by D. Melhoff
16
Scott and Brynn thundered down the fort’s staircase, their feet pounding the carpet as the archery windows flickered by like slots in a zoetrope.
The stairway dumped them into the main vestibule. Across the foyer, Scott saw their group of kids waddling after Mai into the corridor that lead to the ballroom. Brynn ran after them, and he followed, then stopped.
His gaze whipped around the vestibule.
The fortress’s door stood straight ahead, sealed behind the portcullis. A suit of armor guarded the gate’s winch, while a second knight blocked the staircase to the fort’s basement.
“What are you doing?” Brynn called. “Everyone’s in the ballroom.”
Scott ignored her. He dashed to the suit of armor that was barricading the basement and placed his hands on the heavy base, tugging. “Uggh.” He pulled harder, and the veins on his forehead stuck out.
“Stop it,” Brynn shouted. She sprinted over and grabbed Scott’s arm, but he shook her off.
“If we’re right, it’s worse than we thought. We have to check.”
“Check what?”
Scrraaaaape! The suit of armor budged an inch, then another.
“Where are you—?” Brynn started, but it was no use. Scott slipped through the gap and disappeared down the dark staircase.
____
Scott didn’t slow down. His morbid curiosity drove him forward, refusing to brake as he plunged into the oily darkness of the underground passage and soared over the spiraling steps. The air stank like the cold storage room of a farmer’s cellar—or a decrepit crypt.
A glimmer of firelight crackled ahead. When he rounded the bend, he came face-to-face with a torch mounted on the wall. As he reached for its hilt, a hand materialized behind his back and seized his shoulder.
He swung around, knuckles balled into a fist…
It was Brynn. Eyes wide, pupils reflecting the flames. “What do you think you’re doing?” she panted. “Trying to lose me?”
“Not if you keep up.” He grabbed the torch and held it in front of him, peering into the shadows.
None of the usual basement sounds echoed in the abyss. No pipes or ductwork; no vents or furnaces. But it wasn’t silent, either. The wind crept through the ceiling and rode over the dusty floor, alternating between a shh-shh sound and a shrill whistle as it spun through the tight corridor like a breath of air whooshing through a trumpet mouthpiece. Click-click-click. Claws on stone. Scott pictured ruby-eyed mice watching from holes in the walls, thrumming their nails impatiently on the ground until the intruding giants passed by and they could go about their tenebrous business once again.
“Can you tell me where the hell you’re going? Scott? We need to—”
“They were arguing,” he said. “In the ballroom. Charlotte, Norma, and Ella were arguing. They said they’re down here.”
“Who’s down here?”
“The bodies.”
The sound of Brynn’s footsteps stopped behind him. “No,” she said, cold and even. “No. Take me upstairs. Now.”
“If you wanna go, go.”
“Stop it. This is insane.”
“Yes. It is.”
“Jesus, Scott, I don’t need to see any of my dead friends again.” There was anger in her voice now, as well as fear. “Once is enough. You saw Kimberly and Chase—we both did—and Dominique and Erin? They ODed. You were the one who found them in the first place.”
“I don’t know what I found anymore.”
Scott rushed deeper into the basement. A pause, then Brynn’s feet started after him. Neither of them spoke. They wound through the tunnel, mute, while the smells of soil and mildew grew more and more pungent. Another smell lurked beneath the earthy aroma too. Something’s burned, Scott thought, his nose wrinkling at the scent. Must be the smoke from these other torches. How long have they been out? And yet it wasn’t entirely smoke that he was detecting. It was something greasier. Sulfuric, almost.
Just as the odor reached its peak, the staircase dumped them into a circular chamber. It looked like a medieval prison—a place, no doubt, where counselors could bring unruly children to correct their behavior with a few idle threats and a straight-faced dungeon joke or two. Four cells lined the perimeter, each clad with iron bars.
Scott swung the torch in all directions, splashing vertical shadows off the serried rungs. He stepped closer to get a better view.
The first cell was bare except for a pile of straw and a pair of shackles hanging from the wall.
