Previously in the Vines Inquiry— The Call rang anew in the packed diner. The gang, now aware, was able to hear it along with a few unexpected face: Jean, the waitress, and Richard, Frank’s father. The latter two rushed to snatch a Gift while the trio was paralyzed with fear. Richard hinted at Jean’s Inquiry past before using the last gasps of his Gift to shatter the diner windows, injuring Jean and random patrons alike. While everyone fled in the chaos, Frank saw his father head to kitchen and utter a single word before pouring boiling hot oil down his throat: HAIL.
The burning oil swallowed Richard’s scream.
His tongue went first, bubbling; frying with blisters that split instantly like an infected rash. As the liquid fell, it seared and steamed through the soft flesh. There was a crisping sound to it all, the super-heated oil hitting the raw surface of Richard’s body. He shook at the impact, the invasion, and tried to use his free hand to steady himself. His arm flailed about, twitching as it reached for anything solid. When he found the countertop, a stream of oil burst through one side of his throat. It was like his gullet had popped.
Gullet. That was the only option. No one watching could call it a throat anymore. There was no way to process a man pouring frying oil into his own mouth. A gullet. A gullet they could manage.
Richard collapsed backward and smacked his head on the kitchen sink, though he had little left to fear at that point. Had Frank and co. still been able to see him, they would have witnessed the frying liquid bubble up through Richard’s cheek. They would have ignored the smell.
And so, Richard Vines, sr. died with a gurgling wheeze.
Frank couldn’t tell if he was screaming, but his jaw hurt from the pressure. He could see the whites of Harlow’s eyes. It seemed she might never blink again. It was Blevin who broke the spell.
“We have to go,” he whispered between them. Frank couldn’t move. His shoes were permanently stuck to the floor. He was sure of it. He found the sound of his breath and managed to exhale. The bells, Frank realized, were gone. Her Call had ended.
“Now!”
Blevin pulled them both down into a crouch as noises resumed from the kitchen. Someone fetching a glass. The sink running. The trio of them moved toward the far end of the diner counter as Richard came out, sipping.
“Oh my gosh, Jean,” he said, voice pan-fried with a sticky-sweet layer of charm. The pale woman, growing ever-paler, did not answer. “Lester, have we called someone? Jean, listen to me. You’re not dead, hmm?”
He leaned in close enough for a kiss.
“You didn’t die,” said Richard. He titled his head, examining. “Did you, buddy?”
As Blevin pulled them past diner counter and through the back door, they could hear Richard.
“Don’t worry, Jean. This will all be over soon.”
They waited together, huddled in the dark around the back of McCroy’s while the volunteer fire department slipped up icy roads. Most of the diner patrons hung around until the cold was too much for them. They left at the behest of Lester McCroy, promising to return to pay their checks or just flopping down big, Christmas bonus bills.
Richard Vines was one of the last to leave. He held the rag to Jean’s stomach wound, pressing hard amidst her yelping cries, to ‘staunch the blood.’ He was still there, his fingers deep in her wound, long after the waitress had lost consciousness.
Finally, Aunt Toni’s car lurched into the snowy parking lot. Frank leapt up but Harlow grabbed his elbow.
“She’ll help us,” he pleaded. Harlow shook her head. She hadn’t said a word since Frank’s father had shattered the windows with that unknowable not-speech.
“Frank?” Toni shouted above the storm as she crossed the parking lot. Richard shook his head. She was tramping a path in the snow towards the restaurant where Jean lay dying on the counter, but she wasn’t alone.
As Toni struggled through the snow, her first aid kit swinging across her body, Rosalind came out of the passenger side of Toni’s car. Her knee-high boots sent Frank’s mother to the ground on their spindly heels. She cursed to herself and wiped at the snowflakes already crowding into her up-do of dark, burnished hair.
They all left soon after, even Lester. They’d laid Jean in the back seat of Aunt Toni’s SUV and headed up-island towards Hughes House. The car slid at first, but Toni’s snow tires found purchase and then they were on their way. As they piled into the car, Frank could hear his mother ask: “Any luck in the woods?”
Only then did the trio come out of their frozen hiding stances to face the abandoned parking lot. Tire tracks and footprints were already disappearing in the heavy snowfall. The storm was the worst it’d been and showed no signs of stopping.
