by H G Lynch
That thought broke something inside her, and Ingrid crumbled. She let her tears loose and cried until she was shaking and her vision was so blurry, she couldn’t see anything in the darkness. Her head hurt, her eyes were itchy, and her jaw ached. She cried until she felt hollow inside and she was so exhausted, she couldn’t even be scared or upset any more. Her eyes slid closed, and as hard as she tried, she couldn’t open them again. She fell into a fitful sleep there on the floor, and nightmares invaded her mind, slowly eating away at her even as she slept.
Part 2
Ingrid awoke to the sound of rattling and reluctantly pried her eyes open to stare into the darkness. Her eyes felt sore and gritty, and her whole body hurt. Her clothes were heavy and itchy. It took her a moment to realise where she was, and then she remembered everything.
Terror lurched into her, and she bolted upright, scanning the darkness and waiting impatiently for her eyes to adjust. The sound came again, and her heart drummed painfully in her chest. She looked to the door, terrified that it was the handle rattling, but it was still. The strange noise was coming from the dresser.
Ingrid pushed her hair out of her face and started to get off the bed to go and investigate when she paused, realising she hadn’t been on the bed when she’d gone to sleep. She’d been on the floor by the door. How on Earth had she gotten to the bed? Had she sleepwalked? She didn’t usually do such things.
It didn’t matter. What mattered was that the top drawer of the dresser was still rattling as if something was inside and trying to escape. Hey, maybe it’s Tinkerbell, Ingrid thought with a weak, trembling smile. The sad joke was her way of trying to pretend she wasn’t as scared as she was. It didn’t really help, especially as she neared the dresser and noted the curtains swaying in an imaginary breeze. The windows were boarded up tight, so there was no way there was enough of a draft to be swinging the heavy curtains like that. Cautiously, she put her fingers on the handle of the rattling drawer, and it instantly stopped. The curtains billowed out suddenly, and she shrieked in surprise as the fabric folds tried to bind her up and swallow her whole. She stumbled backward, tripped over her own feet, and tumbled to the floor, whacking her elbow painfully.
As quickly as they’d flared to life, the curtains went still, and Ingrid was left staring, wide-eyed, at the dusty lengths of blue canvas. Her heart slowly returned to its normal pace, and she got to her feet carefully. Biting her lip, she anxiously reached for the dresser drawer again and touched the handle, pausing in case it decided to come to life again. It didn’t. Lifting her other arm to shield her face or fight off anything that might spring out of the drawer, she slowly inched it open. Thankfully, nothing jumped out at her, and she lowered her arm to peer inside.
A dusty, worn copy of Macbeth and a colourless, painfully outdated chemistry textbook lay within. Ingrid swiped the dust off the cover and pulled it out. Cracking the cover, she read the publishing date on the inside page and snorted—then sneezed as she got a nose full of dust. The textbook was from 1994. Even older than the textbooks in her ratty academy. Ingrid flicked through the grey pages, trying not to snort more dust. Under the lists of questions at the ends of chapters, there were answers and notations written in small, distinctly male, handwriting.
Outside, a crow cawed somewhere, a raucous omen that made a shiver run down Ingrid’s back. Her stomach clenched, and she was thrown abruptly back in time to the night she’d almost died.
She’d been eight when it had happened. She‘d been just playing in the park one day, waiting for one of her friends, but they hadn’t shown up. It was getting late, getting dark, and she had known she should go home, but she didn’t want to. She’d thought it would be cool to stay out a little later by herself.
She hadn’t even seen him until he’d grabbed her. A guy, a man. She hadn’t seen him come into the park, hadn’t heard him, hadn’t notice him until his hand was over her mouth and he was holding a knife to her throat.
She had screamed and screamed, but nobody had heard her. There had been nobody on the street. It had been so dark. She’d been so scared. She had felt the sting of the knife touching her neck, the coldness of the blood that had crawled down her collar from the tiny cut he’d made as he’d pulled her into darkest corner of the park where the shadows were so thick under the oak trees that nobody would have been able to see her from the street.
She had struggled, kicked, clawed, and had even bit his hand, but he had been so much stronger and she’d had just worn herself out. Too terrified to think, all she had been able to do was fight him.
