The Killing Jar

by Jennifer Bosworth

  The cry came again, weaker now, and more desperate at the same time. I recognized the voice.

  Erin.

  I couldn’t wait for the cops. I had to get to her.

  “Miss?” the operator said. “Miss, what’s happening now?”

  More sounds from above. Wooden chair legs scraping across tile. He was sitting down at the kitchen table, making himself comfortable. What was he eating? Mom had made lasagna yesterday. There were plenty of leftovers. He had probably helped himself.

  Rage churned inside me. It battled with my terror until the two joined and filled me with a chaos of emotions that made it impossible to think straight.

  “Miss? Are you there? What’s happening?”

  “I have to go,” I said, and hung up. I silenced the cell in case the operator tried to call back, and shoved it into my pocket. Then I was moving.

  There was no light. I walked softly, but every step I took nearly gave me a heart attack. I was sweating ice water and shivering, and I couldn’t see a thing. I bolted silently across the remaining distance, but slipped and fell when I was almost there. I touched the ground and felt sticky wetness.

  Please don’t be blood, I thought. Please don’t be blood.

  Then my fingers found something else. I picked up the fragile object. A quick exploration with my fingers told me what it was: a pair of eyeglasses, the lenses shattered.

  Bile rose in my throat. I wiped my hands on my jeans and pushed to my feet.

  The sounds from upstairs had stopped, but I imagined I could hear the man chewing. In my head the sound was as loud as his stomping footsteps—the gooey, wet smacking and gnashing of teeth.

  I stole the rest of the way to the north end of the basement. The door to the storage room was closed and there was light coming from beneath. I leaned with my ear close to the crack, straining to hear through the wood.

  A girl’s shuddering whimper penetrated the barrier.

  I opened the door.

  The bare bulb glaring above cast a mean, relentless light over everything. Over the lake of blood that swamped the concrete floor. My mom was propped against the wall like a forgotten doll on a shelf, her head lolling forward, her white nightgown drenched red with blood. I couldn’t tell if she was breathing.

  “K-Kenna.”

  The voice was barely a voice. It was a wheeze. A thready gasp.

  Erin lay crumpled in the corner of the room. I skirted around the blood and dropped painfully to my knees beside her.

  Suffocated sobs tore at my throat. Erin’s face was a disfigured purple landscape, one of her eyes a swollen mound sealed with a crust of blood. Her pajamas, too, were soaked in blood. My hands hovered over her, wanting to help, unsure what to do, or if there was anything I could do. She needed medical attention, and fast. She was so small, so delicate, it was a miracle she was still alive. How long until the police came? How long did my sister have? Minutes? Seconds?

  Erin opened her mouth and tried to speak again. Blood gurgled in her throat.

  “Shhh. Don’t talk,” I said, my chest so tight I could barely produce the words. “Help is coming. I called the police.”

  But we lived so far from town. It took Blake and me twenty minutes to drive to school every morning. How much time had passed since I’d called 911? Five minutes? Three? I should call again, tell them to send an ambulance. I reached for my phone.

  Erin’s eye rolled toward me. “Get … out,” she managed. “He wants … he wants … you.”

  The man upstairs started moving again, and this time his footsteps were tromping down the stairs.

  Erin’s one eye went wide and she started breathing fast. But her lungs couldn’t handle the air, and she started choking until blood speckled her lips.

  He was coming. There was no way for me to get back to my hiding place, to get anywhere, before he blocked me in.

  I rushed to the door, closed it, and locked it. I spun around, searching for something to prop against the door. I went for a chest of drawers painted butter yellow, which had been mine when I was a kid. As I shoved it in front of the door it made a shrieking sound across the concrete.

  The footsteps halted for one deafeningly silent moment, then thundered as he ran.

  I got the chest of drawers in front of the door just as the man twisted the knob. When it refused to turn, he pounded the door.

  I backed away, my heart thrashing. My vision darkened around the edges with every rapid thud. I retreated to where Erin lay and huddled beside her. Every time the man struck the door, my whole body jolted and my teeth ground together like I’d received an electric shock.

