Isolation: a gripping psychological suspense thriller full of twists

by Sarah K Stephens

  I’d just been to check on the plants in the greenhouse, and was feeling a little giddy that the treatment was working. I’ll be planting everything tomorrow, as long as the front holds off tonight. Brenna said we have enough food to last us until our crops start to yield something, but part of me thinks that she’s spinning the situation.

  She really wants me to come to this dinner party tonight. I hadn’t planned to go though, because there’s so much work to do out here and I don’t really fit with everyone from the main house. Except for Mark, but he’s not really going to be the belle of the ball tonight now, is he?

  “Brenna cast me out of the kitchen,” Margot explained as she walked up to the stables. “She apparently needs total control while she’s cooking.” Margot’s face had been distant, a combination of disappointment and relief. “Could I go for a ride, do you think?”

  She reached up to stroke Jasmine’s nose. “I need to clear my head.”

  How could I say no to that?

  So we suited up my two best girls and headed out. I wasn’t about to let anyone near my horses alone.

  Julie’s breath comes harder as we canter along the edge of the field near the woods. There are lots of sticks down the closer we get to the tree line, and I call out to Margot to steer Jasmine further into the field. One misstep could catch a hoof or a leg, and horses don’t come back from broken bones.

  Margot hears me and nods, taking the reins in her hands and turning them away from the ancient pines and Douglas firs. A few maples are starting to bud, and the mixture makes the forest look like one of those paintings of dots that come together into an image the further you get from it.

  Time to get back and admire the view from a distance, I think. I lean over and give an encouraging command in Julie’s ear, promising her a few cubes of sugar—not too many, we’re rationing, of course—when we get back.

  As Margot makes the turn though, I watch Jasmine rear up on her hind legs. She’s massive, like a thunderstorm bottled into the body of an animal. Every muscle flexes, and her silky fur shivers in waves of angry muscle.

  Margot loses her grip and falls. When her body hits the ground it makes a thud so dull that it’s like an insult to gravity. I try to stop myself, but all my mind can think of is dropping a sack of feed onto the floor—that bulbous round sound of something inanimate collapsing in on itself.

  I halt Julie and immediately rush over to Margot. Both horses know the way home, and they pair up together quickly and start running away from the forest and back to the stable.

  Margot’s head is bloody, her arm bent in a strange angle behind her back. It might be broken, or she might have only fallen on it hard.

  I call out her name. I bend down and listen for her breath.

  She’s breathing, she’s in pain, but she can respond to what I’m saying.

  She winces as she tries to gather a deeper breath.

  I bend over to pick her up, thinking that I can carry her back to the stable—that I can’t leave her here all alone. She says something, too raspy at first for me to understand it.

  As I pick her up and find my way through the field as fast as I can without jostling her broken arm, Margot says it again, more clearly this time.

  “Did you see him?” she asks. “In the forest. Did you see him watching us?”

  20

  Mark

  The band of light arcs across the ceiling towards the right-hand corner of the room.

  My hands and feet are locked in the straps sewn into the side of my bed. The restraints are there for my own protection, I’ve been told.

  I remember that, at least.

  I think I’m alone, but then someone emerges from the corner. It’s hard to make out their face because they’re backlit into darkness by the window behind them. I try to make a guess from the way they carry themselves, but I know it’s futile.

  My mind is becoming a rabbit warren of blank spaces.

  Soon enough I’ll be lucky to remember my own name.

  I watch as they put on gloves. As they ready the needle and prepare the IV bag to give me whatever substance du jour they’ve decided on.

  They tell me they’re curing me, one dose at a time. I don’t know if this is what they always tell me, or if this is a special revelation only meant for today.

  There’s no way to know if it’s true.

  My mind trips.

  A stumble, a two-step shuffle, and then I’m gone, swallowed whole by the plans somebody has for me, into a deep and troubled sleep.

  21

  Felix

  “Why is he tied up?” My mother’s strangled voice leaps out from the intercom speakers in my room. In all the rooms of the house.

  “Margot, why is he tied up?” she shouts again. The air crackles with static and there’s shuffling on the other end before the line goes blank. I move away from my telescope and move towards my doorway, but when I open it Daphne’s there staring at me like a child in a Stephen King novel, blue dress and pinafore and perfectly tamed ringlets.

  “Why’s Mom yelling?” she asks.

  “I don’t know.” I brush her aside and head towards Dad’s end of the house. As I run through the hallway, down the main stairwell, and over the foyer into the separate wing with the keypad and blinking lights, I feel Daphne trail behind me. Not quite as fast, since her legs are shorter than mine, and also because she seems a little sulky. We haven’t made up since our fight in the panic room. Not really, although I apologized and then Mom made me apologize again.

  When we get to Dad’s rooms, the doors are wide open and Mom’s standing at the intercom, her white apron stained with streaks of red and brown and her hair tied into a wild bun on top of her head. I’ve never seen her like this. I didn’t know she owned an apron.

  Greta does, but hers are all colors and patterns. Mom’s looks like something a surgeon would wear in the old Victorian shows Greta would watch sometimes on the TV in the kitchen while she made dinner.

