"You don't have to be involved in this,” Ben told Lori when she turned the car onto Hector Dunn’s road. “You can drop me off. I’ll hobble around to the windows and barn. See if I can find anything."
Lori tilted her head, wanting to say yes, but shaking her head. "No. I'm in. I started all this after all."
"No, you didn't. Dunn started it. And it's time to finish it. If you change your mind, you can wait in the car."
They drove down the desolate road, the house sliding into view.
“That’s it?” Lori whispered, though there was no one to overhear them.
“That’s it,” Ben confirmed. “His van’s gone. He should just be sitting down to questioning. Here’s what we’ve got to do. I need you to drop me off by the house, then stay on this road. Just up there, you’ll see a two-track on your right. Park there, that way your car is hidden. It’s not a long walk, but it’s further than I can go quickly right now. I’ll meet you back here at the house.”
Lori swallowed, sweat trickling down the back of her neck as she turned into Dunn’s driveway. Ben climbed out and limped toward the garage.
She drove back onto the road, found the two-track and parked. Lori ran through the woods, wishing she’d worn tennis shoes that morning rather than sandals. When she made her way back to the house, she found Ben peering through garage windows.
“Anything?” she asked.
He shook his head. “It’s filled with crap, but no vehicles.”
Lori walked to the door at the back of the house, climbed onto the porch and tried the knob.
"It's locked," she whispered to Ben when he came around.
"I figured it would be. Let's check the other doors. I thought we could break a window, but if we do that and find something then he'll know we were here and he'll move it."
"Well, if it's Adrian, we're taking her out of here with us."
"Yeah." Ben spoke the words, but Lori knew he didn’t believe they would find Adrian alive in the house.
Ben searched for unlocked windows, but found none. He discovered Lori at the side of the house. She turned the knob on a door. It creaked open.
“Holy shit,” Ben murmured as it swung in.
“I’ll check the house, you go check the barn,” Lori said. “Let’s meet back here in five minutes.”
Ben shook his head. “I don’t think we should split up.”
She held up a hand. “It’s fine. This is faster. Five minutes. Okay?”
He frowned, but nodded. “Be careful,” he told her.
Lori slipped into the dim interior of the house. Ben hobbled toward the barn at the back of the property. The doors were closed, but not padlocked. He doubted Hector would hide anything—or anyone, for that matter—inside. Too easy for someone to break in and find it.
Still, he wanted a look in that barn for one very particular reason. He peeked between the slightly ajar barn doors into the gloomy space. It was cluttered. Tools and cardboards boxes and old furniture lay strewn along the edges of the barn's interior on the dirt floor. But in the center stood a large vehicle covered by a dark tarp. The tarp was frayed and holey.
Lori crept up the stairs from the laundry room into the kitchen. The house stank of garbage and mildew. She wrinkled her nose, moving through the kitchen and down a dim hall that opened into a living room.
“Adrian?” she called softly.
The only sound was the ticking of a clock.
She opened a door that led to a cellar and hurried down, stepping lightly on the narrow wooden stairs that descended into the darkness. The dirt floor and craggy walls were barely illuminated by a sliver of basement window not coated in grime. There were three windows in total. They’d been covered in black tape. On one window some of the tape had pulled away. It dangled in a slimy-looking black curl that reminded Lori of a snake.
As she searched the murky space, her eye caught on a tall backless bookshelf that blocked a large hole in the wall. Lori stepped closer to the shelf. The book titles startled her: The Devil in the Shape of a Woman, Satanism and Witchcraft, Grimm’s Fairytales.
“What the hell?” she murmured. Why did this man have no fewer than twenty books about witches?
Lori took a worn leather book, titled Surviving the Witch, from the shelf and flipped it open, reading silently.
The witch in a fairytale must be redeemable in some way in order for a lesson to be valuable to the village, but in the truth of life, a cannibal witch who consumes the youth she covets, who steals girls she sees as inherently undeserving of their good fortune, does not need to be redeemable. In fact, on principle, someone who commits such horrors would never be redeemable in the eyes of human beings. So why would such a witch let the children go? What benefit would come to her?