  “He won’t get in. The cops will be here soon. Don’t worry. Don’t worry.” I wasn’t sure if I was talking to Erin or to myself. I checked her face to see if she was even conscious and a moan escaped my throat.

  Erin was limp. Lifeless.

  A memory burned behind my eyes … a butterfly gone slack, sagging to the bottom of a glass jar.

  My moan became a wail. A banshee shriek of grief. I pulled Erin into my arms and crushed her against me.

  My sister. My broken twin self. My best friend.

  Gone.

  The pounding ceased, and then something worse followed.

  The man on the other side of the door began to laugh.

  LIGHTS OUT

  My wail and the man’s laughter collided, making a horrible, discordant sound. I clamped my mouth shut, but my chest strained, filling up with unvoiced anguish. Something was sure to pop. To tear apart inside me. A lung. A heart.

  The man finally stopped laughing. “It’s about time you came home, Kenna. I thought you might keep me waiting all night.”

  I rocked my sister’s body, holding her so tight I would have hurt her if she were alive. I tried to speak. I wanted to scream that the police were on their way, that he better get out while he could. But I opened my mouth and all that came out was a silent, hissing scream. My chest was on fire. My body, my skin and bones, tingled like a limb coming back to life.

  “Are you wondering why?” the man said. “Why your house? Your family? I came for you, Kenna.” His voice lowered, so I had to strain to hear him. “I’ve been watching you for a while now. I wanted to know who you were, to understand why … why you would kill an innocent little boy.”

  My breath stopped in my throat. I remembered the man in the crowd who’d stood there glaring at me with such hatred. There was only one person in the world who had a reason to look at me like that.

  Thomas Dunn.

  “My son. My perfect little boy.” He pounded his fist against the door and a strangled sob wrenched from his throat. “You stole him from me!”

  A scream loosed from my throat. “Get out of my house!”

  A sizzling burn swept across my skin. I felt as though I were coming apart, like filaments of me were peeling away, threads of flesh reaching out from my body and waving in the air, the tips ending in raw, tender nerves.

  “Open the door, Kenna. It’s time you paid for what you took.”

  I shivered so hard my teeth made a sound in my head like helicopter blades cutting the air. I moaned and buried my face in my sister’s hair. There was blood in it, already starting to coagulate, turning her thin strands into stiff, tacky dreadlocks.

  It was my fault. All of this was my fault.

  The image of the dying butterfly flashed behind my eyes again. The shattering glass of its prison. Jason Dunn’s empty eyes sinking into their sockets. His face turning gray. His skin shrinking against his skull.

  The butterfly’s wings tensing, batting, lifting it into the sky.

  “Open the door, you murderer!”

  He struck the door and a crack formed. I didn’t know how much time had passed since the 911 operator told me the police were on their way, but I didn’t think they were going to make it in time.

  I gathered Erin in my arms and lifted her. She was so light she seemed to float into the air, resting weightlessly in the crooks of my elbows. The soun
d of the door splintering was far away now. Numbness filled my ears like cotton. My fingertips burned as though I’d been handling hot coals. My entire body felt like one prickling nerve ending, those strings of me that had unraveled continuing to quiver and dance above my skin. I felt like an electric sea creature. Lightning made flesh.

  I laid Erin’s body down over Mom’s outstretched legs, and then I burrowed in against them, dipping myself into their cooling blood. I didn’t feel revolted. The only thing I felt was all-consuming grief and the tingling extension of my skin. The room seemed brighter than it ought to be. The bare bulb overhead radiated an intense, white light, almost too dazzling to look at. It grew brighter and brighter and then began to flicker for a moment, and right before it popped, I thought once more of the butterfly careening drunkenly into the sky.

  The lightbulb exploded, and shards of thin glass rained down from the ceiling. Everything shook.

  But the room did not go dark.

  The blinding white light remained, but a hundred new hues had joined it. Swirling mists of green, blue, lavender, sparks of yellow, and flickers of red and orange in the air, like ghosts made of fire. A storm of light and color, bubbling and blossoming and fogging around me.

