Isolation: a gripping psychological suspense thriller full of twists

by Sarah K Stephens

  “It was a museum for a while, you know,” she noted, and started moving down the hallway, motioning for me to follow with a long elegant arm. “They were going to tear it down, if you can believe that, and build a shopping mall. But we were able to buy it just in time. We’ve tried to preserve a lot of the original structure of the house, but with modern amenities added in. It’s been a passion project for Mark and me.”

  We’d been walking along the west wing of the house as Brenna talked, and at the mention of her husband we found ourselves outside a heavy oak door that would have been a perfect fit for some period drama with corsets and gas lighting except for the glowing keypad in place of a door handle.

  Brenna explained, “We renovated the rooms to make them as normal-seeming as possible, but with the assurance that Mark would be protected too. After everything that’s happened…” She paused, and I took a deep breath. I waited.

  We were still standing outside the door. She gave her head a small shake, like she was dislodging her original thought.

  “Here we are,” she said, slipping a plastic card out of her pants pocket and holding it against the keypad, like you would in a fancy hotel. There was a soft whir and a click, and the door came ajar.

  Brenna pushed the door open, and I found myself in a softly lit room filled with overstuffed chairs and a plush baby blue couch. The room looked entirely normal, except that there were metal bars installed along the walls at hip height, running around the length of the room. Two bright red buttons glowed dimly from the opposing corners.

  “This was Mark’s sitting room for a while. We’d come in here, after dinner, and relax together. Things moved so quickly though. We didn’t get to use it much.” Brenna reached out a hand as she was talking and touched one of the metal bars. It must have shocked her, perhaps from the static in the air, because she pulled herself back as though she’d just been bit.

  We went through to the next room in the West side of the house, which was still decorated like an interior designer’s vision board with a wallpaper in deep teal that had a sort of sheen to it and expensive long-hanging curtains over the windows, but the room itself was almost entirely bare except for a piece in the far corner that looked like some sort of hybrid desk and bed.

  Brenna kept walking, and pulled out her key card once again to hold against a pad in the furthest door. The door opened like the first, with a soft whoosh, but this time I knew he was inside.

  The smell was unmistakable. It was the odor of skin shrouded in sheets for too long, of a body holding one position for too many unrestful hours. Of a mind chipping away one piece at a time until all that’s left is a tiny kernel of the original’s brilliance.

  It was the smell of debilitation and disease and despair, all rolled into one.

  I stepped inside willingly. This was what I was here to do.

  3

  Tobias

  Horses can smell fear.

  When I walk into the stables this morning, Julie and Jasmine snuffle in their stalls like they have bad colds. I hear a hoof stomp on the ground, followed by another in the adjoining stall. The unrest spreads to the other horses, who all start to rustle. There’s the distinctive scrape of their sleeping blankets against the smooth wood of their stall doors.

  Nobody is happy.

  I think about stepping back outside, into the clean air of the pasture and the acre or two that separates the stables from the main house, but my girls need to be fed and brushed down. They’re waiting for me, and like a parent who has to put on a brave face for their children when there’s danger looming around their little family unit, I shake my shoulders and unclench my jaw and try to act normal.

  The underarms of my shirt are already drenched, even though it’s only seven in the morning and cool outside for the season. I tell my body to behave.

  That’ll teach me to wake up and check the headlines.

  I go to Jasmine first, because she’s the natural matriarch. Julie might be technically older, but Jasmine is the leader of their little pack. She eyes me as I come up at the entrance to her stall, and I whisper the same words I say to her each morning, like I always do.

  “There’s a good girl,” I tell her. “There’s a gorgeous Jasmine. You’re the queen of horses, you are.”

  I put my hand flat against her neck and feel the pulse of her body vibrate through my skin. She pauses for a second, and her nostrils flare as she sniffs the air, but she must decide that I’m calmed down and that the world is back in order, because she turns and nuzzles her cheek into my shoulder.

  I push the hair from her eyes, scratch gently behind her ears, and then move to pick up the brushes in the corner of her stall and take off her sleeping blanket.

  The sounds from the other horses continue to ratchet up, but as I lead Jasmine out into the main area of the stable for her morning rub down she must have communicated something in the pitch of her shoulders or the twist of her body, because they all quiet down and wait patiently as I loop Jasmine’s bridle into the fixed post and then go around to put their morning oats and hay in their troughs.

  Jasmine’s the only horse I feed by hand, which I do before I start to brush her sleek chestnut body.

  The routine helps me too, and as I get into the rhythm of the strokes along her broad back and down her flank, I feel something release in my brain and a sense of security washes over me.

  The world couldn’t collapse. Not when there were still creatures as magnificent as this willing to let us care for them, even though one kick from their leg or the quick toss of a head could kill me.

  Not when there was this type of trust in the world.

  I look out the stable doors as I’m finishing, and the mist from the tall grass in the fields is already burning off as the sun rises in the distance.

