How I’ve Been Dying {Chapter Five}
This is the fifth chapter of my novel about a small town with a big, twisted soul publishing on Medium and my Substack newsletter. Wherever you read it, you can support me on Patreon to help bring this story to life.
Catch up on the story {Prologue, Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four}
Thanks for being here.
One week after the mayor’s son was found unresponsive with no apparent injuries, another resident of Heron’s Call turned up in almost the exact same state of overwhelming shock.
They’d found him wandering catatonic through the center of town, drool dribbling slowly from his half-open mouth. According to Luke’s dad, the man wasn’t well known, lived on the fringes of town in the trailer park community he was always trying to get torn down. None of that could change the story that was already spreading, though.
They were still more than half an hour away from home, catching lunch at an old favorite in Princess Anne’s, and all the conversation around them seemed to concern that reclusive little town down on Perch Island that was going insane one person at a time. A PR disaster already in motion, but Luke could only focus on the plate in front of him and how real the food felt between his teeth. Whatever these people had to say could wait; he’d been taking his meals from a blender until this morning.
His dad, however, throttled a sandwich with one hand and clutched his phone with the other as he made call after call. He’d already scheduled a press conference for the evening and seemed committed to working the drug angle with this new case, holding the poor guy in custody until his blood gave them the motive they needed.
“Of course the guy was a junkie,” he whispered into the phone, careful to contain his rage in public. “Isn’t there still an opioid epidemic going on or something? Can’t we make this about that? I just don’t see where the fuck this connection to my son is coming from and why everyone in the goddamn county is talking about it!”
It must be the chief on the other end, Luke decided. There was a communications secretary under his dad’s administration, but they were only good for convincing the Quenonites to come back every summer. Everything else fell to the chief of police. That had been the job originally set aside for Luke, back when his dad had seen him as an heir and not a burden.
I used to kick the chief in the balls a lot, just run up on him every time he visited the house and let loose, Luke remembered fondly as he ate. There was no more room in his aching head for this scandal; just thinking made his skull throb. It didn’t matter anyway, the guy was on drugs and that was where it ended. How his falling down in Old Heron could be connected to some trailer park trash showing up on Main Street high off his ass was beyond him, and if people wanted to stretch for a conspiracy he wasn’t going to stop them. This would all be over in a few days.
“We should get out of here,” his dad declared, stashing his phone away. “I’ve got to start getting ahead of this or we’re gonna be a tourist attraction by tomorrow.”
“Can I at least finish my food?” Luke complained between stiff, purposeful bites meant to fully savor the last of his fries. “You’re blowing this whole thing out of proportion. It’s a weird coincidence, people love those, but they’ll forget about it by tomorrow, okay? Don’t flatter yourself, no one’s coming to Heron’s Call on purpose.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” his dad said with a face like sour milk. “Didn’t I teach you to never give your opinion on something you’re too much of an idiot to understand?”
“Oh, of course,” Luke replied through a mouthful of fries. “I forgot the intricacies of small-town government are too much for my sad raisin brain.”
“I don’t know why I picked you up from the hospital,” his dad said. “Really, it would’ve done you some good to just leave you there until they found whatever part of your brain is missing.”
“You’ve got a way with words, dad,” Luke said as he finished the last of his food. “Now let’s go home so we can get back to ignoring each other.”
That seemed to work for his dad. They’d only ever been able to stand each other for about half an hour a day, and it had been forty-five minutes since he’d picked Luke up. Exhausted, they made the rest of the drive without saying a word to each other, although it was far from silent.
“You sure there’s no grounds for a criminal case?” his dad said, on the phone with the chief again as they left Princess Anne’s, turning onto the only road toward Perch Island. “I don’t see how this couldn’t be criminal negligence! If we can’t charge her with anything, I’m not lowering myself to a civil dispute.”
Theo again, Luke thought. He won’t leave her alone. If it won’t happen in the courts it’ll be something else, he just needs enough to get her to leave town.
It wasn’t even her fault.
Luke had no idea whose fault it had been, or what had even happened that day. When he thought of the accident, nothing came to him besides the smell of mud and blurred visions of the marsh spinning around him. The rest was darkness — but it wasn’t gone, only shadowed. If it didn’t make his head spin, he might’ve remembered more.
