How I’ve Been Dying {Chapter Six}

Jack O'Grady
17 min readJan 21, 2022

This is the sixth 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, Chapter Five}

Thanks for being here.

The night whispered.

Hushed voices drifted just out of reach, cooing, caressing, unseen hands stretching through shadow to slip cold, silk-like fingers across the goosebumps on her skin. She’d fled into the darkness and it had reached out to swallow her whole.

Stumbling down the open road bridging the void between Dean’s Quarter and the rest of Heron’s Call, Millie found herself on the precipice of insanity, kicking pebbles down to feed the slobbering abyss.

Time was slipping away from her. It must’ve been at least an hour ago that she’d first heard the voice and fled her broken home. An hour, yes, that sounded right.

But it was always there, murmuring just outside of reality, filling the edges of your perception with a blackened mold so pungent and familiar.

She’d been locked in her room, waiting out her father’s nightly routine until it was safe to go and grab a snack. Days passed between their conversations, each one punctuated by a well-placed jab that fed into the cycle of sulking to which they’d become so committed. The most recent blow had been more than verbal, however. He’d pawned off half of her mom’s movie collection to pay for more repairs to the car Lewis habitually crashed. Her anger had only encouraged his cruel nature, and now the other DVDs were trapped in the storage room, boxed up and ready to be taken into town on Monday.

That was when she’d snuck out to slash his tires and earned herself her first belting since she was a preteen.

“You wanna test me?!” he’d howled at her between lashes. “You wanna see how far you can take this bullshit?! Let me show you!”

He’d left her with plenty of scars — one particularly nasty bruise swelled until her left eye could only open halfway — but not the lesson in inferiority he’d hoped to impart. There had never been a ‘test,’ only four flat tires and a girl who missed her mom, and yet a challenge was what he’d seen. A challenge to his authority. A challenge to his monopoly on fear in this twisted house.

I scared him.

“I scared him,” she’d said to Isa later that day as they sat across from each other at a picnic table in the town’s only functional public park. “I don’t know what it is, but he was scared of me, Isa. I swear I could see it in his fucking eyes!”

“Millie…” Isa started, her eyes unable to leave the swollen mark around her friend’s eye alone. “Is that a good thing for you? With everything going on, seeing your mom and all that, it might not be best to keep picking fights with him.”

“I didn’t pick a fight!” Millie bit back, throat closing tight around her anger. “He fucked with her movie collection, the only real thing she left me. It was basically self-defense!”

Her eye throbbed when she shouted, exasperating the pounding that had taken root in the back of her head.

“I know, I know,” Isa backtracked. “Would you feel better staying with me or Fulton for a few days? Maybe getting out of your house would help.”

Why does she have to do this? Millie thought as Isa droned on, the words snaking through her mind like venom. She can’t listen, she just transforms into this therapist mom-thing and starts ordering me around. She imagined reaching across the table and hitting Isa; how her pale skin would redden instantly…how her eyes would widen in painful shock.

Thinking about pain had become a kind of narcotic. Since Isa had gone into that cave and come out with nothing but lies, Millie’s mind’s eye had been invaded by sadistic fantasies. They’d scared her at first, but slowly she’d discovered a strange comfort in them. As Isa lectured her, she escaped to those scenes of violence, floating between them as though her body meant nothing — a cheap paperweight holding down her joke of a life.

“I don’t want to stay with you, Isa,” her exact words were murky now as she was pulled around the memory, but they’d landed like the punch she wanted. “Talking about this with you was a mistake.”

And what happened next?

In Millie’s tattered mind, the conversation faded away and she came back into focus an hour ago inside her bedroom, listening keenly to the sounds of her dad milling about the kitchen. There were unread messages from Isa and Fulton waiting on her phone; they would go unread. Her head hurt too much for that, like someone was trying to shove a second brain in there through her ears.

Something happened, then. Something must’ve happened.

Something enough to force her out of the house. Enough to send her staggering out into the pitch-black night. She should know what had happened, but looking back on that moment, Millie had to strain to even glimpse herself through the fog inundating her mind. Her body blinked in and out of perception, features shifting and disappearing, like her own self-reference was slipping out of existence.

Something spoke to me. I know, oh god, that’s all I know. Why can’t I forget? Why can’t it stop?

