The land of dead flowers: (A serial killer thriller)

by Natasha A. Salnikova

  “What did you do to my mother? To Angelica’s mother? Where’s my wife?” Max yelled as he checked everywhere for some kind of weapon. What was he supposed to do? What should he use to attack or to defend? It was so easy to write about it, but so difficult in real life. He grabbed a piece of wood from the table that was half shaved.

  “Get away from the door!”

  “Damn snoootteeer!” Morris hollered as he jumped from the floor with unexpected speed and threw himself on Max. Max swung the stick, and it connected with Morris’s hand. The knife flew out of his hand and smashed against the wall by the TV. “Damn, damn, damn you!”

  Morris rushed toward Max. His glasses fell and crashed under his feet. Max caught the killer’s arms, pushed him away, but the man attacked him again. Max was stronger and younger. At least, that was what he thought. He didn’t expect the architect to be as strong as he was. His fist burst into Max’s face, crushing his nose, making blood fly everywhere. Max didn’t step back. He crashed his fist into the man’s face, and the architect collapsed on the floor. Max dashed toward the room with the closed door, but before he reached it, the architect grabbed hold of his back and started to pull him down. Max fell on top of the man, turned around in a moment, and the architect appeared under him. They started to roll on the floor, banging into tables and things. The things dropped, crashed, spilled. Images started to flash in Max’s head, mixing with colorful, blazing circles.

  “You killed me!” he screamed. “You killed me!”

  “You’re crazy!” Morris tub-thumped.

  “I trusted you! I was weak and you broke me.” Max was suffocating, sweat trickled into his eyes, images changed one after another. His connection to reality became weak. “You thought no one would ever know! You wanted to take it to your grave! You thought you would stay unpunished and keep killing. That’s what you thought, but I stopped you!”

  Finally, Max sat on top of the architect, on his chest.

  “I am Angelica. I came back to punish you for my death, you murderer!” Max lifted his fist to hit the man in his face, but wailed when the knife went through his wrist. From the sharp and unexpected pain, his head started to spin even harder, but Max held himself together and brought his other fist up. The architect managed to drop him on the floor, and Max fell on his hand with the knife sticking up. It went between his ribs and Max screamed again. He tried to stand and it almost worked, but something heavy landed on his head.

  CHAPTER 62

  When Morris was leaving, Anna pretended to pass out. She wanted him to think that she was weak. Weaker that she actually was. It seemed to work. The maniac did tie her to the bed, but it wasn’t even half as tight as before.

  Anna didn’t want to think about what he had done to her. She concentrated with all her might on thoughts about Max, her home, Morris’s arrest. There wasn’t one spot on her body that didn’t hurt. Her upper lip swelled, one eye refused to open completely, she had horrible thirst and hunger, but still, Anna started to move as soon as the metal banged behind the door. She didn’t know how much time had passed, or how many tears she had shed before her right hand broke away. Anna didn’t believe it at first and studied her free hand for a few seconds with her healthy eye. When her mind accepted the reality, Anna, gasping for air, started to untie her other hand. She did it fast, but her legs took longer. She was sick, dizzy, but she tried to stay alert and not pay attention to the pain tearing through her body. After untying her legs, she pulled the sheet off the bed and wrapped it around her chest, and then she sprinted to the refrigerator and finished the leftover juice from a paper carton, hoping to regain some energy. Only, she didn’t have any weapon. Morris took everything with him. He would see she was free and try to kill her. She could pretend to be tied and use the advantage of surprise to attack him. Would she be strong enough to fight a healthy, armed man?

  Anna checked the room and rested her eyes on the chair. If she hid behind the door, she could hit him with the chair when he entered. Anna grabbed the chair and almost fell. It was solid wood and heavy. Maybe it seemed heavy for a weakened, abused woman, but it wasn’t enough to lift it if she wanted to hit him with a good result. If she lifted it up and swung, she would not have enough time to hit him fast and hard.