  I feel calmer, and the sweat that soaked through my shirt is starting to dry. For a moment I wonder if I should go up to my apartment above the old mill barn around the back and change into a fresh one, but I glance at my watch—it’s eight—and decide to stay put. The extra stable hands will be arriving soon, and they’ll need their instructions for the day.

  It was Mark Stone who hired me way back when they first bought the museum. He had been invested in me from the beginning, even though I wasn’t the perfect fit and my résumé had a few blips on it that I could explain but didn’t want to. Especially not to a man like him.

  They only had two horses back then—Julie and Jasmine, my girls—and the others were added on over the years to make a family for Julie and Jasmine to tend to. At least, that’s what Mark told me once when he stopped by for one of his daily rides.

  “Horses are like people, aren’t they, Tobias?” He’d given me a knowing wink, because of course I knew more about horses than he did. I’d grown up around them my entire life, whereas he’d only started riding after he earned his first and second million, and decided that golf wasn’t his thing, but that being an equestrian might be the rich-person activity he could tolerate. He’d told me that as well, sitting together one afternoon as the sun set over his land and sipping chilled beers from my fridge. He was never proud or condescending. Mark may have owned every piece, but he also knew he was a visitor in the stables. “They need a family.”

  Thinking about Mark takes my mind wandering to other places, and I feel that pulse of sweat flash over me again. I should call my mother, I think.

  What’s ten years of radio silence during a time like this?

  She’s probably still listed in the phone book. Or online somewhere.

  I could find her, if I tried hard enough.

  Something moves in the distance, underneath the long limbs of the grass. It’s making a straight line through the field, towards us. Me and my horses.

  It’s probably a fox. They’ve been coming closer and closer to the stables at night, and a few times I’ve found little nicks at the back of a horse’s legs, from where a fox came in and decided to play boss for the evening. It’s why we’ve started locki
ng up the stables at night, and closing everything up nice and secure like. Luckily it’s been cool enough that the horses are okay with it, and don’t need the stream of a breeze flowing through as they sleep.

  I’m not sure what we’ll do once summer really comes.

  The creature is getting closer. I can tell by the bend of the long grass out in the distance. I glance over at the shovel leaned against the front wall, next to the extra buckets and lead lines. I could grab it in a split second if I needed to.

  My phone buzzes in my back pocket. I keep my gaze on the field, but then tip the front of my baseball cap down to shield my eyes from the glare of the sun’s rays streaming through the stable door, and pull out the tiny glowing screen.

  The alert on my phone is unfamiliar. I have notifications for some of the apps I use—social media accounts where I chat mainly with other horse people and a few political sites. But this is different. The icon in the text box is red, and the words are crisp and blunt, like the edge of my shovel.

  “Lockdown in Full Effect” it says.

  I glance up, but the creature in the field is gone.

  4

  Brenna

  I decide to put on lipstick before I see Mark. It’s a NARS that’s been knocking around in the back of my makeup drawer in the bathroom we used to share. The name of the color is something mildly salacious, like “Pillow Pink” or “Vulva Red,” but I can’t quite remember and the label on the bottom of the tube has rubbed off.

  It’s going to be a hard day at work. The shareholders will be barking down the lines at my assistant. I already have ten new messages pinging at my phone, notifying me that I have my work cut out for me today to try to keep this floating world of my company from sinking.

  I throw the rest of my toiletries back into one of the drawers, where they rattle around with some of Mark’s forgotten items. An old-fashioned razor with its slick blade bent into the handle. An old bottle of cologne Felix bought for him at the school’s Little Elf shop last holiday season. A wristband of meditation beads that he wore more for fashion than meditation.

  My husband was many things. Is many things.

  But a calm mind isn’t one of them.

  I’d already been in once to see Mark, when I first woke up. I like to start my day by seeing how he’s doing. But that early in the morning he’s usually groggy from the sleep medication his physician prescribed starting a few months ago to help him sleep through the pain, and I’ve found that making a second visit before I head to the office gives us a chance to connect again before I leave for the day. Before I turn his care over to Margot.

  My hand shakes a little as I think of her name. I feel myself blush, like some middle schooler with a crush. There’s a smear off the upper corner of my mouth and so I wipe my mistake away with a tissue. Staring at myself in the mirror, I think that I look like a composite of other women, patched together. The last few years have left their mark, and the past nine months have pressed themselves under my eyes, against the hollow skin of my jaw. Sometimes it feels like my body is hanging off my bones, waiting to drop to the floor and finally rest in a heap of everything I won’t let myself feel.

  My phone pings in the back pocket of my wool pants. They have a silk lining, so the fabric doesn’t itch. They cost more than my monthly rent, back when I first founded Chronos.

  A sick feeling rises in my stomach and so I start moving, away from the mirror and through our—my—bedroom and towards the west wing where my husband is waiting for me.

  I ignore my phone. The moment I start responding to that piece of my life is the moment I’m lost for the day.

  Nobody can know how grateful I am to get to leave every day and pretend that my life is something different for eight hours—sometimes ten, on a rough patch of release days—before I return home and have to put on the shell that lets me function as a wife and a mother without cracking from the pressure of caring for other people.

