Birthday Girl

by Matthew Iden

  No answer. He moved to the back of the basement until he stood in front of the primitive wooden door to the root cellar. The must and damp tickled his nose. Memories—of hiding, of crying, of whispering—pressed down on him. He yanked the door open.

  Cobwebs, silence, and darkness.

  He sighed and closed the door, then made a quick circuit of the cellar, listening and moving, his eyes flicking into each corner, until it was obvious he was alone in the space under the house. But that still left the top floor.

  Elliott

  “Get them out on the grass,” Elliott shouted.

  “Is that Lacey?” Amy asked, even as she lowered the children to the ground. “Is it her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Amy’s eyes flicked over the little cadre, devastation in her voice. “She’s not here.”

  “Dave will find her if she’s here. But you and I have to get these kids breathing.”

  The next few minutes were a blur as Elliott moved back and forth from one child to the next, performing CPR, feeling for a pulse, chafing and slapping and breathing for them. Sweat poured off him, rolling down his back and pooling at the base of his spine. His hands were shaking from the effort, but he kept at it until the little girl gave an enormous gasp, turned on her side, and vomited, then took huge, heaving breaths of air. A little boy was next.

  “Come on, come on,” he growled, pushing on the thin, washboard chest until he saw a flicker of eyelids and another gasp of air. Footsteps clattered on the porch, and he glanced up to see Amy running up the steps and back into the house. Too tired to yell, Elliott went from child to child, making sure each was breathing on his or her own.

  Dave

  Dave stared at the door. The others had been open to some degree or another, but this one, the last, was shut and clearly locked. The look of it had stopped him cold. Footsteps pounded up the hollow wooden steps behind him.

  “Is she here? Is Lacey here?” It was Amy, desperate, her voice breaking. “Did you check?”

  “She’s not in the other rooms,” he said dully, then shook himself like a wet dog. “Watch out.”

  He backed up two steps, then lunged forward and planted his foot next to the lock. Or tried to. Just before he made contact with the door, his foot twisted slightly and hit the knob. With a flat crack, the wood around the lock splintered and the door sagged open, but he gasped as a sharp pain lanced up his ankle. Amy brushed passed him and scanned the room, looked under the bed, then raced back out of the room.

  “Amy! Wait!” Dave made a grab for her arm, but she was already out the door and tumbling down the steps, leaving him to hobble after.

  Elliott

  Amy rushed out of the house, her face a twisted wreck. “She’s not there, Elliott. Dave checked every room and the basement.”

  “No sign of the woman either?” he asked, looking up from the older boy.

  “None.”

  Elliott wiped his forehead where the sweat was already cooling in the chill air. “The front door was unlocked when we got here . . .”

  They turned to look at the backyard, where the once-white gate of the picket fence yawned open, revealing a thin, meandering path that led into the woods.

  “That’s got to be it. Lacey made a break for it and that . . . woman followed her.” Amy made a beeline for the path.

  “Amy, wait!” Elliott jumped up and glanced toward the house. “Dave?”

  No answer. He looked down at the kids, made sure they were all breathing on their own. He cursed, torn, then made his decision and sprinted after Amy as she headed down the path, joining her in time to plunge through the gate and into the trees beyond.

  Dave

  Using both hands on the banister, Dave limped down the steps. He’d heard the quick conversation, then Elliott’s garbled shout, but by the time he made it onto the sagging porch, they were gone.

  He spared a quick look in the direction of the row of small bodies. All were breathing on their own; two or three moaned softly as they came to.

  “Jesus, Kim,” he said, feeling sick. “What were you doing?”

  More importantly, he thought, what am I doing? He pulled out his phone, began to dial a number, then stopped. He glanced at the woods, back to the house, then the woods again. Memories and half-recalled conversations played through his head like an old film, poorly spliced and put back together. A shudder shook him. He punched the final number on the keypad, spoke briefly, then put the phone back in his pocket before clenching his teeth and limping painfully through the gate and down the darkened path.

