Sketched

by E. M. Townsend

  “Fuck,” Piper swore softly. “Fuck it, I guess you’re right. I’m…” Piper turned to Harrison to apologize and stopped.

  A scream stuck in her throat, she had to work hard not to drop her flashlight where she stood.

  A golden glimmer.

  Someone stood in the shadows behind Harrison. She was far enough in the distance for her face to be obscured and her body was merely a shape but Piper identified her immediately.

  The heart shaped pendant caught the light and flashed toward her like the slow rotation of a lighthouse beam.

  “What?” Harrison had seen the look on Piper’s face and drawn his gun. He was turned in the direction of her beam, squinting and shining his own down the hall. “What do you see?”

  Her mother, her face lost in shadow, slowly turned. She was unsure and stiff as she moved, as if every step caused her discomfort.

  “You don’t see? Harrison, she’s right there.” Piper’s voice shook as she spoke.

  “Who? Who’s there?”

  Piper, her heart skipping frantically, watched as her mother began to walk into the shadow. Before it absorbed her, she extended her arm, pale and bluish in the light and beckoned them forward. Her curling fingers were coated in what looked like dirt as she coaxed them to follow.

  “My…”

  “Your who?” Harrison was staring at her intently. “Piper who did you see?”

  She tried to swallow but the lump that had appeared in her throat made it almost impossible. She struggled, almost choking from the emotions that rioted inside of her.

  My mother. She wanted to cry. My mother, Harrison. The woman who’s missing poster is still on Laura’s imported kitchen island. That one. Not in a dream, not in a vision. She’s right behind you.

  “This way,” she said instead, her voice strange in her ears. “We need to go this way.”

  Fear and claustrophobia gone, Piper took off in a half run. Her flickering beam bouncing, she scanned the rooms wildly as she went. She half heard Harrison telling her to slow down, but she continued. If she had seen her once, she’d see her again. She was here. Her mother was here and she was showing her the way.

  Two arches later and they found themselves facing a wall that looked like something from an underground train station. Four different arches all led in different directions, each with signs above that had either been painted over or scratched out. Piper came to a halt before them, rapidly scanning her light over each door.

  “Where are you?” she whispered, passing the light from one dark tunnel to the other.

  She heard Harrison’s heavy footfalls as he caught up to her.

  “Piper,” he began, breathless at her side. She held up her hand to silence him, intensity rolling off of her like heat from a fever.

  “Where are you,” she whispered again. One tunnel. Two. She was about to flick her light away from the third when her mother appeared again.

  Standing in the recesses of the hallway, her stained arms limp at her side, her mother raised her head slowly. Harrison heard Piper’s breath halt and her body stiffened.

  “Jesus Piper, tell me who it is. Who is down there?”

  Her tired body felt hollow with adrenaline. Piper kept the light on her mother as her arm rose again, pointing down the tunnel with her dirt caked fingers. There was a flicker and Piper’s flashlight died.

  She heard herself curse loudly and she slammed the light against her palm, her wrist protesting. Harrison shone his light on her, watching her beat her broken torch against her palm, teeth clenched with frustration.

  “You’re starting to make me nervous kid.”

  Still not looking at him, Piper snatched the flashlight from his hand. She shone it back into the tunnel only to find it empty.

  “It’s this way. We need to go this way.” She pressed the broken flashlight awkwardly into Harrison’s hands and took off in a run again, the strong beam of the other torch wobbling against the walls with every step.

  When they emerged from the hallway, they found themselves facing a row of elevators. Nowhere near the grandeur of those in the main entranceway, these were the utilitarian kind reserved for staff. Wherever they were, wherever she had led them, they were as far removed from the theatre of the store as possible.

  They were in Entler Department Store’s guts.

  Piper began to hit the buttons, one by one. She slammed her hands against both up and down arrows. When the middle elevator’s up light suddenly burst into orange life, she cried out in triumph. She looked back at where Harrison stood at her elbow, her face radiant with satisfaction.

  “This is it. We found it,” she said, stepping back.

  Harrison held out his hand.

  “Let me lead the way,” he said. “You got us here, let me get us the rest of the way. Deal?”

  There was a shuddering noise as the elevator landed, creaky and ancient. Piper’s hands felt bloodless when she handed the detective back his flashlight. She had been gripping it so hard, her fingers ached as life made its way back to the tips. They stepped back, listening to the pained whirrs as the doors finally cracked open.

  The light that poured from the elevator was so bright, it took a moment for their eyes to adjust. The dropped ceiling had been broken and the naked fluorescents shone down, illuminating an elevator as soulless as the others had been elaborate.

  Although it was difficult, Piper waited for Harrison to enter first. When she stepped in the doors closed behind her with the same pitiful slowness with which they had opened.

  Under the fluorescent lights, Harrison looked more ill than ever. His face almost looked green and the sides of his hair were starting to become stringy with sweat. He could read the concern on her face and before she opened her mouth to speak, he cut her off.