  I saw them now. The strands of light stretched from my body, an expanding network of colored electricity, reaching through the door, the walls. A mushrooming matrix of luminous, hair-thin ribbons. Everything was quaking, and I was so hot and so cold, and my eyes ached from the light and vibrant color that condensed and billowed toward me like a gathering storm, a violent aurora borealis trapped in this tiny room. I tangled my arms with my mom’s and Erin’s limbs so I was touching them, no longer afraid to hurt them. Those veins of light extending off me seemed to pierce my family’s skin and connect us, creating one organism.

  Then something new. A vacuuming sensation at the tips of the strands, like they’d all become miniscule whirlpools, and I was filling up inside. Elation fluttered my heart. Joy. Madness. A ferocious euphoria, and it was so wrong, so wrong to feel this way right now. But I couldn’t help it. Whatever was happening was beyond my control.

  My emotions flashed from rage to hunger. From buzzing excitement to terror. From yearning to passion to feverish arousal to a predatory desire to hunt, kill, and taste blood in my mouth. To poison. To bite. The urges kept coming, shifting faster. The impulse to cower. To protect. To run. To fly.

  It was too much … too much … I was drowning in impulse and color and light. So much light!

  Then the room began to darken little by little, light and color washing from the air like night overtaking a sunset. I was so overwhelmed, so mesmerized by what was happening that I didn’t realize the pounding on the door had stopped.

  The mayhem inside me reached critical mass, and I felt like I would explode if I didn’t release it. The vacuuming sensation reversed and all that joy and exultation and wildness rushed through the strands connecting me to my mom and Erin, strained by colored tubes as thin and strong as spider silk until every mad, euphoric sensation was gone.

  I cried out as the colored strands vanished from sight. I’d lost the light again and I was empty. The light and color were gone. The maelstrom in my head and heart were gone. I felt as though I’d gone blind and deaf.

  Then something stirred against my hand. The stirring became a spastic flutter of flesh.

  In the dark, I screamed.

  I struggled to my feet, caught in legs and limbs. I forgot about the blood. My feet skidded out from under me and for a moment I was midair, tilting upside down.

  Then my skull hit the concrete floor, and the darkness got darker.

  Before I blacked out, I saw a figure lurching through the darkness. Thomas Dunn was inside the room then.

  So he would be the last thing I saw.

  I supposed that was what I deserved.

  IMPOSSIBLE

  “Wake up. Kenna, wake up!” A woman’s familiar voice.

  “Is she okay? Mom, is she okay?” This time the voice came from a girl.

  “I don’t know. She’s breathing. I think she might have hit her head. Kenna? Kenna?”

  My lids peeled open over my eyes and pain boomed in my skull, a sledgehammer blow that made firecrackers explode in my vision. Darkness and sparks … darkness and sparks. But this pain was nothing compared to the hollowness inside me, a vacant feeling like some vital organ had been removed.

  “Mom? Erin?” I said in a tearful moan. Had I followed them into death? I’d never subscribed to any particular belief about the afterlife, but this was not my kind of heaven, not this dark place. I was cold and empty and wet, as though I was still in the basement, soaked in—

  In blood.

  I sat up fast, blinking out the shadows and the skull-splitting pyrotechnics. The pain in my head blossomed, but my vision began to clear and my eyes to adjust. A narrow bar of moonlight shone under the door, enough light for me to recognize I was in the storage room, and there were two people in the room with me. Two people who were kneeling on either side of me in their own blood, and neither of them was Thomas Dunn.

  My mom and Erin.

  Alive.

  Impossible.

  My memory reversed, and I saw the moments before I blacked out. A figure staggering through the darkness. The phantom lights that came from everywhere and nowhere, filling me to bursting and then vacuumed out of me, cracking me open as they left. The bulb overhead bursting, showering slivers of glass. Thomas Dunn hammering at the door, and then … silence. He’d stopped trying to get in, perhaps startled by the light in the room, if that had even been real.

