Enthralled: Paranormal Diversions

She’s learned that lesson well.

“I’m going to check on the laurel walls.” Margie shoves a water bottle into a ragged backpack with extra shells and a plastic yellow flashlight. “It might take me a while. You going to be okay without me here?”

Sally lies on her back on the leather couch, an old paperback romance held above her head.

“I’m not a baby anymore, you know.” She says it slow and even. “I can tell there’s something going on. You’re not as good at hiding it from me as you think.”

Margie looks at the baby fat still visible under the smooth planes of her sister’s face. “It’s nothing,” she says.

Sally rolls her eyes. “Whatever.”

Margie isn’t lying about checking the perimeter, but that only takes an hour and then she finds a thick copse of weeds where she has a clear view of the cabin. Bugs swirl around her, creeping along her neck and tangling in her lashes, but she sits calm and still through dusk and into the late evening.

Through the window she watches her sister fix something to eat and flip through the atlas listlessly before selecting another novel and carrying it up to the loft. The lantern burns inside, beckoning to Margie, but she keeps to the weeds, waiting while stars begin to catch fire overhead.

He comes a few hours after nightfall, just as the moon burns a bright halo on the horizon. He creeps up the steps and eases into the swing, gripping the rusted chain to keep it from creaking. The ax he’d been carrying lies forgotten against the railing as if he’s not afraid of anyone or anything out here.

None of her traps signaled his approach, and Margie wonders just how many times he’s circumvented their defenses. She watches him a moment; it’s been so long since she’s seen a living human being other than her sister that she’s fascinated, even if this guy’s some sort of creeper who’s been in their cabin and touched their things. He hunches over himself so that most of him’s hidden in shadows, and she can’t get a good look at him except to tell that his hair’s tattered and his clothes ragged along the edges.

He jumps up as she steps from the weeds, but he doesn’t move for his ax. His body’s pole-bean thin, but even so she notices coiled muscles twined around his bare arms and knows he’s strong. She figures he’s her age or a little older.

“Just in case you can’t see out here,” she says, even and strong, “I’ve got a shotgun aimed at your gut. I wouldn’t reach for that ax.” Margie walks into the clearing, toes hitting the ground before she rocks onto her heels. She listens for movement just in case the boy isn’t alone, but she hears nothing but the night bugs screaming.

The boy raises his hands. “I’m not planning on doing anything stupid,” he says.

Margie swallows. She feels off balance inside, not really knowing what to do next. “Who are you and what do you want?”

“My name’s Calvin. I’m here because . . .” He looks down at his feet. He wears old yellow boots with knots in the laces holding them together. He shrugs. “I saw the light and I just . . .” He twists his face like it hurts him to say it. Then he looks up like he can see her in the darkness.

“I was lonely, okay?” He sounds defensive, his shoulders hitched forward.

The words cut into Margie—she doesn’t know what to do with them. “Where’d you come from?” she finally asks.

He shrugs. “Around. Here and there.”

Margie watches him, the slow rise and fall of his chest. He doesn’t seem as scared as he should with a gun pointed at him. “You know I don’t trust you, right? And I’m not going to trust you?”

He nods.

“Kick your ax off the porch,” she tells him. “And if you’ve got any other weapons, toss them too.”

Calvin reaches out with his toe and nudges the ax until it slips under the railing into the overgrown bushes. From his pockets he pulls two knives and a bag of bullets but no gun— they’ve become too scarce in the past years.

Margie keeps the shotgun on him as she climbs the steps. For a while they stare at each other, her trying to put the piece of his existence into the puzzle of her life up here.

“What’s it like back down the mountain?” Margie finally asks.

Calvin doesn’t hesitate. “Horrible.” He slumps into the swing. “There aren’t a lot of safe places left, and finding food’s impossible.” He stares at his hands, his elbows propped on his knees. There’s dirt under his nails and filling the cracks of his skin.

They sit like that for a bit, nothing of the world between them that’s the same except for the monsters. Margie thinks about what it was like before the big change, when you could talk about things like movies or television or some funny joke from the internet. She grapples for some sort of bridge she could pull between them so that the gap across the porch wouldn’t seem so big and wide.

“I can’t let you leave,” she finally says. “You know that, right? I don’t want you sneaking around out here and, even if you left, I can’t have you mention to someone out there that we’ve found a safe place.”

He nods his head. “I was hoping maybe if I promised not to tell anyone . . .” He looks at her and sees that she’s not the kind to offer false hopes to strangers. His face falls. “I understand.”

“I can tie you up on the porch or inside—I’ll give you that option.”

He looks through the window at the lantern spilling over the atlas and guidebooks. “Why West Virginia?” he finally asks.

Margie rubs her fingers along the stock of the shotgun, tracing the edge of the trigger. She still has the safety on, but he doesn’t know that. “My sister gets to choose where we go and she remembered some show about West Virginia.”

“It’s a nice place,” he says. “Prettier than you’d think.”

“You’ve been?”

“Yeah. Before. My family used to go camping up on the Cacapon in the spring.” He no longer looks at his hands but at her. She’s tucked into the darkness, but still there’s something about the way he sees her that makes her feel a sort of intimacy.

“I’ll get the rope,” she says, because she doesn’t want to talk about families or vacations or the time before.

“There’s a guy tied to the porch swing,” Sally says when Margie comes down from the loft in the morning. Margie watches as Calvin slowly rocks outside, his wrists still lashed to the chains.

“You know you’re terrible at knots, right?” Sally says, flipping through one of the guidebooks spread around her. “He could have gotten out easy if he’d wanted.”

She traces an interstate across the mountains on the map, cross-referencing a set of directions in her notebook. “Don’t know why he wouldn’t just escape if he had the chance,” she mumbles without looking up at her older sister.

Margie stares at Calvin. “Me neither.”

Margie pats him down to make sure there aren’t any more weapons tucked in his clothes, and then all three of them go to pick berries. Sally pesters Calvin about where he’s been and what the mountains out West are like compared to those in the East. Calvin’s patient and kind and always aware of the fact that Margie has a gun and is willing to blow some part of his body off at the slightest provocation.

Days pass one after the other: gardening and taking care of the cabin in the day, Calvin tied up at night, time rolling after time as the great clock unwinds.

“She knows the trip is a lie,” Calvin finally says one night as Margie wraps rope around his arm and the swing.

She hesitates.

“She knows more than you think. About the world. About what your chances of survival are.” He pauses. Her face isn’t far from his, and she smells the berry sweetness of his breath.

“Our chances of survival,” he says softly.

Margie lets the rope trail from her fingers and stumbles to the other end of the porch until the railing bites her hips.

“What do I have to do to prove my loyalty to you, Marg?” Calvin asks. “How many nights do I have to sit out here tied up when we both know your knots are crap and I could escape anytime? What will it take for you to trust me?”

Margie slumps, sliding down until she sits on the edge of the porch. Fireflies flash in the gardens, bright reminders that for some creatures the world hasn’t changed.

“I’m the one who had to kill my mother,” Margie confesses. Her chin trembles, her whole body shaking. A breeze trips up the mountain, cool and crisp like fall. “After the change we got out of the city and we found a place and for a while it was safe, but then we were ambushed. My father yelled but no one could hear. They took my mother, and my father resisted, and I didn’t know what to do but grab Sally and run into the woods. I watched what they did to my mother, and when my father tried to fight, they killed him and tossed his body aside. I could smell the death and hear the moans and then they just left my mother on the ground while they ransacked inside. I told Sally to stay and I found my mother and there were bite marks all over her and she said nothing when I held the gun against her.”

She inhales as if she’s never known air before. “We had somewhere safe, and they took it.”