Authors: J.A. Konrath,Jack Kilborn
Tags: #General Fiction
The next photo looked like a hole in the dirt filled with rocks, and Tom had to read the inscription to understand what he was seeing.
Over four thousand human bones found buried on the property.
Creeped out, he made the mistake of clicking on the next photo, which was a shirtless African American man who had so many scars on his body he no longer looked human. As Tom hurried to hit the ESC button, something in the image stopped him.
Something hanging on the man’s mangled shoulder.
A third arm.
It was small, withered, hanging over his chest like a wrinkled leather belt. But there were clearly five fingers on the end of it, and they were—
Holy shit. The fingers are holding a tin drinking cup .
Tom zoomed in, trying to spot if the photo had been altered, but it looked real enough.
What the hell was wrong with some people? Assuming even some of the facts on the website were true, what could make someone treat his fellow man like that?
Tom went to the next picture, partly out of morbid curiosity, partly because he wanted to see the Butlers get what was coming to them. He was rewarded by a photo that looked like two bloody, skinned deer carcasses.
Wrong again. The caption read
The bodies of Jebediah and Annabelle Butler
. They’d had every inch of skin on their body whipped off.
Thankfully, there were no pictures of the tortured Colton. But there was a portrait of Sturgis Butler, and Tom was shocked at how much he looked like Vlad the Impaler. Same dark, bulging eyes. Same pointy black beard. Tom found himself staring into those eyes, revulsion wiggling in his stomach.
Next came a picture of the house after the fire in ‘45. The structure remained intact, but there was telltale soot and fire damage surrounding the windows and front doors. Tom was going to move onto the next page, but something in the photo caught his eye.
He made the jpg the size of his monitor. In one of the blackened windows was a speck of white.
Tom zoomed in further.
The white speck looked like the ghostly face of a man screaming.
There was a sound and movement to Tom’s right, and he immediately glanced over his shoulder, adrenaline kicking in, and watched as his bedroom door—
—closed by itself.
As his fight-or-flight response kicked in, Tom remembered his window was open a crack. The draft sometimes blew the door open and closed; something that happened often enough that Tom actually looked it up and discovered it had to do with air pressure in the room.
Still, it was disconcerting after reading the history of Butler House. Tom’s mouth was dry. His heart was doing a fox trot. And he both felt, and saw, all the tiny hairs on the backs of his hands stick straight up.
He was afraid.
And the Feebies were right. Tom knew, more than most, what it was like to be afraid.
He didn’t like it. Not one bit.
Tom stared at the phone, wanting to call Joan. Hearing her voice would reassure him, calm him down.
Instead he visited YouTube and played an upbeat rock performance by Bob Walkenhorst.
He also turned on the bedroom light.
In the bright room, with the music playing, Tom felt less frightened.
But he couldn’t relax enough to sleep. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw that poor, scarred, three-armed slave. And thought of his partner, Roy.
Fran stood in the safe room with her family, watching the porch monitor. The two men who stood at their front door looked around when Josh hit the intercom button and spoke.
“Who are you and what do you want?”
“Mr. VanCamp?”
They still couldn’t find the camera.
“We’re from the FBI. We want to talk to you and your wife.”
Josh glanced at her, and Fran gave her head a small shake.
“We’re not interested,” Josh answered. “Go away.”
“It’s an opportunity for you to each earn a million dollars.”
“Two million bucks?” Duncan said. “Mom, that’s a crapload of money.”
“And probably a crapload of trouble,” Josh added. “Hon?”
“No way,” Fran said.
“If you’d let us in,”
the man on the porch continued,
“we could explain in detail. It will only require a day of your time. It’s a government-sponsored experiment.”
Josh snorted. Fran saw the incredulity in his eyes. She felt exactly the same way. She’d jump off a cliff onto a bed of nails before trusting the government.
“You have ten seconds to get off of our property,” she said into the intercom. “Or we’re going to shoot you.”
One of the men on the monitor reached into his pocket, and produced some folded papers.
“We have all the information right here.”
“Five seconds,” Josh said.
