by Dan Wells
Part of me wanted to turn away—to plug my ears and pretend I couldn’t hear it—but I didn’t. I listened carefully, straining to catch each word, imagining the scenario in my head. I could only assume that the tortured body I’d seen in the mortuary was one of Forman’s “toys,” that he was the second killer from our earlier conversation. That meant that I’d seen his work before, and I knew what he was doing to Stephanie. The high screams were probably fire; the low grunts probably came from punches and stabs. I knew what each sound meant, and I could have tried to block them out, but it was easier simply to stop caring. Like so many nights in my room as a child, I curled up in the dark and turned myself off.
After a while a second voice joined in the screaming—a man’s voice. Forman’s. It was a horrifying sound: he was screaming at her, but he was also screaming with her at some shared terror. The two voices built together in a crescendo of fear until at last a distant door slammed open and a screaming, crying voice fled down the hallway and past me to the front door. The steps were hard and fast, desperate to leave the house. I heard the outside lock rattle, then again, then a pounding on the front door, then a rattle that finally opened it with a crash. The footsteps ran outside, and Forman’s voice howled a scream so primal that I felt my skin grow cold at the sound. It lasted several seconds and went dead, with no noise but the wind in the trees and the door clapping erratically into the wall.
The footsteps returned, slowly, but this time they steered not into the back room but straight at my closet. I heard a groan, and felt the door creak into place as Forman leaned against it.
“Help me John,” he said, his voice strained. The door rattled as his body shook against it. “Help me. Help me.”
“What do you—” I didn’t know what to say. “What happened?”
“It’s too much,” he said. “Too much pain. Terror. I can’t take it; I can’t take it.”
Forman was a monster—a demon, by his own confession. What could possibly scare him this much? “I can’t help you in here,” I said. Could I use this to escape? “Let me out and tell me what you’re afraid of.”
Something heavy struck the door. His fist, pounding against it.
“Forman? Can you hear me?”
I heard a gasp, then another, like a drowning man finally breaking the surface and desperate for air.
“Forman? Let me out. I can help you.”
“You already have,” he said. His voice was steady now. The door tightened against the frame as he leaned against it, then it went loose again as he stood up. I heard the floor creak as he stepped away.
“What are you talking about?” I shouted. “Forman!”
“You’re a breath of fresh air, John. I’ll see you in the morning.”
He left, and the house fell silent, and then slowly the silence came alive with sounds: muffled whispers, distant sobs, and staccato screams that choked off almost as soon as they appeared. The boards creaked—in the roof, in the walls, in the floor—and behind it all was a low static of clinks and scrapes and shuffles from some dark space below the floor. The house cried; the house groaned; the house breathed and feared and hated.
I closed my eyes and dreamed of death.
16
I came awake to the sound of water running; a shower. Rays of light crept under the closet door, faint, but nearly blinding to my tired eyes. It was morning. The shower was short, followed by a smattering of footsteps. The creak of bed springs. The metallic swish as hangers scraped across a closet bar. The entire house seemed to hold its breath, listening. Soon more footsteps sounded, growing louder as they came closer and then softer as they passed and went on. The front door opened and closed. A ring of keys rattled, muffled by wood and distance. Locks turned and bolts slid into place.
A car door slammed, an engine rumbled, and gravel crunched as the car pulled away. The sound of the engine revved, then faded slowly to nothing.
We were alone.
I forced myself to wait as long as I could before trying to open the door, just to be sure Forman didn’t come back—or that he’d even left at all, and wasn’t just tricking me and hiding in the room beyond. I felt paranoid and sick. The minutes ticked by with agonizing slowness. When I finally convinced myself it was safe, I braced my back against the rear wall of the closet and pushed my feet against the door as hard as I could. It didn’t budge.
I repositioned my body, braced my left foot against the door frame, and lined up a kick with my right. There was a faint line of light outlining the door, and I gauged my kick to land just to the side of it. Thud. Nothing. I kicked again, then again, harder and harder. The door must have been reinforced, just like the walls.
