Where Stars Won't Shine

by Patrick Lacey

  Amy was pinned to the ground by what looked like a little girl. She couldn’t have been older than ten, yet she held Amy in place without effort. The girl’s lips were ruined, shredded so her teeth were visible even when she closed her mouth. She giggled as Amy struggled.

  These were not just any dead people. They were Tucker’s victims, those he’d slaughtered when he came back home. These were the same people she’d seen back at the hotel, clapping inside of the television studio that should not have existed. Jacob with his bloody axe. Annabelle with her severed head. All of them dead and resurrected at the hand of Tucker Ashton.

  Ivy didn’t have to ask where they were being taken. Not that the man without the jaw could’ve answered. Tucker wanted them scattered. There was strength in numbers. It was perhaps their only hope of escape. But now they were separated and that last bit of hope fled out of Ivy like a scab being torn away.

  And scabs, Ivy knew, left quite nasty scars.

  EIGHTEEN

  MARIAH CALLED THE cops again. This time they listened. This time they put out an alert. Not that it would help. It had been a full two days and Ivy had ignored all of her texts and calls, the latter of which went straight to voicemail.

  Before she’d made the decision to fly to Marlowe, Mariah had called the town’s only hotel. She felt stupid for not thinking to do so earlier. She could at least verify Ivy had checked in. In fact, it was something the cops should have suggested to begin with. She thought again of the fat woman on the phone, smirking while she did her crossword, trying not to laugh as the crazy lady talked about Tucker Ashton.

  She waited an eternity while the phone rang into her ear, yet no one picked up. She did some research, Googled the place, only to find it had no website. The more she looked into it, the more her desperation grew. Until she found her answer in an old newspaper article. The headline chilled her.

  Hotel Marlowe Closes Its Doors.

  It appeared the building had shut down not long after the massacre. There had been such a decline in tourism the owners couldn’t sustain their business.

  She shook her head, told herself she was tired, perhaps reading the words wrong. She searched more, found similar articles all proving the same thing.

  Wherever Ivy had gone, it wasn’t to the hotel.

  Unless she chose an empty, dusty room to use as her final resting place.

  Mariah tried to shove the thoughts away but they were persistent. She couldn’t help but feel guilty. She’d been supportive of her sister but not overly so. She’d invited Ivy into her home for what was meant to be months, not years. She’d done the chores, bought the groceries, and supported her sister financially. Yet she hadn’t done it for the right reasons. In the back of her mind, Scott had always been there, dripping with sweat and nibbling her neck. Their six nights together had stayed with her like a growth, some terminal lump she desperately needed to remove. It was the guilt that made her take Ivy in, not concern for her sister’s well-being.

  But none of that mattered now, she thought as she drove the rental (not a PT Cruiser but a Kia something-or-other that felt cheaply made and ready to fall apart) past the green sign that chilled her even worse than the newspaper article.

  Not cute, she thought while reading the words. Or, more specifically, the words that hadn’t been spray-painted over.

  Last stop.

  She drove for several minutes along a wooded road, telling herself this was all just a mix up. Ivy had gone away to a tropical island somewhere. She was sipping fruity cocktails and soaking up the sun instead of lying dead in an abandoned hotel.

  Up ahead Marlowe came into view. It wasn’t the ghost town she’d expected but it wasn’t a raging metropolis either. There were cars parked along Main Street, the occasional shoppers stepping in and out of stores, but no one looked particularly happy. She wondered if those that had stayed behind would ever feel at home. How did you get over something like that? Did the teachers at Columbine ever feel safe again or did they look over their shoulders each morning before homeroom?

  She spotted the hotel. It was hard to miss, standing much taller than every other structure in Marlowe. She parked, stepped outside, and shivered. The temperature hadn’t been this cold at Logan. She was sure of it.

  It was getting dark, the sun moving farther into the trees. She hurried toward the front door of the hotel, stepping under the marquee that reminded her of decades gone by. She moved quickly, didn’t want to stick around come nightfall.

