“Your daughter? Your daughter? Oh, sweet child, these”—she made an expansive gesture in the girls’ direction—“these are not your children. They are my children. Mine. You were only borrowing little Hope.”
The woman laughed a third time, and all Arielle could do was stare at her in shock.
Mine. My children.
“Hope—what an ironic name.”
Arielle shook her head.
No.
“Hope is mine,” Arielle swore through gritted teeth.
Gathering all of her strength, she swung her legs over the side of the gurney.
It was then that she realized she was no longer wearing her clothes. Instead, someone had changed her into some sort of white gown.
What the fuck?
“No, sweetie, she isn’t. She’s mine. They are all mine. And she will stay with me—help me with my work. A life for a life, remember? Filius obcisor. This is a place of death and life, a facilitator of both ends of that spectrum. It has been called many things: the Burning House, and long before that fons vitae; the Fountain of Life. The name changes with the times, my sweets, but it is always—it is perpetual. Like me. Like Mother.”
The woman smiled and Arielle balled her fists.
Fuck you. Hope is my daughter.
“What did you think by coming here? That you think you would just collect your daughter and leave? Do you not remember your agreement, my sweet, pretty thing? Hmm?”
“Fuck the deal, she’s mine. And I’m gonna take her with me.”
Mother made a tsk, tsk, tsk sound.
Arielle dangled her legs down over the gurney and was about to hop off when Mother made the whistle/hiss noise and she hesitated.
“Not so fast,” the woman warned.
One of the larger girls stepped behind Hope and wrapped her arms around her in a tight bear hug. It was clear that this was no affectionate embrace even before another girl—Hanna, Arielle thought—reached up and grabbed a handful of Hope’s blond hair and pulled it back, revealing the soft, pale skin of her throat.
Arielle gasped.
Then the third girl—the Frisbee girl, little Madison—walked over and grabbed a scalpel from a blood-soaked metal dish. Following a nod from Mother, Madison went back to Hope and held the blade against her throat. It was all so robotic, so rehearsed that Arielle felt as if she were watching some sort of demented play.
“You see, my pretty girl,” Mother began, “none of these children are your daughter. They are all mine. And like good little girls, they listen to their Mother.”
“Please,” Arielle stammered, her eyes watering. “Don’t hurt her.”
Mother shook her head, her sweaty gray hair swaying slowly, collectively, like a school of fish.
“Oh, I don’t want to hurt any of my children. But if you don’t give me what I want, you will leave me with no choice.”
What you want? You have Hope… what else could you want?
“Ah, pretty girl, I see the confusion on your face.” Mother chuckled. “You don’t get it, do you? Look around.”
She gestured toward Melissa. One of her painted eyebrows rose up her forehead.
“No? Still nothing?”
Arielle shook her head.
What is she talking about? She has Hope and the other girls… what else does she want?
A smirked passed over Mother’s pale pink lips.
“It’s not about the children, my pretty young woman, it’s about you—it’s about the mothers.”
As if on cue, Melissa, her massive head still tilted backward in her chair as if her eyes were locked on to the ceiling, wheeled herself toward Arielle. It was such a disgusting sight, what with her massive, sweaty breasts and equally large stomach coming toward her, that Arielle nearly hopped off the gurney despite Mother’s warning.
“Every mother also has a role to play in this circle of life, my sweets.” She raised a thin hand, once again indicating Melissa, “And some are better suited for some things than others. You, pretty thing, are perfect for me. After all”—she tugged at the dark robe that clung to her wasted frame—“this body is almost drained.”
Arielle started to sob, her mind near shattering.
Me? She wants me?
Mother slowly made her way over to Arielle, passing in front of the girls that still held the blade to Hope’s exposed throat.
Arielle was helplessly torn; she knew that if she tried to rescue Hope or resist Mother, the girls would kill her daughter. But what Mother was suggesting was… well, she didn’t quite know how to interpret that.
In the end, she made the only decision that she could.
She did nothing.
“I need your body,” Mother whispered now, her voice almost seductive. She approached to within a few feet of Arielle, bringing with her a stink of rot and something akin to singed meat. “Your daughter will be freed, if you give me what I want.”
Arielle felt Mother’s cold, clammy fingers gently brush her forehead, and she slowly eased back into a lying position.
“And if you don’t, Jessie will make you anyway.”
That smile; that smile with the perfectly white teeth.
Arielle looked past her trembling daughter to the hulking, shadowy figure in the doorway of the bastardized operating room.
Jessie was back.
Arielle’s eyes drifted back to poor Hope, her large blue eyes watering so much that she might have thought she was drowning.
“Now, sweet child, have some milk. Give in. Drink, sweetie, drink your milk. Driiiink.”
Melissa wheeled even closer to her, and Mother began fiddling with the hose that was attached to her massively engorged breast. She pulled a mask from somewhere behind the woman’s wheelchair and affixed it to the end of the tube that had once filled the vat. Then she slowly lowered the mask over Arielle’s face.
She didn’t want the milk—the sheer thought of it made her want to vomit—but Arielle she saw no other choice. Give this demon what she wanted and Hope would be set free. Give her—
Somewhere far away, she heard Melissa moan, and then milk started to slowly trickle down the sides of the mask and into her mouth.