The second cell contained an emaciated leg, white as chalk, half-hidden around a corner to give the illusion of a dead prisoner sprawled across the floor. A mannequin limb, Scott dismissed.
It was the sight of the third cell that drove a knife into his gut. Inside, a row of bedsheets covered a dune of large, motionless lumps. He paused, counting the bulges. One, two, three…four? Where are five and six?
He reached out and tugged the bars open on their rusty hinges. The scrape of metal made Brynn jump; the bodies didn’t move.
“I can’t,” Brynn whispered, brushing away a tear.
“Stay here.”
Scott moved inside, bringing the torch with him. The outer chamber darkened, and he heard Brynn shuffling closer, right to the edge of the cell.
The shapes of the shrouds were good indicators of who was underneath, but not complete giveaways. Scott skirted to the end of the line and bent down, shining his torch over the first body. A dark complexion showed through the thread count. Dom. He reached for the edge of the sheet, but as soon as he touched the fabric, Dominique’s hand slipped from where it had been positioned on his stomach and fell to his side, striking the stone floor with a single, bony clack. Scott shuddered, and Brynn sucked back a sharp whimper.
All right. He worked himself up. You can do this. Three, two, one…
He tore the sheet away—
And sighed in relief. Dominique’s eyes were closed—Thank God for silver linings—and someone had dressed him in his underwear. Unlike when Scott had found him in the hut, however, there was no chance that Dominique was still alive. White blotches covered his torso, and every molecule of moisture had long evaporated from his lips.
Scott guessed that the next body was Erin’s, and when he tore the second sheet away, his suspicion was confirmed.
“Well?” Brynn whispered.
Scott studied the bodies side by side. “Poison…suffocating…overdose…” He focused on the insides of Dominique’s arms where a trail of dots ran up and down the varicose veins, not unlike the ones that had plagued many of his personal acquaintances over the years. A junkie’s trail to his own coffin, he thought. The needle highway. The thought stuck. His eyes drifted to Erin, and he noted a puncture mark on her left arm. “Needles,” he muttered. He used the corner of the sheet to pick up Dominique’s wrist and leaned in to examine the corpse’s fingertips. A trickle of sweat dripped off his forehead as he lowered Dominique’s hand and checked Erin’s next. “Jesus Christ,” he said, paralyzed on his haunches.
“What? What?”
“This is one twisted son of a bitch.”
The dungeon fell silent. Scott turned, his torch accenting a look of horror on Brynn’s face.
“The fucker injected them. In their fingertips.”
Another heavy pause.
“Lunatic,” Brynn said. “He—He’s on some psycho lunatic rampage—”
“No,” Scott said. “He’s not. Think about it. Why would you go through the effort of injecting victims or hanging them out of a building when you could shoot them and slip away faster?”
“Maybe he doesn’t have a gun.”
“Or maybe he had it planned out.”
“Planned? Scott, he’s crazy—”
“He’s not crazy. Or out of control. Or random. This guy’s telling a story.” Scott pointed at the white shrouds. “Dominique and Erin: fingers pricked like Sleeping Beauty. Chase and Kimberly: thrown out of the tower and blinded like the prince in �
�Rapunzel.’ Meegan and Bethany…”
Meegan and Bethany. He looked around the cell. Where are Meegan and Bethany? And then he heard a different voice (a woman’s voice—Ella’s) echoing from a recent memory: “I don’t suppose anyone else here is strong enough to…to do what he did to those poor girls. Hanging people is one thing, but…”
The voice jolted another memory—a fresher, olfactory one—and Scott sniffed in the pungent smell he had noted when they entered the dungeon. Burning. He stood up, an almost out-of-body sensation, and ducked past Brynn as if being pulled by the handle of his torch. He crossed to the fourth cell and lifted the flickering light, afraid but determined to see what the last chamber held.
Two more bedsheets lay inside. The figures underneath them were not arranged as neatly as the four in the previous cell.
Scott entered and pulled back the sheets.
“Oh my God.”
The faces of Meegan and Bethany were twisted into white rictuses: eyes peeled open, blood vessels bulging out of their foreheads and temples. They hadn’t died quickly. Their deaths had been long and painful, and when Scott’s gaze trailed to the floor, he saw why.
