It Goes Where It Wants

Content Warning: Murder, ritual sacrifice, death of a teen, grief, and supernatural body horror.

Dana opened the wrong cabinet again.

She’d done it every morning for three weeks. Her hand just habitually went to the cabinet beside the fridge, the one with the cereal bowls, and she stood there staring at the stack of white bowls until she remembered.

The mug was where it belonged now. Second shelf of the cup cabinet to the left of the sink. Oversized and bright yellow with a cartoon cow on the side and UDDERLY EXHAUSTED in bubble letters. Caleb bought it at a gas station for Mother’s Day when he was eleven and handed it over like it was jewelry. To her it was better than jewelry.

For five years he put it away in the wrong place. Every time he unloaded the dishwasher, the cow went with the cereal bowls.

“It’s supposed to go with the mugs,” she’d tell him.

“It’s a cow, Mom. It goes where it wants.”

Now the mug was always where it belonged, and her hand kept going to the bowls anyway. She shut the cabinet and got the mug from the other shelf.

Caleb had been dead for twenty-three days. A man walking his dog found him in the clearing behind the old church camp off Route 9. One stab wound to the chest, straight into the heart. Detective Ruiz said he probably hadn’t suffered long. Dana nodded like that helped.

They said there had been candles around him. Black wax was melted into the dirt in puddles. Ruiz asked if Caleb had been involved in anything unusual.

Dana thought about the last four months. The new friends with older cars. How he’d started shutting his bedroom door on her. Him barking out “nowhere” whenever she asked where he’d been.

She told Ruiz she really didn’t know.

The police questioned the friends. Three boys, all eighteen or nineteen. They claimed they’d been playing video games at one boy’s house that night, and his mother swore to it. With no weapon and no witnesses, no arrests were made.

Dana knew those boys were lying. She just couldn’t prove it, and Ruiz had made it clear that knowing something and proving it were two different things.

So Dana tried her best to pretend she was okay. She made coffee in the cow mug every morning before work. But she never could go into Caleb’s room.

* * *

Things got weird in the second week.

Caleb’s bedroom door would be open a few inches when she got home. One spot in the hallway stayed cold even with the heat running. She’d wake up at two or three in the morning sure she’d heard footsteps in the kitchen, then lie there listening to the clock ticking.

She told her sister about the noises. Jen said grief did that. Jen said she should talk to someone. Jen said a lot of things. So Dana stopped telling her.

Then one night, while she was on the phone with her and rinsing a plate at the sink, she heard the latch for the back gate. She turned off the water and listened, and the latch made a noise again, softer this time, like someone was closing it carefully behind them.

“Did you hear that?”

“I’m on the phone, Dana. What do you think I can hear,” Jen said.

Dana turned on the porch light. The yard was empty. She stayed quiet long enough that Jen asked if she was still there.

“Yeah. Sorry. I think I heard a raccoon.”

That was the first night she seriously considered that the three boys might be coming around her house. They knew where Caleb lived. They’d picked him up plenty of times. If they’d killed him, maybe they were worried about what he’d told her before he died. Maybe they thought she knew something.

She called Ruiz the next morning. A patrol car came by that night and the night after, and nothing happened. On the third night, after the car stopped coming, something knocked on the kitchen window.

Three slow taps.

Dana was on the couch with the television on low. She fumbled around for the remote and muted it.

Three more.

She only went as far as the kitchen doorway. The window over the sink reflected the room around her, including her own pale face. She reached around the corner and turned off the kitchen light.

A hand was pressed against the glass.

It was too big, and very wrong. Fingers grew out of other fingers. A thumb jutted sideways from the palm, and another one beneath it. Some fingers were long and gray. Some were small, like a child’s. One wore a wedding ring. One was bitten down to the quick. 

Dana couldn’t move. She was too scared to even breathe.

The fingers moved. One curled, then another, while two near the bottom stayed perfectly still. The whole thing shifted against the glass, leaving a cloudy smear. Then it slid down and disappeared.

Dana didn’t scream. She walked over and pulled the biggest knife from the block and sat on the floor with her back against the cabinets until daylight.

* * *

She didn’t tell Jen or Ruiz about the hand. What would she even say?

In the morning she went outside to check the window. There was a greasy mark on the glass about the size of her face. She photographed it, and for the next hour she kept opening the picture, zooming in, looking for proof of what she’d seen. Pretended that TV detectives had actually taught her something. Eventually she deleted it. A smear on a window wasn’t going to convince anybody she’d seen fingers growing out of other fingers.

