by Riley Sager
The shadow with the knife is upon the SUV in an instant, flinging open the door and dragging Craig from the front seat.
The blare of the horn stops. Silence reigns again.
Despite his collision with the steering wheel, Craig is still conscious. Yet he doesn’t make a sound as he’s shoved to his knees beside the SUV. He simply stares forward, his eyes sparking with terror.
I turn away from the window, suddenly dizzy. I collapse against the wall, sliding down it, feeling the floor rise up to meet me. Just before everything again goes dark, Craig finally screams.
• • •
Later.
I don’t know how long.
I’m on the floor in one of the bedrooms. My room. I recognize the quilts on the wall. Water trickles beneath the door. I don’t know where it’s coming from. A burst pipe? A flood?
All I know is that I’m wet and bleeding and more scared than I’ve ever been in my life. When I whimper, Rodney says, You’ll be okay. We’ll both be okay.
He’s huddled beside me, one of the quilts from the wall thrown over his shoulders. There’s blood in his hair.
Where’s Betz? I whisper.
Rodney doesn’t answer.
Outside the room, everything is quiet. Even the crickets. Even the trees and the leaves. But then a sound emerges on the other side of the door.
Footsteps.
Slow, cautious ones that slosh through the water in the hall. Each one reminds me of my mother’s mop sliding across the kitchen floor.
Slick-swish.
Slick-swish.
They stop just on the other side of the door.
I look to Rodney, my eyes asking the question I dare not speak: Did you lock the door?
He nods. The doorknob rattles.
Then something slams against the door, bending it, wood bulging outward. Fear lifts me to my feet as the door is rocked by another slam. It bursts open and I see a knife, glinting darkly.
I scream.
I close my eyes.
The knife pushes into my gut. Filling me. A steel-sharp rape. I take a rattling breath through gritted teeth as the blade is pulled out and I slump to the floor.
Quincy, no!
It’s Rodney, pushing past me, throwing his body in front of mine. I don’t open my eyes. I can’t. The lights have gone out. All I can do is listen to the scuffle moving out of the room and into the hall. I hear Rodney grunting and cursing and shoving.
Then a single, strangled yelp.
Then nothing.
• • •
Later still.
I wake again in the wet room. My room.
The cabin is silent. So are the crickets and trees and leaves. Everything’s either dead or fled. Everything but me.
I sit up, the pain at my stomach surpassing the pain at my shoulder. Both still bleed. My dress is soaked with blood and water. Mostly blood. It’s thicker.
Somehow, I get to my feet, now bare, shoes God knows where. Somehow, these weary legs take me through the open door. And somehow I remain upright in the hall, even after I spy Betz dead in the other room, surrounded by liquid from the knife-pierced waterbed.
Rodney is farther down the hall, also dead. I avoid looking at him when I step over his corpse.
It’s not real, I whisper. None of this is real.
I don’t see Him until I’m all the way into the great room, standing by the fireplace, shivering from cold and blood loss. He’s on all fours next to Amy, like a dog sniffing at a carcass, wondering if it’s worth consuming.
Strange sounds rise from the back of His throat. Tiny whimpers. The dog’s in pain.
Then He notices I’m there, head whipping around to face me. The knife is on the floor beside Him, black with fresh blood. He grabs it, lifts it over His head.
I was leaving, He says, breathing hard. I heard screams. I came back. And saw—
I don’t hear the rest because I’m too busy running. Terror and hurt and rage burn through me, mixing together, bubbling under my skin like a chemical reaction. I keep on running.
Out of the cabin.
Into the woods.
Screaming all the way.
42.
The memories arrive all at once. A zombie horde back from the dead, grasping at me with peeled-skin hands. I try to fight them off but can’t. I’m surrounded, overwhelmed and convulsing as memory after memory returns. All those sounds and images I had kept at bay for so long. They’re all back, lodged into my mind, unshakable as they play over and over in an endless loop.
Amy and her dead doll eyes.
Craig being dragged from the SUV.
Betz and Rodney with their palpable horror and desperation. They saw more than I did. They saw it all.
Yet I saw something they couldn’t. I saw Him. Crawling around Amy, whimpering, grabbing the knife, raising it.
That image is the one that repeats itself most often. There’s something off about it, something I can’t quite comprehend.
Breaking free of Tina’s grip, I rush down the hall, my numb legs propelled only by the insistent tug of memory. My breathing is shallow. My heart clangs in my chest.
I don’t stop until I’m in the great room again. Right back where we started. I stand exactly where I stood a decade ago, staring at the spot where I last saw Him. It’s almost as if He’s still there, frozen in place for a decade. I see the raised knife in His hands. I see His smudged glasses. Behind the lenses, His wide and uncomprehending eyes are full moons of fear.
Of me.
He was afraid of me.
He thought I was going to hurt him. That I’m the one who had killed the others.
I drop to my knees and gasp, inhaling dusty air, coughing.
“It wasn’t him,” I say between body-rattling coughs. “He didn’t do it.”
Tina swoops toward me, the knife lowered, now forgotten. She kneels in front of me and grips my arms tight. So tight it hurts.
