by Lee Thompson
Tentatively, she began walking again, quietly, as if doing so might make her harder to locate, though it was a stupid idea since she was still illuminated by the street lights above her. Glancing to her left, she saw a man standing behind a bay window, watching her for a moment before realizing she wasn’t a threat and the man turned away and disappeared into the depths of his home and she wanted to call out to him and say, Hey, why don’t you ask if everything is all right? Why don’t you let me use your phone to call the police?
She heard someone walking behind her and she turned to face them, raising her arms—the one with the pepper spray to attack, the other holding the silver bell that she knew was the only true buffer she had between her and her assailant—but there wasn’t anyone visibly there.
She swallowed, her mouth dry, her skin hot and clammy. Nina feared that her mind had conjured both Sebastian’s voice and the man himself, but having never dealt with delirium she wasn’t sure what to believe, and she was eager to return home, so she walked on.
She checked over both her shoulders every few seconds, ashamed of herself because she wished Anthony was there, walking her to her house, since he’d provide a shield between her and the madman who was toying with her. Then, a few more steps, a few more seconds to think, she decided it was best that Anthony hadn’t accompanied her because Sebastian would snap every bone in his body in a matter of minutes.
No matter, she thought, her legs stiff and her bladder feeling full, I’m almost home, almost…
She turned onto her street, saw the gazebo in the distance, the smooth, flowing green grass of the park stirred by a building wind and appearing to dance in the fading moonlight as clouds thickened and the air grew chill with coming rain.
She heard thunder far off.
Closer, she could see her mother’s house, the gazebo between her and it, and she walked around the place where she had first seen Jacob—and God, how she missed him and his scary friend now—and she gave the structure a wide berth in case Sebastian waited near the steps, or on the floor of the gazebo, eager to end his game and finally seize his prize.
Tears burned her cheeks as soon as she reached the street, thirty or forty feet from the front door. She felt a phantom tingle in her cheek—the echo of her mother having slapped her that very afternoon for scaring her so, and it felt like days ago to Nina now—and she checked behind her, and sighed, and stumbled across the road, exhausted, wanting only to feel her mother drape her arms around her and ask her what was wrong and what she could do to help…
But as she walked onto the porch, she noticed the door was slightly ajar, a yellow beam of light in the shape of a scythe adorning the decking, its tip only inches from her tired feet.
On some level, she knew that raising her voice, to call for her mother, or for Rick, would lead to grave consequences, so she paused there, trying to figure out what to do.
Sweat gathered on her brow as thunder drew closer and the first fat drops of rain pinged off her mother’s car and Rick’s truck.
She listened, angry with the building storm, angry even with God, for the building rain and the thunder drowned out all sound inside the house. She glanced back toward the street, the park, the gazebo, but saw no sign of movement.
Facing the door again, she slowly pushed it open as quietly as she could manage, and she placed one foot on the threshold, the rain behind her not so bothersome now as she moved into the light. The smells of her home, and the associations she’d formed between it and a sanctuary from life—when it got too hectic or hurtful or confusing—reassured her, and she wished that she could somehow draw that reassurance out into an eternity.
Yet she could tell that there was something off with the light coming from the living room. It seemed slanted, askew, painting the wall too brightly, and too low.
And the stillness was not normal, not in her house. It was always alive with noise, even in the middle of the night when she was supposed to be sleeping.
Standing in the doorway, afraid to enter, unable to decide what was wrong—or, truthfully, for her to admit what she knew was wrong—she fought back a sob and thought: I wish I could be anywhere but here, because something is wrong, it’s way wrong…
She considered whispering, Mom? But now, with most of her body in the foyer and the rain picking up outside, she feared her mother wouldn’t hear her, or that someone else—Sebastian—would, so she kept quiet, though it nearly killed her.
She thought over and over, Please, God, don’t let him hurt them…
She moved to the wall on her left and skirted it, her knees stiff and bent, edging toward the living room—believing that if she just maintained her courage she would enter that place where Rick and her mother cuddled on the couch most weekend evenings, at peace with themselves and each other and their time, how little of it they had to spare—and Nina thought: I’ll peek around the wall and I’ll see them there on the couch because all that happened was they forgot to shut the door all the way…
Only…
If only…
She knew she wouldn’t find them reclining together, those rare, open, loving smiles on their faces—the way Nina thought they only truly ever looked at each other in private—and she loved seeing them like that, so intertwined, and so together that they appeared to be one creature with two heads…
Yet, she knew they hadn’t forgotten to shut the door.
She could smell him in the house, his foulness like a force unto itself, and it easily invaded her nostrils and it dug around inside her head, seeking permanent purchase, a stronghold where it could change her life irrevocably. She felt it in her bones, this heaviness, this certainty, and it took all the strength she had remaining just to continue standing and not fall into a sobbing heap.
He would have them duct-taped to the kitchen chairs and he’d be pacing back and forth behind them, Nina’s grandmother’s butcher knife—one of the real knives, back before they started making junk, her mother always said—in his hand, and he’d be frowning until he noticed her. And then he would smile, and his eyes, she knew, would light up, and he’d say, “All right, let’s get started. The party’s all here…”
Only she didn’t know what she had done, or what the Stark family had done, to deserve such nightmares.