The skin below the girls’ kneecaps no longer existed. What little fat their legs had possessed was gone too, and the majority of their muscles and ligaments had melted away to reveal denuded patches of white, calcified bone. Blisters the size of golf balls bubbled up in roiling clusters along their hips, and nothing but scraps of rubber remained around the mutilated stumps where their feet had once kicked and squirmed and writhed—almost dancing—when their shoes had been set on fire.
Visions flashed across Scott’s mind: guards with red-hot iron boots, peasants in a pencil-shaded ceremony, an evil queen crying out in agony.
“Snow White.”
He stumbled backward and careened into Brynn, who hadn’t looked into the cell yet.
“Don’t!” He grabbed her shoulders and swung her the other direction.
“Scott? Scott! Are you okay?”
Scott keeled over and clutched his knees, unsure if he could stop himself from vomiting. “He’s trying…” He panted. “To teach us…” Another cough, another hack. “A lesson.”
“Teach who a lesson? Scott, why would anybody do this to innocent kids? Scott?”
“Counselors.”
“What?”
“Not kids. Counselors.”
“Christ, what difference does it make?”
“The murders,” he said, an epiphany pulling closer into focus. “They’re—they’re all from the stories. He’s tying them to fairy-tale morals.”
“It doesn’t make any sense. Scott, it doesn’t make sense. Why?”
Scott closed his eyes. He saw the ashen faces of Meegan and Bethany—the emaciated girls—staring back from behind their peeling flesh and dripping mascara. “Vanity,” he muttered.
“Huh?”
“Meegan and Bethany were anorexic.”
“What does that have to do with—”
“No matter how much they starved themselves,” he ran a hand over the back of his neck, thoughts racing faster, “they were never good enough in their own eyes. There was always someone thinner, someone prettier. Same as the queen in ‘Snow White’—and they met the same ending.”
“But…no. No, what about the others? What did Kimberly and Chase ever do to anybody?”
“Nothing.” Scott looked at the third cell. “It’s what they did with each other. Lovers shacking up in a tower sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it?”
“Dom?” she asked. “And Erin?”
A beat. “Touching shit they shouldn’t be messing with. ‘Sleeping Beauty.’”
Brynn scanned the cells, assessing the bodies within them. When Scott straightened up, she caught his arm and said, barely above a whisper, “This isn’t over yet, is it?”
“No.” Scott tried swallowing, but his throat had gone bone-dry. “I think it’s just getting started.”
“We need to warn—” But before Brynn could finish, Scott was already bolting for the staircase.
____
Scott emerged from the basement and jammed his torch into an empty sconce. He took one step in the direction of the ballroom, hesitated, then stopped.
Something’s wrong.
He wheeled around as Brynn soared through the archway behind him. “What time is it?”
She checked her watch. “Eight fifteen.” The confusion on her face dissolved into dread. “Wasn’t everyone supposed to meet at eight o’clock? Before leaving for dinner?”
Scott opened his mouth to respond, when—as if striking a grievous cue—a child’s scream echoed in the distance.
“That’s—”
“Outside.”
They raced to the fifteen-foot doors in the vestibule, and Scott grabbed one of the massive handles, noting that the portcullis had already been raised. He pulled, but the door didn’t budge. He reefed again—once, twice.
“Scott. Look.”
Brynn pointed at a beam of moonlight slipping between two wooden boards. Scott moved closer, peering at a tiny crack as the screaming crescendoed behind the stout panels, and realized he was looking at a smaller doorframe—a wicket door meant for fast escapes—carved into the surface. He reached out and tapped the hidden door, and it drifted open with an effortless creak.
The scream—Or is it screams?—rode into the fort and tripled in volume.
“Hurry!” Brynn shouted.
Scott ducked outside and veered onto a path that led to Storybook Square.
The sun had vanished below the treetops, leaving nothing but a purple twilight glow. With every millisecond, every leap forward, the woods grew darker and darker. Only one light wasn’t dying. The mess hall. Scott dug his chin to his chest and pushed toward the screams, not knowing or even looking to check if Brynn was keeping up behind him.
