Chapter 47
Martin slowly made his way along the front porch, and then around the corner of the house.
His breathing was shallow and his heart continued to pound away in his chest. The only thing that kept him driving forward was a conviction that Arielle was here somewhere—and so was his daughter. Although peering into the parked Audi hadn’t revealed much, save a car seat in the back and a fastidiously clean interior, he knew it was Arielle’s car.
Please, don’t burn my daughter.
A shudder racked through him.
If it weren’t for them, he would have been long gone.
There were footprints around the side of the house—three pairs, by the looks of it. There were massive prints coming from somewhere behind Martin, somewhere from back in the woods. Large feet, impressions that seemed to lack a pattern, but appeared to be covered in something… a sock maybe? Was someone running around here in socks?
(Jessie)
The other set of footprints was from smaller feet—wearing shoes this time—while the third were smaller still; tiny, a child’s.
Hope—these are Arielle’s and Hope’s footprints.
Martin followed the footprints, trying to reenact what might have happened here. He quickly made it to a spot where the footsteps converged. And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, there were only two: the large footprints and the child prints, both heading in opposite directions.
What the fuck? What happened to Arielle?
Despite Woodward’s instructions to keep the flashlight low, Martin raised the beam and sprayed it around the muddy area adjacent the house, trying to pick up where Arielle’s footprints began again.
Nothing.
The mud, aside from the footprints in front of him, was relatively undisturbed.
Nothing, except…
Martin pointed the flashlight away from the house, aiming it at the mud that he thought had previously been undisturbed. And now he saw more footprints.
But these were different. For one, the large sock prints and the child’s—even Arielle’s before they disappeared—seemed to flank the house. These didn’t. These moved away from the house, toward the swamp in the distance.
And these were barefoot.
Small feet, like Arielle’s, but clearly barefoot. Martin thought he could even make out the individual toes.
Drawn to these strange prints, he moved away from the house and took a step toward them. And then another, and another, thoughts of his wife and daughter momentarily displaced to the dark recesses of his mind.
Less than twenty paces later, Martin found himself at a spot where the footprints ended. He raised the flashlight slowly with a trembling hand, moving it up first the gnarled roots of the large tree before him, then up the trunk.
There was a woman tied to the tree, a woman with black, smoldering flesh. It was the woman from the porch swing. The burned woman with white eyes that bore into him.
As Martin watched in horror, her mouth started to open, hunks of crispy flesh peeling off and then falling to the muddy ground.
“You burned me and my baby—but you haven’t killed me. I will never die… I will come baaaaack. I will come baaaaaaaack.”
The word back drifted on and on until it, like the bullfrogs and insects before it, receded into a background cacophony.
“You killed my child, and now I will have yours!” Anne LaForet hissed.
Martin felt warmth spread on the front of his jeans.
And then the screaming started.
* * *
“Martin! Martin!”
Martin was staring into the woman’s singed mouth as it opened and closed, shouting his name over and over again. He felt his legs go weak and his eyelids begin to flutter.
Anne LaForet was fading along with his consciousness.
Arielle—I need to find Arielle and Hope.
“Martin!”
Just as he felt his knees buckle, something gripped his arm and brought him back from the brink of whatever hell he was tumbling into.
“Martin!”
His eyes began to refocus, and he found himself staring not into the eyes of a burned corpse, but into Woodward’s. The man’s face was a deep scarlet and he was breathing heavily.
“Martin, what’s wrong! What the fuck! Why are you screaming?”
Me? Screaming, there was screaming, but it wasn’t me…
Martin collected himself and quickly whipped the flashlight around and aimed it back at the tree.
It was dark and dead, twisted knots of thick branches and roots wrapping around itself like a morbid embrace.
But there was no woman.
There was nothing.
His heart skipped a beat.
“Martin!”
He turned back to face Woodward.
“I’m fucking losing it, man,” he stuttered, tears in his eyes. “I’m seeing things… I’m seeing the dead, man.”
Woodward took a deep breath.
“We need to get you out of here Martin… you’ve been through shit today, and seeing a woman burn to death will fuck anyone up. We need to get you out of here and to go see someone. We need to report what happened, we—”
“—we need to find Arielle and Hope.”
Woodward shook his head slowly.
“They’re not here. I don’t think anyone has been here in a very long time… maybe since we last came.”
“What about the car? The footsteps? Look at the footprints.”
Confusion crossed the man’s broad face.
“Footprints?”
Martin gestured toward the ground behind them, where he had seen the barefoot prints, the ones that had led him to the tree.
“There,” he said, but even as the words came out of his mouth they fell away.
There were no prints.
He raised the flashlight higher trying to locate the child’s—Hope’s—and the woman’s—Arielle’s—prints. He found that he had to raise the flashlight higher and higher—Jesus Christ, how far did I wander from the house—but the light died before he could find them.
“No prints,” Woodward informed him.
Martin shook his head. There had been prints; he was sure of it.