I did remember, Luke thought as they passed through the last stretch of mainland before the bridge. In the hospital, while I was out. I know I remembered. But it was just a fall, or swamp gas. If he remembered anything it would just be how he’d gotten lost — nothing more.
But Theo hadn’t found Luke near the marsh. She’d found him by the water, sitting up like he’d moved there himself.
“All right, either way she’s not staying in this town,” his dad was still barking into the phone. “No one’s gonna miss her or her shitty hardware store.”
He hung up exceptionally self-satisfied, flashing a smug smile toward Luke. The man lived for moments like these, celebrating cheap victories over his helpless enemies. Luke only hoped that Theo knew what was coming; better yet, that she’d already left town.
“That woman’s never gonna work again,” his dad said with a smirk. “Not in this state, at least.”
Luke had no response besides silence. Where it came from he didn’t know, but a certainty haunted the corners of his conscience. A certainty that Theo was faultless in this and, more than that, that there was somebody else to blame.
Somebody did this to me.
A thought from the vague shadows of his memory, drifting out from that blank space between the mud and the marsh. And yet it arrived as an immediate truth, like he’d always known this, only lacking the courage to pull it from the wreckage of that half-forgotten day.
Somebody did this to me.
His dad was saying something about replacing Theo’s store with a fast-food place as they crossed the bridge into Perch Island. Luke received only static as his mind receded into itself, reaching through the darkness, grasping for anymore of the truth.
Somebody did this to me.
Theo was woken from a restless sleep by the sound of her front door clicking closed. Picking her head up from the keyboard, whose keys were now clearly legible upon her cheek, Theo found herself looking at her cramped park office through a thick fog. The bell she’d placed above the front door, taken from the same set she installed at the shop, swung rhythmically. Her desk drawers had been pulled open, documents and office supplies removed and left in neat stacks around the room. Each observation sank in, seeping down through the cracks of her tired mind.
The closed door. The swinging bell. The opened drawers.
Faint footsteps reached her from just beyond the door. The distinct swish of marsh grass batting against passing knees, crunching beneath hurried feet. Fading footsteps, disappearing toward Old Heron.
The last drop fell.
Someone was just in my fucking office.
Her desk chair tumbled over as she shot to her feet, hands moving urgently to the left-side drawer where her handgun waited. Its cold weight chilled her fear enough to allow her to rush out of the office and into the open air, muzzle-first.
“I’ll shoot you so many times, you asshole!” she shouted, gun drawn.
About three quarters of the way from her office to the impregnable treeline separating the town from its sunken past, a man froze between steps. His long, narrow body shivered in the breeze as it tarried in the imbalance of an interrupted flight. From this distance, not much was distinguishable but his shape, although his glacial presence extended all across the field, suffocating Theo’s courage.
This fear had no comparison, no equal; it fell upon her with an unnatural ferocity, alive on its own, feeding.
“Who-who are you?” she said, forcing the words out. “Did you break into my office?”
Taking what could’ve been years, the man set his foot down, completing the motion. Two hands extended over his head, reaching spindly fingers toward the sky. Despite the distance between them, Theo’s trigger finger hovered over the killing switch, so unsure of this man and how he could induce such terror. She braced herself for the moment he’d turn around and they’d be eye to eye.
Except he didn’t turn around. Hands raised, without saying a single word, he continued walking away from her.
“Hey!” Theo called after him, brandishing her gun for no audience. “Where do you think you’re going?”
The sound of his feet pressed onward through the grass.
What more Theo could’ve said was lost to the sweet whistling of the summer winds, scattered among the encroaching foliage the man kicked aside as he trudged into the swamp. By the time the darkness of Old Heron had completely swallowed him, Theo’s gun was hanging uselessly from her hip, the confidence it had initially granted her shattered.
Alone now, that terror still clung to her, breathing hot and heavy down her neck. She waited there, half-expecting to wake up, or for the trees to tremble and shriek as he returned from the shadows and completed her nightmare.
This is just another one. I’ll wake up and it’ll just be me and my office, for however long they’ll let me keep it.
