by E. M. Parker
And now, because he wasn’t thinking, because he initially lied to the detectives about knowing Hannah, he found himself in a world of trouble, and short of taking the coward’s route that Donald chose, there would not be an easy way out of it. Not that he deserved one. Arthur may not have killed her, but his complicity after the fact was equally horrific. He understood that, just like he understood that justice, in one form or another, would eventually come for him. After three long, miserable years of waiting, perhaps the call had finally come.
For now, he had his son’s wedding to attend, even if it was currently the last place in the world he wanted to be. He couldn’t shake the image of Sullivan and Greer showing up at the ceremony and hauling him off in handcuffs before his son could even say his vows. How was he going to explain this to him? How was he going to explain this to anybody?
He pushed the question out of his mind as he straightened the bow tie that took him over an hour to get right, put on his suit coat, and headed for the door. He would work on his smile while he was in the car. Right now, the expression seemed more foreign to him than the dimmest star in the furthest reaches of space.
Just as he’d reached for his car keys, there was a knock on the door. He had initially considered not answering it, fearing that the detectives had already come back to collect him. But he knew that avoiding them would do no good. Even if he did run, they would eventually find him. His guilt-riddled conscience would make sure of it.
He looked through the peephole expecting to see them, but instead saw nothing. He quickly shrugged it off, telling himself that it must have been an impatient tenant who decided to try and change the dead battery in the smoke detector by himself this time. At least someone had taken mercy on him today. Arthur smiled at the thought.
A second knock at the door erased the smile before it had the chance to settle on his face.
This time he didn’t bother to look through the peephole, deciding instead to call out, “Who is it?” in the least hospitable voice that he could summon.
“Mr. Finley?”
The young girl’s voice stopped Arthur cold.
“I was wondering if you could help me?”
He looked through the peephole and again saw nothing.
“Who is this?” he asked with a sudden nervousness that he couldn’t explain.
“Olivia Shelby from apartment 607. Please open the door. I need help.”
Ignoring the blaring instinct that told him to do otherwise, Arthur opened the door. He gasped at the empty space in front of him. He quickly looked down the hallway to his right, then to his left. No one.
Then he heard the voice again.
“I’m down here.” Her voice was distant now.
“Where?”
“The storage cellar. I needed a place to hide until I got help.”
“The storage cellar?”
“Yes.”
Arthur knew that was impossible. The storage cellar was locked, and he was the only person who had the key.
“That’s not true,” Olivia said from a place that suddenly didn’t sound so distant. “I have a key too.”
“How is that…” Before the screaming in Arthur’s head could subside long enough to allow him to adequately respond, the voice called out to him again.
“It’s right here. Turn around.”
When he did, he saw a brief flash of brilliant white light. Then everything went dark.
When he came to, he was still in darkness. There was nothing binding him to the floor, but he couldn’t move. His head and back hurt, and he was freezing cold.
He heard the knocking, then he heard someone calling his name. He immediately recognized the voice as Detective Greer’s.
But he sounded very far away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
SULLIVAN AND GREER ARRIVED AT ARTHUR FINLEY’S apartment to find the door partially open. Despite repeated knocks, Arthur did not answer. When Sullivan pushed the door open, she saw his car keys on the ground.
“I’d say this gives us probable cause enough to go in and have a look around,” Greer said as he picked up the keys.
Sullivan nodded her agreement then turned to Natalie. “We don’t know what we’re dealing with yet, so you need to stay here while we have a look inside.”
“If he’s doing anything to my daughter, you’d better make damn sure that you find him before I do,” Natalie warned.
She had been understandably hysterical for the entire elevator ride down, but Sullivan was growing tired of the threats.
“You will stand here, quietly, and let us do our job, or you can go back up to your apartment and wait. Do you understand?”
Natalie indicated her understanding with an exaggerated eye roll.
Greer advanced inside. After one last glare at Natalie for good measure, Sullivan followed.
“Mr. Finley, are you in here?” Greer’s baritone voice bounced off the walls of the empty space and echoed in Sullivan’s ears, and she immediately knew.
“He’s not here.”
“Why would he leave without closing his door?”
“I don’t think he left,” Sullivan said, pointing at the car keys in Greer’s hand.
“So where is he?”
“I don’t know. But something tells me we’d better find him qui—” Sullivan stopped. She heard something. Faint. Difficult to make out.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know.” Then she heard it again. Faint, but definitive. “Do you hear it?”
“No.”
“Someone is screaming.”
“Where? In here?”
Sullivan began moving around the apartment. “No. Someplace else.”
Greer began moving around with her. “I still can’t—”
“Shhh.” Sullivan suddenly stopped, dropped to her knees, and put her ear to the floor. “Here.”
Without saying anything, Greer dropped to the ground, put his ear down, and listened. His wide-eyed glance back to Sullivan indicated that he’d heard the same thing she had.
“Where is it coming from?”
“I don’t know. There must be a basement level that we haven’t seen yet.”
