by Bryan Smith
“You okay, Kate?”
“Oh, I’m fine. Can’t say the same for you, you stupid bitch.”
The radical shift in Kate’s demeanor took Daphne by surprise. She was so baffled by it that some obvious implications temporarily eluded her. “What do you mean?”
Kate grinned in a way that was nearly diabolical. “You’re never getting this fucking chair back.”
The full weight of the betrayal hit Daphne hard. She had been tricked out of something valuable and it had been accomplished with infuriating ease. A part of her had known this was a possibility, but she had considered the risk very slight. They were sisters in bondage, sisters in suffering, and on a subconscious level her decision to take that risk was influenced by stories she had heard of women in similar situations persevering and ultimately prevailing against adversity by sticking together and watching out for each other. But obviously this wasn’t going to be one of those heartwarming tales of sisterhood and transcendence. The act of treachery stung, but nearly as bad was the callous, mocking way Kate had revealed her deceit, like a psychopath’s final twist of the knife after stabbing you in the heart.
Well, she had learned a hard lesson here, one she would not soon forget. She would never again put anyone’s interests or well-being ahead of her own.
“Mama Hunt likes me.”
Daphne wanted to ignore the duplicitous cunt, but the comment aroused her curiosity. “What makes you say that?”
“Because she said so. She says I’m special and that I may get to go live with her.”
Daphne laughed as she kicked her legs and swung back and forth on the chain. “When did she tell you this?”
“The day I got here.”
Daphne laughed again.
“Stop laughing at me!”
Kate’s high-decibel scream echoed in the spacious kitchen and the chair wobbled beneath her as she glowered at Daphne. Despite her desire to coarsen her heart, Daphne couldn’t help feeling another twinge of sympathy at the obvious terror and desperation just beneath the woman’s veneer of hatefulness. She had no doubt Vivian Hunt had implied certain possibilities for Kate. Hadn’t she done the same with Daphne upon her arrival today?
Yes.
And in each case it was clear the woman was just playing with them. She enjoyed planting tiny seeds of hope and savoring the additional level of mental torment this created in her victims. She was a sadist. A monster. If anything, a life as her personal slave would be even more of a horror show than what they were experiencing now.
But there was no point in saying any of this to Kate. It was all stuff she knew or sensed on some level, regardless of her current intense state of denial.
So, rather than continuing to antagonize her, Daphne opted to intensify her almost certainly doomed effort to weaken the beam. She was experiencing a significant level of pain in her shoulders, wrists, and elbows already, but she saw no reason to pace herself or do anything other than go all-out until she either accomplished her seemingly impossible goal or caused irreparable physical damage that would force her to stop. Making this thing happen would take nothing less than throwing herself into it with everything she had. She wouldn’t give up until she was free or dead.
“That won’t work.”
Daphne went into a backswing and stared down at the limp figure sprawled on the floor. The gloom blunted the reality of death and almost made the slightly built dead girl look like a cast-aside doll. She didn’t feel bad about what she had done to Lexus. The girl had been on the side of the bad guys. Knowing this, however, failed to prevent the touch of queasiness she felt every time she looked at her.
“Did you hear me?”
“I heard you. I’m trying to ignore you. So please do me a favor and shut up.”
“I’m not even fucking with you. I know what you’re trying to do and it won’t work. I tried it my first night here. Everyone tries it, I think. That goddamn beam makes a lot of noise, but it doesn’t ever give.”
Daphne’s impulse was to dismiss Kate’s comments as another attempt to taunt her, but there was no hard edge in her voice this time. Instead there was just a calm, almost sad sincerity. She had good reason not to trust anything this woman said, but Daphne sensed she was being genuine for a change.
Shit.
After a few last half-hearted attempts, Daphne stopped kicking her legs.
She felt defeated, her all or nothing bravado revealed as empty bullshit.
Kate sighed. “Sorry to steal your hope, but it’s just impossible. Anyway…oh, shit.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Someone’s coming again. Oh, shit. Oh, fuck.”
Kate kicked the chair over.
Daphne’s eyes widened. “What the fuck? Why did you do that!?”
Kate didn’t say anything.
Daphne’s astonishment was such that the clacking footsteps out in the dining room didn’t register until several seconds after her ears began to pick up the sound. The kitchen’s double flap doors were thrown open an instant later. A hand slapped a wall and in the next moment banks of florescent lights began to blink on overhead, forcing Daphne to squint against the glare.
Someone gasped.
There was a babble of excited voices. This was followed by the sound of several sets of feet racing across the kitchen floor. The first people Daphne saw clearly when her vision came into focus were the butchers, Klaus and Horst. They were dressed in street clothes rather than bloody aprons, but it was impossible to mistake the big brutes for anyone else. Behind them were Vivian Hunt, a blandly handsome middle-aged man and woman in stodgy L.L. Bean attire, and a portly midget with a beret atop his head. As they came closer, Daphne noted an odd detail about the middle-aged couple. Clasped loosely in the woman’s right hand was the looped end of a leash. The lead was attached to a dog collar around the man’s throat.
