by Shannon Kirk
“With this watch I control several things in the house. Smart-home appliances, locks, temperature, et cetera. You don’t need to know the intricacies, but the whole house is rigged.” He pauses to breathe in while closing his eyes. When he opens them, his eyes are dead, like he’s lost whatever soul he had. A rabbit runs across the parking area, but no floodlights switch on.
“See,” he continues, “I’ve lost control of my life. And there’s no way out for me, or for my Gretchen, and I need to end all of this, but I can’t hospitalize her again. I need to give her this game. I need her to finish her project out back. And part of that is having Lucy for a few days. Because this is Gretchen’s wish. My Gretchen wants to play with Lucy one last time. Things, oh—” He pauses. Shakes his head. “Things were pretty bad before. Then when Lucy moved in, there was a small window when I thought we’d turned a corner and things might improve. But no, no, actually things have only escalated.” He pauses and shakes his head again. “Anyway, this house”—he gestures to the house—“this house has no exits. The windows . . .”
Mag notes the slit windows and questions the phrase finish her project out back.
“All of the windows are like that. There’s no basement bulkhead. No other way in or out. The attached garage, sealed. We walled off the interior door, needed the wall space. Okay?”
Mag flares her nostrils and is biting her bottom lip. She’s considering Big D’s five will get you ten, ten will get you killed.
“Anyway,” Jerry continues, “this house is a dormant oven. With my watch, I’ve set up a few things. Gretchen has the same watch, sorry. She thinks pressing the commands I set would bring trusted help if I’m ever hurt. She doesn’t know. We don’t have any trusted help. So, so, thing is, if Gretchen’s game is interrupted, if even one cop comes near this property, if she can’t finish her project out back, or if she sees me harmed, one of us will use our watch and torch the whole place with all of us inside. Yes, murder-suicide. A grand finale for our little cult of two, I don’t know. But yes, Lucy would be caught in the middle. I’m tired, Ms. Bianchi. And my Gretchen deserves this game and to finish her project out back and Lucy to play a part. Got it?”
“You are sick. We can get you and your daughter help. Let’s do that now.”
“Yeah, no. Nope.” He’s shaking his head. “We’ve had too much trouble in our family for any healing. Things just need to see their way through. Look, Ms. Bianchi, don’t fight this. Don’t push this, just wait for the game to play out.”
You are both mentally unwell. You’re suicidal, homicidal. Wake up!
Mag considers him a second and decides getting facts is more important than fighting. You can’t talk reason into someone who feels he’s got nothing left to lose—she should know. “If Gretchen has a project out back, then how can you torch the place with all of you inside?”
Jerry raises an eyebrow, stares at the ground, and then looks up. “Oh, right. Right. Um. Sure. I meant she has a project in the back rooms. We won’t be leaving the house. Much. And, you know, if we were to leave the house, and you or the cops got close, an alarm would trigger, and I’d torch the inside, and anyone inside, like Lucy, sure, the second the alarm flashes. Or my Gretchen would. Lucy would be stuck inside. Sorry.”
Mag is fairly sure this sick man hasn’t thought through his plan, because he’s clearly lying about this alleged project out back. Whatever the truth is, she needs Lucy out right now. She’s not going to “let the game play out.” Fuck that.
She notes the rabbit is frozen and on his haunches now, well within the twenty-foot perimeter. The lights still do not flood on for him, and Jerry’s watch does not flash a warning.
Jerry walks away, turns his back to Mag. She follows. The floodlights blaze, and his watch is flashing. She suspects it vibrates too, given the low hum. He turns and points his gun.
“Listen, Ms. Bianchi, I’m serious. You need to let the game play out. It won’t be long. Be patient, maybe a couple of days, maybe a week, and Lucy will be fine. If you push, she won’t. Simple rule to follow, I think. Just stay out of our way and down in your camper, and wait.”
I won’t fucking wait.
