Isolation: a gripping psychological suspense thriller full of twists

by Sarah K Stephens

  “I was just petting the horses.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” He doesn’t come near me though. Not like last time.

  Something’s different.

  Jasmine whinnies behind me.

  “Shush, girl. That’s a good girl,” Tobias says, but the way he says it seems to only make the horses more nervous.

  “I have a tummy ache,” I tell him. “I don’t feel so good.”

  I get that feeling where you know you’re going to throw up. I glance around, trying to see if there’s a bucket anywhere for me to use, and grab one sitting next to Jasmine’s stall. It’s full of oats though, and as I pull it towards me I know that I’m not going to be able to stop myself. Up comes all those beans Mom made me eat for breakfast, and the peanut butter sandwich I made with the two little ends of bread that I found inside a cake box in the cupboard, and the juice I drank with it.

  “No!” Tobias shouts. “What are you doing?”

  He rushes up to me and yanks at the bucket, but I have a really hard grip on it and I can’t seem to let go.

  The oats are ruined. My tummy feels better, but I know what I’ve done.

  Julie gives a stomp on the ground with her hoof, and Tobias moves away from me again.

  “Get out,” he says, not looking at me.

  I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand because I don’t have anything else and my mouth feels wet and gross. I set the bucket down by my feet.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell him, and Jasmine and Julie. “I really don’t feel good.”

  “Go lie down then,” Tobias says to the stable wall. All I can see is his back, and the skin of his neck has gotten really red.

  There’s nothing I can do, so I stand up and walk really carefully out of the stable, making sure not to bump into anything or to ruin anything else.

  The air feels cold on my face as I go through the open stable doors, and I spot a tall patch of grass out in the distance, by the field, that looks really comfortable.

  I don’t want to go back into the house yet.

  There are clangs and a whooshing sound from the stable behind me, and I think it’s Tobias getting rid of my throw-up and the ruined food for the horses. I look out into the field as I sit down on the patch of grass and think that maybe I could find food for them. Horses eat grass and hay, and so maybe I could work really hard and go out into the field and make up for the food I wasted.

  But suddenly I’m so tired. My head hurts, although my stomach feels calmer than it did before I spoiled Jasmine’s lunch.

  I’ll lie down here, in the sunshine, for a few minutes, I tell myself. Just long enough for Margot to drink her coffee. I saw Mom get it ready for her this morning. Margot shouldn’t be able to taste the peanut butter in it. Greta told me once that coffee is meant to be bitter, and that people drink it after dinner because it hides other flavors they may not like.

  I close my eyes, and dream about my family being happy again.

  38

  Margot

  There was the hot acidic smell of smoke earlier too, but that’s faded away by now.

  Brenna and Tobias never came to move me to the other wing of the house. No one has come to see me in a long while, except for Daphne. She brought me a cup of coffee. I couldn’t believe we still had some left. I was so glad to see someone at first that I reached out to hold her hand when she set the tray down next to the bed. She didn’t let me touch her though, and after a moment I remembered that there’s a doll under a tree, somewhere outside, that looks like me and that’s smeared with something’s blood.

  She stepped away from me and before either of us could get more uncomfortable she left, promising that her mom would be back to check on me soon.

  My ribs ache through my back and just breathing is still difficult. Tobias changed the wrapping around my chest yesterday, and it’s loosened now and needs to be redone in order to give me a decent amount of support so that I can stand up without feeling like I’m dying.

  A door slams, and angry voices cut through the walls.

  The window. I can make it to the window.

  I’m wearing my normal pajamas—a large white men’s T-shirt and soft cotton boxer shorts—and they both hang loosely around me. I sniff at my shirt as I shift to stand up, and the smell of unwashed skin and body-warmed sheets mingles with the aroma of the coffee Daphne brought for me. I take a sip, grateful for the caffeine and that the act of reaching out to hold the cup isn’t as painful as I thought it would be, before trying to move the rest of my body out of bed.

  The only other bone I’ve broken in my entire life was when Mom forgot to pick me up from school after soccer practice and I decided to walk the three miles home, and managed to get clipped by a pickup truck going way too fast on the side road I was walking down. Broken femur. I lay in the ditch by the side of the road for almost two hours before Teresa found me when she started searching the likely routes I’d take home. She took me to the hospital, helped me with my cast, and brought me back home. My mom never left her room, the entire time. That’s when I really knew she wasn’t going to get better. Something inside her was broken, and there wasn’t a sturdy cast and some crutches that were going to help her heal, like me.

  It was watching Teresa take care of me and of Mom at the same time that made me want to be a nurse. Teresa, of course, went into business, even though she’d have been a great nurse. That’s why I found Mark Stone, after all—because of my oldest sister.

  I need to do something, not just sip at my coffee like some lady who lunches convalescing in her bedroom.

  I take a deep breath as gently as I can and hoist myself up from the bed. Steady on, and here I go. I tug at the wrappings around my chest to tighten them, and I manage to make it all the way to the window without too much searing pain shooting up my sides. Outside, the sky is clear with the sun brightening everything with a golden glow. Mark’s wing of the house is straight ahead, and fields stretch out towards the back. The stables cut into the right corner of my view, but not enough for me to see the entrance.

