by Tami Hoag
She didn’t want to see it. She didn’t want to hear it. She fought to shut it down, trying to implement strategies she had learned at Weidman—visualization, relaxation, biofeedback techniques. The images and noise were stronger than her will to be rid of them.
Finally giving up, she sat up in the bed, turned on the television, and started flipping through the channels. The effect was no different from what was going on in her head—snippets of this, snatches of that—with the exception that the voices and faces belonged to strangers . . . until they didn’t . . . until the face on the local news was the face that stared back at her in the mirror every morning.
Everything seemed to freeze in that moment—the chaos in her mind, the beating of her heart, the breath in her lungs. She had seen herself on television many times—the old Dana, Before Dana. After Dana didn’t belong on-screen. After Dana was the still photo that stopped the viewer’s eye and kept him tuned to the channel the same as a photograph of a car wreck might. The station would probably get phone calls from viewers complaining about the shock value of her scarred face.
The reporter was the blond girl, the girl Dana had transformed into herself as she had stood staring at her in the driveway that afternoon. Kimberly Kirk. With both images side by side—Kirk’s animated face and the flat still photo of herself—the contrast was extreme. Beauty and the Beast.
As Dana stared, mesmerized, Kirk told viewers that Dana had no comment when asked if she thought the man who had abducted her could have also abducted her best friend, Casey Grant, seven years before.
Dana hadn’t even heard the question that afternoon. There had been too many voices, too much commotion. Casey Grant was a name from another lifetime. Hearing the question now shocked her, the shock bringing with it a huge logjam of emotions she couldn’t even begin to penetrate. She had to try to peel the feelings away a layer at a time to identify and try to deal with them one by one.
Outrage and disgust at the prurient sensationalism. Offense at the intrusiveness, the willingness to breech a personal boundary and reach into her memory. What had happened to her was her own experience. She didn’t owe anyone the right to know anything about it.
Which was just the opposite of what she would have said as a reporter. As a journalist she would have said that people had invested in her story and had a right to know the truth about that story. And she would have pressed to get the answers to her questions, just as Kimberly Kirk had done.
Anxious and upset, Dana got up from the bed, displacing the cat, and began pacing back and forth across the width of the room, in front of the windows and French doors that led out to the patio.
Now that she had heard the question about Casey, she couldn’t unhear it. It ran in a continuous loop through her brain. Could the man who had abducted her have taken her best friend seven years ago? Could the man who had ended her life as she knew it taken Casey seven years before anyone had ever heard of Doc Holiday?
The idea seemed ridiculous on the face of it—that Doc Holiday could have come to Shelby Mills, Indiana, all those years ago and taken Casey Grant, then years later abducted her best friend from a city hundreds of miles away. The odds against that kind of coincidence had to be astronomical. And yet, the possibility was like a snake that slithered into her imagination, cold and slick, accessing the deepest reaches of her most primal fears.
Could he have watched them both, stalked them both when they were eighteen and just getting ready to experience life? Had he chosen one over the other for a reason or by chance? Had he later chosen Dana knowing, wanting to compare them? If he hadn’t, was he now in hell laughing at the joke that people might consider him so brilliantly diabolical?
Dana had no organic memory of the man who had abducted and tortured her. No image of his face existed in her mind. She hadn’t seen a single photograph of him. She didn’t want to. Better that she didn’t know what he looked like. Better that she couldn’t remember. It could only be worse for the monster to have a face to haunt her nightmares.
But while she had avoided the photographs that would have humanized him, she had sought out the articles that had chronicled his history. She knew Doc Holiday was a middle-aged man with half a dozen aliases who had spent many years crisscrossing the Midwest collecting and selling antiques and junk. He was known to have killed women in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Wisconsin, and Missouri. Why not Indiana? Those cases had all come in the past few years. And while he had marked Dana as his ninth victim, the authorities suspected there were probably more victims than they could officially give him credit for, possibly many more.
Dana couldn’t help but wonder now: What if she might have seen him that summer after graduation? He might have pulled off the interstate and had a meal at the Grindstone truck stop, where Casey had waitressed part-time in the summer. Dana had gone there nearly every afternoon. What if Casey had waited on him? What if Dana had seen him? And if she had, had she remembered him? Had there been a moment of recognition years later as he grabbed her and threw her into his van?
The answer had to be no. Things like that only happened in the movies. Which meant the evil that had touched her life couldn’t be contained to a single entity—Doc Holiday. But she had already known that.
Roxanne Volkman, her friend and mentor at the television station where she had worked in Minneapolis, had explained to her the circumstances that had led to her abduction. Dana had been reporting on the story of a Jane Doe homicide victim that had turned out to be a local teenager, Penelope Gray. For a time, the authorities had suspected the girl was the ninth known victim of Doc Holiday. In the end, a stranger abduction and serial killer had turned out to be the farthest thing from the truth. Evil had lived much closer to home for Penny Gray.
