Ten

The streets were alive.

There were sounds on all sides: cars, doors, footsteps, shouts. Other, less distinct ones. The distant wailing of police sirens.

Only... it wasn't distant, really. It didn't have a location. It was so far away and yet... and yet it was right there, inside her head, closer than it should have been possible.

The vertigo welled up inside her again. This time she couldn't fight it. She couldn't fight anything, not even the grip on her wrist. The scarecrow-thing had locked its fingers around her flesh in the exact same spot as before. The gashes felt like liquid fire.

But even that wasn't real. It seemed, like the sirens, to be very close and very far away at the same time.

Mister Sticks had killed the kid...

She blinked once, twice, owlishly. She had fallen to one knee. When had that happened? There was the sound of something crackling wetly, a yelp. A gunshot. Even that didn't seem real, despite the sudden deafness in her right ear and the ringing noise joining the rest of the cacophony.

She wanted to stand and run, to get as far away from everything as possible. To get away from Mister Sticks.

It had done it so casually...

The memory rose up in her mind, replayed itself over her eyes. The kid, moving like a puppet, not wanting to do what he was doing, a victim as much as anyone. The scarecrow, with that jagged grin like the edge of a rusty saw. The blood.

The vision vanished as she felt all the wind knocked from her lungs. She was up again, moving, but not under her own power. She felt something clamped around her waist, felt the arrhythmic lurching, and realized that Mister Sticks had her slung over one shoulder, as if she weighed nothing at all.

The moonlight illuminated the house they had just left. Some part of her recognized that she was looking at the back door, that the scarecrow was taking her down the hill where there were fewer houses and they might be able to avoid notice.

Most of her was too busy trying to get a grip on her whirling thoughts to think anything coherent.
 
The shack at the bottom of the hill. She had recognized it. Not when she had first seen it, but now, now that she wasn't thinking so lucidly. It was Ethan's. The location was all wrong and the place was even more of a stinking pit than she remembered, but it was Ethan's. It was too close to the hill and too broken-down and it couldn't be but it was, she knew it.

It was his shack. The shack he hated so much with all of its peeling paint and shattered windows and all the little errors that no one saw but-

 - but himself, and Penny Columbine, whom he loved so much but who lived so far away, up at the top of the hill in a house worth more money than he'd make in the entirety of his miserable existence.

Penny Columbine, who had thrown out the flowers he had sent her.

She felt her stomach lurch sickeningly, but her body was too battered and oxygen-starved to even get up the energy to vomit.

There was the sound of a door being forced open, and the moonlight vanished, replaced with the musty, rank smell of the shack. A moment later, she felt herself being lowered onto the rotten wood of the floor.

She gasped, choking for air, for almost a full minute. She couldn't see anything but the tips of the mud-stained boots the scarecrow wore.

She recognized them, now. They were familiar boots, but... viewed through different eyes. Ethan had worn those boots. They were fourth-hand and battered, but they had never been this disgusting to look at.

Neither had the coat, or the pants, or the undershirt. But perhaps he had always thought of them this way.

Slowly, she sat up, propping herself upright on her arms, and looked up at the jack-o'-lantern face.

It seemed to be waiting for something.

She swallowed hard. "I know," she rasped, her voice no stronger than a whisper, "where we are now, Ethan."