99 Souls

by Gabriel Burns

  Trevor was once again impressed by his offspring. He dove into the air, clearing the railing with both feet. With his left hand, he grabbed one of the third-floor posts and swung onto the second floor balcony. Repeating that same jump, he made it to the ground in seconds.

  Ashley had moved back from her landing position, but had not yet started to run. Her mind was slow to process what she had just witnessed.

  Trevor grabbed her wrist and pulled her close. He put a hand on her forehead. The fear on her face faded. Her eyes closed and she went limp.

  It was the same trick he’d used on Brandon twice. Just as he could impart emotions by touch, he could render others unconscious through the energy they shared when connected.

  Hoisting her over his shoulder, he folded light and shadow around them until they all but disappeared, becoming a wrinkle of light on the landscape.

  Chapter 37

  TWO UNIFORMED OFFICERS ESCORTED Jim out of the holding room—one in front, one behind. Although glad to be away from the drug addicts and thieves and God-knows-what-else, Jim couldn't shake the feeling that things were going to get worse. "Where are you taking me?" he nervously asked the officers.

  “This way,” the one in front replied, without turning or slowing down.

  They led him into a narrow hallway with cinderblock walls. When they reached a black steel door, they stopped and the leading officer pressed the intercom button. He announced himself as Officer Rodriguez and his partner as Officer Brown.

  They were buzzed through.

  Another hallway. Another door. Another buzzer.

  Suddenly, Jim found himself in the station lobby. The room was filled with guests waiting for their loved ones to be released, demanding to speak to officers, and comforting friends.

  “Like I said,” the desk clerk was telling a man in a mud-stained tee shirt, “someone will be down to speak with you in a minute.”

  Jim saw Detectives Hammond and Armstrong seated on a long bench near the door. They stood and approached.

  “Thank you,” Detective Hammond said to the two officers.

  Officer Rodriguez nodded. He and his partner returned the way they had come.

  “Mr. Rossin,” Detective Hammond said, extending his right hand, “I'm so sorry this has happened to you.”

  With eyebrows tensed, Jim looked from one detective to the other. His lips were parted like he wanted to say something, but couldn't find the words.

  “Brandon called us looking for his mom,” Detective Armstrong said. “I took the call. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get to him in time and now it looks like he’s back in the hands of his abductor.”

  Hammond lowered his hand. “We were barking up the wrong tree. I’m sorry. We could really use your help.”

  “Or, specifically, Ms. Winslow’s,” Les said.

  Jim wondered if that could really be true. He wanted to believe it, not just because it meant he and Sarah were no longer suspects, but more importantly because it meant Brandon was still alive.

  The police would never have brought him to the lobby if he weren’t, in fact, free, he told himself. They would have taken him to a small room, sat him in a wooden chair, shined a bright light in his eyes, and hovered over him, demanding answers until he broke down into tears.

  As Jim reasoned through his situation, his paranoia subsided. “What can I do?”

  “We need to reach Sarah. Do you know where she is?”

  “No, but I can get in touch with her. How can she help?”

  “When Brandon called us, we traced the number to a neighborhood in Marietta. We think his abductor must live nearby,” explained Hammond.

  “We’re hoping Sarah can give us some insight into this neighborhood,” Armstrong added. “Maybe she’s been there for one thing or another. Maybe she knows some people. At the very least, we’d like her to help us build a suspect composite. We can use software down here at the station and put together something much more accurate than the description she gave us at her house.”

  “Would you mind giving her a call?” asked Hammond. Although still worn by fatigue, his face no longer suggested he was a man suspicious of everyone. To Jim, at least right now, he looked kind.

  SARAH DIDN’T HAVE A destination in mind. She had no money and nowhere to go. At one time, she would have turned to her parents for help, but her mother had died more than a year ago and her father was now living in Briarcliff Gardens, an assisted living facility, where he was slowly losing his battle with dementia. Even on a good day, he might not remember Brandon. On a bad day, he wouldn’t remember her.

  She sat in a plastic bucket seat next to a window and clutched the cell phone Jim had given her. She hoped against hope that he would call. Desperate, she tried to think of a scenario that would include him escaping the police. She stitched together story lines, but each was more absurd than the last.

  She was on her own, with nothing to do but wait to be told that Brandon had been found dead with God is—

  Don’t think about that. He’ll be all right.

  But her mind persisted. And then what comes after that? The police might still blame me. They might still arrest me.

  When the phone finally rang, it took her by surprise. Startled, she stared at the caller ID. The number was blocked. For two long rings, she watched it flash and vibrate in her hands.

  “Yo, you gonna answer that or what?” A man sitting across from her pushed his dreadlocks away from his face, then wiped his hand on his ratty green sweater.

  She smiled apologetically at him and put the phone to her ear. “Hello?” she said, expecting a wrong number.

  “Caterpillar.”

  “Jim? Jim, oh my God, it’s you. Where are you calling me from? Are you in jail?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t understand. I saw you get arrested.”

  “Arrested,” commented Dreadlocks, who was listening in on her conversation. “Sheeeeet. I know what that’s like. Those po-po ain’t no good time.”

