“One sec,” I said. I poked my head through the open doors. This place was big. A side area had lots of chairs and booths and looked like a restaurant. This wasn’t the only door, either—doors stood open at either end. The light shining through them was the only way to see anything in that deep shadow.
I nudged Scarecrow with my elbow. “Go wait for me at the door on that end. Make sure it stays open, okay?”
“Miss Mary, what are you doing?” Rat asked.
“What are you doing?” echoed Joseph.
“I’m setting a trap,” I said, and leaped into the building.
Nothing fancy. I aimed at the door on the far end, and circled around benches and rows of empty shelves. I had a clear path, and my feet pounded against the tile floor as I ran. As fast as you can, Mary. There’s no way this place is just an empty building.
“Don’t look around. Don’t look at anything but the exit,” Rat whispered from behind my ear.
I wasn’t stupid enough to argue. I was going to be the lucky first person who never noticed anything wrong, and let my Wolf be the one who stumbled over this building’s horrible secret as he followed my trail through.
That was assuming I’d get out of here without triggering the story. I kept my eyes locked on the bright rectangle of an open door getting closer as I sprinted towards it. Come on, legs, run a little faster. And door, PLEASE stay open!
Something moved in the doorway. Scarecrow’s shoe, sticking itself over the edge so it couldn’t slam shut. With less junk to run around, she’d gotten there before me. Good girl!
I plunged out through the door into the sunlight again, staggering to a halt and breathing heavily. Now I could risk a peek back over my shoulder. Everything inside that door looked as dim and motionless and harmless as ever. Yeah, right.
I risked a different peek down the road. Still nothing. Now if only I could be out of sight before my Wolf got here, he might be stupid enough to walk right into that place.
“Thanks,” I wheezed.
“Whatever I did, you’re welcome!” chirped Scarecrow.
“Quite a toy you’ve got here. What’s going on?” Joseph asked, strolling around at a more sedate pace. “And I don’t mean about the toy. You’re afraid of something. In some kind of trouble.”
“There’s a Wolf following me.” I panted as my breath came back. “A big one. I don’t think he’s far behind.”
“I’ve got a shotgun at home. He won’t be following you much longer. Come on,” Joseph offered. He stepped past us, and I looked to see where he was going. The ground sloped down subtly beyond the gas station. A gravel path that I wouldn’t quite call a real road ran out the back, and down a ways, it branched out to web together half a dozen scattered buildings. Once upon a time, people had lived here. Never very many.
“I don’t think you understand how big my Wolf is, Mister.”
“Not too big for a couple of shotgun shells. At least let me offer you a meal. If you’ve got any food in that bag, it can’t be enough.” He was dead wrong about the shotgun, but the food …
I looked inside my satchel, and lifted out a still squelchy loaf of bread. With mold on it. My little underwater adventure had not been kind. Everything that hadn’t been sealed in a bottle or can was now a spongy mess, and one by one, I tossed them out and stared at a can of beans I couldn’t heat.
Joseph’s eyebrows lowered over his little round glasses, and he watched me sympathetically. “Let me give you a meal, and if you want, you can make a phone call. Whatever you’ll accept. I just don’t want you to leave until you’ve had a chance to meet my daughter. Something makes me think you two will take to each other.”
“We should keep running, Miss Mary,” Rat whispered from behind my shoulder. “We might be able to make distance faster than the Wolf can track you here.”
My stomach put in its own argument. I hadn’t eaten yet today. “Yeah, okay, a meal. I can’t stay the night or anything.”
alf a dozen buildings did not a town make. It didn’t even make a village. Two were houses, two were big houses that were really fancy apartment buildings, and two were wide and blocky and dull enough looking that they must have been businesses. Neither looked like a store. The rest stop had been the only reason people lived here. A large, fenced vegetable garden behind one of the businesses told me where we were going.
The scratched and faded sign next to the front door read ‘Jigsaw Medical’ and had a crude, blocky, and adorable picture of a little girl putting together a jigsaw puzzle of a stethoscope. Like most doctor’s offices, I guess, it was a flat, single story building with little windows. The concrete brickwork was featurelessly dingy, and the windows might be clean with pleasant curtains visible through them, but they were also covered in iron bars.
