Come With Me

by Ronald Malfi

Genres: Ghost; Horror; Supernatural suspense

Synopsis

A masterful, heart-palpitating novel of small-town horror and psychological dread from a Bram Stoker nominee.



Aaron Decker's life changes one December morning when his wife Allison is killed. Haunted by her absence—and her ghost—Aaron goes through her belongings, where he finds a receipt for a motel room in another part of the country. Piloted by grief and an increasing sense of curiosity, Aaron embarks on a journey to discover what Allison had been doing in the weeks prior to her death.



Yet Aaron is unprepared to discover the dark secrets Allison kept, the death and horror that make up the tapestry of her hidden life. And with each dark secret revealed, Aaron becomes more and more consumed by his obsession to learn the terrifying truth about the woman who had been his wife, even if it puts his own life at risk.

Release date: July 20, 2021

Publisher: Titan Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

PART ONE

HEADLIGHT GHOSTS

CHAPTER ONE

1

Every marriage has its secrets. I understand this, Allison. I get it. Secrets are what allow us to cling to our individual selves while also being one half of a matrimonial whole, and can be as vital as breathing. Fleeting desires, errant daydreams—private things reserved for just one person, the keeper of those secrets, the attendant at the door of the vault. The small secrets are easy to keep hidden—easier, say, than the big secrets, the whoppers, the infidelities and closet addictions that, like some underwater beastie that must ultimately ascend to the surface for a gasp of air, don’t remain secrets forever.

I began the process of learning your secret, Allison, something like three months after your death. I call it a “process” because, much like a haunting, it did not reveal itself to me all at once, but rather as a gradual widening and clarity of circumstance. That’s just like you, too, Allison—layers of depth upon depth that require effort, require work, to piece together. There had never been anything surface level about you, and the secret that, like reverse origami, I unfolded after your death was no different. It’s possible, had I had my wits about me, I would have put the pieces together more quickly. Give me credit, okay? But as it was, I spent those first few months after your death in a sort of hypnagogic trance. You see, part of me had blinked out of existence right along with you—another consequence of the marital union—and what was left in the aftermath only retained the barest essence of a human being.

A cardboard box wrapped in packing tape on our front porch. So commonplace a way to have a piece of your dead wife’s hidden life come to light. And I’ll admit this right from the start, just so there is no confusing the issue later: I am not proud of where my mind went. Not at first. Something the casual observer may have overlooked… but I was your husband, not someone snatching a glimpse of your life through a window. And just like that, the aperture had opened. And then it widened. And then it widened some more.

I’m of the opinion that when it comes to secrets, there is no end to what we don’t know about a person. Even the person who sleeps next to us and shares our lives.

2

It was your darkness that made me fall in love with you, Allison. Darkness of depth, I mean. The way we can peer down a narrow little hole and have our vision robbed by the mesmeric distance of it all. The never-ending-ness of it. You were pretty, yes, but it was the unconventional predatory aura that clung to you—those deep flashes, like flares shot up into the night, that I would sometimes glimpse behind your eyes—that slowly drew me in. Your dark, caustic smile that hinted at some secret knowledge. The cruel way you gnawed at your fingernails, and how, on our first few dates, there were always specks of chartreuse nail polish sparkling along your lower lip. Some grand mystery in the form of a person.

I first glimpsed you alone on a johnboat at the mouth of Deep Creek, where the creek opens up into the bay. You were sitting there with your head down, a dark silhouette, getting drenched in the middle of a springtime downpour. I watched you from beneath the awning of the marina’s snack bar, curious about this lone figure bobbing along the choppy waters in the storm. Admittedly, I didn’t even know you were female at first—the distance between us, confused by the rain, made you look like an indistinguishable, immovable lump, sorry to say. I started to formulate a story about you, and how you ended up floating out there in the rain on that boat—that maybe you were contemplating suicide after suffering a broken heart… or maybe you were already dead, a casualty of a jealous lover, who had propped your body upright on that boat before casting you out toward the bay.