“Who’s doing that?”
I jumped in shock, not expecting the noise, but the voice was soft and distant. It was a woman.
I called back. “Stephanie?”
“Who’s Stephanie? And who are you?” The speaker was somewhere in the house, but in a far corner of it, probably with the door closed. She sounded . . . angry.
“My name is John,” I shouted. “Forman brought me here last night.”
“Are you the one he was playing with?”
Playing with. He’d said something about his “toys;” I guess this confirmed that they were people. “No,” I said. “That was Stephanie. She’s the receptionist at the police station.”
“It doesn’t matter who she is,” said the voice. “Why are you breaking something?” The angry tone was stronger now.
“I’m locked in a closet,” I said. “I’m trying to get out.”
“You think I don’t know that?” she asked. “You’re going to piss him off, and I can guarantee you don’t want him pissed off.”
I paused, remembering the sounds of Stephanie’s screams last night. Why would this woman be so mad at me for trying to escape? “Are you another prisoner here?” I called.
“What the hell else would I be?”
“I can escape,” I said. “I can get out, and I can get help.”
“No!” she shouted. The anger was still there, but joined by something else. Desperation. “What did you say your name was?”
“John.”
“John, listen: I know you think you can get out of here, but you can’t. We’ve all tried. You think we’re just playing around down here? But no one has ever gotten away, and the closer anyone gets the more he hurts us.”
I kicked the door again, hard. It splintered slightly on the edge.
“John!” the voice shouted, enraged. “John, stop it!”
I kicked again, further out from the frame, using it as leverage. The blow bent the wood.
“You’re going to get someone killed!” she shouted. “You think he won’t do it? He’s killed four of us in the last few weeks.”
“Janella Willis,” I shouted, kicking the door again. It bent further. “And Victoria Chatham. I don’t know the other names.”
“How do you know those two?”
“He left them for us to find,” I said. “He was trying to trap me.” I kicked again and the door splintered outward, leaving a long crack and a hole. “But I don’t intend to stay trapped.”
“Dammit!” she shouted. I leaned forward and pushed out the broken piece of door with my hands. It was wide enough to crawl through, but it wouldn’t be comfortable. “You think he’s just going to let this slide? You think nothing’s going to happen? He won’t stop when he’s done with you—he’ll take it out on all of us!”
I bent my head close to the opening, avoiding the shards and splinters of broken door, and peered carefully around the room. It was duller in daylight—dirtier, and emptier. The furniture was old and sagging, and a yellowed roll of wallpaper sat against the side wall.
I reached one arm out, carefully, then used it to push back against the door so I could pull my head and shoulders through the hole. The splintered door scraped against me, raking across my back, but I forced my way past and extracted my other arm. It emerged raw and red through the shat
tered hole. With both arms free I pulled torso through, sucking in my breath to stay as small as possible. Once my hips cleared the hole my legs came easily, and I rolled to my feet with a grimace. My left arm and back were bleeding. The voice was still shouting at me, joined by a chorus of wails.
“How many of you are there?” I shouted.
“Four in the basement,” said the voice, “plus whoever he was playing with last night.”
“Are you sure there’s no more?” I asked, walking to the front window and peering out. We were in the deep woods. The car was gone. “This is a pretty big house.”
“We can hear when he brings people in,” said the voice, “and we can tell when he kills one, because he screams about it for hours. It’s not hard to keep a tally of who’s alive and who’s dead.”
I paused, halfway to the kitchen. “Why does he scream?”
“Because he’s a sick bastard,” the voice growled. “Why do you care?”
“Because after I get out of here, he’s going to come after me again,” I said, entering the kitchen. It was filthy—dishes covered the counters and stove, and the walls were spattered with grease. A cupboard door was missing, and one of the two chairs at the table was barely more than a metal frame around a tattered, hollow cushion. “Next time he comes for me I want to be ready, so I need to know how he works.”
