by Julia Derek
“My next client isn’t until Sunday afternoon, so I have about forty hours. Then there’s Jonah to consider.”
The stiffening of Ian’s body was so subtle and he pulled himself out of it so quickly that I almost missed it. I couldn’t tell whether jealousy or a sense of impotence over the situation had prompted it.
“Consider how?” he asked, his voice neutral.
“He wanted to get together tonight, but I managed to get out of it by claiming that I was sick and hanging over my toilet, throwing up. He told me to feel better and that he’d check in with me tomorrow. If I pretend to be sick tomorrow, too, he might insist on coming by my place to see how I’m doing. Don’t forget, he and I are supposedly dating now.” I stuck out my tongue in a show of disgust and rolled my eyes.
“Right. Well, let’s hope we’ve found Burt and Nadja by then. Let’s go.” Ian walked toward the open bedroom door and I joined him. We continued in silence down the stairs, he leading the way. We entered the kitchen where the door to the basement was, a green-painted door that blended in with the walls.
Ian pulled down the handle, which opened the door immediately, revealing a steep, descending staircase shrouded in darkness. He glanced at me, tilting his head toward my hip holster where my Glock was. I pulled it out and he got out his own gun from his waistband.
“Let’s go see what’s going on down there,” he said.
He flipped on a light switch next to the doorway, illuminating the better part of the basement stairs. You still couldn’t see what was hiding at the bottom, though, barely where the stairs ended. Hesitating momentarily, I followed him as he descended into the basement, hoping there would be more light switches somewhere down there. It didn’t appear that way; we both searched for them on the walls flanking the long staircase, but neither of us could find any. Even so, Ian continued walking.
He stopped suddenly, only a few steps into the darkness, making me almost crash into his back.
“Shouldn’t we get some kind of light before going deeper inside?” I asked.
He didn’t immediately answer, just raised his chin, turning it slowly side to side.
“Do you smell that?” he asked instead of responding to my question.
I sniffed the air that had an earthy, damp quality to it. As I inhaled deeper, I noticed that it also had a distinct rotten note in it.
Ian’s gun-free hand disappeared into his pocket and he pulled out his phone, holding it up. Within a few seconds, light shone out of it and I realized that he had turned on his flashlight app. He directed the light in front of himself, creating an illuminated half circle before him as he walked into the basement.
I followed him, the rotten smell becoming more potent. The basement was huge and it took us almost a minute of walking until Ian stopped short again, shining the flashlight into a corner. It took a little while before I could make out what he was highlighting, but when I had, chills rushed over my skin and I felt an urge to throw up. My hand flew up to my mouth, partly covering the “oh my God” that I gasped as I took in the horrifying sight.
Stacked on top of one another were bodies in varying stages of decomposition, most of them so far gone they had become mummified. I counted about ten of them, both men and women, all of them naked and mutilated to some degree.
Someone—Alyssa presumably—was using this part of the basement as a grave. Ian kept shining the flashlight over the corpses, enabling us to get a fairly good view of all of them. There was no question that they were very dead and had been so for a while. None of them looked like Nadja or Burt.
“Nadja!” Ian called out, removing the flashlight from the stack of bodies and shining it in other directions, like he was searching for something.
“Burt!” I called out.
We both called out their names a few more times, but got no response. I found my old phone in my pocket and checked if it had a flashlight app like Ian’s so we could see more of what was down here in the basement. Except for the bodies, there wasn’t much to see, only shelves along the walls with tools and construction material on them and some old furniture.
My phone didn’t have a flashlight app and the little light it provided when I turned it on didn’t help much.
“It looks she brings them here when she’s done with them,” Ian said, moving his light around over the rest of the big basement. “As a form of burial chamber.”
“Yes, maybe,” I said. “We need to search through this basement thoroughly. The reason we’re not getting a response from either Burt or Nadja might be because they can’t speak. Maybe they’re gagged or… or something else makes them unable to speak.” I had suddenly remembered having read something about Alyssa cutting the tongue out of her young victims’ mouths. Or threatening to, I couldn’t be sure which. I hoped this wasn’t the case with Burt and Nadja.
“Yes, you’re right,” Ian said. “Let’s give it a more thorough examination. Maybe she’s hiding them somewhere here. We could use some better lighting for that. My flashlight is not enough.”
“A lantern would be good. A big one. Can we be sure there aren’t any lights in the ceiling somewhere?”
“No. But you’d think they’d be somewhere along the staircase in that case.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe we missed them. Seems weird that someone would have this big a basement and no lights in the ceiling. The lantern might help us find them, too.”
“True. In the meantime, let’s check again as we go back up.”
We headed back toward the long stairs and started climbing them. The door at the top of them was ajar, the light from the kitchen that we’d turned on seeping in through the crack.
“You check the right side and I check the left,” Ian said as we ascended. As carefully as I could, I scanned the wall at the side of the staircase. I still couldn’t see anything that looked even remotely like a light switch.
“Did you find anything?” I asked Ian when we got to the top and pushed the door open all the way.
“No,” he said and we exited the basement, both of us squinting against the bright light the lamp hanging from the kitchen ceiling emitted.