  “Oh, God! What should I do?” Anna wanted to scream, to cry, but didn’t allow herself to do that. “Hold it, concentrate, think,” she demanded. “I need a sharp stick!”

  Anna found strength to lift the chair again and smash it against the floor. Then again and again. She was on the edge of consciousness. She knew she could lose it any minute. She stopped, took a deep breath, and started to crash the chair on the floor again. The sheet fell off her body, but Anna didn’t care about her nudity. After her eighth attempt, the legs of the chair cracked at the base, and Anna managed a weak scream of triumph. After the eleventh hit one of the legs broke off and flew against the wall. Anna dropped the chair and laughed after snatching the chair leg. The broken part of it looked like it was sharpened. Wrapped in the sheet again and armed with a stick, Anna sat by the door, hoping to make it. Hoping to overpower him. She started to feel some effect from the juice. Despite the pain, her dizziness faded, and it made Anna feel more confident.

  “I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you.”

  She didn’t wait long. About five minutes passed before she heard a noise behind the door.

  “Here’s the stud,” Anna murmured as she stood and took a pose to attack. “Want my meat again, you freaking pervert? Come on, come on, you son of a bitch. Take me.”

  The lock banged; the door cracked and flew open.

  “Damn snotter,” he hissed.

  “Aaaahh!”

  With a bellow, Anna lashed from behind the door and hit with the sharp end of the stick without aiming. The killer roared, the knife flashed in the air, but it missed Anna when she jumped to the side. She hopped on the bed and almost fell from a spell of vertigo. She was in a fog, blood pulsing in her ears, but Anna jumped from the other side of the bed and dashed to the open door.

  “No! Bitch! You damn snotter!”

  Morris caught her up right behind the threshold of the shed, when Anna stepped in the snow with her bare feet. He pulled her hair and Anna fell on her back, losing her sheet-protection. She didn’t feel cold or even pain; the adrenaline in her blood dulled those feelings. She instantly rolled on her stomach, avoiding the knife. It hit the frozen ground right by her arm.

  “Help! Heeelp!”

  “I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!” Morris’s eyes were feverish. His mouth twisted. He raised the knife again, but Anna was already on her knees, crawling away. She jumped to her feet and didn’t understand how she did it. She didn’t have any strength left.

  “Stop!”

  Anna rushed to the house, limping, listening to the snow crunching behind her. She saw an open gate, but she fell a few feet away from it. She rolled away from Morris, who crashed near her.

  Anna tried to get up, but Morris was faster and fell on top of her. Anna wiggled, knowing that this time he would kill her. Morris’s hand went up again, but something dark appeared from behind him and the killer bounced away.

  “Anna! Run!”

  “Max!”

  Anna collected her remaining strength and picked herself up to see her husband. His face was covered in blood. He held a log in his hands. The killer didn’t faint. He was rising with a moan. Max swung the log to hit him again, but screamed and dropped it. Morris had stabbed his leg with the knife. Anna jumped up and went for the log, but her head spun and she fell.

  “Run!” Max yelled.

  Morris stood up. His eyes were like those of a mad animal. He lifted the knife, bared his teeth, and threw himself upon Anna. She squirmed, leaped up, and ran to the gate. Only she was too weak to make it far. She tried to stand after another fall, only vaguely realizing that she approached the road, a car coming closer. Morris burst out of the gate and then into the road, without seeing Anna. He flew back to the gate after
coming face to face with a truck.

  EPILOGUE

  Six months had passed since the events in Watervliet. In the gray house from his dreams.

  Max sat in the hammock on the terrace of his suburban house. Anna was inside, working at the computer. She had been doing it from the morning and deep into the night since she asked her parents to bring her laptop to the hospital after two days there. Max knew why she did it. She wanted to bury herself in work, so she could forget everything that had happened to her.