He reaches the front door, enters, pulls it shut. And within three seconds, as Mag races to pry her way in, those three metal rounds swing and click into place: click, click, click. Mag grabs one and tries to yank, but the thing won’t budge. She sees no keyholes, just solid metal with one bolt on one side. And as she inspects every square inch, she hears the door being locked from within at the knob, and then higher, at a dead bolt. The doorknob and dead bolt do have keyholes, if only she had the keys, and if only there weren’t metal rounds blocking the door from opening.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
After being locked out of the Sabin property, Mag ran to her beast camper, which she’d parked in front of the ranch, and paced a good half hour, muttering to herself, kicking at the beast’s middle sofa area, trying to tease out what the hell was going on. Next, after grabbing her high-powered hunting binoculars and a corner of blue molding clay, she climbed up to the roof of her camper, sat crisscross, and stared at the brick oven at the top of the hill. Watching with binoculars in one hand and rolling her blue clay in the other, she set her intention on never leaving, never blinking, waiting out a moment when she could fly up the hill and snatch Lucy.
She was a crazy loon, nesting below a psycho eagle with brain worms. She considered calling Cord and D for help, but no way they’d get here in time. She considered calling Chief Dyson, but she knew how these Waco-type cult freaks with dual psychosis killed whole communities in one swoop. She didn’t want to test her luck that she could call Jerry’s bluff. He seemed pretty dead inside. He seemed willing to torch his whole world, literally.
She glared on, sitting on the roof of her camper. Hatred, anger, and rage were pushing her mind to wild, impossible solutions she had to keep casting aside. Through her binoculars, she watched squirrels scamper in front of the brick house, but no floodlights beamed on. Same was true when a flock of wild turkeys paraded through the lawn all nonchalant, the leader strutting four feet tall.
I’m safe crouching below knee height, she thought.
Staring for a second at the roof of the low and long shed beneath her camper, a potentially valuable balloon of information floated out of her memory bank: she recalled the cops on the day of their inquiry and how they studied drone images of the forest around the Sabin property. She recalled the cops talking about all the electrical fencing and traps. A segment of the east side, however, had no electrical fencing; instead, that side was bordered by a 150-foot-deep gorge with granite walls. There had to be a notch of some sort that would allow for ingress and egress somewhere at the far side of the gorge, the cops had speculated. But they ultimately decided that to explore the area and come up with a plan would take too long for their purposes, and abandoned using the Sabin property in any way for the inquiry.
Mag would exploit that gorge now.
She slides from the roof and enters the camper through the door that faces the rental ranch, and thus is obscured to the Sabins. Lifting the storage cubby in the rear of the camper, she inventories her various Triple C staff camping, hunting, treetop-course, and expedition gear. Gathering the items she thinks she’ll need in the New Hampshire woods, she packs her black Osprey backpack with night-vision goggles, her high-powered binoculars, her expandable fly-fishing rod with the thickest of unbreakable line, paper and pen, a headlamp, dry matches, pods of water, two bricks of her blue molding clay from that June course in Colorado, a fistful of PowerBars, tissues, a first-aid kit, a lightweight portable hammock, dry socks, a knife, her collapsible bow and arrows, a Gore-Tex jacket, bug spray, and two microfiber blankets, in case she needed warmth or a canopy. Already in her Sarah Connor black pants and a long-sleeve black T-shirt, she laces her lightweight hiking shoes and shoves all her hair under a tight black cap. Black gloves too. Deet sprayed on top of all that.
Using her positional ad
vantage with the camper blocking her, she creeps to a trail to the side of a patch of cattails. Following that down to a field, she then slithers on her belly across the top hem of the field that borders a small pond. From the viewpoint of the brick house at this angle, and also given how the slit windows are situated, it would be impossible for anyone in the house to see her. She looks into the canopies of the dark trees as she approaches the edge of the field and sees no cameras. She presumes, like with the house, that any motion detectors, if they’re bordering this field, are set to about waist-high and higher, to avoid constantly going off for animals and ground fowl.
She drags her backpack along her side, remaining as low to the ground as a rabbit on his haunches or a proud turkey. Can’t have a humped back.
She takes care not to cross the line of trees with all the big orange trespassing signs. And true to the report she’d overheard in the Milberg police station, she can’t anyway, because, sure enough, electrical fence wires are strung tree to tree to tree, from ground to chest-high.
