by Amy Crandall
Abigale’s breath caught in her throat. “You did? Where is he? I need to talk to him. Is he outside?” Her volley of questions was enough for Collins to drop his gaze again. Her heart sank. “He’s okay, right?”
Even Ross appeared remorseful. “No, Abigale. His body was found an hour ago in the dumpster across from your home. I’m sorry.”
His body was found. I’m sorry.
His words echoed in Abigale’s ears. “Not him. Not him too.”
She turned to the two men. “Please tell me it’s not t-true.”
Agent Ross bowed his head. “I wish I could.”
Abigale slumped against the back of the chair, numbness spreading through her. “What happened to him?”
“We think he’s been deceased for about two weeks,” Detective Collins answered. “It’s been ruled as a homicide.”
Homicide.
Her fists clenched at the word. Flashes of Mike and Jules flashed through her mind, of their terrified eyes as she plunged the knife deep into their chests. What if she killed her father too? What if she killed all of them? A rush of nausea overtook her senses, and she had to clench her jaw to keep the bile from rising to her throat.
“I know this has all been quite a shock for you,” Agent Ross said, “but we have something else to discuss, and I have an apology to make.”
Abigale straightened in her chair. “What?”
The two men exchanged a glance, then Ross said, “We just finished cleaning out Neil Thackston’s home, and we came across a note…from Damien. I figured it wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t give you the opportunity to read it before I add it to evidence.”
Abigale eyed the paper in the plastic baggie that Agent Ross held. She saw the neat scrawl of Damien’s handwriting from where she was sitting across the table. Although part of her wanted to read it, part of her didn’t. Would he just ramble about how much he cared for her, and say he was sorry? Or would he explain the whole mess to her?
Eventually, her curiosity won the best of her and she took the bag from the agent. Laying it on the table, she smoothed out the plastic before letting herself become immersed in the words of her abductor.
Dearest Abigale,
If you’re reading this, it means you survived the horrible mistake I made. When I saw you there, lying in a pool of blood, I panicked. I called the cops, who should be here any moment to arrest me. I can’t let that happen, and I think you know that.
I let my anger get the best of me, and the truth is, I love you more than anyone or anything. From the first moment I saw you, I knew I had to have you. Then other people interfered. I grew jealous. I wanted you all to myself. And in the end, I did get you to myself.
I killed everyone. Mike, Julia, your father, and your mother. The truth is, I don’t feel bad about it. They didn’t care about you like I do. They were hurting you. I could see it in your beautiful eyes whenever I’d be lucky enough to see them.
If I hadn’t let my anger get the best of me, we’d be together right now. I gave up everything for you, and in return, you stabbed me in the eye and rejected me multiple times. I have to say that the rejection hurt more. I will lay my life down for you in a heartbeat, which is what I’m doing now.
That’s why I’m sitting here writing to you when you probably will never survive to read it. I have a revolver. It’s lying beside me on the table. I killed my uncle. He was a blubbering mess and I put him out of his misery. If you would have gone into his room that day you asked me about his whereabouts, you would have found his decomposing body.
Now I’m going to kill myself. I can’t wait to see you again in heaven, my angel. No matter how long it takes.
I love you, and I know you love me. You’re just too stubborn to admit it yet.
Yours forever,
Damien.
Abigale stared at the letter for another few minutes, analyzing every sentence, mulling over every word. Her eyes teared up at his confessions, and her skin crawled at his declarations of love. She felt as if her heart had been ripped from her chest and stabbed repeatedly. He was lying about Mike and Jules and their demises. He was still protecting her, even after death.
She remembered now. The deaths…they weren’t just delusions planted in her mind by others. They were real.
But the police couldn’t know that.
Wiping the tears that were gathered under her eyelids, Abigale passed the plastic baggie back to the detective. “So he murdered them?” The words sounded foreign on her lips.
“Well, he’s confessed to all of it, so we can only assume,” Detective Collins said.
Agent Ross, however, was quiet. His face was a mask of calm, and yet Abigale could see the wheels turning in his brain from where she was sitting. He was gauging her reaction, searching for weak points in her words, in her expression. He was smarter than she realized. He figured out what she had done, he just couldn’t prove it. Especially not with Damien’s confession written in his own tidy scrawl.
“So,” Abigale said, her gaze shifting away from the agent. She sniffled, partly for effect. “What happens now?”
“You go home,” Agent Ross said.
The bluntness hit Abigale so hard her stomach lurched. “What?”
“Not alone, of course,” Collins added. “We’ve arranged for your Aunt Marie to come up from Brooklyn. She wants you to move there with her once you’re more…stable.”
Abigale’s mouth pressed into a thin line. “Stable,” she repeated.
“Yes,” Detective Collins said. An edge of nervousness laced his tone and she wondered why. “She wants you to be more comfortable before you move.”
“Sounds reasonable,” she replied, but her voice said anything but that. She hadn’t seen her father’s sister in so long, partly because of the fact that her aunt and father hadn’t gotten along for years. They still don’t. Didn’t.
“Am I still a suspect?”
