The Unclaimed Victim

by D. M. Pulley

  Gazing down at her, he almost looked like he was in love. Not with her but with the idea of saving her.

  “I’m scared.” She crumpled her face into her hands, feeding his fetish as only a professional could.

  He fell silent.

  For a moment, she panicked that she’d gone too far and he’d seen through her ruse. He would slam the door shut and leave her to rot. Or worse. She made a show of stifling her tears, only letting them out in a few tortured wails as though struggling to be strong for him.

  “You must learn to pray, Sister.” He bent down and brushed her cheek.

  She had him.

  She turned away from him as though ashamed, shifting her knees toward her target. “I don’t know how to pray. You were right about me. You were right about everything.”

  He put a hand on her shoulder. “I can teach you. That’s why I’m here—to help. Let us start with the most simple prayer of all, the Lord’s Prayer. Repeat after me, our Father.”

  “Our Father.” She bowed her head all the way down to her knees and grabbed the edges of the plate with both hands.

  “You can just bow your head to your chest,” he said and gently tapped her shoulder. “Who art in heaven.”

  “Who art in heaven.” She lifted the plate and heaved it with all of her strength into the side of his head. It hit his skull with a clunk, and he went sprawling. Ethel leapt to her feet and went careening out the open door without looking back.

  CHAPTER 23

  Ethel ran down the narrow corridor past doorway after doorway. How many more women were locked inside? She didn’t stop to check. The bare bulb in the ceiling threw long shadows after her. As her eyes scrambled for the exit, she realized she’d run the wrong way. Brother Wenger had brought her into the hellhole dungeon from the other end of the corridor.

  She glanced back to see his lantern light spilling out the open door to her cell. It was moving.

  A low grunt bellowed out into the hall. She had slammed a piece of iron into his head. There would be hell to pay, and he wouldn’t go to the police for justice. He’d take a pound of flesh and more.

  She quickened her pace, not knowing where she was heading. The corridor ended in a low-set door, no taller than her waist. Her hand grasped at the knob, frantically turning, praying it wasn’t locked.

  “Hattie! Stop!” a dazed voice called from behind her. “You need help.”

  The handle gave, and she fell through the opening onto a landing two feet below. She hit the other side with a grunt.

  “It’s not your fault, Hattie.” The voice was getting closer. The soft even tone of it sent a shudder through her bones.

  Ethel scrambled to her feet and took off running down a low hallway into the dark, hoping the shadows would shield her. The wretched smell of sewage seared her nostrils as she gulped the swampy air. Vomit, feces, rotting meat. It smelled like the Run. Her head clouded with it.

  Brother Wenger’s voice called from the doorway behind her. “The demon has you in its clutches, Hattie. Let me help you.”

  A light shone in, lighting the brick walls and the low vaulted ceiling. She kept running. The shadow of a door stood open ten feet ahead. She lunged through it and plunged back into blindness.

  “This isn’t the way out, Hattie,” the voice called from behind her.

  She felt her way forward along a wall, running one hand along the cold flat stones and holding the other out in front of her. The wall turned a corner and her arm followed but the rest of her hit more stone. She’d found some sort of hole in the wall. Maybe a window well, but there was no light. Her arm dragged through the thick dust and rubble littering the sill. She kept going past the first window to another one, feeling for a way out. Eight openings down the wall, until it finally turned a corner. She slipped behind it.

  A glow lit the wall in front of her. It was punctuated by three rows of windows stacked one on top of the other between the heavy stones, but they weren’t windows at all. She turned her head to the opening next to her. Crumbling cloth and bones lay inches from her nose. It was a crypt.

  She covered her mouth to hold in a gasp.

  “You shouldn’t be in here, Hattie,” Brother Wenger said softly from the doorway around the corner. “Dear Lord, help me find my lost sister. Help me deliver her from Satan’s grasp.”

  Ethel searched the rows of open tombs for a place to hide. They were all full. A skull with missing teeth gazed out at her from its shelf. Down at the far end, the wall turned again. She took off running for the next cavern, her bare feet only a whisper across the dirt floor.