Her head exploded with pain as a deluge of memories crashed into her all at once. The creeping tickle of hot breath on the back of her neck. A woman sleeping in her dad’s bed — no, not sleeping at all. Lewis shouting, her dad screaming, that same breath spitting daggers from just out of sight. So much noise and no release. Outside the house and still no release. The darkness could howl.

This won’t end.

Dread coagulated into a weight, pulling her to the ground; asphalt peeling her knees on the way down, blood sinking into its surface imperfections. The loose skin squished against her knee as she pressed herself against the road, desperate for the chill of the earth, anything to keep her in this body. Her head had filled with such a deafening roar of noise and terror that her skin barely registered the cold road beneath her; even the throbbing sensation gripping her skull was muffled and lost to her panic.

I’m losing it. I’m losing it. Holy fuck, I’m losing it.

Mind and body melted together. Millie couldn’t tell where her fear ended and her nerves began, what difference existed between her and the road, between her and the night.

Those aren’t my thoughts…no, please, those are whispers.

Breathing, heavy and eager, fell upon her neck. She had enough sensation left to shiver when hands slid up her back to grasp her shoulders with a possessive tightness. An unheard shriek lodged in her throat, like one of those hands had reached through skin and bone to choke her with it.

Each stifled attempt at breathing came faster, shallower, hoarser, struggling in vain to shift that awful grip. Her world was fracturing with each twitch of her crippled lungs, shadows flooding in to fill the cracks and drown her from the mind out.

I just…I just wanted to see my mom.

“No!” a slow voice broke through the noise like a freighter through frozen water, all around her and then right there, a few feet ahead where the darkness quivered hesitantly, like hyenas caught huddled over a lion’s catch.

The grip around her throat loosened slightly, letting through enough air to keep her conscious.

“Not this, you’re not doing this,” the voice came again. Steady and firm, the pounding of a hammer against metal.

Slick fingers ending in daggers tightened around her shoulder as the darkness wailed in response.

“I said no!” the voice pushed back. “Let go of her! You still have an appetite for this? Take it out on me, go fucking crazy, asshole!”

The night screamed with such intensity her eyes might have shaken out of their sockets. Rough hands released her shoulder and her throat; something lunged forward, lunged through her. For an instant, she was consumed by an inhuman hatred that threatened to tear her heart out as it passed; she saw herself cutting her dad’s throat open, holding her friends’ heads under the water just to feel them kick, driving her mom’s car over the cliffs and into the writhing ocean.

It released her heart at the last second, gone without a shape. The voice, the hands, the screaming, the whispers, all of it gone like a horrible dream wilted by the sunrise.

Only shadows were left. They settled in around her and become soft under the moonlight.

When did the moon come out?

Two more lights joined the moon, approaching her from straight ahead. The shadows fled to make room as the lights skidded to a stop only inches away from her unblinking stare. Her eyes burned, but it was so beautiful to see.

So beautiful to be out of the night and the noise.

Catherine’s hands fumbled for her phone as soon as it began to vibrate, ripping it out of her pocket so hastily that it slipped through her fingers and skidded across the sidewalk. The screen came up with another crack and a disappointing notification that she’d almost reached her data limit for the month.

He’ll call me. He’s just late. He’s always just late.

That was a lie. Luke was never just late. No matter what he said whenever he eventually arrived, falling out of his truck to emphasize his sincere urgency, there was always something more than bad timing. Often, that something more had blonde hair and a cloying, floral scent that still clung to his disheveled clothes, or it floated on his breath and betrayed itself in his stumbling gait. He’d slur or stammer an excuse, squeeze her hands and kiss her on the forehead with a perfect tenderness.

How many second chances had she given him? Did they all come from that gentle touch, that sweetness trapped behind his vacant eyes? It had been so close to the surface when they’d started dating, just out of reach but begging to be freed. With each chance, though, it seemed further away. And in the diner last night… she couldn’t catch even a glimpse. Nothing at all.

When the light wasn’t in them, Luke’s eyes were surprisingly dark. Like a shark’s full pupils, moments away from the kill.

However many chances I’ve given him, this is the last one.