The sight of them left Daphne flabbergasted. Outside of a Halloween or other type of costume party, she couldn’t imagine where she might encounter a more incongruous-looking group of people. The gorgeous Vivian Hunt with her fabulous fashion sense looked just as out of place as the rest of them, none of whom looked like anyone you’d expect to find in the kitchen of a backwoods redneck diner that featured human flesh as a menu item.
A tearful Horst knelt next to Lexus and scooped her into his arms. After quickly determining that she was indeed dead, he commenced to wailing and beseeching the heavens in the overwrought manner movies had taught Daphne to associate with various types of ethnic women. Seeing this mountain of a man reduced to such a state was disconcerting. It was also confusing—until she began to pick out certain pertinent bits of information when the man managed an intermittent moment or two of coherence.
Lexus, apparently, had been Horst’s daughter.
Oops.
Daphne’s chest tightened with fresh dread.
If they find out I killed her, I am fucked.
A hint of a smile touched the corners of Vivian’s mouth. She glanced at the kicked-over chair. Her eyes then flicked from Daphne to Kate and back again. And then she did a bit more looking at the chair, pursing her lips and squinting at it like it was that one maddening piece of a jigsaw puzzle that didn’t seem to fit anywhere.
Which was sort of true.
Vivian reached into her purse and removed a stun gun.
Daphne’s stomach clenched.
Vivian approached the hanging women. “Well, well, well. It appears we have a mystery to solve. Who wants to be questioned first?”
14.
Sienna began to emerge from the state of ecstatic abandon that had gripped her in the aftermath of killing the boy. She was still writhing and clawing at the floor when the world began to coalesce around her again. That was how it felt, as if she had been away, floating in some other place of pure pleasure and white light, a place where she was only a mass of nerve endings forever sparking with unbridled erotic power. The first thing she saw when she came back to the world was the ceiling above her
. At the same time she noted a long diagonal crack that had escaped her attention before. It extended from a corner of the room to about the ceiling’s midpoint and looked like it was nearly an inch wide through the middle.
Wow.
This place really is falling apart.
She felt serene in those first moments after her return, imbued with a deep sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. But her face felt strange, its features arranged in a configuration so alien it took some time to identify it for what it was—a wide and radiant smile of perfect bliss. She began to freak out a little when the full weight of it hit her.
She felt…happy.
Sienna didn’t know if she’d ever experienced a moment of true happiness before. She was sure it hadn’t happened since childhood, at least. The emotion troubled her once she recognized it for what it was. She had no aversion to feeling good. It was always nice to savor the things that gave her pleasure. It was just that her idea of pleasure normally derived from things that gave other people nightmares. She liked the darkness that defined her life and personality. But something about this variant brand of pleasure seemed to run counter to all the things she cherished most.
Before she could contemplate this philosophical matter any further, she heard the moaning again. It was the sound she’d heard shortly before going into her trance. Hearing it now reminded her she had more pressing concerns.
Sienna lifted her head and saw the torso of Arlene Baker’s reanimated corpse hanging over the side of the four-poster bed. The thing moaned again and turned its head in Sienna’s direction. Its fingers reached for the floor and clawed at the uneven planks. The creature’s fingernails were long and tinged with yellow and black. One of the nails bent backward as it scraped wood, revealing a bed of inflamed flesh beneath it. Sienna took this as more evidence of how close to death Arlene had been before she’d snuffed her breath with the pillow.
The thing heaved itself off the bed with a final undulating spasm of its torso, its legs evidently as useless in death as they had been in life. It hit the floor with a soft thump, landing only inches from Sienna’s outstretched legs. A moment later it closed a gnarled hand around one of her ankles and began to pull itself forward. Sienna knew she should take some kind of action, but she felt no real sense of alarm. She watched in fascination as the thing dragged itself forward another several inches, breaking off more of its fingernails in the process. Also interesting was the massive brown stain covering the backside of Arlene’s gown, a consequence of the deceased woman shitting and pissing herself in bed for months. Another person might have been repulsed by the sight, but for Sienna it fed her appetite for degradation.
Sienna drew back a foot—the one not currently being clutched by a zombie—and kicked at the creature’s face, the sole of her shoe connecting against its jaw with considerable force, breaking it with an audible snapping of bone. This didn’t kill the thing, but it did impede its progress. After kicking her other foot free of its grasp, she stood up and stepped out of range when it reached for her again.
Being upright gave her a good look at the bloody results of her second murder of the day. The farm boy’s once-handsome face was a bludgeoned study in fleshy ruination. She felt certain no one could look at him and ever imagine that a girl of her relatively diminutive stature had inflicted such damage. He looked as if some big bear of a man—a three-hundred-pound biker, maybe—had gotten hold of him. The gash in his neck was wide and deep, further enhancing this impression. He had bled an amazing amount, obscuring a portion of her lipstick-traced pentagram.. She felt an odd kind of pride as she took in the whole scene. It struck her as similar to how an artist must feel when admiring her latest completed work.
