Last time on Sacred Geometry: Part 4 | Part 5
“So what’s the plan?” asked Ben as he joined Scarlett in at the window.
“Plan?” Scarlett stared at him.
“You don’t have a plan?”
“Stay the fuck away from any cows. Scare the kids off. That’s about all I got.”
Ben frowned. “Do you think they’re dangerous? I could grab the shotgun.”
Scarlett winced. If there was one thing she liked less than cows, it was guns.
Peter stood outside the dingy, two-story colonial that was covered in mildewed siding and topped by a rotting roof and wondered what the hell he’d agreed to. The house had been Abby’s idea from the beginning; an hour’s drive from the city, nestled on ten wooded acres, it was a handyman’s special. “Remember, I grew up in the country,” she had said when they sat in their downtown loft and discussed the idea.
“What do we have here?” Scarlett wondered as she opened the package she’d found waiting on her front porch when she got home. She often received packages from the fans of her blog, Things That Go Bump in the Night, but she never knew quite what to expect. Sometimes they were interesting, sometimes creepy, occasionally disgusting – but they were never dull.
She cut the packing tape, folded back the top, and brushed away a handful of packing peanuts.
“The one thing that I never thought I’d find in church…” Scarlett paused, frowned, and deleted the text. She’d been trying to figure out how to start the newest post for her blog, Things That Go Bump in the Night, for the better part of an hour. Each time she thought she had the first sentence, she ended up deleting it.
“So sleepy,” her brain muttered to her. “Let’s go to bed.
“For a building built by an eccentric architect who supposedly belonged to a modern Pythagorean mystery cult, this hotel looks disappointingly normal,” thought Scarlett. She yawned, set down her bag, and pressed the elevator button.
The drive down from Cleveland had taken three hours, thanks to a wreck on the highway, and she was already tired from staying up the night before doing research. She’d heard about Hotel Tetra from one of the readers of her blog, Things That Go Bump in the Night.
Jim stomped on the brakes, but the car kept moving. He jerked the wheel to the right, just as Cheryl screamed, and the car flew off the side of the rain-slicked road, crashing through the guard rail with a deafening screech of metal on metal before careening down the embankment.
The descent simultaneously took forever and an instant. They crashed through brush, bushes, branches; over rocks and dirt and gravel before slamming into the bottom of the ravine.
“Oh, no,” Maggie thought as she watched the wasp crawl out of her ear, “Not again.” She’d been in the middle of brushing her teeth when she caught the movement out of the corner of her eye, and she stopped and stared at her reflection in the mirror as the creature emerged.
“No, no, no,” she thought as the wasp unfurled its wings. She didn’t want to startle it, so she held very still – her toothbrush in one hand and toothpaste in the other.
Robert nearly flipped over the handlebars of his bike when he saw the sign. Nestled between a poorly pruned shrub and a table full of household junk for sale, the cardboard, hand-lettered sign read, “Free Rent.”
As a bike messenger who liked to spend most of his money getting high, a rent-free apartment was akin to manna from heaven.
“I don’t know, it sounds fishy,” Jessica said with a toss of her auburn hair.
Running into the woman that paid to have you killed for your life insurance is enough to startle anyone. She strolled by, as the setting summer sun warmed the nape of my neck, wearing the cornflower dress that I bought her last summer and the black pumps that were two sizes too big – the ones that her heels popped out of with each step. I caught her distinctive gait out of the corner of my eye while I sopped up a plate of olive oil and sea salt with the remnants of a warm baguette.
John couldn’t think of a single good reason for a severed head to be in his bathtub. Not one. There was no blood to speak of – just a cleanly severed head lying in the center of the tub, staring up at the ceiling.
He struggled with how to react. He thought about vomiting, but the lack of blood failed to create a visceral impact – and he’d never been particularly squeamish to begin with.
