Avery saw the small door on the back wall of the chicken house. It hadn’t been there yesterday evening when she’d gathered eggs. Or at least she hadn’t noticed it then. It was so dark underneath the roosting bars that she might have overlooked it. But she didn’t think so.
Had her daddy made the opening between the coop and adjoining shed where the feed corn was kept when she was at school?
“When did you put the door in the chicken house, Daddy?” she asked him at supper that night.
“What door?” he said around a mouthful of cornbread.
“The one in back under the roosting bars.”
He washed down the cornbread with a big drink of buttermilk and turned his full attention on Avery. She squirmed under the gaze of his narrowed blue eyes. They always seemed to see right through her and not like what they saw: a girl, not the son he had wanted. His only child, and there’d be no more since her birth had messed up Mama’s insides so bad she couldn’t have any more kids.
“You’re seeing things, girl, there ain’t no door. Why in hell would I put a door there anyway?”
Avery looked at her plate, stirred the beans and potatoes together. “I don’t know…”
“Are you telling a story, Avery?” Mama asked from the other end of the table.
“Leo is autistic, Harold,” Mother said, blowing on her morning coffee, then taking a tiny sip. “If he says he saw or heard something, then he did. He doesn’t understand the concept of making things up. You know that.”
“I’m not saying he’s fabricating stories, dear,” Father said, his gaze upon his iPhone, scrolling through emails as he did every morning over breakfast. “Perhaps the boy’s just having vivid dreams.”
Leo listened outside the kitchen nook, his back against the wall to one side of the arched doorway. He eavesdropped a lot; it was the only way to know the truth of things. Mother and Father often lied to him. But not to each other.
“Well, they’re just awful dreams, then,” Mother said. “Monsters killing us in our sleep, of all things.”
“You know,” Father said. “There could be another explanation.”
“Such as?”
“If he knows we’re sending him to Briar Hill….” No surprise there since Leo already knew; his friends had told him.
“Yes, yes!” Mother prodded.
“Perhaps it’s a threat of some sort. He’s getting awfully big, you know. More than you could handle if push comes to shove.” Father cleared his throat. “Remember your broken wrist?”
“He didn’t do it on purpose. It was an accident.”
Leo remembered grabbing Mother’s wrist sometime in the past when she had snatched away his cellphone after seeing him looking at videos of naked men and women doing strange things with each other. She shouldn’t have done that; he liked the way the videos made him feel. But the moment she cried out, he’d let her go. He would never hurt Mother or Father, even though he knew they were sending him away. It was his friends who wanted to hurt them.
His new friends started talking to him after he had hurt Mother’s wrist. At first, it was just whispers and laughter under his bed, but when he began to talk to them, they crawled out of the darkness and up onto his bed. There were three—dark, oily, slimy things with red eyes set above big mouths with lots of yellow, pointy teeth. They didn’t have arms or legs, but were able to move around just the same. Leo was big for his age, which was twelve, bigger than Father; but the monsters were even bigger. The mattress sagged almost to the floor when they all sat on it.
And they became his friends, the only ones he’d ever had.
At first, they just played games with him, mostly Scrabble, and he always beat them because he was skilled at playing games. But after they’d told him a few nights ago that Mother and Father were going to send him to a place called Briar Hill, they stopped playing and started talking, urging Leo to kill his parents while they slept so they couldn’t send him away. “We’re your friends,” they’d said. “Your absolute best friends. If they send you to the loony bin, you won’t see us anymore.”
“You can come with me,” Leo had said.
“No, we can’t.” Three sets of red eyes had locked on him. “We live under your bed. We can’t leave.”
Still, Leo had refused to hurt his parents. “I can’t do that.”
His friends had cackled in unison. “We’ll do it for you, then.”
So, he had warned Mother, who had told Father. And now he knew they didn’t believe him.
“What are we going to do, Harold?” Mother asked.
“Tomorrow, the people from Briar Hill will be here to pick up Leo,” Father said. ‘I have an idea on what we can do tonight.” Leo heard the scrape of chair legs followed by Father’s footsteps and knew he was leaving for work. “Not that I believe we have anything to worry about, but it will put your mind at ease.”
#
Leo found out that night what Father’s “idea” was. After Mother tucked him in bed, Father came in and using handcuffs like Leo had seen policemen do on TV, snapped one cuff over Leo’s wrist and the other to the bedframe. “I don’t like doing this, Son,” Father said, dropping a small, shiny key into the pocket of his robe. “But your mother—she’s worried….”
Leo glanced at the doorway. Mother stood wringing her hands and crying. “It’s okay, Mother,” he said. “I know you’re scared of me, but it’s not me you should fear. It’s my friends that are going to hurt you.”
Father sighed, then dropped a kiss on Leo’s forehead. “Goodnight, Son. We love you.”
Leo nodded. “I know. And I love you too.”
#
His friends came out after the house had been dark and quiet for a long time. Leo started yelling for his parents as soon as he saw the black, red-eyed shapes headed for his bedroom door. “Mother, Father, run! They’re coming for you!”
Soon, his parents were screaming even louder than Leo.
After a time, when Leo had screamed until nothing came from his throat but a raspy whisper, his three friends oozed inside beneath the closed door, their oily shapes glistening in the pale moonlight that spilled through the sheer curtain covering the lone window. One separated from the other two and waving a tentacle-like appendage, used the little key, now dark and wet with blood, to unlock the cuffs. And without a word to Leo, squiggled underneath the bed, trailing sniggers and laughter behind.
#
Six months later, a new family moved into the old, three-story Victorian on Sycamore Street. Ten-year-old Audrey was allowed to select which bedroom would be hers and chose the one on the top floor of the east side of the house, which the real estate agent said had a spectacular view of the moon when it rose.
Five nights later, her three friends paid their first visit.