That night she tried to convince herself it had been a glove. Some kind of Halloween prop. Maybe one of those boys had decided scaring a grieving woman was funny. It wasn’t a very good explanation, but it was better than the alternative.

By the next evening she was checking the locks every time she passed a door. She slept with the television on and the knife on the nightstand.

Four nights later she saw the rest of it.

She was dragging the trash can to the curb. Something else Caleb used to do. It was after ten, and the street was quiet enough that she could hear the neighbor’s TV.

Something stood in the streetlight by the Hendersons’ fence.

For a moment she thought it was a man. It was shaped like one, kind of. It had shoulders that didn’t match. Its arms hung at different lengths, and its head sat at an angle that reminded her of a curious puppy. Odd thought.

Then she saw its face.

It wouldn’t hold still. An old man’s jaw appeared beneath a woman’s eyes. A mouth slid sideways and vanished behind another mouth. The features never finished forming before something else pushed through them.

Its chest bulged. Something pressed outward from inside, stretching the surface until she could just make out the shape of a hand. Then it sank back in.

Dana gripped the trash can handle hard enough that the plastic seam bit into her fingers.

The thing turned and darted around the corner of the fence.

She should have gone inside. Every sensible part of her was telling her to get in the house, lock the door, and call the police. But she was tired of being afraid, and she kept thinking about Caleb. If that thing had anything to do with his death, she wanted to know.

She left the trash can at the curb and followed.

The houses backed up to a small park and part of the gravel walking path ran not far behind them. She held up her phone flashlight and swept it from side to side. The creature was gone.

A man lay in the gravel about twenty feet ahead.

He was maybe forty-five, dressed in running clothes, and one earbud was still in. His eyes were open.

“Sir?” She moved closer. “Sir, can you hear me?”

She knelt beside him and pressed two fingers to his neck. His skin was warm. She moved her fingers and pressed harder.

Nothing.

There was no blood or injury she could see. He looked like someone had just… switched him off.

She called 911 and started CPR. By the time the paramedics got there her arms were shaking. They took over, and she stood back against a fence while they worked.

A cop took her statement in the back of his car with the door open. She told him she’d been taking out the trash, noticed something moving around the back, and gone to look.

“What kind of something?”

“I don’t know. It was dark.”

He wrote that down. “Probably his heart. Guys his age think running makes them bulletproof.”

Dana looked past him at the path. She thought about the creature’s chest, the hand pushing against it from inside. Then she thought about the man lying there without a mark on him.

She didn’t sleep that night either.

* * *

On Sunday morning, Dana opened the cup cabinet and found an empty space.

She stood with her hand on the door and frowned. She’d washed the mug last night. She remembered drying it and putting it away. Second shelf, left of the sink. She checked the dishwasher and the sink. Nothing.

Then she opened the cabinet beside the fridge.

The cow mug sat right in front of the cereal bowls.

For half a second she forgot everything. Oh, he put it in the wrong place again. She even smiled.

Then she remembered.

Dana gripped the edge of the counter and stared at the mug, trying to remember whether she’d moved it herself. She hadn’t. She was sure she hadn’t.

Lack of sleep, she told herself.

She reached for the mug, and something outside the kitchen window caught her eye.

The creature stood near the back fence, watching the house. Its face cycled through strangers. It briefly reminded her of Caleb making an avatar for one of those games he played.

Then it caught on something familiar.

A narrow chin. Dark hair with a stubborn cowlick at the front, the one she used to flatten with her palm before school pictures. And his eyes. Caleb had his father’s eyes. She’d spent sixteen years looking into them.

Dana pressed a hand to her mouth.

The face changed again and the creature turned toward the gate.

“No, wait!”

She shoved the back door open and stumbled onto the porch. “Caleb!”

The gate clanked shut. The yard was empty again.

Dana stood barefoot on the cold boards, staring at the place where it had been. It couldn’t be him.

And yet. The mug. The eyes. Three knocks on the window.

Caleb used to do that when he forgot his key. Three knocks, then he’d stand outside making ridiculous faces until she let him in. She hadn’t thought about that in months.

She went back inside, took the cow mug from the cabinet, and sat at the kitchen table with it between her hands. For the first time since they’d found him, she opened the photos on her phone.

