I let them in. The water worker seemed edgy, nervous. The cop was grim but detached.

  Nick watched the pair descend into the basement.

  He flashed me a look that was worry, fear and guilt somehow all rolled into one.

  “It's okay, kiddo,” I said, smiling. “Our showers are probably going to get pretty dribbly from here on out. You want to go outside, throw a little while they're working?”

  He stared at the basement door for a moment, shrugged, left the kitchen to go to his room. It was too hot outside to wear baseball gear, so I imagined he was just swapping his pajamas for shorts and a t-shirt.

  Sniffing my own fairly gamey clothes, I thought that might not be such a bad idea.

  I passed the basement door on my way to my room, heard the clunking of tools on pipes. Nick's room was right down from the door to the master bedroom, and as I started to go into my room to change clothes, I heard voices.

  Correction. I heard a voice talking, almost chanting.

  I paused in the hallway. His door was open just a crack. We hadn't gotten him a cell phone yet, so was he on mine, talking to someone?

  Leaning in closer, I peeked into the room.

  Nick was curled up atop his rumpled bed, his legs drawn up, his arms wrapped around his knees. His eyes were tightly closed, and he was clearly upset.

  But that wasn't what stopped me, what made the air in my lungs evaporate.

  It was her, her form, standing there between us, her back to me.

  I knew it was her, the fall of her hair across her neck, the dark dress we'd buried her in, the smooth skin of her shoulders, her arms.

  But she was insubstantial there in the darkness, a ghost. I could see Nick clearly through her form.

  She didn't turn to me at all, didn't acknowledge my presence.

  Rather, she focused on Nick, on what he was saying.

  I could just make out words.

  …some other day.

  I hesitated, still not sure what he was saying, who he was talking to.

  As I stood there, silent as I could be, I heard all the words he was saying, and my blood chilled faster than my brain could figure out their implication.

  My mouth dried as thoroughly as if I'd stood outside and held it open to the midday sun.

  Nursery rhymes?

  Why would he—

  A 13-year-old boy reciting nursery rhymes can't—

  Of course not.

  That's crazy.

  Inside his room, he whispered the words again.

  Not knowing what else to do, I held my breath, backed away from the door, went into my own room.

  I think I held my breath the entire time I dressed, only breathing again as I stepped outside to play catch, when the hot, dry air sucked it from me.

  * * *

  Saturday night. I was sitting on the edge of the bed when he came back from brushing his teeth.

  He cut his eyes at me as he pulled off his socks, threw them on the floor. We still hadn't dealt with the room, and laundry was still haphazard because of the water restrictions.

  “Let's talk,” I said, scooting over to make room for him.

  “What's up?” he asked, and right there, right there I knew.

  “We haven't talked much about your mom.”

  “What's there to talk about?”

  “She's dead.”

  “Duh. Why do we need to talk about that?” he asked, his tone becoming petulant. He sidled around me, stretched out on the bed, covered his face with a pillow.

  “Because she's still here, everywhere. I see her here in the house every day, in every room. I see her in you. But she's not here, not really. And we haven’t talked about how we feel about that.”

  He made no response, but I could see his thin chest hitching up and down.

  I reached over gently, tried to remove the pillow. His arms clenched reflexively over it, clamped it down.

  “Nick…”

  I pulled at the pillow again, and he let it loose—slowly, grudgingly—exposing the red, tear-streaked face he was trying to hide.

  For a moment he just glared at me, his chest rising and falling so quickly that he could scarcely catch his breath much less talk. Tears welled from his eyes, snaked down his cheeks, fell onto the pillow beneath his head. Plip-plip-plip.

  The bomb was finally exploding—his, at least.

  There's no need to go into the scene that followed because grief is reduced somehow in the telling. Grief, in all its forms, has a certain triteness when expressed second-hand, a certain banality.

  I don't want to lessen what he felt by trying to express it here.

  I comforted him as he allowed me, what with him being a teenager and all, trying to mourn yet also trying to hold onto some of his recent, hard-won masculinity.

  When he'd calmed somewhat I stood, picked up the book of nursery rhymes, sat back on the bed with it.

  “Want to tell me about this?”

  He flushed, wiped tears from his eyes.

  “It's just a stupid book, just baby rhymes. But…”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I wanted mom back so badly, just part of her. And you wouldn't…I couldn't say…couldn’t…”

  The tears started again, so I risked reaching over and wiping his eyes for him, something I had done dozens of times when he was younger. He let me, sniffled and smiled a little.

  “I wanted that part of her back, and you wouldn't give that to me…so…”

  I swallowed. My throat was dry. “You know I missed—miss—her, too. I'm sorry if I closed you out, Nick, I really am. But I didn't know what to do. I know you don't want to hear this from your dad, but I was just as lost as you.”

  “Dad, it's okay. I understand. It's…well, now I feel stupid and selfish.”

  “No, kiddo, no. You don't have to feel that way at all. I forgot I can't just stop being a dad, whatever the reason.”

  Nick sat up a little in the bed, took the book from me, flipped through its pages quickly.

  Even upside down, I saw a dish running away with a spoon, a house-sized shoe surrounded by children, a cat with a fiddle.

