by J. S. Bailey
Problem was, the only thing she could have used to break the glass was a souvenir baseball bat that Jessica had removed from the passenger floor mat and tucked beside her out of Maria’s reach.
She didn’t want to think about what Jessica planned on doing with it.
Instead, Maria worked at the edges of the tape on her mouth and managed to peel it off without removing any skin. “Jessica, please—”
“I know what you’re thinking,” Jessica said, cutting her off. “You want to run away. Go ahead and try it. You won’t get very far.”
It didn’t take a psychic to figure out Maria’s intentions, but Jessica’s statement still unnerved her. The girl’s voice was more frigid than an arctic wasteland, and while the timbre was undoubtedly that of her daughter, her word choice and phrasing belonged to someone else. Someone she had tried to forget long ago.
“I’ll have to tie you up, you know,” Jessica continued. “I admit this isn’t quite like what you did to me, but unlike you, I don’t have a network of soulless heathens to turn to for help.”
“Where is my daughter?”
Jessica shrugged. “She’s here just as much as I am. She sends her regards.”
“Why isn’t she stopping you?”
The corner of Jessica’s mouth turned up in a sardonic smile.
“Why should she? She doesn’t care anything about you. She begged for your attention. Your approval. Your love. And what did you do? You ignored her. Too bad you didn’t do the same to me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What are you sorry for? Killing me, or the fact that you’re about to meet the same end?”
Good question. “You deserved what we did to you.”
“I don’t deny that.”
“But if I could take it all back…”
“Oh, don’t get all emotional on me. What’s done is done. But if you’d waited, one far greater than you would have taken care of me eventually. You might have forgotten that none of us leave this world alive.” They passed beneath a street lamp, and Maria could see that the smile had not left Jessica’s face. “Not even Christ could do it. I could have been struck dead in a car accident. Maybe cancer would have done me in. But I’ll never know what would have happened, thanks to you.”
“And thanks to you, my baby girl is gone!”
Jessica snorted. “She’s in a more beautiful place than you’ll ever see.” Jessica’s expression changed. “You know I didn’t want to do it. I loved children. Did you know that my baby and Sarah would have been the same age? They might have been friends. Maybe they’d have fallen in love, gotten married, and had children of their own by now. We could have been grandparents together, but we’ll never know, will we?”
“Your baby?” She wasn’t sure what she (he?) was talking about.
The Jerry Madison she had known did not have children.
“Yes. The one Abigail robbed from me. You know about it. She was over seven months along when she finally decided that she didn’t want it.”
Oh. That baby.
“It’s funny,” Jessica was saying, “how people view the death of a fetus and the death of an infant or a toddler or any other child so differently, when it’s really all the same thing. A heart stops beating. A brain ceases to function. A soul leaves the body. You’d think that if it’s okay to kill a human being inside the womb, then it should be perfectly legal to kill humans who have already been born.”
Maria didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say.
“You might say,” Jessica went on, “that I was exercising my right to choose.”
This had gone too far. “You’re sick if you think that what Abigail did and what you did are anything alike! You murdered four children! Destroyed their families! Do you know what happened to them? The Walshes got a divorce. Patrick started drinking and got his license revoked for having too many DUIs. Meredith Scott overdosed on heroin and died in the fall of eighty-six. She was only twenty-nine years old and pregnant with another child at the time. My own father died of a heart attack the next spring because he couldn’t handle the stress of it all. You’d better be proud of what you did, because you sure did a lot.”
Jessica’s voice became solemn. “I told you that I didn’t want to do it.”
“So you’re saying that somebody made you do it?”
She shivered. “Dominoes.”
“What?”
“Abigail pushed the first one. And…and…it was the sixth anniversary of the due date. When I did it. When I had to do it.”
They were driving down a tree-lined road in the middle of nowhere, the lights of Cold Spring now miles behind them. A sign read, “Iron Springs: 2 mi.”
The car turned right onto a road heading south.
Oh no. Oh, no, no, no. Not here. Not this place. She’d vowed never again to come here. Too many memories. Nightmares. Bad. Very bad.
She had to get out of the car if it was the last thing she ever did. She tried the handle a second time. The door remained closed.
Her heart thudded against her rib cage, and her skin was slick with her own sweat.
“Don’t be scared, Maria. The pain doesn’t last.”
But Maria didn’t plan on sticking around for the pain. She just nodded. “I’m sure it doesn’t.”
“The best part is when it stops. When everything stops. Bliss.”
A sign in the distance drew nearer. The Camry slowed. This was it.
“Uh…Jerry?” It felt stupid calling her own daughter by that name. “Are you saying there’s, well, no heaven? No hell?”
“Oh, there’s a hell, all right.”
They were driving down a lane. It had been gravel back then, but now it was paved like the road. Shadows danced out of their way as the headlights cut through the darkness.
The parking lot and church came into view.
More memories flooded back to her. She, Stephen, and some others had arrived here early to meet the Zimmermans in the woods. Rich and Joanna had assured them that their domain was so distant from prying neighbors that it was unlikely for them to be caught. They had done other “ceremonies” there before, they said. Neither Zimmerman would elaborate on that last point. Maria had had the sinking feeling that she was selling her soul to some darker power, but if that’s what it took to numb the pain of losing Sarah, she was willing to do it.