Like the woman on the porch swing? Did you see them like you saw her? Or did you see them like the woman tied to the tree?
But then he did see a set of prints; huge, sock-like footprints.
“There!” he exclaimed, shaking the beam of light about ten paces from where they stood.
“I don’t—ah, there are prints.”
Martin, vindicated that he wasn’t going completely insane, began following the prints with his flashlight. After only a few seconds, he realized that these weren’t the same prints he had seen near the house. They were made by the same feet, surely, but they weren’t the same footprints—those other ones had stayed close to the side of the house.
Instead, these seemed to be moving toward the tree, making a wide birth around it.
The beam of light made it to the tree—still no burned woman, thank God—and then the footprints—or footsmudges—disappeared behind it.
“What the hell?”
Martin wasn’t sure if it was he or Woodward who had said the words, but either way, they shared the sentiment.
The footprints reappeared on the other side of the tree.
Martin’s hand started trembling again as he followed the tracks, realizing that they seemed to be coming straight toward them. The light bobbed up and down so rapidly that the footsmudges were blinking in and out like fireflies.
Woodward raised his own flashlight to the spot where Martin’s stopped, and at first Martin thought that the prints ended at another set of trees.
But then Woodward moved the light upward ever so slightly, and Martin realized that what he was seeing weren’t tree trunks.
Tree trunks didn’t wear denim.
There was an audible grunt and Woodward cried out. Martin was momentarily blinded and deafened as his
friend squeezed off three shots from his revolver in rapid succession.
Through his ringing ears, Martin heard two of those bullets ricochet throughout the swamp. The other bullet, the final shot, made a sickening, organic thlurp sound, but there was no exclamation of pain that Martin expected.
Instead, there was a massive slurping sound from the mud as Woodward’s entire body was lifted out of it. One of the man’s shoes got stuck, but it simply fell away like an overripe banana peel.
All three-hundred plus pounds of Tony Woodward lifted seemingly without effort.
What the fuck.
Martin somehow regained control of some of his faculties, and he raised his flashlight just high enough to see Woodard’s feet running in mid-air while his hands clawed at the fingers that gripped his throat.
His friend was wheezing madly, and his face, purple from exertion before, now appeared nearly black. As soon as Martin directed the beam of light toward the other figure, toward Jessie, Woodward was thrown to the ground.
The force of Woodward’s body hitting the mud in front of Martin was so great that it knocked him to the ground like a shock wave and sent the flashlight flying.
Martin cried out and tried to scramble for the flashlight, but his ass suctioned to the mud. Still, despite his futile efforts, he continued to reach for it, but to no avail.
It was then that he realized the light was pointed directly at Woodward’s face, the beam shining into one open, unblinking eye. A line of blood dripped from his friend’s nose and spilled into his half-open mouth.
Martin screamed and again tried to lift himself from the mud, not to get the flashlight anymore, but to get as far away from Jessie and this place as possible.
But this time, it wasn’t the mud that grabbed him. This time, it was two powerful arms that grasped his shoulders and yanked him from the earth like a toy. And then they began to squeeze.
In less than a minute, Martin’s world faded in a dull, black embrace.
Chapter 48
The screaming started almost immediately after Jessie left Arielle alone in her cell. At first it was just a dull moan, a low, undulating sound, but it soon transgressed into a wail. Not a pained cry so much as an angry scream—or perhaps a mocking one. The way the sound echoed down the dark corridor made it difficult to tell.
And then there were the gunshots. There were at least two, maybe three distinct barks coming from outside the house.
Could it be Martin? Could Martin have come here and tried to rescue me?
It was possible, after all, she had called him and told him the address. She had kept the conversation, simple, abrupt, obtuse, to avoid questions. But a gun? Martin didn’t own a gun…
There was surprisingly little time for Arielle to mull this over, as shortly after what was to be the final gunshot, she heard a door open and the familiar sound of footsteps making their way down the long, damp hallway. There was something else accompanying the footsteps, too: a dragging sound.
Arielle pushed her way from the bars to the back of her cell, scuttling on her ass to near the piss bucket. Mice or not, she didn’t want to be anywhere near Jessie when he made his way back. It was only then that her eyes first fell on a pile of papers on the filthy mattress. She reached up and grabbed the four inch stack, which was held together by a worn elastic.
A cursory glance and it was obvious that wasn’t a stack of papers as she had first thought—it was a stack of letters.
Her letters.
Arielle’s heart sunk. The letters that she had written to Martin were still here and they had never been sent; they still had his address on the front in her hand, but there was no stamp affixed to the upper right-hand corner.
Her blood began to boil.
Mother promised—
It was irrational to be surprised by this after all she had seen. But she was; Arielle was surprised and infuriated.
Seething, she threw the envelopes back onto the mattress just as Jessie stepped into view.
The giant man appeared to be dragging something—something big. With one hand, Jessie threw the cell door wide, and then he reached back with two hands and grunted hard. With a thump, a figure was unceremoniously thrown into her cell, momentarily scattering any mice that might have collected with her presence.