  “The Lord has spoken, Hattie. He has spoken to me just now in the ringing in my ears. You have helped me to hear.” He let out a soft laugh that chilled the air. “Praise God.”

  She pressed her back to the stone wall and peeked out into the dimly lit corridor at the light. It had stopped moving closer.

  “I cannot find you, Hattie. Not until you want to be found. You must find your own way back into the light. We must starve the demon out. The Lord commands it.”

  The shadows swelled on the walls, growing longer and darker as the light receded.

  He’s leaving me here.

  “May God have mercy on your soul, Hattie,” he whispered.

  The sound of the door creaking shut careened past the open graves to where she stood crouched against the wall. The light went out.

  Ethel released an exhausted breath as the tension holding her muscles together collapsed. She crumpled to her knees and struggled to think. He hadn’t let her go. He’d locked her in another dark room, only this one was full of dried corpses.

  Starve the demon out.

  That was his plan. That’s what his Lord told him to do. He was going to let her starve and rot until she went stark raving mad. He would torture her until she believed she’d been possessed by demons. He’d break her until she swallowed up any Jesus story he fed her.

  Unless he killed her first.

  She rested her head on her knees and let out a helpless laugh. The perfect silence of the tomb swallowed the sound of it. There was no doubt in her mind that she would go insane if she didn’t find a way out. But she couldn’t bring herself to move.

  Her body sat there suspended in the dark, floating in an ocean. She could feel her arms and legs disappearing into it as though she’d never existed at all. They’d find her in a few years, just a pile of bones like the others. Ethel drew in another breath. The dust of a hundred dead bodies filled her lungs. Under the smell of sewage and rot lurked the darker scent of a dead fire. The ashes of it settled in a blanket over her bare skin, coating the inside of her mouth, matting her wet eyelashes in mud. I’m being buried alive. Is this what happened to the screaming girl? Is she stuffed into one of these holes?

  Ethel clawed the thought from her head with both hands and forced herself to sit up and focus. Her eyes could do nothing in the dark, so she strained her ears to hear anything that might show her a way out. Under the unsteady rasp of her own breath, the sound of water running through pipes rushed somewhere overhead. She focused on the steady shh with all her might, trying to locate the direction it was coming from, hoping that if she followed the sound, it would lead her out. Sitting up, she turned her head in each direction, but it seemed to be coming from one place and then another and then nowhere at all. It was hopeless.

  A voice whispered from several feet away. “Is he gone?”

  CHAPTER 24

  The feeling of another person hovering somewhere next to her sent Ethel scrambling back into the wall. Rubble scattered under her feet. A shower of dust hit the ground. One of the dead bodies had surely risen to swallow her soul.

  “Is it safe?” The whisper drew closer. A warm hand fell on Ethel’s shoulder.

  “Ahh!” she shrieked and shoved its owner away. The body attached went tumbling, light and frail. It was surprisingly small, Ethel realized too late. It was the body of a child.

  “Shh! They’ll hear you!” the voice hissed
from where it had fallen.

  “He wants to hear me,” Ethel hissed back. She was probably talking to herself, but she kept going. “He wants to hear me scream and beg and grovel. He wants to hear me break.”

  The voice rose up from the ground and floated over her. “We have to go. Before they come back.”

  “Before who comes back? Wait.” Ethel peered blindly into the dark. “Who are you?”

  “It don’t matter.” The soft voice sounded like it belonged to a little girl.

  “Of course it matters,” Ethel argued with the ghost. “Where did you come from? Did Wenger lock you up in here too?”

  “No one knows I’m here.”

  “How old are you?” Ethel reached out a hand to the tiny thing but caught nothing.

  “I dunno.” Her voice had turned away and slipped farther into the dark.

  Ethel had met thrown-away girls down in the Run. Girls without parents. They didn’t last long. She’d seen them sold back and forth for less than a pack of cigarettes. Supposed do-gooders scooped them up and carted them off to “homes.” She’d run away from a home for wayward girls at the age of sixteen. At least on the street she had a fighting chance. The eerie feeling that she was talking to some younger version of herself lilted through her mind. Maybe I really am crazy.

