Clever Creatures of the Night

by Samantha Mabry

Genres: YA Horror

Synopsis

When Case’s best friend Drea goes missing, Case dives into the bizarre, cultlike—and possibly murderous—behavior of Drea’s roommates in this gripping literary horror novel for fans of The Honeys and Mexican Gothic.

WHERE IS DREA?
 
When Case shows up at the isolated West Texas house where her best friend, Drea, lives with friends from school, Drea is nowhere to be found. Why would she ask Case to visit and then disappear? With twenty-four hours until her ride home, Case intends to find out.
 
But Drea’s roommates can’t—or won’t—answer any questions. They leave Case to search alone, to find bits and pieces of Drea's life hidden in and around the house, while they continue playing out a rural utopian fantasy. Their bizarre behavior puts Case on edge, and she’s not the only one. The animals nearby are lashing out, strangely aggressive.
 
Something bad happened in this house. Something that must be connected to Drea’s disappearance—and if she gets too close to the truth, Case might just be next.

Publisher: Workman Publishing Company

Print pages: 240

Sample

All the early mornings look like this: The distant hills are shrouded by a dull gray murk. The trees are frozen in their stark stances. The sky is so thick and ash-colored that it’s impossible to tell what kinds of birds soar silently by until they let out their small, distinguishable cries. When the sun finally hauls itself up and over the zigzag horizon, its weak light is tissue-paper pink.

Is this beautiful or not?

Case rolls down the window to get a better view of those shrouded, distant hills and is immediately hit with the smell of a trash fire. She jolts back in her seat. The scent of smoldering wood alongside the sharp reek of melting plastic is so fresh and familiar. Someone is always burning something out here, even though the county has banned fires.

Case catches the concerned look of the driver in the rearview mirror. “It’s the air,” she says.

“Hmm.” The man crinkles his nose. “I’ve never been down this road.”

The driver is maybe only five years older than Case, but he has a row of pictures of his family taped up on his dashboard. There’s a toddler girl seated on a red tricycle, and an older boy in ready position next to a T-ball stand. Several times during this drive, forty miles westward from Fort Worth, Case has noticed him reaching out to tap the faces on those photos with the fingers of his right hand. He does it again, right now. Is it some kind of good luck tic? Are his kids somewhere far away and he has convinced himself that touching their frozen faces will bring them closer? Or maybe any amount of time away from them feels too long, and his fingers always itch to touch their skin.

“Before I came to pick you up, I double-checked the address to make sure,” the driver says. “Even if you look at the satellite, there’s nothing but trees.”

“I did the same thing,” Case replies, rolling up her window. “Looked at the satellite, I mean.”

When someone grows up in a rural county, they know all the roads, even the ones they’ve never gone down. And since this is the county in which Case grew up, she knew this road was here, but she had always assumed it led to some long-collapsed farmhouse or dead-ended into a riverbank. At the turnoff, there wasn’t a sign or street numbers, or even a mailbox. There was fencing, but it had clearly been neglected for a long time. The wire was snapped and bright with rust. The wood posts were split and slanted.

But the directions in Andrea’s letter were as clear as they could be, and typical for a house tucked deep into the woods: Turn right at the first road after you cross the north fork of the river. Go down farther than you think. The trees will get thicker. The road will get narrower. Keep going. There’s a curve. The house is green.

As the trees get thicker and the road gets narrower, the driver shifts forward in his seat, his chest hovering an inch from the steering wheel. The road starts to feel like it’s dissolving into the oaks and dying cedars, but then, finally, it curves—just as Andrea had said it would—and the house comes into view.

“Oh,” the driver says, straightening up suddenly. “This is it? Are you sure this is it? Someone lives here?”

Case doesn’t reply. She was expecting the house to be green because of paint, but that’s not right. It’s green because it’s covered in ivy. The sides of the old house might be bricked or covered in long strips of siding, but from a distance, it’s impossible to tell. Most of the windows—both on the first and second story—are almost completely obscured by leaves and vines. Wooden steps that lead up to the front door are cracked in half, as if someone had gone and smashed them with a bat. At some point, bricks came loose from the chimney—dislodged probably by that creeping ivy—and they have been left in the driveway where they fell. The whole house looks off-kilter, kicked to an angle.

“This is it,” Case tells the driver, even though she’s not totally convinced.

Case glances down to the letter in her hand, the most recent one from Andrea, the one with the specific-vague directions. It’s postmarked just over two weeks ago. Case’s hand is trembling slightly, causing the paper to flutter. Her gaze snags on one sentence in particular: I can’t wait to see you.

There are more of Andrea’s letters in the duffel bag Case packed for this trip, all tucked into their torn-open envelopes and tied together with a length of gray yarn in a thick bundle. It was important for Case to bring them, to show her friend that she’d read every word of every letter over and over.

