The Sixth Wicked Child

by J. D. Barker

  He made the turn and listened to the gravel crunch under his wheels as he left the pavement. She was at least a quarter mile ahead of him now, lost behind several twists and turns, but that didn’t matter. He knew where they were going, even if he didn’t want to believe that little truth.

  When the large farmhouse came into view at the end of the gravel road, a looming structure of white clapboard and tin roof, it did so as a monster might climb from a hole in the Earth. First with only peaks and chimney, then the second floor, followed by the first and the porch. The front door open like a mouth, a hint of light beyond, although all the windows appeared dark. As Porter pulled up behind Sarah’s empty Lexus, he realized all those windows weren’t dark but boarded. The fingers of his headlight beams reached out across the field behind the house and found the barn, or what was left of it. The roof was long gone. Only three walls still stood, and those appeared to be balanced precariously against each other. A gust of wind in the wrong direction could take the entire structure down.

  Porter shut off the BMW, the lights with it, and that left only the glow from that open front door. He found himself on the porch, boards creaking underfoot, without any recollection of leaving the car. Every inch of his skin prickled. His pulse drummed wildly in his neck. He stepped inside and all went quiet, even the cricket song somehow remaining outside.

  The glow came from candles, dozens of them, placed on various flat surfaces around the house. They’d been burning for some time, and most were about half gone. Sarah hadn’t been here long enough to light them—she had to have done that earlier in the night. All the furniture had been covered with white sheets long ago, thick, gray dust clinging to the cloth.

  Porter found her on the other side of an arched doorway in what could only be the parlor, the room filled with shadows, only a single candle on the stone mantle of the fireplace.

  Her back was to him.

  Kneeling. Her black coat gone. She wore a white gown of some sort. Her head was bowed, and as he neared, he realized her hands were clasped together, her eyes closed.

  On a silver serving tray, three white boxes were on the floor beside her. Several pieces of black string.

  And a knife.

  The light of the candle seemed to like that blade.

  91

  Clair

  Day 6 • 1:31 AM

  The mayor was quiet again.

  Clair was fairly certain he was still in the room next to hers, but he’d stopped crying and he didn’t respond when she called out to him. There was a good chance he was in shock.

  When the face appeared at her door—black mask with dark glasses beneath—Clair stood, went to the glass, and glared back at him, her, whatever. “Who the fuck are you?”

  The head tilted slightly to the right, this slow movement, then a gloved hand raised a water bottle to the window. The bottle rested on the person’s palm and they drew their other hand over the top with their fingers splayed out in a slow caress, like a hand model displaying a product. They then pointed at Clair and gestured for her to move to the back of the room, away from the door.

  The last thing Clair wanted to do was obey this piece of shit, but that bottle of water might as well have been a bar of gold dangled in front of an old Arizona miner. Her dry throat ached at the sight of it.

  Clair stepped back.

  The person didn’t move, only held up the bottle at the window. After a moment, their finger bent slightly, gestured for Clair to get further back.

  One pace from the door.

  Two.

  Three.

  Her fever may have broken, but she was far from healthy. Clair’s legs wobbled beneath her, a light sheen of sweat covered her skin. Simple movement felt labored, exhaustive. If she were to jump this person as they came through the door, Clair was under no illusion she would win the struggle which was sure to follow. Now wasn’t the time.

  That finger again pointed toward the back corner of the room.

  Clair took another step back.

  The face disappeared for a moment.

  The click of a lock disengaging.

  The door slowly swung into the room on squeaky hinges.

  When the masked figure stepped through the narrow opening, Clair noted the broad shoulders, the flat chest. About five foot ten. Male. No doubt anymore.

  Black jeans.

  Black shirt.

  Black gloves.

  Black mask.

  Dark glasses beneath.

  He held the bottle in his right hand, reached into the small room, and placed it on the floor inside the door. From the hallway, he retrieved a brown paper sack, set that next to the water bottle, also with his right hand.

  He didn’t have any keys, but in the door itself, she spotted the nub of a dead bolt. The hallway floor behind him was tiled, although it appeared very old and distressed. The walls were painted a muted gray.

  “I’m still in the hospital, aren’t I?”

  The man looked at her, his eyes appearing buglike behind dark plastic in the mask, but he didn’t answer. Instead, he stepped back out into the hallway, closed the door, and twisted the lock.

  Clair scrambled for the water.

  92

  Porter

  Day 6 • 1:48 AM

  Porter’s breath fell from his lips, the air leaving him as if defeated and retreating. As he saw her on the floor like that, perfectly still, he had to remind himself to take in more air, to breathe, because his body had become a traitor, no longer his own but a separate thing with thoughts and actions of its own.

  Porter stepped deeper into the room, closer to her. “What is this?”

  “This is home, Sam. His home, where he was forced to live after those horrible events in Simpsonville. After we failed to protect him, our little boy.”

  “He’s not our little boy.”

  “He put so much faith in you, as any child would.”

  “I’m not Anson’s father. Don’t imply that I am.”

  “He counted on you. Looked up to you. You were a hero to him, and instead of rescuing him from this hell, you let him burn. You left all of them to burn.”