She hoped her seriousness about that had gotten through to Luke. Making a demand from him, or anyone, wasn’t easy for Catherine; it made her stomach turn and sweat bead up on her forehead and palms. But he’d cheated on her again, gone to the hospital after a freak accident, never called her when he was well enough, and come back to Heron’s Call without so much as a text message. They’d run into him at a fucking diner, having a meal with the woman everyone blamed for his accident.

“Let me take you on a date,” he’d pleaded when her parents were at the counter. “We can go to Princess Anne’s, that Italian place in the mall. Let me make this up to you.”

Everything Luke’s done for us. We need you to hold on to him, Catherine. Her dad’s words, whispered in a drunken stupor and forgotten, still stuck with her, compelled her. One last chance. For the family.

The cracked screen in her hands lit up with a steady buzzing. Luke was calling.

“Hey, baby,” she answered hurriedly. “When are you gonna be here?”

Only the sound of his breathing followed. Catherine’s stomach twisted around itself.

“Luke…?”

“Cat,” he said, finally. “Cat, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

“Why are you sorry?” she asked, but the trembling in her fingers made it clear. The weight pressing into her chest, like the earth was being piled on top of her, made it clear.

“I can’t do this anymore,” he said. “You don’t deserve this and I… I just don’t love you anymore, Cat.”

She didn’t have time to answer before the line went dead. He was gone. The whole thing hadn’t lasted more than a few seconds. But now it was done, and he was gone.

“But you never loved me,” she said to his phantom, just to put the words out there, feel them finally rolling off her tongue how they’d always longed to. They left an emptiness behind, a heavy hollowness that sank into her legs and buckled her knees. Her hands, slick with sweat, dropped her phone again. This time the screen shattered, all the cracks bursting into a splatter of shards against the concrete.

“Is everything okay between you and Luke?” her dad had asked on the drive over. “It seems like you two haven’t talked much since his accident.”

What did I say? A lie, something comforting for him. I should’ve known. I should’ve told him. It’s all over for us now.

Princess Anne’s was just over a half hour away from Heron’s Call by car, and Catherine had no ride back. The road itself was simple; a straight, unlit path through miles of marsh and distant houses.

She left her broken phone on the ground and began to walk.

“Where’d you find her?” Lewis asked.

“About halfway into town,” Fulton said. “She was kinda just laying there in the middle of the road.”

“Oh, Jesus, okay. Well, just keep her there for a bit. Might be a while, with what she said to our dad.”

“All right, all right, I can do that.”

“Cool… thanks, Fulton.”

Putting down the phone, Fulton wracked his memory for any instance where Lewis had actually thanked someone before. He’d always been nice enough to them, but he was related to Millie and spent most of his time working on cars with her dad, so it wasn’t like manners were ever an expectation. But just then, he’d sounded sincere. There’d been real concern in his voice, desperation for someone to find his missing sister, and real relief when he’d found out she was okay.

Whatever had happened to Millie was serious.

Fulton always got a little queasy when he lied, and right now the discontent in his stomach was almost enough to compel him to call Lewis back and tell him everything. That would be a mistake, though; he deserved to believe Millie was fine. And it wasn’t as though there was a truth to tell, besides what he’d seen. And what he’d seen on that impossibly dark backroad…

“Fulton!” his grandma called from her room. Despite the cramped size of their trailer home, she insisted on shouting for help like they lived in a mansion.

“Coming, Gran,” he replied as he crossed the five steps from kitchen to bedroom. Peeking his head through the doorframe, he found his grandma sitting up, her back propped up by a tower of pillows and the bedside lamp illuminating just enough of her face to reveal her distressed confusion.

Oh god, please just be hungry.

“What do ya need?” he said, smiling with all his teeth like she’d told him to when he was a kid. “Is it time for your midnight snack already?”

“I don’t want a midnight snack, I… I think there’s someone in this house,” she stated firmly, surprisingly lucid for so late an hour.

Fulton made a show of turning around to assess the entire interior of the small house from where he stood.

“It’s just you, me, and Millie,” he assured her. “You remember Millie, right, Gran? I told you she has to stay here for the night because she’s feeling a little sick.”

“She’s not sick!” she spit back, veins popping out of her forehead. “Don’t lie to me, Fulton!”

“Gran,” he said slowly, falling back on years of experience with her tantrums. “I’m not lying to you. We talked about this earlier. She’s sick, I’m sure she’ll feel better in the morning.”

