Best Laid Plans (Garnet Run 2)

The screams came again, from above him, and Marmot hissed.

“Oh fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Above him meant braving the stairs. Rye hadn’t touched them. He just saw visions of getting up them only to have them fall away behind him, stranding him on the precarious second story of a house, like a cat caught up a tree.

But he couldn’t let Marmot get hurt. And he certainly would never sleep again with that slasher movie soundtrack of screams.

Rye tested the first step. It seemed sturdy enough. He crept slowly up the second and third. They groaned dramatically, but so did the whole damn house. Rye couldn’t decide whether to cling to the bannister or the wall, so he kind of braced himself against both—not that either would save him if the steps gave way.

Halfway up the staircase his foot hit something that gave way and he threw himself up instead of down, sprawling across the top half of the staircase.

He braced for disaster, but the stairs didn’t move, so the only disaster there was him.

Having inadvertently tested their structural integrity with his whole body, Rye ascended the rest of the stairs quickly. The room at the top had probably been a bedroom—Rye’s flashlight revealed a bathroom to the left—but instead of a bed frame or a dresser it contained only six chairs set in a circle.

“I do not have the capacity for this house to contain a satanic summoning circle,” Rye said.

A thrashing sound in the corner drew his attention, and there was Marmot, tail flicking, pawing at...something.

Rye crept closer and swept the light tentatively over the corner, afraid of what horror it might reveal.

But it was just a squirrel—or, at least, something squirrel-like; Rye didn’t know what the hell animals lived in Wyoming.

It seemed to be caught halfway into the room, its little arms scrabbling at the wood. Marmot crouched two feet away, ears back, hissing, but the little squirrel thing didn’t seem like a threat. It seemed terrified.

“Okay, buddy,” Rye said, in what he hoped would seem a calming voice to a squirrel thing. “Please just don’t be rabid, all right, cuz I don’t have insurance. Can you even cure rabies?” he wondered aloud. “Whatever, just don’t have them.”

He pulled the sleeves of his sweatshirt down over his hands and held the flashlight in his mouth. The squirrel thing was thrashing and screaming, Marmot was hissing, and Rye just thought as loudly as he could, Don’t bite me don’t bite me don’t bite me don’t bite me.

Unsure whether the critter would more easily slide in or out, but sure that he’d rather have it out of the house than in, Rye tried to squeeze it back through the hole it’d come in. First it fought him, then, as Rye changed its angle, something gave and the squirrel thing slid back through the wall.

Screaming was replaced with a chittering sound and then the sound of tiny claws scampering. Then nothing.

He collapsed on his butt on the floor, breathing heavily. The sound of the animal’s panic had been harrowing, and Rye was utterly relieved for it to end.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered. Marmot jumped onto his thigh. “Good looking out, you fruitcake.”

Flashlight in hand, Rye looked around the room for something he could put in the hole so this didn’t happen again. There was a moldy looking blanket draped over the back of one of the chairs, so he stuffed the corner of it into the hole, wincing at the cold dampness of the cloth.

How had his grandfather lived in this falling-down place? Or had it decayed after he died and before the lawyer found Rye?

Now that the dual threats of rabies and a collapsing second story seemed to be past, Rye looked around. This room and the bathroom were the only things the stairs led to—there was no second floor over the kitchen. A mattress had been stood up against the wall in the far corner of the room and remnants of wood that had perhaps once belonged to a dresser or nightstand were stacked against the opposite wall.

On the floor in the center of the circle of chairs was a milk crate cluttered with burnt-out candles. Most were the kind you could buy at any dollar store—white pillars in clear glass, some with the Virgin Mary on them. A few others were dark green and dusty, and Rye didn’t touch them but he bet they’d smell like pine. His mother had put out similar candles around Christmas when he was a child, often surrounded by fake pine boughs studded with plastic cranberries.

“Come on,” Rye said to Marmot, exhausted now that the adrenaline had drained away.

Marmot pranced down the stairs in an instant and Rye followed slowly, reminding himself that if he’d gotten up without them giving way, he’d be able to get down.