He’d whispered in her ear, “Without a soul, I wander in hell, blood on my hands as I ring the devil’s bell.” Then he’d started cutting her. Just cutting her all over, laughing as she’d screamed into his hand, knowing nobody would hear.
She could remember the exact moment when she’d realised nobody was going to save her as she’d watched blood staining her t-shirt and splashing to the dirt. That moment had hurt. It had hurt so much. He’d held a handful of her hair at one point, after she’d stopped screaming, and he’d tried to make her kneel. She had collapsed instead, lying in the dirt, bloody and whimpering. Then she’d passed out.
The next thing she remembered was being in the hospital, surrounded by nurses and doctors, and covered in bandages. Her parents had been there, too. Her mother had cried. They had talked to the doctor, asking what had happened. It was kind of obvious, but they had been distraught, of course. The doctor had said Ingrid would have some permanent scars, but it would be the mental trauma that would affect her most. The police had come, asked questions, and had told her that the man who’d attacked her had killed several other girls. The line he’d whispered to her had been carved into those girls’ bodies. The newspapers had nicknamed him The Devil’s Bell Killer.
Nobody knew why the man hadn’t killed her. The police thought he’d been interrupted, because apparently a witness had seen someone running away from the park. She’d gone to therapy for years afterward and took self-defence classes, but the fear never went away.
Ingrid shook herself out of the horrific memory. It took her a long moment to realise that she was crying hysterically, shaking, every breath a shallow gasp into heaving lungs, every tear containing a glinting memory that cut like the blade.
Somewhere below, there was bang. The scream of wrenching metal tearing from wood as a door burst inward. Ingrid felt her heart stop inside her chest. With icy hands stroking her spine and an iron fist clenching around her lungs, she gagged on the sharp taste of terror once more.
She knew, had known all night, somewhere deep inside, that this was her last night.
In panic, she looked to the boarded up window, already knowing there was no way out of it. She’d need a hammer to remove the nails holding the boards to the walls, and there were more planks of wood on the outside anyway. There was nowhere to hide, nowhere to run, and no escape. The only two doors out of the house were downstairs, all the windows boarded like the one before her, and all the other rooms emptier. There was the attic, but if she was going to die, she didn’t want it to be where her body wouldn’t be found. Somebody would have to find her, so they could tell her parents.
Maybe the police will catch him this time.
With that thought came a sort of resignation, a realisation of exhaustion. She was so, so tired of being scared, of hiding from the world instead of being a part of it, of being a body without a soul.
The stairs moaned their warnings as death crept closer, and she grabbed a pen and paper from the desk. Her hand was shaking so badly that she nearly dropped the pen. Her writing came out almost illegible, but it was all she could do. All she could do to say goodbye to her parents.
A creak right outside the door alerted her to the nearness of her impending murder. Her heart spasmed against her ribs, her stomach heaved over and over again, and sweat trickled down her neck and made her palms wet, slick, and cold. She stood still and silent, waiting. She noted everything in the room in
slow motion as the door slid open, inch by agonising inch. Streaks of dust on the grimy, moulded floorboards, the darkness of the shadows crouched in the corners with the gauzy moths, the smell of age, decay, and fear.
She turned away from the door. She didn’t want to see it coming. She couldn’t see the killer intruding, but she could feel his presence like a cloud of toxic smoke moving over her. She was as unfeeling as stone, already gone from the real world as her mind shut itself down, paralysed.
She felt the hot flare of agony as a blade slid into her back, spearing her heart and lung. White stars flashed behind her closed lids, pain bright as a supernova burning through her, causing her to gasp thick air into lungs flooding with blood. She didn’t feel anything else as she fell to the floor, her legs numb under her, her blood gone cold and spilling into the dust. She saw, before everything went white and then black, the ghost of a small boy, looking down on her like a sad angel.
The last thing she knew as she died was a voice, dark and chilling, speaking in her ear.
“Without a soul, I wander in hell, blood on my hands as I ring the devil’s bell, broken under public eyes as I pretend…and now you join me, my soulless friend.”