The scenario only grew increasingly more peculiar when three figures emerged from the water around you, slick as seals in their black wetsuits, and climbed into the boat with you. Only then did you move—a slight tilt of your head, perhaps to posit a question or to extend an order. One of the wetsuited fellows engaged the outboard motor and the johnboat carved a wide arc around the channel of the creek. When it stopped again, farther away from me, I watched as the wetsuits dropped over the side of the boat and vanished again beneath the turbulent, storm-churned surface of the water. You remained curled there in the rain, a dark semicolon rocking on the waves, your head down as if scrutinizing something life-changing in your lap.

The boat ultimately dropped you off at the marina before vanishing into the rainy mist. You had on an army-green slicker, your dark and shiny hair pulled back into a soaking-wet ponytail. Your face was pale, unblemished, almost boyish. You carried a notebook and a camera in a see-through waterproof bag.

I watched you from across the sparse floor of the marina’s snack bar as you took up a table far from me, ordered a coffee (black, no sugar), and began scribbling furiously in your notebook. For the next twenty minutes, I alternated between reading a Japanese-language edition of a Haruki Murakami novel and watching you. Finally, when I had summoned enough courage to approach, you didn’t even look up at me as you said, “We were searching for a dead body.”

This statement—a lie, you would later confess; you were out with divers from the Naval Academy examining oyster beds for an article you were writing for a local newspaper—rendered me speechless. And when you did look up at me, I could see that this had been your intention all along. To render me speechless; to knock me off kilter. And that was when I thought for the first time, Who is this girl?

So, in that regard, I can hardly blame you for your darkness. I can hardly claim that I was caught unawares by this most recent development. Not completely. I had been forewarned by the first thing you had ever said to me, the first words out of your mouth to a tall, gangly stranger with reading glasses and a chunky, tattered Japanese paperback in his hands. A lie meant as a joke that edged on darkness.

Who is this girl?

After your death, and after five years of what I would consider a pretty goddamn good marriage, I found myself asking that very same question all over again.

3

No one thinks when they first meet a person that there is some cosmic clock counting down the years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds until you will stop knowing each other. It doesn’t occur to most people when you meet the person with whom you wish to spend the rest of your life that, at some point, one of you will leave. Sure, everyone knows this on a practical level—everyone dies, no one lives forever—but no one looks their spouse in the eye on the night of their wedding and actually hears the ticking of that clock. Its sound is buried far beneath the flash and glamour of what we think our futures hold for us. But it’s there; don’t be fooled. It ticks for all of us.

You—Allison, my wife—died on an unseasonably warm and rather peaceable December morning, all things considered. At the time of your death, I was most likely wrapping your Christmas present, wistfully ignorant that you were hemorrhaging blood onto a scuffed linoleum floor. I was still in bed when you left the house that morning, awake but with my eyes closed against the bright sheet of daylight pressed against the bedroom windows. I ran a hand along your side of the bed as I stirred. The sheets were cold.

“Hey,” you said, bustling into the bedroom. “Did I wake you?”

“No, I need to get up. Where are you going?”

You were wearing a scarlet beret, ringlets of inky black hair corkscrewing down both sides of your face, and a houndstooth topcoat that looked like it might be too warm for such a pleasant and mild December morning.

“Harbor Plaza,” you said, hunting around the top of the dresser for something. “I need to pick up a few things. We’re going to the Marshalls’ tonight for that cookie-exchange thing.”

“Ah, that’s right.”

We would not be going to the Marshalls’.

“If I can find my damn keys, that is…”

“Check the mystic pedestal,” I suggested.

You tucked a tress of hair behind one ear as you crossed the bedroom and vanished into our walk-in closet. A few years ago and on a whim, you had returned home from a garage sale with a two-foot-tall marble pedestal. I had helped you drag it out of the car and up three flights of stairs—Lord knows how you managed to get it into the car on your own—and, after a time, it had somehow taken up permanent residence in our bedroom closet. It served no purpose other than to attract, inexplicably, random items thought lost from around our townhome with all the force and mystery of a black hole.

