Her trepidation washed away even more when, as she stepped carefully onto each creaking, wobbly step, she made out a light. Faint at first. The lower she descended, the brighter it became, until, when she got to the floor, she saw a narrow hallway, ravaged by age, stretching in front of her. Old, dim bulbs provided enough illumination for her to make out several doorways, set in opposite pairs, to the end of the corridor. Yellow plasterboard, stained with moldy streaks of moisture. Exposed timbers, uneven and disintegrating. She wouldn’t have gone another step if not for the jabbering and chattering. Baby talk, echoing and funneling up the stairwell. It fueled her worry, and her curiosity. Could it be? More than one baby?
She rushed to the first set of doors and peered to her left and had to lean against the frame. Her knees became jelly at what she saw. A tiny crib, rocking gently. What she heard, though, broke her heart. Crying. Despondent and alone. But the baby wasn’t alone. When Angie turned to the other door, she spotted another crib, and caught a faint whimper. Another child. More wails from down the hall had her running to the next pair of open doors, where she saw what she’d expected to see. More cribs, one in each room. She went to the next ones, and the next, finding in each the same sad scene. Lonely, crying babies.
She went into one of the rooms, wanting to take them all, one by one if she had to. When she got close to the basket-shaped bed, the baby became all she could see. Nothing else mattered. Who had placed these precious little things here—she didn’t want to think about that. All she wanted was to save these innocent babies. And that’s what she would do. So she scooped up the infant, making sure to take the bedding, in one big armful. She rocked and bounced gently, telling the little one it would be okay. She was safe now.
But the sudden silence worried her. And the cold. She reached inside the blanket and was shocked by how icy and stiff the baby felt. She unraveled the cloth, and became more panicked the longer it took. Then, finally, she got a good look at the child, and her blood froze. Unkempt, frizzy hair. Dirt-stained cheeks. An eye that wouldn’t close. Plastic and string. A doll. Not real. Not a baby. The ache in her womb made her drop everything and double over.
She sat on her knees and her own tears began. She stared at the uneven floorboards, and was stunned when, from the hall, she heard the staccato laughter of a child on the run. Sure enough, when she looked up, the same toddler she’d seen earlier ran past the doorway, its little legs motoring like it had an important date to keep. Angie crawled, then got to her feet and dashed to the hall, where she spotted the child, fleetingly, as it skittered to the end of the corridor and behind yet another door which, initially, had been concealed from her sight.
15.
Rolling. Tossing. Whining with misery. Brian kept his eyes open. They burned, but it was better than the alternative. Whenever he closed them, it was like the same movie being played on the insides of his eyelids. Angie. Violated in every depraved way possible. Head rolling side-to-side. Arms tied to the bedposts. Mouth gagged. Naked, except for a sleek, black leather thong. First it was only kissing. Soft and caring. Then the kissing became nibbling. Nibbling became biting, then slapping, and she exhaled loudly in both agony and pleasure. Brian, try as he might, couldn’t get it out of his head. Her cries of delight. An open palm against her breast. She seizes up, back arched, eyes spinning in their sockets. Then the unseen man mounts her and she moans again, taking him inside of her and loving every second. His actions are frantic, fast and rough, and she loves it even more. He slaps her again, calling her a hoar, telling her she’s filth, and she goes wild with muffled vocalizations. He takes off the gag and she roars.
“Yes! Yes! More! Gimme more!”
He slaps her face, her breasts, her thigh. Redness instantly, bruising her fair skin. He gets off of her and the whipping commences. Lash after lash after lash, all with her caterwauling in tortured desire.
Then the tormentor straddles her again and she accepts him willingly. Again he rams hard, banging the headboard, toppling picture frames. He holds her neck with both hands and squeezes. Her mouth opens wide, tongue protruding. She makes a garbled sound like she can’t breathe. The mysterious man pounds his naked hips against hers, keeping his fingers locked tight onto her windpipe. Pounding, pounding. Harder and harder, until it seems he’ll crush the life right out of her.