  Was he still out there, lying in wait to finish what he’d started? What I’d started when I took his son’s life.

  My eyes, adjusting to the darkness now, scoured my family. Despite my aversion to physical contact, I reached out with a trembling hand and touched my mom. She was warm. I sensed the force of her vitality like static electricity, and her eyes … her eyes were black, pupils expanded to the size of pennies. Why, I didn’t know. But who cared? My mom was alive, and so was Erin. That was all that mattered.

  I pulled Erin into a hug, tears burning my eyes, and released her just as quickly. Something about her was different. She felt different.

  I held her back and studied her face. Both of her eyes were open and black, the same as my mom’s, even though when I’d first seen her in the basement, one of her eyes had been a mound of swelling, the lid sealed shut with blood.

  “How?” I asked.

  Mom shook her head, touched the slash marks in her nightgown, as though she were remembering how she got them, who gave them to her. Her head turned toward the splintered door and her upper lip curled to show her teeth. “Where is he?”

  “I—I don’t know,” I said. The door was barely a door anymore. If Thomas Dunn had wanted in, he would have been in.

  Mom rose unsteadily to her feet, her movements disjointed, like those of a newly birthed foal trying to stand for the first time, gawky on unfamiliar legs. She crept in a herky-jerky style toward the door. She peered through the ragged hole he’d made, and then shoved aside the chest of drawers.

  “Mom,” I said sharply, but she turned the knob and wrenched the door open, revealing an unmoving figure lying facedown on the floor outside. I saw that Thomas Dunn had a handgun tucked into the back of his pants.

  Mom bent to grasp Dunn’s wrist and checked his pulse. I braced myself for him to roar to life suddenly, pull out whatever knife he’d used to slay my family the first time around, and do it all over again. Or maybe this time he would use the gun.

  There was a brittle, cracking sound, and then Mr. Dunn’s arm broke off at the elbow like it was no more than a piece of old, charred wood. Erin screamed and clung to me. I would have screamed, too, but I couldn’t find my voice.

  Mom dropped Mr. Dunn’s arm and it hit the concrete, shattering to dust.

  When Erin’s scream ended, I heard the sound of tires grinding to a halt on our gravel drive o
utside the house, followed by the upstairs door crashing open and footsteps pounding across the floor.

  The cavalry had arrived, but I wasn’t sure the old “better late than never” maxim applied this time. There were going to be questions, and, as had been the case when I ran from Jason Dunn’s lifeless body, I didn’t have any answers.

  Boots thudded down the stairs and flashlight beams cut through the shadows.

  “We’re over here,” Mom called to the cops. She raised her hands so they would see she was harmless, but she couldn’t seem to hold them still. That herky-jerky, wind-up-toy jitter continued.

  The flashlight beams located her and froze long enough for the responding officers to take in the sight of a crazed-looking woman drenched in blood before one of them barked, “Lie down on the ground!”

  “This is my house,” Mom said. “My daughters and I were attacked, but—”

  “Down on the ground!” the same cop insisted. Mom did as she was told, lowering herself to her knees and then lying down flat. Erin and I did the same. I ended up next to Thomas Dunn’s body, looking into his face, and I gasped, even though I knew what I would see. Thomas Dunn looked like he’d been dead for a month. Or a year. His skin was lizard gray and leathered, warping around the bones of his face and arms. His eyes, black and wrinkled like prunes, had sunk deep into their sockets. The fingers on his remaining arm were curled into raptor claws. Even as I watched, his hair continued to detach from his scalp and shed onto the floor around him.

  He looked just like Jason had when I’d gotten through with him.

  The police swarmed us, checking for weapons. When they were assured we were the victims, not the perpetrators, they refocused their attention on the dead man and his kill room.

  I explained that I’d made the 911 call and that, despite the blood on my clothes, I was unhurt, and let myself be escorted upstairs. My mom and Erin remained in the basement. The police, assuming they were still injured, chose to restrict their movement. A part of me wanted to stay downstairs with them, to never let them out of my sight again … and at the same time, I wanted to distance myself from them. Needed to distance myself.