by L J McIntyre
“So much of this just doesn’t add up.” I put my head in my hands. “There’s no goddammed curse or demon or ghosts. That stuff just doesn’t exist.”
Chapter Thirty Six
“Annie,” I say as I unwrap the GPS tracker from the tinfoil. “I want you to take this and go back to my room in the motel. Here’s the key.”
She stares at me, eyes wide open, colour draining from her cheeks. “What are you talking about?” She shakes her head.
“We need to confuse them, make them think I’m in the motel. That’s the only place they’ll expect me to be.”
“Jack, we can’t split up. It’s dangerous out there.”
“For me it is, but not for you.”
“That doesn’t mean they won’t come after me, clean up any potential witnesses.”
“They could have hurt you the first night you came to town, but they didn’t. Look, I just need you to trust me. I’ll be back in no time.”
“Jack.”
“Please, Annie.”
She contemplates the key in the palm of her hand. “If you’re not back in the room within the hour, I’m going to come looking for you. Give me your phone number.”
After saving my number, she steps up on her toes and kisses me on the cheek. She walks to the door, opens it slowly and peeks out.
“Be careful,” I say as she leaves.
I’m not sure she really needs to be careful. Annie was right when she said the town was always one step ahead. But something tells me that GPS tracker isn’t the reason. God I hope I’m not wrong, but I’ve started to suspect Annie is one of them, one of the townsfolk. If she isn’t, then I’ve just sent her back out to hell, alone and unarmed.
What she said back in the mine, after we ran through the rats, it set something in motion in my mind that I haven’t been able to shake. She said, “The things we do for this town.”
But we’re not doing anything for the town. We’re trying to get away from it. And the thing is, I didn’t see Arthur Dunlovin’s ghost outside the house—my rational mind won’t accept it—which means Annie and Tamati both saw what I saw and both denied it. They must be in cahoots.
But even more convincing than that, I just can’t shake a recent feeling that there are too many coincidences around Annie. We both arrive in Nesgrove on the same day, within the same few minutes, when clearly no one ever comes this way. She lost a friend recently to suicide, and the girl in the lake, Sally, may have committed suicide. Both died in water. And I feel like she’s been guiding me, making me notice things I wouldn’t have seen otherwise.
She spotted the triangle symbol on the tree at the beginning of the trail toward the demon cabin. She suggested we follow that route, see where it would take us. Christ, she even suggested that we go for a walk that morning, and somehow we ended up miraculously at that cabin.
I think, when I walked up the porch to read the writing on the door yesterday, she was hoping I’d go inside and face whatever was in there.
If I’m right, I’ve been walking around with a psychopath all this time.
Oh man, what the hell’s wrong with me? Am I getting too paranoid? It’s been days since I took my anxiety pills. Maybe I’m seeing everything through the lens of mental illness, or maybe it’s withdrawal from the meds. Maybe none of this is as bad as it seems. Perhaps Annie is an amazing person and just as innocent as me in all this. Dr Randel, what the hell do I do? Is it time to finally trust someone even when I suspect the worst in them?
I’m starting to think being alone wasn’t the best idea.
My awareness suddenly opens up and I realise I’m in an old house where six people were murdered, and the hair on my neck prickles and stands on end at the thought of it. The wind outside blows and whistles through weaknesses in the wooden cladding, and without Annie here I feel exposed. I need my medication.
I look around the kitchen.
Tools. Weapons. Something. I need anything useful to help me get out of this mess. I open the cupboard door closest to me. Apart from a few old tins and a box, it’s empty. I go from cupboard to cupboard, drawer to drawer, not entirely sure what it is I’m looking for, but not finding anything useful either.
I follow the hallway until the living room. Footprints and trails are printed in the dust on the floorboards, which creak and groan as I walk. I peer around the doorframe and see old, moth-eaten furniture, a smashed up coffee table, and some empty, dust-free beer bottles on the floor.