He opened the tall pantry cabinet right next to the basement door and eyed its contents.
“Bingo,” he said and pulled out a handheld spotlight with a large reflector. “This should do the job.” He flipped on its switch and a strong light oozed from the spotlight.
“Great,” I said. “One of us should go back down there while the other stays up here. What if she comes back and sees the door open and slams it shut? We might get stuck in there. Look at this.”
I indicated the lock on the door, a deadbolt that looked unbreakable. The door itself was made out of very thick, sturdy material. “I don’t think we’ll be able to shoot our way through that.”
“Good point,” Ian said, testing the deadbolt. “Okay, let me go down and check. In the meantime, keep your eyes open for her. And your gun at the ready. Not that I need to tell you that.” He gave me a quick wink. “Still, if she managed to take out Burt, she must be good.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said and squeezed the grip of my Glock in my hand. “Go downstairs and check for them now. And hurry.”
Nodding, Ian descended the stairs again, shining the spotlight before him, and was soon at the bottom. As I waited for him to search the basement, I kept scanning my surroundings, glad there was a full moon tonight and the sky virtually cloud free at the moment. The kitchen windows were tall and wide, enabling me to get a fairly good view of what was going on both outside and inside the house.
By the time Ian returned ten minutes later, I was still taking in the quiet kitchen with its yellow-painted cabinets and the rustic kitchen table in the middle, four chairs placed around it.
I turned to look at him and already knew that he hadn’t found anything else horrific by the expression on his face when he walked up beside me.
“Nothing then?” I asked, just to confirm.
He shook his head,
a corner of his mouth quirking up. “Only those ten bodies. I took a closer look at them. It looks like the most recent corpse was brought there about a week or so ago.” He wrinkled his nose. “Hence the stench. The others have been there much longer judging from the state of decomposition.”
I nodded. “She’s been busy. I wonder how she gets the people. I can’t remember having read or heard anything about a serial killer lately. Can you?”
He screwed up his lips, then, “Not me either. Who knows how wide a net she’s been casting, though. Maybe she’s traveling across the country in search for people to kidnap and kill.” His face darkened. “This time around, the victims came to her.” His mouth parted and he let out a breath. “If only we had known. I should’ve taken a closer look at the house to be sure no one had been using it before I left Nadja here alone. I was so sure she’d be okay here I didn’t even give her a gun to protect herself with.”
I put a hand on his arm and caressed it; I could tell the fact that he hadn’t really bothered him.
“How could you have known?” I asked as I stroked his arm. “What are the chances that a serial killer the media has buried is using this particular house as her headquarters? Someone who was active years ago. One in a million, right? Don’t be so hard on yourself, Ian. You couldn’t have known that. She would have been fine had it not been for Alyssa.”
He sighed, putting a hand over mine and squeezing it. “I guess you’re right. Even so, to not have given her a gun…” He gazed before him with empty eyes.
“Even so, nothing. I’m sure Alyssa would’ve found a way to get to her anyway. She did with Burt, whom you had provided with a gun. The question is, what do we do now? Look through the rest of the house again? Should we check the garage? The shed?”
We had parked Ian’s Honda in front of the two-car garage next to the house.
“Yeah, let’s start with the garage and the shed, then we can go through the house again. Not that I think they’re in here, but it doesn’t hurt to give it a closer look.”
As Ian started walking toward the doorway leading out to the spacious hallway, the sound of a door opening reached our ears. We stopped dead in our tracks, gazing at one another.
“That was the front door, wasn’t it?” I whispered to Ian.
“It sure sounded like it.” He brought his gun up to his chin and approached the wide opening that led out to the long foyer. I did the same with my own gun, following him as he neared the kitchen entry way.
Something heavy crashing to the ground outside the kitchen made us both pause. Ian threw a glance at me, having placed his back against the wall right before the doorway, getting ready to face who or what hid on the other side. He rounded the corner and, legs spread wide apart, pointed his gun at whoever was out there.
He lowered the gun and rushed toward the front door. I turned the corner and saw Ian squatting next to Burt, who was lying on the floor, face up and bleeding.
I ran up to them, squatting myself beside Ian. Burt was panting on the ground, the blood coming from several stab wounds I noted as my gaze moved down his body.
“Go get some towels and sheets so we can stop the bleeding,” Ian said to me. “Upstairs. But be careful. She may be here.”
“Yes…” Burt mumbled. “Be careful… she’s crazy and will say and do anything. I was stupid enough to believe her…”
Chapter 6
Torn between listening to what Burt was telling us and getting materials to stop his bleeding, I stared at him as he spoke, his dark skin having taken on a sickly ashen tone. I forced myself to get to my feet and run up the stairs, keeping Burt’s words at the front of my mind. Alyssa could be anywhere, maybe in the house even. I squeezed my gun in my hand as I entered the bedroom where Ian had brought Nadja and grabbed as many towels and sheets as I could find, then dashed down the stairs again. Ian remained next to Burt’s splayed body, pressing his hands against what appeared to be the biggest of the black man’s wounds.
I handed Ian the biggest towel I had found and ripped the sheets into smaller, more manageable pieces.