  “Where now, Piper? There are fifty floors to choose from.” He motioned with his head to the row of buttons beside the door. Piper’s stomach gripped itself again. There wasn’t time to explore them all. There was barely any time to choose. An urgency had developed in her since seeing her mother that had grown into a nagging itch under her skin. It made her twitchy, it made her want to gnaw at her own flesh like an animal. She closed her eyes against the frustration that hit her like a wave.

  Fifty floors mom. Fifty damn floors. You got us this far…

  Behind the darkness of her lids, a gold light suddenly exploded like a short-lived sparkler. Gasping, Piper opened her eyes. Her finger was on a button and it glowed, illuminating the pink beneath her nails. She hadn’t done that. She hadn’t felt her hand move or even made the conscious choice to do so.

  “Forty-two,” Harrison said, incredulity creeping into his tone despite his best efforts “Out of all of them, you choose forty-two?”

  Piper ran through a few explanations but could think of nothing. “You have to start somewhere.”

  Harrison shook his head as the elevator lurched upward.

  “You’re an amazing girl, Piper.”

  When they reached the floor, they watched nervously as the light behind the floor’s button went out and the ancient mechanics of the door whirred into action. Harrison stepped in front of Piper, drawing his gun from his holster. He looked back at her, so sickly and frail, so trusting and determined. He motioned for her to step behind him and the two of them watched the forty-second floor’s slow reveal as the doors opened.

  Unlike the other floors, the halls and open spaces were illuminated by a carefully planned trail of floodlights Like beacons on a landing strip, they created a path through a hall dotted with pillars thicker than the width of the elevator they stepped out of.

  The sound of sobbing, as quiet as the cooing of pigeons seemed to be coming from the far side of the main hall.

  “This is it. Piper, you were right. This is it.” Struggling to hide how badly his hand was shaking, Harrison raised his gun, tucking the flashlight underneath it for added visibility. Piper thought she caught a trace of excitement in his eyes when he looked back at her again. He whi
spered, his voice filled with the authority she remembered despite his crumbling appearance. “When I tell you to run, you run, remember? Do you have your phone?”

  Piper pulled her phone from the pocket of her jacket. She held it up to him.

  “Keep that ready. If we’ve got to use 911 as backup, we will. Even if they think we’re nuts.”

  Piper nodded, her heart thudding too hard to trust her voice. Harrison moved forward, following the path of lights and the tangled cords that ran between them like sleeping orange serpents. They passed through light and then shadow, the sobbing becoming louder with every advance. There was a heartbreaking wail to the tears that hit Piper on an animal level causing her heart to accelerate as they drew closer to its source. It was the sob of loss, horrible, mind breaking loss.

  There were three more lights in the trail. The last was positioned next to a door marked for storage only. Although it was as unexceptional as the elevators had been, Piper felt a fleeting panic when she saw it. She’d seen it before. She’d been here before.

  “Alright, that’s it,” Harrison said, beginning to increase his speed. “They’re in there.” He raised his shaking gun to chest level and broke into a trot, focused on the door with hunting dog precision.

  “Harrison, wait.” Piper was about to reach out and grab his coat sleeve when a figure streamed out from behind a pillar. For a moment, she thought it had been a trick of the eye, one of the many imaginary shadows that she had been dancing in the dark with for the last hour.

  The sound of Harrison’s gun firing told her the opposite.

  The blast echoed throughout the hall, Piper’s ears immediately swelling shut against the deafening crack. She clapped her hands to ears, watching confused as the shadow she had seen seemed to attach itself to Harrison’s back. No taller than him, and so thin she couldn’t convince herself it was real, the shadow and Harrison struggled in the darkness between the final two lights. There was a clatter as Harrison’s gun was knocked from his hand. It shot across the tiles, away from Piper and into the darkness.

  When the two stumbled into the light, Piper was finally able to see the shadow’s face.

  Kingston Entler had the detective by the shoulder, one tendon-thick arm tight across his upper torso. The floodlight shone off the blade he held in his other hand, pressed firmly against Harrison’s throat.

  A toothy smile on his face that reminded Piper unsettlingly of a crocodile, Kingston moved his free hand from Harrison’s shoulder to his head. Taking a handful of the detective’s sweaty, thinning hair, he yanked it back to expose his throat.

  “Piper…” Before Harrison could continue, before another word had the time to form, Kingston ran the blade effortlessly through the pulsing length of Detective Harrison’s throat.

  Despite the ringing in her ears from the gunfire, Piper could hear the heavy hotness of the blood that fountained out of his throat and onto the tiles of the forty-second floor.

  It took seconds. Less than a minute.

  Detective Chris Harrison, the only father figure she had ever known, fell to his knees with Kingston’s fingers still wrapped in his hair, holding him up like a puppet for a moment before allowing his lifeless body to drop.

