The Haunting of Ironwood

by Jeff DeGordick

  "Elizabeth."

  She spun around.

  Earl stood at the bottom of the stairs, a knife in his hand.

  Katie froze.

  "I'm preparing dinner for us tonight. Your dress is on your bed." His voice was slow, like he was carefully watching her every feature and reaction as he said each word. When Katie said nothing, he moved back toward the stairs, but he didn't go up them. He waited for her.

  Katie reluctantly walked toward the stairs, knowing he was suspicious of her. She saw the gleam of the blade in his hand and she faltered.

  "What's the matter?"

  "Nothing."

  Katie slipped past him and hurried up the stairs. As soon as she started ascending them, she heard his footsteps right behind her, coming up quickly.

  He held that knife. Nice and sharp. Swinging back and forth in his hand, right behind her. Close enough to cut a nice strip off her blouse and pierce her soft skin...

  When Katie was at the top of the stairs she turned down the hall and hurried to her bedroom on the second floor without slowing or looking behind her. She shoved the door closed and locked it, pressing her back to it and squeezing her eyes shut.

  Katie choked her dinner down.

  Earl left his sitting on his plate to cool while he watched her. That was what he was most interested in doing. With every motion she made, no matter how banal, he would be watching and would respond accordingly. Like a patron sitting in the seats at an opera and drinking in every note of the show, he shifted slightly in his seat, raised his eyebrows in muted delight, parted his lips imperceptibly in anticipation. His breath would hitch. His pupils grew large.

  "What?" Katie said at last.

  Earl smiled. "That expression you just made... with your lip. The way it curled up after taking a bite. That's just how Elizabeth did it."

  Katie was horrified. She dropped her fork and felt her lip like she had just come home from the dentist; it was foreign and numb. Had she really acted like Elizabeth? But how could that be? Earl had never shown her any videos of the girl—only the endless barrage of photographs and stories.

  She started to rise from the table, but Earl made a quick motion with his hand.

  "Stay," he said.

  "But I..." she started, suddenly finding it hard to draw breath into her lungs. "I think I'm going to be sick."

  Earl stood and walked into the kitchen, returning a moment later with a large ceramic bowl. He put it on the table next to her dinner plate.

  Katie slowly sat back down and took a moment to compose herself before she started back in on her dinner. As she chewed, she self-consciously held her free hand over her mouth. But still Earl watched with delight in his eyes.

  She hadn't wanted to eat at any of his dinners anymore, but she only held out long enough for her stomach to seriously start rumbling. That was yesterday.

  And for the last three days since her attempt to get to the closet in the night, he made her dinner every evening, laying out a new outfit for her to wear. Every time, she felt a little piece of herself slipping away. The sun grew a little dimmer each morning, and the night a little darker.

  The next day, Katie spent her early afternoon walking around the house and stretching her legs. Or so she wanted it to look. She walked a path from the living room on the ground floor to the end of the hall on the second, then the end of the hall on the third. She passed the closet back and forth endlessly on her walk. She tried to make it look like she was staring off into space and lost in her thoughts as she did so. Actually, that was the truth.

  Earl was in the house and he was watching. She knew he was.

  She didn't go into any of the rooms—didn't even look at any of them. All she did was pay attention to the cameras in her peripheral vision. She memorized their locations. Even the hidden ones.

  She was looking for blind spots.

  Katie knew she couldn't start her approach to the closet from her bedroom, because she would have to traverse the full length of the hallway on the second floor, and there was no hiding from the main camera perched up in the corner. But the cameras were sparse on the stairs, and if she slid shut the closet door next to the front door downstairs beforehand, she would be able to slip from the kitchen and up the stairs to the third floor with Earl only catching glimpses of her in the corners of his cameras if he was paying attention. But now the question was how was she going to get to the closet door on the top floor?

  She considered making a break for it once she got to the top of the stairs, but that was throwing a prayer to the wind that once she got inside the closet she would be able to navigate the hidden crawlspaces in the walls and get out before he intervened. And if he was already hidden somewhere in that unknown space...

  Her legs getting tired, Katie returned to her bedroom and collapsed on her bed. Her mind was racing with ideas, but none of them solved the problem. And they did nothing to quell that building panic in her chest that felt like time was running out, like the air in her lungs was slowly lost with each exhale, never to return. As she lay there, a strange illusion played out in front of her where the walls seemed like they were actually closing in on her.

  She rolled onto her stomach and managed a huge inhale of oxygen. Her damp forehead was on the pillow.

  A scratching sound.

  Katie's head turned.

  The black cat was sitting on the windowsill, pawing at the glass.

  She eyed him for a moment, at first not wanting anything to do with him after the gut-wrenching horror he brought the last time. But the cat pawed and pawed, meowing silently from the other side.

  "Oh all right," she said, rising from the bed. She crossed the room to the window and opened it.

  The cat sat on the sill, and instead of immediately brushing up against her, he stayed where he was and cried.

  "What's wrong?" she asked.

  He cried even louder this time, his eyes narrow slits, staring into hers.

  "Oh, I get it. You're hungry, aren't you?"