Her father, Andrés, had been beside himself. Shouting. She feared that someone would hear him. Nobody did.
Jessica put the car in park and killed the engine. She picked up the roll of tape. “Give me your hands.”
Maria valued her life better than to do that. She lunged for the baseball bat, grabbed onto the handle, and busted out the window in a single movement. Glass cascaded onto the ground outside. Figuring that the outer handle wouldn’t work, either, she simply clambered through the now-empty window frame and tried not to step on any of the shards as she ran.
Jerry was not so smart after all.
Or maybe Maria was the stupid one. She ran toward the exit, but since she had been literally dragged from bed, she wore no shoes. Pebbles and bits of who-knew-what lying on the pavement cut into her feet. Pain forced her to slow her pace.
Jessica let out a startled whoop behind her. Maria knew she should see if her daughter was okay, but it could have been a ruse to make her falter so she could be more easily captured.
A man materialized in the center of the lane. The light from a mercury vapor lamp allowed her to see that he was wearing yellow boxer shorts. Blood dripped from the fatal wounds she had carved into his body. It pooled on the pavement at his feet. Through the blood that streamed from his broken nose, she could tell he was grinning.
She screamed, and the world went dark.
“IT’S NOT much farther,” Wayne said to his passengers.
Sidney had the shakes. No matter how hard she tried to hold still, her whole body continued to tremble as if she were caught in a nine-point earthquake. To say she was scared would have been an
understatement. She was flat-out terrified.
They were driving down a tunnel of trees straight into hell itself. Even an agnostic could believe that. Well, maybe she wasn’t much of an agnostic anymore. She didn’t know what she was. She was just Sidney Miller, age nineteen, part-time student and veteran gas station clerk.
Who really, really wanted her mom.
As a child, Marjorie had always made her feel secure. Now Sidney would have to learn to cope with the terrors that life threw at her without anyone’s help but her own and possibly that of the God who may or may not exist.
Eric shifted his weight and unintentionally brushed against her. She jumped. She’d have to learn to control her timidity, too.
The truck was slowing down. A sign sat on the side of the road: “Iron Springs United Methodist Church.”
They turned.
JESSICA WAS confused. Her thoughts tumbled and turned like images inside a kaleidoscope, always changing before she could fully grasp what she had just seen and heard. She was peeling potatoes in Wayne’s kitchen. Arguing with her mother in front of relatives. Picking over lunch. Peeling potatoes again. Eating something from Taco Bell in the car. Arguing with her mother. Arguing with Rachel. Talking to Jerry. A man grabbing her. Hiding in a closet. Driving. With her mother. In a car that wasn’t hers.
Something was in her head. Like a splinter that got wedged so far up under a fingernail that she couldn’t get it out. It wouldn’t leave. Sometimes it let her take partial control of her senses.
Memories. It needed her memories to know what to do.
And it wasn’t Jerry. He was trapped here, too. He had invited it. Or maybe it had lured him in. It was all so puzzling. The thing was using them. It didn’t want them to know which thoughts were their own. It wanted them to think the three of them were one.
Jessica’s mouth was moving. She didn’t know what it was saying anymore. Words were meaningless sounds that echoed dumbly in her eardrums.
She tried to pray. Her mind drew a blank. What was prayer?
They were in a familiar place. They had all been here before. Brick church. Chain-link fence. Headstones.
Her mouth moved again. The woman with her smashed a window and fled.
Suddenly Jessica was outside. Her thoughts cleared long enough for her to see her mother running back toward the road.
“Mom!” she tried to scream, but something constricted her throat before she could get the whole word out.
A humanlike thing appeared in the lane on the other side of Maria. Yellow shorts. Lots of blood. Must be what Sidney saw in the bedroom. It was Jerry, but it wasn’t Jerry, because he was still in her head.
Ahead of her, Maria crumpled in a dead faint.
Jessica’s legs were propelled forward. The ghostly image vanished as soon as she reached her mother’s side.
Anger flooded her mind. Murderer.
A roll of duct tape was in her hands. Maria didn’t stir. That simplified things. Jessica bound the woman’s wrists and ankles without any trouble.
She paused to scratch an ear. What had she just been thinking about? She couldn’t remember anymore. If it was important, she’d remember it later.
But for now, she had work to do.
JESSICA HAD parked the Camry at an odd angle without giving any regard to the painted lines demarcating the parking spaces.
Wayne drew the truck up beside the vacant car, noting that the Camry’s passenger window had been busted out and lay in a thousand pieces on the blacktop. He climbed out of the truck and cupped his hand over his ear to try to determine how far ahead of them Jessica and Maria were. He could hear nothing indicating their presence.
Eric stood beside him, shivering. “Now what?”
Wayne nodded toward the graveyard. “We go that way.”
Behind him, Sidney swore. “I can’t believe I left my bat in the car. Look what they did to my window!”
“Yeah, and I can’t believe I took my holy water out of my truck when I got home from the reunion today.”