“You’re not going to get away,” the woman’s voice insisted.
Forman’s house was like a shabby reflection of my darkest dreams. Everywhere I looked there were signs of imprisonment, torture, and death: bloodstains on the walls; a long, thick chain bolted to the corner of the floor; scratches and gashes in every surface. A smear of dried, brown blood crossed the floor and slid under the pantry door. A pot on the stove held something dark and murky, full of formless, floating shapes and smelling sickly of meat. The kitchen window was barred. In the hallway beyond I could hear raspy, labored breathing, and somewhere below my feet the basement hummed with the desperate voices of Forman’s toys.
“John,” the woman called, “Please listen to me: if you keep thinking about escaping it will only make it worse when you can’t do it. You’ve got to believe me. I’m telling you this for you own—”
“I’m already out,” I said. “How do I get to the basement?”
Silence. I left the yellow kitchen and probed deeper into the house, following the sound of breathing.
“Hello?” I said. “Can you hear me?”
Another woman screamed from the basement. “Help us!”
“Quiet!” the first woman shouted. They sounded much closer now. “What do you mean you’re out?”
“I broke through the closet door and got out,” I said. “Tell me how to find you.”
“We’re in the basement!” the second woman shouted. “It’s the door in the kitchen!”
“Don’t do this to yourselves!” the first woman said. “I want to get out of here just as much as you do, but we can’t keep setting ourselves up for disappointment like this. I don’t think I can take it anymore.”
I went back in to the kitchen. There was only one door, which I had assumed was a pantry. I tugged on the handle, rattling it in the frame, but the handle was locked. I rattled it again. There was a soft noise from the other side, almost too quiet to hear. I leaned up against the door and heard a low sobbing:
“Please, please, please, please. . . .”
I leaned back and tried the door again. “Does he keep the key on him?”
“How am I supposed to know?” the woman shouted, obviously upset.
“Alright,” I said, “just calm down. I’ll look around.”
“Hurry!” the second woman screamed.
I went back into the hall and into the back of the house, following the pained breathing. It led me to a closed door, but this time it wasn’t locked; I opened it carefully, wary of some kind of trap, but nothing happened. It was a small bedroom, with an empty, coverless mattress on the floor in the corner. The flowered wallpaper was faded and slashed. I opened the door wider and stepped in, and gasped.
Stephanie was hanging against the wall, her wrists tied up with thick ropes that ran up to a pair of ragged holes in the ceiling. They pulled her arms up and to the sides, just high enough that she couldn’t quite kneel; she hung, unconscious, like a crooked cross. She was still wearing her clothes from yesterday—the blouse and skirt she’d worn to work—but they were streaked now with sweat and blood, and a pool of blood and urine had soaked into the carpet around her feet, joining a much larger, much older circle of blood; she was not the first victim to hang in that spot. Her head hung forward limply, her dirty blond hair a long, stringy clump obscuring her face and chest. The room smelled like bitter smoke and singed meat.
I stepped into the room, my mouth open in awe. The scene was terrifying and repulsive and beautiful—here, in one room, was so much of my life distilled to solid form. All the dreams I’d lost sleep to avoid; all my darkest fantasies of what I wanted to do to people. How many times had I imagined this exact scene with my mother, to teach her never to control me again; how many times had I found Brooke here in my mind, desperate for me to save her, eager to do whatever she could to win my favor. I had spent my entire life—built all of my rules, severed all of my human contacts—to avoid this room, but that same focus had made it loom large in my mind, like a phantom triumph. It was simultaneously a personal hell and an unattainable ideal. It was everything I had always denied myself, which made it, inescapably, everything I had ever wanted.