That conversation with Roxanne came back to Dana now as if they had only just had it, even though she hadn’t thought of it once in months. Dana had been among the first to report the possible link between the elusive serial killer and the gruesome discovery of the girl’s body on New Year’s Eve. When the victim’s identity had become known, Dana’s interest had only increased. With the station shorthanded due to the holidays and a rampant flu bug, she had lobbied hard with Roxanne to be able to do more on the story than just report on it from behind the desk on the early-morning news. She had begged for and gotten the extra field assignment as part of the around-the-clock coverage of the story.
And the reason she had been so interested and pushed so hard to get that assignment, Roxanne had reminded her, was that she once had a friend go missing and never come home.
Her coverage of the Penny Gray story had captured the interest of Doc Holiday.
“Oh my God,” she whispered now, sinking down onto the chair behind her desk.
She had asked to cover Penny Gray’s story because of Casey and had ended up in the clutches of a killer—a killer who might have ended her friend’s life seven years ago.
No wonder the news media was so hot for the story. It was tailor-made for television: a tale of good and evil as intricately woven as a fine tapestry, as twisted as a Gordian knot.
As a journalist, she would have given her right arm for a story like that to dig into. As a victim, she didn’t want to share any part of it with anyone.
And as the best friend of a missing girl . . . ?
She looked at the blank black screen of her computer. She could turn it on and in a matter of seconds see the face of the man who had ruined her life and maybe spark a memory that could solve a seven-year mystery.
She stared at her dark, ghostly reflection in the screen, as a cold fear spread through her chest. Seven years, she thought. Whatever had happened to Casey had happened long ago. What was the point in knowing the worst? Better to leave it alone and let hope, however slim, live, right? If she was dead, she was dead. Nothing could change that. If she was alive, then Doc Holiday had nothing to do with her disappearance.
In her exhaustion, her damaged mind toyed with her. Her reflection shivered and shuddered, taking on dimension, radiating energy. Dana sat back, trying to get away from it.
Save yourself, little coward, it said.
“So what if I do?” she asked back.
Better to leave her own memory blank, she thought. She didn’t want to know more about the man who had abused her. Knowing more wouldn’t change what had happened. It would only make the forgetting more difficult. And more than anything, she wanted to forget—or not to remember, to be more accurate.
The reflection’s eyes glowed red. You can never escape yourself.
“You’re not real,” Dana said.
I’m as real as you are. I live in your head. You can’t get away from me.
In defiance, Dana rose and turned her back on the computer, coming face-to-face with a photograph in the bookcase, one of her younger self and Casey Grant. Best friends forever, each with an arm around the other, the two girls mugged for the camera, silly at sixteen, dolled up for a school dance. Dana: blond and blue-eyed. Casey, so pretty with her dark hair and sparkling dark eyes and wide smile. They looked as happy as they could have possibly been, clueless about the cruelties life held in store for both of them. They’d had no thought in that moment that life wouldn’t always be exactly what they wanted. It hadn’t occurred to either of them that everything could change in the blink of an eye.
“Stay that way,” Dana murmured, as if those girls could hear her, as if she could somehow bend space and time and warn them, and change it all.
If that were possible, I wouldn’t be here now and this wouldn’t be real, she thought. Then this reality would be nothing but a bad dream from which she could awake. God, how she wished that could be true.
You can never escape yourself, her own voice whispered within the walls of her mind.
Something touched her from behind, and she gave a little shriek as she spun around, expecting to face her specter from the computer screen, thinking it might have crawled out of the machine onto her desk. But there was nothing there but her cat, Tuxedo, sitting with his head tipped quizzically to one side.
Shivering from the stress and the fatigue, Dana wrapped her arms around herself and walked away. She went to stand at the French doors and leaned her forehead against the cool glass, staring out at the patio. The area was aglow with subtle lighting tucked beneath the shrubbery. She could see only to the edge of the landscaping. Beyond that was nothing but blackness . . . and whatever lived in blackness—the evil she would have warned her younger self to fear.
As she stood there staring out, she imagined that evil embodied, an entity staring back at her, waiting to reach out and touch her. She imagined she could feel its gaze on her, greedily drinking in the sight of her from just out of her range of vision. That was what evil did, what predators did—watched and waited, patient for an opportunity, ready to spring when the victim wasn’t looking.
Fear rippled down the back of her neck, and she shuddered. That evil knew her, had already had her. It could want more of her.
An icy cold seeped through her, running down her arms and legs like water, sliding back up her chest like a cold, bony hand, fingers wrapping around her throat, cutting off her air.
The trembling began deep within, working its way to the surface like an earthquake.
You can’t escape. I’m inside you.
A little mewling sound of fear escaped her lips. Hands shaking, she fumbled with the deadbolt, fully expecting that evil thing to rush out of the darkness, across the patio, to yank the door open before she could secure the lock.
Tears welled up in her eyes and turned her vision to liquid. She yanked the curtains closed and backed away from the door, her breath catching hard in her throat as she banged into the desk, turned and bumped into an upholstered chair.
She scurried to the bed—to high ground—put her back up against the headboard, and curled herself into a quivering knot, arms bound around legs, knees tucked against chest—the position she always assumed to ride out the storm of panic.
