Isolation: a gripping psychological suspense thriller full of twists

by Sarah K Stephens

  Learning how people work.

  You see, I told him people are coming because he needs to be scared, because somebody in this house is trying to kill me.

  26

  Day 11

  Tobias

  I couldn’t sleep last night. I just lay there, tossing and turning around in my sheets until they were hot and damp. I must have eventually slept at some point, but today I’m achy and it’s like someone has stuffed cotton inside my head. I put deadbolts on my doors after the sleepwalking problems last summer, so at least I know I wasn’t out wandering—it always got worse when I was sleeping less.

  None of that matters though, because there’s no stopping the day ahead coming, which is both a comfort and a curse. Colleen used to have trouble sleeping too, and we’d lay there awake together in bed, staring into the blackness and holding hands. It was kind of romantic, and while life pulled us in different directions it was a comfort to feel her hand in mine during those long nights.

  Once she was pregnant though, she slept like a baby, which left me alone when I couldn’t sleep. That made it harder.

  I get up and pull on a fresh shirt and the same jeans I wore yesterday. There haven’t been any issues with our running water, and Greta apparently bought laundry detergent in bulk so we’re fine there, but I’ve noticed Margot and the children recycling their outfits day to day, and my jeans aren’t dirty.

  There’s a fine mist covering the fields when I glance out the window, and so I tug on a sweater over my T-shirt before I head out the door. It’s not far to the stable, but I know something is wrong before I’m even two steps out my door, because the stable door is open.

  I always close it at night. I don’t want foxes or other unwelcome guests wandering in and hurting my horses. Their horses, I suppose—Mark and Brenna’s.

  But, my horses, all the same. They’re tough but fragile creatures, and in the stable they’re exposed more than people realize. Fenced in but also kept from getting out.

  My boots make a strange click clack on the gravel as I run over, and although I know that it’s probably because I haven’t slept well last night, or for the last several nights—not since, well… I stop myself from thinking again of Darren. I can’t change what’s happened.

  The past is the past. People get hurt. People die. People do things they never thought they’d be capable of.

  There’s a strange smell when I arrive inside the stables. I do a quick scan and all the horses are accounted for. Jasmine and Julie are snug in their pens, and the dark heads of their friends are lined up on either side down the length of the stable.

  But that smell. There’s a tang in the air, like metal that’s been buried deep in the ground and unearthed.

  I look again at Jasmine, and that’s when I notice that even though her head is bent and she isn’t nervously pawing at the ground, there’s something wrong and she knows it. Her nostrils flare, and as I move closer to her she lets out a sound like nothing I’ve heard before.

  Another terrible memory flashes up, of the afternoon I came home to surprise Colleen and take her out to lunch, only to hear her crying out from our bedroom. I thought she’d gone into some sort of false labor or that there was something wrong with the baby. I rushed down the hallway and through the closed door, and found her and our next-door neighbor, Jack Minnigan, thrashing and writhing on our bed, so distracted by what they were doing with each other that they didn’t even hear me come in.

  I could have shouted out, and gone and hauled that man off of my visibly pregnant wife and told them both that I’d seen everything—obviously—and to get the hell out of my house. But I didn’t. Instead, I slinked out the door, closed it quietly behind me, and went back to work. When I came home that night, Colleen had made homemade spaghetti and meatballs for dinner. She kissed me deep on the mouth as I stepped through the door, and before we could eat dinner I had her in the bedroom again, trying to erase the traces of him from her body.

  I know it’s terrible, and wrong, but that’s what I think of as Jasmine cries out into the soft air of the stable, where blood has mixed with fresh hay and the sweet bite of horse manure: me trying to take possession of my wife again.

  I check Jasmine first, and then Julie. Neither of them appear to be hurt. It’s not until I head further down the aisle between the stalls that I realize what’s happened.

  The body was hidden behind a rack of saddles and I don’t see it until I move deeper into the stable. Bile rises in my mouth as I take in the two eyes staring back at me, clouded with death, one slightly bulging out as though there was some great pressure behind it, but the rest of the face perfectly serene and unharmed.

  I reach out to touch the bright fur, and it’s coarser under my fingers than I thought it would be. Blood has pooled all around the fox’s body. It’s hard to tell exactly what happened in the dim light slipping through the windows, but it appears that someone slit its throat and let its life pour out onto the floor of the stable.

  I wonder if it was the same fox I’d seen wandering the fields around Granfield. The one I made sure to close the stable doors to at night, so that the harm it caused would stay outside the walls.

  I wonder how someone could have caught such a fiercely defensive creature.

  There’s a noise that comes further down, where the last of the pens are. A sort of tinkling rustle, and again all I can think of is how Colleen made an extra plate of spaghetti that night to take over to Jack, “Because he’s all on his own.” I was the one who pulled the tin foil from the drawer and stretched out the piece to wrap around the plate. Thin metal, crinkling along the edges of food that was never meant for me.

  I grab a shovel in my hand and move as silently as I can towards where the sound is coming from. Jasmine rustles in her stall. When I get to the end of the stables though, there’s no one there.

