by Stella Hart
“Know what this is?” Greg asked, dangling it over my face.
“Ginger,” I said. I could smell it now.
“That’s right. Peeled ginger with a bit of chili powder rubbed on it. I used it on the stupid girls who tried to use their sexuality against me. That showed them their place pretty fucking fast,” he said with another nasty smile. “You wanna know where I put it?”
“I can guess,” I muttered.
“You’re probably thinking I shoved it in their pussies, right?”
I gulped. “Yes.”
“Wrong,” he replied, eyes crinkling around the sides with sick amusement. “Like I said, I wanted them to know how fucking worthless I found their pussies. So these things went in their ass instead. No lube. Wanna know what happened then?”
“What?”
“The ginger made it feel like their insides were burning right up, and they’d scream and squirm all over the place. That actually made their muscles clench, which made the pain worse,” he explained. “It’s actually a very old practice, you know. People used to do it to horses to make them carry their tails higher when they raced.”
“But… I haven’t tried to seduce you,” I said, shaking my head as tremors of terror jolted my body.
“Oh, sweetheart. I know you haven’t,” Greg said, lips tipping down in a play at sympathy. “But I’ve missed it all so much. I have to do it or I’ll lose my fucking mind.”
He said that as if he hadn’t already lost his mind years ago.
“Please,” I cried out, voice almost cracking with fear as horror churned my stomach. “Please don’t do this!”
Before I could scream again, he pushed my legs apart, brought the ginger between them, and pressed it against my ass. I clenched the ring of muscles as hard as I could to stop it from entering, but it didn’t work. Greg was too strong for me. He shoved it inside me in one merciless thrust, eyes glittering with manic arousal.
My chest heaved as pain seared every nerve ending below my waist. I screamed and screamed until all the air went out of my lungs. It felt like the sensitive tissue inside me had been doused with gasoline and set on fire.
“Please!” I shrieked. “Stop!”
He didn’t stop. He pushed the peeled ginger in deeper, making me writhe with agony. Then he pulled it out before shoving it all the way back in, using it like it was a dildo.
“Stop it!” I screamed as jolt after jolt of pain rocked my core. “Stop! Stop! Stop!”
“You’re the one who needs to fucking stop,” Greg hissed next to my ear. “If you don’t shut the fuck up, I’ll cut your toes off and shove them up your ass instead.”
I believed him.
While Nate had made a lot of threats against me and hurt me terribly in the past, he’d never done anything to permanently maim me, unless you counted a few scars on my legs, and recently I’d gotten the impression that he’d find it difficult or even impossible to do something like that. He only wanted to hurt me because of all the terrible things he thought I’d done, but it wasn’t who he was at his core. He wasn’t a monster.
Greg was different. He was pure evil. He enjoyed every sick, twisted second of the torture he inflicted on innocent people.
“Do you want that, sweetheart?” he said. “You want me to cut them off?”
“No,” I moaned, gasping for air. I wanted to pass out more than anything, but I was wide awake, so I knew there was no way I’d faint anytime soon, even with the shock of the torture. If he cut my toes off, I’d be wide awake for that too.
“Are you sure? Because I’d love to see the look on your face when I do it,” he said, grinning wickedly.
My stomach lurched with horror again. “Don’t,” I said, lowering my voice to a strangled whisper. “I’ll be quiet.”
“Good girl,” Greg replied in a mellifluous tone, stroking one of my arms with his free hand. “Don’t get me wrong, sweetheart—I love the crying and screaming. But this place isn’t soundproofed, and I can’t have anyone hearing you and reporting it to the cops. So you really need to lower the fucking volume.”
He resumed the ginger torture, mercilessly shoving it in and out as I jerked on the bench and tried my best to swallow my sobs.
I was in absolute agony, but somewhere in that miserable haze, hope was glittering.
I was wrong earlier. Wherever Greg was holding me, it was close enough for someone to hear me if I screamed loud enough. I couldn’t do it now, or else he’d maim me like he threatened to a moment ago, but I could wait until he left again, and then I could scream the place down.
A moment later, Greg shoved the thick ginger so deep inside me that I couldn’t help but let a wail escape my lips. He let out an irritated sigh and slapped me in the face, leaving me breathless. Then he stepped away from the bench.
When he returned, he was holding one of the ropes from the bag and a balled-up sock. “I didn’t want to do this, because I wanted to hear something from you, but you won’t stop fucking screaming, so I don’t really have a choice, do I?” he said, pushing the sock into my mouth.
He laid the thick, wiry rope over the lower third of my face and pushed it between my lips, forcing me to bite down on it along with the sock. Then he tied it tightly under the bench. I could only let out strangled groans now, even if I tried to scream at the top of my lungs.
There goes my plan.
My eyes welled up with tears as Greg speared me with the ginger again. He’d done it so many times that it felt like he was using a red-hot poker on my insides.
I scrunched my eyes shut and let my mind drift to Nate again, wishing he was with me. Wishing he was squeezing my hand and whispering in my ear, telling me it would all be okay soon.
