Liam grunted and rubbed his forehead. He had a terrible headache brewing, one that threatened to derail any rational thought.
He was remembering what Stevie and he had been talking about before they had fallen asleep at his desk.
About the census.
About how none of the girls that had gone missing—Stacey, Carla, Alex, Justine—were actually from Elloree.
How Stevie’s lop-sided eyes had said what his mouth was afraid too: none of the missing girls were from Elloree… yet.
It appeared as if yet had just become now.
“You… okay?” Thomas asked.
A hand landed on his shoulder and Liam instantly pulled away.
“Don’t touch me,” he snapped.
It was Stevie.
“Sorry,” he grumbled.
Stevie blinked, and then gestured to a distraught looking woman over his left shoulder.
“This woman… she says her daughter’s missing.”
Liam couldn’t believe his ears.
“These people… their daughters have gone missing, too,” he almost whispered.
The roar of a car engine suddenly drew their attention. A midnight black sedan pulled into the police parking lot and Liam instinctively stepped in front of Stevie and the civilians. For the second time since stepping outside the police station, his hand fell to the butt of his gun.
When the door started to open, Liam took another aggressive step forward.
“Come out slowly,” he instructed in a loud voice.
Two pale hands shot up into the night, and a young man with the beginnings of a mustache peered out.
“Who are you?” Liam demanded.
“My name’s Officer Jenkins… from Batesburg? I’m here to pick up the missing girl—Stacey Weller.”
Chapter 43
Dwight stumbled through the mud, trying desperately to keep up with the two men who were not only nimbler than he, not surprising given his two-hundred and forty plus pound frame—but also seemed to know where they were going.
“Hugh,” Dwight gasped. “Wait up, I think… I think…” I’m going to pass out, he tried to say, but couldn’t manage anything more than a gasp.
Hugh turned back to look at him with a dirt-smeared face, but the man in the lead, blond, thin, wearing nothing but a t-shirt and soiled jeans, didn’t even slow.
“Keep up, Dwight—you have to keep up!”
Dwight wanted to ask where they were going, what the hell was with those girls with the black eyes, but he could barely breathe, let alone speak.
He side-stepped a large puddle that looked like it was connected to the main body of water to their right, a bog of sorts, and in the process, his hip smashed against a tree. He grunted, but compelled by sheer terror, he managed to keep on driving forward.
The lead man took a sharp right, and for a moment he disappeared entirely. Hugh followed, but when Dwight turned the corner, the detective was gone, too.
“Wait!” Dwight managed, but then, realizing that he was alone again, regretted drawing attention to himself. Lungs and legs burning, he also made the abrupt turn around the thick oak tree, then stopped.
There was nothing there.
There was no more swamp, thin trees interspersed with ancient oaks, marshland, mud.
There was simply nothing there.
Just sheer and utter blackness.
“What the fuck?”
A hand shot out of nowhere, grabbed his sweat-soaked collar, and pulled.
And then Dwight was falling.
***
“Should we wake him up?”
“I’m not even sure why you brought him. You should have let Mother have him. He’ll only slow things down, get in the way.”
“I couldn’t just leave him there. They were… they were coming for him.”
Dwight’s eyes fluttered, and harsh light suddenly flooded his vision.
Where am I?
He squinted, trying to make sense of what was happening. He remembered running through the woods, chasing after Hugh Freeman and the other, strange man who he didn’t recognize.
He remembered being desperate to get away from the girls with the black eyes, the ones that had come out of the water like amphibious creatures. And he remembered the swamp and the darkness, the cool and complete darkness that had enveloped him like a blanket.
And then he remembered falling.
What Dwight didn’t remember, however, was how he ended up here. He thought he should have been in pain from the fall, especially given how different the current environment was from the swamp. Except when he moved his head from side to side to look around, Dwight felt no such pain.
Hugh was standing off to one side, his back to Dwight, conversing with the other man from the swamp. Neither realized that he had awoken.
Where the fuck am I?
He was in a room of sorts, of that he was certain. What kind of room, however, was still up for debate.
A lab, maybe? Hospital?
The walls were white, covered in subway tiles that extended high above him, all the way to a ceiling that Dwight could barely see even when squinting. To his right stood a massive cylindrical tank made of glass, filled with some sort of blue liquid. As he watched, a thin stream of bubbles rose from the bottom. Behind this tank was another, identical to the first, except there appeared to be a person inside. Nude, save for a mask on his face, the man—
“He’s awake,” a voice hissed.
Unlike Hugh and the other man, this voice wasn’t male. And it was much, much older.
Dwight instinctively turned his head toward the voice, and found himself staring at a diminutive woman.
She was a hair over four feet tall, even taking into consideration the considerably crooked nature of her spine. Her skin was like leather left out in the sun for much too long, with respect to both color and presumed texture. The woman’s nose seemed slightly too big for her narrow face, and wisps of thin gray hair that flitted about her liver-spotted scalp. She was wearing torn rags the color of a burlap sack, and given the rest of her appearance, Dwight wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that that’s exactly what they had been fashioned from.
