by Chad Huskins
Kaley opened her mouth, and closed it. She didn’t have an answer. At least, not one that she believed would satisfy the monster.
They both stood there for a few more beats, Spencer remaining mistrustful, Kaley remaining afraid, and the man on the floor remaining dead. On the bus with her, Shannon had stopped shaking her, and now only squeezed her arm, and gave her the occasional yank, like the reminder from a persistent child that needed to go potty. “Kaley,” she whispered. It was whined, a drawn out “Kaaaaa-leyyyyy.”
“Hush now,” she said.
Spencer cocked his head to one side. “You’re really talkin’ to your sister?” he said, his voice reverting to that Southern twang it sometimes went to. Kaley remembered that. She recalled how he could speak calmly and enunciate, and then whenever excited or humored, his voice would return to his native Southern.
“Maybe,” she said, suddenly aware that it wasn’t a good idea to let Spencer Pelletier know anything more than he already knows.
“Bullshit, maybe.” He was far too intuitive to trick or evade easily. Kaley knew she would do well to remember that. “So, you can talk to her, too, where you’re at?” Kaley said nothing. “Ya better talk, ya little cunt, I ain’t in no mood for games. What the hell’s goin’ on here?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “And that’s the truth.”
Spencer sighed heavily, and finally lowered his gun. “Fuck this. I’m outta here.” He stepped over to where he’d dropped the suitcase, bent down quickly to lift it, and just like that, he was ready to leave.
“Wait! You can’t go!”
“Yeah?” he said, opening the door. A cold wind rushed in, and Kaley felt every bit of it. A frigid blast as harsh as Spencer’s attitude. “An’ why not?”
“The boy is still downstairs.”
“So? You’re here now. You do something about it.” There they were again, an obstinacy and self-preservation so reflexive it had to be in the man’s DNA.
“I can’t,” she said, taking a step towards him. In this state, in this “form,” the floor was so slippery, and she “skated” a bit. Spencer watched her with some intrigue and smiled. “I can’t help him. I can’t unlock the doors—”
“What’re you talkin’ about? Just go over and—”
“I’m not actually here, you moron!”
Spencer’s smile diminished, and all at once Kaley felt a wave, and an underlying tremor that rippled out from him. Her intestines felt it, even though in this state she didn’t really have any intestines, and they felt temporarily rearranged. Her heart skipped a beat, even though she didn’t have a heart, either.
Kaley swallowed, even though she didn’t really have a throat. An impulse rehearsed by a life lived in a normal human body. The tears on her face probably weren’t real, either, but she no less felt them. “I’m not really here,” she said, more calmly now. “I’m…it’s like a…I guess like a telepresence.”
The psychopath raised an eyebrow. “A what?”
“Telepresence. Like with a telephone. Just because you can hear someone on the telephone doesn’t mean they’re in the room with you. I’ve been having these…episodes. I Googled it—”
“You ‘Googled’ telepresence,” he put in.
“And I think I’m…” She searched for a better way to say it, but couldn’t. “I’m phoning in myself. I can see and hear and feel everything in this room, but I can’t actually affect anything.”
Spencer snorted. “Astral projection. Well, ain’t that a bitch. See ya.”
“You can’t leave him here!”
He had just turned his back and was halfway out the door, then slowly rounded on her. And though she suspected he couldn’t physically do anything to her in this state, instincts forced Kaley to take a step back. “You don’t tell me what I can an’ can’t do,” he said quietly, in a voice seething with silken hate. “You may not be in this room with me, an’ I may not be able to touch you, but I know what’ll hurt you. Don’t think I won’t go down into that basement an’ hurt that little fucker, just because I know it’ll hurt you, in every way imaginable.” Kaley didn’t move, didn’t blink. “Don’t think I won’t, not for one second.”