“Do you think it’s–”
Natalie’s sudden appearance in the doorway interrupted him. “Hey, get out here quick!”
By the time Sullivan and Greer got to their feet, Natalie had already run off, her blood-curdling screams filling the hallway like a cloud of toxic gas.
She stopped in front of a door at the far end of the hallway. “Are you down there, Olivia?”
The distant, unfamiliar voice of a young girl answered. “Mommy, I’m here. Please, hurry.”
This was immediately followed by the sound of another distant voice. This one very familiar. “Oh my God, please don’t. Please!” Arthur let out a guttural scream of agony, then he was silent.
Natalie raced through the door. “I’m coming, Olivia!”
Before Sullivan had a chance to process the exchange, she and Greer were giving chase. When they reached the door, they saw a long staircase leading into a vast wall of darkness.
“Where are you?” The distant echo of Natalie’s voice traveled up the staircase in pulsating waves, dying before it reached the surface.
Sullivan reached for her flashlight while Greer reached for his gun.
“It might be a good time to radio in,” Greer advised.
Sullivan agreed, phoning in the request for back up while Greer took his first steps down the staircase.
Last year, she had been shot and nearly killed as she confronted the man who had murdered her former partner. Those waning moments of consciousness that she spent on the operating table awaiting surgery were by far the most frightening of her life.
Until now.
CHAPTER THIRTY
DONALD TISDALE’S APARTMENT WAS EVERY BIT the cold, empty shell that Fiona imagined it would be. There were no reminders of the life that he’d once lived, aside from a recliner that was oddly
situated under a door frame (the sight of his suicide?), a few magazines scattered about the living room, and a mountain of mail covering the kitchen countertops. But the reminders of his death – from the crime scene tape, to the black fingerprint dust on the walls, to the empty plastic vials used to collect whatever it was he left behind, to the pungent stench of decay – were plentiful.
Fiona had become so transfixed by the condition of the apartment that she almost hadn’t processed the fact that Olivia was nowhere to be found. She’d called out to her several times upon entering, but was met with silence each time. At first, she assumed that Olivia had simply been hiding, unconvinced of Fiona’s assertion that she was by herself. But after several verbal assurances of her safety were ignored, Fiona came to a conclusion that was startling, and at the same time, utterly predictable: the voice that lured her in here did not belong to Olivia.
“Where is she?” Fiona asked the empty apartment. Given the dark specter of recent events, and her mounting belief that those events were not merely figments of her splintered consciousness, she was confident that it would find a way to answer. When it didn’t, she asked again. “I said, where is she? Are you keeping her somewhere? Did you use her to bring me here?” She grew angry at the silence. “Goddamn it, what the hell do you want?”
A thin shaft of light suddenly illuminated the hallway.
Fiona resisted the instinct to run for the door, choosing instead to take a step toward the light. She stopped when something stirred inside the bedroom.
“Why am I here?” The question was spoken aloud, but it was aimed more at herself than whatever else she thought might be able to hear it.
“To see.”
The words were faint, but they were unmistakable, and they made Fiona jump. But she held her ground.
It was with an odd mixture of fear and curiosity that she took another step forward. “What am I supposed to see?”
She heard something heavy sliding across the bedroom floor. It came to a rest with a heavy clang.
“Here.”
It was the same soft voice that lured Fiona into the apartment, the same voice that she now knew didn’t belong to Olivia, but to her sister Hannah.
Fiona took a step toward the bedroom, then stopped and listened, not to the apartment, but to the inner-voice that recognized danger long before her conscious mind could. The voice was silent. She took another step, stopped again, and listened. This time she could hear it, very faint, like Hannah’s voice had been. But it was just as unmistakable. Keep going, it said. You’re supposed to be here. You’re supposed to see what’s in that room. You’re supposed to help, so help. This is not the time to be afraid.
She was plenty afraid as she moved toward the bedroom. The fear diminished a little bit with each step, but not enough to ease the intense pounding in her chest. Had she chosen to listen to her flight response, which was honed by thousands of years of evolution, instead of an unreliable inner-voice that deceived her time and again, she would have never walked into this apartment in the first place.
But it was too late to look back now.
Once Fiona reached the bedroom, she could see that the source of light had come from inside the closet. Aside from the strange placement of a large trunk in the middle of the floor (the heavy sliding sound?), there was nothing to suggest that anyone else had been here.
Then Fiona saw the flicker of a shadow move across the light. Something was in the closet. She had considered calling out to whatever was in there, but she couldn’t think of anything more fruitless under the circumstances than saying ‘hello?’, so she abandoned the idea and kept moving forward.
When she reached the closet, she was surprised to see that it was empty, except for a pile of what looked like Donald Tisdale’s work uniforms strewn haphazardly in one corner. A square piece of plywood with a small handle and broken hinges rested against the back wall a few feet away.
