by Ania Ahlborn
He grinned because Jack Winter had been in the exact spot he was meant to be in that night. He grinned because, judging by the dazed expression on the kid’s face, Jack Winter didn’t realize he was covered from head to toe in blood.
It seemed like the sun would never set. The hours ticked by with the slowness of a hundred years. Jack and Aimee kept to their separate rooms—her in the living room, Jack in the kitchen—making time inch by that much more slowly. There was a sickening tinge of finality to their division, as though they’d reached the end of something.
Jack had already pushed through four cups of coffee when he decided to try for a peace offering. Part of him wanted nothing to do with her, but the other half—the half that had loved her for so long—pushed for reconciliation. He fished a mug from the cupboard and poured Aimee a cup of coffee.
When he stepped into the living room, Aimee was in the same spot he’d left her hours before: her feet were pulled up onto the cushions of the couch, her shoulders wrapped in a faux cashmere blanket Patricia had given her as a last minute birthday present—the kind of gift you pick up on your way to a party: an afterthought. Aimee’s eyes were still swollen. Her skin was sallow. She was coming down with a bad case of heartbreak. Jack stepped across the room and offered her the mug. She didn’t take it, and he placed it on the coffee table before silently taking a seat next to her.
It was hard to know what to say. They couldn’t talk about normal things because nothing was normal anymore, and they certainly couldn’t talk about the girls because the girls were gone. Jack pressed his lips together in a tight line and finally found a suitable inquiry.
“Did you call your mother?”
Aimee rolled her eyes and chose not to answer. Apparently it was a question that didn’t deserve a reply.
Jack stared at his hands for a long time, trying to decipher the puzzle that had suddenly been set out before them. Despite the gut-wrenching anxiety of having both their children missing, he couldn’t seem to fit one of the pieces in its rightful slot. It seemed that they should have been closer than ever while dealing with something so incomprehensible. When they had met, banding together had been one of their talents. They were on the same side of every argument, shared the same opinion on nearly every subject. But now, just when they needed each other most, Aimee wasn’t there at all. She was vacant. Missing, just like Abby and Charlotte. And Jack was half-gone, his soul being eaten away by the darkness of his past.
“Did I do something?” Jack asked. “Is there a reason that you’re shutting me out?”
Aimee kept her silence, deeming that question just as undeserving as the last. Jack looked back to his hands. He tried to sit there, to give her time, but after a handful of seconds that familiar irritation started to itch beneath his skin. He got up.
“Whatever,” he said under his breath and pointed himself down the hallway. Aimee spoke up just as he rounded the corner.
“You’re a liar,” she said flatly. “You brought something into this house. I found the photos.”
He knew she had. He’d seen them torn on the comforter. The sight of them had nearly set him off, nearly sent him into the kitchen for Aimee’s butcher block.
“What is it?” she asked. “What’s that shadow that shows up in all of them? Do I deserve to know yet? Or will I only deserve it when the police call and ask us to meet them at the morgue?”
Jack retraced his steps into the living room. The man that loved her wanted to tell her. Telling her would lift the weight of his terrible secret; it would free him from the burden of looking over his shoulder every day, half-expecting to see a razor-toothed monster standing behind him with a snarling grin. But the look on her face stopped him. Her expression was bitter, twisted in muted betrayal. He could see the simmer of loathing behind her eyes. Those big doe eyes that used to smile at him were now filled with nothing short of confined disdain. He had expected a lot—losing Charlie, facing his darkest fears… but seeing Aimee fall out of love with him right before his eyes was something he hadn’t counted on.
“So you aren’t going to tell me?” she asked.
Jack shook his head.
“No,” he said, then turned down the hall.
Aimee followed him into the bedroom, caught him pulling on his jacket. She blocked the door by pressing her hip against the jamb.
“You’re leaving?” she asked, her tone growing more defiant. Jack didn’t look at her. He slid his arms through his sleeves and shoved a few supplies into his backpack—a flashlight, some extra batteries, a bottle of water he’d grabbed out of the fridge.