  He found the page he was looking for, passed it to me.

  The watercolor illustration showed a young boy looking from a window. Outside, the rain fell in sheets. His face was ridiculously sad, and he held a baseball and glove.

  Rain, rain go away.

  Come again some other day.

  I held the page with shaking hands.

  “Mom used to read it to me. I read it to see if it worked.”

  I licked my lips, lowered the book.

  “Every day I came in here and read the rhyme out loud, and I can feel her here with me. Sometimes…sometimes I even think I can see her, standing in my doorway, looking in on me.”

  My breathing hitched. I remembered the dark cloud in the hallway, my experience in the garage. I remembered her standing here in this room, beside his bed.

  And I could feel her presence here, around us, unseen, urging us on.

  “I didn't think it would work, but it did. Dad, it did! That very first day. Remember? We played catch. So, I did it the next morning and the next and the next. And it worked every day. It's worked all this time.”

  “Nick—”

  “You don't believe me, but it's true. I just wanted…I just wanted you to play catch. I wanted you to notice me, like she used to.”

  I pulled him to me, pressed my lips to his cheek and apologized, over and over.

  I felt tears slip from my cheek to his, fall to the bed. Plip-plip-plip.

  “I caused this. It's my fault. The drought, the water rationing.”

  I pulled away, cupped his face with my hands, shushed him.

  “It doesn't matter anymore, Nick.”

  “But Dad, the water…?”

  I shrugged. “You've said the rhyme every day? Well, not that I believe it's anything more than coincidence, but if it makes you feel better, just don't say it tomorrow. Don't say it anymore.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Will that work?”

  “If saying it worked, not saying it should work, too.”

  And I believed that.

  * * *

  Sunday. Early in the morning.

  It was late when I finally went to my bed, threw myself on it, hunkered down into the pillows. Even though I hadn't seen her recently, hadn't even dreamed about her, I could still smell her on the linens, despite the scented laundry detergent, the fabric softener. I supposed her ghost would linger here the longest.

  But even with that thought, I still felt as if an enormous weight had been lifted from my shoulders, my heart, and I fell into a deep sleep fairly quickly.

  There were no dreams, and I floated easily through the night.

  I was awakened by the sound of the wind outside, whistling, whining; tree limbs raking the sides of the house.

  There was a flash of lightning, a tremendous rumble of thunder.

  And then a sound, loud, from above.

  Something heavy hit the roof, thudded through the house's bones.

  Then another, and another.

  I got out of bed, went to the window, yanked open the blinds.

  It wasn't dawn yet, but the sky was a nauseous shade of grey-green. Clouds roiled high in the sky, churned, boiled with lightning.

  Something struck the lawn, left a crater in the dry dirt.

  It took me a moment to figure out what it was.

  A raindrop.

  A raindrop the size of a bowling ball.

  More hit. One struck the branch of a tree, snapped it off.

  I thought about running into Nick's room, grabbing the book.

  I thought about having Nick recite the nursery rhyme just one more day.

  But I knew we had waited too long.

  Sometimes the world weeps for us when we cannot.

  John F.D. Taff has published more than seventy short stories during his career that spans more than two decades. His unique brand of dark fiction has been published in Cemetery Dance, Deathrealm, Big Pulp, Postscripts to Darkness, Hot Blood: Fear the Fever, Hot Blood: Seeds of Fear and Shock Rock II. Six of his short stories have been given honorable mentions in the Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror.

  His first collection, Little Deaths, was published in 2012 and has been well-reviewed by critics and readers alike. The collection appeared on the Bram Stoker Reading List, has been a Number One bestseller and was named the “Number One Horror Collection of 2012” by HorrorTalk. Taff’s The Bell Witch is a historical novel inspired by the events of a real-life haunting and was released in August 2013. His thriller Kill/Off was published in December 2013.

  Taff’s short story “Show Me” is featured in the 2013 Bram Stoker Award®-nominated anthology from Grey Matter Press, Dark Visions: A Collection of Modern Horror – Volume One. His tale that breathes new life into the zombie apocalypse, “Angie,” appears in the bestselling Grey Matter Press volume Ominous Realities: The Anthology of Dark Speculative Horrors. And his second single-author collection of five haunting novellas, The End in all Beginnings, received massive critical acclaim when it was published by Grey Matter Press in 2014.

  She would not be easy to find, but Matthew knew she was in there. Somewhere deep. Somewhere hidden. But definitely there.

  “And now, for word on a developing situation in Cobb County, Georgia, we go to Atlanta where Jane Riley has been following events and is live on-scene. Jane?”

  The plantation-style house loomed large before him as he made his way down the hillside path. Its white clapboard façade, double portico porch, pitched-roof dormer and fanlight entryway were exactly as he had envisioned them. The structure looked very old, almost part of the natural landscape. Very old, but recently built.

  Just as he’d expected. Just as he'd told himself.

  “Thanks, Ted. Years ago, a quiet, residential community, similar to the one whose homes line the street behind me now, was stunned by the bizarre slayings of two of its residents.”