That's why there are few stories of children who have survived such a witch. It would be a great hazard to the witch to release such a child and it would render the witch’s original purpose void.
We must also consider how such a child might react if they did escape a cannibal witch. If they survived such an ordeal, we should not underestimate the power of their own mind to make it all go away. To lock such an experience in that dark basement known as the shadow where so many of our repressed memories go. There it will fester until it is ultimately transformed into some other future trauma—such as an inability to enter the woods, to be close to older women, etc. But I would hazard to say that in all likelihood a child taken by this witch never returns.
How long the witch would keep the child is a question I’ve often pondered. In all the stories of mythical witches, the child must perform certain tasks. In Vasalisa the Wise, the girl must clean Baba Yaga’s hut, prepare her meals and separate the rotten corn from the good corn. In Hansel and Gretel, the witch keeps the children to fatten them up. This period of holding implies that it does not satisfy the witch’s appetite if she consumes her victim immediately.
Lori flipped to another page and read on.
In fairytales, to face the witch and survive, the heroine must show no fear. The heroine will not beat her, not in the usual way. Instead, she must face her, serve her, and do it with clarity and strength. In a sense, she must impress the witch, earn her respect. The witch can see through layers of the psyche, into the heroine’s conscious and unconscious mind, into her darkest desires and her deepest fears.
On the floor above Lori, the clock chimed and she jumped, dropping the book.
Ben slipped inside the barn and moved to the tarp, grabbed a corner with one hand and lifted it high. A dark green Chevy pickup sat beneath the tarp. Ben's breath left him in a rush and a ripple of wooziness coursed through him. He leaned his good hip against the truck, fighting for breath. He hadn't expected the reaction, the almost panic that arose at seeing the truck again, at reliving the impact as it struck him from behind and sent him airborne.
He registered a sound behind him and straightened up, dropped the tarp and stepped back to the barn door. Through the opening, he spotted dust flying as someone drove fast into the driveway and slammed to a stop.
Hector Dunn had returned.
Lori bent and picked the book up. As she placed it on the shelf, she got a whiff of something rancid drifting from the hole in the wall. She reached for her cell phone to use the flashlight, but found her back pocket empty. She’d left it in the car.
She turned and walked the perimeter of the basement, found an old box of long wooden matches. She returned to the bookcase and lit a match, reached with trembling fingers between the shelves so she could illuminate what lay in the hole.
She moved closer, peering into the opening. It was a hollowed-out space, much too low for standing, with a dirt floor and walls. On the floor lay a heap of dirty-looking sheets. Lori stared at them for a long time.
Something poked from beneath the corner of one sheet. Gradually she understood that it was a girl’s tennis shoe, a pink and yellow high-top sneaker faded with time. She’d seen the shoe before and she knew where. It had been the sh
oe Meredith Abram had been wearing the day she vanished.
As she stared at the shoe and the shape beneath the sheets, Lori started to sway from side to side. Black dots danced behind her eyes and the scared voice, the Lorraine in the woods voice, screamed at her to run, to get out. She was standing in the house of a murderer staring at what had to be the body of a thirteen-year-old girl who’d vanished decades before.
In a distant part of her mind, Lori registered the sound of a door banging open above her. Footsteps hammered across the floor and she knew it was not Ben, could not be Ben, because he was injured and couldn’t walk fast.
She lurched away from the bookshelf, searching for someplace to hide, looking again at the tiny windows. If she could manage to get one open, she doubted she could fit through to get out.
Lori heard him moving down the hallway above her. The door to the basement had been closed. Lori had opened it, and she searched her memory for whether she’d closed it.
Lori didn’t think so.
Her body quivered with fear as she shuffled to the wall, pressing her back against the cold stone. Her bladder felt heavy, her knees weak, and again child Lorraine pleaded with her to try for the window, bash the glass and wriggle to freedom, but Lori knew she’d never fit through.