“NO!” Brian sat straight in bed. The cat, startled by the sudden turmoil, jumped to the floor and scurried away. Brian shook the nightmare from his consciousness and checked his own forehead. He felt better, a little, and decided to venture downstairs. Angie had been down there a long time.
In the kitchen, he became alarmed when, on the floor, he found the bottle of cold and flu medicine she’d promised to bring up to him.
“Angie?”
Nobody answered. He did hear something, though. Or someone. Panting. Lips smacking. Bodies rubbing. Brian looked back toward the pantry. Nothing. But the clear, unmistakable sounds of lovemaking were all around. One moment of intent listening told him the noises were coming from a familiar yet threatening place—the basement.
He thought about calling for his wife again, but the idea of being seen terrified him into silence. Stealthily, he took a step, measuring his own noise output, making sure he wouldn’t be discovered. He wanted to catch them in the act, however painful and awkward that may have been. For that reason, he kept the flashlight off, and went slow and deliberate. After only three steps down the stairs, he knew no one was in the basement. Right away, he had visions of that depraved torture chamber beyond the secret door.
On the basement floor, his suspicions were confirmed. Nobody. Even the sexual noises had quieted to nothing. His head began to throb again, and he wondered if it all wasn’t a part of his fever—everything, from the first time he’d heard the sounds of his wife being fucked by another man, to when he set eyes on the abnormal sexual devices in the hidden room below the basement. A part of him wanted to just leave. Go back to bed. Guzzle a gallon of Nyquil and sleep it off. A mysterious draft of wind, though, brought with it a faint giggle, and he jolted into motion, certain it was his wife. He trained his light on the hidden door and found it wide open. He tingled with dreaded anticipation, and the closer he came, the more distinctive Angie’s voice became, and the more distressed she sounded, until he no longer cared about getting the jump on anyone.
When he made it to the bottom of the old stairs, he couldn’t believe it. Still nothing. Still nobody. It couldn’t be. He heard her, that very moment, shrieking in the darkness, bellowing in ecstasy. Brian caught the extreme pain in her soulful moans, and knew she was being hurt, badly, by some unknown sexual predator. Used. Debased. More sounds drove him mad with anxiety. The hard, sharp crack of a whip. The slinging of metal. The menacing laughter of the torturer. And each time one of those sounds would resonate in the tiny, murky space, Angie reacted vocally, registering her pleasure, her pain, and begging for more.
With his flashlight, he explored the fissures on the cave-like walls. So raw, so untamed. He had a hard time accepting the hidden chamber actually existed under his house. How could such a refined and ornate home harbor such a sordid place? Those questions were abandoned when his light caught a small crevice concealing a gaping hole. Yet another hidden door. Yet another stairway down. Yet another cry of agony and delight.
He had no choice but go down. Angie’s screams had turned into more than just sex play. They sounded deadly. And the more he ran, skipping steps and stumbling, the more he saw in that terrible place. The torture chamber. All the likely suspects were there. The ancient stretching machine and the modern shiny metal thing with arm restraints, wires and ropes and pulleys. The vibrators, all shapes and sizes and colors, and other things he’d blushed at when he saw them the first time. He didn’t blush now. He had a mission, and it turned serious the moment his eyes traveled to the far corner, where he saw Angie, strapped into a chair, wearing a skimpy black bustier that left nothing to the imagination, her long hair concealing her face.
“ANGIE!”
16.
The late summer sunset blinded Betty for a moment as her Buick Regal crested the hill on McDonald Road. This wasn’t a route she took normally. Normally, she did all she could to avoid driving anywhere near the Castle.