  Sarah glanced at the stranger. He winked at her.

  She got up and squeezed past other passengers, moving to the back of the bus.

  “I’m out,” Jim told her.

  “Why you gotta do me like that?” Dreadlocks shouted as Sarah walked away.

  Sitting by another window, now facing forward, she asked Jim, “They let you go?”

  “They know I’m innocent, Sarah. They know you are, too.”

  “Really?”

  “I swear.”

  “How?”

  “Brandon called them.”

  Her heart drummed with excitement and her hope, which had been drained to nearly nothing moments ago, was renewed. “He did? He’s okay? The police have him?” The questions came rapidly, one after another, without time for Jim to respond.

  “Calm down. Please. It’s not all good news, but it’s much better than we could have expected. They know he’s alive and they know where he called from. They also think they know the area of town he’s in.”

  “I don’t understand. How could he have called them? How come they don’t have him?”

  “Apparently he escaped from his kidnapper, at least for a little while. When he did, he called your cell phone looking for you and Detective Armstrong answered it, but by the time they got to the address he’d called from, the kidnapper had already found him.”

  Sarah slumped in her chair. “Oh.”

  “The detectives were hoping you would sit down with them and give a description of the guy.”

  “You sure this isn’t a trick?”

  “I promise. They’re on our side. Where are you?”

  “I’m on a bus.”

  “Okay. Get off at the next stop and give me the cross streets. They’ll send the closest cop car to pick you up.”

  Chapter 38

  WHEN TREVOR CARRIED ASHLEY into the guest bedroom, she was still unconscious. This time, he made sure to close and lock the door after stepping over the threshold.

  He l
aid Ashley on the bed and said to Brandon, “When she wakes up, you can tell her what I told you, if you like. She is your sister, after all.”

  BRANDON NODDED HIS understanding. After the stories the bad man had told, after seeing the dolls in the basement and seeing him kill, Brandon was too scared to argue.

  The bad man nodded back a thank you. Then he left.

  Alone in the room, Brandon stood by the bed watching Ashley’s belly rise and fall slowly as she breathed. He wondered when she would wake up. After a while, he returned to his spot on the floor, his “post.” At different times while sitting there, he had imagined himself as a captive war hero, an imprisoned knight, and now, due to the arrival of his roommate, a defender of the innocent.

  He must figure out how to control this new trick now, he told himself. He was no longer the only one in danger.

  As he had before, he stared at the lock. He imagined sliding the key he’d seen in the bad man’s hand into it. He imagined the mechanism turning, the door opening. This time, he played out the scenario without drawing upon the energy he needed to keep back the ghosts of ghosts.

  When nothing happened, he repeated the scenario. Key in, mechanism turning. The lock started to rattle. It wasn’t much, but it was enough for Brandon to know he was flexing the right muscle.

  From behind, he heard a voice. “Where am I?” Groggy, weak. He turned to see Ashley sitting on the bed, slouched forward, rubbing her head.

  Brandon stood and padded in his pajama feet over to her. “In a bedroom,” he answered.

  She looked up at him. “Who are you?”

  “Brandon.”

  “This is your bedroom?”

  Brandon shook his head no.

  “Whose bedroom is it?”

  He shrugged.

  “How did I get here?” When Brandon didn’t answer, shrug, or nod in response to this last question, she turned her attention to the bedspread and asked again, this time to herself, “How did I get here?”

  Brandon watched her eyes move as she tried to rebuild her memories. “I was at the art store... I was there to get supplies for my science project. Then... I went home, and... and I went to my room to study, and...”

  “There was a bad man,” he finally said.

  With that, she seemed to remember everything. She looked at him. “Yes, there was. You know him?”

  “No.”

  After another moment inside her own head, Ashley jumped from the bed and ran to the door. She tried to pull the handle, but the door wouldn’t open. “Help!” she screamed. “Help! Let me out!”

  She crossed to the windows and, like so many others had, tried to pry them from their frames. They wouldn’t budge. Once she’d exhausted herself, she approached Brandon. Kneeling before him, she asked, “You don’t know another way out, do you?”

  “There isn’t one.”

  “What do you mean? There has to be another way out!”

  Brandon shook his head no.

  “How long have you been here?”

  “One day... I think.”

  “That’s it? Just one day?” She looked around at the toys on the floor. “There are others, aren’t there? There have to be others. All these toys can’t be just for you, can they?” Her gaze shifted from one toy to another as she cataloged and sorted them in her mind. “No, they can’t all be for you. Some are girls’ toys.” Then, looking again at Brandon: “There are others, aren’t there?”

  Brandon resisted the urge to say, “Not anymore.”

  Chapter 39

  WHEN SARAH SAW JIM AT THE police station, she ran to him and hugged him. “You don’t know how glad I am to see you’re okay,” she said into his shoulder. After letting go, she ran a knuckle under each glassy eye.

  “You, too,” he said. “Believe me.”

  Once the reunion was over, Mark Hammond apologized for falsely accusing her, and Les Armstrong introduced herself.

  “We’d like to get you with a trained FACES officer right away,” Mark said.