“I’m going to look for the girls.”
Aimee didn’t move when he approached her. She continued to block his way, and he had to physically move her aside to get into the hall. Aimee watched him stalk down the hallway; and suddenly panic set in. It was her turn to get that sense of finality, to realize that this moment would forever change her life.
“Jack.” His name warbled in her throat. When he turned, she hesitated. “Maybe you should just stay here,” she said.
“You know I can’t,” he told her.
Aimee looked down at her feet. The familiar burn of saline flared in her sinus cavity. When she looked up again she was crying, looking so much like she had when they’d first fallen in love that it made Jack weak in the knees.
“But I don’t want to be alone,” she confessed.
Jack shifted his backpack from his shoulder to the floor and met Aimee at the threshold of their bedroom. His hands drifted to her shoulders as a sob rumbled deep in her throat.
“You won’t be alone for long,” he assured her with a whisper. She eventually nodded, roughly wiping the tears from her face. “I’ll see you soon,” he said, then leaned in and pressed a kiss to the top of her head.
She tried to whisper “I love you,” but it caught in her throat. The screen door slammed behind him, and she slid down the wall to the floor, sobbing like a girl who’d just lost everything.
Chapter Fifteen
Jack stared ahead into the trees. His first instinct was to get in the car, but just before he reached the driver’s side door he paused, those keys hanging from his fingers, swaying like a noose. Something pulled at him, like a magnet tugging a metal screw across a table. It was coming from across the road.
Standing next to Arnold’s car, he could almost see Charlie and Abigail running into the trees, hand in hand like two best friends. That slow pull assured him that he was right about the two dashing across the street, but it wasn’t to go on a lighthearted expedition. Aimee was right: Charlie did take Abigail. But she hadn’t taken Abby because she wanted her: she had taken Abby because she wanted Jack to follow them.
The keys slipped from his fingers. It was oddly poetic: instead of taking his father-in-law’s showboat into the abyss, he’d simply step into the darkness and let it engulf him the way it had always wanted. Like stepping into the gaping mouth of a whale, he’d either be swallowed whole or he’d find a wooden boat.
But Jack was a pessimist. There wouldn’t be a boat. There wouldn’t be an ‘other side’. No light at the end of the tunnel. Not the welcoming faces of his mom and dad, smiling, reaching for him, inviting him up to a bright white Heaven.
Jack stood on the front lawn of their small Southern home for a few moments longer, remembering the day he and Aimee first spotted this place while taking a late afternoon drive. He remembered how hard it had been to get the king-sized mattress through the front door, and how even more impossible it was to maneuver it through that narrow hallway. He saw Aimee painting the walls of what would become Abigail’s nursery a pastel yellow that felt like sunshine. He remembered how Aimee had yelled for him to come as fast as he could when Abby trod down the hall in a half-walk half-stumble that made up her first steps.
Then there was Charlie—beautiful, amazing Charlie, who had mesmerized Jack so fully he had been afraid he’d love her too much. There was her bubbly laughter as a toddler, her dress-up sessions
as she got older; the Spongebob theme song that, for a whole year, she’d sing at the top of her lungs at random intervals, making Jack laugh every time she did it.
There was Aimee’s garden in the backyard, where she planted sunflowers that came back every year, and the way she’d stand in the full-length mirror on early summer mornings and look herself over like a surgeon, picking herself apart while Jack wondered how a woman could be so beautiful. It seemed as though his entire life had happened in this run-down house. It began here, and it would end here. Thirteen short years of bliss. It hadn’t seemed like bad luck until just then.
Jack sucked in a steadying breath and stepped forward, his back to his home and wife and all the memories that made him who he was. That magnetic tug pulled him forward like a string tied around his heart. He had no idea where he was going, no idea whether he’d find Abby or Charlie or anyone out in those trees. All he knew was that he was done running. It was time to face the shadow with the jagged teeth and hungry smile; time to look himself in the eyes and face the demon he was and the killer he’d always be.