Instantly attuned to what I was doing, Ian tied the long segments of sheet around Burt’s smaller wounds, having placed the towel over the big one and making Burt press on it. When I was done shredding the sheets, I pressed a couple of the smaller towels against the wounds.
“What happened, Burt?” I asked, trying to look into his half-closed snake eyes. Sweat coated his face and it seemed to get paler by the second. “Can you talk?”
He made a downward move with his head, barely a nod, then, “Alyssa came to the house…”
“When?” Ian asked. “Why didn’t you call me?”
Burt’s tongue came out and he tried to lick his lips. “She told me if I wanted to save Nadja, I had to come with her right away and leave the gun here… So I went… I know it was stupid, but I wanted to save Nadja… You have to go there… save Nadja… She’s still alive.”
“Where is she?” I asked, pressing the towel harder against Burt’s wound. Our efforts seemed to be helping because he was looking a tiny bit better and no blood was coming out.
“In the woods… tied to a tree… Behind the garage… There’s a creek there… She is in the glade, beneath the mountain. You need to go help her. Alyssa will kill her…”
“Where is Alyssa?” Ian asked, putting a folded towel under Burt’s head.
“I don’t know… I just woke up… When I got to the tree where she’d tied Nadja, she hit me in the head with something and I passed out.” He sucked in a breath. “When I woke up, I was bleeding from several cuts. She must have stabbed me, but not enough to kill me. Kill me immediately. She was gone, so I made my way back to the house to call you… She’ll kill Nadja… you must go back and save her…”
Ian and I gazed at each other over Burt’s body.
“We need to get him to an emergency room ASAP,” I said. “If we just drop him there, he’ll be admitted as a John Doe. Or, even better, he can give a false name and claim to have lost his wallet. When he’s been given enough care, we can come get him.” I glanced down at Burt. “You can call us from the hospital.”
“First you need to go save Nadja,” Burt said, his voice weak. “Then take me… I’ll be fine now.”
“He’s right,” I said to Ian. “We need to get Nadja away from Alyssa’s clutches. The longer she’s with her, the bigger the chance that she’ll die. How about you go look for Nadja and I stay here with Burt? You know the geography better than me around here.”
“No, go both,” Burt murmured. “It’s better. If you’re two, you’ll be able to defend yourself if she tries something… She won’t be able to take you out the way she did with me…”
Ian sighed. “It’s true. It’s better if we go together. The darkness will make it a lot riskier what with her being a hybrid. Her night vision might be better than ours.”
“You know where the glade is that he’s talking about?” I asked.
“Yes, I think so.” He glanced down at Burt. “It’s close, isn’t it?”
“Yes, only about five minutes’ walk straight behind the garage…” Burt managed to say.
“Okay,” Ian said and got to his feet. “We’ll bring the spotlight with us. Let’s go. It shouldn’t take very long for us to get her back to the house. Provided she’s in the same spot still.”
I looked down at the black man, who had stopped sweating so profusely now, not feeling good about leaving Burt there all alone, but I also wasn’t comfortable about Ian going out in the dark woods on his own. But Burt was right; we stood a better chance if we went to get Nadja together.
“Let’s move him into a corner and put a gun in his hands,” I said. “That way he can defend himself if she all of a sudden decides to show up here and tries to kill him.”
Ian nodded and, together, we carefully lifted Burt and positioned him so that his back was placed against one of the corners in the hallway, facing the front door. Then we went to pick up the handgun
Burt had left on a kitchen chair per Alyssa’s request and placed it in his hands. Shortly thereafter, Ian and I left via the front door.
The full moon was hiding behind a few gauzy clouds now, making it darker outside, but with the spotlight in our hands, we had all the light we needed. Ian took the lead, going around the wide garage attached to the house, shining the light before us all the while. The trees started to grow only feet after the garage ended, and there were many of them, growing close to one another, most of them tall and their branches thick with needles or leaves.
Ian brushed aside a few branches, but before he entered the woods, he paused and turned to me. “Be sure to stay close to me.”
“I will,” I said, then, urging him on by placing a hand on his back, I added, “Let’s hurry. The sooner we can find Nadja, the sooner we can get back to Burt and get him medical attention.”
“Right,” Ian said. He pushed forth between the trees, me following right behind. It soon became clear that others had walked the path we were on.
We quickly advanced deeper into the woods, neither of us saying a word and keeping our guns at the ready. I could sense that Ian was tense like a wire, just like I was. Alyssa had an advantage over us wherever she was—due to the strong light in Ian’s hand, she’d instantly spot us. From several yards away. Not only that, like Ian had already mentioned, unlike us regular humans, she might also have better night vision, exactly like Burt had claimed to have. She definitely had the upper hand.
Much to my relief and maybe surprise, we soon heard what sounded like water trickling forth somewhere. We must be getting close to the glade.
“Do you think that’s the creek he mentioned?” I asked Ian.
“Yes,” he replied. “The glade should come up soon. Arghh…”
Ian suddenly fell to the ground and the spotlight bounced off, ending up a few yards away from us. Terror shot through me. What the fuck just happened?