But it was her eyes that were the most striking. Unlike the children of the swamp who had black, almost obsidian eyes, this woman’s were completely white, cataractous even.
Hugh suddenly stepped between him and the old woman, for which Dwight was grateful, then he crouched so that they were at the same level.
“You okay, Dwight?”
Dwight cleared his throat.
“Who’s that?” He croaked.
Hugh leaned to one side, giving Dwight a clear view of the man who had led them here. He was indeed young, about Hugh’s age, which would put them roughly three or four years older than Dwight himself. Like Hugh, the man’s face was streaked with dirt and bore a matching perpetual scowl.
“That’s FBI Agent Brett Cherry. He’s the one—”
Dwight shook his head.
“No, not him,” he managed. “Her.”
Chapter 44
“I’m going to be honest with you, Sheriff Lancaster, I’m having a hard time stomaching this.”
Liam nodded; he had expected as much. He and Officer Jenkins were sitting in the interrogation room, which Liam had hastily cleaned of Father Smith’s blood, while Stevie was taking details from the four distraught parents with missing children.
In the end, Liam couldn’t come up with an analogy that wouldn’t make him sound delusional, so he simply shrugged.
“I really can’t explain it better than I already have,” he offered.
Jenkins rubbed his thin mustache as he thought this over. After a few moments, he leaned forward and spoke in a quiet tone.
“I’m having a hard time stomaching it, Sheriff, ‘cause it feels a bit like déjà vu.”
Now it was Liam’s turn to look confused.
“I don’t get it.”
Jenkins sighed.
“You told your story, now it’s my turn.”
Liam nodded and Jenkins continued.
“A couple of years back, I had a woman visit me. I was in Georgia then and not South Carolina, but she stuck with me all this time. But here’s the thing: I couldn’t have spent more than five minutes with her. She claimed that her child was missing, only the problem was, when I asked for a picture of her daughter, she produced a photo of a blackened corpse. I mean, at the time, I thought it was a twisted joke, but when I called her on it, she bolted. Now, I know how it sounds, but this woman… she might have been insane, and ever since that day I’ve had several other people less… uh… psychiatric than her, but I dismissed them all. This particular woman, however, I just couldn’t get her out of my head. So, I did some digging, and found some pretty disturbing things.”
Liam yawned. He hadn’t meant to, but couldn’t help it. He might have fallen asleep for an hour at his desk, but that was hardly enough to recharge his batteries.
“Sorry,” he grumbled.
“It’s alright, it’s late—I won’t bore you with the details, but I’ve come to one glaring conclusion: everything revolves around the swamp—Stumphole swamp. The swamp and mother.”
Liam squinted.
“What’d you say?”
“Everything revolves around Stumphole swamp.”
“No, the other thing.”
“What thing?”
“You said Mother. You’re here about the girls, but you said mother, not girls. Why’s that?”
Jenkins continued to scratch at his mustache.
“Because it’s always been about Mother,” he said after a short pause. “And even though the girls are the ones that have gone missing, it isn’t really about them. It’s about Mother.”
Before Liam had a chance to ask Jenkins to elucidate, there was a knock on the interrogation room window. Stevie stared in at them, either a spooked expression on his face, or one of just plain exhaustion.
“Hold that thought.”
Liam rose, stretched his tired legs, and walked to the door. He opened it and peeked his head out.
“Yeah? What is it, Stevie?”
The man’s lopsided eyes fell to his shoes.
“There’ve been two more calls.”
“Calls?”
“Yeah: two teenage girls went out last night and never came home.”
Liam shook his head.
“What the fuck is going on here, Stevie? You really think—”
“I don’t know what to think,” Stevie said quickly. The response was a rare one from a man who never seemed to stop spouting off.
Jenkins suddenly appeared behind Liam.
“What’s the problem?”
“More girls have gone missing,” Liam told him.
“What do we do, Liam?” Stevie asked. “What’re we gonna do?”
It dawned on Liam that it wasn’t just Stevie who was looking for guidance, but so were the rest of the people in the police station, including the concerned parents and Officer Jenkins.
Sheriff Lancaster still wasn’t convinced that there was anything supernatural going on, but the facts were the facts: there were fifteen people dead, most of whom were young girls. At least another six had gone missing.
And if his instincts were right, there would be more before the sun rose in the morning.
Supernatural forces or not, he was going to put a stop to this one way or another; he would find the missing girls and bring them back to their parents.
The ones that weren’t already burnt to a crisp, that is.
Sheriff Liam Lancaster sighed and rubbed his forehead.
“I’ve got an idea,” he said, more to himself than to anyone else. He checked his watch: it was coming up on five in the morning. “But we’ve got to hurry—we only have a few hours before sunrise.”
Chapter 45
“I don’t… I don’t understand any of this,” Dwight mumbled.
