“What is this?” Maxwell asks, holding up the piece of paper that I had found with his free hand.
“That?” The man smiles. “It’s a work of art.”
“Why are the characters based on us?” I ask, starting to tremble again.
“The characters aren’t based on you,” the man says, quickly snatching the piece of paper from Maxwell’s hand. He glances over at us, a smile still on his weather-worn face. “The characters are you.”
“Why?” Maxwell lets go of me and takes a step forward, buffing out his chest. “Why the hell would you do this?” He slaps the piece of paper out of the man’s hand.
“It’s none of your concern.” In a blur, the man pulls back his arm and swings a punch, getting Maxwell in the side of the head with a sickening crack, making him crumble to the floor.
“Maxwell!” I throw myself towards the floor, but I’m snatched up by the man and am yanked away from Maxwell’s limp body. I squirm, trying to get out of his grasp. “Let me go!”
“You’re a feisty one,” the man says with a chuckle. He grabs both of my wrists tightly as I struggle to get away. “I like that.”
“Let me go!” I scream. I yank my body to the right, but the man’s grip holds.
“You’re not like her. You’re stronger than she ever was,” he says, making me back up.
“What the hell did you do to her?!” My blood boils with fury.
A look crosses the man’s face too quickly for me to detect. “She had heart problems.”
My breath comes out heavy and shaky as I try to make sense of what he is saying. “What?”
“She was the first girl–the original girl. If she would have made it, you would have never been here.” He throws a quick glance over his shoulder at the decaying body in the corner. “She was going to be the main character.”
“What are you talking about?” I can feel tears burn in my eyes as I bump into the wall, stopping me from struggling against the man’s grip.
“The story, honey.” He smiles.
“I don’t understand.” It’s hard to speak with my lips trembling.
“That’s okay.” He presses my arms against the wall and leans down into me. I can feel his hot breath against my skin. It smells like beer. “You were never supposed to understand.”
“Get away from me!” I try to twist out of his grasp, but he presses his body tighter against me.
“You are also a lot more stubborn than she was.” He laughs like this is all some kind of joke to him. “When I had slipped into that room one night, she was more than willing when I told her that I could help her.”
“You sick bastard!” In reflex, I bring my knee up, nailing him right in the groin. An ugly moan escapes from his lips as his eyes bulge. He drops my arms and tumbles back, clutching himself.
Taking this as my chance, I push myself off the wall and hurry to Maxwell, who is still sprawled on the floor. There are four little scratches on his cheek from where the man’s knuckles had made contact. “Maxwell, wake up.” I grab his shoulders and try to shake him awake. More tears bubble into my eyes, making my vision blurry. “Please, Maxwell. Please, wake up.”
“Sara?” Maxwell’s eyes slowly creak open to look at me. “Wha–”
“You little bitch!”
I turn around just in time to see the man hurry over to me in two quick strides, his hand pulled back. Pain shoots through my face as the man’s hand makes contact with the side of my face, making me roll away from Maxwell. My knees and arms scrape against the concrete floor, cutting them.
“Don’t you ever pull a stunt like that again!” He straddles over me and starts to reach for my throat. “Actually, when I’m done with you, you won’t be able to.”
“No!” I struggle under his weight, but his icy-cold, sweaty hands wrap around my throat, pressing tighter and tighter until black spots dance in front of my eyes. Am I really going to die like this? Without finding Lynne? Without telling my parents how much I love them? Without telling my friends, Owen, Leigha, and Zoe, how special they are to me? Or without telling Maxwell how much he means to me? Are they going to just throw my body in the corner along with Willow’s?
“It looks like it’s the end of the story for you,” the man says through clenched teeth. He’s shaking with fury, and there is sweat forming at his hairline.
I heave in a breath that catches where the man holds my throat. Struggling for a final breath, I close my eyes, ready to give up.
The sound of splintering wood fills my ears just as sharp, little pieces rain down on my face. I snap my eyes open.
