She laughed, too.
He handed her a couple hundred dollars, and that sealed the deal. Most people liked money. “I’ll give you another hundred in the morning.”
“Well, okay,” she smirked, tucking the money into her bra. “If you insist.”
Colton drove back home and parked his truck in the driveway. They got out and tripped up the walkway together. She grabbed him on the front porch. She tasted funny, like stale beer and cigarettes. She held his hand and pulled him inside. She looked around the place and said, “Wow. You could really flip this house.”
“Do what?” he asked, panting a little.
“You know, flip this house,” she explained. “Renovate the place and sell it for big bucks. It’s cute. It’s not half bad.”
He slapped her on the ass. “I want to show you something.”
“Aren’t you even going to ask me my name? Since I’m staying the night?”
“Okay. What’s your name?” He grinned.
She placed her hand on the banister and hurried up the stairs. “Jenny.”
“Wait a second,” he said.
“Catch me!”
“Hold on.” He followed close behind. The carpet runners on the stairs were stained and threadbare from years of use. When they got to the top of the landing, her nostrils flared with revulsion. “What is that smell?” she asked.
He looked at her. The air was tinged with the odor of animal feces, urine and garbage. It made him sick. He feared the worst—that she would lose her shit right now. That she would manage to escape and tell on him. Debris littered the hallway.
“Wow,” she giggled, shocked and amazed. “An intervention should’ve taken place years ago. Kidding! I’ve seen worse. Don’t look so freaked out.”
It made the skin on the back of his neck prickle and crawl. “Come back downstairs. We’ll have a drink.”
“But seriously, what’s that smell?” she said, looking at him with stoned eyes.
The doors to all four rooms on the second floor were closed. One of them was labeled DO NOT ENTER. Jenny opened that one and stepped inside. The windows were covered with old newspapers. The floor was tacky when you walked across it. There was a stomach-churning smell and mousetraps on the floor. There was a cage in the corner. The lights were off. It was dark.
“Oh my God,” she whispered, cautiously approaching the cage. The smell was overpowering. She drew back. She didn’t want to look anymore. She tried to run away.
He prevented her from escaping by choking the screams right out of her.
Her eyes rolled up in her skull, her knees buckled and she dropped like a sack of potatoes.
Blackwood, New York
Benjamin heard the scream in the middle of the night again and bolted upright in bed. It sent shivers cascading across his shoulders. He looked over at Cassie, who was sound asleep beside him.
He waited in the dark.
It wasn’t going to go away.
The screams weren’t going to end.
He clapped his hands over his ears, which was crazy, since the screams were coming from inside his head.
Make it go away,
he prayed in the dark, dreading the next one.
Dignity, Vermont
Colton never panicked, but this situation was different.
Bella was screaming. All the way from the basement.
“Shut the hell up!” he hollered down to her.
She stopped.
He grabbed Jenny by the ankles and dragged the body across the hallway, then threw a powerful kick that bounced the bathroom door open. He dragged her into the tile-floored bathroom, gathered her up, along with her purse and jacket, and dropped everything in the tub. Her head bonked against the porcelain.
He opened her purse and fished around for her wallet. He took all the cash and the rest of her pot and dropped the purse in the tub.
He tromped downstairs and unlocked the basement door, fingers fumbling with the key. He could hear Bella screaming down there. “Shut up!” he roared, and she gasped a bunch of times and stopped.
He tromped down the steps and wove through the crates and junk and found his grandmother’s moth-eaten trunk and threw it open. He grabbed his kit and hurried back up the stairs. “Bella, I don’t want to hear another peep out of you!”
He detoured into the kitchen, where he peeled a couple of trash bags off the roll. Then he took the stairs to the second floor, where he saw the place with new eyes. He didn’t like what he saw.
