The thing in the chair had his father’s plaid shirt, the one with the torn pocket where he used to keep his Skoal. It had his father’s hands—knuckles like walnuts, the left pinkie bent sideways from a long-ago fight with a hay baler. But the face was wrong. The face was a smooth, gray expanse of skin where features should have been. No eyes. No mouth. Just two small slits where a nose might have been, flaring slightly with each of the house’s breaths.
“Out where?”
It wasn’t his father.
The thing tilted its head—his father’s gesture, the one he made when he was disappointed. “He’s out there.”
I’m not angry, son. I just want to show you something. He-s Out There
The air was thick with honeysuckle and something else—something metallic, like old blood on a butcher block. Crickets sawed their legs in a frenzy, then stopped all at once. Sam’s boots crunched on the gravel, and the sound seemed too loud, too final.
Sam took a step toward the door. Then another. The thing in the chair had his father’s
The front door was unlocked. That should have been his first warning.