“Ugh.” The man’s grip around my throat loosens, but a heavier weight squishes my body as the man’s eyes roll upwards and he topples over me. His head rests right next to mine as half of his body covers mine.
I gasp in air, like a fish out of water, trying to fill the need of my burning lungs, then start to cough by the sudden intakes.
“Sara!”
“M–Maxwell?” I blink a couple times before my eyes focus on Maxwell, who is standing above me holding just the legs of the chair.
“Hold still.” He reaches down and lifts the man, who is now unconscious, and tosses him to the side. When the man lands with a thud beside me, Maxwell reaches down, grabs my hands, and pulls me up to my feet.
“Maxwell,” I start once I’m on my feet. “This whole thing is a story, just like you said. They’re writing about us. Whatever we do, they write it down,” I say in the midst of coughing.
“Did he tell you that?” Maxwell asks.
I nod, still coughing and gasping for air. “He also told me that Willow is supposed to be here and not me.”
“What?” He frowns, confused.
“He–he said I was never supposed to be here. It was supposed to be Willow.” I point to the corpse.
Maxwell turns to look at Willow’s corpse stuffed in the corner. “I was supposed to be with her?”
I nod but a thought occurs to me. If Maxwell and Willow were the ones stuck in the Salmon Room instead of him and me, would he have fallen for her?
“Hey.” Maxwell touches my shoulder, drawing me out of thought.
“What?” I turn to look at him, still trembling.
“Let’s get out of here” –he cocks his head towards the door– “before he wakes up.”
I nod and trail after Maxwell to the door but pick up the piece of paper that lays on the floor and stuff it back into my bra.
“Whoa.” Maxwell stops right before the door and peers inside the Doll Room. “You really did make a mess.”
“Well, you said to smash them.” I shrug. “So I smashed them.”
Maxwell looks down at me over his shoulder. “No shoes?”
I look down at my bare feet and feel stupid that I hadn’t put on my Sneakers. “I guess not.”
“Here.” He moves behind me and scoops me up bridal-style.
“Wait. What are you doing?” I swing my arms around his neck, clinging to him as he carries me across the room, the porcelain crunching under his shoes. He carries me to the doorway on the other side of the room before setting me down.
“Stay here,” he instructs, setting me down in the dark room with the ladder. I watch as he walks away from me and into the Doll Room, where he picks up the padlock from the floor and slips it through the little lock on the door before closing it, locking the door. “There.” He comes back to me, plants a quick kiss on my lips, before he grabs my arm and pulls me to the ladder.
He lets me crawl up the ladder first. When I reach the hole up top, I pull myself through it and scoot to the side so Maxwell can come up.
“We have to find Lynne,” I say when Maxwell comes out of the hole and puts the cover over it.
“They took her too?” Maxwell stands up and turns to look at me in the dark.
I nod. “I don’t know where, though.”
“Come on.” He grabs my hand and pulls me out of the room and into the hallway. We hurry down the hall, trying to open each
of the doors again, but like before, they are all locked.
“Maxwell, I found something,” I say as we try to open a door to the left.
“Like what?” He doesn’t seem interested.
“The day they took you and Lynne, I kind of flipped out” –I jiggle a doorknob– “and accidently ripped some wallpaper.”
“So?” He pulls me to the next door.
“There was a nail,” I rush on. “And wood. Like something’s boarded up.”
“Really?” He stops suddenly, making me bump against his back. He turns to face me. “Where in the room?”
“The wall opposite of the door,” I reply.
“Come on.” He pulls me as we start to run down the hall towards the Salmon Room.
“What about Lynne?” I ask as I hurry after him.
Maxwell ignores me and continues down the hall.
“We have to find Lynne.” When we stop in front of the door leading to the Salmon Room, I tug my hand out of Maxwell’s. “I have to find her with, or without you.”
As if he can’t hear me, Maxwell opens the door.
“Sarwa?”