“We’ll, um, leave it here for you.”
Fran watched the man stick the papers in the door jamb, and then they left. She followed them, monitor to monitor, until they walked off the grounds.
Duncan stared over at her, his eyes wide. “Would you really have shot them, Mom?”
Fran didn’t answer. But her thoughts went back to Safe Haven. To all the friends she’d lost. To all the horror she and her family had endured.
Would she have shot them? Hell yeah.
No one will ever have a chance to harm her, or her family, again.
Not as long as Fran still had the strength to rack a shotgun and pull a trigger.
“It’s just for twenty-four hours,” said the FBI agent in the doorway. “You’ll arrive, have a meal, get examined by a doctor, then be locked in the Butler House overnight, and closely monitored to study how you react to fear.”
“So they’ll be purposely trying to frighten us?” Deb asked.
Mal had tucked the gun into his bathrobe pocket, and his wife was holding his hand so hard she was cutting off his circulation.
“It’s a fear study,” the agent said. “You both have had unique experiences that make you ideal candidates.”
“And we live with those experiences, every day,” Mal said. His apprehension had been fading since they answered the door, and was slowly being replaced by anger. “You have no right to come here and make this offer.”
After all he and Deb had survived, why would they willingly expose themselves to even more horrors, real or convoluted? To even ask that of his wife made Mal’s blood pressure skyrocket, and there was no way in hell he’d ever allow—
“Can we think it over?” Deb said.
Mal stared at her, unable to hide his surprise.
“Deb?”
“I didn’t say we’ll do it, hon. But I think we should talk about it.”
Mal didn’t understand. Sure, two million dollars was a lot, but they were doing fine financially. Why would Deb even consider this?
The agent who’d done all the talking reached into his jacket and handed Deb some folded papers. Mal detected the tiniest smirk in the corner of the man’s mouth.
“The experiment begins this weekend. Good evening to you both.”
The Feds left, and his wife closed the door, locking the various latches and deadbolts.
“Debbie, you’re not serious.” He searched her pretty face. “Are you?”
“I think we should at least discuss it, before you make a decision for the both of us.”
“I don’t understand.” Which was as true a statement he’d ever made. “I thought—”
“That’s the problem, Mal,” she snapped. “
You
thought, but didn’t ask me.”
“Is it the money?”
“I wasn’t even thinking about the money.”
“So what’s there to discuss? We can’t sleep as it is. You want to go someplace where they’re purposely trying to terrify you?”
“It’s a
fear
study, Mal. Something you and I suffer from, every single day.”
“Exactly, so—”
“So maybe a doctor who studies fear could somehow teach us how to deal with ours.”
Mal was about to object, but caught himself. They’d both had psychiatric treatment since the Rushmore Inn. Hypnotherapy. Exposure Therapy. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Interpersonal. Group. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. And a pharmacy’s worth of drugs, from sleep agents to SSRIs to beta-blockers to anti-psychotics.
Nothing seemed to work. In fact, some of the treatments worsened their condition.
“You remember exposure therapy,” Mal said.
“Of course.”
They’d been subjected to shocking images of mutilations and congenital malformations in order to desensitize them. Deb had freaked out during a session, crying so uncontrollably they’d had to quit, and later that night Mal had gone to the ER, unable to stop hyperventilating, convinced he was having a heart attack.
“This seems even worse, Deb. They’re not just going to show us pictures. They’re going to try to scare us.”
“We’ll get through it,” Deb said, reaching for him again. “Just like we got through the Rushmore. But maybe we’ll learn something this time.”
Mal chewed his lower lip. The worst part about fear wasn’t the dread, it was the helplessness. The FBI agents said they’d be able to bring any items they wanted to with them for the weekend, including weapons. But the gun in Mal’s robe didn’t make him feel any safer. Quite the opposite. The very fact he owned a gun was a constant reminder of what he was so afraid of.
“I don’t know, Deb…”
“Can we discuss it, at least?” She moved a step closer to him, the hydraulic cylinders in her prosthetics whirring softly.