She held tight to herself, shaking and crying. And even as she choked on the fear, in the back of her mind lingered the mocking thought that she should be used to this by now. This terror threatened to swallow her whole on a nightly basis. But that knowledge didn’t lessen the trembling or the sensation of not being able to breathe. And just because she hadn’t died of it the night before didn’t mean it wasn’t real tonight.
Tonight might be the night the faceless evil that stalked her mind took physical form and finished the job started months ago. Because, even though Dana had no conscious memory of it, she knew better than anyone what evil was capable of doing.
* * *
AND IN THE NIGHT, beyond the reach of the lights, the watcher stood in the woods, wrapped in the blackness, and sighed in disappointment as the girl closed the drapes . . .
9
The sound of the screams pierced her eardrums like the point of the knife. The knife traced patterns in the girl’s flesh like a fine red pen. The red was blood that fell in drops like tears from her eyes. Big brown eyes full of terror and pain, and something that struck even harder—accusation.
Not my eyes, Dana thought.
Not my blood.
Not my pain.
And yet, she felt trapped there, frozen in hell, unable to move, as if she was the one tied to the table.
“You should have seen him coming,” the girl said calmly. “I died for nothing.”
“You’re not dead.”
The girl smiled a dark, cruel smile. “I’m as dead as you are.”
“I’m alive.”
The girl began to laugh. She arched her back and strained against the ties that bound her wrists to the table, laughing and laughing.
“Stop it!” Dana shouted. “Stop laughing!”
The girl paid no attention to her. The sound of her laughter seemed to multiply and echo until Dana felt surrounded by it. Then the laughter gave way to choking. The young woman’s long dark hair transformed to a mass of writhing snakes. She turned her face toward Dana and her eyes changed from human eyes to elliptical reptilian slits, glowing green and red.
Dana sucked in a breath to scream but couldn’t release the sound, couldn’t release the air from her lungs. She tried to turn away, to move away, to run away, but she couldn’t move. Something invisible and oppressive held her in place in a grip as strong as iron.
The demon’s face turned red as it began to choke. Its body convulsed with effort as it choked and gagged, trying to dislodge something from its throat.
Suddenly a tiny hand emerged from the mouth, fingers curling and uncurling. Another round of choking forced a tiny arm to thrust out. Then Dana watched in horror as a baby was born from the mouth of the demon, emerging on a sea of blood, falling to the floor. It looked up at Dana, and she tried again to scream as she stared down into her own face.
Terror propelled her from the nightmare, flinging her to consciousness, flinging her upright in the bed, flinging her from the bed. She scrambled to get her feet under her, slipped and fell to her knees as her stomach twisted and heaved. She grabbed the wastebasket from beside the desk and vomited into it again and again.
The nightmare image burned the insides of her eyelids: her own face looking up at her, attached to the body of a newborn infant covered in blood. She pressed the heels of her hands hard against her eyeballs, pressing until all she could see were starbursts of color on a field of black. But the images only went deeper into her psyche.
She couldn’t unsee the baby or the face of the girl turned demon bound to the table—Casey Grant. Pretty Casey with her long dark hair and big brown eyes transformed into something demonic and terrifying.
Shaking uncontrollably, drenched in sweat, Dana alternated between sucking in air and retching into the wastebasket.
I’m as dead as you are . . . I’m as dead as you are . . . Casey’s words from the dream echoed inside her head.
“Stop it. Stop it,” Dana said again and again. “I’m alive.”
She looked around as her heart rate slowed and her breathing gradually returned to normal. The television on the wall above her dresser was whispering to itself. She had left all the lights on. Bored with her histrionics, Tuxedo sat in a pile of clothes on the foot of the bed, licking the toes of an upraised hind paw.
Mustering some strength, Dana got up from the floor, took the wastebasket into her bathroom, flushed the contents, and washed out the plastic cylinder, then washed her hands and face and brushed her teeth. She didn’t have the energy to strip off her sweaty clothes or shower.
The digital clock on her nightstand read 3:27 A.M. She had been abducted from the parking lot of her apartment building around 3:15 in the morning, on her way to work. She woke up nearly every night around the same time, as if to somehow ward off potential danger in her dreams. Too late tonight.
She felt like she’d been run over by a truck. But as tired and drained as she was, she had no desire to try to return to sleep, where this new nightmare lay in wait. She tried to interpret the dream as she sat down in her desk chair.
It was obviously Casey being held by Doc Holiday. Tied down as Dana had been told she had been tied down. It had taken months for the ligature marks to fade from her ankles and wrists. Casey was telling Dana she should have seen the monster coming. Why? Because she had seen him before?
It was only a dream, she told herself, spun out of all the things she had been thinking about earlier. It didn’t mean anything. Yet she still felt disturbed by it. She couldn’t shake the creepy aftereffects.
Dr. Dewar had told her the subconscious mind couldn’t distinguish between an experience that was real and one that was vividly imagined. The brain’s physiological reaction was the same, hence the pounding heart, the rapid breath, the sweating, the sense of dread. A stupid design flaw on the part of Mother Nature, Dana thought. A waste of adrenaline.