  “What’s that?” Sarah asked.

  “It’s the modern-day version of a sketch artist,” Les explained. “It’s software that lets us build a composite of the suspect more quickly and accurately than a sketch artist could.”

  “Oh, sure. Of course, I’ll do it,” Sarah responded.

  “Come with us.”

  Mark led the group to an elevator and up to the fifth floor, where he deposited Sarah and Jim in a conference room that was barely big enough for a whiteboard and a wooden table that sat six. With no windows looking out onto the hallway, the room was suffocating. Les said she would wait with them while Mark went to get one of the FACES officers.

  “You’re the one who talked to Brandon?” Sarah asked Les after they were all seated.

  “I was.”

  Without realizing what she was doing, Sarah reached over to Jim, who was sitting beside her, and squeezed his hand.

  Jim looked down at the armrest, where her hand held his, and squeezed back. As he did, his heart ached. All he could be right now was her rock, tethering her to reality as she drifted atop the turbulent seas of worry and desperation. He wondered if the gesture suggested that one day she might want something more.

  “How did he sound?” Sarah asked.

  “He sounded all right. I don’t think anything bad has happened to him yet.”

  Sarah bit her lip.

  “We’re going to find him.”

  “I hope so.”

  “I’m as sure as I’ve ever been. We know he’s alive. We know where to start searching. Soon, we’ll know what the perp looks like. We really couldn’t ask for much more than that.”

  Before Sarah could respond, Mark returned with a man carrying a laptop. Presumably the FACES officer. “Sit there,” Mark told him, pointing to the head of the table, “next to Sarah Winslow.”

  Mark took a seat beside his partner. “Sarah, this Officer Harman McClain.”

  She shook his hand.

  Harman assured her they would get her son back safely. Then he opened the laptop and asked her to tell him what the suspect looked like.

  As Sarah described the kidnapper, his fingers sweeping across the touchpad. The face that began to take shape on the screen was nearly an exact match to her memory.

  “Is that really what he looked like?” Jim asked Sarah.

  “The nose is too big.”

  Harman applied a smaller one. When he finally finished, Sarah said the composite was perfect.

  “Great,” said Mark.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “I’m going to go get this out over the wire,” Harman answered, as he closed the laptop and hurried out of the room.

  “You two mind sticking around in case we need you for anything else?” Mark asked.

  “Of course not,” said Jim.

  Chapter 40

  TREVOR DIDN’T HEAR ASHLEY screaming until he came up from the basement to get a glass of water. She was ranting about other children, about being trapped. She was hollering for help.

  If the police came back, he had no doubt they’d hear her. That wouldn’t do.

  Maybe she was screaming louder than she would have otherwise because she wasn’t alone. He couldn’t remember any of the others screaming so loud. Maybe Brandon had told her about the woman he’d seen him kill.

  Ashley’s doll was little more than a lump of clay, but he no longer felt he had the time to finish it; he had to silence her now. Not only would her screaming betray Trevor’s plan if the police showed up, it was undoubtedly compounding his son’s fear.

  He loved both of the children upstairs too much to let either suffer needlessly.

  In this one case, he decided, he would forgo his ritual. For the sake of the children. But just this one time. Brandon’s doll was almost done and he was far too important to deserve anything less.

  He took off the paint-stained apron, folded it in half, and laid it on the granite countertop in the kitchen. Then he methodically washed his hands,
working the soap around his nails and between his fingers for a good minute.

  All the while, the screaming upstairs continued.

  After he dried his hands on the towel that hung above the sink, Trevor climbed the stairs, pulled the skeleton key from his pocket, and unlocked the bedroom door.

  When the key turned inside the lock, though, it did something more than simply rotate the cylinder. It was that something more which had made futile all of Brandon’s efforts to psychically unlock it.

  As the key slid into place, there was a kind of twinkling, a sparkle of light in the darkness between it and the pins it pushed into position. This twinkling was the result of unraveling space, an actual contortion of the universe and its energy. It was the same kind of contortion Trevor’s visitors had used to form their physical bodies and enabled Trevor himself to hide in plain sight during so many abductions. Sarah and Jim had driven right past him on their way back to Sarah’s house immediately after Brandon had been taken, the car’s headlights fading briefly as the universal fabric Trevor cloaked himself in pulled at the car. How many friends, parents, lovers had come within feet of him when he had disappeared with one of his children? Dozens?

  By harnessing the charge of energy that flows constantly around us, he, like his visitors, could manipulate any number of things in the physical world.

  “I need you to come with me,” he told Ashley, once he was on the other side of the door.

  Trembling, but no longer screaming, she backed away from Trevor. “It’s you,” she muttered. “You killed him. You killed my boyfriend.” When her heel hit the wall, she started screaming again. “Help! Help! Somebody get me out of here! I don’t want to die! Heeeeeeelllllp!”

  Trevor pointed to Brandon, who was between him and Ashley. “Go stand in the other corner.”

  “Help! Somebody! Please!”

  Brandon also took a step back.

  “Now!” Trevor shouted at him, and then he did as he was told.