  Piper was paralyzed. Grief and horror made her limbs as heavy as the marble pillars that surrounded them. She had no weapon. She had no flashlight. Both had rolled from Harrison’s hands and had been quickly consumed by the black that seemed to get closer with every gasping breath her shocked body remembered to take.

  She knew his eyes. She knew the sharp drop of his nose and the pretty sculpt of each of the painfully visible bones in his skull. He was the man who held a darkness much worse and much thicker than anything that encroached on her now. The kind of darkness in this slip of a man before her existed without light to define it.

  “I know you.” He was suddenly at her side, having crossed the gap between them before she had a chance to even think about running. How had he moved so fast? “I know you, don’t I? I thought I recognized your little boyfriend there, but you…”

  He tapped the end of the knife, still slick with Harrison’s blood against Piper’s forehead.

  “No, you I definitely know. Now, how did you manage to make it up here? Don’t tell me my electrician skills aren’t quite what I thought.” His hand was on her throat now, holding her still under the light. Piper’s breaths came in gasps, her mind blank with shock. He turned her head to the left and right, carefully examining her. She could feel his breath against her skin, sweet and smelling faintly of caramel. His hand was incredibly strong - she could feel a kind of buzz of electricity running through his fingers and into her skin. “Yes,” he sighed, holding her back from him so he could examine the rest of her. “Oh my, yes.” He used the knife to gently pry her jacket open. Piper’s chest rose and fell with every panicked breath, the hollows of her collarbones dipping downward dramatically.

  “Very pretty,” he said, his voice mellow and pleased. “A pretty little bird, just for me.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  * * *

  Entler’s Department Store- Main Storage Room

  On first sight, Piper believed the room to be packed with people. An instinct to flee screamed through her bloodstream, making her limbs so tight they ached. Their backs to her, there must have been more than a hundred of them, all standing perfectly still, their bald heads pointed toward what looked like a brightly lit upper-class living room.

  She pulled against where Kingston held her by the wrist but stopped when the pain swept through her brain like a sandstorm. He had broken it when he grabbed her. A look of manic delight on his face, he had moved his hand from her throat to her wrist, crushing the already fractured bones in his grip.

  She had finally screamed then. She had screamed for Harrison, whose eyes had been pleading with her to run even as he fell, dead to the floor. She had screamed for her body which became paralyzed with fear when she needed it the most. She had screamed for her mother, somewhere watching in the dark.

  She had only stopped when the agony in her wrist took her breath away.

  Kingston looked back to where he was dragging her like a reluctant prom date into the room. Her eyes were frantic with terror, darting around the room while she tried to understand the scene Kingston had created.

  “Oh silly,” he said, dragging her into the crowd of motionless mannequins. He ran his sticky knife down the exaggerated spine of one as he passed. “They’re not real, obviously. Although I can’t blame you. My six-year-old self would tell you otherwise. I’m still not overly pleased to be alone with them. Funny how childhood trauma has such far reaching impact.”

  Kingston yanked on Piper’s broken wrist, flinging her like she weighed no more than one of the mannequins that surrounded them. She stumbled forward into the faux living room, falling in a heap onto the hard floor. Her eyes closed against the pain that yelled at her from inside. When she felt the coldness of the concrete against her bare knees, she knew at once where she was.

  This is where she had been in her vision at Harrison’s house. This was where the little boy had been locked away. Unbidden, the woman’s voice came back to her, screeching with fury from the other side of the locked door. The door that Kingston had just pulled her through.

  She was suddenly aware of the sobbing she had heard in the hallway. It was closer to her now, only a few feet away. The heat from the floodlights was making her skin burn and there was a smell.

  Piper opened her eyes and saw the bare feet of a young girl in front of her. Scuffed and bloody, she saw that one of the toenails had been torn off and the others were turning blue from the tightness of her duct tape bonds. Without even looking up, she knew who the girl taped to the easy chair was in an instant.

  The sobbing became muffled words and she kicked her legs against the chair uselessly. Piper looked up into the bloodshot, wild eyes of the young girl she had drawn earlier that day. One eye was sealed shut from what looked like multiple beatings and
her hair was ropy with sweat, but there was no mistaking her.

  “I’m so sorry,” Piper said, choking on a sob. She got to her feet unsteadily, cradling her wrist in her hand. She took a few steps toward Jennifer. She began to shake her head again, whipping her filthy hair around her face in an attempt to communicate. “Your mother,” Piper said, “where’s your mother?”

  Jennifer’s head dropped backward and a hollow noise that began in her chest vibrated throughout her entire body.

  “I’m afraid it’s not the best day for mothers in general.” Kingston’s voice, melodic as ever came from behind her. He walked to her side, a frown crinkling the smooth expanse of his brow. “Mrs. Stone ended up being a bit of a dud. She passed out cold before she could join in.” Piper cringed as he placed both hands on her shoulders gently. He spun her slowly to the right, “What I thought was fashionably thin was really just a lack of muscle tone. Complete emaciation. I mean, look.”