The car rolls to a stop, and the front door of the house swings open. A girl appears. She doesn’t step out and over the broken steps but, instead, leans against the doorframe. The first thing Case notices is the color of the girl’s hair, dark blond, like a bale of hay. It’s woven into a long braid and swept over her shoulder. The girl is wearing a denim apron over a light-colored button-up shirt and rolled-up jeans. She’s roughly wiping her hands on a once-white, now-grayish-and-stained kitchen towel. She looks weirdly wholesome, like she belongs on a label for something like butter or bleach.

“Oh, there’s your friend!” the driver exclaims, clearly relieved. He throws the car into park and then immediately launches outside to grab Case’s bag from the trunk.

The girl standing in the door, however, isn’t Andrea, and the bland expression on her face isn’t friendly. She must be one of the roommates. In her letters, Andrea mentioned she’d been sharing the house with three other kids she’d been at boarding school with, but she only ever described one of them—not this one, though. A different one, the boy.

Imagine my surprise, Drea had written, when Troy told me his family owned a house in Palo Pinto—just a couple miles from the junior high!

After taking one last glance at the pictures of the dashboard family, Case climbs out of the car. She takes her bag from the driver’s outstretched hand and lifts her gaze to search the house’s second-story windows. Andrea could appear any moment, shaken from sleep by the sounds of car doors and the trunk slamming shut. Any moment now, Andrea could be there, grinning and waving.

“Pick you up same time tomorrow?” the driver asks.

“Uh, yeah.” Case spins around. She digs into the front pocket of her jeans to pull out two crumpled twenties for tip. “Yes.”

She’d paid for the two rides, twenty-four hours apart, in advance—the first from Fort Worth to here, and the second, from here to Fort Worth. Andrea had told Case she could stay at the house, but not for more than a day and a night. Her roommates, she said, wouldn’t like anything longer than that.

“I’ll be standing right here,” Case adds, passing the cash to the driver.

Case waits until the car swings around the curve and disappears down the tree-choked lane before turning back to face the house. Again, she peers up to the second-floor windows. The nail on her pointer finger scratches across the paper she’s holding in her still-quaking hand, right across that sentence, I can’t wait to see you. The stink of burning wood and trash still hangs in the air, but there’s a layer of something else now. It’s coming straight from the house: the stonelike scent of bread baking.

“I’m here for Drea,” Case says. She holds out her letter and steps forward.

The girl in the doorway doesn’t respond, but she looks down, frowning when she sees the way Case’s hand shakes. Case tries to peer over the girl’s shoulder, but can’t make out anything except the darkened depths of the house.

“She asked me to come today,” Case clarifies.

“Are you Case?” the girl asks.

Case grins, buoyed by the simple joy of having been mentioned. “I am. Yeah.”

“Andrea’s not here,” the girl says flatly. “She’s not here right now.”

Another girl, slightly younger, maybe thirteen, emerges from around the far side of the house. She’s running, holding a wide-brimmed straw hat onto her head with one hand and carrying a wicker basket lined with cloth in the other. When she sees Case, she stops so suddenly she nearly trips over her own feet.

“Is that a letter?” the older girl in the doorway asks. “Like, a letter on paper? Who still writes letters?”

“Andrea still writes letters.” Case attempts another smile, but this one gets stuck. She extends the envelope out farther. “See? This is her handwriting.”

All Case gets in response is the girl’s indifferent stare, which makes her feel stupid for even attempting to be cheery. She drops her hand to her side. The envelope slaps against her leg.

“Where did you come from?” the younger girl asks, approaching Case. She also has hair the color of straw, Case notices, as the girl pulls her own braid over her shoulder and starts to tug at its ends.

“Not that far,” Case replies. “Fort Worth.”

“I like Fort Worth!” The younger girl looks to the doorway. “Kendall, remember when we used to—”

“Steph,” the older girl warns. “Stop.”

The smell of the baking bread is stronger now, tangy and bright, like sourdough. The older girl—Kendall—lifts her nose to sniff the air. Her expression is still neutral to the point of bored, but Case notices the hard way she grips her dirty towel in her hands, causing her knuckles to pale. There’s dough crusted around the girl’s nail beds, and dried in spots on her palm and the pad of her thumb.

“You’re late.” Kendall extends her arm toward the younger girl—Steph. “I need the eggs.”

Steph hands over the basket, and Kendall turns, disappearing into the house.

Case listens to the long screech of a cicada—a needle-­sharp sound she’ll recognize as long as she lives—and then looks helplessly to the younger girl.

“Um . . . hey,” Case offers.

Steph smiles, bright and true, like sun on glass.

“It’s almost time for breakfast,” the girl says. “Come inside if you’re hungry.”

If Kendall had walked off a label for butter, then the boy sitting across from Case at the kitchen table could be from a billboard for watches or cuff links or cologne. He is too clean. His white shirt is too white. It’s not breezy linen, but a cotton button-up pressed into offensively hard angles. The sleeves of that shirt are rolled up, and he has his elbows resting on a wooden table that looks at least a hundred years old. The table is covered in nicks and crumbs, but not the boy. He is . . . Case thinks for a moment. He is pristine. Case can smell his soap—a pure white bar.