  Ethel pulled herself to her feet and held her hands out into the blackness toward the tiny voice. “Let’s get a look at you. Come here, sweetie. I won’t bite.”

  Her hand found a shoulder, then a head full of snarled hair sitting just below the height of Ethel’s shoulder. Then it darted away.

  “You must be about nine, I’d think,” Ethel thought out loud. “You remember your parents?”

  “We have to go,” the voice insisted, trailing away from her.

  “Wait.” Ethel started after her with her arms out to guard her face. “How did you get down here?”

  “I stay here,” the faraway voice answered. “When I can.”

  “All by yourself?” Ethel considered which answer would be more horrifying. She certainly didn’t want to run into the little urchin’s “daddy.”

  “Sometimes.” The girl had turned a corner.

  Ethel tried to keep up, stumbling over rubble on the ground. Bones, she thought with a shudder. The smell of the sewer grew stronger as they went. Bile. Feces. Fermenting leaves. Her hand found the rough stone of a wall and traced it to a corner. The chill in the air deepened as they went. Ethel shivered and cursed that bastard Wenger for taking her clothes. The darkness undulated blue and black, growing thicker with each step.

  “You still there?” she whispered, trying hard to keep the panic out of her voice. “I still don’t know your name.”

  “Johnnie.” The girl’s voice made Ethel jump. She was only a few feet away, waiting for her.

  The name rang a distant bell. She sucked in a breath and steadied herself. “Treat to meet you, Johnnie. I’m Ethel.”

  The girl didn’t seem to care for pleasantries. Her voice slipped away again “We have to go. They’ll be back.”

  “They?” Ethel kept her arms out and dragged her feet carefully across the sandy ground. “Who are they?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t like them. They’re bad.”

  “What kind of bad?”

  “The hurting kind.”

  “Hurting how? What do they do?” Echoes of the screams she’d heard earlier hung in the darkness behind her.

  “They yell about devils and demons. They make them pray for forgiveness.” The girl’s tiny voice sounded eerily unaffected, like she was merely talking about a strange dream. “They make them scream.”

  Ethel swallowed hard. Mary Alice. “Did one of them look like the man that locked me up in here? Did they sound like him?”

  “I dunno. Maybe. They don’t have faces.”

  Ethel frowned into the dark. “How many of them did you see?”

  The girl didn’t answer.

  “Was there a woman? Did a woman get hurt?”

  “Yes.”

  Ethel fought to keep the quavering out of her voice for the sake of her little guide. “Didn’t they see you?”

  “I don’t let people see me . . .”

  The deadened tone of the girl’s voice left Ethel unnerved. Johnnie had stayed alive in the city all by herself for God knows how long, living like a sewer rat from the sounds of it. That sort of life could break a child and twist together a monster; Ethel had seen it happen. The girl could easily stab her right there in the dark, and no one would ever know.

  “You must’ve been scared to death. Why, uh . . . why did you decide to help me?”

  “So God will forgive me.” Her voice sounded farther away.

  “Forgive you for what?”

  There was no answer.

  “Johnnie?” Ethel found another stone wall with her hand and traced it toward the voice.

  “You’ll have to climb through.” The girl was suddenly beside her, hovering at her waist as though she were somehow inside the wall.

  “Through what?” Ethel groped the dusty stone to her right where she’d heard the voice until she felt the edges and flat ledge of an opening in the wall. Another crypt. She felt around for bones and drew in a breath before climbing inside.

  The opening was too narrow to crawl on her hands and knees, so Ethel was forced to wriggle into it until her entire body was swallowed by the stones. She inched her way along on her elbows, half expecting Johnnie to smash her head in with a rock, bracing herself for impact. The child was feral and clearly damaged. There was no telling what she might do now that Ethel lay there trapped in the wall.

  Her eyes scanned the blackness warily as she went, blind but wide open all the same. A dim light registered far ahead. A shadow crossed in front of her.

