Disembodied Bones (11 page)

She didn’t pause to survey the damage. Leonie
twisted back onto the ladder and allowed Douglas to pull her up.
There was a long moment in time where she couldn’t find purchase,
where her feet seemed to move like they would in a dream, eternally
stuck in a sea of glue, endlessly seeking the steps so that she
could escape that which threatened them so horrifically. She was
certain that Whitechapel would recover in that eternal moment; he
would reach up once again with maddeningly powerful fingers to
restrain her once more and finish what he had started. Then her
body was moving, mostly under her own steam, partly with Douglas’s
help.

It seemed like Leonie and Douglas couldn’t
move fast enough. They were surrounded by blackness and only a
rectangle of light shown up in a warm, musty place full of shifting
shadows. The floor was finished with rough plywood and their heads
almost touched the dark shapes above them that were struts overhead
forming the shape of the roof. Boxes and old furniture was piled in
every corner with only a narrow passage to allow them through.

Douglas was directing her, pulling her along
with him, through a constricted corridor made from someone
depositing old and unused possessions in a place where no one would
likely see them again. He bounced off a box, causing it to fall and
disgorge its contents on the rough wooden surface below. Recovering
quickly he tugged at her arm to guide her away from the obstacle.
Leonie looked over her shoulder at the patch of light that dimly
illuminated the area, knowing that Whitechapel would appear at any
moment.

They turned a corner as Leonie saw a shadow
block out the little bit of light at the attic opening. She started
to trip and Douglas jerked her to her feet. “Hurry,” he whispered.
“You got him good, but he’s still coming.”

“I know,” she whispered back and blinked
furiously, trying to get her eyes to adjust to the darkness. They
slowed to an almost unbearable pace and when Whitechapel called to
them, they only stilled for a moment.

“Douglas,” he called and his deep voice made
an eerie echo in the stale airlessness of the attic. He sounded
congested and she abruptly realized it was because she had broken
his nose. “I don’t want to hurt
you.
”

Douglas started to say something and Leonie
covered his lips with her fingers, finding them unerringly in the
blackness. They were both deathly afraid and she wondered that she
could feel the younger boy’s fear so plainly along aside her
own.

“We can be happy without her. All I want to
do is have fun with you. We can play together. I have a thousand
toys we can play with,” Whitechapel’s voice was strangely odd in
the staleness as if he were trying to convince himself that what he
was saying was true. “I can buy whatever you want. You like arcade
games. I can have a hundred of them, just for you.”

Then it was Leonie tugging Douglas along in
her wake. She was feeling her way along boxes and pieces of
furniture, wincing and biting her lip when she knocked her shin on
an old rocking chair. She felt a pile of something that felt like
knobby baseball bats and quickly grabbed one with the hand of the
injured arm, fully intent on using it for some form of meager
protection. She risked looking back once and saw that Whitechapel
was inside the attic, blocking out the light from below, inching
his way behind them. From his slow rate, she guessed he wasn’t that
familiar with the attic and that perhaps he didn’t spend much time
in this place. Down below in the terrifying house full of toys and
games he would have the advantage, but here, they had the darkness
and it was on their side.

“Hide,” she whispered to Douglas. “Hide in
the boxes and I’ll lead him away from you.”

“No.” His childish voice was low but firm. In
a second, Leonie realized that Douglas probably had made the first
step into adulthood. Whitechapel had forced nature to speed its
course with him. He would never be the same. “No. I’m going with
you.”

Leonie knew they didn’t have time to argue.
She directed his hand to hold onto the waistband of her jeans and
continued through the stark darkness. When she found a door, she
was elated. But upon opening the undersized aperture, she found
that the stairs inside didn’t lead down. They went up. And they
could hear Whitechapel moving rapidly through the attic, closing in
on them. He tripped over the box that Douglas had upended and they
heard him curse.

The two children went into the doorway and
Leonie carefully shut the door behind them, hopeful that
Whitechapel might think they had found the door that led down
instead.

•

“What the hell are you doing here?” Roosevelt
demanded of Jacques, Louis, and another man he didn’t
recognize.

