Gods and Monsters: Unclean Spirits by Chuck Wendig

he’d hurt a neighborhood animal. The Burtons next door have a cat and Barn’s only crime there is that he wants to hug and squeeze the cat a little too aggressively (a child’s love cares little for restraint, after all)—but that doesn’t explain blood.
    Fine, then. Back to the original mystery—maybe one answer will offer another. Kids are like that, sometimes. You’re missing an earring and later you ask the tiny human why he keeps messing with that tree stump and you find out he’s been hoarding things from inside the house and hiding them inside the stump (along with lots of bugs alive and dead, like some kind of insect graveyard where the living visit the deceased and leave things like Mommy’s earrings as tribute). That actually happened. So:
    “Why’d you put Mommy’s frying pan on the lawn?”
    “I dunno.” Eyes shifting left and right. Then followed by his feet. “I didn’t?”
    “Did you?”
    “I didn’t.” Hedging his bets again: “I dunno.”
    Parental exasperation takes hold. Sometimes she pursues these mysteries to their meaningless conclusions, other times—like now, blessedly—she realizes that the answer will have very little utility and the illumination won’t buy her back the time it took to get to the truth. Better instead to just go get the damn pan off the lawn.
    She sighs, turns, opens the front door to go reclaim her wayward skillet.
    And that’s when she sees the woman on her lawn.
    She’s got a wild mane of unkempt hair, dark as a storm cloud and with the same lack of symmetry. T-shirt a size or two too big. Pair of baggy cargo shorts. If Alison had to describe it, she’d say the woman has an Edward Scissorhands vibe going on.
    The woman is staring down into the grass. Nudging something with her foot.
    “Uh, hello?” Alison says. Barney appears at her side and looks out.
    “Whozat?” Barney asks.
    “I have no idea.” Alison snaps her fingers at the woman. “Hey. Hello.”
    The woman bends down, picks up the skillet from the lawn.
    She proceeds to smell it. Then lick it. Then make a frowny face with eyebrows cocked and lips twisted.
    “Is this yours?” the woman asks, holding up the skillet by the handle the same way one might hold a pair of mysterious dirty underwear found in a swimming pool. The pan dangles between thumb and forefinger.
    Alison offers a lame, bewildered nod.
    The woman lets the skillet fall back to the lawn. Thudding into the grass. With that, she begins walking toward the house. Toward Alison and her son.
    Again, the Mommy Alarm. Def-Con going up a notch. Or down—whichever is the one where the worry escalates and the klaxons get louder. Something about this woman isn’t right. She walks with her shoulders tight, her elbows pinched to her sides like they’re not used to hanging loose. The woman’s chin is pressed to her chest, and she offers only a piercing, guarded stare as she fast approaches.
    “No, no,” Alison starts to say, “no, we don’t want any,” a default response to anyone coming to the door, though she can’t imagine what this lady could possibly be selling (perhaps the Satanic Bible).
    But then calmness sweeps over her. It’s like—she feels something sliding along the margins of her mind, and at first it calls to mind a snake, but that changes and then it’s like a pair of warm hands cupping her mind from beneath, the way one might gently hold and stroke a cat or a puppy, and that sensation washes over her like a warm, sudsy tide.
    The woman stands on the walkway.
    “I’d like to come in,” the woman says.
    “Okay,” Alison says. To her own surprise.
     
     
    “M Y NAME IS Psyche.” Sy-kee. “I am the daughter of a king and queen.”
    Alison sits on the living room couch, the woman sitting not across from her but next to her, the way that a pair of teens might sit when going out on a first date. Neither of them look at one another. Psyche seems to shy away—like she’s forced to sit next to an uncle who