“She’s not sick,” she reiterated, this time a little less forcefully. Her eyes had shifted away from him, looking over his shoulder and into the living room. “Oh lord, Fulton, it’s hurting the poor girl.”

“What –”

“GET OFF ME!” Millie screamed, so loud and sudden it was like a flash-bang had gone off in his eardrums.

“Millie!” he shouted, spinning around and dashing toward her. His foot caught on the edge of their rug, enough to knock him off balance and send him sprawling onto the floor in a mess of flailing limbs, each failing to prevent his head from colliding hard with the floor.

Millie thrashed violently on the couch; the sound of her struggle blotting out his pain with panic.

A pillow dropped onto his head as he pushed himself off the ground, reaching out to find her before her seizing got any worse.

But when Fulton could finally see straight, Millie was exactly where he’d left her, sleeping like a corpse on his couch. All the pillows had been pushed off, the blanket tossed across the room, Millie as still as silence. Her breathing, shallow and fast, was the only remnant of her fit.

“Millie?” he asked, cautiously getting to his feet.

“Poor girl, poor girl, poor girl…” His grandma’s earnest muttering filled the trailer like a chorus.

“She’s fine, gran!” Fulton assured her, waiting for her murmurs to slowly reduce to silence. “She’s fine.”

And yet, even sleeping, Millie seemed charged, as though the seizing could return at any moment. Carefully, he slipped a pillow under her head and pulled the blanket over her body. The way the fabric settled on top of her was… odd. It was like an invisible weight was resting on her chest, forming a strange indent in the blanket.

That’s gotta be some kind of optical illusion. I’m sure Isa will know about it.

Once Millie seemed comfortable again, he crouched beside her until it seemed that another seizure would’ve surely come by now if it was going to happen. Fulton tiptoed back over to check on his grandma. He found her sound asleep, with the blanket pulled all the way over her head. She’d always slept like that, like a mummy in their sarcophagus, a corpse awaiting autopsy.

She looks dead in the dark.

Fulton pinched himself, hard. Thoughts like that were a poison; they’d almost rotted him before. His grandma was alive, and no tricky shadows could change that.

The door shook in its hinges a little when Theo knocked. Fulton winced, bracing himself for the chaos if either Millie or his grandma had been woken by the noise. The silence persisted, thankfully.

Going back to his tiptoes, Fulton went over to the door like a spy behind enemy lines, holding his breath when he had to maneuver around the couch. The blanket was already falling off Millie; she must’ve been shifting around in her sleep again. Once he was clear of her, he quickly crossed the rest of the distance and opened the door with one finger over his lips, shimmying through to meet Theo outside.

“Can we talk by your car?” he whispered.

Theo nodded, apologizing profusely as they walked to her truck.

“Don’t worry about it, Theo,” Fulton said, comfortable enough now to use a normal volume. “You’re just a terrible person and I’m never gonna forgive you.”

“Oh, shut it, Sheen,” Theo said with a smile. “One of these days you gotta just make it official and turn your place into a nursing home. That way I’d know to be a little quieter.”

“I’m sure Gran would love that,” Fulton said and laughed. “She gets along so well with others.”

“She taking this well? Your friend being here?”

“I’ve had to explain the whole thing to her more times than I can count, but she seems to have accepted it,” Fulton said, taking a seat on the bed of Theo’s truck with a deep sigh. “Thought I’ll admit, I’m not even sure what the whole thing is myself.”

“That why you called me?” Theo asked. “Am I supposed to be some kinda expert on anything weird in this town?”

“I mean, yes,” Fulton grinned. “But really, I just need someone who knows what they’re doing to check on Millie.”

Theo considered, crossing her arms. She’d never been one to get too involved with the townspeople, but Fulton was hoping that, just this once, she might make an exception.

“This’s the girl who likes all the horror movies, right?” she asked.

“All of them?” Fulton retorted. “I think… yeah, actually.”

Theo just rolled her eyes and cuffed Fulton on the ear as she climbed over him and into the truck-bed. When she jumped back down, she had a red plastic case tucked under one arm, which she set on the ground and began sifting through.

“Just so I know,” she said, “how’d you find her? Did she look hurt at all?”

A lump formed tightly inside Fulton’s throat. He knew the taste of it, the texture as it went down — fear.