  Morris died that same day. He was alive when Max took Anna to the house, found a blanket for her, and returned to the scene. He saw a crowd of people, the truck driver talking on his cell phone, and the man in the snow. His body was twisted, his face and hands covered in blood. Max didn’t see the knife and thought it was covered by the snow. Women standing around cried and questioned, men theorized. Somebody rushed to Max and demanded an explanation of what had happened. Max’s hand, leg, and head were throbbing from pain. Blood on his fist oozed through a piece of cloth that he tore and hurriedly wrapped around his wound in the house. Darkness gathered in front of him, but he still approached the man on the ground and bent to him, so he could hear the killer’s last words.

  “Momma,” Morris moaned. “Mommy. I need to finish the figurine. I need to plant flowers. Mom, take me with you. Angelica, where are you?”

  Max went back into the house, noticing that somebody followed him, somebody was asking him questions. He found Anna lying on the couch.

  “Is he dead?” she asked coldly.

  “Not yet.”

  Max sat down by his wife, hoping not to pass out, but it still happened before an ambulance came. When he woke up, he was already in the hospital bed. Anna was next to him. Her parents asked the doctors to put them in one room.

  Anna was conscious all the way to the hospital, talked to her mother on the phone, and learned that Morris died before the doctors could help him.

  “Too bad,” Anna said. “I wanted to see his eyes when he was dying.”

  It was the last conversation about the killer between her and Max.

  Anna healed faster than Max, and left the hospital two days before him. He had complications with his hand. It required a difficult surgery, the healing process went slowly, but after three months, he could type with one finger, and two weeks later he used all of them.

  Max didn’t check on Angelica’s mother that day, but it was a happy surprise for him that she was alive. Morris had stabbed her, but didn’t touch any vital organs. An ambulance took her to the same hospital as Anna and Max. After he started to feel better, he visited her a few times. On his first visit, she cried and asked him to forgive her. His second time she said that she didn’t know how to act with him. Max suggested that she act as she had done before, but he knew that was not going to happen. He felt close to her in a way that he never felt with his mother. His other mother.

  Max had enough time in the hospital to mull over the events. To reason out his new understanding of life and death. His new understanding of reality. Even at this time, he still couldn’t believe completely in the theory of reincarnation. Max didn’t doubt that he and Angelica were one and the same, but it didn’t fit with anything he had ever believed in and he needed more time to adjust and accept. How was it possible? He didn’t know. Despite his memory of that past life, he kept all his habits and interests. He was the same person, with a different life perspective. He tried to explain his passion for ballet with the fact that Angelica took ballet lessons at five. They both loved nature. He read about half a dozen books about reincarnation, but they didn’t make him change his religion. Besides her mother, Max hadn’t talked to anyone else about his past life. And there was one more thing—he started forgetting it.

  First, as with a sponge, Angelica’s murder was wiped from his mind. Next, was the scene in the empty classroom, then the fight with her friend and other negative moments.

  Max clung to the pleasant memories, but he understood that sooner or later they would slip away from him.

  He worried about Anna and had no idea about the future of their relationship. He felt guilty about everything. He thought it was his fault they had fought, that the killer turned to Anna and kidnapped her. His doctor called in a therapist, who tried to convince Max that he didn’t make things happen the way they did, but his words disappeared like the steam of a warm breath into the cold air. It seemed that Anna erased all the memory of her days with the killer from her mind. She had to talk about him with the detective, but not with anyone else. She turned the TV off every time somebody mentioned the name Morris Bishop. Architect and serial killer, who planted immortelles on his victims’ graves and carved their figurines.

  “Immortelles. Immortal,” Max whispered. Where did the souls of the eleven other girls go? Would they remember the way they died in their previous life? Did they have strange, horrifying dreams?