Mal didn’t want to discuss it. He wanted to run away, someplace where it never got dark. Where nightmares didn’t exist, both the ones in his head and the real ones.
But the longing in his wife’s eyes made his heart hurt.
“Of course, Deb. If this is something you want.”
“It is.”
Deb moved in for the hug, and he reluctantly embraced her, a thought bouncing through his mind and forcing out all others.
Be careful what you wish for, because it may come true.
Dr. Emil Forenzi could barely hear the phone ring above all the screaming.
“It’s okay,” Forenzi told his patient, giving him an affectionate pat on the cheek. “It’s all going to be okay.”
The screaming didn’t abate. Forenzi gave him a dose of traumesterone and the noise went down to a hoarse wheeze.
Forenzi answered the phone, located on the wall next to the EKG machine.
“I’m with a patient,” he said into the receiver. Which was unnecessary, because he was always with a patient. Even at ungodly hours like this. Who could sleep when there was so much to do?
“We have a head count for this weekend.”
“Go on.”
“Three confirmed.”
“And the others?”
“Still deciding.”
Forenzi frowned. He’d been hoping for better results.
“Which three?”
“Sara Randhurst. Moni Draper. Frank Belgium.”
Forenzi rubbed the stubble on his chin, and his eyes drifted across his laboratory. Besides his patient, and the various pieces of equipment, there was a large, glass apparatus on a stainless steel table, which looked like something out of a mad scientist movie. It was currently distilling a batch of Serum 3.
That serum, Forenzi knew, was going to win him a Nobel Prize.
Some believed that most of humanity’s conflicts, be it person-to-person or country-to-country, were based upon one possessing something the other one wanted. Land. Oil. Water. Food. Religious and political differences were used as excuses to dehumanize the enemy and grab their resources.
But Forenzi knew that this greed was bolstered by another, even more base and powerful emotion.
Fear.
Mankind reeked of fear.
This fear led to distrust, and ultimately to hate.
Being able to conquer fear meant a fresh start for the world.
“Let me know if the situation changes,” he said, then hung up.
Of the three who signed on, Dr. Belgium interested him most. A molecular biologist, he would recognize what Forenzi was doing here. It would be refreshing to talk to someone who could grasp the magnitude of this invention. Who would understand it.
He turned back to his patient, whose eyelids had drooped in sleep. Forenzi yawned sympathetically.
“You’re exhausted, my friend. So am I. We can continue the therapy tomorrow. Sleep well.”
Forenzi left the lab, walking into a hallway that looked more like a tunnel in a coal mine than the basement of a mansion. The floors were crumbling concrete, the walls lined with stacked railroad ties. There were wood ceiling braces every five meters, and Forenzi wouldn’t have doubted the bare 60w bulbs hanging from them were older than he was. As he passed beneath one, it buzzed and flickered.
One of the many ghosts of Butler House, demanding attention.
Forenzi paid it no mind. Instead, he took the hall to a fork, went right, and headed for the veterinary clinic. As he approached, he heard some lone trilling, and recognized it as Gunter’s.
Forenzi’s spirits dipped, and his pace quickened. He entered the clinic through the metal push door and beelined for Gunter’s habitat, which was situated to the right. It was several cubic meters in size, with a window of clear, unbreakable Plexiglas, the interior foliage meant to mimic a Columbian forest, with twisted, dead tree branches and fake plants.
The Panamanian Night Monkey watched his approach while upside down, hanging from a limb. Gunter was large for an
A. zolalis
, nearly three pounds in weight. His bushy brown fur was mottled with blood, and his enormous red eyes stared at Forenzi dispassionately.
“Gunter… Gunter… what have you done?”
Of course, Forenzi already had the answer to that. Gunter’s two cagemates, capuchins named Laurel and Hardy, were dead on the fake grass in the habitat. They’d been dismembered and eviscerated, their insides strewn across the bathing pond and staining the water pink.
“You just can’t play well with others, can you?” Forenzi shook his head and tsked.
Gunter stared, unmoving.
Aphobic.
Forenzi picked up the clipboard next to the habitat, recorded the event, and then flipped through the previous five months to get an accurate count.