  47

  Elliott

  “Is there a flashlight on that phone?”

  Amy shook her head. “Too old.”

  He bit back a curse and kept walking, trying simultaneously to scan the ground, glance at the path ahead of them, and keep an ear cocked for a sound, any sound. The sun was, at this point, over the horizon, its afterglow barely touching the bottoms of the long, wispy clouds, turning them into blushing streaks in the sky. The reflection was enough to light their way, but he knew the effect was temporary—already the trees were silhouettes in his vision, painted black for all the difference the light made. Darkness was almost upon them, and with it would go any chance of staying on the unfamiliar path, not to mention catching up with Sister or Lacey. The thought made him clench his jaw to the point where his teeth made cracking sounds.

  Dead branches and forest debris crackled under their feet as they hurried along the narrow track of dirt and gray-green moss. More than once they had to catch each other as they stumbled over tree roots and half-buried river stones.

  The wind sighed through the trees, rustling the leaves in small bunches. A solitary mockingbird chirruped a handful of times, then fell silent. Elliott heard Amy’s breath catch at a crashing noise that sounded just like a person stumbling through the woods . . . only to find out it was a squirrel dashing along the ground. The damp smell of rot and thick, fecund dirt was overwhelming and sat heavy in the air, catching in the throat and nose.

  “Wait,” Amy hissed, holding up a hand.

  Elliott stopped obediently and listened until he was nearly deaf from his own pulse pounding in his ears. Canting his head, he willed his hearing to be sharper, clearer.

  Nothing.

  He waited longer, trying to pick out anything from the long, low sigh of wind, waiting so long that the silence itself took on a sound. Still nothing. He opened his mouth to tell Amy they should keep moving when, somewhere ahead of them, someone screamed a string of words, incoherent but full of rage and pain and hate. Amy clutched his arm.

  Paralyzed, they waited as the sound faded away, swallowed by the woods. When it was clear there wouldn’t be another like it, they threw caution away and sprinted down the path.

  Charlotte

  Charlotte cried out as she tripped on a root and went sprawling, momentarily dropping the blanket, but she was up and moving almost before she was aware she’d fallen. She’d heard Sister’s shouted threats from the yard, but told herself it was just the typical bluster from the woman. Anyway, it didn’t mean Sister hadn’t taken the bait and headed down the driveway to the road.

  But then she’d heard a scream from the woods behind her, an animal howl that began guttural and nearly subsonic, ending on a high, birdlike screech before it was followed by a horrifying tumble of words and noises, rising and falling in pitch and timbre. The sound wasn’t normal, barely human, and scared Charlotte more than anything she’d ever heard.

  Sister hadn’t been duped by her little trick to escape to the woods and not the road. She was following her, and wasn’t far away.

  It was cold. The tip of her runny nose and her chin were tingling—she wrapped the blanket around her shoulders as she ran, but only managed to get it around her neck as a kind of shawl. The clutter of leaves and downed trees made the path hard to follow—it was easier to look where the path wasn’t and hope that she’d chosen correctly.

  Her breathing was ra
gged and her chest ached. Trapped in the house for so long, with no chance to run or play, her muscles felt shrunken and unused; moving faster than a walk on legs that hadn’t stretched much in what seemed like an eternity was difficult. The cold air cut through to her lungs and made her dizzy. But then she imagined hearing Sister’s footsteps through the dry leaves, felt the long, bony hand reaching out for her shoulder, and she suddenly found the energy to push herself forward.

  She was moving fast enough, in fact, that she nearly ran headlong into the bole of a large, gnarled oak that split the path. Without giving it a thought, she went with her instinct, stumbling deeper into the darkened wood.

  Tina

  Tina flinched at the yelp, then gasped at the rage-filled screams that rang through the forest. Already terrified from being in the woods, having difficulty even getting accustomed to a world larger than the four walls of Sister’s house, she sobbed and broke into a run. Plans to catch up with Charlotte were gone—the only thing left was flight. She crashed through the underbrush, narrowly missing a large tree, and swerved down an overgrown path.