  Matthew heard his own reassuring voice, a running narrative instructing him, giving him directions, telling him to remain relaxed, that he was in control, that there was no reason to be afraid. He was safe in these surroundings. They were his creation; familiar, comforting, known to him. He took a moment to study the features of the house, to concentrate on its details. Details meant focus. Focus was the key to success. Focus was always the key to success.

  The edifice was precisely as he'd envisioned it. The roof’s split-wood shingles cascaded uniformly in valleys that straddled the dormers. The two-story portico rose high beneath the majestic pediment, protruding forward on columns set one atop another, Ionic over Doric, separated by a balcony. Nine-over-nine, double-hung sash windows stared outward, unblinking eyes cocked sideways between louvered-shutter lids.

  Everything was just as it was supposed to be.

  Matthew walked forward and stepped onto the porch. Glass sidelights with lead dividers separated pairs of colonettes, framing an exquisite set of fielded panel double doors beneath the arching fanlight. He hesitated as he reached for the door handle, his disembodied voice telling him to be calm. Breathing deeply, he listened to it. This was why he came, it said. Go inside and find her. This is where she would be.

  The door opened as he touched it, swinging inward, revealing the foyer and beckoning him across the threshold. Vague light from uncertain sources illuminated dark walls and darker floors. Just past the entryway, a huge staircase wound upward to the second floor, carpeted in red, with scrolled face-string paneling and ornately carved balusters. To his right was an open dining room, simply but tastefully furnished. To his left, a library. The books in the library were aligned in tight rows from floor to ceiling, packed around a marble-faced fireplace with a mahogany mantle and Doric pilasters.

  “When police arrived at the Chambers’ home in response to a domestic disturbance complaint, they found twenty-six-year-old Melody Chambers sprawled on her living room floor, the apparent victim of a strangulation. The police didn’t need to wait for the autopsy to realize she had been, in the responding officers’ words, ‘throttled.’ The imprint of her killer’s hands was still clearly visible on her throat.”

  Matthew told himself to ignore the upstairs. He needed to descend deep, to travel far into the recesses of the house, the house he had so painstakingly designed, the house he had built piece by piece for this very purpose. That’s where she would be—deep, deep, deep—pressed back into some distant crevice, dug in like a tick.

  He took a moment to take in his surroundings, to smell the leather of the library, to feel the wood of the floor beneath him. Only after immersing himself in the details of the place, testing the reality of it, did he continue forward. With calm, measured breaths and steady steps he moved past the staircase, looking for the opening to the basement.

  She had been making her presence known to him for some time now. Sleep was her invitation, her opening. She insinuated herself into his dreams like a virus. More of the computer variety than the biological kind, a piece of malware bent on shutting down his operating system. If he was dreaming of making love to his wife, he might feel a tap on his shoulder, then turn to see her standing there, mere inches away, that rictus smile on her face, baring jagged teeth. If the dream was the product of generalized stress, the type where he'd find himself all but naked as he rushed to meet a crucial deadline, she would pop out of nowhere, taunting him, laughing at him, warning him that eventually there would come a dream from which he would never wake up, because it wouldn't be a dream at all.

  Sometimes, he didn’t even need to be asleep.

  It would start with that voice. Cloyingly sweet, a cocktail of seduction and spite, calling his name. Then, once it got his attention, not sweet at all, just shrill and abrasive as it grated against his brain, vocal fingernails on a chalkboard. He might be in a meeting, discussing the latest marketing campaign, or in an elevator, surrounded by co-workers. “Matthew,” would come the scrape. “Maaaaaath-yew.” No one else ever seemed to hear it. Everyone seemed to notice that he did.

  But the dreams were even worse. He often woke in a start, bolting upright in bed, his t-shirt damp and clinging, her lingering presence so real, so tangible. He could smell her, taste her. Feel her.

  The rude awakenings, the panic attacks in the middle of the night, the exhaustion that defined so many days that followed so many restless nights—those things were bad enough. Lately, however, he had begun to wake up having left his bed.

  The sleepwalking seemed almost planned, controlled, and if that was the case, Matthew knew she was more powerful than before and would have to be dealt with. The evidence was impossible to ignore.

  A week earlier he awoke in the kitchen, having grabbed a knife as she leapt toward him, her eyes blazing, her jaws set wide, her wiry body springing like a leopard. But when consciousness hit him, jolting through him like electricity, the knife in his hand was poised at his own throat, its point depressing the flesh near his jugular. This last time, rather than fending off an attack, he found himself standing beside his bed, wielding a large hammer, his arm cocked high above his head, ready to bring the head of it down on the skull of his sleeping wife.

  She was building up to something. Something bad.

  “What police found next would shock the sleepy bedroom community and make headlines for months to come. The controversy would ignite a debate that dominated local talk radio and raised questions no one seemed able to answer.”

  Beyond the staircase, the house stretched back in a long corridor, gradually narrowing into darkness. Photos lined the walls of the hall as far as sight could take him. Matthew had seen the images all before. Photos of him. Photos of his new wife, Jill. Stills of the two of them at the beach. In the park. At a dinner party. On their wedding day. There were many doors along the hall. One for every handful of photos. But he knew she wouldn’t be behind any of them.

  She would be in the basement.