  No, you don’t get to run away because you’re scared. Your sister—if she’s even alive—needs you right now. Keep telling yourself you’re strong if that’s what it takes.

  She stopped at the front doors and felt like crying. It came as no surprise they were boarded up. Some part of her had hoped the article was a prank. She tried to peer between the slats of wood but whoever sealed the place up had done a good job.

  From her left, someone cleared their throat. Her heart jumped. She expected to see something inhuman, something with an impossibly large mouth filled with impossibly large teeth. Instead it was a short man with a bowtie. His hair was gray, thinning with age, and he reminded her of an English professor. “Can I help you, miss?”

  She shook her head, then nodded. “Maybe you can. Is there another hotel in town?”

  He smiled, as if she were playing a joke, then seemed to realize just how serious she was. “Afraid not. There was a bed and breakfast a few miles down the road. A woman by the name of Angie opened it. But as you can imagine, it didn’t drum up a whole lot of business. She closed shop after a few months.”

  “Then where does someone stay if they come here? If they aren’t from here.”

  He shrugged. “Nowhere. Miss, you do know where you are, right? This is—”

  She held up her hands. “I’m well aware. It’s just … I’m supposed to meet someone here. I’m having trouble finding them.”

  “Quite an odd place to meet. Are you sure they didn’t say Ipswich or Essex? Both are just down the road.”

  She winced against the migraine. She’d taken several Excedrin earlier. Her symptoms had lessened but they remained in the background, taunting her with each mile she traveled. “I’m positive. It’s here, in this town, and she’s missing.”

  “Who is?”

  “My sister.”

  “Maybe she’s just running late. Maybe she doesn’t know the hotel’s condemned and will probably be tore down if anyone gets around to caring.”

  She wanted to tell him he didn’t know what he was talking about. Her sister was inside those condemned walls this very moment, preparing to take her own life if she hadn’t already. But she didn’t have the heart to snap at the man. His eyes had a kindness she hadn’t seen in quite some time. His smile allowed her to take her first deep breath since landing. “Did you know him?”

  His smile contorted. “I’m guessing you mean the Ashton boy.”

  She nodded. “I didn’t mean to touch a nerve. You probably get that a lot. I bet plenty of sickos come here, to the scene of the crime, asking all about what happened.”

  “You’d be surprised. There was some of that after it first happened but it’s tapered off. The occasional ghost hunter travels through, searching for evil spirits but they always leave empty handed.”

  She looked into the distance. The sun was fading quickly. “No ghosts in Marlowe, huh?”

  “I’m not sure I believe in ghosts but if they do exist, they’d be someplace like this, where something senseless happened to innocent people. But if I were a ghost, I wouldn’t want to be bothered. I’d keep to myself.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Me too. I’m sorry I wasted your time. It’s getting late and my eyes are closing.”

  “Not a bother at all.” He patted her on the shoulder. The gesture reminded her of her grandmother, in the ground ten years now. No matter how hysterical Mariah had been, no matter how big of a fight she’d gotten into with Ivy, her grammy was able to calm her down with nothing more tha
n a touch. “I hope you find what you’re looking for. And I hope it’s somewhere other than here.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  She made to leave but he held onto her arm. “I did know him. The Ashton boy, I mean. Not well but I knew him. I was running late that night. I work in the city. Traffic is a bitch if you’ll excuse my French, especially driving somewhere so far out of the way. When I came home my door had been busted open. Nothing had been taken or destroyed. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Not until later that night when I heard the sirens. They were everywhere, in every direction, and they didn’t stop for hours. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I still hear those things. Or maybe it’s just my ears ringing. I knew he was a bad seed. I just didn’t know how bad until that night. I’ve thanked God for rush hour on more than one occasion and I haven’t complained about traffic since.”