Arielle didn’t move at first, and was surprised that Jessie actually receded down the hallway again, leaving the cell door open. She pushed herself to a kneeling position and concentrated on Jessie’s fading footsteps.
To her dismay, they didn’t travel far enough to risk a dash for it. So, instead, she turned her attention to the figure on the floor of her cell, and she immediately gaped.
“Oh my God.”
It was Woodward; even looking at only one side of his pale face as it lay flat on the damp floor, she knew it was him.
Arielle screamed. She hadn’t meant to, but it just happened and once it escaped her, there was no stopping it.
She kept on screaming even when Jessie returned, throwing another limp figure on top of Woodard. The body bounced off the officer’s very large and very dead stomach and landed on his back, face up.
Her scream caught in her throat.
The second body was her husband.
It was Martin.
Just as her mind started to wrap itself around this fact, Jessie slammed the door closed and locked it.
This was followed by more screaming, but it didn’t come from Arielle this time. This time, it came from someone else, a woman somewhere down the abyss of a hellhole that she was trapped in. And now its purpose was patently obvious: it was a mocking cry.
A chill ran up her spine.
It was Mother.
Chapter 49
“Martin! Martin! Wake up, Martin!” Arielle was shaking her husband’s shoulder, trying to force him to open his eyes, to confirm that he was still living. His slowly rising and falling chest was not enough proof for her.
Tears streamed down her cheeks.
“You bastard,” she shouted at Jessie, who was now sitting with his back to the cell, sipping on his glass of milk. “You bastard! What did you do to him?”
Both Martin and Woodward’s bodies were covered in mud, but they had no outward sign of injuries, save for the blood around Woodward’s nose and mouth.
“You fucking bastard!” she screamed again, wiping snot from her nose with the back of her hand.
“Mother is very upset that you came back,” Jessie said suddenly. His words were slurred, as if his tongue had started to swell from a bee sting. “You made a deal, Arielle.”
Ariellllle.
“Fuck Mother! Tell that skinny bitch to show her face and I’ll rip her tits off!”
No answer from Jessie this time, but from someone else.
Someone groaned, and Arielle scrambled away from the bars of her cell and back to her husband’s body.
“Martin! Martin!”
But Martin’s eyes were still closed, his breathing rhythmic, his lips twisted into a grimace.
A particularly long and loud scream came from somewhere down the hall, echoing off the dewy brick walls, giving her pause. When the reverberations finally ended, she turned back to Jessie.
“Mother is nawwwt happp—ppp—ppp—pp—eeee,” the lanky figure outside her cell stuttered.
Arielle looked up just in time to see Jessie’s body visibly slump against the cell.
“Fuck you,” Arielle spat, her hands now cradling her husband’s pale face. “Fuck you, you monster!”
She stared at Jessie’s massive curled spine.
“You hear me?”
The man didn’t respond.
“Jessie?”
And then something in her mind clicked. The appearance of Martin and Woodward had caused her to completely forget about the promethazine that she had stirred into Jessie’s milk when he had been gone. Momentarily ignoring her husband and Woodward, Arielle scrambled to the front of the cell. To be safe, she poked the man’s arm with a finger through
the bars, prepared to scoot back toward the safety of her piss bucket should he awake.
He didn’t.
Moving quickly, not knowing how long the effects of the promethazine overdose would last in someone of Jessie’s stature, she snatched the keys from his belt and immediately set about opening the rusted lock on her cell door that looked like it had been stolen from the 1850s.
It took three tries, and once she almost dropped the keys, but Arielle eventually made it out of the cell. Hovering over Jessie, she hesitated, turning back to look at the litany of bodies strewn both inside and outside of her cell, her room.
Her eyes eventually fell on Martin’s flaccid face.
“I’ll come back for you,” she promised. “After I save Hope, I’ll save you, too.”
After all the pain she had gone through to protect both Hope and Martin, her efforts had been a complete and utter failure.
But she could still save them.
Filius obcisor. Filia obcisor.
She could save her boy and her girl.
A moan fluttered down the hallway, and Arielle turned away from the cell and shuffled toward the sound.
I’ll save you both. Nobody fucks with Arielle Reigns.
Chapter 50
Arielle stumbled down the hallway, careful to keep her fingers at least brushing against the dewy brick wall to maintain her bearings. As she moved through the damp space, memories started flooding back—twisted memories that were threatening to split her mind into two.
There was the time when she’d first arrived, before she had left to have sex with Martin. Back then, the house had been gray, but clean.
Normal.
But then there was the other time, toward the end of her nine-month stay, when whatever was in the milk had started to lose its potency, or when she had built up a tolerance. That was when things had started to change, and the veneer of fake reality that she had erected in her sick mind had started to peel and curl like wallpaper heated with a hair dryer. Desperate minds can conjure desperate images, shards of fake reality needed to keep one sane, to help facilitate the cognizant dissonance that was required when replying to an ad that promised a one hundred percent success rate.
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