Careful now. Careful. The psychopath had his own games, his own notions and goals in life, and he couldn’t be bargained with in any normal fashion, nor would he bandy words with those he felt were beneath him (which was pretty much everyone), and especially not with those he thought had slighted him in any way. That mode of thinking, and that way of life, made no sense to Kaley and she figured it was best not to try to figure it. As easily count the stars in the heavens as fathom a warped mind such as that.
She licked her lips, in both the cabin and on the bus. Looking out the window to her right, she saw that they were on Old Mill Road. Almost to the school. Kaley looked straight ahead, at both the stoplight ahead and at Spencer. “The boy’s hurt. And he’s locked downstairs.”
“Not my probl—”
“Please! Please, just listen! I’m begging you! I know that we’re isolated out here, I can sense it. This cabin…wherever it is, it’s in a remote place, isn’t it? That boy, he’ll starve down there if you don’t—”
“You should ask me if I give a shit first,” he suggested, turning his back on her.
“How can you be so heartless?!”
“What part of ‘psychopath’ don’t you get? The psycho, or the path?” he called over his shoulder, stepping out into a snow so powerful Kaley could barely see through it to a line of trees far way. “I’m a psycho who walks his own path. Get it?” He laughed, and staggered a bit in the snow. Kaley half walked, half skated over to the door, and there she paused in utter frustration. The cold was cutting, but it would not kill her. She didn’t have blood for it chill, nor a circulatory system for it to kill. “Spencer!” she hollered. “Help me! Help him! Pleeeeeease!” Inside the bus, the other kids around her looked at her, started laughing at her. Miss Devereux looked at her in the rearview mirror, and just yelled “Keep it down back there” and nothing else.
The monster threw a wave over his shoulder, then disappeared into the blizzard.
The bus lurched, slowed, made a wide turn, and just up ahead Kaley could see the large turnaround where all the parents dropped off their kids. They were riding on a road parallel to that turnaround, going around to the side of the school where the buses dropped off their loads. Their bus joined the normal procession, but it wasn’t a long wait.
The door hissed, opened, and Kaley stood there looking out the bus’s door at Cartersville Middle School, not too far away from the elementary school, where Shannon and the other smaller kids would be dropped off once all the big kids were offloaded.
“Kaley,” Shannon whispered. “Come back. Don’t stay with him.”
Looking out the bus door, she was also looking out the cabin’s front door, into a world blanketed by white cold, and utterly devoid of meaningful life. How? How could she possibly go to school now, knowing that somewhere a world away a boy was dying in a basement? She could tell her teachers, but she was old enough to know how crazy it would sound—Detective Leon Hulsey and the others, they hadn’t believed, and neither had their mother. Kaley had known that early on, but Shan had insisted on telling everyone. Not long after that, her little sister also took the hint.
They won’t believe. They can’t believe. And who can blame them?
Kaley stood up. Shan held on for dear life. “Don’t go! Don’t go!”
“Awww, look, Stinky’s cryin’,” said Nancy Boyle.
Kaley shot her a look, then leaned over and looked her sister dead in the eye. “I can’t leave the boy. I can’t leave him, not when Spencer—”
“Don’t say his name!”
Kaley sighed, and sat back down to let the other kids shuffle past her. “Not when the laughing man can help. That boy, he’s got nobody. Just like you and I did when we…I can’t just leave him. He needs help. You unnerstan, chil’?” Nan again, coming
out in her. Shan shook her head, but inwardly she understood. Kaley felt her understanding. It was agony for Shannon, having to let her sister go on to school, never knowing if this was going to be the last time they ever spoke. Shan was that afraid that the laughing man might find a way to hurt her. “I have to go, girl. I have to help.”
“But the laughing man won’t help! He won’t help anybody!”
Kaley gave it some thought. “He will if I speak his language. I have to…” She searched for the right way to express it. “He’s like a dog. A pitbull, like you told him in the car, remember?” Watery-eyed, Shan nodded. “And a pitbull is mean, especially if it’s brought up wrong, but if you give it the right bait…maybe you can aim it at the right bad guys. I can try, Shan. I have to try. You understand that, don’t you? Deep down inside, you understand.”