That voice. Squeezing past Maxwell and the doorframe, I step into the Salmon Room and peer towards the center of the room, where my sister is sitting, playing with a cloth doll with yellow yarn hair and big blue eyes. My mouth falls open and my eyes bulge in surprise.
“Lynne?”
Chapter 13
“Lynne?”
“Sarwa!” Lynne crawls to her feet and runs over to me with her arms opened wide, the doll clutched in her hand.
I drop to my knees and grab her, bringing her in for a hug. Fresh tears make their way into my eyes as I burry my face into Lynne’s head of soft hair. Relief swarms through me, making my body shake. It feels so surreal to have her back in my arms.
“Sarwa, look.” She wiggles away from me and holds out the smiling doll with the yellow yarn hair twisted into two braids. “They gave it to me.”
“Who? Who gave it to you?” I ask, glancing at the doll. The yellow hair reminds me of Willow.
Lynne shrugs, turning the doll to face her. “A wady did.”
“A lady?”
She nods. “She was willy nice.”
I look at Lynne, noticing she looks different. She looks . . . healthier. She doesn’t seem to be hungry, and there is a clean, soapy smell that clings to her. Whoever had taken her had held up their end of the deal.
“How long has she been here?” Maxwell asks, kneeling down beside me.
I hold Lynne by her shoulders at arm length. “How long have you been down here, Lynne?”
“I dunno.” She starts to play with the doll’s hair.
“Sara, where did you say you found the boards?” Maxwell stands back up. He looks around the room with a hint of urgency.
“Over there.” Standing up, I swipe away a tear that is trailing down my cheek and scoop up Lynne, never wanting to let her go again. I walk across the room and jut my head to the side, indicating the boards. “Right here.”
“Can you shut the door?” Maxwell asks as he moves around me to study the boards.
“Yeah.” Placing Lynne down, I quickly cross the room and shut the door. Nervous pricks of fear stabs me in a hundred places just by being near the hallway by myself. What if I get snatched and dragged to the room that we locked that man in? What if he somehow got out and comes back for revenge? Standing at arm’s length away, I kick the door shut with my foot, letting it swing closed.
“I can’t believe it,” Maxwell murmurs as he traces his hand along the creases of wood.
“What is it?” I turn around and hurry back to his side. “What’s wrong?”
Maxwell fingers the nail that juts from one of the wood boards curiously, ignoring me.
“Maxwell?” I peer over his broad shoulders to get a better look at what he’s looking at.
“You did it,” he whispers in a voice that I barely hear over the pounding of my heart.
“What did I do?” I whisper back.
He turns his head to look at me, excitement flashing in his dark irises. “You found the way out.”
Chapter 14
“That’s the way out?” The words are so miraculous that they sound ludicrous. “Really?”
Maxwell nods, turning back to the nails in the boards. “I can’t believe the whole time we were here, there had always been a way to escape.”
Something behind us clicks. I spin around, but no one is there. “Did the door just–”
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Maxwell says. “We already have a way out.”
“Then should we go?” I ask, turning back to him.
Maxwell shakes his head then grabs my wrist, tugging me closer to him.
“We wait till tonight,” he whispers, his breath stirring the hair around my ear.
“Why?” I whisper back. My heart skips a few beats, and my pulse quickens just being near him.
“Because it’s too dangerous if we leave right now,” he explains quietly. “If we leave right now, they could come after us and do something far more worse to us than they already have.”
“Something worse?” I stiffen in fear.
He nods and starts tracing his hand along the pieces of wood again.
“Maxwell?” I whisper.
“Yeah?” He throws a glance towards me.
“What will happen to us once we get out of here?” The question has been swirling in my head ever since he’s confirmed that our exit was on the other side of the boards. It’s a nervous thought that I truly don’t know if I want the answer to or not, but I know I have to ask.
“What do you mean?” He lets his attention drop from the boards and turns to face me.