Such a yearning seemed crazy to the logical part of my brain, but I couldn’t switch it off or make it go away. Perhaps I’d succumbed to Stockholm syndrome after all the weeks I’d spent with him, or perhaps he was simply the lesser of two evils in my life right now. Either way, I wanted him by my side. Craved his hands on my cheeks and his warm lips on my neck.
The fantasy was so alluring that it almost stripped away my pain as I sank deeper and deeper into it. In the bright, glittering dreamworld, Nate never hated me, and we had no reason to be enemies. He was just a strong, soothing fixture in my life, always there to hold me and kiss me. Always there to chase the demons away.
“Good girl,” Greg murmured, tearing me out of my hazy dream state. “That’s so much better.”
He leaned down as he spoke, fetid breath ghosting over my lips and nose. I swallowed the bile in my throat as it rose upward. It took all of my strength to let myself sink back into my dreamworld; to ignore the presence of the man who personified the word ‘monster’.
When he picked up the knife again, slicing it down my abdomen, I didn’t even whimper. I simply closed my eyes again and retreated to my fantasy world, where the pain was gone and Nate was waiting for me.
5
Nate
I sat on the couch with my head in my hands, trying to ignore the ticking clock on the other side of the room. Every minute that passed—no, every fucking second—made me feel like a useless moron.
It was already after nine o’clock, which meant that over seventeen hours had passed since I woke up on that bunker floor, and I was still yet to figure out anything that would help me find my uncle and Alexis.
After I watched that horrifying ‘Sarah - 2006’ tape this morning and realized just how much danger Alexis was in, I sprang into action to find my car, hoping it would be that simple. It wasn’t, of course. The company that installed the GPS unit when I bought it was able to track its movements after I reported it stolen, but when they contacted me a couple of hours later and informed me that they’d located it at a coastal lookout thirty minutes south of the estate, I didn’t hold out much hope.
I was right not to.
The company contacted the police after I told them my car was stolen—I didn’t tell them that I knew who took it, though—and a
couple of officers were at the lookout when I showed up to get the car. They told me it had been left in the small parking lot with the keys in the front seat, and no one in the area had seen a thing. There was no sign of Greg or Alexis, and the stash of cash I kept in the glove compartment in case of emergencies was gone.
I also learned from the police at the scene that a young couple who’d gone for an early morning swim near the lookout had reported their vehicle stolen as well. They’d left it parked next to mine before trekking down the steep path to the beach to take their dip. An hour later, they returned to the lot to find their car gone.
Their keys were with them down at the beach, which meant Greg would’ve needed to hotwire it in order to steal it. He’d chosen that particular car for a good reason, too. It was a shitty old beater with no GPS unit, which made it a hell of a lot harder for the cops to track down. It could be days or weeks until it was found.
With an exasperated sigh, I got off the couch and started pacing around the room, needing to burn off the frustrated energy coursing through me. The feeling of fear and powerlessness that came with not knowing what was happening to Alexis right now crawled beneath my skin, invisible and unscratchable.
I had to find her. Fucking had to.
My gaze fell on the boxes of DVDs and videotapes, packed with evidence of my uncle’s sickening crimes. I’d carefully counted the tapes earlier and arrived at a figure of 520. The earliest date on any of the labels was September 1999.
That was 520 people murdered over a period of ten years, making Greg the worst serial killer in the history of the country by a huge margin. Maybe even the world.
I had no idea where he found that many people to abduct and kill, because Avalon wasn’t a place where people regularly went missing. It didn’t have the population to sustain such an inordinate number of disappearances, either. At least not without anyone noticing.
I could only assume that Greg found his victims on the mainland and brought them over here to the island, but that didn’t help me figure out who any of them were. The tapes only had their first names on the labels, and I wasn’t able to locate any articles about them when I went online and searched for things like ‘Sarah 2006 missing woman West Coast’.
Whoever the victims were, they’d clearly fallen through the cracks of society. No one had ever reported them missing, and it was likely that no one even knew any of them were dead.
Judging by how thin some of them were, I figured it was likely that they were homeless people or drug addicts. Maybe even both. That could explain why none of their families or friends reported them missing. They might not even know they were missing. They might’ve just assumed they ran off somewhere and never bothered coming back.
My stomach lurched at the thought. All those people, and no one even knew they were gone. All that human potential, stripped away and mutilated until there was nothing left but skin and bones. No eyes, no organs, no blood.
I knew they were all killed in the same way as Sarah from the first tape I watched, because I’d spent the last several hours watching every other tape, hoping that one of them would be shot in a different location which might reveal a clue about Greg’s current location. I couldn’t stand to watch them properly, so I’d tripled the video speed and raced through each one, trying to spot anything different on the screen each time.
No dice.
Each video had been shot in the exact same room down in the Blackthorne tunnels, and there was no way my uncle would be stupid enough to return there right now. Not when the place was still crawling with cops after the recent copycat murders, along with my alleged mugging.
Unless…
A sudden idea froze me to the spot. All the shock and horror of the day—along with the throbbing head injury—had turned me into an automaton, incapable of critical thinking. I hadn’t even considered the possibility that the cops might be gone by now. They could’ve searched the Blackthorne tunnels days ago, found no one down there, and left, leaving it available for Greg to return to with Alexis in tow.