The room turned quiet. Detective Collins looked expectantly at Ross, who was staring intently at Abigale. He was still analyzing her, deciding something. Finally, he said, “No. It appears as though Mr. Thackston has admitted to all the murders.”
Abigale bowed her head. “I guess so.”
Agent Ross stood up, snatching the manila folder off the table. His eyes, cold and calculating, seemed to bore into Abigale’s very soul. He leaned forward, whispering something in her ear that she barely caught. It was a warning. A threat. Goosebumps appeared on the flesh of her neck as she processed his words. When he turned away, he was smirking.
His voice continued to ring in her ears when the two men left the room. She couldn’t help but feel the panic building in her chest. Glancing down at her hands, she examined the red crescents in her palms, marks left by her chipped fingernails.
He’s still looking out for you, isn’t he, Abigale Katherine Fern?
“But why?” she whispered to no one.
CHAPTER FORTY
It had been five months.
Five months since the interrogations.
Five months since she almost died.
Five months since she lost everything.
When she first arrived at her aunt’s two-bedroom apartment at the beginning of the school year, Abigale felt like a fugitive on the run. In a way, she was. She carried a terrible secret from Arcata to Brooklyn, one that would certainly end her life as she knew it if it was repeated.
It was hard in the beginning. Her first day at school was worse than it had been in Arcata, if that was even possible. Word traveled fast, and people talked. Whispers circulated the hallways. She caught words like murderer, liar, and orphan being muttered between friends. The last one bothered her more than the first two since she’d never thought of herself as an orphan. An orphan. It was true, but Abigale didn’t want to admit it. It was painful enough knowing that her parents were gone. She didn’t need a petty label to make it worse.
By the third week of school, she lost hope in finding any friends. All the students avoided her like the plague. She was l
abeled a freak, and nobody wanted to hang out with a freak.
She didn’t blame them.
Her aunt was kind enough but rarely spoke to Abigale unless she had to. By November, she’d grown used to the silence that awaited her at home. She spent most of her evenings in her room, sitting at her desk and surfing the Internet aimlessly.
At night, the nightmares would come.
They were tolerable enough at first. Most of them involved her running from a shadowy figure. She assumed it was Damien, but she’d never seen their face. All she could focus on in those instances was her pounding heart and the inevitable stench of death lingering in the air.
Then the dreams worsened. She began envisioning the dead bodies of her friends, her parents. She would awake screaming for someone to help her, but nobody came. Her aunt was a heavy sleeper.
Eventually, Abigale stopped trying. She napped for about two hours per night, setting an alarm to make sure she awoke before the nightmares arrived. For the remainder of the night, she’d blast music in her ears and try not to think about anything.
Unfortunately, she always thought about Damien and his words to her right before he stabbed her.
Even though DarkHeart434—who she assumed had been Damien—hadn’t contacted her since the profile disappeared, Abigale still felt like someone was watching her, waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike. For this reason, she always made sure the curtains were drawn over her small bedroom window. While it didn’t ease her concerns, it kept the paralysis from setting in when she was encased in the pitch black.
Some would say the nightmares were simply her conscience’s way of eating her alive with guilt, but the truth was, she was in mourning. She’d come to the decision when she left Arcata that it wasn’t her who had killed her loved ones, but an entirely separate being. One that would only appear when she lost control of herself, and of the reality she’d been placed in.
Maybe she was delusional, but it was the only rational thought she could conjure up.
***
The first time her aunt seemed to take an interest in her was when her report card came in the mail. She was failing seven of her eight classes. The only class she was passing was art.
"What’s going on, Abigale?" her aunt had asked. She stood in the doorway of Abigale’s bedroom, the report card clutched in her hand. “You’re failing seven classes?”
Sighing, Abigale put down the pencil she’d been using to shade the parts of the flower cast in shadow. After leaving Arcata, she’d taken up a new hobby that doubled as therapy to cope with her own personal hell: drawing. She found that illustrating her worst fears helped her keep the hallucinations away. She often looked at her creations when she was alone, trying to decipher what exactly made them frightening. So far, she’d come to no resolutions.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she muttered, staring down at her latest work. Abigale examined the intricate patterns her pencil had woven into the petals, hoping her aunt would leave without further probing like she always did.
However, this time was different.
Her aunt marched into the room and kneeled down under the bed where Abigale kept her stash of drawings. She pulled the box out like she’d done it a million times before.
Maybe she had.
“W-What are you doing?” Abigale managed to get out, tripping over the chair leg as she stood. “Those are private.”
Lifting the lid off of the shoebox, her aunt reached inside, removing the many papers Abigale had carefully hidden. What terrified her wasn’t the pictures she had drawn, but the script written on the backs of the pages. She wasn’t sure where they’d come from. There were some nights where she’d black out, unable to remember anything, and her latest drawing would be laying in front of her with angry words scribbled across the back of the page. They said things like kill her, and they all deserved it. Abigale wished she’d thrown them out. She wasn’t sure why she didn’t.