I take a step back and notice a cupboard to my right. The door is wedged shut. I yank it hard and the door swings open. Something lunges at me from the cupboard, there’s a loud crash, which sends me reeling backwards. My hand instinctively moves toward my penknife.
I take a breath and relax a little when I see that a broom and mop had fallen and landed on the floor when I opened the door. I tell myself to keep calm while I scan the contents of the cupboard: some rags, old newspapers, plastic bottles and a metal watering can.
I turn around, eye the staircase, look for the bravery to climb the steps.
It’s just a house.
I hold onto the bannister as I climb. Each creaking step announces my impending arrival onto the upper floor. The staircase walls were probably a magenta colour before, but now they’re filthy and smudged with some sort of brown paint or dirt.
At the top of the stairs there’s a landing with a few rooms coming off it, left and right. A bathroom is at the far end of the hallway. The door is open. If I’m going to find anything useful in this house, it’ll more likely be in there.
I walk along the landing and glance quickly in each bedroom. Litter is scattered on the floor in the rooms. A small cot is in the centre of one. In another, two single beds that once held and offered comfort to two children now have mattresses made purely of rusted springs. The frame of a double bed is in the master bedroom. It sits against a wall which has the message, “Where are you now?” sprayed in red paint.
The door to the other room is closed.
That frightens the hell out of me.
I sneak up to the bathroom and carefully crane my neck around the door. The tiles, the ones that aren’t smashed, are pea green. There’s mould and white powdery stuff everywhere on the walls, ceiling and tiled floor. The bathtub is holding a thick layer of what appears to be crumbled plaster. The shower curtain is still perfectly attached to the railing. It’s pulled back above the bath but entirely eaten by black mould. Against the wall, in a plastic holder, is a long rubber-hosed shower.
There doesn’t seem to be anything else in the bathroom, no cupboard or storage to speak of. I turn to the shower again, climb over the lip of the bath and stand inside, on top of the plaster.
I wrap my hands around the shower hose and rip it from the wall, sending wall tiles crashing to the floor. It comes off easier than I’d expected, but I suppose decades of rot will do that. I use brute force, rotating the showerhead with my hand until it snaps off the hose. Now I’m left with a length of rubber tubing about a metre long which I coil around my arm so that it’s more manageable to carry.
I take one last look around the room before I climb out of the tub and go back into the landing. I ignore the first door to my left, the closed door, and approach the next room, the one with the cot in the centre.
There’s a single chest of drawers against the wall to the left, and in the corner…
My body goes stiff.
For a second I tell myself it’s just a hallucination. It’s not real. It can’t hurt me. But that doesn’t make what I’m seeing go away, or make me feel any better.
My breathing quickens and I take a step back.
A stocky child with a dirty white sheet over its head and body, with holes cut out for eyes, stands motionless and watches me from the corner of the room. I think I can see through the holes, see the blank eyes looking back at me. It’s not a toy. It’s not a mannequin. It’s a real thing in front of me.
Its chest starts to bleed.
Chapter Thirty
Seven
Crimson seeps through the sheet. Like a forest fire, it spreads in all directions, most spilling down the child’s stomach and oozing further down the white material until the floorboard underfoot starts to glisten an evil red.
There’s no precedent for this situation in the human mind, no natural response to it that overrides your thoughts and actions to ensure you survive. In other words, I do nothing for an eternity. Everything in front of me feels raw, the details too sharp and crisp, and time drags; all the while blood is spreading, the white sheet almost dyed entirely red.
The tide of vomit rising up my throat sets me in motion, kicks me out of this state of shock, and I swallow hard and start running. I bundle myself down the staircase, plough into the walls, and leap the last five or six steps while managing to stay on two feet.
I try to run through the downstairs hallway but something catches my foot, knocks me to the ground. I kick out at whatever’s grabbed me until I realise my foot is caught in the mop head which is still lying on the floor. I spring up onto two feet, but before I leave, I lean into the cupboard and grab the metal watering can I saw earlier.
