The Legend of Bush Man — Chapters 6 and 7: The Wrong Voice

Chapter 6: The Wrong Voice

The voice in the driveway said, "Chloe? Honey, come inside. Lunch is getting cold."

Chloe's mother was standing two feet in front of them, blinking at Marcus with the polite confusion of a woman whose morning had just taken a sharp left off a cliff.

Her car sat empty at the curb. Driver's door open. Engine dead.

Nobody in the driveway. The voice had come from inside the car.

"Mom," Chloe said, very carefully, the way you talk to a dog you think might bite. "Mom, don't turn around."

Her mother turned around.

It was, Marcus would think later, the most human moment of the whole day — of course she turned around. Someone had just called her daughter's name in her own voice, and what mother on earth would not turn toward that?

What saved her was the lawn.

The thorn-mass stood where the azaleas had been that morning — eight feet of black thorns, pale eyes open in the foliage like wounds, leaves trembling in the dead-still air — waiting, with infinite patience, to be seen.

And Chloe's mother, turning toward the driveway, put the lawn directly in her eyeline.

Marcus moved without deciding to. He hit her shoulder-first, like a linebacker with no linebacker training whatsoever, spinning her bodily to face the street, and shouted the only instruction he had left:

"Don't look at the lawn! Do. Not. Look. At. The. Lawn."

She stumbled, caught herself against the mailbox, and stared at him. "Marcus —"

"Gas leak," Chloe said again, louder, latching onto the only lie that had ever worked. "Mom, we told you, gas leak, we have to get to the Hendersons', come on —"

The voice came again, from the car's dead dashboard, warm and ordinary and exactly like home:

"Chloe? Honey? Come inside."

And then, underneath it — threading through it like a second instrument tuning up — came the sound from Chloe's phone, still clutched in her hand, the 911 call still connected, the timer blinking 06:03:

Crunch... swoosh... crunch...

The footsteps had stopped keeping time with anything. They had started keeping time with her.

"Give me your phone," Marcus said quietly.

"No —"

"Chloe. It's not 911 anymore."

She looked at the screen. No operator had ever answered. No ringing had ever happened. The call had been open for six minutes and three seconds, and in all that time the only thing on the other end had been breathing, footsteps, and now — practicing, patient, the way a child learns a song by singing it wrong until it sings it right — her mother's voice.

Chloe? Honey. Chloe? Honey, come inside. Lunch is getting cold.

It was learning her. It was rehearsing her.

From the Desk of AOP3D: The Mimic

Posted by AOP3D — archived thread, "The Bush Man Files," page 41 of 200.

It does not need your tongue to use your voice. It needs an open channel — a voicemail, a call that never connects, a Bluetooth pairing you forgot you left on. (Sound familiar, Toby?)

It learns the way a parrot learns: by repetition, without comprehension, forever. The first time it says your name it will sound wrong, like a recording played backward through water. The tenth time, your own mother won't know the difference.

When it can call you home in the voice of someone you love, it has finished studying you.

Do not answer. Do not correct its pronunciation. Every word you say back is another lesson, and it is a diligent student.

— AOP3D

The admin's note at the bottom, in smaller type: Toby's voicemail is still on page 1 of this thread. I keep it there so nobody forgets what the tuition costs.

Chapter 6, continued

Marcus understood three things at once, the way you understand everything at once when your house is trying to eat your street.

One: the Bluetooth. Mom's phone had been paired to the car since the dealership. The engine was off, but the system woke for incoming audio — and the thing that had been riding Chloe's 911 call had simply... changed lanes. It was in the phone. It was in the car. It was in anything with a speaker and a signal, the way smoke is in anything with air.

Two: the bait was already working. Chloe's mother had come home for lunch, right on schedule, exactly the way the forum said she would — called by nothing, lured by routine, delivered by love. They had kept her from looking at the lawn. This time.

Three: the car's shadow was falling toward its own headlights.

Marcus stared at that for a long moment, his brain filing a formal complaint and leaving the building. Headlights off. Engine dead. And the long black shape of the sedan stretched toward the front bumper, the way shadows stretch toward a light source — as if something enormous were standing between them and the sun, leaning over the car, leaning over all of them, patient as weather.

Something was standing over the car.

They just couldn't see it yet.

"Walk," Marcus said, very quietly, not taking his eyes off the empty air above the sedan. "Don't run. It doesn't chase. Walking is — walking is fine. Walk to the Hendersons'."

Chloe took her mother's hand. Her mother let her, which told Marcus everything about how scared the woman was pretending not to be.

They walked.

Chapter 7: The Girl in the Window

The Hendersons lived two doors down, in the blue house with the porch swing that creaked in a friendly way — the way porch swings are supposed to creak, the way nothing in Chloe's house would ever creak again.

Halfway there, Chloe's mother tried to be the adult. "Kids," she said, in the voice of a woman assembling normalcy out of spare parts, "when we get to the Hendersons' I'm calling the gas company, and then I'm calling —"

"Don't use your phone," Marcus and Chloe said together.

"My phone is fine —"

"Mom." Chloe stopped walking. "It's in the phone."

Her mother looked at the phone in her own hand — the one that had buzzed with a text at the curb, the one still paired to a car that was speaking in her voice — and slowly, carefully, the way you set down something that might be a spider, she powered it off.

"Okay," she said faintly. "Okay. Landline. The Hendersons have a landline."

They reached the blue house. The porch light was on. The swing hung motionless in the still air.

Her mother knocked. Nothing. Knocked again, harder. The sound fell flat against the door, the way sounds had been falling flat all morning, as if the street were holding its breath.

And Marcus — because Marcus was the one who read the forum, Marcus was the one who pieced the rules together, Marcus was apparently the one whose job it was to notice things first and enjoy it last — looked up at the Hendersons' upstairs window.

Pale eyes. In the foliage. Opening like wounds.

It had never been only at Chloe's house. The forum had been clear: once it has seen you, it can grow anywhere you have been seen. Chloe had looked at the lawn-creature. It had looked back. The tether was set — and Chloe had been everywhere. The Hendersons' porch. The sidewalk. The whole patient street.

It wasn't following them.

It was already there.

Chapter 7, continued

"Don't," Chloe whispered. "Don't look up. Mom, don't look up, just — just keep knocking —"

But Chloe was already looking back.

Down the street. At her own house. The immaculate house with the prize azaleas that weren't azaleas anymore, the hardwood floors that had learned to breathe, the wooden box built on top of the earth that had finally, patiently, settled into it.

In her bedroom window — second floor, the one with the chipped blue frame she'd meant to repaint all summer — a girl was standing.

It was Chloe.

Same wild hair. Same torn jacket. Same grass stain on the left knee, from the morning she'd decided the lawn was safe to sit on, back when the lawn had been a lawn.

The other Chloe smiled the exact smile Chloe used when she was about to say something brave and stupid.

And mouthed, through the glass, one word:

"Inside."

Every porch light on the street went out at once.