Stephanie’s breath was pained and wheezy; the unnatural angle of her arms was probably constricting her chest and cutting off air to her lungs. Even so, she was breathing, so I knew she was alive, and the fact that she still hadn’t reacted to my entrance—or to my shouted conversation with the women in the basement—meant she was probably unconscious. I stepped closer, studying her closely. Her blouse was short-sleeved, and her arms were covered with red marks—shallow cuts and bright, angry burns. I leaned around the side, peering in at her face behind its web of hair. Purple welts and bruises covered her cheek and eye, and her nose was smashed from Forman’s attack in the police station.
I closed my eyes and remembered her screams.
There was a dresser just a few steps away, covered with an array of tools—not the orderly array of clean torture implements you’d see in a spy movie, but a haphazard pile of kitchen knives and construction tools: screwdrivers, pliers, a vise grip, a hammer. There was a pincushion studded with needles. There was a book of matches, a set of candles, and, oddly, a box of firework sparklers. I picked up a pair of snubnose pliers; there was something black and ragged caught in the metal teeth. I set them back down and picked up a paring knife, its short blade covered with dried blood—layer after layer of it, as if it had cut a hundred victims and never been cleaned.
Stephanie hung motionless from the ropes on her wrists. Completely still, like a corpse. I held the knife toward the corpse, blade up, like an offering. So many dreams . . .
Gravel crunched in the driveway outside, and I looked up abruptly.
“John!” screamed the woman downstairs.
I dropped the knife and took a step toward the door, then stopped, went back, and grabbed the knife again; I didn’t know what good it would be against a demon, but it was better than nothing. If I was lucky, I could get out without confronting him at all.
I ran further into the house, stepping lightly and hoping the floor didn’t squeak. There had to be a back door. I found another bedroom, probably Forman’s own, still largely unfurnished but with a closet full of good suits and clean white shirts. Beyond that was a bathroom, the tiles cracked and mildewed, and beyond that another bedroom, locked this time. There was no back door. I could hide in one of the other rooms and wait until he left again—but no, he’d know as soon as he came in the house that I’d escaped. The broken closet door was practically the first thing he’d see. He’d know I was out, and he’d be looking for me.
The front door opened, a distant jangle of locks and keys, and Forman called out:
“Did you honestly think you could escape, John?” He paused, then spoke again. “That was a new door, John. I’m going to have to get a metal one this time.”
He’d started talking before he was even inside—he’d known I was out before he even saw the door. How?
“Confused, John? That’s natural. Didn’t the toys warn you that nobody ever gets away?”
I crept quietly back toward the room where Stephanie still hung unconscious. There was a window in there; I might be able to open it and get out before he came in.
“Ah,” said Forman, “hope. I feel a lot of that at work, but it’s been a long time since anybody felt it here.” I could hear his footsteps, still several rooms away but coming closer. “If you have hope then you have a plan, but you’re not nearly angry enough to attack me, which means you think you can get away. There’s no back door, and the windows are obviously not an option. What could it be?”
I slipped through the door into Stephanie’s room and glanced at the window—it was barred, just like the kitchen. Was the whole house barred shut?
“Desperation is mounting,” said Forman, his voice drawing closer. “You’re plan isn’t working, or I’m scaring you—maybe both. Either way, you’re out of options.”
If I hadn’t been so focused on Stephanie’s torture the last time I was in here, I would have seen the bars on the windows—what else had I missed? I spun around, looking for anything I could use to get away or fight back. There was a small closet in the corner, but the door was missing, and the pile of boxes inside was too small to hide behind. I could go through the drawers of the dresser, but he was too close now—he’d hear everything I did. I was desperate now, searching for anything I could find: the mattress was old; the single light bulb was off; the rear wall was new sheetrock, still bare. There was a—
There were eyes in the wall.
Right about my own eye level, in the rear wall, there was a hole in the sheetrock with two eyes peeking through. I jumped back, startled, nearly tripping, but it wasn’t Forman—it was someone else, someone dirty and motionless. I paused, waiting for the eyes to move, for the head to shake, for any sign of movement. The eyes blinked and glistened; they were crying.