It wasn’t until Fiona walked all the way into the closet that she noticed the hole in the floor. She walked up to it, half-expecting something to jump out at her. When nothing did, she blew out a tentative sigh of relief and moved in for a closer inspection. Seeing nothing in her immediate field of vision, she got down on her hands and knees, pulled out her previously useless cell phone, and turned on the flashlight feature. She moved the light around the dark, shallow space, but saw nothing. Curiosity once again getting the best of her, she stuck her arm into the hole as far as it would go and felt around. After some time, her hand finally found something. It was thin, plastic. The two curved tips on either side told her that it was a pair of eyeglasses. She recognized the oval-shaped spectacles the moment she pulled them out. They looked just like the pair that Olivia wore, the pair that belonged to her sister, but with two major differences: the crack in the lens, and the large splatter of dried blood that dotted the frame.
“Oh Jesus.”
The realization settled in fast and hard. The glasses were Hannah’s, which meant the blood most likely was hers too. She saw evidence that the police had been inside the bedroom, and it was unlikely that they would have missed the hole in the floor. So how had they missed this? Fiona shuddered when she considered that maybe they hadn’t. Maybe the glasses weren’t there at all when they looked. Maybe they were meant for her to find, and only her. But why?
To see, Hannah’s voice said in her mind.
Pushing the thought away, Fiona stuck her arm down the hole again. It wasn’t long before she came upon something else. Thick, heavy, and braided. When she pulled it out, she felt an immediate charge.
The rope was approximately two feet long, with one end tied off in a loose slip knot that had the makings of a noose. An image of the recliner in the doorway of Donald Tisdale’s living room suddenly flashed in Fiona’s mind. An image of Tisdale followed. He was standing on the chair, adjusting the rope that had been secured to a hook in the frame, slipping his neck inside, and lifting his legs up. The details were clear and present, like a traumatic memory permanently seared into her brain.
Fiona dropped the rope and stood up. She immediately felt dizzy and had to make her way to Tisdale’s bed to sit before she fell over. She took in a deep breath and closed her eyes, hoping that the sudden nausea would pass. Hannah’s pale, listless face was visible in the darkness. She wore the same cracked eyeglasses that Fiona found in the floor. The dried-on blood was now a fresh pool that dripped off the frame like an endless stream of crimson tear drops.
Fiona opened her eyes, but Hannah was still there; not as a startling image in her mind, but as a physical presence in the room. She was crouched on all fours in the corner next to the bed. She covered her head with her hand, but it was not enough to stop the open wound from dripping blood onto the baseboard. Using what was left of her strength, she began hitting the wall with a closed fist while she mouthed a word that looked like help. A last, desperate attempt to save herself.
Hannah continued pounding the wall as she rose slowly to her feet and staggered out of the bedroom.
Fiona stood up to follow her.
When Hannah made it into the kitchen, she collapsed to her knees again; the blood from her head pooling on the floor beneath her.
Fiona instinctively ran to help, but by the time she got to the kitchen, Hannah was gone.
That’s because Hannah was never here in the first place, she told herself. None of this is real.
When the front door opened to reveal Donald Tisdale rounding the corner with a large plastic bag in his hands, it certainly felt real.
Fiona walked out behind him, following at an unnecessarily safe distance (he isn’t real, Fiona, remember?) until he reached her apartment. After a quick knock on the door, a man who she was certain was Arthur Finley (so that’s whose voice I heard), opened the door and stepped out into the hallway. Though she stood some distance away, Fiona could hear their conversation as if she was standing in the middle of it.
“Is this everything?” Arthur asked in an agitated voice.
“Okay, bring it in. Hurry.”
Arthur suddenly grew more agitated as Donald moved toward the apartment.
“Damn it, would you watch what you’re doing? It’s dripping all over the place.” Arthur pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbed at the carpet before quickly pulling Donald inside and shutting the door.
The blood stains in front of 607. Hannah was trying to make me see her the whole time.
Without warning, the scene in Fiona’s mind shifted and she was back inside Donald Tisdale’s apartment, standing with her back to the front door, the same as when she had first entered. The space looked the same as it had before, but for one major difference: she was not alone this time.
Donald Tisdale stood in front of the recliner, staring up at the noose that dangled from a hook on the doorframe. He didn’t look at all certain of what he was about to do, even as he stepped on the recliner to position his head in front of the noose.
“That’s right. Do it.”
At first, Fiona thought that Hannah’s voice was a manifestation of her mind apart from the vision unfolding before her. But when Donald Tisdale jumped at the sound of it, she realized that the voice was part of the vision.
The unmistakable look of terror that came over Donald’s face all but confirmed it.
“You don’t deserve to live. Not after what you did to me.”
A child’s hand suddenly appeared on the door frame. Hannah was watching him.
Donald started crying. “Please don’t.”
Torturing him.
“I don’t want to die. Not like this.”
Hannah’s hand gripped the doorframe tighter.
As if being led against his will, Donald suddenly put his head inside the noose and forcefully tightened the knot.