  But the back door where we slide bales of hay through is open, the tack for some long-forgotten horse swinging off of its peg even though there’s no whisper of wind.

  I move the fox’s body out of the stable and bury it in the earth a few yards from the greenhouse and the garden plots. It’ll feed us one day.

  27

  Day 14

  Brenna

  I can’t hear anything. His voice comes like it’s traveling through thick cement walls. Like we’re prisoners in adjoining cells.

  I shake my head and the world snaps back into place.

  “Someone killed a fox.” Tobias’ voice comes through clearly this time. He’s staring at me with that way he has, where his eyes seem to look at only one side of my face. I never noticed it before, but now it’s all I seem to see when we talk. Which still isn’t as often as you’d think, given that we’re trapped in this house and grounds for the foreseeable future.

  “What?” I feel like one of the children being told they’ll have to eat lentils for breakfast now we’re out of cereal and store-bought bread. I’m all petulance and disbelief.

  “It was a few days ago.”

  He breaks his gaze from mine and stares out into the middle distance. We’re standing outside the greenhouses. Inside, many of the plants are ready to go into the ground, we think. Tobias has already planted some of them in the plowed plot over the last few days.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I want to shove him hard, with both my hands pressed firmly against his broad shoulders. I want to slap his face, because he’s the only person in this house I could get away with pushing around. I’ve discovered that Tobias doesn’t care if I’m nasty to him. He doesn’t have to love me, like the others are supposed to. We just have to tolerate each other in order to feed our group. It’s a relief, in a way, to have someone I don’t need to pretend to be perfect for.

  I think of Margot, still bedridden while her ribs heal. I’ve been avoiding her as much as I can. Bed rest does not agree with her. And also what she supposedly saw out in the field when the horse bucked her off—I don’t want to talk about it or what it might
mean. The night it happened, the night I made that sour sludge of a stew, and Daphne insisted that it was Darren Margot saw in the woods as a way of distracting me from the task at hand, which was figuring out whether Daphne had touched the gun, I decided to confront Tobias out in the stables once the children were in bed. He assured me that there was no way Darren was out there in the woods. “It was just shadows,” he’d told me. “Or maybe a snake along the edge of the field. Horses spook easily.” But now everything he said seems to be in question.

  “I didn’t think it was that important. You’ve had full nursing duties pretty much, and I’ve been trying to get the garden growing. I didn’t want to scare you unnecessarily.”

  “You said someone, not something.”

  I think about how exposed I felt the night of Margot’s accident, wielding that gun like a maniac while I thought someone was rushing up the stairs to come and drag us away. I think about men in black masks, speaking to each other in some language I’ve never heard before, holding a gun to Mark’s head.

  Tobias shrugs, but I can tell he’s pretending that it isn’t a big deal. He tells me about finding it in the stable, about smelling the blood on the air and thinking at first it was one of the horses that’d been hurt. “Its throat was slit. There’s no way an animal could have done that. It had to have been a person.”

  I blink twice, because all I see is blackness for one heartbeat. Two. Three.

  Tobias doesn’t say anything. And then colors come back and the rich brown of the upturned soil and the ridged gray of the outbuildings behind sharpen into focus.

  “And you didn’t think to tell me until now? There’s somebody roaming around, waiting for us. Margot saw them in the woods, and you convinced me it was nothing. And now there are animals being slaughtered! Whoever this is, they’re taunting us, like it’s some sort of sick game.”

  I really do shove him this time. Hard. He stumbles back, his boots catching on a rock strewn in the lawn around the greenhouse, and then he falls. He catches himself with his hands, but he must have hit himself in the stomach when he landed and knocked the air out of his lungs, because he lays there for a moment. I look around, and the edges of the rocks poking up from the grass twinkle with small crystals in the sunlight. They’re just within reach. I could bend down and grab one, feel the smoothness in my hand. It wouldn’t take much to do it.

  I squeeze both my hands into tight fists.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell him without making eye contact. I stare at a cloud passing overhead, fat and cottony against the blue sky.

  “I know you have children.” Tobias stands up and brushes a few blades of grass off his shirt and jeans before continuing, like he’s figuring out what to say next. “That’s why I didn’t tell you, at first. But something else has happened now, and I think you need to know about it.”

  “You mean something besides my family being stalked in our own home.”

  I pace back and forth, wearing a groove into the grass with my steps. My fingernails are bit to the quick, but I keep finding myself biting at them anyway. There’s a riot inside my body that’s been building and building and now it’s gotten so loud that I have to strain to hear my own voice inside my head.

  You’re losing control. The thought breaks through the surface, followed quickly by another one: You’re failing them.

  “I don’t think anyone is stalking us.” Tobias looks at me as he says it. Right at me, without that strange shift of his gaze, and I shrink back involuntarily, like I’m worried he can magically read my thoughts.

  “Come with me.” He gestures with his hand, and moves across the path by the greenhouse and into the copse of trees that separates it from the main house and other barns. “I think you need to see it first.”

