.

They could have looked beautiful once, but Breaker Street had succumbed to time and apathy. The fences leaned and the lawns had lost their color. Children’s toys had been abandoned in a nearby yard: tricycles and a small plastic slide now overgrown with weeds.

This was how you survived in Doubtful. You watched. You learned. And you figured out the rules that would keep you safe.

A different officer was unrolling police tape around the building. It would probably stay there, knots coming loose and plastic decaying, until strands broke free and were lost in the mud and bushes. Just like all the others. A broken spiderweb of forgotten police tape across the town.

And it was always better to be on the approaching side of daylight, not the receding.

A lot of those pages were water damaged, the paper stiff and crinkly and warped. Many were sun bleached, too; it washed the smiling faces out until they were barely recognizable. Any edges that weren’t fixed in place with rusty pins or yellowing tape fluttered in the wind, sounding very much like dead leaves in autumn.

She’d always had a strong sense of direction. But there was something disorienting about the forest. It was impossible to follow a straight line, and it robbed her of her sense of space, her sense of time, and her sense of how to retrace her steps.

We want to feel that we have control over our destiny, that we wouldn’t ever make the same mistakes that cost someone else everything.

The day it happened was bad. The sky was so overcast, it felt like dusk.

Clocks wind back Windows crack Signals fall Motors stall Long red thread Someone’s dead

A cold gust of air touched the back of Connor’s neck like a ghostly finger grazing his skin. He crossed to the hallway and looked down its length.

People always said sunsets were beautiful. To Connor, it looked more like a massive bruise swelling out across the horizon.

A dark shape between the leaves. Something tall. Something with limbs that branched out from its sides, almost as long and as heavy as the tree’s own branches. Something staring directly at him. A hand pressed into the small of his back.

She’d already seen three body bags carried out, and they still weren’t done.

“Who was that in there with you?” her mother asked. Riya, who was pulling her seatbelt down toward the buckle, went still. “What?” “There was someone behind you.” Her mother turned toward her, and her pupils seemed tiny in her wide eyes. “It’s why I put my lights on. Because someone was behind you, and they were walking closer, and I couldn’t see who it was.” They both stared into Bobby’s Pizzeria. The dining room was empty.

It was a small, old-fashioned box set with an antenna angled on top. Images merged across the screen. Two separate shows tangled, their audio and visuals blending horribly. Faces and shapes fused into one another. Digital artifacts infected the screen. The audio tormented, not quite music or dialogue or background sounds, but a ragged blend of all three. Abby was certain she could see a screaming face off to one side, howling at the audience beneath layers of jarring color and texture. She turned aside.

“Of course.” Her thin, bony hands twitched on her lap. “I’m just waiting for the end of my show.” The face in the corner of the television screamed, and screamed, and screamed.

But in every case? No one, no matter their personality or temperament, ever made a sound?

The Stitcher waits The Stitcher takes The Stitcher cuts The Stitcher shapes * * * Rule #3: Stay as far from Charles Vickers as you can.

There’s no color in Doubtful, she realized as she stared up at the curtains floating out of an open bedroom window. It was like the town had been drained over decades. Everywhere else was muted browns, faded earthy greens, and grays. Everywhere except for Jen’s own body, which sported a striped blue-and-black shirt…and the curtains. They reminded her of Hope and her tinted hair.

She’d heard that drowning people would clutch at anyone trying to rescue them, and very often pull them under as well. Right now, Abby was drowning. And Riya could feel herself teetering on the edge of it, too: wanting to grasp at anyone who could help, but knowing she’d just be spreading the damage.

Abby knew what Alma was saying. A lot of people didn’t want to be around someone who’d come so close to the Stitcher. As though it tainted them by proximity. As though being too near them might draw the Stitcher’s attention, somehow.

Sometimes the worst things that happen to you come from the smallest decisions. You lean on the accelerator instead of the break. Or you shift your weight on the ladder. Or you leap into the pool headfirst without checking how deep the water is. Tiny, tiny mistakes that would have been inconsequential any other day. But for some reason, the universe’s gears get jammed at that exact second, and your tiny mistake permanently changes the remainder of your life.

And then I looked down at my shadow. It was growing bigger. And that was such a strange thing that I couldn’t tear my eyes off it. It kept ballooning out and changing shape until I finally understood what was happening. It wasn’t my shadow growing bigger. It was a second shadow, much larger than mine, falling over me as the Stitcher approached from behind.

At first I thought it was night. But it was so much darker than any night I’d ever seen before. There’s always some kind of light, no matter how scarce it might be. But this—this was pure emptiness. A void.

lost track of time. Later, at the hospital, I learned I’d been gone for three days. In the dark of the mines, it felt like weeks. Weeks of numb limbs and pain that wouldn’t fade and exhaustion that I had to fight through to keep crawling.

“Are we certain the Stitcher’s human?” Abby had no idea how to answer him.

More threads crossed their path. Sometimes they snagged over rocks, running across the tunnel’s walls like wiring. Sometimes they crisscrossed the path, and Abby had to duck to get under them. Sometimes they disappeared into the solid stone walls, as though someone had used a needle to pierce the rocks.

Pale white lines ran along the darker stone. There were four of them, running parallel along the passage for at least ten feet. As though someone had scraped enormous nails across the rock wall. Abby lifted her own hand and held it just an inch above the scrapes. Even when she spread her fingers as wide as possible, she still couldn’t cover the same surface area as the marks. Her fingers shook as she drew them back into a fist at her side.

Old stains discolored what had probably been white and gray fabric. Bloodstains, Abby’s mind whispered. The shoe was soaked in them.

Her light had died. Nothing was visible; her entire world was a blanket of inky darkness. But, as her ears cleared, she thought she heard distant noises. Not quite splashing, but soft, swift sluicing sounds, like practiced limbs brushing through water. They were moving away from her.

It turned out a person could make the correct choice, and still feel strangled by regret.

You never know how you’ll act under pressure until you’re forced to find out.