Agent Brett Cherry scratched the beginnings of a beard.
“I saw my partner being burnt alive, I saw her sacrifice herself, try to call the demon that was once Anne LaForet into her. But the kids… the fucking kids, they summoned it, the goddamn demon, into them… they became possessed by this evil.”
Dwight shook his head the entire time Brett was speaking.
“No, no, no, no, no,” he muttered. “This isn’t happening.”
“It is happening. It’s happening right here, right now, and if we don’t do anything about it, it will continue to happen. Every twenty years or so the goddamn demon comes back, calls to the children around the swamp, draws them in, makes them do her bidding.”
Behind his closed lids, Dwight saw flashes of the corpses, the tiny bodies coated in black skin that looked like tar.
“Oh my god,” Dwight gasped. His eyes flew open, and he staggered backward. His ass banged up against a hard metal table, and he cried out.
“Dwight? You okay?” Hugh asked.
Dwight raised a shaky finger and aimed it at Agent Cherry’s chest.
“I know what happened… you fucking murdered those girls,” he croaked. “You fucking lured them into the house, and burned them alive.”
When Agent Cherry didn’t immediately deny these allegations, Dwight knew that he was right.
“Oh my god,” he said again, turning quickly to face Hugh. “He did it! He killed them! Do something! Do something!”
Hugh averted his gaze.
“You’re the one with the gun and the cuffs, Dwight,” he said under his breath. “You want to do something? You do it.”
Agent Cherry stepped forward, and Dwight initially mistook this as an act of aggression and his palm slipped onto the butt of his pistol. But Brett surprised him by holding out his dirty hands, palms up.
“Arrest me then,” he begged. “Arrest me, and I’ll be done with it. But the demon… the demon will keep on coming. Mother will keep on coming.”
Dwight looked at the man’s wrists, then at Hugh, then at Brett’s scowling face.
His hand fell from the gun and Brett lowered his hands.
“I might have started that fire, burned those girls, but I didn’t murder them.”
He turned and made his way toward the giant tank filled with the strange blue fluid. He tapped it and a dull thunk reverberated throughout the room. “I didn’t murder them, because those girls weren’t alive.”
Dwight’s eyes narrowed.
“Weren’t alive? I don’t know what the fuck is going on here—”
Brett whipped around and when he spoke again, his voice had escalated several octaves.
“They were dead already!” he shouted. “You wanna know how I know this?”
Dwight, his whole body trembling now, shook his head.
“No,” he whimpered. “I don’t want to know.”
And he truly didn’t want to know; he didn’t want to know any of this. He didn’t want to know what a burned corpse looked like, what a man’s eyes became after jabbing a pair of scissors into them.
But when the scowl slid off Brett Cherry’s face and was replaced by something more horrible, Dwight knew he was going to find out whether he wanted to or not.
“Because I already drowned them,” Brett said with a grin. “That’s how I know.”
Chapter 46
Light began to leak over the horizon like juice squeezed from a blood orange.
“What are we supposed to tell them?” Stevie asked, his eyes drifting up to the large blue doors.
Liam rubbed his eyes. They burned as if someone had thrown detergent into them, and then tried to wipe it away with eight-grit sandpaper.
“The high school kids will come to school as usual, but instead of Principal Zanbar, you’re going to greet them; you and Officer Jenkins,” the Sheriff said calmly.
The doors were still firmly locked, but if things hadn’t changed, the music teacher, Mrs. Ducharm, would be there at six-thirty just as she’d always been, even back when Liam had been a student
all those years ago.
And then he would sweet talk her into letting him take over the gym for the day.
“Yeah, that’s all good and dandy,” Stevie replied, “but what about the kids that don’t go to high school? The ones that are sick, or the ones in middle school? Kindergarten, even? We know that most of the missing girls are around six years old.”
Liam’s gaze drifted from the school doors to Officer Jenkins’s car and the tired looking man who was in the passenger seat.
“That’s where Thomas comes in. He’ll put up flyers in all the store windows, let people know that there will be a… I dunno… special giveaway in the gymnasium today.”
Stevie made a face.
“A giveaway? What kind of giveaway?”
Liam chewed his lip; he hadn’t thought this through, not completely. His mind drifted to his younger days on the force, back when he was just a rookie deputy. They were trying to apprehend a man who had three times skipped out on his parole-required piss test. Every time they zeroed in on him, he would slip away like butter between a fat lady’s thighs.
Until one day they decided that they weren’t going to catch the man by going after him; they had to convince the parolee to come to them. In what at the time Liam considered the greatest sting operation known to man, they had convened with the local car dealership and asked the proprietor to lend a hand. After just a short debriefing, their head salesman had called the perp and explained to him that his name had been randomly drawn from the town census and that he’d won a brand-new car. This was before the time of emails from Nigerian Princes, mind you, but regardless, Liam had the man in cuffs in under an hour.
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