Just when she thinks she might be staring at him too long, the boy gifts Case with a grin. He tosses a toothpick into his mouth, grinds and swivels it around with his teeth. Case looks away. She hates when people chew on toothpicks.

Kendall is at the kitchen counter rolling out a disc of dough with a wooden pin that looks as old and worn as the table. Right beside where Kendall stands is a metal stove—a squat cast-iron beast of a thing. Over on one of the gas burners, bacon is frying in a skillet, creating a little symphony of meat and grease. Steph is standing next to Kendall at the counter, sorting her eggs into a carton. No one is talking, and Case gets the sense she’s entered a scene that plays out the same way every single morning.

But then the boy—the pristine boy—pushes a French press across the table toward Case.

“Have some coffee,” he says, “before it gets cold.”

Case grabs a cup from a stack in the center of the table and pours. The sip she takes is bitter and burns her tongue, but she doesn’t hiss or make a face. She may not be able to hide the tremors that often plague her hands, but she’s good at hiding her reactions to the things she finds painful or unpleasant.

“You’re Troy,” Case says, forcing down another sip. “This is your house.”

“My family’s house, actually.” Troy sits back in his chair. “We’re from California—Manhattan Beach, near LA.” He pauses, as if granting Case time to process that information. “But my grandparents bought this place a few years ago as an investment property.”

Case snorts out a laugh before she realizes that wasn’t a joke.

“An investment property,” Case repeats. “For real? Out here?”

“Not so much the house,” Troy says. “But the land, yeah.”

“You know Drea’s originally from just down the road,” Case adds. “Me too.”

“I know,” Troy says. “Small world, right?”

There’s a creak above, in the ceiling. Case’s gaze snaps up at the sound—a footstep, maybe.

“It’s no one,” Troy says, as if reading her thoughts. “The house is old. It makes sounds.”

“How do you know about Troy?” Steph asks from across the room. “Did Andrea write to you about him?”

Case looks to the girl. She hasn’t cleaned up since being outside. An exposed patch of skin at her bare throat is caked with a mix of dirt and sweat. There’s a smear of something—mud or chicken shit—across her wrist. Stuck to that smear is the tiniest feather.

“She did, actually,” Case replies.

Troy is the roommate Case knows about. He is the boy. Case knows, for example, that Drea and Troy met two years ago, when they were sophomores, in fall semester Ethics class. He was brilliant, Andrea wrote, knew so much about all kinds of things, but he was also kind and generous. She could hardly believe when, during the first signs of the eruption, Troy had grabbed her by the elbow in the hallway, hustled her out the door and into Abby’s car, offering to let her—the scholarship kid from the sticks—tag along with his WASPy gang of friends and stay at his country house, halfway across the state, for the whole spring and summer, maybe even longer if their school reopening was delayed.

In her more recent letters, Andrea mentioned how, on some mornings, she and Troy would wade into the Brazos River together and try half-heartedly to catch fish. When they were alone, ankle-deep in the cold, muddy water, Troy would smile as wide as a sunrise. His green eyes would shine. Andrea said she swore she could feel the riverbed shift.

Case looks into Troy’s dark eyes—dark like the water of the river after it hasn’t rained for weeks, when it’s flat and full of mud, not a flattering shade of green at all. She doesn’t see anything magical. For sure, the ground beneath her doesn’t move.

“Did Andrea write about me?” Kendall asks, slapping her rolling pin against the dough. “Steph, get a dish towel, would you? Drain the bacon.”

“She did not,” Case says. She sets her coffee cup on its saucer with a clang. “So. Where’s Drea?”

“I’ve never heard anyone call her that before. Dray-ah.” Kendall draws out the syllables so that they sound distorted and ugly. She whacks the pin down again and pushes it roughly across the dough, causing the whole counter to shake.

“She went to Millsap, probably,” Troy says. “To see her mom. She does that sometimes.”

“So she drove?” Case asks. The small town of Millsap is close but not that close—at least a couple hours’ walk, if not more. “Is there a car here?”

“Only Abby uses the car,” Steph says.

Case watches the younger girl peel the strips of cooked bacon from the skillet with her shit-smeared fingers and then press them between two layers of dish towels. When she thinks no one is looking, Steph leans in, rips off a piece of the meat, and pops it into her mouth.

Case thinks: This girl is sort of wonderful.

“Abby also lives here,” Troy finally offers.

“I gathered that, yeah,” Case replies. “Someone came and picked Drea up, then?”

Troy grunts in response and then nudges at the French press again, silently urging Case to refill her cup. She doesn’t want to. Not just because it’s bad coffee, but because Case is beginning to feel sick. The tremors in her hand are getting worse, . . .