  Max refused to give interviews, didn’t answer his aunt’s phone calls. The rights to all his books had been optioned by movie studios. His old books took all the top spots on all possible bestselling lists. One company wanted to shoot a documentary about his adventures, but Max wasn’t interested. He wasn’t excited about money coming his way, from remembering the circumstances of his labor, but he and Anna chose and bought a big house in New Jersey. Anna quit her job, but found more work. Max wrote during the week, sitting on the wooden terrace that faced the forest and the lake. On weekends, he visited Wilma. Alone mostly, but sometimes with Anna. He deleted the book consisting of his memories and finished a new book, based on Bishop’s biography, which was called a book of the year even before it was published. Max didn’t care about money or fame when he wrote it. He had to write it to get rid of the emotions and pain. He finished the book and didn’t even edit it. He didn’t want to go through it again. When he wrote the book, it felt as if he spilled out all his hatred for the killer, all his anger. He felt better and hoped that Anna would spill out her pain and anger in her drawings.

  Max flinched and turned when something rustled behind his back. Anna stood by the exit of the room and smiled. It was a smile that Max hadn’t seen in months. It was a smile without sadness or bitterness. A white curtain on the window near the door fluttered in the wind, just like Anna’s hair, which was now below her chest. The gentle fragrance of flowers in the air, sweet grass, and lemon in his glass of water. A bouquet of daises sat on the low table by the door.

  “What is it, Ann?” Max smiled. Whatever it was, he would embrace it with open arms if it made his wife smile like that.

  Anna, holding her hands behind her back, walked over to Max and climbed onto his lap.

  “What is it?” Max asked again, now without hiding his surprise. They’d had sex in the last two months, but they didn’t have much passion between them. Anna turned away from him right away and didn’t let him hug her.

  Anna moved her hands in front of her, and Max saw a white, plastic stick that looked like a thermometer. His wife didn’t say anything yet, but his heart dropped.

  “What is it?” he asked, feeling like a fool.

  “Two stripes,” Anna exhaled and started to cry. “Two stripes, Max. Do you understand what that means, silly?”

  Max didn’t say anything, but he hugged his wife, pressed her to his chest, and hid his tears in her hair that smelled like the forest in the morning.

  “The soul of some nice person is going to be reborn,” Anna whispered.

  “I love you, Anna. I love you.”

  ***

  Six months before

  In a small village, high in the mountains, in a tiny house made of clay, something sad had happened. The goat gave birth to a boy, instead of a girl. It was castrated right away and locked in a small cage. After two months, the owner would kill it for his daughter’s wedding and its short life would end up as a roaster on a wedding table. No one would ever think that a human soul had entered the body of this goat. This person hadn’t been good during his life. His
soul didn’t remember where it had lived before reincarnation and didn’t know it was going to be born many, many times, but never again in human form. He had lost that privilege. Because every human being, every man or woman, has a choice of who they would become, and their choices decide their next life.

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  Natasha’s books on Amazon

  Psychological thrillers

  Quiet River

  Dark curtain

  The savior

  Love, Thais

  Mean girl

  The garden of dead thoughts

  Suspense thriller

  Rotten Apple

  Supernatural thrillers

  The voice of waterfalls

  The calling of waterfallls

  Silence in the house

  Science fiction

  A step to nowhere

  One hundred lives

  Natasha A. Salnikova’s FB page

  THE VOICE OF WATERWALLS

  Description

  Inga manages to escape from a "house of terror" where she was held as a captive along with other girls who were kidnapped. She is chased into the woods and runs onto the road, almost falling under the wheels of an approaching car. She thought, it would be better to die that way than to return to her captors. The driver of the car, another surprise, saves her. He brings her to his house and introduces her to his family: his mother, his father and his younger sister. He gives Inga a key to a separate room and brings her food. She appreciates his help and calls him her knight from the road. All she needs now is a phone to make a call to her mother. Her savior, Alman, says they don't have one in the house. He's also not in a hurry to take her from his house in the woods to the town where she can talk to police. And Inga began to doubt the noble intentions of her savior. After some time she starts to think this house is worse than the one she was imprisoned in before, if that was possible.