Where We Live and Die by Brian Keene Read Free Book Online

refrigerator, and listened. The baby has a toy cell phone that beeps and rings when you push the buttons. I thought that perhaps Smokey (my wife’s indoor cat) was playing with it. She’s not yet a year old and still has a lot of kitten in her, and she likes to play with the baby’s toys. Turn your back for one second and she’s wandering off with his Curious George doll or batting a block around on the floor. After a few seconds, it occurred to me that I couldn’t be hearing the baby’s toy phone because we’d picked up all his toys before he went to bed—a nightly ritual we make sure to engage him in. I sing the “Clean Up” song from Barney while we do it. I use a Barney voice because it makes the baby laugh.
    That wasn’t what was happening this time, but there was no way to tell her that. I walked up to the window and looked out into the darkness. Our porch light, which is motion sensitive and comes on even when something as small as a squirrel runs by, was dark. The beeping continued, and it wasn’t my imagination. The sound was coming from the glider.
    “Do you want me to pause this?”
    I jumped, startled. Cassi was standing between the kitchen and the living room. When I turned around, I saw that her expression was puzzled.
    “What are you doing?”
    I shrugged. “I thought I heard something.”
    “What?”
    “It sounded like…a cell phone. You know, like when someone is dialing or texting? The little beeps that the keys make?”
    She paused, frowning. “I don’t hear it.”
    That’s what I’m afraid of, I thought to myself.
    “You want to go outside and check it out?” she asked.
    “No,” I said. “It was probably nothing.”
     

    * * *
     

    One week later, I was hauling the trash cans up to the road so that the garbage men could pick them up the next morning. It was dark out, and I had a flashlight in one hand so that speeding cars wouldn’t plow into me.
    At the top of the driveway, I heard the beeping sound again.
    I’ve written about characters feeling “an icy finger running up their spine” but until that moment, I’d never experienced it in real life. Indeed, I didn’t think it was something you actually could experience in real life. I’d always thought it was just one of those standard euphemisms that are occasionally required in horror fiction.
    I shined the flashlight around, but there was nobody there. It was just me, the trees, our mailbox, our neighbor’s mailbox and trash cans, and that wooden cross, now looking much more weather-beaten and worse for the wear.
    The beeping stopped.
    I leaned the trash cans against the guardrail and the beeping recommenced. Headlights pinpointed me, and I heard a pickup truck come around the corner. It zipped past me fast enough to ruffle my jacket. After it had passed, and the darkness returned, the road was silent.
    “There’s nothing there,” I said out loud.
    I started down the driveway and the beeping rang out behind me.
    I ran all the way to the deck. I was out of breath when I got inside. Cassi asked me what was wrong. I smiled and waved a hand, indicating that I’d answer her as soon as I’d stopped hyperventilating. When I could talk again, I lied, and told her that I ran down the driveway to get some exercise.
     

    ENTRY 13:
      

    The dreams continued sporadically throughout the spring and into the summer. With them came more glider rocking and phantom texting during my waking hours. If they had happened every day, I really do think I would have lost my shit, but they didn’t. There was no rhyme or reason. No way of predicting when it would occur. Weeks would go by without a single nightmare and then I’d have four in a row. A month would pass without the glider moving on its own or those haunting, disembodied beeps, and then there would be a flurry of activity that lasted several days.
    There were little things, too—occasional, one-time occurrences that didn’t seem connected to all of this at the time, but