She rubbed her face and found it wet.
Her lips felt numb, her breathing labored.
Ahead, she could see the cordless phone on the table her mom had placed against the living room wall, and above it, she could see the eight-by-ten photograph of her family—Rick, her mother, Patricia, and her, taken only last year.
Nina thought: I need to get the phone and dial nine-one-one even if I don’t say anything, just let them hear me talking to him… I need to get my mom and Rick out of here. I have to. Are you listening God? I have to get them out of here, somehow, someway, even if I have to let him take me…
A thousand scenarios were running rampant through her head, yet she knew that she needed, somehow, to take things in baby steps: she’d get the phone, dial nine-one-one, and then make sure her mother and Rick were okay…
At the corner, where the wall ended at the edge of the living room, she whispered, “Screw it,” and made a mad dash for the cordless, refusing as she crossed the ten feet of space to even look at the living room.
In that short distance it felt like the weight of all her years had gathered in a single moment and had come to rest on her shoulders. It mattered very little in the large scheme, though it exhausted what little energy she possessed.
Her fingers closed around the phone and she was dialing even as she spun toward the couch and television, knowing she had to prepare herself for what might await her eyes, yet also afraid to recognize, and knowing she had to, like Jacob had had to, that it was always too late to prepare yourself for anything.
Upon first glance she saw nothing out of the ordinary.
The couch, coffee table, television, and book cases were all undisturbed and where they belonged. She let ou
t a breath that shook her insides, looked again, and noticed the lamp. It lay on the floor, its shade trampled, but the light at its heart glowing furiously. It illuminated her shins and painted her shadow on the wall behind her and cast a pall over the photograph of her family.
Nina moved forward, disconcerted, into the living room.
She heard the nine-one-one operator ask for information about her emergency, and Nina pressed her thumb over the speaker to mask the tinny, otherworldly voice.
She whispered, “Mom?”
As she rounded the sofa, she realized that lights were on all throughout the house, and somewhere deeper in what she had once thought of as her sanctuary, a man swore and something heavy smashed against a wall.
She considered the possibility that her mother and Rick had simply had a fight—the trampled lamp, the man swearing and throwing things around—and it wasn’t too far-fetched, but as she recalled all the times she had seen Rick angry, she had never once seen him curse or break anything.
The smell that she had quickly come to associate with disease—one now infecting her family, much like she thought it had the Stark family—grew stronger and it stung her eyes and she squeezed them shut for a second, pinched the top of her nose and continued to ignore the vibration of the nine-one-one operator’s voice against her thumb.
She didn’t know how long it would take the police to trace the call to their address—she didn’t even know if they could trace it—but she knew she had to do something and she had to find her mother and Rick and get them all out of there.
She inched to the far side of the living room and listened intently to the sounds coming from the back of the house, in what she assumed was her bedroom.
Glancing toward the kitchen she noticed someone had spilled something on the floor, something dark, a puddle, and she shook her head as she stepped forward, angling herself so that she could see more of the kitchen without entering it, and she saw her mother there on the floor with a hole in her forehead, just a small hole Nina could stick a pencil in, and the puddle of blood had seeped from the back of her mother’s head. Her face looked at peace and that made Nina want to cry all the more.
She placed a hand over her mouth to stifle a sob and her eyes hurt and she closed them for the briefest of moments, knowing that closing them forever wasn’t an option, no matter how badly she wanted to.
When she opened them again she looked from her mother to her stepfather. Rick sat at the table, one arm cast across it as if reaching for his wife, his face hidden against his bicep. But his blood coated the wall behind him, mixed with grayish blue clumps that she knew were pieces of his hair and bone and brain matter.
Yet he reached for her mother.
Her sleeping, hard, beautiful mother, who Nina looked at again now, looked at her hard, feeling something inside her chest close off from her mind, and she backed into the living room then toward the front door.
Something else banged off the wall in her bedroom and the man slammed a door, which she hoped was only the door to her closet, yet she feared it wasn’t, her standing there fifteen feet from the rain and the wet grass and the cool wind that she thought might somehow wash this bad dream away, to carry it off in a flood, to bury it beneath waters so deep that she would never have to—
Nina heard his footsteps in the hall, headed her way. She sprinted for the door, terrified, and angry, and worried that he would just walk outside and he’d disappear into the darkness, just another phantom that no one could put a face to. And she couldn’t remember his face now, believing that it was only because she had spoken to him for a minute or two. What justice would there be for her family if he never suffered for his crimes?
Her feet seemed as loud as firecrackers popping on the porch and she dove over the railing behind the bushes, the operator’s voice louder for a second as she lost hold of the cordless phone, and she heard that voice in the darkness close to the house, and she worried that he would hear it too and he’d find her, and he’d tear her apart…
So she scrambled, quickly, her fingers hitting a garden hose that felt like a cold, dead snake, her palms cut by sharp roots and a rose bush that her mother had cut off near ground-level, and she nearly screamed out in surprise as the pain grabbed a hold of her, but, she was relieved as her fingers brushed the plastic casing and she lifted the phone and ended the call.