I sprint through the house and fling the door open before jumping off the porch and running back toward the factory. My hand is slashed by loose metal on the chicken-wire fence as I squeeze through the opening. I collapse against the wall of the factory, clutching the hose and watering can.
My hands are shaking. Blood is pouring from my left palm, down my wrist, and onto the ground. I drop the things I’m carrying and try to wipe away the blood from the cut. It’s deep. No matter how much blood is pushed aside, even more emerges from the gash. It’s not life-threatening, but it stings like hell.
I feel around the back pocket of my pants and, like a superstitious fool, I pull out the necklace Tamati gave me back at his house. I untie it, put it around my neck, and fumble around for minutes just trying to re-tie it: my hands are shaking too much, my fingers too damp from the blood. Eventually I make a crude knot, pick the hose and watering can up again and try to regain my mental footing.
Freaking out and panicking won’t help me now.
I get to my feet and walk to the edge of the factory wall. I look around at Tragedy House for any movement in the windows, any sign that something really is in there. Nothing happens. Nothing appears.
I run to the fence and then skirt around it and hide behind a large, dented bin. From there I can make out a car parked outside a house, probably five houses down from Tragedy House. I sprint as fast as I can, clutching for dear life the things I’m carrying.
When I get to the car I work as quickly as possible. Fortunately it’s an old vehicle, made before petrol tanks were built to stop thieves accessing them. I unscrew the cap, slip the rubber hose in the tank as far as it can go, put the other end of the hose in my mouth and start sucking.
It doesn’t take long before a cold liquid and bitter chemical taste hit the back of my mouth and force me to gag. I put the hose in the watering can and spit the contents of my mouth on the floor. I eye every direction while I crouch by the side of the car and wait for the can to fill with petrol. My mouth feels like it’s been attacked by a hundred and ninety two proof alcohol.
With so much blood, my hand and wrist look like they’ve been mauled by a dog, but the bleeding’s actually slowed enough to reduce my panic.
I raise my head and listen carefully. A noise, a car engine, is coming closer. I can’t make out where it’s coming from. The engine is getting louder, the vehicle closer, and I’m saying silently, come on, come on, to the flowing petrol.
I catch sight of the car. It’s moving along a road that connects to this street just a stone’s throw from where I’m crouching. I leave the hose and can, and sneak around the back of the car I’m syphoning the fuel from. The other car pulls onto the street but turns left, in the opposite direction from me, and moves slowly away.
Moments later, certain the car’s out of sight, I move back onto the road. I pull the hose out of the almost full can, remove the other end from the tank, and throw it over the road into the long grass. I screw the cap back on the tank and carefully jog to the factory with a watering can of petrol in my hand.
I sit on the grass, knees up to my chest, back against the factory wall, the can of petrol next to me, and I drop my head between my knees. I close my eyes, try to process what I’ve just seen; the bleeding child, Arthur Dunlovin.
How many more things do I have to witness before I start believing my own eyes? The woman outside the café yesterday morning, the barefoot woman with blood on her head: no one saw her, as well. Was she a ghost? Was everyone else in the café playing dumb? Or have I been hallucinating? And the man in the pinstripe suit: who is he? Or more importantly, is he real?
I didn’t know Arthur Dunlovin’s hair was red. How could my hallucination have gotten that right? Although, I didn’t notice his hair or clothes until Tamati described them. Did my mind fill in the blanks because of Tamati’s description?
I raise my head and look closely at the palm of my hand. Crusty blood has filled most of the gash but it’s still bleeding at both ends, red liquid searching for the few places on my hand and wrist that aren’t blood-soaked. I regard the petrol and see a future act of desperation, of taking back some control, of violence.
My watch tells me It’s been fifteen minutes since Annie left. Another forty five to go until she calls in the backup and has the whole town looking for me.