Jacques was halfway inside his truck, the
door wide open, one hand on the steering wheel, and an indomitable
expression tainted with anger. “She’s inside there,” he said
quietly.

Roosevelt had pulled the sedan up so that it
blocked the gates. Leonie’s father gave him a grim look and added,
“Move your car,
M’su
detective.”

“How do you know she’s in there?” Roosevelt
couldn’t help the question. All the rumors he’d heard about the
Lake People were swirling around in his head like a mass of angry
bees. What if Leonie was speaking nothing but the truth? What if
she really knows where the Trent boy is, and she had come to what?
Rescue him? His face showed his troubled thoughts. And I didn’t
believe a word she said, because it sounded like a little kid
making up some big story. Shining a cop on.

Louis shrugged almost carelessly. “We know.
Just take our word on it. And we need to get in there before it’s
too late.”

“MOVE YOUR CAR, GODDAMNIT!” Jacques suddenly
screamed at Roosevelt. A little drip of spittle flew from his mouth
as he yelled at the large black man. Despite himself Roosevelt took
a step backwards. Jacques’s voice went down in volume, but the
virulence was still there, and the slight French accent
unconsciously thickened. “You want a child’s death on your hands.
Not one,
non
? But two. Are you so stupid that you can’t
understand that not everything is as night and day as in a police
manual?”

•

The staircase was darker than the attic.
Leonie ignored everything except the feel of Douglas holding onto
her waistband and moved upward. One hand felt along the steep,
narrow stairs. The other held the object she’d picked up before,
afraid to let it go. She let it poke the air ahead of them, not
wanting to careen into something and cause unnecessary noise that
would alert Whitechapel of their location.

How can this staircase be so tall
? she
wondered with some trepidation.
Only two floors and an attic
and-
Leonie found the door with her head, except it was tilted
inward, to follow the slant of the roof. Her head’s impact made a
resounding thud on the door and both children hesitated in frozen
anxiety. She put the baseball-bat-like object between her legs and
felt for a knob or a latch and time seemed to hang in limbo.

“Hurry, Leonie,” Douglas whispered
frantically. His fingers tugged at her jeans.

There was a little sliding mechanism at the
top of the door and Leonie found it with a snort of relief. She
slid it back with one hand and retrieved her makeshift weapon from
between her legs. There was a thundering noise that made them both
start violently. Leonie had a passing thought that the previously
clear blue day that it had been had suddenly become fraught with a
thunderstorm. Even in the darkness of the stairwell, a flash of
lightning could be seen.

Then it repeated itself and Leonie knew
exactly what it was. Not wasting even another microsecond, she used
her bad shoulder to shove the door open to the roof of the large
house. Exploding out the opening, she dragged Douglas with her and
out of the corner of her eye she saw Whitechapel at the base of the
stairs, firing a pistol at them. No, he was firing a pistol at her
alone, its muzzle tracking her movement. In the darkness he had
fired above their heads, trying to make them give up so that he
could still have the boy.

Whitechapel was roaring as loudly as the
retort of the gun. “I WON’T LET YOU GO, DOUGLAS!” It was then that
she knew that he had lost all sense of reality. He believed that
Douglas belonged to him and that Leonie was taking the boy away
from him. Up until this point in time he had been impervious to
harm. He had laughed at the authorities’ attempts to find previous
missing children who he had taken, but this time it was this little
scrap of a child who was thwarting him and he couldn’t have it. He
would kill them both to prevent it.

Leonie yanked Douglas away from the opening
and used her foot to slam it shut. She knew that it was a poor
barrier at best. The larger, stronger man didn’t even have a
sliding lock to prevent him from coming after them. She shoved the
younger boy away from her and shrieked at him, “RUN, DOUGLAS!”

This time Douglas ran, scrambling up the
peaks of the roofs.

•

Jacques stopped as they heard a new noise.
The four men’s heads turned as one toward the back of the big
house. The unambiguous sounds of gunshots carried back to them,
deadly whizzing noises that rippled on the wind.

