Growing Grounds

Chapter 4: Missing

Chapter 4

At twenty-five minutes after midnight, all the officers, the two fingerprint technicians and Tad, Officer Green's son, were gone. Matt was more exhausted mentally than he had been since his first year at college, which he never thought possible.

One hour later, Matt was sleeping soundly in the bedroom where Tammy had been ready to jump out the window earlier in the evening. Tammy watched him from just outside the doorway. She, on the other hand, still felt nervous that somehow they had all missed the intruder who was still hiding inside the house, waiting for Tammy Wilforth Milner to be alone again. Surely, if he had not meant harm before, he would now. He would retaliate because she had called the cops and they had fingerprinted the chair he had pushed across the floor, making just enough noise to taunt his intended victim. r**e, murder, robbery--any one, or all three, would have been sufficient motive for any criminal looking for trouble, she thought.

She was left alone feeling angry that Matt could brush off the day and sleep like a log despite all that had happened. Because it had not happened to him or the others that were present afterwards, they all could afford to put it aside, call it female hysteria and give each other those sideways glances that always mean, 'Yep, she's a little jumpy. Woman-nerves for ya. Good thing we men are here to make her feel secure again.'

Tammy walked downstairs, huffed out a long sigh in the direction of the still-misplaced chair, which Matt had left in the house against her wishes and despite her protests. He had mumbled something about it being safer in the house until the next day as he fell asleep. She thought that was absurd. After all that had gone on that evening, why would he give a damn about the chair? She thought if he were a sincerely caring husband who wanted his wife to feel comfortable in their home, he would have taken the chair immediately to the storage building. Her anger notched up another level and she decided to remove the chair by herself.

She flipped on the porch light and looked out the window beside the door, making sure that no one lurked out there. Leaving the dead bolt in place, she undid the chain lock and eyed the chair. It was too heavy and awkward for her to pick up, so she grabbed the arms from the front, meaning to lean back and pull the chair to the door.

But it happened differently. Not the way she intended at all.

The chair armrests pulsed underneath Tammy's fingers and she stopped short in her endeavor, hands still on the armrests, and tried to sort out what she had felt. Unfortunately, she remained in contact with the chair for a few seconds too many.

Just as she convinced herself that it was only her own heartbeat that she felt pulsing in her hands, the chair moved again. This time, the end of the armrests that looked like big bony hands draped over the edges, twitched at the fingers. Those hands pulled free of the supports and wrapped around Tammy's wrists. The movement was fast as a snake-strike and she was stunned so perfectly immobile that her vocal cords forgot how to scream and her brain forgot how to think.

With less noise than one would think, the chair continued to unfold. Had she been in a cognitive state of mind, Tammy would have seen why those talons pointed back and up under the back of the chair. It was indeed a kneeling creature in chair form.

In its upright position, the chair's three tiny heads loomed over Tammy by at least ten inches. The seat made up the torso and this is what the hands pulled her against before she had sense enough to try to scream. All she could do while it reeled her into its clutches was suck in little gasps of air. Her chest mashed up against the seat-torso and the supports that had, until seconds earlier held up those gnarly looking hands, crossed over her back. The ladder rung where one would have rested his feet if sitting in the chair curved and moved up until it was situated under her backside, lifting her feet a few inches off the floor.

The wooden creature took one unsteady step toward the front door and Tammy tried to scream. The first hint of sound eked out and one of the creature's hard hands pressed ruthlessly against her mouth and the other against the back of her head. The three tiny heads, of which two sat atop what should have been shoulders had this evil creature been human, swiveled downward, toward her face and the middle one seemed to shake in negation while the other two glared at her with looks of admonishment.

Another shaky step broke her paralysis entirely and she began to thrash and wail even though the hands only clamped tighter around her head, mashing her lips into her teeth until blood oozed out and into her mouth. As the creature tightened its hold on her body, she felt her ribs bend almost to the breaking point and the pain stilled her movements. The pressure on her head made her dizzy and after a moment, she felt as if she floated instead of being supported in midair.

At the point of complete blackout, Tammy watched as the middle head sneered, leaning closer so she could see its sharp little teeth.

Everything turned black and all sounds seemed far away and unimportant as she slipped into that blackness.

* * * *

The wooden creature took its hand away from Tammy's mouth and supported her lolling head with the other hand as it yawed and scuffled its way to the front door. It had been too many years since the thing had been in a standing position and it was clumsy with the first attempts at getting out the locked door. Not bothering to flip off the porch light, it finally mastered the deadbolt and opened the door. Ducking through the doorway sideways so as not to make any noise, the creature slowly descended the porch steps and moved into the shadows where it stopped, heads turning independently in different directions, trying to sense the correct path to take.