You returned from the closet dangling the keys from one hand. “Did you put them there?”

I shook my head.

“Well,” you said, “that sufficiently creeps me out. There’s no way I left them in there on that thing.”

“All hail the mystic pedestal.”

You smiled at me, standing there at the foot of the bed in your scarlet beret and topcoat. Something was on your mind—I could sense its urgency in you, desperate to come into the light of day. Something had been on your mind for a while lately. It had risen up like an invisible pillar between us. Over the past month or so you had grown distant toward me, had begun to close in on yourself. My attempts at drawing whatever it was out of you had been met with denial—everything was fine, you were just under a lot of stress at work, this too shall pass. But I knew better. I knew you better.

“Come with me,” you said.

I rolled over and looked at the clock on your nightstand. It was a quarter after eight. “Too early for me,” I confessed, spilling back onto my mound of pillows. Beyond the windows, I could see what looked like a hawk wheeling against a sky the color of bone. “Besides, I wanna try and get some work done.”

“Are you sure? We can get breakfast at the Rooster.”

Normally, I’d kill for a plate of French toast from the Fat Rooster Café—two slices of artesian bread as thick as Bibles, a dusting of powdered sugar, maple syrup as dense and rich as tree sap. Yet the prospect of negotiating around a throng of last-minute Christmas shoppers overrode any desire I had for French toast.

“Vile temptress,” I said, “but I’ll have to opt out, love.”

“Suit yourself.” You came to the bed and kissed the top of my head the way a mother would a sick child. “There’s coffee downstairs.”

“You’re a peach.”

“I thought I was a vile temptress?”

“Malleable persona. It’s part of your charm.”

“Oh, it’s true,” you said, and left the room.

It was the last time you and I would have a conversation, Allison. The next time I would see you would be in the county morgue, your body laid out on a steel table with a plain white sheet tucked up to your collarbone, an index card placed discreetly over the bullet hole in your skull. And, of course, I can still hear you saying it, over and over, like a curse or maybe a prayer: Come with me. Some may say that our destinies are etched in stone from the moment of our births, but I don’t believe that. I think that life is what you make of it and the choices are yours. Free will asserts that we all must live with the consequences of our actions… which is why it torments me to close my eyes and hear you say it, even though it’s only now just inside my head, Come with me, as if the more I think of it the closer I may be to cracking the code to all of space and time and finding a way to slip behind the bulwark of it all, the window dressing and beams and girders that make up the tangible world, and escape with you into that enigmatic, floating sea. Just go. Because my presence with you on that morning, had I gone, may have changed the outcome of what happened.

Some attack of urgency ushered me out of the bed soon after you’d gone. It was like ghost hands leveraging me up and off the mattress, forcing me into the approximation of a sitting position. I climbed out of bed and stood there in a daze until the vestige of that sensation fled from me. Running my hands through my hair, I went to the closet and shut off the light. You were always leaving that light on, Allison. All the goddamn time.

Rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I went to the windows that looked down on our uncomplicated little spot in the world—the fishhook that was Arlette Street, the parade of townhomes the uniform color of sawdust, the brown hills beyond bristling with the barren, skeletal lightning bolts of trees. I watched you come out of the house and wave to Greg Holmes, out for his morning jog in his headband and gray sweatshirt with the dark armpit stains. You said something that made him laugh before he chugged onward toward the four-way intersection at the end of our development. I watched you get into the Subaru (what you’d always referred to as the Sube), crank over the engine, and pull out of the driveway. Overhead, my friend the hawk was still there, describing pinwheels against the backdrop of silver clouds behind which the morning sun struggled to poke through. I watched the taillights of the Sube flash as you changed gears. Watched you snap your seatbelt into place (you always did this once you were in the street and never while you were still in the driveway, as if wearing your seatbelt made it impossible to drive in reverse). I watched you adjust your beret in the rearview mirror before you drove away. I watched all of these simple contrivances—things I had observed you to do innumerable times before—without so much as an inkling that all the while, that great and terrible cosmic clock was winding down, tick, tick, tick, mercilessly close to coming to a full stop on our time together in this life.