“Is this why?” Her aunt flipped through the pages. She hadn’t seen the backs of the few that were written on. Abigale made sure she’d stashed them at the bottom of the pile. Each drawing her aunt saw caused Abigale to flinch in place. Some depicted gruesome scenes. Of Mike and Jules after they died; of herself standing over the bodies. But that wasn’t all. Most of the drawings showed a male figure shrouded in shadow. Some showed an incredible likeness to Damien. Others depicted her worst fear: of a person showing up in the dark to kill her. Another one, one of her latest works, showed herself as the shadowy figure, a long blade in hand.
“Abigale,” her aunt whispered, “what are these?”
Abigale snapped out of her stupor and rushed forward. She swiped the pages from her aunt’s grasp and stuffed them inside the shoe box. “These are none of your business.”
“Abigale—”
“No!” she snapped. She held the box close to her chest, stepping away from her aunt like she was poisonous. “These are none of your business.”
“Please,” her aunt stood, taking a hesitant step closer, “let me help you, Abigale.”
“I don’t need your help.”
“Yes, honey,” she said. “You’re hurting. Please let me help you. We can go see someone. A counselor?”
“No!” Abigale was shaking, the shoebox quaking in her pale hands. The edges of her vision were tinged with red. She knew what would happen next if she didn’t calm down. It was the same sensation she’d felt before she killed Mike.
After the first month in Brooklyn had passed, more of the memories she had lost came rushing back to her. Most of them appeared in the form of dreams, others in hallucinations during class. She was able to piece together everything that had happened in Arcata, including what happened to her father.
Her anger edged into fear as she thought about her father. She still remembered how heavy he was to push into the dumpster, and how his glazed eyes stared up at her with disapproval. He was the only one who deserved what he got, but it still terrified her what she was capable of.
“Abigale?”
At the sound of her aunt’s voice, she snapped back to attention. The shoebox had fallen out of her hands and her drawings littered the floor around her. Her mouth went dry as she glanced down at all of them. The horrors depicted across the pages were enough to drive anyone to insanity if they looked at them long enough. Her eyes found her aunt’s. Abigale’s heart sank into her stomach when she saw her terrified countenance. Her aunt was scared of her.
“Sweetie,” her aunt said, glancing between the papers and her. “Wait here. I’ll be right back. I’m going to call someone to come over and talk to you, okay?”
Abigale had no choice but to nod. A numb feeling had spread throughout her body at the thought of her aunt being scared of her.
She wasn’t scary, was she?
***
Her aunt didn’t return in the five minutes that Abigale remained in the same spot she’d been left. Something twisted in her stomach and a feeling of uncertainty settled over her. What was taking her aunt so long?
With careful footsteps, she walked to the entrance to her room and peered through the doorframe. She heard her aunt’s insistent tone in the kitchen, but she couldn’t make out what she was saying. Abigale stepped out into the hallway and snuck by the other rooms in the apartment. By the sounds of her aunt pacing the room, she didn’t know that Abigale was listening in.
“—something wrong with her,” her aunt said. “I think she killed them.”
There was a pause. Then, “What? No, I need you to call the police! She’s in the apartment with me. There’s something wrong with her. Please!”
A malicious voice rang in Abigale’s ears, one she hadn’t heard since the day Jules died.
She’s going to turn us in! You know what you have to do, Abigale. You have to stop her…
She stepped forward, but it wasn’t Abigale Fern who did so. A familiar haze settled over Abigale as she continued to sneak around the corner to where her aunt stood. It was as if
she were a puppet, and someone else above her was pulling the strings. When she saw her aunt, she gained tunnel vision.
You have to stop her, the voice hissed inside of her head.
When her aunt saw her, the cordless phone dropped out of her hand, smashing on the tile. The batteries rolled across the floor, one stopping at Abigale’s foot. Something flashed in her aunt’s eyes. She was terrified.
But for some reason, Abigale didn’t care.
“Abigale,” her aunt said, faltering near the end of her name. “Sweetie, it’s okay. Put the knife down.”
The knife?
Abigale’s gaze flickered to her hand, which indeed held a long knife that hadn’t been there before. Then a smirk that was unlike Abigale Fern’s flickered across her lips. She must have grabbed it from the block sitting on the counter when she came around the corner.
When Abigale stepped closer, her aunt backed up. She hit the wall on the opposite side of the kitchen, clutching at the walls, staring at her deranged niece.
“You told on me,” Abigale said, her voice barely above a whisper. The words sounded foreign coming out of her mouth.
“What? No, honey, I didn’t. That was just a friend. You haven’t done anything. I know you haven’t!”
Abigale detected the lie just by peering into her aunt’s face. She was terrified, and she was just trying to save her own skin. The thought made her even angrier. In that moment, Abigale Fern disappeared into a former shell of herself. She lunged forward and sank the blade into her aunt’s flesh.
A scream roared from her latest victim’s lips, quickly silenced when Abigale clapped a hand over her aunt’s mouth. She sank down to the floor with her and stabbed again. Blood splattered across Abigale’s clothes, her face, her hair, and the cupboards around them. When her aunt passed out from the blood loss and pain, Abigale let the blade clatter to the floor. She looked around; the crimson stains on the walls appeared like fresh paint. When Abigale looked back to her aunt, the voice urged, Finish her.