  At first I think that no one is outside, but then I spot a small figure in the bright green grass near the back fields. I have to squint, and just the movement of tightening those muscles in my face sends a bright pain through my back, but I’m able to make out Daphne’s blond curls and the bright pink shirt she was wearing when she brought the coffee to me.

  She looks like she’s asleep. I try to watch for movement, because something about the way her arms and legs are splayed out seems not quite right, but it’s too far away for me to tell exactly what she’s doing or if she’s okay.

  As I’m turning from the window I spot a flicker of movement in the windows across from me. Someone is moving through Mark’s rooms. A reflection gleams off the window for a second, and when I’m able to see inside again the figure is gone.

  It didn’t look like Brenna—I would have spotted her bright almost-white hair—and Tobias has that fiery red beard that makes him distinctive. Daphne is outside still, and Felix is too short and dark to match who I saw.

  Because it was Darren. I’m certain I saw Darren walking into Mark’s rooms.

  I need to go to him.

  I scan the room, grab at a big sweatshirt someone has left limply folded on the chair in the corner, and pull my head through it as gingerly as possible in order to cover my braless chest and thin T-shirt. I can’t manage to put pants on, so the boxer shorts will have to do.

  Next to the chair in the corner there’s a walking stick I’ve never used, because it always seemed like some decorative artifact Brenna put there to look rustic. I snatch it, place the handle under my armpit, and use it to brace myself. It relieves some of the pressure on my chest, and I’m able to make it through the door and down the hallway faster than I could have anticipated.

  I’m so preoccupied with getting to Mark that I don’t pay attention to the growing tingling in my lips. My breaths are raspy and getting harder and harder to make, but I’d assumed it
was because of my broken ribs.

  Too late, I feel my throat start to close and realize I’m not going to make it to Mark. Or Daphne.

  Daphne. The doll, the blood. My coffee. What was it that I tasted a hint of as I sipped? I was so focused on the terrible things invading this godforsaken house that I didn’t do the most basic thing anyone with a deadly allergy has to do, almost by instinct.

  I didn’t pay attention to what I was about to put into my body.

  My breathing comes in rasps, and my throat tightens like a drumhead. I spin in circles, whirling my arms around me as though that will bring the EpiPen from my room back within reach.

  When I collapse on the floor, desperate for air, there’s a terrible crack as I drop down against the massive decorative vase in the hallway. And then pain. Waves and waves of pain.

  39

  Darren

  I slam through the drawers of the medical suite, looking for the correct vial. I know I’ve seen Brenna and that nurse give Mark doses of the stuff to “calm him down”, and even though I prepped things earlier I still can’t seem to find it.

  My hands shake as I rummage through the supplies. Adrenaline is a hell of a thing.

  Brenna looks up at me from the corner of the room where I set her down, hands and feet tied together behind her back. Like an animal.

  Not that I think she’s an animal, but the woman did try to have me killed because I had a cold. Among other reasons.

  She wasn’t supposed to see me like that. I was so careful for so long, and now I’ve ruined it all because I had to use her stupid computer for, of all things, a Skype call. Who knew that even guns for hire needed some sort of verification before they took your money.

  Not that I have a lot of it, but Brenna and Mark sure do, which is kind of the point.

  Finally, my fingers grip onto the vial I need. Codeine. Perfect.

  I find a sterile syringe and rip the packet open, fill the plunger like I’ve watched nurses and doctors do on TV a million times, and spritz out a bit at the top to make sure there aren’t air bubbles. I glance over at Mark, tied to his bed—talk about treating someone like an animal; I’ll untie him as soon as I get everything figured out here—and check he’s still sound asleep, in that medication-fogged haze Brenna likes to keep him.

  I tied a scarf from the chair of the library around Brenna’s mouth, and from her corner she mumbles angrily at me but can’t really form any words. I don’t give myself a chance to think, I rush over in three quick steps and jam the needle into her arm. It goes in easily, and the drug flows into her so smoothly that I can almost count the seconds—three, two, one—until she’s passed out on the floor. I adjust her shoulders and feet so that she’s hopefully somewhat comfortable whenever she wakes, which shouldn’t be for a while if I estimated the dosage properly, and then stop myself because what the hell do I care that she’s comfortable, after what she’s done to me. I take the gun from her waistband and slip its cool metal frame against my own side.

  I stand at the window, looking out into the courtyard and thinking through what I need to do next. There were footsteps above my head a few minutes ago, which probably means that Felix is awake again. I never wanted to hurt him, but I also couldn’t have him taking my key card. I needed to get into this side of the building, not only to check on Mark but to also get supplies.

  Daphne’s small body is curled up on the soft bed of grass near the further fields. When she was even younger, she’d love to take off her shoes and socks and run through that tussock of grass in her bare feet. She was always such a lovely happy baby.

  There’s a flash of movement from across the manor house, in the other wing. I see a shock of white and the dark hair framing the nurse’s pale face. She was bedridden, with broken ribs.