  Behind her, so close she imagined she could feel the ground shake, came the heavy footsteps of an adult in pursuit.

  Sister

  Sister paused as she came up to the ancient oak that split the path in two, unable to help herself. She hadn’t seen the tree since she’d been a little girl, and a flood of memories washed over her as her eyes traced the twisted, almost grotesque branches that radiated outward from the massive trunk. She slowed as a memory, tucked away and forgotten until now, thrust itself to the forefront of her mind, digging its claws in deep.

  She’d played at the base of this tree with her brother, daring each other to climb higher, neither of them having the courage to go more than fifteen or twenty feet off the ground, the distance they felt they could fall and survive.

  One day, he’d displeased Mother and run into the woods rather than face her discipline. He’d climbed nearly to the top of this oak, refusing to come down even after Mother followed him into the woods and threatened him with all manner of punishments, each of them more horrific than the last. Finally, with the sun setting just like it was now, Mother had ordered Sister to gather kindling. Then, pulling out the box of matches she always carried with her to light the stove, she set fire to the small nest of twigs and leaves, letting him smell the smoke and promising to burn him up if he didn’t come down.

  Terrified for him, Sister had cried and begged Brother to come down, even if it meant facing a whole new frontier of punishment and pain. Eventually, he’d slid down the trunk in a hail of bark and branches, then stood silent as Mother—furious—had ordered him to take off his shoes and walk back to the house barefoot. Sister had brought up the rear of the silent trio, watching as the footprints—clear and clean to start—became bloodier with each passing step.

  She slapped herself, hard. Memory was an unforgivable luxury right now.

  She bit her lip, considering. Charlotte and Tina had already proven themselves cunning, and Sister was sure, given the choice, they would continue to pick the clever choice. Most people, being right-handed, would choose the right, no doubt. A clever person would reverse that. An older, more conniving person would know that and return the choice to the right. But were two little girls conniving or clever enough?

  Sister paused, uncertain, until the clear sound of movement came to her through the brush. With a hiss of triumph, she took off after it.

  Elliott

  Amy stared at the tree, then at the path. “What now?”

  “We’ve got to split up,” Elliott said, squinting down the right-hand track snaking away into the gloom.

  “What if it forks again?”

  He shook his head. “Make a choice and go with it. What we can’t do is stand still.”

  She turned to the left, but before she could move, he grabbed her and pulled her into his arms.

  “We’re going to save her,” he whispered into her hair. “I know we are.”

  She squeezed him, hard, but didn’t answer. They hugged each other for a quick moment longer, then separated. He held her at arm’s length.

  “First one to find her yells out and keeps yelling.”

  “What if . . . what do we do about Sister?”

  “Do whatever you have to,” he said, and his voice sounded strange to his own ears.

  He shoved her gently toward the path on the left, then turned and hurried around the thick trunk to the right, trying to maintain a shred of optimism, but his mind, analytical and relentlessly logical, refused to stop calculating their chances of success. Every answer seemed to result in failure.

  A million variables could keep them from Lacey at this point, from Kim Reston’s malevolence to the simple, natural fact that the day was ending. Lacey might die of exposure while they stumbled around the forest, calling her name, or Reston might have found her already and taken her back to finish what she’d started in the kitchen. There’d be no way to know until it was too late to do anything about any of it.

  Profound helplessness welled inside him, drawing him back irresistibly to his past. The bitter taste of those long, barren days of asking and waiting and looking for his little girl filled his mouth as though he’d drunk from that cup yesterday, not almost a decade ago. He remembered with near-perfect recall the moment when he’d realized that not every question had an answer and that some situations simply were.

  He’d been standing on his porch at midnight, looking out onto the street, waiting for something—anything—to happen, for anyone to appear. Marilyn had tried to coax him inside, but he’d ignored her. Cars had passed occasionally, but none had stopped, and they soon became as much a part of the tapestry of the night as the yellow-orange streetlights and distant barks of dogs and smell of newly cut grass. He’d stood there so long his knees had locked and his hands had gone numb from squeezing them together.