Above her the footsteps stopped and then they started again, but not across. They were coming down, one heavy boot-fall after the next, pounding down the wooden stairs.
Hector’s shoulders were hunched and his face was red. Anger twisted his features, and Lori froze as he stepped off the last stairs into the basement.
Her breath wheezed out, and his head jerked up, his eyes bulging when they landed on her. He didn’t move, didn’t speak, and then after a long, sickening span as he appraised her, he smiled.
"Ask and he shall receive," Hector muttered, fingering the zipper on his jacket. Up and down, it went, his hands and legs fidgety as he bounced, locking her in place with narrowed, predatory eyes.
Lori stood statuesque, as if by not moving she would vanish before him, but she didn't. She was pinned in place. He didn't have a weapon, but he did have a hundred pounds on her. He wasn't fit, but was tall and barrel-chested. Her eyes drifted down to his large, cumbersome work boots. One kick and she'd be unconscious.
"I… my cat is missing," she stammered. "I live just down the road and she… she tears people's screens and breaks in sometimes. She… she's a real piece of work." The lie sounded even less believable when it spilled from her lips.
Hector Dunn cocked his head to the side, nodding as if he bought it. He stepped closer, his bulk taking up more of the space than seemed possible. "Here, kitty, kitty," he sang.
Lori started toward him. She'd just brush by and make a run for it.
He almost let her, but before she'd made it to the steps, he caught her upper arm hard in his meaty fist.
"Hold on there, little kitty," he whispered, his breath sour. "Don't I know you from somewhere?" He pushed her against the wall, pressing a knee between her legs, trapping her. He stared down into her face. "Yeah… I think so. I think you were one of them girls, them girls in the woods."
Lori clenched her eyes shut, panic seizing her. She couldn't run, couldn't fight back. Her only hope was Ben, who could barely walk. An unbidden image rose in her mind of two more bodies tossed beneath those dirty sheets, two more bodies that would never be found.
She searched for a way to stall him. “Why do you have the books? The ones about witches?” she sputtered, gesturing toward the bookshelf. She instantly regretted the question. She’d just given away that she likely knew what lay behind it.
He stared at her for a long time, unblinking, and she sensed his mind churning behind his dark eyes. “Of all the things you might have come to ask, you’re interested in some books.”
“Did you take Bev? Was it you? Or…”
“Or what?” He smirked. “Was it something else? Something that makes me look tame in comparison?”
He lifted a callused finger and traced it down Lori’s cheek. She squirmed beneath his touch.
“My mother loved to read,” he murmured gazing toward the books. “You might have even called her obsessed with stories. She read all the time. A lot of people thought she was an only child.” He shook his head. “No, no, she had a sister. A prettier sister, smarter, faster.”
“What happened to her?” Lori whispered, fearing she already knew.
“One day she didn’t come out of the forest,” he said, “and my mother was not so very sad. For days her sister was gone. They searched and searched and then on the fifth day, she appeared. She was not beautiful anymore. Her hair, once glossy and black, was white and dirty like the wool of a lamb who’d been out to pasture. Two fingers of her right hand had been severed as well as her right foot. Her face, her once-beautiful face, was withered and gray.”
“I don’t understand,” Lori whispered.
“Don’t you?”
“What… what took her?”
He moved his face close to her. His breath blew hot on her cheek and he sniffed her neck. “I think you already know.”
Lori screamed and reached her free arm up, jabbing her fingernails into Hector's right eye. He howled and brought his head forward hard, smashing it against hers. A dazzle of black spots exploded behind her eyes, but she twisted sideways, falling on her hands and knees.
He grabbed her long hair and jerked her back. Lori cried out, trying to wrench away. He didn't release her and she shrieked at the tearing sensation in the back of her skull. She thought he'd tear her hair from her head.