The gravel path transformed into grass and then cobblestone. He swerved right, launching himself at the source of the yelling, and buttonhooked the Seven Dwarfs fountain.
The mess hall appeared straight ahead, a glowing beacon in the night.
He bulleted forward, hands raised, and braced himself for the slam of the door…
But the slam came early. The hall burst open, and a searing backdraft blasted into his face. He pinched his eyes half shut as all fifty-five of the camp’s children spilled out of the building in one terrified mass, wailing and scattering helter-skelter into the shadows of the square.
Scott didn’t stop. He moved faster, struggling against the crowd—forcing one kid after another out of his way—and stepped into the mess hall.
The room was deserted.
Shattered glass and broken bowls lay strewn across the floor like shrapnel from a violent food fight. The condiments station was knocked over in a gory pool of ketchup, mustard, and hot sauce, and a stainless-steel cutlery rack had been tipped on its side and used to block the door to the kitchen.
That’s where the screaming’s coming from, he realized. The kitchen.
“Scott! Don’t go back there!”
Scott turned to see Lance leaning in the hall’s doorway. “Who is it?” he demanded. “Who’s—?”
“I—I tried helping her,” Lance stammered, sweat streaking down his forehead in heavy torrents. “It was too late. No one knew until she started screaming.”
Ignoring the warning, Scott ran for the shutters that separated the dining room from the kitchen. He yanked on the knobs as the shrieking swelled higher and higher into banshee-like whistles. Dammit, it’s latched! He hammered on the slats with both fists and the wood buckled, cracking off the frame with every blow.
Bang…bang…BANG!
The shutters blew open, and Scott coughed as smoke gushed into his face, filling his lungs with the putrescent—and familiar—stench of burning flesh.
He covered his mouth and staggered back at the sight of the kitchen’s giant brick oven. Flames billowed inside like demonic imps, and in the center of the confl
agration lay the enormous—almost unrecognizable—carcass of Ella Ross. Strands of fat hung off her skull in long, tarry ropes, while jets of steam screeched though her nostrils and ears and eye sockets, attempting to escape the woman’s cranial chamber through any available route. The pressure was too great. Ella’s jaw joints snapped, and the cook’s mouth dropped open, screaming like a human teapot.
17
The screams issuing from Ella’s skull echoed in Scott’s ears as he whirled around and went stumbling for the mess hall’s doors. He was half-aware of someone tugging on his wrist, but the sensation seemed distant and wraithlike: a ghostly dream figure pulling him out of the hall before he could think to mobilize his own feet.
Then he was outside. His knees buckled, but there was that strength again, gripping his arm, holding him up.
“Sister…my sister…”
Brynn, he thought. She wasn’t just holding his arm—she was shaking it.
“Sister…tell me…did you see…? Oh God, Stephy, oh please, God.”
Scott looked at the mess hall again and pictured the wave of children bursting through its doors. His gaze shifted to the empty streets and then to the silhouette of the fort leering over the square. Without a word, he shook himself free of Brynn’s grasp and started north.
“Where are you going?” she asked, panicked.
“Back to safety. Move it.”
Brynn grabbed his shoulder and swung him around. “What about the kids? What about my sister?”
“It’s the counselors who are in trouble, not the kids. You know that.”
“Are you serious?”
“As long as we’re here, we’re targets,” Scott said. “We’ve gotta get back to the fort and find a way to get the upper hand on this freak. Catch him off guard, draw him out during the day—”
“We don’t even know who he is.”
“Bruce. Jack the Ripper. The Bogeyman. It doesn’t matter. Someone’s in control of this sick slaughter camp, and I swear to God I won’t be the next guy to cross his path. Let’s go.” He snatched her wrist and tried pulling her away from the mess hall.
“Get off me,” Brynn yelled. “Get…Get off.”
She writhed free, stumbling backward, and dodged Scott’s second attempt to grab her arm. “Run away, asshole,” she hollered, dashing in the opposite direction of the fort. “Just leave us and run!”