  The man looked at something behind Mariah. She was certain that if she turned, she wouldn’t like the source of his interest. Then, as if his face had never looked worried, he was the cute, little English professor once more. All smiles and wisdom. He was good at hiding his fear. “Have a great evening.”

  He walked away, whistling some tune she couldn’t place.

  When he was gone, Mariah looked again at the boards sealing her from the hotel’s interior, wondered if there was another way in, wondered if it was worth looking.

  Wondered where the hell her sister had gone.

  The following excerpts were taken from Charles Williamson’s Birth of a Monster, published on the day of his death.

  The night Tucker Ashton came back to Marlowe, it rained torrents into the streets. Several road crews had been called out to deal with flooding. A few streets were closed to traffic. The police were busy with calls of their own, as was the fire department. Basements had been ruined. Animals had been trapped. The residents of Marlowe recall the storm as a nightmare, though that is a term much more fitting for what happened next.

  It is still unclear how long Tucker was in Marlowe before he went on his final—and most infamous—killing spree. Before his disappearance, he gave several different answers. First, he told officials it had been mere hours. Then it was days. Then even months (which does not add up with the timeline of his trip across the country). The reason for this discrepancy was not to confuse those that interviewed him. The reason, he claimed on more than one occasion, was simple.

  He couldn’t be certain. Time, according to Tucker Ashton, moved differently in his hometown. He could not explain the phenomenon, yet he knew it to be true. One recurring theme during his many interrogations was the idea that Marlowe had called him back. He’d felt such an urge to return, he became sickly. Except when Tucker did return, he was let down. Some part of him believed the town would be different, changed somehow. He expected, no matter how irrational, to come home and be accepted, to be noticed. Never mind that, at this point, he was the nation’s most wanted killer.

  He went on record claiming he would “build his own Marlowe,” his own version of the place into which he’d been born. There, he would be in control of everyone and everything. If there had been any doubts of Tucker having lost touch with reality, they were shattered.

  The rain worked to Tucker’s advantage that night. He did not believe in miracles until he saw the storm clouds hovering over the town. He moved quickly from victim to victim. Investigators still question if he truly worked alone. His actions were too precise. Surely a single man couldn’t kill so many people within a few hours.

  The first victim was a man named Terrence Hawkins. He was walking his dog several blocks away from his home on Peabody Street, visiting the closest mailbox to drop off his cable bill. Terrence would turn seventy-five the following week. He and technology did not get along well. Friends and family offered several times to help set him up with online banking but each time he refused.

  His dog, a cocker spaniel with three legs, was the first to notice Tucker rushing them. The knife cut so deep and clean into Terrence’s temple, the coroner believed his death was instant. Others would not be so lucky.

  Next was Jacob Matheson, proprietor of Jacob’s Pub, one of only two bars in town and the most popular by a landslide. Jacob was known to forget about carding quite often, which drew in teens from surrounding towns. It is also the place where Brad Ashton spent much of his time after Diana’s death. Brad was, Jacob used to say, one of his biggest customers. That night, business was slow on account of the storm. When there hadn’t been a patron in nearly a half hour, Jacob opened the back door and smoked a cigarette. According to his wife, he had been considering selling the pub and retiring. He rarely hired help and, as he reminded everyone who would listen, he was getting too old.

  He did not hear Tucker enter the front door, despite the creaky floor. The rain was much too loud at that point. Nor did he hear Tucker as he stepped past the bathroom and office, past the kitchen, and lodged an axe (taken from the emergency case near the jukebox) into his back. His spine was severed instantly.

  The third was a girl named Tanya Gomez. She was waiting for the bus, had stayed at school late that night. She was the head of the senior Spanish club and was nearly done planning their annual trip to Madrid. Her grades were flawless. She had been accepted to Stanford early, set to study medicine. She was found hours later with a slice from her sternum to pelvis, the wound reminiscent of an autopsy procedure. The rain washed much of her blood into a nearby sewer grate.