“Are you sure?” Hope colors her words. A trembling, uncertain, pitiable hope. “Tell me you’re sure.”
“I’m sure.”
I now understand why we’re here. Why Tina sought out Lisa and me. She wanted me to remember everything, to prove Joe’s innocence, to declare once and for all that he didn’t do it.
It was all for him.
For Joe.
“I wanted to come with him,” Tina says. “I wanted to run away. Together. But he told me to stay. Even after I followed him down the hall to that broken door. He said he’d come back for me. So I stayed behind. Then they told me he was dead. That he’d killed a bunch of kids. But I knew he didn’t do it.”
“I didn’t know,” I say. “I truly thought it was him.”
“So who did it? Who killed them?”
Disbelief rises like bile in my throat. I cough again, trying to dislodge it. “Someone else.”
“You?” she asks. “Was it you, Quinn?”
God knows she has every right to think that. I’d forgotten so much. And she’s seen me angry. That was her goal, after all. To poke me, get me mad, see what I’m capable of. I didn’t disappoint.
“No,” I say. “I swear, it wasn’t me.”
“Then who?”
I shake my head. I’m breathless, exhausted.
“I don’t know.”
But I do. At least, I think I do. Another memory arrives. A straggler. It’s a memory of me running through the woods, seeing something else.
Someone else.
“You’re remembering something,” Tina says.
I nod. I close my eyes. I think. I think until my head throbs.
And then I see it, as vibrant as the day it happened. I’m running through the woods, screaming, that branch all but punching me in the face. I see headlights. I see a man silhouetted in the brightness
.
A cop. I see his uniform.
It’s covered with something dark and wet. In the dim moonlight, it almost looks as if he’s been smeared with motor oil. Yet I know that’s not the case. Even as I run toward him, I know his uniform is covered with blood.
My blood. Janelle’s blood. Everyone’s blood.
But I’m too scared to think clearly. Especially with Joe somewhere in the woods behind me. Chasing me. The taste of his lips still on mine.
So I make a beeline toward the cop, embracing him, pressing my dress to his uniform.
Blood against blood.
They’re dead, I gasp. They’re all dead. And he’s still out here.
And suddenly Joe’s there, bursting through the trees. The cop draws his gun and fires off three shots. Two in the chest, one in the head. As loud in memory as they were in real life.
I hear a fourth shot.
Louder than memory.
Definitely real life.
It blasts through the cabin, vibrating off the walls. The energy of the bullet streaks from the open door into Pine Cottage. It has a presence, a force that fills the room.
A splatter of hot liquid hits my face.
I shriek when I feel it, my eyes flying open to see Tina slumping onto her side. One of her hands flings outward past her head, knuckles against the floor, knife skittering from her grip. A thin pool of blood starts to roll out from under her, spreading fast.
She’s not moving. I’m not even sure she’s still alive.
“Tina?” I say, shaking her. “Tina?”
Noise drifts from the doorway. Someone breathing. I look up and see Coop standing there. Even in the darkness, I can make out the glint of his blue eyes as he lowers the gun.
“Quincy,” he says with a nod.
There’s always a nod.
43.
I notice the ring immediately. The red class ring he wears in place of a wedding band. It’s familiar, yet foreign. I’ve seen it so many times that I’ve come to not see it. Taken it for granted, like so many other things about Coop.
That’s why I didn’t recognize it when I saw it in that photograph on Lisa Milner’s dresser. Coop’s face wasn’t in the picture. It was just his hand thrown over Lisa’s shoulder, the ring right there, visible yet not.
But now it’s all I see, worn on the same hand that holds his Glock. Although the gun is lowered, his index finger continues to twitch against the trigger.
“Are you hurt?” he asks.
“No.”
“Good,” Coop says. “That’s real good, Quincy.”
He takes another step closer, his long legs covering twice the distance of a normal stride. One more step and he’s right beside us, towering over Tina and me. Or maybe it’s just me now. Tina’s likely dead already. I can’t tell.
Coop gives the knife near Tina’s hand a rough kick, sending it sliding into a distant corner, where it’s swallowed by the shadows.
There’s no point in trying to run. Coop’s finger never leaves that trigger. One shot is all it would take to put me down. Just like Tina. I’m not sure I even can run. Grief and pills and the weight of remembering that night have left me paralyzed.
“For a few years there in the beginning, I always wondered how much you knew,” Coop says. “When you asked to see me in the hospital that day, I thought you were toying with me. That you wanted me to be there when you told the detectives you remembered everything. I almost didn’t come.”
“Why did you?”
“Because I think I loved you even then.”
I sway slightly, dizzy from disgust. When I drift too far to the left, Coop tightens his finger around the trigger. I force myself to stop moving.
“How many were there?” I ask. “Before that night?”
“Three.”
There’s no hesitation. He says it with the same ease with which he orders his coffee. I was hoping for at least a pause.
Three. The strangled woman on the side of the road and the two campers stabbed in their tent. All of them were mentioned in the article I found at Lisa’s house. I think she knew what happened to them. I think she died because of it.