Once settled on the general direction, the creature walked with its stiff, stilted gait toward the mountain south of the Milner's house. Carrying the unconscious woman was cumbersome and, at the same time, invigorating. For now there was another chance.

Hopefully a better outcome than the last one, all those years before.

* * * *

Matt awoke to the heavy downpour of rain pelting the bedroom window and a chill in the air. The first thing he noticed was that Tammy was nowhere in the bedroom or adjoining bath. Hopefully she's making coffee.

He rolled the covers tighter around himself, thought about lying there until she gave up and came upstairs to force him out of bed, but in the end, he flipped the covers to the center of the bed and sat on the edge. The rain was really coming down outside. He had never seen raindrops as big as the ones in his new rural setting. The city seemed to have more finesse even with the mid-size of its raindrops. Country living, he decided, was not all it was made out to be. He could happily leave it all behind and go back to his little city life immediately.

With no sense of rush, he gathered up his Saturday clothes and showered, whistling a few notes, but nothing that resembled a tune, to dispel the drearies he always seemed to get when it rained and the sky was overcast.

Whistling turned into humming as Matt turned off the shower and stepped out of the tub. He finished his ablutions, the thought of a good cup of black coffee now too alluring to ignore.

The chill in the air held a definite bite when he walked from his steam-warmed bathroom into his bedroom and was even chillier in the hallway. He yelled for Tammy as he headed for the stairs. "Hey hon, how about turning up the thermostat?"

Halfway down the stairs, he stopped fiddling with his watchband as a gust of cold wind blew up the stairs and hit him fully frontal. Stunned, he saw the front door standing open far enough that the knob touched the wall and even banged it a little as the wind gusted. The rug inside the doorway had soaked up a lot of water and was now nearly submerged as the rainwater pooled around the foyer.

"What the hell, Tammy?" He yelled, rushing to shut the door.

In his hurry, he failed to see that the chair and his wife were missing. Turning from the door, he yelled for Tammy again and once again, there was no answer. He quickly checked the driveway for her car and saw that it was in the same spot as always.

Instead of grabbing towels to sop up the mess, he went to the storage closet set in the empty space under the staircase, grabbed two of Tammy's handcrafted quilts and spread them in front of the door.

Opening the door to toss out the sodden rug, Matt felt the first pang of worry deep in his chest.

Though the porch had a roof, the wind continued to blow the downpour into the house while the door stood open. Even the screen door was insufficient at keeping out the water. He searched the landscape as far as he could by peering around the screen door, water spattering his face in bursts. There was no sign of Tammy. The thought of being soaked by the rain left him as he stepped onto the porch, walked to one side and looked toward the back yard and then went to the other side and did the same--leaning far out over the railing and into the driving rain.

Worry faded fast and fear took its place. He ran back into the house, yelling Tammy's name and not receiving a response. She was not in the back yard as he searched from the back door.

Yelling her name again, Matt turned from the back door and realized for the first time that the chair was missing.

His gut wrenched. He spun on his heel to check every corner of the living room for the chair. Not there. She's gone to take that chair to the shed. Would she have left the front door open with the wind and rain blowing in? He thought not. Not unless something had happened while she was in the shed.

Rushing back out the door and into the rain, Matt's feet slapped up waterspouts as he ran across the yard. The building door was padlocked from the outside and that lock was still in place. Tammy could not be in the building but at this point, Matt pounded on the door anyway. "You in there, Tammy?" No reply.

Back in the house, tracking mud and dripping wet, Matt retrieved the set of keys from the small hanger on the wall in the kitchen, found the key to the storage shed and ran out again.

With the shed's door open and still no sign of Tammy or the chair, there was only one other place on the property he had not checked--the cellar. It was not a basement; it was just what everyone called it, a cellar. The bulkhead was padlocked, too. Matt found the key and, with the wind now beginning to freeze the feeling out of his fingers, he opened the lock. The cellar was dark, dank and completely devoid of his wife.

Walking back into the house, across the wet blankets and to the hallway phone, Matt felt as if he were trapped in a bad dream where things make no sense and all movement is slowed to a ridiculous speed.

Door open in the rain, car is here, chair is missing, floor soaked, I'm wet… his thoughts seemed to be circling something very important. Some fact his conscious mind had yet to pick up hid just out of grasp. There had to be logic in what was happening because there was logic in everything but he could not see it.