If you lead a man into a fog-covered field and tell him to walk straight, he’ll walk in circles instead. The further Jack walked, the more disoriented he became. He swore he was passing the same landmarks, seeing the same scars on tree trunks. He knew that if he was lost, he’d stay lost whether he kept going forward or tried to go back. And if he wasn’t lost, he’d eventually come across the thing he was seeking. His instinct assured him that the second was correct, to disregard the first. And so he did, because there was nothing left to do.
And he did find what he sought. Spotting Charlie in a small clearing, Jack stopped dead. Something about finally setting his eyes on her while knowing what she truly was felt like a miniature death. The part of his heart that Charlie once owned shriveled into a black, brittle husk. She stood with her hands at her sides and her hair hanging limply around her face—but the face wasn’t hers. Her smile was jagged, her eyes had lost their spark, and her skin had turned a fetid grey-blue—the color of a bloated, half-buried corpse. Her lips twitched when she saw him stop. Jack couldn’t control the emotion that washed over his face. There was his little girl, his angel, a monster.
“Oh, Daddy, I knew you’d find me,” she said with a perverse grin. “We’ve been waiting for you for a very long time.”
“Where’s Abigail?” Jack asked, and for a brief moment he was surprised he remembered his purpose for wandering into the woods at all. Staring into the twisted face of a six-year-old was enough to make any mind go blank, but Abby pushed through, reminding him that he needed to find her. If he was going to lose one he couldn’t lose the other.
Charlie’s crooked smile twisted down at the corners, her mouth taking on a grotesque angle of over-exaggerated disappointment. “Is that all you came for?” she asked, her large eyes now disturbingly huge.
“Give her to me,” Jack demanded. “You have no right.”
The frown disappeared, and for a moment Charlie’s expression went frightfully blank before blooming with vicious glee. She exhaled a screeching laugh and clapped her hands together in amusement,
“No right?” She hissed, her laughter suddenly gone. “No right? How dare you tell me what right I have, chief.”
Jack wanted to run. The look on Charlie’s face, the warped tone of voice, all of it screamed Get the fuck out! And yet Jack stood frozen, half in fear and half in stupid defiance.
“I want Abigail,” he repeated. He tried to sound as imposing as he could—but his tone betrayed him. He knew he wasn’t going to win this one. Abby was lost. She had been lost as soon as she had ducked into the trees.
Charlie picked up on that ghost of defeat, and rather than rushing him and putting him out of his misery, her face settled back into its perfect composition. Her big eyes were bright and doe-like again. Her cheeks were touched with pink. This time the look of disappointment was heartbreaking.
“Oh, Daddy,” she said in a voice that made Jack’s heart swell. “Aren’t I still your favorite?”
Jack looked away. He cringed at the question and clenched his teeth against the answer. “No,” he said with a surprising force. “You’re not my favorite. Abigail was always my favorite.”
That malicious smile returned to her face.
“That’s what I was counting on,” she hummed in her chest, like a dog growling right before a bark. “Maybe you’ll figure out how to get her down.”
Jack narrowed his eyes at the statement, then blinked when something wet dripped onto his cheek. Slowly tipping his chin upward, he pulled his fingers across his face. Blood. Above him, a pair of feet swayed in the breeze.
Abby rocked back and forth, the movement making it hard for Jack to see past his panic. After a moment he realized what he was looking at; Abby hung fifteen feet overhead, her small intestines looped around her neck in a makeshift noose.
A sob tore itself out of Jack’s heart, punching through his chest.
“So sensitive,” Charlie sang with a smirk. “Funny, you weren’t that sensitive when you feasted upon the flesh of your own mother and father.”
But Jack didn’t hear her. She could have said a thousand terrible things, she could have screamed it into the sky; he wouldn’t have heard a word over the deafening thud of his own heart. His face felt hot and vertigo kept him low to the ground. He dug his fingers into the earth, scooping up decomposing leaves, trying to steady himself despite the nausea that rocked him back and forth. He didn’t see her shift, but he sensed that Charlie was on the move. That gut instinct assured him that he had to pull it together, that he had to gather up the broken pieces of his heart and his mind and glue it all together in some sort of semblance of sanity.
