Like everything else in Covedale, the diner looked exactly the same to Jared as it had ten years ago when he walked in through the pseudo-retro 50s-style silver door and made his way right up to the soda-counter-style bar.
"Picking up for Fisher," he told the woman behind the counter when she turned to him, her hair a fiery orange against the cherry red of—well, everything else in the diner. She was dressed in a waitress' uniform to match the era, in a sea foam blue that did nothing but make the red that much more headache-inducing. He never understood why Danielle always loved this place.
The woman nodded once, turned to yell something to the back, and turned back on Jared with a smile. Jared handed over his card to pay.
"First time at the diner?" the woman asked politely once the transaction was finished, leaning one elbow on the linoleum bar top and handing the card back again as Jared slipped onto one of the stools. "How long you been in town?"
"Few hours," Jared admitted. "My sister and I just rolled in and realized we didn't have any food. It was this or grocery shopping on an empty stomach thirty minutes before closing."
The woman cocked her head. "You came in today?"
"Yeah. We'll be here a few weeks."
Something seemed to cross the woman's features, a mixture of confusion and—fear? Shock? Jared couldn't decide before she was turning away, but the sight of whatever it was left a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach. A large brown paper bag appeared in his line of sight. The woman handed it over without prompt or another word on her part, and Jared walked out of the diner feeling like he missed something crucial.
-
"I think the lady at the diner recognized me?" Jared asked more than said when he returned to the house, bag in hand, and dropped it unceremoniously onto the dining table in the nook off of the kitchen where Danielle was already seated.
Danielle looked up at him with a frown, her hands freezing halfway to the bag. "What? How? Did you recognize her?"
"Nope," said Jared, thumping down into a chair. "Never seen her before in my life."
"Weird. How could she have recognized you? You don't look anything like Ben, so it can't be that."
Danielle was right. With Jared's overall dark coloring, he looked nothing like his sandy-blond-haired-and-bright-blue-eyed uncle. Except his nose. Jared had definitely inherited the Fisher nose.
Jared shrugged, accepting his food when Danielle handed it over and popping the container open. "I don't know. Maybe I was wrong. She was definitely acting weird, though, I wasn't imagining that part."
"Well, did you say anything weird?"
"No, Danielle. I didn't say anything weird." When Danielle gave him a doubtful look, Jared jerked his head at her accusingly. "I didn't! You do realize, as a teacher, I've had to learn not to say everything that comes to my mind, right? They conditioned that shit out of me in college. I'm the picture of tenth-grade professionalism now."
"You're still pretty damn weird, that's why you're the English teacher," Danielle muttered, then yelped when Jared blew his straw wrapper at her. "And mature!" she accused, laughing.
"Summer break, Dan. I don't have to be an adult for two whole months."
"God help me," she laughed, then started to dig in. She didn't make it farther than sawing off a bite of her chicken and waffles before she hesitated, the forkful of waffles halfway to her open mouth. Jared watched through the steam of his own dinner as she cocked her head slightly and a wrinkle formed between her eyebrows. "Do you hear that?" she asked after a beat, her fork lowering back down.
Jared, already two bites in, slowed his chewing, but didn't stop completely. "Hear what?" he asked, mouth still full.
Danielle wrinkled her nose in disgust, but motioned with her free hand for him to shut up and listen. He swallowed the contents of his mouth, closed his eyes, and did.
At first, he still didn't hear anything but the sound of the electricity running through the house and the fan in the background making a poor substitute for air conditioning, but then it started to become clearer. Sharp and high, a keening that just barely road on the outskirts of the noises of the house, it sounded like—
"Screaming?" Jared spluttered in surprise. "Is that screaming?"
Danielle pursed her lips, looking up at him from beneath her lashes. "Animal screaming, maybe," she muttered, like she was talking to herself. "That's not human. Humans don't sound like that."
"How can you be so sure?" Jared challenged, but Danielle had closed her eyes and didn't reply. She looked suddenly pale in the yellowed light of the kitchen. It made the already-uneasy feeling blooming in the pit of Jared's stomach worsen, to the point where he snapped his mouth shut on the brotherly heckle he'd almost loosed.
Their dinner was silent after that. Neither of them felt right talking over the screams they couldn't understand, and they kept silent even after it had stopped.
-
Jared kept the lights on that night when he crawled into bed. He couldn't hear the screaming anymore, not even on the sounds of the waves crashing along the shore behind the house, but something about the noise earlier had settled badly with him, and he knew the darkness would be too much on its own for him to handle peacefully.
He didn't feel so bad about being twenty-four and keeping his lights on at night when he got up to grab a book from his suitcase and saw, through the crack he had left his door open to, that Danielle had left her lights on, too.
That night, he dreamt he was drowning on starlight and screams, with the voice of his uncle in the background begging him to run.
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