Chapter Text
Grave robbing in Texas is this hour’s top news story...
...what appeared to be a grisly work of art...
...the remains of a badly decomposed body, wired to a large monument...
...the extremities removed, and...
WE'RE ALL JUST VICTIMS OF THE TIMES
It was morning already.
The rim of the moon still clung like a stain to the bright white sky, steadily and soundlessly drained of color over the hours he had watched it, sleepless, raw-eyed. His nighttime panic had cooled to a daze; he had bitten down his nails and with a dull blade dug carelessly under what remained of the crescent.
For weeks he had craned his neck to the warbling of the radio on the grease-spattered kitchen counter.
For the past few days, he had heard nothing more of himself or his group.
It was an inconsequential story, anyway, the hot topic of that past August— a van full of ill-fated twenty-somethings vanished on the roads of rural Texas, likely near Newt, a small town made of sun and dust and little else, populated by tight-lipped locals who, minus the grass-sprawled drunkard, had little or nothing to say. The starving public had no patience for a mystery. Naturally, the lurid details of more hideous crimes filled the airwaves instead. And it was too damn hot out for anybody to care—an excuse anyone would sympathize with.
The affluent parents of the missing tried to fight it, begging for their babies to come home, but the coverage waned—that any airtime was spared at all was a matter of privilege. And so, in compromise they turned to belief: in their lives, in their safety, belief that the silence was just youthful carelessness, years late to the Summer of Love, that anyone might like to exhibit had they the opportunity to be young again—they chose to leave the porch lights on for them.
Life goes on.
Life sure goes on. Earthquakes, shootings, kidnappings. Families with their faces carved off. The shining new day, full of promise, bright sky paled as though drowned in milk, offered a peal of hideous soundbites. His new family had nothing to do with any of it.
But it’s important to nurture a bit of optimism, he supposes, pensively chewing the ends of his sore pink fingertips, as hopeless as the world may otherwise seem. Through tremulous voices carried by electrostatic signal, miles and miles away, his parents told him how to think for the last time: that his sister and her friends will find their way back, probably, wherever they went. He, too, had lost curiosity about them.
And with the public giving up on him, perhaps he was free.
The panic seizes him.
The weight of it hits him at once, like a summer storm, or a fatal crack to the skull, or a red wet calf unceremoniously birthed and splattered onto the floor of the black-mold kitchen: his old life was dead and gone. There would be no one looking for him, or the missing 1972 Ford Club Wagon rusting unnoticed in the yard.
The finality is raw and frightening. He trembles. He grips the arms of his chair to brace for nausea. But it dissipates with ease, and instead he feels cool, and good, as his ample sweat carries away the uncomfortable heat in his body.
Well, what a relief. He stopped bargaining for his escape long ago. Why return to where he is unwanted? He retrieves the old bandage from his front pocket, stiffened with exudate, ravels and unravels it around his hand, clutches it achingly to his chest like a lover’s memento. He allows his mind to wander back to the familiar worry that had wrenched him awake, before the crow of a rooster, before the day's first whir of the chainsaw and the sobering smell of its burnt fuel, its blue smoke filling the limited air: he worries about the hitchhiker, and when he will come back for him.
The hitchhiker left in the middle of the night. When the radio lists his misdeeds later in the day, they will blame it on something else.
A grisly work of art, and the top story of the hour, to compete with the remaining hours of the day. Does the owner of that fatherly voice, edges crackling comfortably with radio distortion, know how happy he makes the culprit to hear? For a time, that sick praise was the highlight of his day. Scold him, rub his nose into the soiled newspaper—it won't work, if stopping him is the goal. No one's ever caught him. It doesn't matter. In the grand scheme of things the hitchhiker is a minor pest. And maybe there is no shortage of monsters. But to know one so intimately...
The slash on his arm, the smear on the van, the bones in his grandfather's house: all was a steadfast, blood-sworn oath, that he would come back for him, for him, and no one else. His fear wasn't for nothing; it wasn't wasted. For sure, he will come back, just as he came back for him the first time. The hitchhiker can leave to play outside, but he’s just as bound to the home as he is.
He was right in the end. Even about being killed, though only partially; it was a part of him that for now, he is glad is dead.
The huge man with the human leather mask looms nearby, waiting for Franklin to turn the dial to the music station. He could force him, but the intensity of Franklin's furrowed glare out the window makes him feel like a stranger in his own home. Confused, and to unconsciously appease the source of tension, maybe, he feigns busy work and fusses loudly with the pots and pans. The motion stirs the cheerful silver bells on his charm bracelet and Franklin pretends the sound is not familiar.
Somewhere outside the town of Newt, past red-rusted cars latticed by dirty rope, and flattened cans over dry grass, and barren peach trees that bear glass bottles, is a comely Victorian farmhouse, painted white. Nestled in a pocket of green away from the endless tan stretch of road, where rocky ground transitions to deep dense growth, and eerie-still save for the whir of a generator, it is often mistaken for refuge.
The attuned nose of an animal might smell the graveyard stench from miles away. Lacking this sense, many a hapless human traveler had entered the house-machine to be destroyed and processed.
But anyone who had made it that far believed there was goodness and meaning in the world. They didn't deserve what happened and they'll never come back out.
Guests stay forever in some form or another.