  Mom sees us and her face is like a shade coming down—or going up, depending on how you look at it. She shakes her head, smiles, and motions for us to come in.

  “Everything’s fine, sweethearts. I’m trying to find Margot. Have you seen her?”

  I think back to what I saw through the telescope lens earlier today, before Mom did an all-points bulletin across the entire house. Part of me wants to tell her. Get it all out there. But another part knows it’d be better to keep it to myself. She already looks terrified.

  I glance over at Daphne, who blinks her huge doe-eyes and tips her chin up towards Mom. “I think she went horseback riding with Tobias,” she tells Mom. Blink, blink.

  I stay quiet. I’m not certain of what I saw, anyway. And we’re safe inside the house. That’s why we have alarms and locks and keypads. I don’t want to make Mom worry more than she already is.

  Mom runs a hand through her hair, but she must have forgotten that she tied it up because her fingers catch on the elastic band. Most of her hair comes undone as she pulls her hand back down, and she snatches at the band to pull it out completely. It makes a ripping noise, and she winces as some strands stay stuck in the clasp of the elastic.

  “I was just making dinner.” Mom gestures to her apron with her other hand, shoving the hair tie into an unseen pocket in her pants.

  “It smells delicious,” Daphne says, and I want to punch her for it. There’s nothing to smell but plastic packaging and expensive disinfectant. If I got close enough to Dad I could probably smell his cologne, which I think Mom or Margot sprays on him in the mornings, but I don’t want to see Dad right now. The corner of his bed is visible from where we’re standing in the outer room, but I don’t hear any movement and he doesn’t call out to us.

  Mom follows my gaze.

  “Your father’s resting,” she tells us. “I really need to find Margot.”

  There’s a slam from somewhere in the house, and then two sets of steps rushing around.

  Mom freezes, only for a split
second. Then she whirls into action. She jumps in front of Daphne and me and propels the door closed with both hands. It’s quiet for a moment, and I hear the soft hum of the locks engaging.

  “Get inside with your father,” she tells us, and Daphne and I obey.

  “Is it happening again?” Daphne asks. “Are they coming for him?”

  They are the whole reason we have all the security in the house, especially around where Dad is. Right when he first got sick, a group of people tried to break in and kidnap him. Mom’s never really told me the specifics, and I somehow managed to sleep through the entire thing. The next day though, there were police cars and an ambulance with a big black bag covering a stretcher. I didn’t realize it at the time, and Greta pulled me away from the window when she caught me staring out at what was happening, but of course it was a body underneath that cover.

  When I looked everything up online afterwards, it turned out that I was only seeing the last of the dead men.

  Mom’s gone for what feels like an hour but I realize is probably only twenty or thirty seconds—I read in one of my books that time is relative, and I feel like that’s especially true when you think something terrible is happening. When she comes back she races past us and runs into the bathroom in the other room. I want to scream out to her, and ask her why she’s leaving us again, but this time she’s back in another second.

  There’s something dark and angled in her hand. It takes me a moment to realize what it is, and Daphne beats me to it.

  “Mom, why do you have a gun?” She sounds more excited than frightened.

  That’s when the banging on the door starts.

  Mom holds the gun between her hands, pointed at the door like someone in an action movie. She won’t take her eyes off the door.

  None of us can.

  Except for Dad, I notice. He just stares blankly up at a streak of light on the ceiling.

  22

  Margot

  I know what I saw.

  That’s what I tell Tobias through strangled gasps of air while he carries me to the main house. I know there’s no other way for me to get back, but I can’t help but flinch a little when he first goes to touch me. There are so many images swirling in my head, and one of them is Tobias staring with those dead, sleepwalker eyes at me from the corner of my room.

  Nearby the two horses trot towards the stables. They went ahead of us at first, eager to get away from what we spotted in the woods, but now they seem to hang back. My horse keeps turning her head with her long neck, one round eye peering back until she finds Tobias and me hobbling along. Then she shifts to the front, and canters a few feet further into the meadow.

  Tobias makes a whistling sound through his teeth, and both brown heads turn and their hooves stop. He repeats it, ending it louder and on an up-tone this time, and both horses pause for a heartbeat before they move together like one huge animal and trot to the barn. It takes them only a few seconds, it seems, before they’re safely swallowed into their stables. I know I’m imagining it, but I swear I could hear the scrape and click of the stable door closing behind them, as though one of them was able to do it with their mind or had suddenly sprouted arms along with their improbably long legs.

  Tobias grunts as he readjusts the weight of me across his shoulders. He’s carrying me like a bride on her wedding day. My mother had a photo in her bedroom where my father held her the way Tobias is holding me. They were both smiling these wide grins, and the photo had little white speckles across it, which Teresa told me later were bits of confetti that people threw as Mom and my father left the church. I’ve seen a bunch of wedding photos since then—mostly on Facebook or Instagram, granted—and I’ve realized that it was strange for him to be carrying my mother out of the church. Most couples walk hand in hand.

  It feels like a prediction, my mother needing to be carried into her marriage rather than walking out, equal and ready.