4

That article that the Herald did on you? Reporter of the Year? For your Christmas gift, I had it laminated and inserted into a polished wooden plaque so you could hang it on the wall of our shared home office. You were always too modest for such showmanship, but I was proud of you. There was the photo of you on the front page of the Community section, an enlarged version of the one that usually accompanied your byline. You look sly and dark in that photo; that unassuming pink scarf-thing you’re wearing around your neck does nothing to cloak your depth. You’d received the honor for your work with teenage girls interested in journalism, offering them space within your column to speak their mind about important issues. These were girls mostly from broken homes, girls who worked part-time while also attending school to help their parents—usually a single mother—pay the bills. For the most part, they did not live in the middle-class neighborhoods the Herald serviced, but that didn’t stop you from seeking these girls out and lending them a voice. You’d been touched by the gesture when they presented you with the honor at that banquet dinner at the Chesapeake Club, but then confided in me on the drive home (and after quite a few gin and tonics, if we’re being honest) that the money spent on the banquet could have been put to better use helping those very girls for whom you’d received accolades for helping. You also said reporters were by their very nature supposed to report the stories, not be the stories.

“Unless sometimes they are,” I’d told you.

After you left the house that morning, I dug out some wrapping paper from the hall closet and swaddled the plaque in chintzy Santa Claus and reindeer foil. I stuck a festive red bow on one corner. Voilà!

It was no secret to either one of us where we hid each other’s gifts. Hell, it was very nearly a game of temptation, wasn’t it? Ours was a modest-sized townhome but that walk-in closet off the master bedroom was enormous. All my clothes and personal belongings neatly filed away on my side of the closet, all your stuff strewn and cluttered and heaped on your side of the closet. Christ, Allison, we were the original Odd Couple, weren’t we? Our stuff appeared caught in some perpetual standoff, like cowboys facing each other at opposite ends of a dusty dirt road.

I always kept your gifts in my (faux) alligator-hide footlocker, which I’d humped around with me since my days at the University of Maryland. You always hid mine away inside your hope chest, which you kept shoved beneath a rack of what you called your “office clothes” and looked for all the world like a child’s coffin.

I knelt down before my footlocker, lifted the latch, and prised it open amidst a chorus of squealing hinges. As always, the smell of old books and gym socks slapped me in the face. This was the case no matter how many pine-scented air fresheners I dumped in there. Among my old high-school yearbooks, some academic texts, and a few boxed-up novel manuscripts I’d written in longhand on yellow legal pads while still in college (all of them terrible), there were a few wrapped Christmas gifts for you already in there. I moved them aside and made room for the newly wrapped plaque.

I shut the footlocker’s lid, grunted as I rose to my feet, and was about to head out of the closet when I noticed something peculiar. At some point, Allison, you had put a lock on the lid of your hope chest. A metal clasp and eyelet with a padlock running through it. It was possible you had done this some time ago, but I was only noticing it now. Something about it struck me not only as odd, but caused a flicker of disquiet to come alive in the pit of my stomach. People put locks on things when they want to keep them safe. People put locks on things when they don’t want other people to see what they’re hiding inside.

I tugged on the lock. It was sturdy. I couldn’t tell how new it was just from looking at it.

Probably got me one hell of a Christmas gift this year, I told myself, though this didn’t help settle the disquiet that had risen in me at the sight of that lock.

Ignorant to the fact that, by this time, the trajectory of my life had already been wholly and irrevocably altered, I went downstairs, clicked on the television, then poured myself a large mug of coffee in the kitchen. It had cooled in the pot, so I popped it in the microwave then stepped out onto the back deck for a cigarette while it reheated. Although the day was abnormally warm, the overcast sky looked ready to dump some snow. While I smoked—I did this whenever you were out of the house; you abhorred me smoking—I searched the sky for the hawk I’d spotted twice earlier, but the fellow was nowhere in sight. Somewhere in the distance, probably out by the highway, I could hear police sirens. Closer, a dog barked incessantly into the gray late morning.