“You know . . .” I glance down, twisting my fingers into the material of my dress. “Are we just . . . going to leave one another . . . ?” I peek nervously up at him, praying he’ll say, “No, of course not.”
Maxwell swallows and runs a hand through his hair. “I don’t know.”
I turn my head, not wanting Maxwell to see the tears brimming in my eyes. How could he say that? How could we just leave one another after everything we’ve been through? It doesn’t seem right. It shouldn’t have to end like that.
“Sara?” Maxwell takes a step nearer and gently touches my arm.
“What?” I blink away the tears and actually manage to keep them away until I look at Maxwell, and then they come bubbling back. Before I can think of what I’m doing, I rush to him, wrapping my arms tightly around his torso. Tears run from my eyes and dampen his shirt, but he just wraps his arms around me, holding me close.
“Everything is going to be okay,” he whispers into my hair. “We won’t just leave each other. That would be impossible after everything we’ve been through together.”
That’s exactly what I thought.
“We’ll just have to sort things out when we get out of here,” he says. “Okay?”
“Sarwa? Why are you cwying?” Lynne asks, resting her hands on my exposed legs.
“No reason.” I back away from Maxwell and swipe my eyes. Forcing a smile, I kneel down to be eye-level with my sister. “Do you want to see Mommy?”
“Yeah!” A smile rushes onto Lynne’s face as she claps her hands together.
With a painful, forced smile, I brush some of her clean hair off her forehead so I can see her brown eyes. “Good.” I stand up and force myself to look at Maxwell. “What do we do now?”
He glances at the boards, down at his feet, then over at me. “We wait.”
Nighttime comes slowly. Daytime creeps by; minutes like hours, hours like days . . . It seems as if darkness will never come.
And it never does.
“What’s going on?” Maxwell tilts his head upwards as he paces the floor, looking at the hole in the mirrored-ceiling where he had broken the mirror when he first arrived. “The lights should be off by now.”
“How do you know?” I yawn. “It could be earlier then we think i
t is.”
“No.” He shakes his head, his eyebrows knitting into a frown. The coldness I haven’t seen in a while returns to his eyes. “No, there’s something going on up there.”
“Maxwell.” It suddenly occurs to me. “They know our plan.”
“Huh?” He turns to me with his mouth open a gap.
“We didn’t whisper our plan,” I continue. “They know that we know how to escape.”
“Shit.” He stops pacing and runs a frustrated hand through his hair. “It’s all my fault.”
“What are we going to do?” I ask, feeling defeated. I don’t want to be here anymore.
“We go.” He whips his head around to look at me.
“What?” I stand up from the cot where I have been sitting for what feels like hours.
“We have to go, Sara.” His determined eyes shine like glass.
“But there’s only three–two and a half of us, and we don’t know how many of them are out there. There could be men out there just like the one we locked in that room, standing right outside, just waiting to snatch us.” Fear digs deep in my chest.
“Sara, if we don’t go now, we might not have another chance,” Maxwell explains. He hurries to the boards and starts to rip them down. “Can you help me?”
“Yeah.” I rush to him, dig my fingers between the boards and start to pull on them. The board doesn’t budge. My arm quivers as I try to pull the piece of board down.
With a grunt, Maxwell rips down his first board, revealing a small corner of a window, before directing his attention towards me. “Need help?”
“Yeah.” I glance nervously downwards as I move to the side to let Maxwell have the room. With four hard yanks and one giant grunt, the board makes a loud ripping sound and falls off the window.
“Shit.” Maxwell stumbles back, clutching his hand.
“What’s wrong?” I look at him with a mixture of confusion and panic.
“There was a nail I didn’t see in the board,” he replies through clenched teeth.
“How bad is it?” Walking over to him, I grab the hand he is clutching and turn it over for me to see. There is a long scratch along the center of his palm with dark red blood oozing from it. “Ouch. Does it hurt really bad?”
Through the Glass (A Storybook Novel 1) Page 14
