Vern’s eyes flicked open, not of their own accord. Her face twisted into a wide smile, skin stretching like a sheet of latex until the muscles were sore, a foreign body inside her pressing them up and up, her cheeks bulging uncomfortably.
“She’s here?” the stranger asked from the living room.
Vern nodded the same as she would have if the question had been posed to her, her body possessed.
“What a cozy home you’ve inserted yourself into, Vern,” the intruder shouted in that lazy Southern drawl. Vern recognized the cadence of it immediately. Ollie, back from the dead, had come for her.
Vern tried to remain still, but the creature was inside Vern’s mind, and she was inside its, seeing what it was seeing. Disorientation threatened the grip she had on the bed frame.
“Have I surprised you?” asked Ollie, her tone genuine rather than taunting as she asked the question, apologetic to be catching Vern unawares. “I supposed I’d be, too, if I were the one who’d left me for dead, barely a pulse or a breath, neck broken, back broken. You couldn’t have known at the time that I’m never alone, Vern. You were never my one and only. Queen here predates you, and if you don’t listen to me very carefully, she will outlast you.”
Vern’s chest tightened painfully with understanding. The night of Vern and Ollie’s fateful clash, Vern had told the growling animal circling nearby to finish the fiend off, but it had done the opposite and revived her. Ollie’s pet.
Vern recalled her children’s birthnight and her first confrontation with the fiend. Ollie had stood over Vern, threatening, speaking those words that forever changed Vern’s life. The wolves always flush out the runaways. Robed in shadow, a creature had skulked out of sight, distracting the fiend long enough for Vern to stab her.
That had been this pet, too. What had Ollie called her? Queen. The name felt familiar, but Vern couldn’t place it.
Hindsight sharpened Vern’s memory. It hadn’t been Ollie who’d put the wolf haunting into Vern’s head. It had been this creature.
She was the great antlered creature from Vern’s vision. She was the beast Vern was becoming.
Queen had told Vern she was coming, and here she was, true to her word.
“I don’t blame you for what you did to me,” called Ollie. “I wasn’t forthright with you, and you had no reason to trust me. Women like us, hard women, don’t take kindly to betrayal, but believe me when I tell you that the only way forward is with me. Queen and I have come here alone. We are the only ones who know your location. I did that for you, Vern, because I want to give you the chance to make the smart decision. Come out,” said Ollie.
Vern remained in her hiding spot.
“Come on, Vern. Don’t do this. Not again. You must be tired of running. Tired of hiding. Come with me.”
Vern could clock a manipulation when she saw one. Ollie presented two choices. Run forever or surrender. But this world was one full of infinite possibility, and even if it wasn’t, there was a third option that was such low-hanging fruit, to pretend it didn’t exist revealed Ollie’s hand. To fight.
Ollie wanted her to forget that Vern had almost killed her. Vern wasn’t going to forget.
“Fine, we’ll do this the hard way, then,” said Ollie, and Vern shivered at the threat.
Feet scraped along the wood floor as Queen snarled and croaked. Vern’s nose twitched, and her eyes fluttered open. Smoke. The fume of it overwhelmed the cabin.
“You smell that, Vern? I can’t, of course, but I suspect you do by now; smoke pulled from a memory from God knows who and God knows when. But it’s yours now. Queen’s gift to you.”
Vern tried to meditate away the pungent gas of fire. Silently, she chanted, It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real.
But it was real. Her body’s cells didn’t distinguish between the physical world and that of the hauntings, her neurons firing identically at the sensory input.
“I admire your endurance,” said Ollie, “but Queen’s got fifty years on you. She won’t lose to a neophyte. She can’t lose to anyone. You thought you were singular, Vern? Extraordinary? It is she who is the singular one.”
Fifty years. Think, Vern, think, mouthed Vern, hastening her mind to remember the name. Who was Queen?
Who was this woman Ollie dragged hither and yonder like a pet? She had to be a Cainite, didn’t she? Those were the only ones with the fungus. No one that Vern would remember, someone older. Much older. Someone with fifty years on Vern.