He-s Out There Today
I’m here, Dad. I’m right here.
“Will it end?” he asked. “If I find him?”
The chair turned slowly.
“You left him.” The thing took a step forward. The floor didn’t creak. “You were twelve years old. He went into the woods to find you, and you heard him calling. ‘Sammy. Sammy, where are you?’ And you hid. You put your hands over your ears and you hid in the hollow log until the sound stopped.”
The chair creaked.
“Dad?” His voice came out smaller than he intended.
“He would have what? Hit you? Screamed at you?” The thing was close now. Sam could smell it—not rot, not decay, but something worse. The smell of a basement after a flood. The smell of things that should have stayed buried. “He was your father, Sam. And you left him out there. You let the woods take him.” He-s Out There
The sign at the county line had been bullet-riddled for twenty years: WELCOME TO PACKER’S CORNER. POP. 312. Now it was just a ragged metal ghost, like everything else in his memory.
“How?” Sam whispered.
And somewhere in the shadows between the trees, the thing in the plaid shirt sits in a chair that doesn’t exist, humming a song that never ends, waiting for the next one to come home.
You don’t have to do this, the reasonable part of his brain whispered. Turn around. Drive back to Nashville. Forget he ever existed. I’m here, Dad