The old-fashioned tub had dripping faucets and the toilet didn’t flush properly. Everything was streaked with rust. Everything was moldy. He put down his kit and went to check on the thing across the hall. He approached the cage slowly, cautiously, and the creature stirred in the shadows. Colton could make out its strange features moving in the darkness. “Sorry, buddy. You okay? Huh? Don’t worry. It won’t happen again. The bad lady’s gone.” He held up his hand to the cage, pressing his palm flat against the wires, because you couldn’t poke your fingers in there. He had the scars to prove it. The thing gratefully licked his hand. It had a moist sandpapery tongue. It was amazing—you fed something and you earned its loyalty forever. “Everything’s okay now. Go back to sleep.” It stopped licking his hand and shrank into the shadows, where it watched him with wet, menacing eyes.
Colton got up and crossed the room and gently closed the door behind him. He strode across the hallway and stood staring down at the prostitute. He hated her for showing him exactly who he was.
He opened his kit and took out the rag and the bottle. He leaned over the tub and could see that she was still breathing. Still alive. He opened the trash bag and tossed in her purse and jacket and shoes. He took off her socks and pulled off her T-shirt and unzipped her jeans, and he put everything in the bag until she lay in the tub in her underwear. She wore a thin red bra and a matching pair of red thong underpants.
He sat on the bathroom floor and waited for her to regain consciousness again. He waited for six or seven minutes, until her eyelids fluttered open. She inhaled a big gasp, but he was ready for her. He held the soaked rag to her face, and she kicked and flailed around, but he kept the pressure up until she blinked out like a light.
Blackwood, New York
When Benjamin got home from work that night, he parked his car, got out and stood looking at the woods across the street, branches stirring in a chilly breeze. The sun had set and the sky was a haunting crimson color. He shuddered and drew his coat collar tight. The voice, the presence, had been fading in and out all day long. Pulsating like the tide, back and forth, back and forth. It was exhausting. He finally had a name.
Bella.
She reminded him of thunderclouds, of a looming ozone-filled atmosphere. Her presence was not wholly human. He could sense her all around him now. She was in pain. She needed rescuing.
The voice, this feeling, was coming from the east. Everything pointed in that direction. Now the sun sank below the horizon and the sky dimmed. His heart raced as he surrendered himself to the darkness. It had snowed again this morning, and the ground was lacy blue in the moonlight. He caught a movement out of the corner of his eye and turned to his right, where the woods were dense and pitchy. But it was just the wind shaking patches of snow off the trees. He felt a sweep of movement to his left and turned again. But it was just the wind in the trees. He was jumpy. He told himself to chill. Calm down.
He walked toward the house, taking the cold air deep into his lungs. The night sky felt incredibly close, like the domed ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The single yard light cast a yellow rectangle over the snow. The gutters were laced with icicles. He paused to inspect the dry rot on the weathered boards, wrinkling and alligatoring in the moonlight. He mounted the porch steps and scraped his boots on the horsehair mat. Then he went inside.
The house was warm and full of solid blocks of furniture with well-established boundaries—assertive desks and obstinate chairs with tufted upholstery. He went over to a living room window, parted the curtains and looked across the road at the dark, sodden woods. He heard a distant cry and flinched.
Bella’s voice inside his head was like the warm breath of a dog, intrusive and inquisitive. It would whisper things that didn’t make any sense:
Who is she? What did she ever do to him? I’ll kill him. Did he kill her? What did she ever do?
Babbling like an insane person.
Then it faded away.
He waited. He listened.
Nothing. Not for the longest time. It was maddening. He was fed up.
The house was dark. He switched on the hallway light and made his way toward the second story, drifting past an ecology of shadows. Cassie was still sleeping a lot during the day, still healing. He didn’t want to wake her up but he needed the human contact, and not just any contact—hers. She had closed the door again. She was so incredibly afraid of everything since her experience at Hope Hollow that she kept the doors and windows shut. Now he placed his hand on the antique glass knob, and the door opened smoothly on well-oiled hinges. The lights were off. The curtains were drawn. He could barely make out the peaks and valleys of this nocturnal landscape.
Something was wrong with the play of shadows.
“Cassie? You okay?”
She was sitting up in the dark. Rubbing her face. Rubbing her shoulder.
Crying. She was crying.
“What’s wrong? Are you okay?” He threw the switch.
“Benjamin?” She looked up with an awful urgency.
