HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down by T. J. Brearton Read Free Book Online Page A

in.
    It wasn’t Christopher.
    Her chest felt as though it had collapsed. Her arms and legs were quivering limpets. On her butt, on the floor, right next to Jared and his shotgun, Elizabeth was eye level with the spot where the wooden kickboard of the screen door ended and the mesh began — about two and a half feet above the threshold.
    What was outside on the porch was attempting to see in. She saw an eyeball, and a nose. It was as if whatever was out there was somehow on its back, unable to get upright, and she thought fleetingly once again of Christopher.
    It wasn’t him. The person or thing on the porch had no hair. She could see its forehead now, and the top of its skull as it strained to lift its head higher, to elevate itself to see over the kickboard, to get a better look in at them.
    She and Jared sat breathless, unable to move. Her heart was triphammering — she could feel the pulse in her ears, her jaw, her neck.
    They watched the screen door. A hand: human enough maybe, pale and shining wet, with baby-like skin that looked both waxen and delicate, hooked into a claw. It rose up and found the latch to the screen door.
    And a second head appeared, right next to the first one, so close that the ears (if they were ears — one appeared as a mere unformed lump of skin) were touching.
    Two heads were looking in at them, just behind the screen mesh, peering in with two sets of misshapen eyes — one eye barely articulated, just a small rent, with a murky pea-sized ball within the cleft of skin.
    The screen door started to open, and that’s when Jared fired the shotgun.
    * * *
    Elizabeth had met Christopher at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. She had been eighteen, and he twenty-four.
    Jared, she met four years later at a concert. He was the consummate rocker — long, flowing brown hair, torn jeans. He’d played the entire gig — or most of it — with his eyes closed, and when the band had offered him solo time, Jared had been truly magnetic.
    They’d made love that night when a group of them — musicians and groupies alike — had shacked up in a wintry board-and-batten cabin in Vermont. He hadn’t initiated the sex; she had. His aloofness had made him all the more appealing, and she’d been unable to resist.
    “Get out of here,” Jared said now, the shotgun gripped in his hands in a way that reminded her, absurdly, of him playing guitar. He stood up, pointing the weapon down at the floor, gripping along the stock. “Elizabeth, get out of here.”
    The screen door had been obliterated into a ragged hole of splintered wood and wire mesh, blown outward. There was no sign of the things that had been looking in, only the holly which grew up between the weathered slats of the old porch.
    Elizabeth did as she was told, and, getting to her feet, started to back away and out of the kitchen.
    For one last instance she thought again of Christopher. Though she knew it hadn’t been him outside just now, struggling to look in, to get inside their home, her mind still visited the idea. Envisioning how he’d stood in that kitchen, not too far from where Jared was now, the pool of glistening water spreading at his feet. She remembered the sound of his voice when he spoke his solitary word to her. Her name. She suddenly fully understood why the quality she’d heard in his voice earlier in this troubled evening had so bothered her. It was the same intonation she’d heard the final time Christopher had ever appeared at NA. He was afraid he was going to start using again, and was trying to explain it to the group, trying to tell them that it was hopeless, that he wasn’t meant to be sober, that it was either using or death. It wasn’t that he had sounded scared, or angry, or volatile even — nothing like that would have alarmed her. It had been the quality of resignation , the sense that bigger things, inescapable things, were moving and orchestrating the world.
    That thought scared Elizabeth more than anything else. It