Started with a lie

Chapter 5: Creeper before ultrasound

We stare at the thing, bewildered. Mom asks Brady if he did anything to me. Nope, not a thing, says Brady. I run to get the phone to call her cousin and ask him to come up - she thinks maybe it's a hired hand and he's just at the wrong farm. Just as she asks him to come on down, the phone goes dead. Well. That's unsettling.

All at once, there is a loud, insistent banging on the front door. We all scream. Brady, who is terrifyingly resourceful, huddles us all into the living room, away from a window where anyone can see us. Then, while mom, me and my brother tremble there on the couch, she grabs a serrated bread knife from the kitchen and cautiously approaches the front door. She peeks out a side window, very stealthily. She turns back to us and looks confused. She shakes her head, like, "No one is there." We all kind of breathe easier.

Then EVERY goddamn door in the house is banging - relentlessly. I can still hear it. Rhythmic and terrifying, like all the doors are about to splinter and crack. There were two doors in the basement beneath us, so the sound is also a reverberation at our feet. The three ground-floor doors are shaking - we can see them trembling and jerking on their hinges from our vantage point on the couch. Finally, mom runs to the window - either from a psychotic break with reality or terror, I have no clue. She cries, "Oh thank Christ - Cousin is here!" We run to her and peek out the picture window - there is no one that we can see in the yard, but we can't see all the doors from our viewpoint. Cousin walks by truck with a shotgun in his hand. Cousin, it should be noted, has pretty much every gun ever made. He looks puzzled, looking at the rear of the truck, then he glances in the cab window and he stops. He goes pale, runs a hand down his face. Then he RUNS towards to house, towards us.