  I follow him along the path. It’s only a short distance, but still I find myself having trouble keeping up with his long strides.

  Inside the grouping of trees it’s darker than out in the open. The sun barely peeks through the tips of the treetops. Tobias moves off the path, into the soft grass that grows under the pines. It’s longer than out in the rest of the lawn, and dew collects on the tops of my shoes as I step through it.

  And then there it is, nestled in under one of the largest pines, almost entirely hidden by the skirt of the tree’s branches.

  Tobias turns towards me. “This wasn’t here when Margot and I went for that ride. I know because I spent part of that morning stripping out the dead branches from these trees.”

  I see the fresh cuts along the trunk of the tree, above the arranged objects he’s brought me to see. The cuts are still pale against the dark of the tree’s bark. A small part of my mind scratches at something normal and positive to say.

  “You did a nice job clearing the dead away.”

  Tobias flinches. He knows I’m deflecting. Because, if what we’re looking at wasn’t here before Margot fell off the horse and became bedridden, and there’s no boogeyman out in the woods, then that only leaves me, Tobias, and the children as capable of making this thing.

  I bend down, my legs shaking, and force myself to take a closer look. There’s a doll-size table that I recognize from the children’s playroom. It goes with a set of chairs, and Felix and Mark used to play tea with his stuffed animals when he was little.

  On top of the doll table is a doll with long brown hair dressed in a Victorian-style corset and skirt. It’s one of those American Girl dolls that Daphne was really into playing with last summer, but has since been left sitting in a pile at the back of her closet.

  Your children are spoiled, a voice whispers around me and I beat it back.

  The doll’s eyes are crossed out with two large, black X-es. Her white dress is smeared with brown streaks, which I don’t need Tobias to tell me are probably blood. There are a few kitchen candles melted into the top of the table.

  A small paring knife lies next to the doll. As I look closer, I see small slits cut into the plastic running along both of the doll’s legs.

  Tobias leans over me, blocking the bit of light in this close terrible space.

  “It looks a lot like Margot, doesn’t it?” he says.

  28

  Margot

  “What do you mean you found an effigy of me?”

  I’m trying to stay calm, but ever since my fall and then needing to stay in bed inside this oppressive mansion, tension has run constant laps up and down my spine.

  “Tobias found it. I’m sorry, but I thought you should know.” Brenna’s mouth sets in a mean line. You’d never know that my lips had touched hers from the way she’s talking to me. No one would be able to see that we’d held each other close, naked and breathless in the night, more times than I can even remember at this point. Although not recently. Not since this all happened, except for that one time.

  I’m not sure if she’s telling the truth.

  “I need to see it.” And suddenly that energy replaces everything else moving through my body. This need to picture what the hell someone has constructed out there in order to hurt me, or—is this even possible?—worship me. Or both, I realize.

  My head spins a bit and the deep ache in my chest rises as I force as deep a breath as I can manage.

  You are strong. You are capable. You are healing.

  My sisters and I would chant the first two to each other, whisper it in each other’s ears at bedtime as we kissed each other goodnight and the older ones tucked the younger ones in, including me, while our mother sat alone in her darkened bedroom and coped by pretending her family didn’t exist. The third I’ve added these last several days.

  They say nurses don’t know how to care for themselves, but I’ve never been typical about anything. After watching my mother for so many years, I know how to take care of myself in order to take care of others.

  I wish I could call Teresa right now. Hear my oldest sister’s voice. She always knew how to set me going in the right direction. She always knew what to say.

  Unlike my mother, who neve
r said anything.

  “You can’t move. You need to rest.” Brenna sits down on the foot of my bed, and for a moment I think we’re going to have a flash of tenderness in the midst of this horror. I know she’s married, and that she loves her husband, but I also think there’s room inside for me.

  But it’s not that. I’ve misread the situation, again, with my wishful thinking.

  Her eyes won’t look at me—they keep flitting around the room, landing on the top of a dresser or the corner of the bedpost. Not on me. She shifts further on the edge of the bed so that no part of us, even through the downy comforter, is touching.

  She has more to tell me.

  “I think we should move you into the secure wing, with Mark.”

  A brief wave of relief washes over me, because I thought it was going to be some other gruesome addition. I don’t mind being closer to Mark.

  “All right. But I still would like to see what this thing is.”

  “I didn’t take a picture of it.” Brenna stands.

  “Could you take one? I’d really like to see what’s happening out there.” I gesture towards the window, and then wince at the pinching in my torso.

  You are strong. You are capable. You are healing.

  I want to go back to normal. Sitting in this bed all day, with only my thoughts to keep me company, is killing me.

  “I don’t think that’d be a good idea.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s too awful.”

  She gives her head a slight shake, and her blond hair falls in shiny waves over her shoulders. I’d been so preoccupied that I hadn’t noticed Brenna’s appearance. She looks better today than she has since we went into lockdown. She’s dressed in one of her going-to-work outfits, and her skin has a creamy pink glow.