  Like he understood the words, he took a step forward to the inside of the windowsill. Then he sat and bristled, crying again. His voice was shaky and more than pathetic.

  She looked at the sad cat and deliberated for a moment before finally sighing. "Okay, fine. I'll see if I can find you something downstairs. Just... stay right here."

  Katie started for the bedroom door, looking over her shoulder.

  The cat remained on the windowsill. His glassy green eyes watched her in anticipation.

  Then a strange thing happened: Katie felt a smile creep over her face. It was so sudden and natural that she hadn't noticed she did it until she was halfway down the stairs to the bottom floor. She didn't know how to feel about her reaction, but she didn't want to think about it now; she had to focus on the task at hand.

  She began rooting through the kitchen cupboards, looking for something suitable for a cat.

  "Not cereal," she told herself as she closed one cupboard. It may have been good enough for her, but she didn't want to hurt the poor thing.

  She pulled open the fridge, but there wasn't much besides an old loaf of bread, a wilting head of lettuce, some cheese and eggs, and some condiments. Earl had stocked up the last time he came back from town, but the meat he'd been feeding her in his dinners had been kept in the freezer until he was ready to thaw and prepare—hardly anything that would help the cat right now.

  "There's got to be something here," she said to herself.

  Katie stretched up on her toes and opened the cupboard above the fridge. A dusty plastic colander.

  In the cabinets that spanned the floor to the ceiling next to the window by the entrance, there was a row of similarly small cupboards up high that Katie had never looked in before. She stretched up and opened them, hyperextending her arm as she pushed around some steel pots and pans.

  So that's where he keeps those, she thought, noticing that he never kept anything she could use as a weapon easily within her reach. She felt around the cupboard,
but he must have kept the knives and forks somewhere else.

  Rooting through some cupboards on the other side of the sink, she found a can of beef stew.

  "This could work."

  She rifled through the cutlery drawers and found a can opener.

  "Perfect!"

  She returned to the stairs with the can opener and beef stew in her hands, feeling a spring in her step. She caught herself doing it and realized how excited she was getting over a cat; she didn't even like cats. But right now he was the only friend she had.

  And then, when she reached the top of the stairs, another thought came into her head. Her mind floated back to the route up and down the hallways she'd walked endlessly that day, to the pots and pans in the cupboard, to some of the other things she'd seen in the kitchen. And then she had the solution.

  She didn't need to figure out a way to slip by the cameras unnoticed, and she certainly couldn't rely on Earl leaving the house. She already had exactly what she needed all along.

  A distraction.

  Where There's Smoke, There's Fire

  The cat cried incessantly until she put down the open can of beef stew on the floor. The cat jumped from the windowsill immediately and began sniffing the can before eating the hunks of beef at the top.

  "There you go," Katie said, kneeling down next to him and patting his black fur. She tilted the can on an angle and scooped some of the beef toward the edge where he could get it. The cat happily gobbled up everything she put in front of his mouth, and he ate so quickly that it seemed like he hadn't had a meal in days.

  "Poor thing," she said with a pout as she scratched her finger behind his ears.

  The cat began purring as he ate.

  "But you need a name, don't you?" Katie asked him.

  He was wearing a collar with no name tag, but he was obviously just a stray. Even a stray cat needed a name.

  "What do you think of Shadow? Too obvious? Hmm, maybe Onyx. Or Ash. Or is that too grim?"

  The cat ignored her as he feasted on the beef.

  A hiss of static came over the speaker.

  "What are you doing with that thing in your room?" Earl asked.

  "It's just a cat," Katie said to the room.

  "There are no pets allowed in this house," he replied.

  Katie turned her gaze to the camera watching her from the closet and soured her face. "He needs to eat. The poor thing hasn't had a meal in a while."

  "Get rid of it."

  "No," Katie said defiantly. "He's hungry."

  Earl's voice became thinner and more impatient. "If you don't get rid of that thing right now, I'm going to kill it." There was nothing joking in his voice.

  Katie was shocked by his inhumanity. When she didn't do anything to get rid of the cat, the ceiling above her creaked as footsteps traveled from one side of the house to the other. Then they galloped down the stairs and stomped along the hall.

  "Okay, okay!" Katie said. She frantically turned to the cat and began shoving it away from the can. "Okay, buddy, that's all you can have for now." She pulled the can away and set it next to the bed. "Come on, get out of here. I'm serious!" She picked him up and set him on the windowsill. He turned his head up toward her and let out a long and pathetic cry.

  "No," she said. "Get out of here!"

  The footsteps were almost at her door.

  She gave him a shove, but the cat refused to leave.

  Tears began leaking from her eyes as she pleaded with him. "Please, go! I can't watch that again." She gave him a hard shove and the cat finally stepped to the outer part of the windowsill. "Find some way to help me," she whispered. "Please!" Then she shut the window.

  Her bedroom door burst open and Earl stood in the threshold with his hands balled up into fists.

  "He's gone!" Katie said, hardly able to catch her breath.

  Earl walked into the room, turning his piercing gaze away from her to the floor where she'd been feeding him.

  "He's gone, okay? I swear!"

  "You're not hiding him, are you?" He knelt down and lifted up the bed skirt, looking underneath. He stood and turned, eyeing the closet, then he looked at the closed window.