She couldn’t hear her mother’s murderer inside the house, but she saw his shadow fall out of the doorway and stretch out into the lawn. It was a long, dark shadow, and she read the menace of his intent even inside his still, calm, controlled and dark otherness.
Despite her fear and her heartache, she thought: You have to pay for what you’ve done!
But she knew he wouldn’t. Men like Sebastian were beyond the reach of sane people, even police. They couldn’t begin to understand him, though they strived to. They couldn’t even understand a man like Victor, who, Nina thought at that point, really wasn’t all that bad…
And then the stillness stretched out, the shadows in the corner of the porch long and heavy. She listened intently, but she heard only the rain falling and the wind, far off now, howling…
I don’t know what to do, Nina thought, knowing only that that she didn’t want to think about what she saw—her mother lying there in a pool of her own blood, and Rick, in his own blood, reaching for her as if, even after death he could somehow save her, possibly bring her back…
The brush, the shrubs rustled behind her, ever so briefly.
Nina turned, not expecting anything, unable to feel anything, and her imagination blocked out any true sight or sound, or any of the sensations she would assign, like so many other people, to reality.
She could imagine a lot.
And she imagined this:
The air full of falling stars, brilliant in the blackness of the sky. The vacant streets drained of color and the quiet houses where families huddled behind locked doors trying to feel safe, with every light on, because they knew something terrible was creeping through the night and they knew that it would take someone, there was no stopping that…
But Nina knew what they did not know: that evil was not afraid of the light. There was no incantation or symbol that could stop or even begin to restrain such elemental forces; evil simply ran its course and it left its mark behind on those who survived a brush with it.
Then, slowly, she imagined that something was stuck in her arm. Just two small projectiles fired from a weapon she was unfamiliar with, two small pegs that looked like the pieces in the board game Battle Ship, and there were wires attached to the end of those pegs that ran off into the darkness now like a living thing smothering the porch, and she thought again, No, something is way wrong…
But she imagined her body convulsing as he hit a button and the Taser sent fifty-thousand volts like a hard, unrelenting rain through her limbs and into her brain, every nerve ending overloaded, the black night like a cape he had thrown over her head, and when he whipped it away to show his audience, she would be gone…
She shook her head, heard him grunt and curse again, and she was afraid he would step onto the porch, jump over the railing and take her up in his arms, hold her tight to his chest, and the smell of him would seep inside her and no matter how much she prayed, and no matter what she did to feel like she was a good person, a compassionate person, nothing would ever be able to wash her clean.
So she squatted there behind the shrubbery which was level with the porch railing and she tried not to breathe and she tried to fold herself into such a small ball that she could become invisible.
And then he killed the lights one by one inside the house where her mother and stepfather lay, and she realized that she couldn’t move even if she wanted to.
But another minute passed, and then she heard his labored breathing, his tread heavy on the decking, and the steps creaking beneath his weight.
She worried that any second he would claim her and nothing she did, no matter how valiantly she fought
back, would prevent him from pressing a pistol to her forehead and erasing all the memories she desperately wanted to cling to.
But he never came for her, and slowly she heard crickets and birds resume their night songs, and after she believed him gone, she found it incredibly hard to breathe at all, trembling as she was, seeing the house she’d grown up in as still as he’d made it, knowing that he had left broken pieces in the dark kitchen that she could never reassemble.
18
Richard Stark sat on the merry-go-round from which his daughter had been taken. He held a half-empty bottle of Butterscotch Schnapps gently between his long fingers wanting only to get so drunk that the anger he felt toward his wife would vanish. In truth, he just wanted everything to vanish, even while, like Loretta, there was still a sliver of him that hoped for the best in regards to their daughter. His thoughts became more tangled the more he drank and, for a while, there was only him and the still, endless night.
It shamed him that he felt angry with his wife, and he was hurt that she was angry with him. Loretta failed to understand the guilt he had coiling around his heart like a snake, and that serpent whispered to him throughout the last few days and nights that he was a failure, that all a man really had to do was to love and protect his family, nothing more, just two simple things.
And Richard had failed, foolishly believing that somehow his love for his daughter should have been more than enough to sound warning bells in his head that a predator was near. But he’d only possessed the joy that always filled him when spending time with Robin, and it, that joy, was especially sweet and all-consuming that morning before she was taken.
He’d reveled in the fact that she was Daddy’s girl. She’d always been Daddy’s girl; from the moment he held her in his arms and their big brown eyes had met in the delivery room. From the first moment he held her Richard had felt all the pain he’d carried with him through his childhood, teen years, and adulthood, fall away, as if the little miracle who stared into his face with such warmth and love and trust, her eyes such deep pools of endless knowledge already there and shining from her glorious soul, were a miracle. Both he and Loretta had needed her because he’d been working too much and offered his wife so little time, so little appreciation, until she told him she was having his baby…