  Porter’s head was shaking before he realized he had moved at all. He raised both his hands and gestured around the room. “I don’t know what any of this is. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t remember anything.”

  “Try, Sam.”

  “I have. There’s nothing there.”

  “But you know this place, don’t you? You remember being here? You remember standing in this very room?” She said this without opening her eyes, her hands still clasped. When her voice began to plead, she bit it off, paused for a moment. “Memories are fluid, like water. They can disappear into the smallest cracks in a wall, drip by drip, but they never completely vanish, they fester back there, grow mold, until they can no longer be contained, then they find an opening, they reach for the light. Your memories want to come out. You only need to let them. They’re pushing on the backside of those walls.”

  Porter circled her with slow steps, dust from the carpet pluming up with each footfall. When he faced her, he went still.

  Her eyes opened, and she looked up at him, at his hand resting on the butt of the .38 attached to his belt. “Are you going to kill me?”

  “Why would I kill you?”

  “Like the others, I mean.”

  Porter didn’t remember reaching for the weapon, and his hand fell away. He tried not to look at the empty white boxes beside her, at the knife. “I haven’t killed anyone.”

  At this, she only smiled.

  Porter knelt down, his voice growing firm. “I met you for the first time in New Orleans. I met Anson for the first time in Chicago when I got called in to investigate that bus accident, the victim we thought was 4MK. Whatever you’re trying to do here is bullshit. It’s a lie. It’s you and that kid of yours playing some kind of twisted, fucked up game, and I refuse to be part of it.”

  Her smile grew. “Sam, you’ve been
playing the game longer than any of us.”

  His face grew red. “What happened to Anson’s father? His real father?”

  “He was shot, Sam. In the head.”

  “Like it said in the diary,” Sam interjected.

  “Not like in the diary,” she replied. “Not like that diary at all.”

  Blowing out a breath, Sam got to his feet. “Why the hell are you doing this?”

  Sarah unclasped her hands. “Do you remember the last time you stood in this room?”

  “I’ve never been in this room.”

  She nodded toward a chair on his left. “Pull the sheet from that armchair, Sam.”

  “Why?”

  “Because your memories want to get out. Can’t you hear them?”

  Porter shook his head, frustration mounting. He reached for the dusty sheet and tugged the cloth away, let it fall to the floor in a crumpled pile. The armchair was a yellow wingback, tufted velvet with stubby wooden legs. At the center of the seat cushion, up one arm and covering nearly half the backrest, was a dark brown stain. Someone had made an attempt to scrub it out, but Porter knew this was the kind of thing you couldn’t wash away. Whoever had worked on the stain only managed to spread it out, creating deep swirling patterns. With this much blood, all you could do was strip it away, burn the material, start over.

  Cover it with a sheet and forget. His mind whispered back. Some things are better forgotten.

  Something horrible happened here. That much blood.

  “The couch, too,” Sarah said softly.

  Before she even had the words out, Porter was pulling away that sheet, the dust rising around him, tickling his eyes and nose.

  The stains on the couch were far worse than the chair. The cushions had been soaked so deeply he found himself looking to the sides of the couch to determine the original color because that deep brown had found its way into every crease and crevice on top, and there was no denying someone had died there. Multiple someones had died there. This was too much for only one. He’d been to enough crime scenes to understand that.

  Porter reached for another sheet, and when he pulled that one away, he found a broken wooden chair beneath, also stained in death. The next sheet revealed an old roll-top desk, covered in utility bills, the paper and desktop streaked with the remains of some horrific event.

  Taking the candle down from the fireplace mantel, Porter held it to the walls and realized the splatter extended even there, drips and lines. And the more he looked, the worse it got. What he first thought were intricate patterns in the wallpaper were something terrible. The room screamed of death. A long-ago massacre.

  Porter wanted to ask her what happened here, but he choked on the words. He forced out, “They killed Stocks, upstairs. That’s where the diaries I have end. What happened after that? What happened here?”

  At first, Sarah didn’t reply, and when he finally turned back to her, she was no longer kneeling on the floor. She’d risen to her feet and moved to the arched doorway. “Father, forgive me,” she said softly.

  “What?” The word came out harsh, his throat filled with dust.

  “When I asked him, that’s all he would tell me. ‘Father, forgive me,’” she said. “He carved the same words in the top of that desk. He said you may have forgotten, but he wasn’t willing to, regardless of how much it hurt.”

  Porter reached for the desk and pulled the roll-top down, the words glaring at him from cherry-stained mahogany, maybe the only place in the room not touched by blood.

  93

  Poole

  Day 6 • 2:29 AM

  The address on Porter’s file was a rural farmhouse about thirty minutes outside Charleston. Still in the FBI communications truck, en route back to the Chicago field office, Poole and Hurless loaded up satellite images. There wasn’t much to see. Even from the distant aerial shots, the place appeared abandoned. County records indicated the property comprised nearly twenty acres. There was a main house and the remains of a barn set back in an open field.

  Poole’s cell phone had come to life on a tower near that farmhouse.

  Hurless read the data to Poole aloud as it came in. “It’s been nearly a decade since anyone had the power on out there. Plot data says the property’s got a well for water. Last crop record said they farmed wheat, but that dates back nearly two decades. Nothing current.”