Caleb as an infant, his tiny hand wrapped around her finger. Then a little boy, grinning through the gap where his front teeth should have been. At twelve, scowling because she’d made him wear a tie. At fifteen, holding up a fish he’d caught and looking way too pleased with himself. She stopped on a picture from his last birthday. That grin. Those eyes.

She stayed at the table for a long time, taking comfort from cold porcelain.

* * *

That night she sat on the back steps with a blanket around her shoulders and the cow mug full of coffee she didn’t drink.

She’d thought about calling Jen. She’d even pulled up her number once before putting the phone down. What would she say? I think Caleb’s come home, but I don’t know what he is anymore.

She thought about the candles in the clearing. Those boys who’d lied to the police. The thing under the streetlight and the man on the path.

Then she thought about the hand on her window, and the fingernail bitten down to the quick. Caleb had chewed his nails since second grade. She’d tried everything to get him to stop. That finger could have belonged to anyone. She knew that. It didn’t stop her from watching the gate.

A little after midnight, the latch moved.

The creature came through and stopped just inside the yard at the edge of the porch light.

Up close, it was so much worse. Hands kept pushing out through its body, every size, some with fingers spread wide, others curled into fists. Something moved under its shoulder, dragging the surface out of shape before it sank away. And there was a sound coming from it. Voices, like a crowd talking in another room, too many at once to make out a single word.

Dana stood up. Her legs were shaking.

“Hey, baby,” she said.

The faces shifted. Then Caleb’s eyes appeared.

She took one step off the porch. The creature backed away.

“It’s okay.” She swallowed. “It’s me.”

Another step. It retreated again, almost to the gate.

She stopped.

The man on the gravel path came back to her. His open eyes and warm skin. But no heartbeat.

One of the hands pushed out of the creature’s chest toward her, reaching. Something pulled it back inside.

“Caleb?”

She could see more of him now. His nose. His mouth. The little crease beside his left eye when he was trying not to smile. She’d seen that look a thousand times.

“Please,” she said. “You put my cup in the wrong place again. You know how much that pisses me off.”

Something happened to his face that might have been a smile.

Her eyes filled. She stepped toward him, and he moved back so fast his shoulder hit the gate.

“Baby, I’m not going to hurt you.”

He stared at her. Then he turned to leave.

Dana couldn’t stand it anymore. She’d watched them lower his coffin into the ground. She’d spent a month waking up in a house where every room reminded her he was gone. And now he was leaving again.

“No. Caleb, wait.”

She ran across the grass and caught his arm with both hands.

It was so cold it burned.

She tried to let go. Her hands wouldn’t open. She pulled harder, but her fingers were already sinking into him, and the cold spread past her wrists and up her arms. She twisted around, looking for the gatepost, the fence, anything she could grab.

And saw herself lying in the grass.

Her body was on its side, one arm stretched toward the gate. Her eyes were open.

Just like the man on the walking path.

Please, no.

She looked up into familiar eyes. Then she was pulled the rest of the way in.

It was dark and crowded and loud with what used to be people. They pressed against her from every direction, and she couldn’t tell where one ended and the next began. She tried to move, but she had nothing to move with. Pieces of her were coming loose, and she couldn’t hold them together.

She tried to think of Caleb. For a moment she couldn’t remember his face.

Then, somewhere in all that chaos, she felt something familiar. She couldn’t see him but she didn’t need to. She’d know him anywhere, the same way she’d known him in the dark when he was small and climbed into her bed after a nightmare.

“I’m sorry,” he said. His voice carried over the others.

She wanted to tell him it was okay.

She came apart before she could.

* * *

Those boys in the clearing had wanted a demon.

They’d gotten him.

He remembered them holding him down and the knife piercing his skin. Then, waking up in the clearing, hungry, and the first stranger who’d stopped to help him. What happened when he touched her.

After that he stayed away from people unless he needed to feed. He tried to stay away from his mother too. But he wanted to see her. Make sure she was eating. 

He’d put her cup in the wrong cabinet because he thought she’d understand. 

He should have stopped coming back after she saw him at the fence.

Now, her body lay in the grass beside the gate. He stood over it a long time, watching her face, and wishing he’d gotten away quicker. She was in him now, somewhere among all the others. He reached for her, searching through the crowd of fractured souls he carried, but there was nothing he could recognize.

He would carry her forever and never feel her once.

Her cup sat on the back step, going cold.

There was no one left to put it away for.