“Merciful
Dieu
,” prayed Louis and
Jacques couldn’t even clear the dry knot of pain from his throat to
say anything.

Only seconds later as Roosevelt was calling
for backup on his radio, they all saw the little boy waving crazily
from the roof. He had seen them and was leaping up and down as if
it would save his life by the very action. But Roosevelt ignored
the child and shot the mechanism of the gate instead, utilizing the
strength of the other men to push the gates apart.

The little boy stopped for a moment and
twisted around to stare at something the men below couldn’t see.
Another sharp popping noise came flying across to them.

•

Leonie turned back to the opening. It started
to open rapidly and she threw herself on it, using all of her
weight to pound it back down. With a bone-jarring hit, she knew it
worked for a moment. Whitechapel screamed with pain as the solid
wood connected with his head and there was a loud series of
crashing noises as he fell back down the stairs a little ways. She
dragged herself to her feet and ran after Douglas.

Halfway across the peak two more shots rang
out as Whitechapel fired from within the staircase, trying to
eliminate his small nemesis. Leonie ducked and ran faster,
scrambling up the steep peak of the roof to discover that Douglas
was already on the opposite side of the house, frantically looking
for a way to get down from. Then he was yelling loudly at someone
she couldn’t see and waving his arms back and forth, “Help us!”

Leonie hesitated and tripped. She slid down
one crest, skinning her elbows on the roughhewn tiles of the roof
and caught herself just before she fell onto a huge glass skylight.
She looked down and saw the wondrously creepy carousel she’d passed
earlier. The animals seemed to sneer at her, the light of the sun
bouncing off their intricate carvings and jeweled
accoutrements.

Then Whitechapel picked her up by her hair,
turning her body toward him, and thrust his face into hers. “You
little bitch,” he growled at her. His face was a perverted mask of
frenzied emotion. He was ready to rip her to shreds and throw the
pieces off the roof. “How did you know Douglas was here? You
couldn’t have known. My plan was perfect.”

An eerie calm came over Leonie. One of her
hands rested on Whitechapel’s shoulder as if what he was doing
wasn’t causing excruciating pain to her scalp and neck. She
answered him coolly, “I knew because he’s missing.”

“Missing,” Whitechapel echoed numbly. The
incredible anger started to slip away from his face as he pondered
her answer.

“I can feel his mother’s pain. She misses him
like you stole a part of her soul.”

“What a crock of bullshit,” he cursed
vehemently, giving her a furious shake like he would correct a
disobedient animal. Whitechapel raised the Smith and Wesson and
cocked it again. But Leonie was already shoving the thing she had
picked up in the attic toward his body. When she came into the
light she saw that it was a broken off wooden horn of a unicorn
that been replaced with another at some point in time in the past.
There had been a pile of replacement pieces for the carousel inside
the attic, legs, horns, and poles that could be used in the future
or could be discarded without thought. Without hesitation, she
thrust the sharp tip of the unicorn’s horn into his chest. She felt
resistance and her hurt shoulder erupted into more pain than she
would have ever imagined, but still she pushed until the carved
horn cracked in her hand and there was nothing left to push.

Whitechapel made a gurgling noise and dropped
her. With utter disbelief, he looked down at the horn sticking into
his chest. Leonie bounced off the glass of the skylight, the motion
causing the large pane to shudder and another more terrifying noise
followed. The sound of glass splintering was just as chilling as a
spider web of cracks appeared beneath her. She stared horrified at
the man she had just stabbed. He stood there for a second, blood
beginning to spill from his chest, a strange strangling noise
coming out of his throat, and he said with amazement, “But you
haven’t solved the last riddle…” Then his finger tightened on the
trigger and another shot erupted from the pistol, the very last one
left in the weapon.

There was an immediate burning sensation that
scorched like a runaway fire across her cheekbone and Leonie winced
away from the pain. Then Whitechapel fell onto her and the glass
shattered under the extra weight. His body twisted to the side and
went into the room below first, and somehow Leonie was pulled in
with him. Both of them fell into the carousel room.