  The deed was in the name of Sam Porter.

  “He bought the place seventeen years ago and looks like he left it empty, unless he’s running a generator out there for electric.”

  “He was in Chicago by then,” Poole pointed out. “Doesn’t make sense.”

  “I’ve got a small cabin on a lake up in Wisconsin I visit in the summer,” Hurless pointed out.

  “Nobody buys a farm as a vacation house.”

  “Maybe he planned to retire there.”

  “Maybe.” Poole sighed. “Or maybe this is like the place in Simpsonville. Porter claimed Bishop falsified the records.”

  An FBI tech, who was seated in a chair bolted to the floor across from them, removed her headphones and turned to Hurless. “Sir? I think you’ll want to see this.” She pointed at a frozen video on a computer monitor. “This is airing live right now on Channel Seven.” She twisted a volume knob, and sound came from the van speakers mounted in the ceiling. Poole recognized the reporter as Lizeth Loudon, a local fixture.

  “— source within the department who wishes to remain anonymous has told us Bishop claimed innocence, saying that his involvement in the case was as a pawn in a sting operation perpetrated by Detective Nash’s partner, Detective Sam Porter. Before any of this could be confirmed, a security malfunction somehow led to the disappearance of both Anson Bishop and Detective Porter. While Detective Porter’s whereabouts are still unknown, we just received the following message from Anson Bishop.”

  Loudon went quiet, staring at the camera. The shot switched from her to one of Bishop and a video that appeared to have been shot with a cell phone. “I don’t know who else to go to. I’m not sure who I can trust anymore. When they took me to Metro, I explained everything to the FBI, everything, I thought they could protect me, keep me safe. This is bigger than Porter, though—he’s working with other people. Somehow, those people triggered the sprinklers in the building, all the doors unlocked, everything, all at once.” Bishop ran his hand through his hair in frustration, then looked back at the camera. “Porter tried to kill me. I think he created the distraction, him and the people he’s working with. I managed to get out, but I had to run, hide—I don’t know what else to do, who I can trust. I was in federal custody, and he still almost killed me. Porter won’t stop until I’m dead. I know that now.” He looked to the ground for a moment, then back at the camera. “I’m going to turn myself in to you, the press, the people of Chicago. I’m not sure what else I can do. I’ll be at the Guyon Hotel at six in the morning. I don’t think Porter would kill me in public, not in front of a crowd. I want the FBI there. U.S. Marshalls. Anyone who can protect me and safely bring me in. All of you, anyone. My only safety is in numbers. I’ll only be safe with you. If Detective Sam Porter finds me first, I know I’m dead. I don’t know if anyone in law enforcement can be trusted. I’ll do what I can to stay alive, but I need help. I need your help. If I don’t show up, you’ll know it’s because he found me first, or the people he’s working with did. Nothing else will keep me from there. Nothing.”

  Bishop’s face froze, still looking at the camera.

  The image returned to the live shot of Lizeth Louden and panned back several feet to reveal that she was standing outside in a parking lot, a large building looming behind her, snow drifting down and catching the bright lights from her camera crew. She turned slightly and gestured back. “The Guyon Hotel is a 1927 Moorish Revival in West Garfield at 4000 West Washington, an area of town that has seen severe decline over the past several years. The one-time home of WFMT and Benny Goodman has been in a constant state of disrepair, and while it has changed h
ands numerous times in attempts at revitalization, all have failed. In the ’80s, the Guyon even hosted President Jimmy Carter while he was in the area working with Habitat for Humanity. Shortly after that, an attempt to convert the hotel to low-income housing was made, but that didn’t pan out, either. Since 2005, this once-spectacular Chicago hotel has changed hands at least four times but has remained abandoned. Preservation Chicago, the organization behind the renovated Rosenwald Apartments, believes they can turn the building around, but their efforts have yet to be realized.” The camera zoomed back in on Louden’s face. She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “Two days ago, former Metro Detective Sam Porter was apprehended in this building and taken into federal custody. He later escaped and is still at large. I personally plan to stay here at the Guyon and wait for Anson Bishop to turn himself in at six this morning, approximately three and a half hours from now. I welcome all our viewers to join me. We’ll see this developing story through to the end together. If you do come out, I advise you to dress warm. You may also want to consider bringing food and water—there are only a handful of businesses supporting this neighborhood, and most likely they will not be able to handle an influx of visitors, particularly at this hour.”

  Hurless was pale. “Oh, Christ.”

  “It will be a mob, all gunning for the police. He’s trying to turn the public on us.”

  Hurless shouted up to the driver. “We’re moving base—get us over to the Guyon Hotel in West Garfield!” He turned back to Poole. “I’ll build a perimeter and get our people in place on this end. I want you to reach out to Granger—his team is closest to that farmhouse. Get him on the phone. I want them out there.”

  Poole nodded.

  Taking out his own phone, Hurless added, “You disobeyed a direct order by leaving town. When this is over, you will answer for that. Don’t think you won’t.” He turned his back on him, holding on to the ceiling with his free hand as the van lurched forward.