Twilight Children Episode 7
Vlad and Ryth search for the missing Elaine.
Twilight Children is a horror serialization about care giving, family, and consuming stories. Episodes are released weekly. If you’re new here, you can catch up on episodes on the Twilight Children homepage.
Writing Skins is a reader supporter author newsletter that shares excerpts from Aigner Loren Wilson’s writing journal. Aigner is an award winning and nominated author of literary speculative fiction and nonfiction.
Previously On: In last week’s episode, after Vlad went through a quick aging, Elaine vanishes into the snow.
Ruins
VladFourteen days and an annoying number of hours, minutes, and seconds were speeding away from Vlad. At that time, neither she nor Ryth had been able to find any trace of Elaine.
“You sure she’d come here?” Ryth asked Vlad as the younger teen searched through the frozen, empty guts of the half-built homes meant to make up the new housing development, The Pines. “This place seems too pedestrian for her.”
“We put shit in these walls.” Vlad checked the open spaces in the foundation and skeleton of the house for any trace of Elaine. Since Vlad had grown, she was still getting used to how easily she was able to reach things, and access them when before she could barely even perceive them. “Nothing but old skid marks. We’ll check the next.”
“No. Let’s go home.” Ryth leaned against the drywall. Sweat, snow, and frost had caked their makeup to their face making them look like a glittering tan angel trapped in a crystalized pre-suburbia.
“Not without Elaine.” Vlad grabbed Ryth and pulled them out through the garage without a door and back into the snow.
“Vlad, we’re not going to find her here.”
“We have to look.”
She kept pulling them through the snow to the next house only a few feet away. Ryth fought against her but not hard. Not until they saw the small yellow truck with silver decals running along its curved body, idling in the back of the very house Vlad was dragging them into.
“Vlad, stop.” Ryth tried yanking Vlad back.
Vlad wasn’t weak like she used to be, she was a teenager now. She was strong, young, and filled with fire without a name. Using Ryth like a battering ram, she spun them around and flung them at the plastic tarp acting like a door over the small opening for the door that hadn’t been installed. They disappeared into the house’s inner darkness and screamed.
Vlad darted inside and moved toward the black that had taken Ryth with her teeth and knuckles, ready for whatever was to come. Ryth stood frozen in front of a young man with curly dark hair and a bleached blonde snow-caked bushy mustache. He looked just as frightened as Ryth did, and Vlad used that to try and pounce on him.
“Vlad, no,” Ryth said, standing in between the two. “Dear god, that is not what we do when we see cute boys stealing.”
Vlad allowed Ryth to pull her off the boy surrounded by a small pile of pipes, hammers, some high-powered equipment, and a whole lot of lumber.
“You caught me.” He smiled, flashing crooked teeth.
Vlad showed her own terrifying maw.
“And we’re sorry,” Ryth said, stepping in front of Vlad and helping him up. “We’re just looking for someone. You wouldn’t happen to have seen an old Black woman running around here smearing shit in the walls?”
Instead of laughing like Vlad thought he was going to do like everyone always does when they talk about Elaine, the boy’s face dropped. “Fuck,” he said. “Is your grandma missing or something? Are you all right?”
Ryth let him look around them at Vlad but brought his attention back. “You seen her? She’s kind of hard to miss.”
“Yeah, no, sorry, I haven’t. But I can help y’all look.” They headed through the dark hallway leading to the back of the house and beckoned them to follow.
Vlad didn’t want to go with boys into the dark and snow. She wanted Elaine and their home and the fire and a story about comfort to rest on her tongue and to fill her brain with that sliver of a tale only halfway truth and all emotion. Vlad wanted to leave and wanted Ryth to come with her. But Ryth, Ryth was watching the spot in the air where the boy had been.
“We shouldn’t follow him,” Ryth said and started heading in the opposite direction.
But Vlad knew lies and stories and knew when someone was spinning a yarn for themselves.
Ryth came back muttering under their breath, “Stupid cute butts and stupid fucking trucks.”