“That’s it,” Mother whispered in her soothing voice, “drink up. It will all be over soon. A life for a life. All those years ago, you thought you could just get away with what you did, but I was there. I was watching.” The woman’s eyes rolled back and her voice suddenly changed; it became younger—spritely, even. “You can’t have it! You need to get it out! A life for a life. You must never forget.”
Arielle’s vision blurred. In her mind, she was transported back to a bathtub, a bathtub full of rose-colored water, her mother using a sponge to clean her back.
The demon’s voice switched back.
“And now I’m here to collect… only I don’t want Hope, I want you.”
The first few drops of the sickly sweet liquid stung like acid when they hit Arielle’s throat.
Tired, so tired. It will all be over soon.
Arielle’s eyes closed, and they seemed to take forever before opening again. When they did, everything was slightly out of focus, as if she wearing reading glasses.
Mother was beside the gurney, her legs spread at an awkward angle as if she were giving birth again. She was trembling, too, wet hair flicking back and forth, speckling the metal table with her sweat. A foul-looking substance akin to smoke, only thicker, wafted from beneath the woman’s dark robe and twisted upward, coming toward Arielle like an ethereal hand.
Mother moaned, a shuddering sound that might have been of pain or could have equally been of pleasure.
The dark cloud drifted upward, reaching the edge of the gurney before spilling—crawling—over it, coming dangerously close to Arielle’s bare leg.
The effects of the milk started to overwhelm over. All she wanted to do was sleep, to just forget this entire mess and wake up beside Martin, tucked into his big arms, with Hope sleeping soundly in the next room. Back in Batesbu
rg, dreaming of meeting up with the Woodwards and a play date with little Thomas.
Sleep didn’t take her just yet. Instead, Arielle’s eyes flicked open one last time, and she saw that Mother had once again changed.
The woman with the pink lips, leathery skin, and bright blue eyeshadow was gone.
In Mother’s place was a blackened, hunched creature with large, white eyes and a red slit for a mouth that ran nearly from ear to ear. Strips of dead flesh flaked off of its body like rotting mummy wrappings with every trembling movement, and there were two holes in its face where its nose should have been. As Arielle watched, the burned creature crouched, its limbs akimbo. The only thing that remained of Mother were the turquoise stones that hung from its long, stretched earlobes—stones that took Arielle back to her time in the church—a lifetime ago.
Filius obcisor.
Arielle would have screamed, but the mask and the milk that dripped from it prevented any sound from coming out of her mouth.
Instead, she drank.
Chapter 54
Martin’s eyes snapped open and he gasped for air. His whole world was spinning as if he were trapped on a carnival teacup ride that just… wouldn’t… stop.
Where am I?
Somewhere far away he could feel his body, but it was an abstract notion, something separated not only by significant distance but also by time.
He squeezed his eyes closed again, trying his best to stop this nightmare. And it worked… sort of; the spinning slowed, but the nightmare remained. As his senses returned, the first thing he felt was something cold and clammy. It was his cheek—his cheek was pressed against something cool and wet.
Martin’s eyelids fluttered involuntarily and he thought he might lose consciousness again. Thankfully, the tremor was transient and after only a few seconds his vision slowly began to focus.
As did his mind.
Woodward.
The image of his friend falling to the muddy ground, the beam of light from the flashlight reflecting off his open eye, blood dripping from his nose filled him.
With great effort and considerable pain, Martin manage to hoist himself to a seated position.
He was in a cell of some sort, some archaic cold, gray cell complete with a soiled cot that was pushed against the back wall. There was a stack of papers on top of the cot and a metal bucket lying beside it.
Jail? Am I in some sort of jail?
His eyes fell on Woodward’s body next, and all other rational thought fled him.
“Woodward!” he hissed, scrambling across the damp floor to his friend who was lying on his back, his face turned away from him.
Martin reached his friend and gently turned his head toward him.
“No,” he moaned.
Woodward’s eyes were still rolled back in their sockets, revealing only the whites, and when he turned the man’s head, the blood that had pooled in his mouth spilled out like vomit.
Martin didn’t need to put his fingers on the man’s pale neck to know that he was dead.
But he did it anyway.
And then he laid his head on the man’s barrel chest and began to sob.
Fuck me. It’s my fault… he shouldn’t even be here.
Fuck me.
Martin pulled his head away from Woodward and sat up, wiping the tears from his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
Through watery eyes, Martin quickly scanned the rest of the room, noting that although the front of the cell was composed of metal bars, the door was open.
That was something.
He could leave. Unlike Woodward, he could leave.
Fuck.
Fury building inside him, Martin searched the rest of the room, looking for something—anything—he might be able to use as a weapon should Jessie return. His eyes drifted to the metal bucket, but it was cheap and flimsy and wouldn’t serve to squish a cockroach, let alone brain a giant.
Then his eyes fell on the bed.
It was the simplest of cots, just four metal brackets arranged in a rectangle with a shit-stained mattress laid over top.