Safe now, or at least alone, Harlow tried to call her mother, but her phone had no signal.
She went to the payphone by the diner’s front door, borrowing some quarters from Frank. Harlow leaned close to the diner to shield herself from the squall. Blevin joined to act as a human barrier.
“Is privacy dead along with us?” she sniped. Blevin’s face fell into mush and he trudged over to Frank.
Frank thought he should console, or at least explain Blevin’s error, but he was stuck in, mesmerized by the sight of McCroy’s.
Three of the five windows were totally gone. The lights flickered against the snow falling in through the open frames. The TV was halfway through one of those Claymation specials that were already classics before Frank was born, broadcasting to no one but the bodies that had been left. Down-island, the fire department sirens just barely penetrated the pines, promising help too late.
“We need to go,” Blevin said again. He looked down-island, nervous.
Frank swayed where he stood. The jukebox had gotten to the final song he’d put in. “God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman” began with a single bell and flourish, promising tidings of comfort and joy to whatever might linger in McCroy’s.
“Yes, Momma. I’m fine. Are you? How’s your hand?” Harlow put a finger in her free ear, blocking out the howling squall. “I will. I promise. Yes, Ma’am. I will. I love you, too.”
Frank watched the diner trying to carry on, even as the storm dampened the red-and-green paper ribbons they hung each year. The cookies by the register would be getting soggy soon. He had heard Blevin, and knew the man was right. They couldn’t be found here. Not that they’d be blamed for what happened. They just didn’t have time to waste. The song answered the question on all their minds.
“To save us all from Satan’s power, when we were gone astray...”
“What can we do?” whispered Blevin.
Frank blinked rapidly; his daze broken like a snuffed out fire. “We’re gonna get in the holiday spirit.” There was a raw edge on his words. Ragged. “They wanted me home for Christmas? Then let’s go home.”
Frank marched away from the diner, banishing the cold with teenage fury, and called over his shoulder. “I don’t expect you two to come with me. Wait. Harlow, is your mom okay?” She nodded. “Alright.” Frank continued on, each step a third of his normal stride.
“She’s worried about us. She heard what happened, Frank.”
Harlow’s voice had changed too. If Frank’s was serrated, Harlow’s was the leather he was cutting through. He recognized it immediately. That’s how he must have sounded when he called her earlier—had it only been one day??—to help him out of his father’s death trap.
“I want to see— Why don’t we all just go down to the bar and regroup or something?”
“Regroup for what?” He turned on the spot, fighting to hear her over the storm. “We all know what the next step has to be. The longer we wait, the more time we give them to get another Gift. The more time it gives them to hurt someone else I care about. What if they go for your parents? My Aunt Toni?”
Harlow sighed. “She’s with them now, Frank.”
“Exactly!” Tears froze in their ducts, aborting any chance of them releasing some stress. “I left her here, Harlow. I left your parents and you. I let mine chase me away. Let them do all of this right under my nose. I probably smelled it and called it something different. No more.
“I let Dick down. I let…” Frank turned towards the diner where Jean’s blood was already turning a clouded maroon. “I let Jean down. I don’t even know who else! Jean listed all those weird deaths, and all the ones we had as kids. I’m not going to let them get her too, Harlow. I’m not going to let them get anyone else.”
Twenty minutes later, they were all crowded onto the trolley. It was packed with diner patrons, hurriedly sharing the story with the passion of true voyeurs to other passengers who’d been lucky enough to eat elsewhere.
Harlow sat against the window with Blevin next to her. Frank stood, his gritty determination softening back to hopeful pessimism.
“Do you want to sit on my lap, Frank?” said Blevin, not even a pinch of seduction in his voice. Harlow rolled her eyes hard enough to shift the trolley off the track.
“No. Thank you?”
Blevin grinned and nodded. “Let me know if you change your mind.”
“Harlow, it’s not too late to turn around. I really didn’t expect y’all to come. Please, go see your parents.”
Harlow snorted. “Oh god, he’s y’alling.”
“I mean it.”
“Frank, I can go home like you can notice your family’s a bunch of demon worshippers earlier than just before they end the world and kill everyone.” The little girl in front of them, who’d been alternating between staring out the window and at Blevin, gasped. “Oh. Not you, sweetie.”