When I went back inside, I realized that at least some of the sirens I had been hearing were coming from the TV. I retrieved my coffee from the microwave then stood looking over the counter at the image on the television screen. And, for a moment, I wasn’t able to reconcile what I was looking at. In a way, it was like hearing my own voice coming out of a tape recorder—familiar yet momentarily unidentifiable. But then I realized what I was looking at: Harbor Plaza, the outdoor strip mall out by the highway, with its tidy row of shops now partially concealed behind the flashing rack-lights of several police cruisers. Superimposed at the bottom of the screen were the words ACTIVE SHOOTER.

I set my coffee on the counter before I could drop it to the floor. The TV remote was on the counter, so I grabbed it and thumbed the volume louder.

“…where police have shut down the road until they are able to gain control of the situation, where, as we’ve been reporting, a man opened fire less than twenty minutes ago in the Ease of Whimsy boutique here at Harbor Plaza…”

The image on the screen changed. A different angle of the Harbor Plaza shopping center, I could see police cars blocking the entrance to the parking lot. There was an ambulance in the background. A snarl of traffic was being redirected by police waving flares. Switching to a third angle, I could see people being speedily escorted by police from the Fat Rooster Café with their hands on their heads. I recognized none of them.

It was always a scavenger hunt to locate my cell phone, but somehow I managed to find it right there beside the coffeemaker. I dialed your number, Allison. It rang six times before it went to voicemail. In the time it took, my body had exuded a staggering amount of sweat and my scalp had gone prickly. I felt like a piece of uranium radiating poison into the atmosphere. I disconnected the call and immediately called you back. Again: six rings, then straight to voicemail.

There’s probably too much going on for you to stop and answer your phone, I told myself. Maybe you even lost it in all the commotion. It was a mantra I repeated over and over to myself as I got in my Civic and sped down Arlette Street toward the highway. There was a ridiculous amount of traffic, which I attributed to the police blocking off the roads surrounding Harbor Plaza. I sat, unmoving, behind a Chevy Equinox with its blinker flashing and a bumper sticker that said KEEP EARTH CLEAN, IT’S NOT URANUS for what felt like a decade. I was no longer a glowing rod of uranium, but rather had transmogrified into some amphibious thing, clammy with perspiration, fingers joined together by a translucent connectivity of webbing as I clutched the steering wheel.

“Fuck it.”

I spun the wheel and tore across the rumble strip at the shoulder of the road, thump-thump-thump-thump-thump, loose change in the cup holder rattling, a half-empty bottle of spring water jouncing in the passenger-side foot well. Car horns blared at me. I hit redial on my cell phone and the Bluetooth automatically engaged the car’s stereo. The ringing of your cell phone caused the speakers to crackle. Six rings then straight to voicemail. Your perfunctory prompt to leave a message. For the first time in five years of marriage and thousands of times calling your cell phone, I noticed you don’t say your name—just a cursory order to leave a message.

None of those people hurrying out of the Fat Rooster with their hands on their heads were answering cell phones. Maybe the police won’t let them.

I bypassed the highway exit and instead took the winding back road through a small subdivision. At the end of the road, just as I approached the plaza’s intersection, another knot of traffic brought me to a sudden halt.

“Come on, Allison,” I said, redialing your number. Ringing and voicemail. Ringing and voicemail. “Answer the damn phone.”

It’s not like you always answered your phone when I called. I often got your voicemail when I tried to reach you. This was no different.

Up ahead, I could see the lights of the police cars reflected in the shop windows on the far side of the street. Two uniformed officers were rerouting traffic, cars trundling over the grassy shoulders and redirecting themselves. Cars passed by me, heading in the direction from which they’d just come, moving with the cautious, halting crawl of someone who was lost. There was a 7-Eleven gas station to my left, a small collection of people standing out by the pumps observing the situation. I spun my wheel and hopped the curb, scraping the undercarriage, until I was in the gas station’s parking area. I jumped out of my car and jogged toward the mob of people, calling, “What’s going on? What’s going on?”