“We have to find Elaine,” Vlad said, following Ryth back out into the snow where the boy stood waiting beside his truck that was taller than him.
“Name’s Nos,” he said, smiling at Ryth and reaching a hand toward them.
Ryth didn’t take it. “Ryth.”
“Cool,” Nos said, dropping his hand and smiling at Vlad.
Ryth moved around the truck to the passenger side steps. “Vlad, you coming? We might be able to see Elaine in this monster truck toy car.”
“Hey, now.” Nos smiled brighter as he heaved himself into the truck.
Vlad backed away from them. “You won’t find Elaine because you don’t care. I’ll find her.”
Ryth jumped out of the truck instantly, but Vlad had already turned her back on them and was storming off into the woods and the snow, not looking for Elaine but looking for a way away from the electricity crawling over her skin that wasn’t hers but theirs. Ryth called out to her, but that only made her run.
Vlad fled through the woods and started crying like she was a child. But she wasn’t a child. She had stopped being a child for Elaine. And Elaine left anyway. Now, Vlad needed to find her and pull herself together. That’s what Elaine needed, not some half-grown thing fleeing through the forest. Vlad stopped running and felt an ache in her bones. She had gone far, further than she thought she could, but she wasn’t alone.
“You looking for that crazy bat of yours?” Von Northman sat on his snowmobile, watching Vlad through the trees.
“Elaine.” Vlad could place where she was. A mile or so away from the skeleton of The Pines, where she left Ryth. “Her name is Elaine. She’s missing. She could be hurt.”
Von Northman laughed and got off his black and red machine. There was a rifle slung in his arms like a baby that Vlad didn’t see until he adjusted it, pointing the barrel for a second at her. He was wearing one of his company’s parkas that had an outline of a pig labeled meat.
“It’s not funny,” Vlad said.
“Fuck. I think it is.” As he got closer to Vlad, he looked around. “Girls like you shouldn’t be out in the woods alone, you know?”
“I’m no girl. I’m a worm. I’m a story. I’m a storm. I’m a Wandering Woman. And you’re an asshole.”
“Naw, you’re an orphan shit. Hey, tell me, now, that government pig ever test those paternity samples?”
Vlad turned away from Von and his lies and his words and started to head back toward The Pines. Maybe Ryth and Nos would still be there and not chasing each other’s tails into the snow.
“You know you’re just going to find her corpse face down in the ice somewhere, right? Women like her and my wife don’t have any other futures. Sure that’s something you want to see? A dead body? Your poor old bitch dead in a ditch, skin frozen?” He walked behind her, using the barrel of his gun to nudge her in the back. “But you’re not like her, are you? No, you’re different. Knew it the moment I saw you. Knew you’d be special. Not like that old broken whore.”
His gun pressed hard into Vlad’s back. She pushed against it and tried to elbow Von in the nose, but he was faster than her and had the gun raised against her cheek as soon as she turned around.
“Hey!” Ryth’s voice cut through the snow. They came running up with their phone drawn. “Keep away from her right now, Von.”
Nos was with Ryth and had a small black handgun out but not raised. His eyes moved between Vlad and Ryth.
“Put that away, boy. No one has service in The Outer Banks.”
“Don’t need to have service to record your ass threatening someone with a deadly weapon. A minor no less. Vlad, you okay?”
Vlad had been counting the pores in Von’s face. Those small holes that gave way to such vile flesh. She did, in fact, want to see a dead body, but it wasn’t hers or Elaine’s. Von finally dropped his gun and tucked it back under his arm. He eyed Vlad one more time before crunching his way back over to his snowmobile and triggering it to life, leaving them in the snow with the echo of his engine and his voice in Vlad’s head.
Next Time: The town comes together to help Vlad in Elaine’s absence.
Twilight Children Episode 8
Twilight Children is a horror serialization about care giving, family, and consuming stories. Episodes are released weekly. If you’re new here, you can catch up on episodes on the Twilight Children homepage.
What did you think? I’m trying things out and everything is an experiment. I’d love to know your thoughts? Love it. Hate it. Absolutely indifferent and confused?