  “Hurry!” Johnnie hissed into the narrow portal. “Follow the ladder.”

  “Wait.” Ethel wriggled faster until her hands reached the end of the stone slab beneath her and fell six inches onto a dirt floor. She pulled the rest of her body out and found herself in some sort of root cellar not quite tall enough to stand in. The faint light streamed down from a small trapdoor in the ceiling. The shadow of a wooden ladder fell against the stacked stone wall beneath it.

  As Ethel’s eyes adjusted to the filtered light, her body reappeared out of thin air. Her hands and knees were scraped and bleeding. A thick layer of dust clung to her naked skin. She hugged herself and scanned the tiny cellar for the girl. A tunnel punctured the wall where she’d climbed through. A pile of loose stones sat strewn next to it that matched the others in the wall. Johnnie was nowhere to be seen.

  Ethel poked her head up through the trapdoor. “Johnnie?”

  It was a basement. She scanned the block walls and wood floor joists stretched over her head. The room was the size of a small tavern. Coal furnace. Empty shelves. Water pipes laced overhead. The dull yellow light streamed down from the top of a slapped-together set of wood planks and stringers that formed the stairs. The realization that she’d just crawled inside someone’s house struck her. On instinct, she covered her naked, filthy body with her hands.

  “Hello?” she whispered.

  Ethel scanned the walls and canning shelves and corners for a wild creature of a girl and saw nothing. I don’t let people see me. She climbed the rest of the way out of the ground. The house was silent. There were no telltale footsteps or clinks of dishes. Whoever lived there was either gone or asleep. Ethel approached the stairs with her ears perked, waiting for the bark of a dog. Waiting for someone to shout for the police. Waiting for the crack of a gun. A train blew its whistle somewhere in the distance. At the foot of the stairwell, she could see the yellow streetlights streaming in through the window of the door on the landing above. The glass was cracked.

  Standing in the light, she glanced down at her naked breasts swinging freely. It wouldn’t do at all, not if she was going to go to the police for help. She turned and searched the basement again. There was nothing but a pile of torn
burlap sacks, none of them large enough to cover her. The sting of the cold still fresh in her mind, she tied two sacks over her feet, knotting them the best she could. She wrapped the largest one around her middle and climbed the stairs one creaking tread at a time. A dog barked a block away.

  At the top of the landing, she saw the back door had been pried away from its jamb and hung loose in the opening. Gazing into the kitchen left no doubt. The house had been abandoned. A rat rummaged through debris scattered across the wood counter. The window over the sink had been smashed in. She glanced the other direction into the living room. A tattered couch. A torn chair. A scattering of newspapers.

  The stink of feces and unwashed sweat registered as she stood there scanning the wreckage. Abandoned houses were rarely empty. Any number of squatters might be holed up in there, blind drunk and hostile.

  “Johnnie?” she whispered again, knowing full well she wouldn’t get an answer. She bit her lip and debated the futility of trying to locate the child. She could be anywhere, and there wasn’t much good she could do for the poor thing even if she found her. Ethel was nothing but a homeless old whore. “Thank you, sweet girl,” she whispered, “I won’t forget it.”

  With that, she swung open the broken door and slipped away. Glancing back at the house, Ethel saw the door had been marked. Someone had painted a crooked eight-pointed star on the cracked wood. It looked like it had been painted in blood.

  FIND TORSO SLAYER’S

  10TH VICTIM IN RIVER

  Police Seek Head of Mad Knifer’s Prey

  Parts of the body of the 10th victim of Cleveland’s torso murderer were found cleanly dismembered in the Cuyahoga River today at the W. Third Street Bridge.

  —Cleveland Press, July 6, 1937, p. 1

  CHAPTER 25

  April 9, 1999

  “Can you describe the prowler?”

  “No, I didn’t see him,” Kris sighed and rubbed her forehead. “I told you. Last night around one thirty. I heard footsteps pacing outside my house. When I woke up this morning, this strange symbol was there.”