Shannon was out of excuses.
Kaley stood up, and this time Shannon’s hand fell from hers limply. She has no more strength left to fight. They took that from her, too, she thought angrily. Kaley turned, shouldered her book bag, and was shoved ever so slightly by Laquanda Everest. There was a flash of anger, but Kaley suppressed it. Still, the slight remained, and, though she didn’t know it, it was like an aggravant to a clam, destined to form a pearl.
The bus would go on down the street, and drop Shan off at Cartersville Elementary School. Kaley took one look back at her little sister, gave her what she hoped was a reassuring smile, and stepped out of the bus, and out of the log cabin.
The blizzard had eased up, but that wasn’t saying much. If he wanted to get out of here, he would have to move fast. A few more hours, and he estimated the roads back to Chelyabinsk would be impassable.
The shed was open, Spencer was glad to find. It would have been a real pain in the ass to have to pick the locks or smash his way through one of the tiny windows—he’d peeked inside it earlier, and saw that there were cramped shelves filled with tools hugging the walls beside every window. The snow had piled up around the double wooden doors considerably, and it took a minute of yanking and pulling to get them open.
The wind was the real bitch. It kept trying to slam one of the doors shut, while forcing the other open so wide that its hinges were crackling. It also pushed around at him and bit deeply into his cheeks. Should’ve gotten one o’ those wool balaclavas from Zak’s dresser, he thought. There was still time to go back and do that, after he’d secured a way out of here. He was in no real hurry to leave, because it certainly appeared that Zakhar had liked and maintained his privacy. Still, he’d rather not just lay up here for too long. The vory might be putting things together as fast as Interpol, maybe faster, and they might want to come out to warn their boy Zakhar personally.
Interpol was certainly onto him, though they had all the events and the timeline screwed up. According to their website, where his face occasionally made an appearance in the updates section, Spencer Pelletier was “known to associate with elements of Russian organized crime,” and was “believed to have been involved in the monumental human trafficking case that shocked the world, as it spanned from Atlanta, Georgia, to far parts of Europe and even Asia.” There was a description of how he might look now, a computer rendering that added in the facial scar that came to him courtesy of Dmitry Ankundinov. He’d gotten out of the U.S. ahead of the story, but had accelerateed his plans once Interpol started getting more public with their search. Hence, why he’d gone ahead and done Andrei in before quickly finishing up his search in Derbent.
Spencer tugged on a piece of string dangling from the shed’s ceiling and the lights came on. Tools were arrayed all around. The black Subaru Forester, though new, looked like it hadn’t been driven recently. A sheet was flung halfway over it, not completely covering the backside, and dust had collected. As he’d noted when peeking through the window that morning while Zakhar was still asleep inside, only the front two tires had chains on them.
He followed Zakhar’s instructions. There was indeed a pegboard with a poster of a large bear hanging from it, saying, in large English, THIS IS SIBERIA. Yes, it is, he mused. Spencer knocked all around it, found it hollow, then searched for the edges. It didn’t take long. At the edge of the poster there was an indentation. He forced his fingernails into it and pried it open. Inside were a few hooks hanging from the pegboard, and from those hooks dangled a strange assortment of tools that seemingly had nothing to do with one another: a few electric drills, a kinky ball-and-gag, some bungee cords, keys to the Subaru and the ATV (he’d planned on hotwiring the car, so keys were welcome), a strap-on dildo (of all things) that hadn’t been taken out of the package, and, of course, the snow chains.
Spencer reached inside to take the chains, then cleared a space on the floor so that he could lay the chains out and remove any twists or kinks. He made sure the V-bars were straight and would make contact with road surface, and made sure the cross and side chains were all straight.
“Spencer?” Such a teeny voice.
He looked up, half startled. Part of him had already started convincing himself that he’d imagined every bit of it. It didn’t really matter to him whether or not it was really happening, it just quietly surprised him that it was happening. “Beat it, chick-a-dee. I ain’t listenin’.”