The front door wasn’t locked. Joseph pulled it open, making a little bell jingle, then stopped and gave the windows the same uncomfortable look I did. “Barred windows. The man who built this building had a paranoid streak. There’s no crime out here, and never was. If a stranger broke into our home, we made them dinner and welcomed the company.” He accompanied this explanation with a single, wistful chuckle.
He flipped the light switch by the door, and we followed him into a perfectly ordinary doctor’s office. Semi-comfortable chairs in the waiting room, counter for the nurse, box of toys, little table with wooden beads on wires. Nobody around, but I couldn’t see any reason it couldn’t reopen at a moment’s notice. Joseph didn’t stop, and we walked into the back section. The exam room I glanced into looked a little sterile. The next one looked a lot sterile, with its featureless tile walls and flat bed under a light and mobile table covered in little medical tools. Somebody had his own miniature surgery. Imagine that.
Joseph stopped at a solid, institutional door. “Our home is the other side of the building.” Fishing a key out of his pocket, he twisted it in the lock and pulled the handle. The door opened, but the handle stayed stiff.
Joseph stepped through, but I paused, holding the door open.
“Yeah, I’m going through a door that locks automatically in a building with barred windows,” I muttered. I reached back and pulled him off my shoulder. Watching him dangle in both my hands with his little legs sticking out straight could almost make me forget my Wolf was right behind me.
So much for forgetting that. Trying to ignore the uncomfortable feeling spreading up and down from the back of my neck, I deposited Rat on Scarecrow’s arm. “Since old doc Joseph figures you don’t exist, you can rig the door. I don’t want to be locked in here.” They got it. Scarecrow held the door and I left her and Rat wedging the bottle cap into the lock.
I hurried after Joseph so he could keep pretending only humans were people. In this lost ghost town, his home was so freaking normal. He had one open and one closed closet by the front door, a living room with a beat up leather couch, a television, a kitchen with only a few dishes lying out untidily. The place wasn’t clean and it wasn’t messy. A huge jigsaw puzzle took up most of the dining room table. It lay in bits, and I couldn’t figure out what the cartoony fire engine in one half-assembled patch had to do with the leaping koi goldfish on another patch or the impressionist faces in a crowd in a third, but hey, jigsaw puzzles.
“I’m not going to push you to let me help find your parents, but I do want to make you a meal. With any luck, my daughter will be back before we’re done eating. Do you like Chinese stir-fry?” Joseph asked, flipping open two cabinets in the kitchen before peering into the fridge.
I loved stir-fry. Plus, it was hard to make it out of suspicious meat. “If you cook the vegetables right, I guess.”
Score one for old doc Joseph, he pulled out a wok and a lid! He was going to steam them. “I don’t know how you got wet out here, but your shoes and that bag are still damp. Why don’t you leave them in my daughter’s room?”
There was no way I was taking off my shoes, but maybe I could dry out my socks. It would at least be a good idea to be polite. I wal
ked down the back hall to the bedrooms. The one on the end had to belong to a girl. For one thing, there was a Catholic school uniform with a pleated white shirt and gray plaid skirt folded neatly on the bed. I dumped my mostly empty satchel next to it. The whole room had gone past orderly and well into neat freak. The bed had been made, and I could cut myself with the corners. Stuffed animals were old and worn, but arranged in nice rows on shelves. I could see the books on those shelves were alphabetized at a glance, and a few makeup tools and a box of tissues lined up neatly on the dresser. More jigsaw puzzle pieces had been painted on the wall.
“Where is your daughter, anyway?” I asked as I walked back to the dining room.
“Out getting groceries. As you can imagine, the next store is quite a ways down the road,” Joseph answered, measuring out rice.
“If she’s out buying groceries, are you going to have enough to feed all three of us? Won’t you have to go tell her to buy more?” I asked.
“We’ll stretch. I couldn’t leave a guest all alone.” He didn’t sound one hundred percent sure of himself.
“I’m used to it, and I don’t mind waiting around. I don’t know where I’d be going next, anyway. To be honest, now I really want to meet your daughter,” I said.