Martin scrambled over to the bed, wincing at the pain that radiated from his chest and shoulders. A cough overtook him, and he had to pause to collect himself. He was lucky to be alive—Jessie had nearly crushed him to death.
When the pain numbed, he continued to the bed, moving more slowly now, deliberately, trying to avoid the brunt of the pain in his chest. With a grunt, he yanked the mattress off the metal cot, gulping air with his mouth to avoid experiencing the brunt of the smell of human feces that wafted toward him.
Beneath the mattress was a series of metal coils pushed through holes in the frame. He easily pulled these out of one side, then set about unscrewing the long side of the bed closest him from the short head piece.
There were only two screws holding the pieces together, and only by two loose nuts. But it was hard going nonetheless, given the state of his burnt fingers; his fingertips were slick with burst blisters, and his ability for small manipulations had been lost.
But Martin eventually managed, and when he was done, he was left with half a bed, complete with the coils still attached, along with two freed pieces of metal. The one that had once made up the long end of the cot was too long to wield, but the other…
Martin picked up the four foot piece of metal and waved it back and forth with one hand. It fit well enough in his palm, but it was heavy. Still, with two hands he thought he might be able to swing it in a nasty arc. Or jab—he could jab with it like a spear.
Whether it would be sufficient to take out Jessie Radcliffe, he wasn’t sure. But Woodward’s gun was still in the mud outside by the—burnt woman with the white eyes—tree, and somewhere in this dungeon Arielle and Hope needed him.
It would have to do.
Metal bar in hand, Martin slowly made his way toward the open cell door, trying his best not to focus on his friend’s flaccid body that in the center of the room. He would come back for him; if he got through this, he would come back for his friend’s body.
The hallway outside the cell extended in both directions. On his left there was a door not ten paces from where he stood, an exterior door, while to his right he could make out more dimly lit cells.
A scream echoed up the corridor, drawing his gaze in that direction. It wasn’t Arielle who had made that scream, but for some reason he knew that following that sound would lead him to her.
Moving slowly, gripping the piece of metal so tightly in his left hand that more blisters on his palm popped, Martin made his way toward the scream.
A tall, thin man paced nude in the second cell that Martin passed. The man was but a collection of spindle-like bones patched together with barely enough skin to cover them all. He was a hideous sight, one that churned Martin’s stomach. Grimacing, he tried to avert his eyes, to sneak by without being noticed, but as he turned, the metal rod in his hand slipped.
No!
Somehow he managed to catch the metal piece before it fell completely, but he wasn’t fast enough to stop the pointed end from clanking noisily off the hard ground.
The man in the cell turned toward the sound, and with two large, ungainly steps he was suddenly at the front of the cage. He wrapped his huge hands around the bars, squeezing them, twisting them with fingers that seemed too long, and then he finagled his way down to Martin’s level, pressing his pointed face between them.
“Help me,” the man moaned. “Please, help me… let me out of here.”
His face was covered in sores, his cheeks and lips oozing either blood or pus or some other substance that Martin refused to consider.
Martin instinctively stepped away from the cage, retreating until he felt the cold wall against his back.
The index finger of the man’s right hand unfurled from the cell bar, an impossible long process, and he aimed it at the rusted wooden lock that hung from the latch.
“Do you have the key?” his voice was excited
, almost giddy. A long, pointed tongue darted from between its thin lips and licked at them hungrily, sucking up some of the fluid from the burst sores. “Can you open it? Can you open it?”
Martin didn’t answer the man right away. Instead, his mind was transported back to Jennifer’s apartment before the fire started—back to her story of Anne LaForet.
A name came to him, and for some reason he felt compelled to utter it out loud.
“Benjamin,” Martin said, his voice oddly detached. “Benjamin Heath.”
The man’s finger retracted as if it had been singed. Then his mouth, a horrible slit of a thing, broke into a smile, more of the sores cracking and oozing.
“She’s gonna get you, Mother is gonna get you and make you like me… like meeeeee! She’s gonna make you burn.”
The sound was piercing, grating, and when the man started to shout—“He’s here! He’s here!”—Martin scrambled away from the cell and continued down the hallway, dragging the metal rod with him.
He passed another cell, then another, Benjamin Heath’s words chasing him like a foul smell.
When Martin made it to the fourth cell, he saw her and stopped dead.
Arielle was lying on a metal gurney, her face covered in some sort of mask. Her hair was different—it was dark and cropped short—but he knew it was her; it had been more than four years since he had laid eyes on his wife, but he knew it was her. And his heart immediately filled with sadness, for her, for him, for the time they had lost.
Forcing these feelings away, Martin tried to get a better look at her body, to make sure she was okay, but there was someone blocking his line of sight. A tall figure, one not unlike the freak whose cell he had just run away from.
It was Jessie.
Martin took a step toward the open cell door, and then stopped cold.
As he passed out of Jessie’s shadow, he came to the horrible realization that Arielle wasn’t alone on top of the gurney.
There was something else with her—on her.
A figure was mounting her—a blackened, burnt figure.
And Martin immediately recognized what it was.
Its name was Anne LaForet or Jane Heath or… it didn’t matter what you called it; it was one thing.
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