This was a nightmare; that made perfect sense, what with her entire livelihood likely a few days away from annihilation. The last week had been nothing short of traumatizing: fighting for her life over the phone; suffering through countless interrogations and unlawful searches. All over a rich jackass who couldn’t tell his left from right. Of course she’d have a nightmare. Just another minute and she could wake up and let this all be forgotten.
Dregs of terror still lingered around her mind’s eye, but the images they conjured were blurry, tattered recreations of moments rapidly diminishing into snapshots of a bad dream. Whether the dream had come to her in the depths of sleep or the shallow confusion between waking and living, all that mattered was forgetting it.
I need to get Fulton to stop telling me about all those horror movies his friends make him watch, Theo thought as she turned to go back into the office and finish up the day’s long-procrastinated work. Delaying her tasks was another novelty; one she’d embraced, with the influx of legal documents fighting to trick her into liability for Lemon’s accident.
Silas will find a way to pin this new shit on me, too. One little dick gets lost and now I’m the fucking town Bogeyman.
Her landline began to whine as she entered the office; the old piece of junk rarely got calls, but sure knew how to announce when it did. Bending down to retrieve it, she cursed whoever had the audacity to call her, eyes moving right past the stack of papers pulled from her open drawers and placed carefully on the desk.
“Who is it?” she grumbled into the phone.
“Hey, Theo,” a familiar annoyance answered timidly. “Umm… it’s Luke.”
You gotta be kidding me.
Against her better judgement, Theo met Lemon for a bite to eat halfway across town at Laurence’s — the one restaurant in Heron’s Call that kept its doors open outside of the summer rush. They took a booth in the back-left corner, a quiet spot in the notoriously raucous diner, squeezing into decades-old seats without having spoken five words to each other.
“You better be paying for this, Lemon,” Theo said after ordering her usual.
“Don’t worry, it’s covered,” he said, absentmindedly flipping through the menu as he shooed the waitress away. “Well, I guess you’re still paying for it since I’m using my dad’s card, but who’s gonna notice, right?”
Not a day out of the hospital and you’re right back to the same shit.
Except something was wrong. Different. Under the surface, hanging between them in the stale air, Theo sensed a change. The boy shifting uncomfortably in the booth across from her was not the same one she had taken into the marshes of Old Heron just a week ago.
That day, he’d been the swaggering amalgamation of every boy she’d ever hated, wearing a shit-eating grin beneath his perfectly messy hair and the bright eyes that betrayed a hollow mind within. Today, though, his sandy hair clung to his forehead, slick and unkempt. His eyes would not meet hers, zeroed in on the diner table between them as he anxiously waited for their food to arrive. Everything about him emanated an intense unease, filling their corner of this roadside diner like a pungent odor.
“Here you go, Theo,” the waitress — a lovely girl who had used to come by Theo’s store before her dad found out — said with an apologetic smile as she placed her food down and turned to Lemon. “Have you decided what you’d like to order, sir?”
“You know,” Lemon decided, closing the menu, “I’ll just have a water… and a slice of chocolate cake.”
The bemused waitress jotted that down and scampered away, whispering hurriedly to one of her coworkers before they’d even reached the privacy of the kitchen.
“This has gotta be quite the optics for you,” Theo remarked. “Getting a meal with the woman everyone thinks tried to kill you, and ordering nothing but water and cake.”
“What are you gonna do?” Lemon said with a shrug. “I like cake and I needed to talk to you. People in this town will always look for things to talk about.”
That was one of the few things Lemon had ever said that Theo agreed with. She’d been the subject of this town’s gossip for most of her time here, and it looked like that would be what finally drove her out, too.
But what did Lemon have to say to her at this point? Theirs, at least, was a simple story of misplaced rich idiot and over-encumbered groundskeeper. If he was looking for any kind of forgiveness, he’d be better served using his dad’s card to pay her inevitable bail.
“You don’t have much to say,” Lemon said, venturing into the silence, showing a little more of his typical confidence.
“I was just waiting for you to tell me why the fuck we’re here. My whole week’s been nothing but your dad screaming my ear off about how I’m responsible for your dumbass and now you want to get dinner with me. I don’t mind the free food, Lemon, but I will be leaving unless you get to the point real soon.”