  That day in the forest, I hadn’t meant to scare the horses at all. I was out in the woods, near the tree line, trying to clear my head and figure out what I was going to do, when I turned and there they were—the nurse and Tobias, riding our beautiful horses like the world wasn’t burning. And I don’t know. I guess this wave of anger came up over me, for everything I’d been through, and I couldn’t control myself.

  I stayed in the shadows and dropped down to my hands and knees, waiting for the right time to spring up and let the horses know that I was there. They say horses can smell fear, but they can also smell anger.

  Afterwards, I felt terrible. But there wasn’t much I could do to change things.

  Just like now.

  I scan the room, seeing Brenna sound asleep with a bit of drool dribbling down from the corner of her mouth and Mark still almost frozen in time in his sick bed.

  “I’m going to save you,” I tell him as I undo his wrist and ankle restraints. I should have done it when I was here earlier, when the greenhouse was burning and the house was empty. I needed to check on the supplies, figure out what was here that I could use. But I couldn’t unfasten them, in case someone would guess that I’d been there. Which turned out to be an unnecessary precaution, what with Brenna finding me in her office anyway.

  I tuck the gun I took from Brenna in between the mattresses of Mark’s bed. I’ll get it later. Given what’s coming next, it’s better to not have a gun on me.

  I swipe my key card past the locks on the doors and rush out to where I’m sure Margot is going, after spotting a dead man in her boss’s sick room. I’ll find her, there’s no doubt about that. Like there isn’t any doubt about what will happen when I do.

  40

  Felix

  Counting helps me stay calm, so I count my steps but keep moving towards what I know is going to be awful.

  One thousand steps.

  That’s how many it takes to cross from one end of our home to the other. I know it’s strange that it’s such an exact number. But there are lots of strange things happening, and the fact that I can walk from our dinner parlor to the end of the kitchen in a perfectly round number seems to be a little less weird than everything else.

  But, if that bothers you, I can give you other measurements.

  375 seconds. Six minutes and fifteen seconds.

  59 breaths.

  10 rooms to cross.

  25 windows to look out of.

  5 people to avoid.

  Except today is different. Today, I only get to 785 steps before I see the body.

  “Four people to avoid.” This new fact slithers out of my mouth before I can replace it with something more appropriate, like “Oh no!” or “Help!” or “Are you okay?” even though I can clearly see that they aren’t.

  Their pale white fingers clench into a claw that grips at nothing. And there’s blood. So, so much blood that I can barely see two eyes blankly staring through the wet curtain of it.

  I shouldn’t be able to count, but I do and it only takes me 523 steps to run upstairs, past my bedroom and into the panic room. I curl myself into a ball against the soft soundproof walls, pulling my hands over my eyes like a toddler who thinks nobody can see them if they can’t see anything themselves.

  And that’s where I wait for what I know is coming next.

  Coming for all of us.

  41

  Tobias

  I couldn’t kill Darren.

  I know I told Brenna that I could. That it was the right choice and that we couldn’t risk having the infection spread around, but there’s no way for her to understand what it’s like to have someone else’s life in your hands, and what it means to choose whether they get to go on breathing and eating and loving and making decisions that could hurt other people.

  Colleen’s affair wasn’t the only thing she was hiding from me. Even though she was pregnant, she’d started smoking again. That was something her and our next-door neighbor—Jack—apparently did. Afterwards.

  My fists clench, thinking of that bastard. Of how he took my life, my love, and my baby all because he couldn’t control his stupid urges. Not that Colleen didn’t have a choice. She did, and she chose him.

 
But I can’t help believing that we’d still be together, and she’d still be alive, and that I wouldn’t be in this hellhole if stupid Jack had been able to keep it in his pants.

  She was smoking in bed that night, and she’d get really sleepy all of a sudden sometimes, with the pregnancy. The cigarette was still burning when she fell asleep and she didn’t have an ashtray—because she didn’t want me knowing what she was doing—and the bed caught on fire in just a few seconds.

  I came home from work and smoke was already billowing out of the windows. No one had called it in to 911 yet, and so I had to dial in on my phone while trying to fight against the flames in order to get to my beautiful, pregnant, cheating wife before she burned to death.

  I didn’t make it, of course. I was too late.

  The flames were too big, and the roof of the house was threatening to collapse. The firefighters pulled me out from the wreckage, coughing and blackened by the toxic fumes from our married life burning up around us.

  They were trying to get me to sit down in the back of an ambulance while they took my vitals and a separate team of firefighters tried to break through the flames to get to Colleen.

  It was over before it began. There was no saving her.

  They took me down to the police station, but pretty soon they released me. The fire marshal had already ruled it an accident. They’d found remnants of cigarette smoke, and apparently one of the neighbors was able to tell them that Colleen was a smoker, even though I’d insisted that she wasn’t.

  Oh, the pity in their eyes when the officers taking my statement looked at me.

  That’s when I knew. I knew it was fucking Jack Minnigan who’d told them about Colleen, and their affair, and the smoking.