  A cancerous black hole had opened in his heart, and a part of him decided that it wasn’t his heart that was real—it was the hole. Everything was nothing, and the sooner he came to grips with that fact, the sooner he’d be able to move on. Let go, a voice inside his head said. Just let go.

  He’d wanted to. Dear god, how he’d wanted to. When it was obvious Cee Cee would never come home, that this was a wound outside of time’s ability to heal, that there would be no recovering from it, ever.

  But he’d never quite done it. The hole was still there, but so was what was left of his heart. He’d never stopped caring, never stopped hoping. It was what kept him going and what kept him from giving in.

  He touched his face. He was crying again, the tears stiff and not quite frozen on his cheeks. He cuffed them away and pushed ahead.

  “I’m coming, Cee Cee,” he choked out loud, pushing his pace to a jog, then a run. “I’m coming.”

  Tina

  Tina’s tears had stopped, nearly frozen to her face, replaced by the growing belief that she was going to die, lost and alone in the woods, but a deep, instinctive fear kept her from calling for help. Despite her wish to atone for whatever Charlotte had done, she simply couldn’t find the courage to turn herself over to Sister—the woman’s anger had no end, and she was terrified at the thought of what she was capable of.

  Hiding seemed the only option. Hide and try to find her way out of the maze of trees in the morning. Stepping gingerly from the path, she was just about to lift a wide evergreen branch when a hand came down on the back of her neck.

  “I’m so disappointed in you, Tina,” Sister said in her ear. The words began in a voice that was terrifyingly calm, only to rise insanely fast on an upward scale. “So very disappointed.”

  Amy

  Out of habit, Amy wrapped her arms around her chest, but realized she’d pitch directly onto her face if she snagged a foot on a tree root or slipped on one of the millions of round river stones in her way if she didn’t have a way to catch herself. And, a voice whispered in her head, if you come across the woman who
took your little girl, you’ll want to have a hand free.

  The path, flat to this point, began to climb, and Amy’s thighs were soon burning as she pushed herself to keep up a fast pace. The air, crystalline with cold, burned her lungs, and she cupped her hands across her mouth to warm the air as she breathed in.

  Overhead, the clouds were ridged lumps, their edges fading as the light slipped away. The path suffered the same, disappearing just thirty feet ahead. In the dim light, she found she needed saplings and the trunks of trees as a guide, moving forward by moving from one to the other. The gloom seemed to engulf everything around her and, as she looked around, the impossibility of what she was doing caught up with her.

  What if Lacey had chosen the other path? Or a third branch she and Elliott had missed? What if Sister knew a thousand different shortcuts to get through the woods? At this very moment, the woman might be behind them and heading back to the house with Lacey trussed up and thrown over a shoulder like a trophy. Amy leaned against a tree and let the feelings wash over her.

  “Lacey!” she cried, then cupped her hands to her mouth. “Lacey, honey! If you’re out there, I’m coming!”

  You can’t give up. You’ve come too far. She pushed herself away from the tree and staggered down the path.

  From somewhere just in front of her came a muted shout, a high-pitched voice suddenly smothered, followed by whispers—strained, intense, and unintelligible. It was too dim to see and, struck by a thought, she fished out her lighter and flicked it on and held it high.

  Standing at the edge of the path was the gaunt, tall figure of Kim Reston, struggling with a smaller figure. Even as she grappled with the child, Reston’s dark eyes snapped upward to lock with Amy’s.

  “Lacey?” Amy screamed, trying to see through the shadows. “Is that you, honey?”

  Reston’s breath was thick and hoarse, rags of sound that cut through the quiet night. She made a keening noise in between breaths, a sound on the edge of human hearing, something between a moan and wail that sent a shiver down Amy’s spine. Snake quick, she spun the girl around and wrapped a long, bony arm around the child’s neck.