Still on her belly, she turns and snakes along the long edge of the field until she is out of the wedge of dark pine. Once she tops the crest of a rolling hill, she rolls her backpack down to the base, and she, too, rolls. Out of any possible visual view from the Sabin house above, she stands and runs to a point where she feels safe she’s out of Sabin property range. No electrical fences here. She sees no traps. She turns left, enters the woods, and, albeit from a blurry memory, tracks as best she can to where the drone picture showed a gorge.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
LUCY
On my first day in this shit-hole bone-pool prison in Gretchen’s house, Gretchen set up a pattern with me. At 1:00 p.m., her terrible voice came over the intercom, and she said she could see me through some camera in the ceiling among the blinding bulbs. And, she said, she knew I was flipping her off, which I was. Then she moaned about how I hadn’t made any progress in the one hour I’d been her captive and she was “disappointed.” I yelled back, “Fuck off, you crazy bitch.” Then she laughed. Anyway, she said I needed to step all the way to the far side of the room and sit on my hands, and if I did, she’d throw some food in for me, as my lunch. Not knowing when she’d offer food again, I walked to the far side of the room.
“Sit on your hands if you want food. This is the last offer for lunch today.”
So I did all that stupid shit she said, and she threw in a loaf of Wonder bread, a bottle of water, and a package of presliced ham—the gross, wet, oil-slick kind.
“I’ll be back at five before I leave to work my other bones into their permanent place out back. You better comply then and sit on your hands again if you want more food for the night, because after a couple of hours out back, I’ll need to leave straightaway for the pit.”
No clue what working out back or the pit means, but this is the pattern. My brain is in survival mode, and I’ll pay emotionally someday, but I’m stripping out all horror aspects and straining to stick to facts, facts, facts.
And here she is, 5:00 p.m. on the dot. My first dinner. I’ve completed exactly zero skeleton puzzles, because fuck if I’m going to touch dead bodies with my own hands.
I’ve been sitting in the same spot, still as a statue, inventorying everything I might use in the room to get the hell out. Am I pissed? Damn right I’m pissed. What’s in here? Nothing beyond what I saw when I entered: ten blue kiddie pools, gray mats, bones in the pools, a printout page of skeletal structure, a crazy-ass-insane note from crazy-ass-insane Gretchen, a dumb yellow toilet, cameras in the ceiling, ginormous industrial lights, a damn locked door.
And me.
And a bag of Wonder bread.
And disgusting fake ham that looks like shaved face skin.
An empty bottle of water.
I don’t have my phone; that’s charging down at the camper. Because I didn’t think collecting Allen would take longer than three minutes. And I didn’t predict I’d be taken as a hostage in a lunatic’s brick prison of puzzle bones. FUCK.
I’m wearing clothes, whoop-de-doo. Jeans. A T-shirt. Underwear. Consolation bra. Socks. Sneakers. My silver jelly pendant.
I’ve got nothing else. No weapons. No tools.
“Oh whoa, Lucy. You didn’t make any progress today,” Gretchen’s saying through the intercom. “I don’t know. Gee. And with your lack of progress and my concern that my pit workers haven’t found you the right bones yet, hmm, would be a shame for you to have to wait until my pit workers find any missing pieces. Could take weeks! Would really be better if you got a jump on it so we can see if any specific pieces are missing for your puzzles.”
Pit workers?
I crack my neck and look up at the cameras in the lights. I am not flinching.
I extend both middle fingers. “This bone’s missing, Gretchen. And this one too.”
“Oh, Lucy! You’re so funny. Go sit on your hands if you want some bacon for dinner. I know you love lots of bacon!”
I sit on the floor on my hands on the far side of the room and watch her toss in three tiny juice boxes and several pieces of bacon, directly on the floor, like I’m a literal dog. I suppose I’m supposed to make a sandwich with more of my Wonder bread.