He went over to her. In the soft pink light, he could tell she was trapped inside a remorseless hole of sorrow. Her pajamas had ice cream cones all over them—reflecting Cassie’s ironic sense of humor, but her sorrow gave them a pathetic resonance. As soon as he sat down beside her, she thrashed around, pushing him away and making soft, blunt motions with her hands. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t touch me!”
“Okay,” he said, terrified for her. “I’m sorry. I’m here. It’s okay.”
At the sound of his voice, she stopped thrashing around. She wiped the tears off her cheeks. There was an antique chest at the foot of the bed where they’d once made uncomfortable love. There were two lamps, perfect for reading, and an easy chair by the window that beckoned you to sit and relax. Benjamin’s books were stacked in precarious piles against the walls, waiting to be shelved. She reached for him in a helpless way and let him hold her. He did his best to reassure her by pushing past his own inner turmoil.
“Benjamin?” She twisted her fingers like the roots of a tree into his scalp and gave him a steely, unrelenting look. “Whatever happens… say you’ll understand. All right?”
His heart began to pound irregularly.
There was a pearly translucence to her skin. He touched her lovely swan-like neck and stroked the silky loops of her hair, then bent to kiss her sugary lips.
She pushed him away and made him stop. She held his eye. “I love you.”
He was too stunned to respond.
“Do you understand?”
He nodded dumbly. He didn’t believe her. He could only hope it was true.
“I love you, Benjamin. You’re such a good person.” She was crying. Her mouth was wet and open, and her face was flushed and hot. He brushed aside some of her hair, dumbstruck with love.
“Benjamin, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. I love you, too.”
“No. You don’t understand. I have to go home. I’m sorry.” She was sobbing.
Home,
she signed. “I have to go home.”
Dignity, Vermont
48 hours later, the moon was out. It was past midnight. A cool breeze had blown in from the southwest, promising more snow. Colton pitched his shovel into the ground, leaning hard on the shovelhead and digging out more dirt. He balanced the steel blade on the cold ground, placed his foot on the shovelhead and had to stomp a few times to break the surface, since the turf in this part of the yard was obstinate.
Live by ‘em, die by ‘em.
He threw his back into it, working with conviction. Each time the shovel struck a rock, he had to stoop down, pick it up and toss it aside. There was a growing pile of rocks to his right. The soil here was poor for farming.
Unaware of any utility right-of-ways on his property, Colton thrust the blade with confidence into the earth again. Once the turf gave way, he attacked the stubborn roots, chopping through tubers and rotating the shovel until his arms grew tired. He extracted plug after plug of crumbling soil, dumping it off to one side. He used an old tire iron to pry some of the bigger rocks out, since even the best of shovels couldn’t get all the rocks out. He was digging a pretty big hole, and it would take some time. As his dad used to say, “Death’s gonna get us. Every damn one of us.”
Not me,
Colton thought. He brought death—he would never succumb to death. That’s what he told himself anyway.
After about an hour, sweaty from exertion, he dropped the shovel and breathed for a minute. Then he walked a few yards toward the old pig trough, where he’d left the body, and picked her up by the legs and dragged her back to the hole. He paused to look at the moon. Ever since they’d landed up there, he wasn’t as mystified as he’d been as a kid. Swiss cheese, his father used to say.
The moon is made of Swiss cheese.
When in reality, it was dry as dust and a dull gray nothing. Now he exerted himself and pushed the body into the hole, but she landed crookedly with her arms and legs splayed, so he had to go down there and fix her, which made him mad. He needed a shower. He was hot and sweaty, despite the chill in the air.
He climbed back out of the hole and fetched the trash bag with all her stuff in it and threw that on top of her. Then he knelt down and started pushing big piles of dirt over the side of the hole, clawing with his hands. Big scallops of dirt landed with a plunking sound on the body below. He tossed in the rocks, too, and they made even louder sounds in the moonlight. It was a lot of work. It was exhausting. Why was everything such a hassle? At long last, he stood up and shoveled the rest of dirt back into the hole. Then he patted and tamped it down with his boots. He clapped his hands. Done. Now he had bills to pay. Fucking cable rip-off and electric company.