  "He's gone!" she reiterated. "I made him leave." Her voice was shaking from fear.

  When Earl was satisfied the feline truly was gone, he turned his fiery eyes on her. They were so intense that they made her take a step back. He approached her. She stumbled back until she hit the wall between the bookcase and the bed.

  Earl approached until he was right in her face. He was not a tall man, but he was taller than her, and she felt the full weight of his oppressive stare bearing down on her. His breath ran in and out of his nostrils like an agitated bull.

  Katie pressed the back of her head to the wall so hard it hurt. He was only an inch from her face, but he leaned in even closer. She squeezed her eyes shut and turned her head away, unsure of what he was going to do. Then she felt his hand grip her wrist. It was like iron. The blood was cut off from her hand and it quickly went numb.

  She felt his warm breath on her neck, smelled the staleness of it, as he spoke measured words into her ear.

  "My patience with you is wearing thin, Elizabeth," he said. "Don't make me regret my choice to bring you here. Is that understood?"

  With her eyes still squeezed shut, Katie nodded her head.

  "Good." Earl squeezed her wrist even tighter. "And if I ever see that cat in here again, I'm going to chop it into tiny pieces and feed it to you." He let go of her wrist and turned out of the room.

  Katie was left pressed up against the wall. Tremors of shock coursed through her body. She was too frightened and surprised to cry, so she just sank to her knees and held herself. She rocked against the wall, staring at the half-eaten can of stew on the floor next to the bed.

  She was never going to give him a chance to do anything to the cat, because in just a couple hours, she would be gone.

  Later in the afternoon Katie made her way down to the kitchen. Earl was up in his normal spot somewhere in the house, watching her. When she reached up in the high cupboard and pulled out a saucepan, his voice came over the speaker.

  "What are you doing?" he asked.

  Katie tried to act casual as she put the saucepan on one of the stove's elements. "I'm still hungry from breakfast," she said. "I was just going to cook myself a little something."

  "You aren't to touch those," he said firmly.

  "It's okay. I know how to cook. Honest. I'll even clean up the mess when I'm done. Please, I'm hungry."

  There was a long pause. "Can't you wait until dinner? It will be in two hours."

  "No," she said. "Please, my stomach's growling." She searched her imagination, trying to flesh out her excuse. "And there's something I want to make myself. An old family recipe. It would mean a lot to me."

  "What recipe?"

  Katie froze. "Uh..." The truth was she was a terrible cook and didn't know how to make anything. Her mind raced, trying to remember what ingredients were even available in the kitchen that would be believable enough to cook on a stove. When she couldn't think of anything, she said, "It's beef stew, but it's spiced up a bit. My mom used to make it for me all the time."

  She waited for him to say something, and after a very long pause, finally over the speaker: "Fine."

  Katie looked in the cupboard where she'd gotten the can of beef stew before, but it turned out that had been the only can. Reluctantly, she hurried upstairs and retrieved the half-eaten can from beside her bed and brought it down to the kitchen as the saucepan warmed up on the element. She rifled through the cupboards to find some spices, pulling out the small, dusty bottles at random. She scooped out the remains of the stew into the saucepan then liberally sprinkled in some spices. Next, in a moment of near panic to make her act believable, she opened the fridge and took out a package of processed cheese, peeling off a slice and dropping it into the pan. She stirred the concoction, trying not to react to the obnoxious smell.

  Katie
dumped the contents into a bowl and stuck a spoon in it, then she put away the ingredients and began cleaning the pan in the sink. There was a bottle of olive oil sitting on the counter next to her.

  A camera watched from a little hole cut out in the ceiling behind her; she knew that. So she shifted over a little, using her body to block the camera's view as she grabbed the bottle of oil and dumped as much of it as she could into the saucepan. Then she ran the water, carefully directing the stream outside of the pan.

  When she was done, she dried the outside of the pan and set it back on the stove's element before taking the bowl of foul stew and hurrying out of the kitchen—the element that she had intentionally set to high heat when she cooked the stew, and the same element that she had never turned off.

  Katie sat on her bed, holding the stew in her lap. She wanted to chuck it out the window or slide it under the bed, but she knew Earl would be suspicious if she did. She looked down at the unappealing mess, already half-eaten by a cat, and she tried to hide her grimace. She scooped up a spoonful and put it in her mouth and nearly choked on the cayenne pepper in it.

  The taste was horrible and far too spicy, but she slowly chewed and swallowed it down, pretending it was good. She ate it as slowly as possible, waiting for her plan to hatch.

  Downstairs, white smoke began pouring out of the saucepan. A moment later it ignited in a huge blaze.

  Katie heard the smoke detector go off downstairs. Then footsteps scrambled across the floor above her. She listened carefully to their location. They started from that blank spot on the third floor between Earl's bedroom and the empty one, just as she suspected. A frantic and muffled voice spewed curse words she couldn't hear as the thundering footsteps stormed through the bowels of the house. She heard the mysterious door fling open above her, then the footsteps hurried downstairs.

  When they were in the kitchen, Katie sprung out of bed and into action.

  Breaking Out