  “We need to get you back to the house. You need to rest.”

  “I know what I saw,” I tell Tobias again. I peer over his shoulder, the scruffy wool of his plaid shirt rubbing on the corner of my cheek. The forest looks abandoned. It’s just nature, and wind, and tall grasses waving along.

  There’s no dark figure, reaching out from the edge.

  But I wasn’t the only one who saw it.

  “The horses saw them,” I add. I cough and a piercing flash of pain ripples around my chest. “I think a few of my ribs are broken.”

  Tobias stops. We’re about fifty yards from the house. It’s not a long distance, but it’s long enough. His breaths come in deeper pulls, and beads of sweat have collected on his forehead. We’ve gone about a mile from where Jasmine threw me.

  “Horses are easily frightened.” He sets me down on my feet, looking into my eyes as a way of asking if I can handle standing for a few moments. I nod and he keeps a hold on my arm as I find my footing. Another sharp bolt of pain traces itself up the right side of my chest.

  Probably three, maybe four ribs.

  It’s going to be hell to heal these up, I think. And then another thought flashes through my mind. Who will take care of Mark? Why was I so stupid, letting my cabin fever get the best of me?

  I look up ahead at the house, its grey stone looming up like a monolith against the bright blue sky. Only a few clouds cover the wide expanse. If people weren’t dying all over this country, it would be a beautiful day.

  “So you think your horses got spooked by a shadow or something?” Tobias’ grip tightens on me, and I fight the urge to squirm as I keep talking. “You think I’m seeing things?”

  He pulls me closer to him, and for a brief moment it flashes through my mind that he’s going to kiss me and that I’ll have to fight him off with my broken ribs and my shaking, adrenaline-laced hands. But he doesn’t kiss me.

  Instead, he pulls me up into his arms, gentle as ever but still making me wince as my broken body realigns itself. “We need to get you back to the house.”

  “There’s someone out there, Tobias.” I don’t know why, because we are in an open field and there’s nobody around within hearing distance, but I whisper the words in his ear.

  “The mind plays weird tricks sometimes,” he responds, walking faster as we get closer to the house.

  I have to say it. My heart drums, remembering the outline of the figure I saw in the woods. The heft to the shoulders. And the cough, mild, and rattled with the leaves in the breeze blowing through as Jasmine bucked me off.

  “Are you sure…” I pause, and Tobias seems to ignore what I’m saying or be willing to let me fill the silence. His arms are warm against my back and legs, where he’s supporting my weight as he takes me back to Granfield.

  “Never can be sure of anything,” he whispers back to me. The wind whips up again and snatches the last few syllables such that I have to assume what he said. He could have said “everything”, or “anyone”. I don’t know.

  I start again. We’re almost to the back patio, and I hope the slashes of pain wracking my body will lessen once we’re on more solid ground, and Tobias doesn’t have to navigate the bumpy undergrowth of the field.

  “Are you sure that Darren is gone?”

  I can picture perfectly the dark imprint of the man in the woods. I’m certain it was a man. The figure was too big to be a woman. In the field, I swear I smelled a whiff of tobacco. The horses smelled it too, I think. Motor oil and freshly turned earth hung on the air.

  My father smoked. That’s what my sisters told me.

  Darren did too, from what I can remember of seeing him out around the estate.

  We’ve come to the patio, and Tobias almost hurls my body onto the ground, only at the last moment catching me up with his hands and lowering me with a bit more pressure.

  He looks at me and his face is ashen, his mouth a grim divider. He looks certain of something, but his eyes are weak and liquid. It’s like his body has mixed two pieces of his life, past and present on the same face.

  �
�I’m sure,” he says.

  And he wrenches the door open and calls into the cool dark air of the house.

  23

  Felix

  “Where’s Daphne,” Mom screams. “Oh my God, where’s my baby girl?”

  Daphne’s standing right behind Mom, but it’s like she can’t see her. Mom’s eyes track across the room, staring blankly at the corners and walls. The gun in her hand glints under the special recessed lighting, and I see Daphne watching it with her eyes.

  She doesn’t move to knock Mom out of her trance, or whatever it is that’s happening to our mother. My sister stands there, a look on her face that is pinched and, more than anything, mean. She looks kind of disgusted that our Mom is freaking out.

  Not that anyone likes each other much at this point.

  But we love each other. That’s what family does. Dad reminded us of that all the time, before he got sick and had trouble focusing his thoughts. When you’re family, you love each other. No matter what.

  I have to remind myself of that sometimes, because it can be hard for me to feel things that other people feel. Like right now, Mom is screaming for Daphne and frightened about who is out there, and I seem to be relatively fine. Although, for some reason I can’t really tell you, I don’t tell Mom that Daphne is right behind her. I keep letting her stare wildly out in front of her.

  The voices come through the walls again, but they aren’t loud, although there are rushing footsteps alongside them, which makes me think that either someone is running towards us but trying to sneak along at the same time—which is unlikely—or it isn’t someone bad. Instead, it’s something bad that’s happened, to someone here at Granfield.