When people talked about that house, they never did so out in the open. Just wasn’t smart. If there wasn’t an employee from Mountain View Bank listening around the corner at the hardware store, then it was a relative, a friend of a friend, someone affiliated with the place. That bank owned Vernonia. Nobody, but nobody crossed the bank. And they didn’t talk about the Castle. They didn’t speak of how it was a black hole. Like that old commercial for the Roach Motel. Bugs check in, but they don’t check out. But these weren’t bugs. They were families. Young, lively, always from out of town. Some even had children. Betty should have done something then. The children. They broke her heart the most. But she never said a word. Nobody did. And whenever a new set of occupants went missing suddenly, which they did every time, nobody asked questions, and many were quick to offer explanations. Always the same story. The new owners couldn’t keep up with the payments. They were underwater, and couldn’t sell the place, so they just walked. Sounded plausible on the surface. People walk away from houses all the time. And whenever they walked away from the Castle, the bank foreclosed, the realtor stabbed a For Sale sign in the yard, and the process would start all over. Nothing to see here. Move along, now.
But the townspeople knew better. They knew of an unspeakable evil that lurked in the Castle. One that not a soul in town could explain. A few rumors about satanic worship had drifted around in the nineties. Some people even thought it was some kind of evil vortex, a place where hell itself reached up to the earth and scraped off what it could chew. Betty didn’t know about any of that. She just knew the place was a meat grinder, and, even at her own peril, she was determined to put an end to it, to save those young people, and save her own soul in the process. It wouldn’t erase all her guilt, but it would be enough. She’d lived a long life. At her age, now, after all these years of bowing to that goddamn bank, she didn’t care anymore. She only wanted to do what was right.
At the turn onto Pebble Creek Road, she had to reach quickly and save her paperwork from sliding into the crack between the seat and the passenger door. Right then she wished she’d placed it all in an envelope or something. She didn’t have the time. Earl had been watching her like a hawk lately (seemed he knew what was on her mind), so Betty had to be hasty about digging up all the newspaper clippings and internet printouts she’d gathered regarding the Castle over the years. Small stories, not much individually, telling of a house being abandoned in Vernonia. Some even told of owners who’d disappeared, yet none really went into depth about what had happened to them. Betty always wondered why no industrious reporter ever put it all together and blew the lid off the story. She guessed that was up to her, and that’s what she was going to do. She’d bring all this stuff to that young woman, Angie Mason, and she’d clear at least a little of her conscience by saving their skin, and by ending the tragedy once and for all.
The sun roamed to her left, flitting through the tall timbers, and when she shifted the visor over, Betty no longer had a view of the side of the road. She had no way of seeing the deer, charging hard and fast, taking several yards of ground with each large, powerful leap. She didn’t see the animal until it was right in front of her, and her automatic reaction was to jerk right, sending the Cavalier at a hard angle. In the rearview mirror, she saw the deer, a young buck with forked antlers, standing straight and proud on the dotted yellow divider line. She was looking back when she should have been looking forward. Her car ran out of pavement and jettisoned over the edge, down a large embankment, crashing through underbrush and scraping against an old rotten cedar trunk. Betty died instantly when the car hit the cold water of Pebble Creek. She didn’t know her Cavalier wouldn’t be found for over three months, though it was a bright and conspicuous red, and though over a hundred volunteers from as far away as Seattle searched relentlessly. She also didn’t know the creek water would claim her notes and printouts and newspaper clippings, washing away the evidence of the terrible evil. She did know one thing, though. She knew, as her neck broke from the impact and she went on to that other place, that she’d never get the chance to save those two young people.
17.
The only thing Angie saw at the foot of the stairs, on what she calculated as the third level below her house, was the faint glow from the floor above. That was it. Not even her hand in front of her face. From the sound of her own breath resonating off the walls, she surmised the room was small, though for some reason, she got the sensation of spaciousness, and took one brave step after the other into the nothingness, keeping her hands out. Slowly yet thankfully, her vision adjusted and she saw shapes, outlines, the ceiling and…something on the floor.
One, two, three steps closer and the image came into focus. A small cluster of cloth, round and tight and…and moving. In one motion she gathered it up from the floor and instantly a baby started to fuss and squirm in her arms.
“Shhh…Shhh,” she said gently, holding the darling to her shoulder, twisting at her waist slowly, carefully, gently. “I’m here now.”