That did it. “Alright. I’ll take the car and make it quick. You do need to meet her as soon as possible.” He wiped his hands on a dish towel, he grabbed his keys off the kitchen counter and walked out the door. Scarecrow held it for him, and he didn’t even glance at her as he passed.
When I heard the faint tinkle of the clinic door opening and closing, I walked over to Scarecrow. She held out her arm, and Rat jumped from her hand onto both of mine. “Miss Mary, what are we even doing here? This is a horror story!”
“You got that right,” I said, “I’ve made it this far by making my Wolf fight his way through every nasty thing I left behind. I’m going to leave this story hungry and ready to kill when he walks into it.”
“It won’t stop him. Little Red Riding Hood is killing other stories to get to you now. I don’t even know what that means.” He was such a lousy liar. Perfect poker face, unable to hide the worry in his voice at all. He was scared for me.
I took one extra breath to make sure my voice didn’t tremble. Seriously, Rat, don’t make me be the brave one here! “It’ll slow him down. Maybe I can bleed my story to death fighting a hundred others. I sure as crap don’t have any sympathy for old doc ‘I might as well wear a sign reading Psycho Killer around my neck’ Joseph. Now, come on. Scarecrow’s going to hold the door so we don’t find out the lock works after all, and you and I are going to find the nasty secret, get this horror story primed, and then run as fast as we can. Okay?”
He didn’t like it, and he was too smart to argue with me. He hugged my thumb, then jumped off my hand onto the dining room table. Little guy was getting personally attached. Whatever. Get this done fast, and go. We were in a bad place to linger.
The nasty little secret had to be in the medical clinic half of the building with the convenient little surgery, but we started on this half just to be sure. No mysterious packages of unmarked meat in the refrigerator. No skulls in the cupboards, or jars with awful things in them, or silverware of the bone saw variety.
Bathroom looked normal. Towels, blow dryer, toothbrush, that sort of thing. One man’s worth.
Back into Joseph’s conspicuously nameless daughter’s bedroom. The books were a mix of kiddie books, worn fantasy novels, and textbooks that ranged from kindergarten to college. Hey, nothing suspicious here.
I went through her drawers, and got a look at her drawers. The clothes were all like the school dress on the bed. Clean, neatly folded, showing no signs of being worn, and the kind of thing you could claim with a straight face you bought because they were cute instead of tarty. Joseph and my Wolf were going to get along just fine together. Sheesh.
And no actually personal effects.
Rat searched Joseph’s bedroom, and I peeked in to see him on Joseph’s dresser, flipping through a diary. “Anything?” I asked.
“Every girl he’s ever met looks like his daughter. Creepy, but not specific.”
I walked back to the door dividing the clinic in half. “Everything okay down here?” I asked Scarecrow as I pushed Joseph’s coats around in his closet.
“I don’t know. I want to go play with the play table out front, and I want you and Rat and me to leave right now,” she answered.
“We’re almost done. I want to be long gone before Doc Psycho gets back, too,” I said. I turned around and tried what looked like the pantry door. Locked!
Oh, geez. This had to be it. “Rat, any keys in there?” I called out.
Seconds later, he came scurrying out of Joseph’s bedroom, a key chain in his teeth. I grabbed the keys as he jumped up onto my skirt. They were all different sizes, which helped. This was your big, old-fashioned skeleton key type lock, so I tried that key. It turned, and it clicked. Oh boy. “Get ready to run,” I whispered.
I pushed open the door. This was a pantry, alright. It looked pretty normal except for the teenage girl sitting on the floor at the back. Her eyes blinked open, and she asked with a voice as perky as Scarecrow’s, “Are you my husband? My name is Puzzle.”
She stood up. Oh, geez. Puzzle. Yeah, that had to be her name. One eye was green and one eye was dark blue. Her nose could have graced a Greek statue, except it was surrounded by stitches, and the skin inside the stitches was well tanned, while the cheeks were freckled pink. More stitches circled under her bangs. No stitches on her shoulders, but her arms had an oriental tint that didn’t match the Caucasian neck. There wasn’t much I couldn’t see with the see-through slip. At least she had a bra and panties on. Stitches not quite hidden by the bra. Stitches behind her jaw. Every part was beautiful by itself, which made her plain, flat lips stand out. Hey, you know who had a tiny, pink, curvy mouth? I did.