He dragged her, hand sunk into her hair, up the stairs. Lori stumbled to stay on her feet, holding his fist in her hands and trying to loosen his grip.
Hector topped the stairs and stepped through the doorway, yanking Lori behind him.
“Please,” she murmured. “I won’t tell anyone. I swear.” She knew her words fell on deaf ears.
As he dragged her into the hall, she caught sight of Ben.
Ben held a rifle in his hand, lifting it high.
Hector didn’t have time to react. Ben swung the handle of the rifle and smashed it against the side of Hector’s head. Hector teetered, releasing Lori’s hair. He tried to take a step toward Ben, but his right leg gave out and he crashed into the wall.
Ben turned the gun around and pumped the rifle.
“Move and you’re dead,” he told him.
Lori crawled past Hector, who seemed to have lost consciousness. Blood rushed from the wound in the side of his head, pooling on the floor.
In the distance, she heard sirens.
40
The day passed in a blur of police and questions and a brief stint in the back of an ambulance, while a paramedic gingerly touched Lori’s hair and declared that Hector had not actually ripped more than a few strands from her scalp.
After what felt like hours in the too bright police station, Lori and Ben, both haggard, walked to her car in the dark parking lot.
“Look up,” Ben said as she opened her driver’s door.
The vast night sky was lit with a billion flecks of silver.
Lori let out a shuddering breath and stared up, the horror of the day slipping away for a moment as the infinite swept her out of her small world.
She shifted her attention back to Ben.
He smiled. “Let’s get out of here.”
When Ben asked her to spend the night, she said yes.
They walked in, both exhausted, and collapsed on his bed fully clothed.
Lori fell into a fitful sleep, waking the following morning with a headache and a tender spot on her forehead where Hector had smacked his skull against hers.
She slipped from the bed and walked downstairs, overhearing Ben on the phone.
“There were two though? I see. Okay, and no chance he’s getting out? Good. Call me if you hear anything else. Thanks. Bye.”
Lori walked into living room, rubbing her sleepy eyes. Ben sat on the couch.
&
nbsp; “Hey, you’re awake,” Ben said, smiling.
“Any news?” she asked.
“Yeah, that was Zander. His brother has a friend on the force in Luther. They’re keeping a tight lid on it and obviously it’s early, but so far, they’ve found two sets of remains in Dunn’s basement. They’ve tentatively identified one as Meredith Abram based on clothing, but it will take weeks for dental records.”
“Only two though?” Lori asked, sitting on the couch beside Ben and folding her legs beneath her.
“It’s a huge piece of property. The important thing is that piece of shit is sitting in jail and he won’t be walking free again in this lifetime.”
"We got him," Lori murmured.
“Yeah.” Ben sighed, staring into space. She saw a shadow of something pass over his face, sadness perhaps.
"You finally caught the bad guy, so why do you look bummed out?" she asked.
Ben gazed at her, unblinking. "I guess… in some weird way, I don't want it to end."
"The search? The hunt?"
He shook his head. "Us. You and me and this whole insane last couple of weeks. It's been mad and yet… I almost feel sick that it's over, that tomorrow I won't be texting you to say we need to jump in the car and drive west to Scottville or Reed City."
“It’s not over yet. There’s a long path ahead now. Questioning, an eventual trial.”
Ben took her hand and rubbed his fingers across her knuckles. “And maybe some fun stuff too.”
She smiled. "I'll stay with you again tonight if you want," she said. "Play nurse to your patient. Though I'm afraid you'll have to tell me what to do."
He grinned and kissed her. "Sponge baths mostly.”
The kiss was long and Lori wanted more when it ended.
“Let’s go upstairs,” she said.
Ben stood and took her hand. “Are you sure?” he asked.
“Very.”
The following day, Ben insisted on making breakfast, though Lori wasn’t hungry and his throbbing knee caused him to sit every few minutes, which left her to flip the pancakes. She enjoyed it, the ease with which they’d woken together.
Darkness Stirring: A Troubled Spirits Novel Page 26