“That’s fair,” Lemon said, deflating, exhaustion creeping into the corners of his eyes. “I — I’m trying to figure out what happened to me, Theo. I don’t think it’s your fault.”
“Well, of course it’s not,” she scoffed. “I’ll tell you what happened, you got lost! You didn’t listen to me, you wandered off in a dangerous place, and you got what you deserved!”
Lemon took her words like punches, shrinking back into his seat. She could crush him, grind him away with the palm of her hand. An immense heat ignited inside her, begging to be released, to scorch this place. The eyes of everyone in the restaurant were on her, and she could burn them, too.
Goddammit, Theo, Luke thought. This ain’t the place.
She swallowed her rage. The fire burned terribly as it went down.
“What… what do you remember happening?” she said, keeping her voice low.
“I remember getting lost, and I-I couldn’t find you,” Lemon started, as though this was all new to him, arriving as it was spoken. “And I remember falling, the mud, terrible pain in my nose, of course, but not my head. It’s all there in snapshots, nothing really complete.”
He fell silent, fixed on a distant memory, or perhaps the painfully vague remnants of one. Theo thanked the waitress on his behalf when the single slice of cake arrived, sneaking a few bites of her own meal during this interlude. Eating felt strangely rude, however, like Lemon deserved this moment.
Whatever’s on his mind, it’s hurting him.
“Theo,” he said suddenly. “The only other thing I can remember is…fear. There’s nothing in my mind to go with it, it’s just fear. The worst fear I’ve ever experienced.”
Ten fingers, unnaturally long, reaching up toward the sky.
That was a nightmare.
But she didn’t remember waking up.
“It’s so weird, though,” Lemon was saying, his voice drifting in and out of Theo’s rattled attention. “When I remember the fear, there’s nothing but black, you know… normal. But it doesn’t completely feel like I’m looking at nothing, just that I’m looking at something so… so dark.” He paused, collecting himself. “I’m sure you don’t care, I didn’t really expect you to. I just wanted to know what you think happened. Honestly, I trust you on this.”
“When you got lost,” Theo said, jumping right over a chance to rib Lemon for his baffling sincerity. “Do you remember anything unique about where you were, any landmarks?”
Another silence as Lemon retreated back into his mind, closing his eyes and taking thoughtful bites of his chocolate cake. Sweat dripped off Theo’s nose and into her food. Her fork vibrated in her hand. Desperation consumed her resolve as she waited for his response, letting the nightmare flood over reality. Those fingers, that man, her fear, they could all be real. They could all be waiting for her back in those sickly, shadowed woods.
“I was past downtown,” Lemon said, opening his eyes. “There was a lot of running, I think, but I remember… there was a house. I can’t even put it all together in my head, but there was a house. All above ground, a house, Theo-”
“Luke?”
Lemon froze, wide eyes trapped by a speaker just beyond Theo’s view. From their reflection in the window, though, Theo could make out three figures, huddled defensively together.
“…Hey, Cat,” he said, like a death row inmate accepting their sentence. “I was gonna tell you, but, um, I’m back.”
And just like that, the moment disappeared. That shine of sincerity withered against his timid, helplessly self-pitying expression. Whoever stood behind her, she hoped they tore his heart out and cooked a chocolate cake with it. She just had no interest in being collateral damage.
“I’ll see you around, Lemon,” Theo said as she left the booth, refusing to meet his eyes or acknowledge the three strangers waiting awkwardly in the dead space between their table and the kitchen. Empty eyes followed her out of the restaurant, already transforming the story, twisting her into the grotesque villain they needed.
They can think whatever they want. I’ll be out of this shit town soon anyways.
The sun leaned into the ocean, casting Heron’s Call in dreary shades of grey as Theo climbed into her truck and headed for Main Street. She’d be sleeping in the store tonight — likely every night, until she was ready to move out.
There were other islands, there were other dirt-poor beach towns to open a store in, there were even other marshes to explore and preserve. But there wasn’t a single house in Old Heron left standing after the storm. Not a single house.