Congratulations, Joseph. You were a bigger horror story freak than I’d imagined.
“I’m Mary, and the answer is ‘no way’,” I answered. My voice sounded a weak. Just looking at this mismatched creature made me feel helpless.
She gave me a bemused grin, lifting her arms and stretching as she took a couple of steps forward. “It doesn’t seem likely, does it? Daddy promised that as soon as I’m ready, he’ll introduce me to my husband. I don’t think he meant a girl. Maybe you?” She stared down at where Rat clung to my hip.
I took a couple of steps backwards myself, until I hit the edge of the closet’s door. I did not want this thing touching me. What nasty surprises did it have in store? And it looked so friendly.
Crap. Oh, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap. I couldn’t just assume she was a monster. She sounded so nice. She might be just as much a victim as the girls who’d been chopped up to make her.
“I’m sorry, Miss Puzzle. I belong to Miss Mary here,” Rat said.
“Rat, we’ve found the story. We have to take her and get out of here. Right now,” I said. My voice sounded a little strained, but the sewing on Puzzle’s face was hard to look at, especially since every few moments, I’d start to look at the face underneath the threads, and despite the color mismatch, she was lovely.
“I’d love to go out for once, but Daddy said I’m not ready yet,” Puzzle said, her eyebrows furrowed, sounding puzzled.
“Miss Mary, we can’t. She’s the focus of a horror story. You won’t get her out, you’ll drag us in!” Rat protested.
He was right, but I refused to leave her.
A little bell tinkled in the clinic. Scarecrow squealed, “Wolf!”
My shoes weren’t quite dry. I became very aware of that as they pounded against the floor as I ran down the hall. My eyes stung with sudden tears. I stumbled into Puzzle’s unused bedroom. What was I doing in here? The windows were barred! Away. It was away. I’d left Scarecrow behind. I heard a thump, I heard her squeal in pain, and then I heard a clatter of wood. My Wolf was behind me.
There was no use
staring at a barred window. I turned around.
He had to be getting bigger. He took up too much of the doorway. Pale blue eyes looked straight into mine, and his shoulders rolled as he padded forward. His bass voice purred luxuriously as he mused, “Someone worked hard to make sure no one could escape this building. Isn’t that lucky? It’s time, my love. I’m hungry. My body and my heart and my soul are hungry.”
He walked past the pantry, and behind him Puzzle stepped up to the door and asked, “Are you the husband Daddy promised me?”
I had to do something.
The Wolf turned his head and looked back at her, and kept looking. His voice went as rich and sweet as fudge, like when we’d first met, and he asked, “Where did you come from, beautiful girl?”
Without a care in the world, she answered, “My name is Puzzle! I live here in the closet until I’m ready, but you know, I remember things. My eyes have seen purple grass waving over the hills, and the sun shining on blue waves. My legs used to dance in night clubs.”
I could hear the Wolf’s heavy breathing from way down here. His voice dropped, adding a touch of whisper as he told Puzzle, “Yes, my beautiful girl. I am the husband you’ve been waiting for. I’ve come to claim you at last.”
He reached out a paw and hooked it around her waist, drawing her out of the closet and into the hallway. His barrel chest pulsed, he was breathing so fast and hard. Then he paused, and turned his head back to look at me, and cold spiked up the bones in my legs and into my spine.
“I’m sorry, Red. I swear to you, our love is true, and this won’t change things between us, but I’m a man and a wolf. I have needs.” He swallowed, panting like a dog as he concluded, “I can’t pass up an opportunity this unique.”
He turned back to Puzzle, and she smiled and twisted her hair around her finger shyly as she asked him, “Where will we go?”
“I’m going to take you right here, beautiful girl.” His paw slid up to her shoulder, and he pressed her back against the wall of the hallway. Together, they almost filled it.
Quite Contrary Page 27