“Some guy shot up the strip mall,” said a woman. She looked stricken, like someone forcefully roused from a nightmare.

“He’s dead, he’s dead,” said a tall man wearing a blue turban. He had a great white moustache that curled to points on either side. He had his cell phone to one ear, a finger screwed into the other.

“Who?” someone else said.

“The shooter, I think,” said the man in the turban. “Wait, wait…” He uncorked his finger from his ear and pistoned it above his head. He began speaking into the phone in a language I did not understand.

My cell phone still clutched in one hand, I proceeded to run toward the two police officers directing traffic at the intersection. One of them saw me and shouted something at me but I didn’t understand. It felt like bees were swarming around inside my head. Only when the officer came out of the intersection and approached me at a quick clip, one hand held up at me in a stop-running-you-idiot gesture, did I pause halfway across the road.

“Get back!” he yelled.

I uttered something about my wife.

“You’re going to get hit,” he yelled, motioning toward the confusion of traffic that was trying to reroute in my direction.

I jumped backward onto the curb. From here, I could see the parking lot of the plaza. People were clustered together by the First National Bank. I headed in that direction, vaguely aware that someone—probably that cop in the middle of the street—was once again shouting at me. A truck screeched to a stop as I hurried across the road toward the plaza, the shiny chrome of its bumper mere inches from me. The driver laid on his horn and shouted something while I was simultaneously startled by the sudden whirring of helicopter rotors directly overhead. The thing appeared out of nowhere and cut low as it circled around the plaza, over the street, the nearby trees, the baseball field and firehouse on the opposite side of the road, then back again.

People sat on metal benches outside the bank and stood like herded cattle at the farthest point of the parking lot. Most of them were on cell phones, including a teenage girl who sobbed uncontrollably as she held her iPhone to one ear. I passed through them like a ghost, gripping dark-haired women by their shoulders to turn them around so I could see if one of them was you, Allison. None were. I shoved my way through the mob until I could see a shimmer of broken glass collected on the sidewalk outside the boutique. There were cops and paramedics everywhere. I saw some news trucks and cameras out there, too. Overhead, the helicopter made another pass. I tried to advance up the sidewalk toward the boutique, but another police officer—a woman with striking green eyes and a no-bullshit expression—shoved me back with a hand on my sternum.

“I’m looking for my wife,” I said, and held up my cell phone as if it was some verification required for admission. “Her name’s Allison Decker.”

“Sir, you’ll have to stand over there with the others.”

“She’s wearing a red beret,” I said.

The cop’s stern expression did not change when she grabbed me around the forearm and led me back toward the crowd. My whole body felt weightless; this police officer could have lifted me over her head with one hand, had she wanted to.

“Listen to me,” she said, once we’d reached the outskirts of the parking lot. “See the fire station?”

I’d seen it a million times, of course, but I followed her gaze across the street to where the Harbor Volunteer Fire Department’s two-bay brick building stood among a corral of fir trees. Like a dummy, I nodded my head.

“Go there,” said the cop.

“But my wife—”

“You need to go there. It’s a rally point. Do you understand?”

I didn’t—it was as if she were speaking gibberish—but I felt myself nodding my head.

“What’s your name, sir?”

“Aaron,” I managed. “Aaron Decker. My wife is Allison. She’s wearing a red beret.” Because how many goddamn red berets were out here bobbing around in some suburban Maryland parking lot?

“Go across the street and wait, Mr. Decker.”

Still nodding like an imbecile, I backed away from her until my shoulders struck a van parked alongside the curb. I turned and saw a face in the van’s window—a young girl, maybe eight or nine, staring right at me. The fear in her eyes was unmistakable. I glanced around again at the crowd of people, their faces filled with equal parts terror, grief, shock, confusion. One woman was clutching a small boy to her hip, tears streaking down her face. A man in a puffy green jacket kept touching a small cut on his forehead then looking at his bloodied fingertips with incomprehension, ...