“A bat can kick holy water’s butt any day.”
He didn’t bother replying. They possessed neither bat nor water, so it was irrelevant which was more effective.
Eric set off down the graveyard path at what seemed like a hundred miles an hour. Wayne wondered how the soles of his feet were handling the gravel. Sidney started jogging to keep up but stopped when she seemed to realize they were leaving him in the dust. “Hey, wait up for Wayne.”
The younger man paused and glanced back over his shoulder. “Sorry.”
Wayne caught up with them in a dozen strides. “We all walk together,” he said, “seeing as we have only one flashlight.”
“So you’ve been here before?” Eric asked, slowing his pace to match Wayne’s but still managing to pull ahead of him by a few feet.
“Yeah, yesterday. Jessica wanted me to go grave digging with her.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Well, not around these graves. The one they stuck our friend in.”
“You find anything?”
“Yeah. Jerry.” He wove his way through a cluster of knee-high granite headstones when they left the gravel path and almost fell over a smaller marker lying flat on the ground that he didn’t see until the last moment. “Part of him, anyway. He was in a garbage bag.”
Wayne’s chest tightened at the memory of the fleshless skull staring up at them in a silent plea. He’d never thought that seeing a skeleton would have such an effect on him since he’d seen much worse. Hopefully he would never have to look at one again—or any dead person, for that matter. They were too much of a reminder of his own mortality. He had never been punished for what he did to his mother. Dying would likely remedy that.
“What did you do with him?”
His thoughts were whisked back to the present. “Hmm?”
“With Jerry,” Eric said. “What did you do with his body?”
“Oh. We left him there. We covered him back up so no one else would find him.”
“What was the point of digging him up?”
“Good question.”
“Maybe we should be quiet,” Sidney said as she stepped over a mossy log. “Jessica might hear us and take her mom somewhere else.”
As loud as they had been so far, it didn’t matter if they continued to talk or not, because chances were that Jessica had already heard them. “Just keep your eyes peeled.”
A hush fell over their little group with a swiftness that made Wayne uneasy the moment they entered the forest. The darkness transformed the forest into a far more alien and sinister place than it had been the day before. It didn’t help that the branches closing in around them reminded him of grasping arms reaching out to capture them like bugs in a Venus flytrap. He recoiled and almost screamed when he walked face-first into an invisible silky substance that had to have been a spider web stretched between two branches.
“You all right?” Sidney whispered.
He had stopped to clear the offending web from his skin. “Yeah. I’m fine.” But now his hands were shaking, and they wouldn’t stop.
“I don’t see any lights out here,” Eric said. “She can’t have come out here without being able to see anything.”
A sudden spark lit up the darkness ahead of them and to the left.
“You were saying?” Wayne said. He altered his course to head toward the distant light, feeling yet another spider web brush across his face. Though he’d have preferred to face a firing squad than have an arachnid crawling over his nose, he chose to ignore it. Jessica and Maria needed him, and if something as silly as a spider prevented him from saving their lives, he would never forgive himself.
Up ahead, the light flickered. He had no idea what was causing it. He did have an idea where it would lead.
MARIA CAME to but did not open her eyes for fear of what she might see. Through her eyelids came a flickering orange glow. The sudden pop of a burning stick made her twitch.
She tried to move b
ut found that her arms were pinned behind her and growing increasingly numb from the unnatural position Her legs were bound at the knees and ankles but weren’t tied to anything else, so she was able to draw them closer to her chest to keep warm.
“How are you feeling?”
Her eyes flew open. Jessica sat Indian-style on the ground a few feet in front of her. Her hands were folded in her lap. The baseball bat lay in the dirt at her right hip.
Maria glanced down at herself. Tape was wound around her middle too many times for her to count. She twisted her neck around and saw that she had been tied to a sapling bare of leaves.
The ground she sat on was soft and looked as though it had been recently disturbed.
A small pile of wood burning nearby cast a fluid light over the forest. She must have been out cold for longer than she thought if Jessica had the time to start the blaze.
Maria licked her lips. They were chapped, and she was badly in need of a drink. At least Jessica hadn’t put tape over her mouth again. “Do you really expect me to answer that?”
“But I want to know.”
“You don’t need to know.”
Jessica laughed in a manner most unlike the daughter Maria barely knew. “I’ll find out anyway, won’t I?”
“Leave my daughter alone.”
“Jessica’s fine. I don’t have any reason to hurt her.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Then don’t.”
If Jessica were still inside her head somewhere, maybe she’d be able to hear what was going on and put an end to this. “Jessica, can you hear me? Make him stop!”
Jessica exhaled in a drawn-out sigh. “I find it interesting how someone tried to strangle me that night, and you made them stop. I’ve wondered about that for years and never was able to figure it out. What was going through your head? Why couldn’t you have let me go quickly?”
“I…” Her voice faltered. She had brought the knife with her to Jerry’s execution without giving it much thought. When Rich jerked the cord around Jerry’s neck, she knew it was wrong. Rich was no part of it. She needed to end it herself and had started in with the knife before she even realized what she was doing. It had both revolted and thrilled her.