I grabbed my phone and called my frat brother Jasper. He answered on the fifth ring, practically hacking up a lung. “Hey, man. How you doin’?” he asked before lapsing into another coughing fit.
He was smoking weed with his friends. I could tell by the watery sound of the bong in the background as someone else inhaled.
“I’m good. Just wanted to ask you something,” I said.
Either Jasper didn’t hear me or he was too stoned to register my words. “How’s your stomach?” he asked. “I still can’t believe you got fucking stabbed.”
“It’s fine,” I said impatiently. “You’re still at Blackthorne, right?”
“Yup.”
“You know how the cops think the guy who mugged me might be the same one who killed those girls and left them in the quad?”
“Yeah. It’s fucked, man.”
“Did you hear about the tunnels under the campus as well? The ones they thought the guy might be using to get around?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you know if they’re still searching them?”
“Yup, they’re still swarming all over the place,” he replied. “The entrance is blocked off now, which fucking sucks, because I really wanna go and look through them. I had no idea they were even there. Fuckin’ crazy, right?”
It suddenly occurred to me that Greg probably had no idea about the recent copycat murders at Blackthorne, unless someone—presumably my mother—was providing him with regular news updates while he was locked down in the bunker. That meant he could’ve gone to Blackthorne today to scope out his old hideout before finding it occupied by cops and forensic workers.
He might’ve taken one look at the scene and hightailed it out of there, but there was a chance that hadn’t happened. He might have been caught lurking around the area and taken in for questioning, which meant that Alexis was now safe. Probably bound and gagged in a stolen car somewhere, but still safe from my uncle.
“Do you know if the cops found anyone in there?” I asked Jasper. “Someone who could be a suspect?”
“Nope. They haven’t caught anyone.”
Fuck. I collapsed onto the couch, shoulders sagging.
“They did find some stuff down there, though,” Jasper went on. “Weird shit.”
“Like what?” I asked, skin prickling.
“I dunno if it’s true. I just heard it from one of the guys who said he overheard a security guard talking about it. Apparently those tunnels have gates all through them to stop people from getting in and walking around them. Anyway, someone must’ve found a key somewhere, because the cops think someone was down there very recently.”
I stiffened. “Why?”
“They found a room down there with a mattress and food wrappers with 2019 expiry dates on them. So they think a homeless person could’ve been living down there.”
“Oh.” I let out a short sigh of irritation. The room he was describing was just the cell where I kept Alexis all those weeks ago.
“There was blood in there, too.”
Yeah, my fucking blood, I thought bitterly, remembering the shock that jolted through me when Alexis looked me right in the eye and jammed a knife into my guts. Why the hell am I looking for her again?
I rubbed my eyes. “Did they find anything else?” I asked.
“Yup. This is the crazy part. The cops found another room in the tunnels. The walls were covered in plastic, and there were a bunch of old knives lying around. And get this—there were chains and shackles hanging from the ceiling. They think it might’ve been the original Butcher’s killing spot.”
I rubbed my temples and inwardly groaned. The cops hadn’t found anything in the tunnels that I didn’t already know about, and clearly, Greg had been smart enough to avoid the area.
Jasper launched into a spiel about the original Butcher—the one he knew as Peter Covington—and I leaned forward, lips pressing together in a tight line as I considered my next move. I k
new I should call the cops and show them the boxes of evidence which proved that Peter was innocent, but something was holding me back.
I just couldn’t trust that they’d do the right thing. Not after they turned a blind eye to reality ten years ago and let Peter take the blame for something he didn’t do while my crazy uncle went underground. It seemed obvious that they’d taken some sort of bribe in order for everything to unfold the way it did, and they might’ve even planted the so-called evidence in Peter’s office and house.
They might’ve even known that Greg was the real killer.
That could be the reason he was locked down in the bunker on our estate for the last ten years. My mom might’ve made a deal with the cops—their silence and a frame-job on Peter Covington in return for a boatload of cash and a promise that Greg would be banished from society for the rest of his life so that he couldn’t kill anyone else.
It all made a sick, twisted kind of sense. After all, like Colette told me earlier, my mother loved her brother dearly despite his shitty behavior over the years.
She might’ve also chosen to cover for him as a way to protect the Lockwood legacy. Crazy yet understandable in a fucked-up world of wealth and privilege like Avalon Island, where family names and reputation meant far more than they should.
I ended the call with Jasper and started pacing the room again, frustration simmering in my blood. I had a long mental list of places where Greg wouldn’t go, but I was still no closer to figuring out where he would go.
Where the fuck could anyone even hide on Avalon, anyway? It was a massive island, but there weren’t too many places where a supposedly dead man could hide out with a captive in tow. It had to be somewhere enclosed, because being out in the open was too risky, and it had to be somewhere no one would ever go. Somewhere no one would ever look.
My thoughts twisted and turned, whispers and murmurs drowning each other out as new ideas floated into my mind only to be rejected seconds later for not making sense. I violently shook my head, wishing the sudden movement and resulting pain would shake something loose in my brain, but it didn’t help.