She felt a piercing ache in her collarbone and at first attributed it to a strained muscle or sprained tendon. The pain became so searing hot, she pulled the baby away from her chest and shrieked at all the blood. She shrieked again at the sight of the baby’s features. A squared forehead and deep-seated eyes, too far apart and surrounded by large, dark circles. Skin cracked and flaked in large sections, so much so it looked like half its face would soon slide off. But the worst were its teeth, which a child of that age shouldn’t have had. But it did. Huge teeth. Jagged and aggressive and splashed red with blood. Her blood. The wound in her neck gushed, and at the same time the little demented thing unleashed a terrible hiss. By instinct she dropped the child to the floor. It wasn’t harmed at all. In fact, the blow only made the baby angrier. On all fours, it moved so fast it shocked her and she, hand on her neck, still not believing what she was seeing, sprinted to the stairs for safety.
She stopped before she could get started. At the top of the stairs, crawling down rapidly, was another baby, the same freakish features, the same ravenous stare in its black, black eyes. Both babies made the most awful noises she’d ever heard. Howls of evil hunger, mixed with wicked delight. She stepped back from the staircase and searched for an escape. Instead, what she saw made her sick. In the dark, wallowing, kicking, creeping, fighting to get at her, were ten, twenty, a hundred tiny toddlers, so small they couldn’t yet walk. But they could crawl. And they were coming for her, each rougher than the last. Like little wild animals. Starving, cunning, unstoppable.
She wanted to flee, but had nowhere to go but back, back, back until she ran against a wall. Babies were everywhere, and as soon as she stopped, one was on her, taking a meaty chunk from her ankle. She cried out in agony. Cried out for Brian. Cried out for God almighty to save her from this hell. Not a soul would hear her. Not a soul aside from the unfeeling monsters amassing all around her. Another bit at her leg, then another, climbing on top of several others to get to her thigh. She called her husband’s name until her voice went hoarse. By then, the babies—gnashing their blackened, uneven fangs and wailing in devilish delight—had formed a mountain on all sides, walling her in with a fortress of the undead. She was trapped. No hidden door for escape. No getting away. She felt stinging, slicing, gnawing from all parts of her body now. Then the mass collapsed on her, pulling her down, burying her in teeth and sharp nails and wiry, sinewy muscle. As the tiny monsters ripped into her, tearing off larger and larger pieces, burrowing in with their powerful jaws and twisting off mouthful after mouthful, all pain went away. All pain but the sorrowful, hollow gnawing in the deepest depths of her belly. She no longer had to be afraid, and she knew it. Eat, she thought as they ravaged her flesh, tore her organs
and consumed her essence. Eat little children. All little children must eat.
18.
Breathlessly, Brian held his wife’s cheeks and tried to get her to look at him. “Angie, answer me! Say something!”
Her open eyes remained cold and distant. Her head wobbled freely on her neck. She wasn’t breathing. Then he saw a leather collar buckled around her neck, so tight it had suffocated her. All life drained out of him at that moment, the moment he knew she was dead. He remained motionless, not knowing what to do. Then he decided to not give up. He’d save her. He’d resuscitate her. She’d live. She had to.
Before he could get her out of the shackles, a low thump from behind made him stand and turn. That’s when he saw him, the man responsible for all of this, a giant of a man, wrapped head to toe in black leather with zippers over the mouth, nose, even the eyes. Brian’s rage became an irresistible force, propelling him forward, fists clenched, throwing a hard roundhouse. He’d teach this guy. Kick the shit out of him. Boot stomp him to death. However, the leather-clad man had other ideas, and he also had the jump on Brian. He stepped out of the way, letting Brian run headlong into an old workbench, scattering the metal utensils and chains and small devices of torment. In the mess, Brian spotted a long, curved blade and snatched it up. He would never get the chance to use it. From over a shoulder, and without him seeing, the intruder came down with an iron bar, cracking his skull.
Bank Owned Page 6