Taming the Beast

The stairs opened onto a long hallway that stretched for the length of the house. Closed doors lined each side and in between them were family photos. Rose brushed the dust off one of them and saw a family staring back at her. The parents looked stout and happy and their three kids were all tall and chubby cheeked and primary school-aged. Was one of the kids Liam? But they all looked so normal. Curious now, she wiped the dust from another picture and saw the same family but a few years older. The children were nearly twice as tall it seemed and were clearly a girl and two boys, though which of them was Liam was impossible to say.

However he looked now, he hadn’t always been that way. Something had happened. Something terrible. And it had changed him. Was it an accident? A disease? He seemed unable to tell her.

She went through the door Liam had mentioned and found the library. Marvelous built-in shelves filled every wall and every shelf was crammed with books. They were ordered alphabetically, Rose noticed with approval. A window looked out over the land below, facing the low rolling hills that stretched out behind the farmhouse and in front of the window on a low table was the phone.

It was an old landline, the push-button kind, industrial and black. But somehow it still worked. Rose picked it up and was shocked to hear the old hum of the dial tone in her ear. And for a moment she was a kid again, picking up the phone after she got home from school to call her mother’s office and let her know that she’d got home safely. It summoned a feeling of childish helplessness in her that she struggled to shake.

Now that she had a phone, who could she call? On a pad near the phone was the name Pete and a local number and the words For Emergencies written and underlined harshly. So she dialed that number.

“Sheriff Pete here,” said a grumbling voice on the other end of the line.

“Hi, my name is Rose and I’m stranded at—" She paused. Did she even know the address? “I’m at Liam’s house?” she tried.

“Liam?” Sheriff Pete said. “I only know one Liam and he’s a big guy. Bad temper. Lives by himself way outside town. You mean him?”

“I guess?” Rose said. “I haven’t seen any temper but the rest fits.”

“And you’re stranded? Let me guess, the storm?”

Rose nodded and then said, “Yes,” when she remembered he couldn’t hear her nod.

“Okay well, you’re a far ways outside of town, lady and I have two dozen other motorists who called before you who also need help. Buncha tourists got no idea how to drive if you ask me,” he grumbled. “I’ll get to you as soon as I can, but it won’t be soon. And if I’m not there before dark, you find someplace safe and hole up, you hear me? Don’t go out at night there.”

Rose flinched. Should she tell the sheriff about Ronald Carter and his goons? Or would it even matter?

“Okay, but hurry please.”

“I’ll be as fast as I can,” Sheriff Pete said. “But don’t hold your breath.”

He hung up abruptly and then Rose dialed her mother’s office. Besides the library and her own cell number it was the only actual phone number she knew. It went right to voicemail and Rose left a message that began as calm and clear but quickly took some wrong turns and ended up a rambling, half-sobbing mess where she explained that Ronald Carter had pursued her relentlessly, and when she turned him away time and again he showed up as the library was closing and threatened to ruin her life if she didn’t give him what he wanted.

The voicemail cut her off before she could say everything she wanted, but Rose decided not to call back and spill the rest. There was a chance that Ronald would go after her parents—he’d implied as much on more than one occasion—so they deserved a warning.

After the phone call was done, and she’d regained some composure, she called down to Liam. “Which books did you want? There’s quite a few up here.”

“Something good please. That’s all.” Then he added quickly, “With a happy ending please.”

Rose spent an hour looking through the books. There wasn’t a single book newer than 1988. It was as if the room had been sealed then and preserved. She picked out some classics for Liam, some of her favorites too, and also a small stack of novels that she had heard were wonderful but had never had the chance to read. She dropped them, off the edge of the stairs, one by one, into Liam’s waiting hands. It wasn’t throwing she decided, so it was perfectly okay to do. It would violate no library code, real or imagined.

Should she explore the rest of the upstairs? The mystery called to her, but also Liam was watching and waiting and it seemed terribly rude to do so. Climbing down the stair wreckage was harder than going up. She couldn’t ignore the nails and sharp bits of wood that sprouted from the space under the stairs like a particularly evil flowerbed.

Rose took a deep breath and summoned her courage and decided that taking the steps quickly would be her best strategy. She nearly hopped down the steps, she went so fast, faking a confidence she didn’t really feel. And that’s probably why she slipped.

One moment she was on a step with her hands gripping the railing and the next the world had gone sideways and those rusty nails were all she could see as her body hurtled earthwards toward them.

But instead of the sharp impact of wood and the sharper impact of nails, she fell onto something warm and soft and forgiving. It was Liam. His huge arms were wrapped around her protectively and his back was smashed against the pile of wood and nails. He’d jumped in between Rose and—well, if not death then certainly huge discomfort.

“Are you okay?” his voice was pained with concern.

“I’m fine. Thank you,” she said. “I can’t believe you caught me. How did you move so fast?” His arms were still wrapped around her, but Rose didn’t feel any immediate need to move. She felt safer in that moment than she had in years.

“I can move fast when I need to,” Liam said, then hissed.

“What’s wrong?”

“These nails,” he said.

Rose pushed his arms open and got to her feet and saw then that Liam had been stabbed by at least a dozen of the nails. “Oh my God, I can’t believe it,” she said. “We need to get you to a hospital.”