“It’s a sickness,” Coop says. “You need to understand that, Quincy. I never wanted to do those things.”
I sob. When snot starts leaking from my nose, I don’t bother to wipe it away. “Then why did you?”
“I’ve spent my whole life in these woods. Hiking, hunting, doing things I was too young to be doing. I lost my virginity on that big rock up on the hill.” Coop cringes at the memory, hating himself. “She was the school slut. Willing to do it with anyone. Even me. When it was over, I puked in the bushes. Christ, I was ashamed of what I’d done. So ashamed that I thought about snapping her neck right there on that rock, just so she wouldn’t tell anyone. It was only fear of getting caught that kept me from doing it.”
I shake my head and put a hand to my temple. With every word, a piece of my heart breaks off and falls away.
“Please stop.”
Coop keeps talking, his words carrying the relieved rush of confession.
“But I was curious. God help me, I was. I thought the military would shake it out of me. That killing for my country would make me not want to do it. But it didn’t work. All the messed-up things I saw over there only made it worse. And not long after I got back home I found myself back in these woods, in a car, getting sucked off by some whore trying to hitchhike her way to New York. That time I wasn’t afraid. War had beat all the fear out of me. That time I actually did it.”
I keep my expression blank, willing myself not to show the fear and disgust churning inside me. I don’t want him to know what I’m thinking. I don’t want to make him mad.
“I swore I’d only do it that one time,” Coop says. “That I got it out of my system. But I kept coming back to these woods. Usually with a knife. And when I saw those two campers, I knew the sickness hadn’t left me.”
“What about now?”
“I’m trying, Quincy. I’m trying real hard.”
“You weren’t trying that night,” I say, trembling with desire to glare at him, to show him how much I hate him. There’s nothing left of my heart. It’s been reduced to knifelike shards.
“I was testing myself,” Coop says. “Going to this cabin. That’s how I’d do it. I’d park down the road and walk up here, peeking in windows, both hoping and dreading I’d see something that would bring the sickness back. Nothing ever did. Until I saw you.”
I think I might pass out. I pray that I do.
“I was supposed to be looking for the kid who escaped from the psych hospital,” he says. “Instead, I started circling this place, ready for another test. That’s when I found you in the woods. With the knife. You walked right past me. So close I could have reached out and touched you. But you were too angry to see me. You were so angry, Quincy. And so fiercely sad. It was beautiful.”
“I wasn’t going to do what you think I was,” I say, hoping he believes me. Hoping that one day I’ll believe it too. “I dropped that knife.”
“I know. I watched you do it once he showed up. Then you left. And he left. But the knife stayed. So I picked it up.”
Coop takes another step closer. So close I can smell him. A mix of sweat and aftershave. I’m hit with flashes of last night. Him on top of me. Inside me. His scent now is exactly the same as then.
“I never meant for all that to happen, Quincy. You’ve got to believe me. I just wanted to see where you were headed with that knife. I wanted to know what made someone as perfect as you so angry. So I went to the rock and saw them, and I knew that’s what upset you. The two of them screwing like filthy animals. That’s what they looked like, you know. Two grunting, dirty animals that needed to be put down.”
Coop lightly swings the hand that holds the gun, his elbow bending an
d unbending, as if he’s no longer willing to point it at me.
“But then your friend ran,” he says. “Craig. That was his name, right? And I couldn’t let him get away, Quincy. I just couldn’t. And there you were. And your friends. And I knew I had to get rid of all of you.”
I’m crying more now. Tears of shame and sorrow and confusion soak my face. “Why didn’t you kill me too? You killed the others. Why not me?”
“Because I could tell you were special,” Coop says slowly, as if he’s still amazed by me all these years later. “And I was right. You should have seen yourself running through those woods, Quincy. Strong even then. Even more, you were running toward me, wanting me to help you.”
He gives me a bright-eyed look of admiration. Of awe.
“I had no right to snuff that out.”
“Even though there was a chance I could suddenly remember it was you?”
“Yes,” Coop says. “Even then. Because I knew what was happening. I had created another Lisa Milner. Another Samantha Boyd.”
“You knew who they were,” I say.
“I’m a cop. Of course I knew,” Coop says. “The Final Girls. Such strong, defiant women. And I had made one. Me. In my mind, it made up for all the other bad things I’d done. And I swore I’d never let anything bad happen to you. I made sure you’d always need me. Even when it looked like you were drifting away from me.”
At first, I don’t know what he means. But then realization settles onto my shoulders, weighing me down. I slump further against the floor.
“The letter,” I say weakly. “You wrote that letter.”
“I had to,” Coop says. “You were straying too far from me.”
It’s true. I was. Getting the website off the ground, moving in with Jeff, finally becoming the woman I’d always wanted to be. So Coop drove to Quincy, Illinois, and mailed that typewritten threat, knowing it would make me run back to him in a heartbeat. And I did.
A question unfolds in my mind, curling open like a flower. I’m afraid to ask it, but I must. “What else have you done? After that night? Were there more bad things?”