Harlow pat her head. The girl sank back into her seat and was never heard from again. She didn’t die, as far as any of them knew. She was just heading to her cousin Matt’s and the social circles didn’t overlap.
On the hike up from the trolley station to the Big House, Frank thought how lucky it was they’d met Blevin. Sure, he didn’t have all the same social habits and was a bit too enthusiastic about the cult; but the man could cut a path through snow. And who was Frank to judge when it came to social graces?
His job was largely to mask his real feelings— a skill he’d honed to perfection over a lifetime of making sure he was the slimmest, ittiest bittiest version of himself. So small, in fact, that he’d lacked the perspective to see what was right in front of him.
Don’t lie, he thought. You knew. You heard it all, and you ignored it.
That had to be the truth, but was it? If he’d known his parents worshipped Feenuín all this time, and if he knew what different kind of knives were and the best environment to grow oleander in…where was it all?
The only way Frank thought he could forget details like that was if they were boring. Typical. Normalized. But could he have been that dense? He was too worried to ask Harlow, and no wonder. He’d apparently been too afraid to ask himself for almost twenty years.
She might say yes; an immeasurable mix of joking and spite.
Aunt Toni—the coddler, his blanket in a blizzard—would say no.
He couldn’t ask the only person whose answer he could trust. The only person who had been there too: his brother, Dick.
Is that why you died? he thought. So that I would be alone and do whatever they wanted?
As they walked up the front steps, heat from within eased out between the double doors. It immediately felt too hot, boiling. But then, that was perfect. That’s what he was. A Maryland blue crab, in water that was slowly heating up.
Did they notice before it was too late, or not until the bubbles were catching on their black eyes?
Would someone smarter or braver or stronger have done something?
Harlow reached for the door handle and Blevin gasped.
“Wow,” he said like a child first seeing fireworks. “I don’t think I’m ready.” He bounced from boot to boot.
The truck from when Harlow had come by earlier was still there and there were no tire tracks. Not certifiable with the snow, but Frank doubted his parents would come home tonight. Odds were Rosalind would be spending most of it at the hospital working on diners, if only to keep up appearances. Richard would be stood supportive at her side, but only when he wasn’t fetching coffee and snack machine treats for weeping relatives in the waiting room.
Frank hoped that would give the three of them enough time to get it done. “I promise. It’s just a house.”
Blevin burst into laughter. “To you, maybe!” He smiled wider. “Frank, I’ve been working my entire adult life to earn a key to the house you were born in.”
Harlow gave Blevin a side-eye, but tilted her head towards Frank. The man wasn’t lying, even if he may have been misguided. And as much as Frank wanted to part ways right then, weary of becoming close to anymore cultists, he realized they never would have made it this far without Blevin. As much as they were fumbling in the dark, he was at least a match in the black.
Or, more accurately, a stick held between a dog’s jaws that caught fire by accident.
“What’s that?” said Blevin, pointing to a low grate at the manor’s foundation. “And that!” Frank ignored him.
“Think we need to worry about them?” said Harlow, pointing at the grey truck. One of the back doors was still open.
Frank had no clue, but it couldn’t be worse than what they’d already faced. He brushed away the snow on the side of the truck with a freezing hand. PARKS DEPARTMENT stood out against the grey metal in faded red lettering.
He shrugged. “It was here when we left earlier. They just got stuck with the weather.”
“Or Buffalo Bill got a job with a government pension,” she said. “Wait, what was their day job?”
“Whatever. The house is big enough for someone to lurk in it twenty-four seven without us ever crossing paths. The way things are going, the Woods Woman probably already got the poor schmuck.”
“For the last time, she’s not real!”
“She was there! We believe in gift-giving demons but not the Woods Woman?!”
Even Blevin shook his head, chuckling. “Frank, please. We’re not children.”
“You know I didn’t have to be friends with you,” said Harlow. “There were two seats open in the cafeteria that day. One next to you, one next to Joe Rizzoli. And he owns a boat now!”
“Joe Rizzoli lives on a boat,” said Frank. “That is not the same.”
Inside, seemingly alone, they settled down in the parlor where Rosalind had performed her sacrament. If he’d chosen another chair maybe Frank wouldn’t have seen them.
But there they were, a pair, posed like they might pierce right through.