My phone vibrates. I take it out my pocket, use the hand covered in less blood to open it and check my emails. There’s something from Ethan:
Hi mate,
Good news! They’re going to publish your article online as an opinion piece tomorrow. It’s not really the type of thing we’d put in print but the readership online is still decent. Neil seemed to find it entertaining. I’m not sure he fully believes the story but he thinks it could be clickbait material. That’s what being a journalist is all about nowadays, apparently: clickbait.
But listen, I just contacted the British consulate in Auckland and told them you needed help. To apply a bit of pressure on them, at the end of your piece I added that the embassy has been contacted, and have confirmed they will work closely with the authorities to help you. This could just be a standardised response from the embassy. No idea. And who knows how slowly these things move. I gave them your NZ number. Hopefully they’ve been in touch with you by now.
I found the number for the Nesgrove police and called them, too. They declined to comment but I told them I’d alerted the British embassy to their collusion with whatever is going on there.
Just do me a favour; let me know you’re okay.
Ethan
I hit Reply:
Hi Ethan,
You’re a lifesaver. Or at least, I hope you are. I’ll need all the help I can get.
I honestly think I’m losing my mind. This place is so screwed up, so many murders and missing people.
Before I go I just want to say sorry for breaking your watch in the first year of university. Yeah, it was me. I always knew you suspected it was me, and I’ve felt guilty for it ever since.
Sorry mate.
Jack
The article being published online could save the dwindling remnants of my photography career, not to mention give me leverage against this town. I’ve dealt with British consulates a couple of times on my travels, and they’ve been absolutely no use. When I was robbed in Indonesia, they told me to file a report with the local police. That was it. No advice. Nothing.
I look at the next email below Ethan’s. It’s from Tracy Dayton of LaserTek:
Tracy’s email says:
Hi Jack,
What’s been going on recently? Your social media looks like a bloody war zone and you don’t seem to be doing anything about it.
I’m afraid we’re going to have to sever our ties with you and cancel the sponsorship deal. Sorry, but you know we need to be associated with influencers who have nothing
less than a sparkling reputation, and right now, yours is as filthy as it gets. We can’t have ours muddied by association.
All the best
Tracy
She certainly didn’t pull any punches. And there goes my financial lifeline.
The phone sits in my hand, screen beaming bright, and in a twisted way I start to notice how incredible this little thing is. Back in the U.K. I could pick it up and call Ethan to see if he wanted a pint down the pub, or check the football results, or google best T.V. series to watch this year. At my fingertips was the whole world and I embraced it because, well, why wouldn’t I?
But within this technological miracle, is the power to strip away a twenty eight year old life in a matter of hours. All you need is a dash of fake news, a social media platform and a tiny pinch of that ever growing source of online outrage, and you’ve got yourself a stampede of hatred hurling itself toward you so quickly that it destroys every beautiful photo and every meaningful communication you ever put online. In its wake, you’re left with a cyber-void that people of my generation, people who’ve only ever known life with the internet, just aren’t prepared for. My entire online life is close to dead now, including dreams of doing a job I truly enjoy.
I just need to save whatever is left of my pitiful, real life and see what happens from there. First, I have to know what I’m up against. I flick up google and search, “Backpacker murders in Nesgrove.”
Chapter Thirty Eight
Only one result seems to hold any useful information: a podcast episode titled, “The Backpacker Butcher of Nesgrove.” Before I follow the link, I look around to make sure I’m still alone. Apart from the tops of trees swaying and swishing in the wind, the forest is quiet. I put my head down and go to the podcast home page.
‘The Darkness Without’, the podcast show is called, and each week it details a different murder with a new guest who is a supposed expert in that particular case. The more gruesome the murder, the better. It’s a popular show that I’ve listened to a few times in the past while waiting for public transport. The Nesgrove episode is thirty minutes long, thirty minutes I can’t spare right now. I download it directly to my phone to listen to it later.