“Just listen!”
“If you want the kid out, start walkin’. I’m sure you’ll find somebody that’ll come back to get him out of—”
“He could be dead by then. We’re…we’re out in the middle of nowhere!” Tears again. Always with the fucking tears, he thought. “Spencer, just…just please hear me out.”
“Nothin’ to hear,” he said, blowing into his hands to warm them up and then checking the cam tighteners on the chains. He started moving about the Subaru, very carefully placing the chains on the rear tires, centering them, making sure they were all good and squared away before he snagged the keys from the pegboard. Kaley, the little phantom girl, watched in sullen silence.
Finally, she said, “You need to help him, Spencer.”
“I told you before about tellin’ me what I need to do.”
“What I mean is, he can help you.”
“How is some seven-year-old gonna help me?”
Kaley walked over to him, and as she did, it didn’t quite look right. That is, she put one foot in front of the other, but she tended to slide forward, gaining a bit more space that she ought to. And, of course, she left no tracks in the snow that was blowing in from outside. She stopped just a foot from him, just as he was opening the driver’s side door. “He knows things.”
“Yeah?” he said, hopping inside and driving slightly forward so that he could fasten the bottoms of the chains. He drove slowly, keeping the driver’s side door open so that he could look at the back tires and make sure he wasn’t going so fast that the chains came off. Once he’d gone far enough, he put the car in park. “What does he know that could help me?” He knelt down, and went to tightening the fasteners.
“At-ta Biral,” she said. Spencer looked up at her. “Eight Cats.”
He paused amid his work and considered. In his pocket, Zakhar’s iPhone rang again. He ignored it.
After a moment, Spencer stood up and walked over to the pegboard, retrieving a few bungee cords to tighten the chains across the wheel. While kneeling and at work, he said, “Do you remember what happened that night?” The little girl said nothing. “Your silence tells me everything. You do remember, don’t you? No repressed memories?” He nodded, stood, and walked around to the other side to address that tire. “Do you recall everything I said to you before, when you were floatin’ around inside my head?”
“I remember a lot of things about that night.”
“Do you remember the bet we made, about me showin’ up on yer twenty-first birthday if it turned out that some Atlanta PD cops had helped those pricks that snatched you?”
“I remember you made a bet, but I never accepted it. That doesn’t matter right now, though. That boy has got to—”
“I only
bring it up because I was right, of course. I’m always right about people,” he declared, tugging on the bungees, making sure they were secured. He stood up and put his hands on his hips, huffed, watched the warm clouds come out of his mouth, and tried to think if he was forgetting anything. “People are fuckin’ pricks, and if they get the chance, they’ll take any opportunity to get what they want.”
“Spencer, I’m begging you—”
“Opportunity makes the thief. Every priest in the world will rape a drunk fifteen-year-old girl if she’s passed out in front of him, an’ if he hasn’t had enough pussy in a while, an’ if all other sorts o’ stars are in alignment. Opportunity makes the thief, never forget that.”
“What does any of this have to do with—”
“Ya say the kid knows somethin’ about the At-ta Biral,” he said. “How do I know you didn’t just pry that right outta my own mind?” Spencer rounded the Subaru, and as he approached her he watched her take a step back. Half of Kaley’s right leg passed through the vehicle’s driver side headlight, and she didn’t seem to notice. “You know you have a power I can’t track, a power I can’t keep up with, so you have an opportunity right now. An opportunity to lie, to bluff me. I think ya pulled that name outta my head, and you’re trying to get me to go and see what the boy knows so that I’ll open those three locks on that basement door, let him out.” He smiled. “I’m never wrong about people.”
Kaley shook her head. “I’m not lying.”
“That’s a lie.”
“It’s not!” she shouted. Her breath didn’t come out in any great tufts of cloud. Spencer figured she didn’t need to breathe in this form, whatever it was. “The boy knows something, I can feel it!”