He looked up to where Charlie had stood through the blur of tears. She was gone, and he found himself stumbling forward, spinning around like a spooked animal, searching for the predator that was most certainly hiding, waiting for the perfect moment to pounce.
“Charlie,” he said, her name cracking with desperation. “Charlie, don’t let it take you from me…”
A part of him knew Charlie was lost; that whatever had wrapped itself around her soul had squeezed the life out of her long before he or Aimee ever knew she was gone. But he couldn’t help but hope. Charlie had always been strong. He refused to believe his little girl would simply give up and disappear.
And then he saw her standing next to a tree with her chin tipped upward, her expression as sad as he’d ever seen. Remorse radiated from her eyes. She was looking up at Abigail, her bottom lip trembling as her sister swung overhead. But Jack wasn’t convinced. He had been strong-willed as a child as well—sharp as any kid in Rosewood—and the darkness had swallowed him whole. He had murdered his parents and forgotten it ever happened. Seeing Charlie standing like that—her expression grave—he knew that even if she was seeing Abby, she’d never remember disemboweling her sister, and she’d never recall how she got Abby’s body up into those trees.
Jack pulled the bag he’d brought toward him and reached for its bottom. Groping around until he found what he was looking for, his fingers wrapped around the handle of Aimee’s best kitchen knife. He drew it out of his bag like a knight drawing his sword, desperate for it not to come to this, but he saw no other way. It was a cycle: left unchecked, Charlie would be in this very same position in twenty years time—standing in front of her own child, devastated by the knowledge that her baby was lost. He loved her too much to let that happen. He loved her too much to let her live.
“Daddy?” Charlie was jolted out of her daze by the glint of the blade. She regarded the knife, her face puzzled. Jack held the knife at his side, the long blade pointing straight toward Hell. He waited for Charlie’s expression to shift again, waited for that monster to show itself once more, but instead of Charlie’s face going cold with rage, she stood dumbfounded and scared just the way Jack hoped she wouldn’t.
“Daddy, what are you doing with Momma’s knife?” she asked.
It isn’t her, Jack told himself. It’s a trick, like David fucking Copperfield. When his eyes snapped open, he half-expected Charlie to have disappeared again—but she was exactly where he had left her, spooked and confused. It’s an act. It isn’t really her.
But it looked like her. So much like her that it twisted what was left of his heart into a knot.
You have to do it.
Jack pushed on against the throbbing in his chest. He stepped forward even though his ears rushed with blood. Charlie let out a muffled gasp and pressed herself against the base of a tree.
“Please don’t hurt me,” she whispered, her eyes wide and glittering in the moonlight. “I’m sorry if I messed up,” she told him. “I’ll make it up, Daddy, I promise I will.”
Jack’s grip wavered on that blade.
“It isn’t me,” she whimpered. “It’s just like when you were little.” Her chest heaved, her breaths shallow. “Do you remember, Daddy?” She began to wheeze. Charlie hadn’t had an asthma attack in years, and here was the relapse, appropriately timed as her father held a knife at his side, ready to plunge it into her six-year-old chest.
Nothing could have been any more disarming than watching his little girl struggle to breathe. Her hands pressed over her t-shirt as she tried to gulp air, and all those thoughts of demons and curses and never-ending cycles faded into obscurity. Jack let the knife slip from his fingers as he moved forward, catching Charlie by her shoulders, saving her as she gasped for air. He left her to search his bag, dumping out its contents onto the forest floor, looking for a solution he knew wasn’t there. Even as the wheezing slowed, Jack continued to rack his brain on how to help her, panicking at his own uselessness.
“Daddy?”
He jumped at the sound directly behind his ear. Veering around, he saw her standing next to him, her face flushed from the effort it had taken to catch her breath.
“Are you mad at me?” she asked.