After she locks me back in, I rewind her words and ask myself who these pit workers could be. Mother of all fucking hell, why didn’t I tell Dali sooner, like way, way sooner this summer, how loony tunes this bitch is? Maybe I would have avoided all this. Instead, I played her game, and now I’m a stupid doofus in a horror. I’ll work all night on a way out. I won’t sleep.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
MOTHER
The winter owl banked just in time to pass
And save herself from breaking window glass.
—Robert Frost
After a full afternoon of trekking and hiking, Mag finds the gorge by evening. Standing atop a 150-foot-tall granite wall, she looks across the cavern between and to another granite wall on the opposite side. On the floor of the gorge is a thin soot valley with trees and shrubs. She sets down her backpack to take a break and collect her flashlight and night-vision goggles, intending to search out a trail down into the gorge’s valley and back up the opposite wall into the Sabin property.
But voices moving into the floor of the gorge from the opposite side stop her.
Lying flat on her stomach, camouflaged in black within the black night, she slips on her night-vision goggles. The cavern of the gorge is like a bullhorn, so voices within are as if she is down below with them.
“Move it. Move it. Move it,” a girl says. Focusing her goggles, Mag recognizes the girl as Gretchen Sabin; Gretchen holds the rear of a train of people walking along a far trail onto the floor of the gorge, a headlamp strapped to her forehead and a gun in her hand and pointed to the back of a woman in front of her. Focusing further on the train of people, Mag gasps, quickly shooting a hand to her mouth to bottle the shock. In front of Gretchen, wobbling and struggling to walk, is Laura Ingrace, outfitted in ripped and soiled sweatpants and a sweatshirt, obviously forced to march, although slowed and pained on what Mag perceives to be broken or severely injured legs. In front of Laura is Jerry Sabin, who wears white gloves and holds his piddly little gun to the back of an old man. Jerry, too, wears a headlamp. The captives, Laura and the old man, do not.
Holy shit.
Darkness drapes on the train of people, folding darkness between the Sabins with headlamps. The whole trek and their practiced gait seem like recurring drudgery. Also apparent, when Mag zooms in, are the biting bugs peppering Laura and the old man, as well as the pain on Laura’s face, the excruciating wince each time she grabs a pine bough to pull herself forward or grasp a skinny sapling to stable her wobbling ankles. Something has happened to Laura to become a broken-leg captive, but what? A beating? A fall?
Mag watches from her far-up perch as the train progresses down the final switchback of the opposite trail and onto the gorge floor. Laura, as if choreographed, slides, palms a tree, turns, step
s, slides more, palms a tree, and so on. She walks the jangy way a stilt walker walks, but without the excuse of stilts. Her legs are atrophied and crooked under her tight and grimy sweatpants, and based on the picture on Nathan Vinet’s phone, she’s overall lost about twenty pounds. Her face skin sinks into the shape of her skull. Her hair is a knotted nest of dry-brush hay.
“Lucy’s come for Allen,” Gretchen taunts Laura, the train now snaking along the floor of the gorge toward an end capped by a line of pine and what appears to be a wide-mouthed granite cave. “Maybe she can work the night shift too. Would you like that, Laura Ingrace?”
Mag, calculating, listening, hears the name of her daughter come off this demon child’s tongue. That apple-print dress of hers will be a rag of blood. For now, bottling every motherly urge in her body to fly off the top of the cliff and into the gorge to eradicate Jerry and Gretchen and take their watches, Mag pulls on all of her tracking and hunting training with Cord and D. She sets her intention to listen. Assess. Collect information.
She closes her eyes. She exhales.
Listen. Assess. Gather information. Get those watches.
The train of captors and captives reaches the capped end, and in a click and hum, lights powered by a now-visible generator bloom, illuminating an open cave that nubs the end of the gorge. With her point of view now illuminated, Mag rips off her night-vision goggles and switches to her high-powered binoculars. Laura and the old man, again in practiced drudgery, allow the Sabins to place headlamps on their heads before they drop to their asses and slide into a pit in the floor of the cave.
“Grandpa, I need that femur tonight,” Gretchen says to the old man. “If you finally finish these excavations, you can go back to being our renter again. But move it.”