“Her brother, Lewis,” he started. “He called me saying that she’d gotten in a crazy fight with their dad.”

“Randy, right? I worked with him when I used to do odd jobs in Quenon. Hate that guy.”

“Yeah, no one likes him much,” Fulton said. “But Millie and him are like… well, they despise each other. I think she blames him for her mom dying. They got into it again and she just left.”

The bruise around Millie’s left eye was old, already swollen enough to render her half-blind it seemed, so it had been some time since she’d been hit. If she attacked Randy…

“When I found her, I mean, she was just in the middle of the road,” Fulton continued, shaking off those uneasy thoughts. “You know the only road that goes from Dean’s Quarter into downtown, it’s got no lights, just pitch-black at night. I almost hit her.”

“And what’d she do?” Theo asked, stuffing her selected tools into her pockets. A flash of metal briefly caught the moonlight as she re-tucked her shirt.

She’s carrying again. What, does she think Silas is gonna have her shot?

“She just sat there and… looked at you? Like a deer in the headlights or something?”

“You’ve got a gift for storytelling, Theo. That’s exactly what she did. I had to lift her into the car. She was completely catatonic, passed out before we got home.” He didn’t know how to explain what Millie had said on the ride back. Mumbling awful things to herself, staring at him the entire time. “I’ve got no idea what happened to her, really.”

His last words sank into the silence.

I really hope they’re both still asleep when we come in.

“Did you see anyone else on the road?” Theo said, choosing each word with strong purpose. “When you found your friend, did you see anyone else?”

Images of total darkness flashed behind his eyes. It had been so thick that stepping out of the car was like going underwater.

“No, there was no one but us,” Fulton replied. “Why would there have been someone else?”

“GET OFF OF HER!”

NO!

Fulton leapt to his feet, almost tripping again as he scrambled over their loose gravel driveway, legs moving faster than he was thinking.

“GET OFF OF HER!”

His shoulder collided with Theo as he rushed past. She grunted in surprise, but had already started moving toward the house as well. Screaming came from inside, escalating over his grandma’s trembling commands.

“GET OFF OF HER!”

He went up the stairs of their ramshackle wooden porch in one step, slamming into the door so hard one of the hinges snapped. Theo wasn’t far behind, pushing him through the crooked door as she came barreling in behind.

“GRAN!” he shouted, desperate to get eyes on her as soon as possible. The moment he did, he froze in place.

His grandma stood in her bedroom door, one quivering arm clutching the frame for support. Sweat poured down her face, her whole frail body shaking, taking everything she had to stay on her feet.

But it wasn’t just her. No, there were hands reaching out from the shadows behind her. Hands curling around her back, clutching her nightshirt, her skin, her face. There were hands everywhere. Hands spilling out from under the couch. Hands pushing through the loose floorboards, slithering out of open cabinets and the empty space between couch cushions. Millie was covered in them; they grabbed every part of her, pulling on her hair, clamping her mouth shut and her eyes closed.

There was a man kneeling in front of Millie. He was tall, unnaturally lean with arms like a spider’s, ending in fingers far too long and grimy with dust. Those fingers hovered above Millie’s head. One eye reacted to their arrival, rising up to meet their horrified stares. The other, glazed over, just lay dead in its socket.

“It seems to like her,” the man said. “I didn’t know this would happen. I thought –”

A terrible chill washed over Fulton.

The man looked back down at Millie, a hint of sorrow lurking behind his eye.

“I thought I’d be enough,” he said, standing up.

That lump of fear in Fulton’s throat was hard enough to choke on now. Every bone in his body wanted to run, to put as much distance between himself and this house as possible. It was all wrong, it was all unimaginably wrong. But he couldn’t move, not one muscle.

“I don’t know what happens next,” the man said, speaking to them like a doctor breaking bad news. “She might die… she might have to.” He turned back to Fulton and Theo. “You don’t want to remember me.”

Fulton’s reflection gawked back at him from the glint of the black in that single functioning eye. Even from across the room, it was clear as day, like he could walk right through, like he already had.

“No,” he heard Theo say, although her voice was fading, drifting away. “No, I remember you.”

A gunshot blew out his right eardrum.

End of Chapter Six

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Jack O'Grady

Everything is happening so much and I’m just trying to write it down. Check out my fiction newsletter at: https://goodhaunts.substack.com/