  I hear footsteps on the stairs as I turn right towards Mark’s set of rooms. Even though the sun is out, the light streaming through the glass dome in the center of the front hall above the main staircase is muted the way light filters through a swimming pool.

  Felix is at the bottom, his backpack strapped across his shoulders like he’s preparing for war. I give him a little smile, which he may not even be able to see given the dim light and how far away from him I am.

  “I’m going to check on Daddy, and then we’ll get you and your sister to school,” I tell him, my voice flipped into a bright song.

  My phone pings again, sending a jolt through my body.

  “Can I come with you?”

  The muscles in my stomach clench.

  “Sure, sweetheart.” I move down a few steps and extend my hand to my son. Despite all of Greta’s best efforts to making fortifying dishes of grits and potatoes au gratin and macaroni and cheese, Felix is still whippet-thin and sallow with dark blunt bangs—which he cut himself one night alone in his bathroom—and hunched shoulders. Margot told me once that he looked like he was nine going on ninety.

  I had to correct her. Felix is eleven, not nine.

  And then I felt like a terrible mother for implicitly agreeing with everything else she’d said.

  Felix’s face brightens and he skips up the stairs, leaving his backpack on the ground by the front door. He holds on to my hand as we walk the short distance to the first keypad, passing Margot along the way as she returns from her morning rounds with Mark. We give each other a quick nod when we pass, but Felix ignores Margot and keeps his own eyes fixed ahead.

  I squeeze his hand. “She’s taking good care of Dad, don’t you think?”

  My son doesn’t respond, and a few seconds later I have to let go of him in order to retrieve the key card from my left side pocket.

  Felix shudders into life. “Can I do the keypad?”

  “Not today,” I say as I press the card to the door and the locks sweep themselves open.

  I reach out and take my son’s hand again as we cross the two other rooms before we come up to where his father is lying, machines and tubes leeching out from all sides.

  But as we enter the room, something is wrong.

  The whir of the monitors and pumps are missing, making the space where my husband should be resting entirely silent. Mark’s bed is empty.

  “Oh my God,” I cry out before I can catch myself. Felix’s hand tightens in my grip, and almost instantly I feel his palm slick with sweat.

  “Where’s Dad?” he asks.

  “Maybe Margot put him in his chair?” My mind scrambles for some explanation. “Maybe Margot’s with him?”

  “We just passed her,” Felix replies matter-of-factly.

  I scan the room, but everything is a blank space. The hospital-style bed and monitors, the intravenous stand. Empty. There’s no sign of Mark anywhere, except for the rumpled sheets on the bed and the side railing on the right side, which has been brought down.

  So he must have gotten out of bed, somehow, rather than having someone carry him?

  All of this seems ridiculous.

  My phone pings again, and I finally pull it out and look at it, ignoring the judgmental glance from Felix that says, “How can you worry about that stupid thing when my father is missing!”

  There are so many notifications that my screen has loaded them, one on top of another, like an accordion pleat. But the very first one hasn’t been replaced, even though it came in twenty minutes ago.

  It’s not from my assistant or my CFO or anyone at my company.

  It’s a state-wide alert that we are all in lockdown. No one is to leave their homes. No one is meant to be on the roads. The National Guard is being deployed.

  We are at the epicenter of an international pandemic, apparently.

  I glance from my screen to my son’s face, who looks at me with such a vivid gaze of disappointment that I have to catch my breath.

  “We’re locked in, aren’t we?” he says, all statement and no quest
ion.

  “I…We…” I fumble to put my phone back into my pocket, but it won’t slip inside despite the expensive fabric and the hand-sewn lining.

  I run around the room, feeling terror shudder through my body and making my movements jerky. My limbs keep bumping into edges and surfaces that I misjudge as I navigate the space. I look inside the adjoining and handicap-equipped bathroom, but it is empty and smells sterile. Like no one has used it for a long time.

  I can’t do this without Mark.

  I can’t be here, with them, together with the end in sight without my husband.

  Where is he?

  I come back out into the room, and an intense pressure grips at my chest and temples to the point that I think I’m going to hyperventilate.

  In the corner of the room, by the door we entered, is a figure backlit by the light of the curtains. It’s clear from their posture that they’re holding a body across their arms.

  Felix walks towards them, extending his hand as though he’s about to touch a holy relic. The figure in the doorway moves in the direction of my son, and the size of this person looming over the room swallows Felix in shadow. A stab of recognition slices through the base of my skull: someone got in again.

  Someone broke into my husband’s safe place. This time they did it right.

  They are here to blackmail us, or kidnap us. Or take revenge for something Mark did before he became so sick.

  Or after, I correct myself.

  Not again, I want to scream. Not again.

  “Get the fuck away from my family!” I hurl my body into the room, cutting off Felix as he approaches this monster holding my husband’s inert body like a rag doll.

  “Get out!” I scream. I clench my hands into two tight fists and prepare to do whatever I can so that Felix can leave the room safely and run to get help from Margot. To take Daphne into the panic room we didn’t have a chance to use last time.