The Arlene-thing continued to come at her, albeit even more slowly than before. This creature was of no more use to her. She had determined that she could indeed raise human dead with sufficient sacrificial juice. But its apparent mindlessness troubled her. Mere flesh reanimation wasn’t enough. She wanted to restore her father to how she’d known him in life. What she was seeing here didn’t bode well for that. But she would not give up. She was more powerful than ever. She would refine her focus and figure out how to pull her father’s essence back from the other side. It could be done. She was sure of it. Of course, sticking that spirit back in its original, long-dead body might result in some nasty complications, but she would cross that bridge when she came to it.
There was a lot of work still to be done and probably a dwindling amount of time in which to get started. Farm stud here had a family somewhere very nearby, people who would begin to worry about him if he didn’t return from his mission to check on Arlene soon. She had hoped to have a little longer to finalize her preparations before heading out to Hopkins Bend. Another week to meditate and become truly ready would have been nice. But that was no longer an option thanks to the meddling of this bible-thumping asshole.
First things first.
Finish this bitch.
Sienna scanned the blood-splattered floor for the hammer and frowned when she was initially unable to locate it. She then realized it must be under the Arlene-thing. Sidestepping its weakly grasping hands, she seized the creature by its ankles and dragged it away from the bed. Sure enough, the hammer soon came into view. It slid along beneath the body for a moment before popping free. The cool feel of the dead flesh in Sienna’s hands didn’t bother her, nor did the way it felt like the dead woman’s brittle bones would shatter if she increased the pressure of her grip even slightly. As always, she felt that calm kinship with dead and decaying things that so spooked other people about her.
After retrieving the hammer, Sienna buried the claw end in the crown of the Arlene-thing’s skull. As she’d anticipated, this had the effect of vanquishing the spark of reanimating magic Sienna’s ritual had kindled in its brain. The creature stopped moving almost at once. Though the hammer’s claw had penetrated the skull with surprising ease, prying it loose again proved harder. She had to brace a foot against the dead woman’s neck and strain to pull it free. Once it finally came loose, she stood panting in the middle of the room a moment as she pondered her next move.
She glanced at her blood-covered hands and it hit her that she should probably see about cleaning up some before doing anything else. Sienna went into the bathroom and studied her reflection in the mirror above the sink. She had forgotten about painting her face with Bradley’s blood. It had dried some and was flaking away from her skin. A little probing with a fingertip revealed that it was still sticky beneath the dry surface. She smeared the sticky stuff around some before plopping her finger in her mouth and savoring the taste of the blood.
After allowing herself a few last moments to admire her blood-caked visage, she turned a tap and was pleased to see the spurt of rust-colored water that splashed into the sink. As with the electricity, she was amazed to find it hadn’t been shut off. By now she was sure Delmont had kept the bills paid to avoid suspicion regarding the level of care he was providing for Arlene.
In a few moments the water turned clear and Sienna bent her head to the sink and splashed water on her face. An ancient, dried-out bar of soap sat on a small ceramic dish at the back of the sink. She coaxed some suds from it by holding it under the water and rubbing it briskly between her hands, after which she was able to scrub almost all the blood from her face, neck, and hands. There would be no getting the stains out of her clothes, but she dabbed at her dress and stockings with a damp washcloth until the thickest, stickiest blood spatters had been reduced to the point of near invisibility thanks to the black fabric.
Once she was satisfied she had cleaned herself as well as possible, she returned to the bedroom, where she rooted through her backpack until she found her phone. She then took several pictures of her handiwork from various angles, setting one close-up she particularly liked of Bradley’s ruined face as the phone’s background image. Satisfied that she had documented her work as well as she could, she put her phone away and patted the dead bo
y’s pockets until she found his keys. Next she retrieved the rest of her things and stashed them in the backpack. This included the hammer, the knife, the jar she’d kept Spooky in, and the empty absinthe bottle. Sienna had always been something of a packrat and hated to throw anything away.
One of the few regrets she had about Jodi kicking her out was all the things she’d had to leave behind, including her books, journals, stuffed animals, vinyl records, and, perhaps most of all, her massive collection of random junk, most of it cast-off crap she found either by poking through other people’s garbage or while wandering like an aimless waif through the streets of Bedford. Some of her discoveries were nearly practical, such as an ashtray or empty Altoids tin. Other items she procured were of the sort that made people question her sanity. She had fond memories of the disgusted looks people gave her when she would stop on a sidewalk to pick up discarded cigarette butts, used condoms, and, on more than one occasion, the remains of a dead bird or rodent. These things she sealed in Ziploc bags and carried home with her. Her dresser drawers and closet were overflowing with them. The birds and rats she kept because, hello, dead things. The butts and condoms she kept because she had vague notions of using them in future magical rituals. She was sure she could one day use the DNA traces to compel the people who’d discarded them to do nasty things. It would at least be fun conducting the experiments.
But she didn’t have a car and had only been able to leave with what she could fit inside her backpack. Like always, she got angry when she thought about how Jodi tried to run her life, as if she were her mother instead of her sister. Just as bad was the constant barrage of judgmental bullshit. Getting out from under all that was a great thing, but beneath the contempt she felt for Jodi was a deep reservoir of hurt. She just wished her goddamn sister at least had been able to accept her as she was, but that had never even come close to happening. A time of reckoning was coming for that bitch, just as soon as she could bring their father back.