Molly knew teenagers were difficult. She had raised three; Melissa, Sami, and Turk. All three of them were gone now, college or beyond. Travis had been a surprise, though, so he was far younger than the rest. In the beginning, it had been easier. Her other children were old enough to help raise him. A true blessing, especially with Tom away on business so much.
Maybe she’d been too reliant on them, though. The others had certainly been trouble in their teenage years. Nothing like Travis, though, and when his siblings left, he acted out and no form of discipline seemed to work. She spent a lot of time looking at photographs of her older children, sometimes talking to them on the phone, sometimes about Travis, sometimes even when she knew he was listening. Tom just said it was a phase he’d grow out of. He’d been right with the others, but now she wasn’t so sure.
Molly just didn’t know what to say to her youngest. He might have dressed like his peers, but there was a darkness around his eyes that Molly would swear was eyeliner, but she could never wipe it off, no matter how hard she tried. Travis would stand, hard as a statue, and let her wipe his face, saying nothing, but radiating fury. When she asked him why he was so angry, he would stare at her and say, “Look at what you’ve done.” Molly would ask what he meant, but he would say nothing, just stand there, burning with the intensity of a forest fire.
It made her feel awful, but every time she heard about another school shooting, she’d grab her phone to check the news. It was never Travis, which only made her feel worse, guilty, like she was failing him.
Not that she could tell. Travis spent most of his time in his room. In his younger days, each poster on the walls of his room was a chapter of his life, like a chart for his personal anthropology. Lego movies, Star Wars, K-Pop stars. Then that changed, and it became photos of Bigfoot, flying saucers, ancient warlocks whipping up the sea. Eventually these were papered over with images of monsters that bubbled eyes, things that could have been UFOs, but weren’t, and esoteric symbols that Molly couldn’t even guess at. Eventually, she talked about it with Tom, in private. They decided they’d have a word with Travis about the strange decorations when her husband got back from his next trip.
She lived in dread of her husband’s return until she picked him up from the airport. His relief to be home immediately changed to anger when they saw what Travis had done. Every bottle in the liquor cabinet was broken, every coat had been pulled out of the closet, cabinets ripped open, floorboards pulled up. The cellar door had been pulled off its hinges.
Tom stormed to Travis’s room yelling, but when he stomped through the threshold, he went quiet as a church at midnight. Molly summoned all her courage to follow him.
The bed had been flipped into a corner, the carpet ripped up. On the bare wood underneath, drawn in charcoal, was a symbol that might have been a pentagram, but was too intricate, so much so that it seemed to move when she left her gaze on it too long.
All of this fell away, though, when Molly saw the cellar door pushed up against the wall. It had been painted black, oozed the color even, until Molly saw it wasn’t a door anymore. It stood there like a hole in the wall, an opening to a headless maw.
She never saw Travis again.
See the author’s published work here.
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