  The third and fourth victims were Sasha and Michelle Clancy. They were not related, their mutual last names simply a coincidence. It was a running joke between the couple. If they ever got married—and according to their friends, they spoke of it often—they would save time and paperwork. They had pulled over once the storm grew worse, visibility poor, to put it lightly. Tucker opened the passenger side door and hauled Michelle to the curb. She was the driver in the relationship but had recently undergone surgery for webbed feet. Tucker did not use a weapon. He bashed her head to the ground several times before using his feet to stomp on her neck. Before Sasha could unbuckle, Tucker stepped back into the car, pushed her outside, and repeated the process.

  Perhaps the most vicious death that night was Annabelle Perkins. She’d been working the front desk at Hotel Marlowe, the only hotel in town aside from a small, short-lived bed and breakfast. The hotel’s generator began to malfunction because of the weather. The lights flickered. She called her manager and was told to reset the machinery. The controls were in a small shed several yards from the back of the hotel. On her way out she tripped and split her head open on the wet gravel. When she attempted to get back up, Tucker held her down with a foot, leaving his right hand free to pull her hair and his left hand to saw through her neck (using a knife taken from the hotel’s kitchen) until she was decapitated.

  Her head was never found.

  The body count rose at an exponential rate. It is estimated that Tucker killed a resident of Marlowe every five minutes, which is why many believe he enlisted some sort of help, though he denied the claim.

  He’d simply grown more efficient, he insisted.

  Police were called in from several surrounding communities, as well as state officials. The FBI did not arrive on the scene until Tucker had been detained. He was found in the basement of his childhood home, after first visiting his mother’s grave, where he left a single rose. It lay wilted and shriveled from the flooding.

  Tucker would later admit he planned on killing his father, whom he blamed for his mother’s death. He knew this to be irrational, that a random act of violence had ended her life, but he could not stare into Brad Ashton’s face without seeing Diana’s open casket, her face very much not at peace. Tucker was shocked to learn the house had been put on the market one month after he left Marlowe. His father moved to an apartment complex for low-income families. There he lived until his eventual stroke landed him in a nearby nursing and rehabilitation center.

  He searched through the old home until finally
venturing into the basement, the place where he’d spent so much time as a child. It was there his madness was born and nurtured and it was there he was found after taking so many lives. All his belongings had since been removed, aside from one item. It lay in the closet, in a particularly dark corner. A single potato. It had rotted beyond return, black and bruised and misshapen. It reminded Tucker of a tumor, yet he found it beautiful, felt compelled to hold it like a child, sit cross-legged on the moist carpet (the rain had seeped through two of the windows), and wait to be found.

  He did not resist arrest when police arrived thirty minutes later. He held his hands out and smiled as he was cuffed and taken to the cruiser outside.

  The rain continued to pour and Tucker’s miracle storm clouds held steady over Marlowe.

  NINETEEN

  FOR A LONG time there was nothing. Blackness. Pure and simple. No corpses or killers, no blood or screaming. That was not to say Ivy Longwood felt safe in this void. If anything, she was on edge, uncertain if she was still alive or if she’d died back there, being dragged by a walking impossibility.

  In the nothingness she fell forever. Vertigo surrounded her. It became obvious after a while. She’d fallen into the infinite crack surrounding Marlowe. She’d been taken from the others and tossed into a pit that was, she assumed, never-ending.

  Of course it is, she thought. Ethan tossed a rock in, remember? It didn’t make a sound. Not a peep. It just kept on sinking into who knows where. There is no end to anything. Not this nightmare, not your grief, not even life.

  She supposed this could’ve been death itself. Oddly enough, she didn’t often think on the subject, though it surrounded her on a daily basis. Ever since Scott and his damned ellipsis and the blood that was very much fake in the real world but very much real in this fake world, she’d tried not to think about what came after. Some part of her hoped, on those sleepless nights that so often visited her, she would see all of her lost loved ones again. It was a pleasant notion no matter how quickly it usually faded.